Shine Your Light on Me (16 page)

Elroy had blood covering his face, the front of his shirt. He squeezed Jessica from the side and said to Mitch, “He healed me, right before he fell. Pine would have killed him. He cut my head open.”

There were tears in his eyes, and he let them fall, no shame there. He smiled and leaned over and kissed the top of Jessica’s head. He looked at Pine then, his face a patchwork of emotion.

Mitch said, “I had to shoot Pine.”

Elroy nodded and said, “He was hurting her. Aria caught him.”

“I know.” He scooped Jessica up in his arms. She felt heavier than she had before. He held her so tightly that she had to tell him he was squashing her. He eased up the best he could and painted the side of her face with kisses, stroked her hair and felt Elroy’s blood in it, drying now, or freezing there. He said, “I have to get you home and get you a bath. Nobody will ever hurt you again, I promise.”

Elroy said, “Did Aiden survive the fall?”

Mitch shook his head.

“We all killed him,” Elroy said. “He went after Pine to protect her too, and we all killed him.”

“I know,” Mitch said. “I’m sorry.”

“Not as sorry as his parents and me and Jessica. Aiden was a good person and...”

“It’s okay,” Mitch said. “Let’s get you home too. We can worry about how we feel tomorrow, after we’re clean and we’ve all slept. Do you want to come to my house?”

Elroy nodded. He followed Mitch and Jessica toward the ladder. Mitch was so exhausted he was worried about carrying her all the way down. He looked back at Pine and the blood around him, smeared, but slowly being covered by snow, thinking to himself that there was a beginning and ending for everything.

CHAPTER 10

Aria suspected she’d sleep until the following noon, but a tremor shook the house shortly after 8 a.m. and she could not find rest again. The prior night, she’d brought Jack back to the home she had tried to build with Mickey—who still lay dead on the living room floor, maybe content with it in ways he had never been content with living—and Jack, overcome by the events, and the events that had preceded watching his wife be torn apart, and his son fall from the sky, had fallen quickly asleep on the couch.

He was still asleep when someone knocked on the door and she answered, wearing her robe, her hair a mess, without makeup, her whole body sore. A state policeman, dark-haired, cursed by a severe face, and skinny with the flat stomach of youth, but the suspicious, probing eyes of authority, told her why he was there. A simple statement about last night’s deaths and any part she had played in it. She invited him inside and he followed her into the living room and she pointed at Mickey, as if he was a thing and not a person, and she said, “He died last night. I think it was a heart attack.”

The trooper asked, “And you’re just reporting this now?”

She shrugged, said, “It was a busy night.”

He asked if there was somewhere they could sit, noticing Jack burrowed into a quilt on the couch. “Who’s that?”

“A friend,” she said. “Maybe the only one I have in the world.”

He cocked his head and studied her, maybe suspecting that she was playing some kind of game. She led him to the kitchen, offered him coffee, which he declined. She made some for herself and for Jack once he woke. While she busied herself, the policeman called in about Mickey and gave the address and set his black-leather pad on the table. He clicked his pen several times, impatient. Aria couldn’t imagine the stories he’d heard from others, well, she could imagine that, but she couldn’t imagine how someone who hadn’t seen it first-hand would be able to accept it took place. He said, “Tell me about it.”

She told him most of it. She left out the part of Mickey attacking her. It wasn’t important. She’d torn the pages from that part of her life and threw them in the fire alongside the burning remains of Pine’s collection. And she didn’t tell him that Mitch had shot his brother. She doubted anyone else in town would. If anything, the majority would have liked to have done it themselves. But it was right his brother was the one. It was right Jessica was home and would not endure further scarring.

She was surprised her eyes had moistened. She did not feel much emotion at all, at least not on the surface. But so many things had begun to play out in her mind, and once the train got moving, once it gained momentum, there was no way to stop it.

The trooper let her cry it out. When she finished, he looked bored and asked for a cup of coffee. She made him one, not in the least ashamed by her tears. She figured others he’d talked to had cried as well.

