Landing (21 page)

Chapter 33

We barrel down the gravel road
toward Dr. Lee’s house. Everything in the car is rattling, like we’re running
over the bristles of a gigantic comb. The engine whines, and the gas light has
been on for how long? New energy surges through me, and I navigate the tight
roads on a pin.

We pull up to Dr. Lee’s cabin, and
I hit the brakes so hard they squeal, and the medical kit under Tarren’s feet
tumbles forward.

“We’re here,” I say dumbly. I
release my grip on the wheel slowly. My hands are shaking, and my fingers
resist the pressure to straighten. They seem permanently molded to the contours
of the wheel.

“Get Gabe,” I tell Tarren, and then
I’m jumping out of the car, running to the porch, and beating on the door with
both fists.

“We need help!” I scream in a voice
so raw that I hardly recognize it.

I hear stairs creaking, feel
Francesca’s energy moving toward me.

“Please!” I cry.

The door swings open.

“Maya?” Francesca says. She looks
over my shoulder. “Oh my god.” Tarren is coming up behind me, carrying Gabe in
his arms.

“Get him in the spare bedroom,” Dr.
Lee calls from the top of the stairs. He grips the banister hard and makes his
way down, taking one stair at a time. I step out of the way, and Tarren brings
Gabe into the house. Francesca follows him. I put a hand against the door and
lock my knees, because I suddenly feel so dizzy. Pain crackles up my spine,
into my head, and the monster is shrinking back into the darkness, leaving this
aching, exhausted body for Maya to re-commander. Except that Maya isn’t coming.
She would rather stay curled in the corner, hugging her knees and pressing her
closed eyes against her boney kneecaps.

“Locked closet in the hallway.” Dr.
Lee stands in front of me. A small key hangs between his thumb and index
finger. “Bring everything inside to me,” he says. “All of it.”

***

The key proves stubborn in my
shaking hands, when I try to open the locked closet in Dr. Lee’s hall. A swift
kick sends the door swinging back hard. Inside, the shelves are filled with
plastic tubing, gauze, cans of something called Nutren, and heating pads. Three
oxygen tanks stand in the corner. Dr. Lee has created his own angel victim
trauma center.

He knew this day would come. I
guess we all did one way or another.

I grab an oxygen tank and a long
coil of tubing and turn to leave. On second thought, I back up and snatch the
heating pads. Gabe’s skin was so cold.

“…to the ER,” Francesca’s voice
drifts from the spare bedroom. Even this far out, I can feel the fearful
torrents of her energy. My palms split and curl open.

“Please, not now,” I hiss at my hands.

“He’s not going anywhere,” Dr. Lee
snaps in a gruff voice. “You either help or stay out of my way. Where the hell
is the oxygen?”

“Here.” I careen into the room on
my wobbly legs and drop my armful on the floor.

Dr. Lee is leaning over the bed,
placing a stethoscope on the chest of a waxen figure that cannot possibly be
Gabe. Francesca stands at the foot of the bed. Her eyes are wide and wet.

“Well?” Dr. Lee looks at her over
his shoulder.

There’s a long pause, then
Francesca reaches into Dr. Lee’s medical bag and snaps on a pair of latex
gloves.

“No questions, understand?” The
doctor says. “Hand me the thermometer.”

Francesca nods, and her features
set into a focused mask as she finds the thermometer and extends it to Dr. Lee.
She doesn’t mind her aura though. It lashes around her body in high, arching
yellows and oranges. The song is playing loud chords in my head, and I’m scared
as all fuck. I can’t believe I can be this terrified for this long and still be
continually surprised by it.

And I even have to remind myself
that Grand is dead, because it still feels like he’s out there. All the anger
and grief and vengeance inside of me hasn’t changed at all. God, my head is
going crazy.

Tarren
.

Tarren always knows what to do.
Tarren will jut out his jaw, steady me with the flint in his eyes, and scowl us
all out of this terrible disaster.

Except Tarren lingers in the corner
of the room, lost in the smudgy haze of his aura. His eyes are down, staring
absently at his shoelaces. His profile reminds me of the pictures in Diana’s
bedroom, of the bowed little head that was Tarren in every photo as a child.

Shy boy. Scared boy. Gabe told me
that Tarren never wanted to fight, never wanted to be a hero.

