Lurlene McDaniel (15 page)

Analise is back in the hospital. She's in an oxygen tent, being given all kinds of meds through IVs. Sonya tells me, “I think she's getting better.”

Jack looks tired, like he's run a marathon. They stand with their arms around each other in the waiting area of the ICU. “My poor little girl. She's been through so much.”

“Will she go back to the care unit when she's better?” I ask.

Jack and Sonya trade glances. “Actually,” Jack says, “we're planning on taking her home once she's out of the woods. We can hire a home-care nurse and a physical therapist to come to the house. Sonya knows how to clean and maintain the feeding tube. I've talked to a contractor, and we're starting renovations on our
sunroom come Monday. We'll turn it into a nice permanent-care room for her. And the hospital is only minutes away by ambulance if we run into problems.”

I like the idea. “Once she's home, maybe she'll wake up.”

“My thoughts exactly,” Sonya says.

She smiles, and for the first time in months, I see hope on both their faces.

At two o'clock in the morning, my cell starts singing the “Hallelujah Chorus,” and I sit bolt upright in bed. My heart pounds and my blood turns cold.
Analise?
How can she be calling me? Did she wake up? Then I remember that I assigned her ringtone to Sonya and Jack's phone.

I scramble out of bed, stub my toe and curse, stumble to my desk and sweep the top until I feel my phone. I flip it open and manage to croak, “Hello.”

Sonya's crying. My heart almost stops. “I—I can't understand you,” I say.

I hear the phone being taken over and then Jack's voice. “Analise developed a blood clot. It lodged in her heart.”

“B-but how?” I'm confused and my brain's still
fuzzy. I recall that her doctors have taken her off her blood thinners.

Jack's voice says, “She died, Jeremy. Just minutes ago, while we were standing next to her bed, our little girl died.”

At two o'clock in the morning, the whole world seems dead. The house is quiet, like a tomb, my room as silent as a grave. Mom's gone to bed and I'm alone and feeling dead.
Serves you right, Laurie Stark.
I haven't felt alive for months. I know now what I have to do. I should have done it a long time ago. It's the only way to turn off the hurt inside me and set things right.

I sit at my computer, wait for words to come. When they come, I write, the clicking of the keys the only sound in the world. My fingers have a life of their own as they follow the script in my head, and the words spill onto the screen in neat little rows.

I will be reviled for what I'm about to do. I am destroying a sports god, a definite no-no in the hallowed halls of Southern high school culture. I'm destroying myself too. But no one will care
about that. I must do this if I'm ever going to be free, if I'm ever going to feel clean.

I go to my closet, rummage through a pile of old clothes in the back, where I've hidden a manila folder in an old notebook from the eighth grade. I take it to my desk, where I carefully copy information into the story lengthening on my computer screen. It's the name of the body shop in Charlotte where Quin's dad took the Cadillac SUV to be repaired. Before he dumped it. Before he bought a new Lexus. There are four photos of the damaged fender from different angles, the telltale green paint from Analise's bike embedded in the gouges. I scan the photos into my photo software program and attach the file to the e-mail. This is my trump card, my ace in the hole, as I've known it would be. As I planned.

I think back to the day I stole the information. I was in Quin's house and we had a fight. He stormed out, leaving me there. His father was at work, his mom was passed out upstairs and I was alone, fuming, eager for a way to get even with Quin. I marched into his father's den and over to the huge new desk. The top gleamed, smooth as glass, beautiful to see and touch, made in part, I knew, by Jeremy's hands. I went through the drawers, not even sure what I was looking for, just
searching for something, anything that would make Quin faithful to his promise to stay with me until I let him go.

Quin's dad hadn't bothered to lock the desk— his bad. His files were neat and alphabetized and well labeled. The one innocently marked CADDY was where I discovered the information about the SUV. The fix-it shop had dutifully filled out the paperwork in every detail. There was a copy machine in the den, so I made a copy, placed it in the file folder, and kept the original along with the photos. I shut the drawer, wiped the top of the desk with the tail of my shirt until it shone, and left the den.

I complete my e-mail message to Amy, yearbook editor at Asheville High School, read and reread it until I know it by heart. It will become the final and most important message in her tribute pages for Analise Bower. I put the cursor on Send, knowing that once I hit the button, there's no turning back. I think about Dad, wonder if he'd approve of what I'm doing, of the story I'm breaking—and if he'll still love me when the truth comes out. I set my finger on the mouse, close my eyes and whisper, “Just do it.”

And I click.

