The Reaping of Norah Bentley (10 page)

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

And I could hardly explain how Eli was the only thing keeping me sane and driving me insane at the same time, how he made me feel safe and vulnerable all at once when he literally drove away the demons following me. I didn’t understand it myself, but until I did there was no way I could stay away from him. I didn’t want to. Even right now I was stealing glances all around, searching in the shadows of shop-front awnings and down side streets in hopes of catching a glimpse of him—just to be sure he was still as close as he’d promised.

“Norah?”

“I…I don’t know.” I offered Luke a weak smile. “Can we just talk about something else? Please?”

He looked over at me and shook his head. There was a seriousness in his expression that I wasn’t used to, that somehow seemed out of place there in his dark brown eyes.

“I didn’t really feel like talking anymore, anyways,” he said.

So we didn’t. For the entire, long walk back to my house, the only sound either of us made was the steady thudding of footsteps that echoed through the empty streets. He left me at the corner of my street, mumbled something about having Biology homework he needed to finish. And just like that, he was gone.

I walked on a little ways down the street, mostly so Luke would think I was going straight home if he happened to turn around to check on me. About halfway to my house, though, my walk got a little more crooked. I drifted back and forth, onto the sidewalk, into the street, back onto the sidewalk and over into the grass, walking circles and doubling back like I had no real destination in mind; and in a way I didn’t. If Helen hadn’t called me by now, it meant she’d gone to bed without checking my room. She didn’t know I was gone, so she couldn’t fuss, and it didn’t really matter when I got home. I could have gone anywhere as long as I was back in my room by morning, before she saw my empty bed. And I thought about it too, thought about going to Luke’s, maybe throwing some rocks on his window. I thought about going back to the park and sitting by that fountain some more. I thought about hopping a bus and just riding around in circles for a few hours.

But mostly I thought about running away. Not making circles, but a straight line straight out of here. The road in front of me was no longer that dead river it had seemed before; now it was more like a glittering, silver path, and I got this idea in my head that if I just followed it, if I just ran far and fast enough, then I could get away from all of this.

I was getting ready to take off in a sprint when a shadow overtook mine on the sidewalk. I straightened up and, without turning around, I asked,

“Why did you piss him off like that?”

Eli’s sudden appearance hadn’t startled me. There was a strange, complete calmness I was beginning to notice every time he was near, and so I could sense him coming; it started with the silence in my head and from there it spread through my arms and legs, until all the tension in them had dissolved. Or at least, that’s how it had been before. Now, with the memory of how close he’d been earlier, of his breath on my cheek…now I could feel my body fighting like it had in the park, confused about whether it should go through with the desperate sprint its muscles had been stretching for, or if it should turn and embrace Eli’s warmth, his comfort.

I ended up staying. But I didn’t exactly embrace Eli; I just turned to face him, my balance unsteady and my skin prickling with the realization of just how close he was.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’re sorry?”

He nodded, and sank down onto the curb. “I told you,” he said. “It makes people do crazy things.”

I sat down beside him. “What are you talking about?”

“Jealousy. Or love. Take your pick—or maybe it’s both? You can’t have one without the other, I suppose.” He spoke halfway to himself, like he was still trying to sort out his own thoughts even as he said them.

“…Blame it on whatever you want,” I said, leaning back and supporting myself on my palms. The flagstone was cold underneath me, and the loose pebbles on the sidewalk dug into my skin. “The fact is, Luke is pissed at me and I have no idea how I’m going to fix it.”

Eli looked thoughtful for a minute, staring straight ahead. “Maybe you shouldn’t?”

“Excuse me?”

“I don’t know. There’s something strange about that boy...the fact that he can see me, for one thing. It’s not normal. I don’t know what it is with him, exactly, but I can’t help thinking it’s better if you keep your distance.”

“I feel like I just had this conversation,” I said dryly.

Eli followed my example and leaned back against the sidewalk, turned and looked me in the eyes. “But you weren’t listening then, I take it? Seeing as how you didn’t try to run away from me, even though that’s what Luke would have wanted?”

“I
can’t
run away from you,” I reminded him. “There’s that whole craziness in my head thing that happens whenever you’re gone.”

“Right.” He was quiet for a few seconds and then: “And if you could run away?”

The abruptness of the question caught me a little off-guard. I lifted my hand and studied the red grooves the sidewalk cracks had imprinted in my palm, scraped free the little pebble sticking to it and rolled it around between my hands.

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter,” I stammered. “The fact is I can’t—and you can’t go away, either. Right? I mean I guess you could, but…” I looked over at him again, and my gaze got stuck in his before I could do anything about it. “But you won’t, right?”

He shook his head slowly. “I’m not planning on it,” he said.

“Good.” I dropped the pebble. It rolled to the toe of my shoe and stopped. “I mean…because then it doesn’t matter if I could, anyways.”

I stood up. I’m not sure why. I didn’t really want to go anywhere anymore; just wanted to see the scene from a different angle, I guess. It was just as confusing from up there, though.

Eli stood up, too. “It’s getting really late, isn’t it?” He looked toward my house, toward its overgrown hedges and its cracked sidewalk and that bright blue door my dad always said he hated but had never bothered to repaint. “I don’t want you to get in trouble,” he said.

I shrugged. “I don’t think anyone even knows I’m gone.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t give them anymore time to figure it out?” he said. He held out his arm. “May I walk you to the door?”

I didn’t take his arm, not because I didn’t want to, but because I was distracted by a sudden question.