“How long ago did this happen?” Dr.
Lee barks at Tarren. He presses the thermometer into Gabe’s ear.

Tarren doesn’t answer. I’m not sure
he even heard the question. I look at the clock on the nightstand and
calculate.

“Eight hours, thirty two minutes,”
I say.

Dr. Lee checks the thermometer and
slams it down on the bedside table. “You brought me a damn corpse!” His energy
jumps, all sharp and angry. He notices our stares, the stricken expression on
my face, shakes his head, and says to Francesca, “Set up the oxygen.”

“You,” his eyes dart up to mine,
“empty that closet. I want everything in here.”

It takes me three trips to transfer
all the supplies from the closet into the bedroom. During this time, Francesca
and Dr. Lee have proceeded to wrap and puncture Gabe with several tubes. The
oxygen tank hisses, and Gabe’s heartbeats are now announced in short, unsteady
beeps. I glance at the monitor, see how fantastically low his blood pressure
is, and look away.

Dr. Lee issues orders, and
Francesca’s hands flutter over the supplies I have laid out, grasping each
necessary item and handing it over to Dr. Lee. I’m surprised by how calm she
is. Not that she’s actually calm—her aura is a wild whirlwind of color—but that
she’s not screaming or demanding to know what happened or wondering why we
drove eight hours, past a hundred hospitals to put Gabe in the care of a
retired physician who happens to have a secret closet in his house filled with
the exact medical equipment we need.

“Anything else I should know
about?” Dr. Lee asks without looking up.

“His ribs are broken,” I say. “He
fell and…and….” Hysteria buzzes in my chest like a swarm of angry wasps. “His
head is bleeding,” I manage.

“Nothing we can do if he’s
hemorrhaging,” Dr. Lee murmurs to Francesca. “Though he probably wouldn’t have
lasted this long if he was. Next priorities are getting up core temp, and then
we’ll insert NG orally. I’ll assess brain function after we stabilize.”

Tarren makes a weird, garbled noise
in his throat. Everyone ignores him.

“Heating pads,” Dr. Lee says,
“clothes off.”

Tarren turns and leaves the room.

Francesca slips her fingers through
a pair of scissors, and they open with a metallic sigh. The first
sic
of
the scissors biting through the fabric of Gabe’s shirt echoes through my brain
and, eventually, triggers an emotional reaction.

“Not his coat,” I whimper, “Don’t
cut his coat.”

Dr. Lee looks up, and something
registers on his face. “You can’t be in here,” he says.

“He loves that coat. He’ll need
it,” I insist. How can they not understand?

“The radiation,” Dr. Lee cuts me
off, “His immune system is severely compromised.”

“It was a present!” I cry.

Francesca lays the scissors on the
bed. She stands up and reaches out to put a hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t!” I hiss and back away so
violently that I hit the wall. My bruised shoulders remind me that I have
already slammed into enough walls. I just about lose it right there. My whole
little world.

“I won’t cut his coat Maya, I
promise,” Francesca says from somewhere beyond my panic. “You need to go find
Tarren. Comfort him. Can you do that?”

I just stare at her, at her lambent
aura.

“We’re going to take good care of
Gabe, I swear. As soon as he stabilizes, I’ll call you. Please Maya, find
Tarren. He needs you.”

“Okay,” I nod, “okay.”

***

Outside, I pull in a deep breath of
the cold air and then a couple more. Then I almost have a breakdown, but I
can’t. Francesca is right, I need to find Tarren. I’m suddenly afraid that
he’ll hurt himself. That look on his face. That flat, dark ring of energy
hovering around him like his own personal reaper.

The Murano still sits in Dr. Lee’s
driveway. Tarren went into the woods. I extend my senses. I’m exhausted, almost
completely deflated of energy, but I know Tarren’s scent. I know the tug of his
energy, the patterns of his mind. I already found him once in the last
twenty-four hours, I can find him again.

I take to the trees, where I can
leap from branch to branch across wide distances. My body is heavy and
resistant, filled with the pain, electricity, and bruises from my
confrontations with Jane and Grand. I force it onward, deeper into the forest.
The sun is lowering itself gingerly below the horizon, and the pall of night
creeps across the trees, dusting everything in long shadows and purple mists.

