NOCTE (Nocte Trilogy #1) (11 page)

I
don’t deserve it.
 

“You don’t understand,” I start to say,
then
decide I’d sound crazy if I tried to explain.
 

“You can’t say that, because you don’t
know me,” I say instead, my voice harsh and stilted.
 

Dare runs a hand through his hair and his
eyes glint like
obsidian.
 
“I guess not.”

And then he abruptly turns and walks out,
his shoulders wide as he strides across my lawn, away from me.
 

Something bothers me as I wipe off the
counters, and it isn’t until I flip off the lights and walk into the Great Room
that I realize what it is.
 

He acts like I disappointed him.
 

I don’t know why.

DUODECIM

Calla

I
haven’t seen Dare in days, which is strange since he lives here now.
 
But not so strange, considering that
I’ve somehow disappointed him.
 

I’ve heard his motorcycle roar to life in
the mornings, then I hear him come back home late at night, but I haven’t
personally seen him for seventy-two long hours.
 

“I wonder where he goes every day?” Finn
muses at breakfast, as we hear his bike roar down the mountain.
 
My father shrugs.

“Don’t know.
 
It doesn’t matter to me. He paid for
three months of rent in advance, so as far as I’m concerned, he’s not my
business until September.”

Three months in advance?
 
That’s interesting.
 
I chew my biscuit as I consider
that.
 
Is that how long he’s
staying?

I feel Finn watching me, waiting for a
reaction, but I don’t give him one.
 
For some reason, I don’t want to let him know how much time I spend
musing about Dare DuBray, how I’ve laid in bed for three nights, obsessing
about his voice and what it might be like if it was whispering into my ear in
the dark.
 

“Want to do something today?” Finn asks,
after taking a swig of orange juice.
 
I shrug.
 

“Sure. Like what?”

He eyes me over his glass.
 
“Maybe we could go to the cemetery?”

And just like that, it feels like he stomped
on my solar plexus, squeezing out every last vestige of oxygen from it.
 

“Why would we do that today?” I manage to
ask around the constricted muscle. Our father is unusually silent as he watches
our interaction.
 

Finn levels his gaze at me.
 
“Because we haven’t been there yet.
 
I don’t want mom to think we’ve
forgotten.”

Dad makes a choking sound and picks up
his plate (which incidentally is one of a set of 16 perfectly matched china
plates from their wedding) before rushing away to the kitchen, and I glare at
my brother.
 

“Mom’s dead. She’s doesn’t
think
anything.”
 

Finn’s gaze doesn’t falter.
 
“You don’t know that.
 
You have no idea what she sees or doesn’t
see.
 
Now, do you want to go visit
her today?”

There’s a stern tone to his voice,
something firm and judgmental.
 
I
swallow hard because I’m so not ready for that.
 

“I can’t…yet,” I finally tell him
quietly.
 
His blue eyes soften
although he doesn’t look away.
 

“I don’t think it’ll get easier with
time,” he answers.
 
I shake my
head.
 

“That’s not what I’m hoping for.
 
It’s just that…
I’m
not ready.
 
Not
yet.”

“Ok,” Finn gives in.
 
“What else would you like to do today?”

I look out the window, my gaze instantly
drawn to the water.
 

“I’m hungry for crab legs.”

Finn smiles, the slow one that I love.
“Crab fishing, it is.”

So I dump my dishes in the kitchen and
job upstairs to change into old scrubby clothes and a floppy hat to protect my
white skin from the sun.
 
I meet
Finn in the foyer.

“Do you have sunscreen in that thing?”
Finn eyes my giant beach bag.
 
I
nod.
 

“Of course.”

We head out to the trail that leads to
the beach, then climb over the rocks and strewn seaweed to get to the rickety
pier.
 
Our little boat bobs gently
in the slip, it’s graying sides faded by the sun.
 

As we step aboard, I lick the briny air
from my lips, while the breeze rustles the hair away from my face.
 
There’s already crab traps loaded in the
cargo hold, and Finn releases the anchor so we drift out in the bay.
 

 
The sun beats down through the thin
material of my sleeves, and I imagine that even now more freckles are forming,
but I don’t care.
 
All I care about
is moving through the water, over the swells and further into the ocean.
 

Finn leans down and grabs a crap pot,
dropping it over the side.
 
The
orange buoy bobs in the waves to mark the spot as we move to a different
location, and then we drop another.
 
We drop five total before we drift further out to sea and lay limply in
the sun on the hull of the boat.
 

I stare up at the sky, at the blueness of
it, and watch the way the white clouds frolic with each other, bouncing and
stretching and existing in the air.
 
It makes me wonder if it’s where Heaven is.
 
Or if there’s even a
Heaven at all.
 
I ponder
this, of course, because of mom.
Because she’s always in the
back of my mind.
 
And because Finn ripped the Band-Aid off that wound this morning.
 

“Maybe Heaven is another dimension,” I
muse out loud.
 
“Maybe the people
there exist right now, moving and talking alongside us, we just can’t see
them.
 
And maybe they can’t see us,
either.”

Finn lays back, his arms behind his head,
his eyes closed.

“I think they can see us.”

“So you definitely think there’s a
Heaven?” I ask doubtfully.
 
“How can
you be sure?”

“I can’t,” he answers.
 
“But it’s what I believe.
 