For the loss of a good kid.

For the loss of more miracles.

For the questions it had raised in each of them.

She said, “I’d like to be alone now. But thank you for the company.”

He put his hat on at the door, nodded once, and offered a little wave, and she realized his hands looked too large for the rest of him. She watched him walk to his car and escape. She wished him God speed.

She didn’t know about the bombs going off at the high school until Elroy brought Jack’s van over. After he told her about the explosions, he hiked his thumb over his shoulder at the window and the van, dented in places, and filthy, the windshield cracked, and he said, “Mitch said he wants to apologize for stealing it.”

“He has a lot more than that to apologize for.”

“Jack’s here, isn’t he? I went by his house and the bar, thinking that maybe he and Aiden would be at one or the other, like maybe it was all just a bad dream. “

“It wasn’t a dream.” She looked at her watch. It was just after noon. “An ambulance is on the way here.

“For what?”

“Your dad had a heart attack last night.”

He nodded as if these things happen, or maybe because he’d had his fill of grief, his cup full of it. He didn’t ask how his dad was fairing and she didn’t offer any more information. She had always liked Elroy, to a degree at least, but something had changed in her, she saw the O’Connell’s and she saw herself leaving them, erasing herself from their lives, and never thinking of any of them again.

Elroy pointed at her jaw. He appeared nervous about it. Aria said, “It’s nothing. Just the price I had to pay for doing what was right. They’re the easiest scars to carry.”

Faintly she heard sirens in the distance. The front door was ajar, washing the house with a crispness, the first signs of an Indian summer, or an early spring. Elroy said, “They must have found some people in the school.” She didn’t know what he was talking about, and really didn’t care, but he told her anyway. And then he said, “Bobby had warned me away from the school.” His expression shifted. He said, perplexed, “What do you make of all this? What happened to Aiden at the bar? What happened afterwards?”

She thought about it for a second, and said, “It was like a flash flood, an act of God. But for whose benefit, if anyone’s, we’ll never know.”

• • •

The paramedics coming in, probing and testing Mickey’s corpse, woke Jack. Aria had coffee waiting for him in the kitchen. And he sat and drank with her for more than an hour, enjoying her company, the silence between them. He could see that she was as hurt as he was.

Men had crippled him, and that was fine, he knew the risk he was taking with Aria—the same risk anyone else would have taken, but he deserved, he believed, the judgment which Mitch had brought upon him.

But Janice hadn’t deserved his betrayal, nor her death in their home at the hands of lunatics.

And Aiden, gifted with something strange and beautiful, hadn’t deserved what anyone had done to him.

Jack sat in his wheelchair, looking back, and looking forward.

He said, “If it wasn’t for that little girl, I’d kill Mitch. I’d burn this town down.”

Aria waited.

He cleared his throat and said, “I need some time alone. Then I need to see if any of those assholes who tore my house apart plan to pay for the repairs. Thanks for all you’ve done for me. I mean that.”

“That’s it?”

He nodded and rolled his chair to the front door and eased himself down the two small steps. His van was a wreck, the windows cracked and smeared with road grime, dents that hadn’t been there before and unnoticeable to someone else, sticking out to him like wounds in its flesh. He was grateful that the motorized ramp still worked, but inside it smelled like Mitch’s cologne and, faintly, of old fear and nursed bitterness, and the sweat of innocent children.

He drove to the water tower. Police and fire and ambulance vehicles had cordoned off the parking lot of the school. Normally there would have been gawkers, but after last night, he figured people probably felt bad enough, thinking that perhaps one of them had done this, thinking that it was the right thing to do at the time.

He pulled his van right out on the pasture and parked twenty feet or so from the spot where Aiden had died. His hands shook as he left the ramp and wheeled himself through the slush, around flashlights still glowing dimly, and cigarette butts cast aside in the snow.