“What about you?” I asked. “Does anyone know you’re gone? Won’t they be worried about you?” I’d already decided the whole story about Uncle Harold Greene was a bunch of crap. And I must’ve been right, too, because my questions caused a pained look to spasm across his face. He recovered just as quickly, though.

“I do fine just worrying about myself,” he said.

“Where are you going to go, though? Do you
have
anywhere to go?”

“Even if I did, I wouldn’t leave this street. I told you I wasn’t going to leave you, remember?” He smiled a little. “That whole craziness in your head that I keep away?”

I was hit with the same feeling I’d had earlier that night— that worry, that fear of him hurting in any way. And I thought about the devastating feeling of loneliness I’d been fighting all day, with all these things happening that I couldn’t talk to Rachel or Luke about. It was his voice, his touch, those rocks on the window had saved me from that loneliness.

I frowned, because I couldn’t stand the thought of not doing the same for him, couldn’t stand picturing him as alone as I’d been without anybody to come to his rescue. He’d tried to hide the pain on his face, but that split second of it was all I needed to see for it to dig into me, for the claws of worry to start tearing at the pit of my stomach.

“I hadn’t even thought about that,” I said. “But what are you going to do, then? You can’t sleep out here on the street.”

“Why not? I don’t mind the outdoors.”

“It’s freezing out here!”

“Norah, it has to be at least sixty degrees out here.”

“That counts as cold to me.”

“Well, I don’t mind the cold, either,” he said. “Stop worrying about me and go inside—especially if you’re cold. Please?” He sounded a little amused, or awed maybe, by my sudden concern for him.

“I’m not going inside without you.”

“What?”

“Don’t be ridiculous—nobody can see you,” I said. “It’s not like I’m going to get in trouble for bringing you inside. It would be stupid for you to stay out here.”

“Norah—”

“And we’ve got spare bedrooms. Heck, you could have my bed if you want. I can sleep on the couch.”

“Now
you’re
being ridiculous. I am not taking your bed.”

“Fine, you don’t have to. But you’re not staying out here, either.”

It took a few more minutes of convincing, but eventually we were both sneaking our way in through the sliding-glass door in the back. Well, I was sneaking. Eli’s every step was all but silent already, so he just walked normally behind me, through the living room and up the stairs, down the dark hall. We stopped outside my bedroom door, and I pointed at a closed door a few feet down.

“The guest bedroom,” I whispered.

He nodded but didn’t move. Neither of us did, even though it was cramped in that narrow hallway, with the antique, bow-legged table to the right of us and several of my dad’s old paintings hanging in bulky antique frames above us, threatening to crash to the floor at the slightest bump.

I felt his eyes on me and looked up. Even in the darkness, they still seemed to shine an impossibly bright blue. He took my hand, lifted it and brushed his lips across the back of it. It was all one fluid, deliberate motion, like an artist brushing strokes across his canvas.

“Good night,” he said, letting go of my hand, the tips of his fingers lingering in my palm until the last possible second. “And Norah?”

“Yes?”

“Thank you.”

“I…You’re welcome?” I said, feeling incredibly lame all of a sudden. “And good night…good night to you too.”

He turned away, and I was so caught up in watching him that I copied his every movement without thinking; only I didn’t turn into the open hallway, I turned right into the wall—smacked it hard enough that one of the paintings, the big watercolor of the sunrise over the ocean, rocked from side-to-side for a few seconds. When it finally looked steady again, I let out the breath I’d been holding and glanced back at Eli, hoping he hadn’t seen that less-than-graceful exit. He was already gone. Thank God.

I stared at the closed guest room door, absently touching the back of the hand he’d kissed goodnight. Then, with a wary glance at the paintings on the wall, I turned again and this time managed to make it through my bedroom door without running into anything. I floated inside my room, like some sort of ghost that haunted the place but couldn’t really claim it. Not anymore. I went over to my bed, collapsed without bothering to change, and buried my face in the pillows.

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel. Guilt, maybe? Confusion? All of that and more, probably. But all of those feelings were just a buzzing in the back of my mind. All I really felt—all I could really focus on— was warmth.

And that night, knowing Eli was just next door, I slept better than I’d slept in a really long time.

When I woke up the next morning, he was there. At first I thought I was still dreaming, maybe still drifting through that malleable world in between waking and sleeping; everything seemed so surreal. My bedroom was drenched in golden sunlight, and Eli was sitting in the window, his shape a dark silhouette against the pane. He was staring out into the morning, and his concentration didn’t break as I sat up, even when the creaking of bedsprings disrupted the quiet. I watched him for a minute, not speaking, not wanting to shatter the peace of the moment.

He eventually spoke first, without looking away from the window and in a voice soft as the sunrise itself— like he was afraid I was really still sleeping and he didn’t want to wake me up.

“I’m sorry for intruding like this,” he said. “But your mother came—”

“Step-mother,” I corrected automatically.

“Yes. Her.” He glanced over at me. “Anyway, she came into the guest room this morning, started to clean…”

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes, not at Eli but at Helen; nobody had stayed in that guest room in at least a year, but she was always cleaning it. She was always cleaning everything. And she was always trying to get Dad and me to join in because, as she reminded us as often as possible: a clean house was a happy house. Or, at least, it looked like one.

“But it’s not like she could see you, right?”

“No, but she could still sense that I was there,” he said. “Most people can, and it tends to make them uncomfortable. Your step-mother—she kept walking in and out of the room, muttering to herself, opening and shutting that door…making all kinds of noise; so I just slipped out of the room when she came in for about the fifth time. I was afraid she was going to wake you up.”

“I don’t think anything would’ve woke me up last night,” I said with a yawn.