I move forward with caution, forced
to double back when I lose Tarren’s trail. At first, his wandering seems
aimless, but then, all of a sudden, I recognize the area and realize his
intent. I am cautious no longer as I cover the remaining distance as fast as my
body can take me.

I come to a halt just outside the
grove and feel Tarren’s blunted energy radiating from within. That long, shaky
breath must be his.

I consider giving Tarren his space,
but I can’t. It’s too cold out here for him. He’s bled out half to death and
hasn’t eaten anything for however long this nightmare has been playing. And
there was that look on his face, that wretched noise he made before he left Dr.
Lee’s house.

One more leap sends me into the
grove, landing heavy on the branch of a spruce ringing the perimeter.

Tarren is kneeling in the long
grasses, hands tucked into his lap. His energy is a solid, dark shell around
his body. At the sound of my not-graceful-in-the-least entrance, his shoulders
straighten, and his head comes up. I am behind him, but he doesn’t turn around.

I crouch low on my branch, and drag
in a long
holy shit now what?
breath.

Apparently Tarren is still in story
mode. In that empty, sandpaper rasp he has recently acquired, Tarren says,
“After you were born, Mom kept you in her bedroom and wouldn’t let any of us
see you. She didn’t tell us anything. Gabe thought she was hiding toys, but
Tammy and I understood. We’d seen her big belly and could hear you crying
sometimes.”

He doesn’t turn around, but he
knows I can hear. I close my eyes, tense my muscles, and listen. This is going
to be painful.

“One night I got scared again. I
knew I wasn’t supposed to, but I snuck into Mom’s bedroom. She was asleep, so I
climbed into the bed. I didn’t realize you were in the bed too until you
started fussing.” Tarren takes a short breath. “Mom said, ‘Canton, can you take
her?’”

Tarren reaches out to the pile of
rocks on his left and traces the letters etched into surface of the top stone.
“I knew Dad was gone, as much as a six-year-old can understand death. I missed
him so much. I wanted to be brave and strong like him. I wanted my mom to be
happy again, so I took you in my arms and tried to shush you.”

Tarren drops his hand. “I was so
scared. I’d never held a baby before, but I remembered how Tammy told me to do
it when we played games. Support the head. Babies have big heavy heads that
will fall off if you don’t support them.”

I grab hold of the branch under my
feet. My legs are suddenly weak, trembling. Oh wait, that’s all of me
trembling.

Tarren continues, “I named you
Persephone, because Mom had read us that Greek myth before bed. I rocked you
back and forth but not too much. You were heavy and stinky and kept reaching up
to pull on the buttons of my pajamas. Then you fell asleep, and I didn’t know
how to put you down. I was afraid I would hurt you, or that your head would
fall off if I tried, so I just sat there in bed forever and ever holding you,
trying so hard not to fall asleep.”

Tarren bows his head like a
repentant sinner.

“But I did fall asleep,” he says,
“and when Mom found us, she got really angry. She took you out of my arms and
told me to leave. She didn’t scream or raise her voice at all, but you could
just see it in her eyes. All she ever needed was a single look, and that was
punishment enough.”

I can see Diana; her eyes, which
are Tarren’s eyes, filled with disappointment. My emotions are swirling so
fast, so fierce; gale winds raging beneath my skin.

Tarren’s monotone whisper plods on.
“The next day, Mom buckled us all in the car. She drove, and it felt like
forever before we stopped and she put us all to bed in a motel room. It was a
Motel Six. I had learned my numbers the year before. The pipes rattled in the
walls. I thought it was a monster. The next day you were gone. Mom never spoke
of you again until just before she died. She wanted us to forget you ever
existed.”

Tarren pauses, and the silence is
filled with the sounds of the forest.

“But how could I forget?” he
finally whispers. “You are the one she wanted to protect. The one she granted a
normal life. The only one who ever got a chance to be happy.” His gaze sweeps
across the three separate piles of rock, resting for a moment on the name
carved into the stone at the top of each pyramid.

Gabe and I visit this grove every
week that we’re home. He tells me that in the spring there are enough flowers
along the way that he can gather small bouquets for each grave. He tries to
find red flowers for Tammy. Red was her favorite color.

Only Diana’s body resides beneath
the ground in this grove. Gabe told me that they wrapped her in white sheets.
Tammy and Gabe dug the grave, while Tarren carried the body the two mile
distance. She weighed almost nothing in his arms.