The heat from the explosion at the school had melted most of the snow, but there were still pockets, and the only things showing in the bald patches were areas of last year’s clover. He stopped in the area he figured Aiden had ceased being his son and become one of God’s, and he wiped his eyes and listened to the chatter of birds high up on the water tower, and the voices of the men working to clear the doorways of the ruined school.

He doubted any of the kids went today, not after the whole town was out last night, bus drivers, teachers, the principal’s son butchered and thrown from the tower by Pine.

Destruction all around them.

And for what, he wondered, for what?

Life didn’t make much sense sometimes.

Sometimes you found you had nothing left to hold on to.

He wiggled his toes, unsure where exactly Aiden struck the earth and left his mark on it. The ground was trampled by footprints. He wiggled his toes again, without thinking for a second, and then he heard a car pull onto the field, park a ways back from his van and kill the engine.

He could feel every muscle in his legs flexing. It hurt, in a good way, a natural way. He scanned the flashlights, ten, fifteen feet out. Their lights were dim. But near the foot boards of his chair, shining from a clump of clover there was a sliver of bright light. It touched the tip of his foot.

Jack turned his chair and let it wash over him, silent and mysterious, healing and warm. And he felt stronger than he’d ever felt, as if he could lift a mountain, as if he could climb to the heavens and reclaim his wife and boy.

He tried to remember Aiden’s last words.

A car door shut.

He hoped it was Mitch.

He’d let him get close enough, and then spring on him, and this field of blood would find new wine to drink.

But he heard her walking cautiously, could smell her, such a unique scent of womanhood and desire and rightness. He moved his foot as she stopped beside him and placed her hand on his shoulder. She said, “What are you doing here, Jack? None of this was your fault.”

He lifted his hand and held it over hers. Her flesh was warm, her bones small, fragile. He lifted both of his feet from the chair, stuck them straight out in front of him, pointed his toes toward the water tower and then back toward them, and then he lowered them slowly.

Aria said, “How?”

“It’s in the clover,” Jack said.

She knelt, her knees wet, her fingers separating the patch until she recoiled.

Her face paled considerably, it made the blister on her jaw an angrier red.

He said, “What is it?”

“I can’t touch it.”

He wasn’t sure if anyone was watching, and if so, he didn’t want them to see him stand. He plopped onto the ground, soaking the seat of his pants, but the cold felt good in a way. He did as she had done, and then he saw and Aria took another step back, in disgust, as Jack lifted the eyeball from the weeds and cupped it in his hand. He thought, sadly, My son lost something when he fell...

He said to Aria, “Find me something to put this in.”

She retreated.

Jack held Aiden’s eye, wet and light and warm in his palm.

She came back a minute later with a coin purse he’d never seen her use. He slipped the eye into it and closed it and said, “I can go on playing the cripple. No one has to know but me and you.”

She touched the side of his cheek again, with her knuckles now, and it sent a pang through his middle. She said so quietly he could barely hear her over the pounding of his heart, “If we leave here, together, you can be anyone you want to be, wherever we end up.”

Her smile was beatific, her gaze full of heat, the corners of her mouth delicate.

He put an arm around her waist and pulled her closer and took her hand and kissed the back of it.

Jack did not promise her anything, not in a world where he never knew what might happen next. But there was something in his face she must have seen, something he had not yet even knew existed inside him, because she laughed and bent over and kissed him.

He was surprised to find himself kissing her back. But his thoughts were not on the warmness of her lips, or the heat of her body, or the places they might go to start again.

He was thinking of his wife, a woman he had not deserved, and who had taught him so much, a woman he had failed in more ways than he could count. Yet here he was, with someone else, strangely offered a second chance.

And Jack was thinking of his son, and how Aiden had given what he could to those he could help, without hope of thanks or return. Traits he had not learned from his father, but beautiful things nonetheless, no matter their origin.

He could see clearly in his mind, that glimmer of light, of goodness, which everyone harbored. And that light would always possess the face of his boy. And gathered around his son’s serious and sometimes hopeful expressions, there was an endless darkness rampant with every person’s worst fears, an emptiness the light must forever pierce.