A
t two o'clock in the morning, I float freely above my body as it lies on the hospital bed. I simply lift off like a feather drifting on a summer breeze, hovering briefly above the narrow bed, the machines and the medical personnel. I look down on myself, but I feel no more pity. The body on the bed looks vacated, empty, abandoned like a cracked eggshell. I see my parents holding on to each other and crying. I want to tell them I'm fine … more than fine. I'm free!

I drift out of the hospital into the night, no longer a captive of time, nor of coma. As I float, I pass my school, my neighborhood, my home. I see through walls as if they were made of clear glass. I see my friends having a sleepover at Amy's. I see a girl hunched over a computer keyboard. I don't know her, and yet she's somehow familiar.
No matter.
My ties to this earth are severed and all I
feel is weightlessness and peace. Even when I pass over Jeremy's house, see into his room, see him on his bed, his face buried in his pillow, and know that he's crying, I feel no sadness. I know he loved me and I loved him. There was a time when all I wanted was to be with him. It's different now. Longing and bitterness, fear and anger, malice and vengefulness have all melted away.

The importance of my old life is dimming as I move toward the bright light I've seen once before. It's allowing me to come to it, and this time, I won't be sent back. If only the people I'm leaving behind could understand! There is no sadness where I'm going. Only joy.

I reach out and embrace the light.

“How's it coming?” Mark asks.

“I'm almost finished,” I tell him. I've been hand-rubbing a coat of beeswax on the coffin we've built for Analise from the rare woods in his workshop. Building it was my suggestion. Using the beautiful woods was Mark's. It was his gift—to me and to her and her family.

Rudy has showed up out of the blue. He said, “Heard about your girl. Real sorry, son. Can I help?”

For three days, we work together on the box that will hold her body. It's a work of art, with sides of curly cherry and a top of quilted mahogany, inlaid with crosses of ebony and bird's-eye maple. I've applied ten layers of wax, rubbing each coat until the wood glows. I let one coat dry, add another, and do it all over again. My back and shoulders throb, my hands ache.

Sonya and Jack came yesterday and lined the inside with foam and pale lavender satin. All that remains is to affix the wooden plaque Amy has prepared, with words she meticulously burned into the grain. Analise will be buried tomorrow in the most beautiful coffin our human hands could make, for all eternity.

Mark says, “I heard that the cops arrested Spence Palmer and charged him as an accessory.”

The story was all over the news. The big man on campus, Quin Palmer, had committed the crime, but his father had tried to cover it up by repairing and then dumping the car that hit Analise. The local DA swears he will prosecute. But I know that Spencer Palmer is one of the most powerful men in the state and that Palmer money may slow down justice. “We'll see,” I say.

Mark says, “It took guts for Quin's girlfriend to blow the whistle.”

I picture Laurie all teary-eyed for the news cameras. “Too little, too late.” I have trouble talking about it. Sonya and Jack have found some peace, but if I ever get my hands on Quin, I might kill him.

“Still, it was a brave thing she did, sending that e-mail and those photos to Amy and implicating herself. Did you know her?”

“Not personally. I've seen her around school. She's one of the in-crowd because she was dating Quin. I don't know if she always was.” I keep buffing the wood. The cops found the SUV in Pennsylvania, owned by a man who innocently bought it from a car wholesaler in Charlotte. The right fender and bumper were new, but the vehicle ID number matched the one Palmer once owned. The tires were the same too. The right front tread perfectly matched the cast that police forensics had made of a tire mark on the road near the broken guardrail on the night Analise was struck. Quin swore to the police that he thought he'd hit a deer, but I think his story stinks. At some point, according to Laurie, he knew, and he did nothing.

“If you're finished, I'll get my pickup,” Mark says.

We're going to drive the coffin to the funeral home, where Analise's body has been prepared for tomorrow's funeral. I step back, look over the box. The finish is flawless. “It's ready.”

He leaves, and I know he'll take his time so that I can be alone for a little while. One last thing to do. I pick up the plaque and a drill. I attach the piece of wood to the top, just under the crosses, with tiny brass screws. When the drill stops, quiet comes. I see days without Analise stretching in
front of me. When she was in the coma, at least I could see and touch her. Now I can't. This is the hardest part for me.

The air in the old barn is still and smells sweetly of sawdust, freshly cut lumber and beeswax. The sun shines through a high window in the unused loft above, spilling a shaft of soft golden light across the coffin, turning the wood the color of honey. I run my fingers over the words burned into the plaque, fighting to keep my cool.

Our angel sleeps here.

For as long as the world spins and the earth is green with new wood, she will lie in this box and not in my arms.

“Goodbye, my angel.”

a cognizant v5 original release september 20 2010