Mom did too.”

That catches my attention and I stare at
him.
 
“How do you know that?”

He’s unconcerned with my anxious tone.
“Because she told me once.
 
She used
to love those Chicken Soup for the Soul books, remember?”

Of course I remember.
 
“She got me Chicken Soup for the Teenage
Soul last year.
 
She put in my
Christmas stocking.” I’d wanted an iTunes card.
 

Finn grins without opening his eyes.
 
“Well, she put Chicken Soup for the
Grieving Soul in the foyer waiting room.
 
I read it one day when I was bored, and she caught me.”

I giggle because I can only imagine how
happy she probably was… to think that she was finally influencing Finn’s
literary taste. She loved those freaking books.
 

“One of the stories was about the
afterlife.
Sort of.
 
It was her favorite.”

Finn falls silent and I wait.
 

And wait.
 

“And?” I prompt him.
 
He opens an eye.

“And?
 
Oh, you want to hear the story?”

I roll my eyes.
 
“Obviously.”

“Fine.”
 
Finn is clearly bored with this, but he
humors me.
 
“Once upon a time, there
was a colony of water bugs.
 
They
were a close colony, a family.
 
Where one went, the others went.
 
But every so often, one would straggle away on
their
own,
crawl onto a lily pad, and never return.
 
This was a great mystery to the family
of water bugs.
 
They couldn’t figure
out what was happening to their family members, or why they disappeared.
 
They talked about it often, and worried
about it, but they could never figure it out.”

Finn opens his eyes now, and stares out
at the water, past me, past the waves, and out to the horizon.
 
He fixes his gaze on the red lighthouse
in the distance, on the pelicans that dive for their dinner around it, and the
waves that break apart against the rocks.

“Well, one day, another water bug climbed
onto the lily pad, drawn there by invisible forces from within itself, forces
it didn’t understand and couldn’t control.
 
As it sat there in the sun, it transformed into a beautiful dragonfly.
 
It shed its water bug skin, and sprouted
iridescent wings that gleamed in the sunlight. Wings so large and strong, it
was able to fly into the air, doing loops in the sky.
 

“The new dragonfly was ecstatic with it’s
new body and thought to itself, ‘I need to go back and tell the others. They
need to know that this is what happens so they won’t be scared.’
 
So he dipped and dove through the air,
directly at the water. But unfortunately, he couldn’t dive below the surface to
where the
water-bugs
were swimming.
 
In his new form, the dragonfly was no
longer able to communicate with his family.
 
He felt at peace, though, because he
knew that someday, his family would all transform too, and they’d all be
together again.”

Finn pauses and looks at me.
 
“And such it is with Heaven.
 
People die, they go on to another place,
a better place, but they can’t communicate with us anymore because they’re in a
different form.
 
But it doesn’t mean
that it’s not just as real.
 
Or that
we won’t find out for ourselves one day.”

My throat feels gunky and tight, so I
clear it.
 
“Mom believed this?”

Finn nods. “Yeah.
 
She told me.”

The story is beautiful and it makes me
want to cry, and it also makes me resent Finn just a little bit because he
shared that moment with mom and I didn’t.
 
But I push that irrational thought away.
 
It’s enough that I know now.
 

We float for a while in silence, and I
drag my fingers through the water.
 

At least an hour passes before Finn
finally speaks again.
 
“We need to
go to the cemetery, you know.”

I nod. “Okay.”

He raises an eyebrow.
 
“Okay?”

I nod again. “Yeah.
 
Soon.”

He
smiles,
a
real smile, and we float randomly for another hour before he finally points the
rudder toward the first crab pot.
 
As we approach, I reach over the side and drag it in, pulling the wet
chain into the boat.
 
The crab pot
is empty.
 
But the next one isn’t,
nor the next.
 
We end up with five
crabs, a good haul for the day.
 
 

My stomach rumbles at the mere thought of
drowning their legs in butter and putting them into my belly.
 

We float inland, and Finn steers the boat
into the slip, while I stuff my hat into a bench and then transfer the crabs
into a bucket.
 
Their legs make
scratching sounds as they slide around against the plastic, and for just one
brief moment, I allow myself to feel guilty because I’m going to drop them into
boiling water later.

“What the hell?” Finn mutters, staring
ahead of us, past the trail, past the treescape, and into the clearing behind
the Carriage House.
 
I follow his
gaze and almost audibly gasp when I see Dare.
 

He’s back from town now, and dressed in
workout clothes, shorts and a cut off ratty t-shirt.
 
He’s repeatedly punching the side of the
woodshed.
 

Over and over and over.

Thud.
Thud. Thud. Thud.

Like a machete or a thresher or a piston.
  

Sweat drips down his face, and blood
drops from his hand, as he pummels the wood, punching at it like a
machine.
 

“What the hell,” I echo Finn’s sentiment,
before I shove the crab bucket into his hands and take off up the trail to get
to
Dare
.
 
Finn
protests from behind me, but I don’t stop and I don’t slow down.
 

I skid to a stop next to Dare, pulling at
his elbow. He smells like sweat, so I can’t imagine how long he’s been out
here, hurting himself.
 

“Dare, stop,” I tell him.
 
“You’re bleeding.”

He shakes my hand off, not looking at me,
and punches again.
 

Blood splatters the ground and onto my
bare foot.

“Dare.”