Under Zenith (16 page)

“You’ve certainly been more helpful lately,” I accused.

“We’re getting closer to the end. I figured if you’ve made it this far, you might actually get to your Destination.”

“Which will look good to your mystery boss.”

“Yep,” he replied simply, his ey
es roaming over my arm expertly.

My cut didn’t really hurt too much anymore, but it didn’t look like it was getting any better either.
The only thing that seemed to heal well in this place was Hayden.

Curious, I grabbed his shoulder with my free hand and pulled him closer to where I sat on the hospital bed. I
tugged the no longer torn neck of his shirt down to see that the injury he’d sustained in the last task was now completely healed.

“What are you doing you crazy woman?”
he asked, trying to shift out of my grasp.

“You’re shoulder. It’s healed,” I said incredulously.

I ran my thumb over the skin where his scar should have been, but there wasn’t so much as a mark there anymore.

“Would you stop that,” he complained, pulling away from me and straightening the neck of his black shirt once more.

“Why is it that
you
heal, but I don’t? We both reset at the beginning of each cycle right?” I asked.

“I’m
actually surprised you aren’t healing. I thought you would just as quickly as me,” he said, looking concerned. “Does your head still hurt?”

I nodded
, but didn’t say anything because Hayden was, yet again, running his fingers through my hair to find the bump on my head. Not for the first time, our close proximity and the feeling of his fingers moving over my scalp made me wish he was a nice guy who was sweet and charming, rather than the horror he really was.

“It’s getting a little better,” he said quietly.

He had my face practically resting on his shoulder as he examined my head and I resisted the urge to actually lay my head there.

“It feels a little better,” I agreed, my eyes closed and a daydream
flittered in my mind of a sweet Hayden.

Really, my afterlife would be kind of exciting if the company was a bit better. Sure Hayden was nice to look at
, but being constantly berated by him was not quite pleasant, and it was kind of starting to feel like dangling a caramel apple in front of me that just happened to be rotten in the middle. It looked good, but I knew it would make me sick.

“It’s not snow time already is it?” Hayden asked, pulling away from me and looking around.

Apparently I’d sounded dazed and confused by our closeness. That was a bit embarrassing.

“So you don’t remember what you do when the cycle ends?” I asked, wanting to focus on something other than my conflicted feelings about my Guide.

“I already told you, I know I’m doing something between these tasks, but it’s all kind of a blur. When the snow falls, I go to leave and the next thing I know, I’m here at the start of a cycle, waiting for you.”

“Hayden,” I began seriously as he took a step back so that we could have this conversation without him practically
straddling me. “Do you really know what’s going on here?”

“Yes
, Isla. Everything’s fine,” he said in exasperation.

“No
, I mean it. Do you know what’s going to happen to me when I reach my Destination?”

Hayden thought about this for a moment. I was sure I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear from him that we were all pretty much in the dark about what was going on.
Since the last task, I’d begun to worry that maybe reaching my Destination wasn’t such a good thing. If Hayden didn’t even know what was in store for me, who was to say it was a good place I’d be going to?

“I feel like I must have known at some point,” Hayden said, looking angry that he couldn’t remember the most basic motivation for him
self as a Guide. “And I feel like I know when I’m not with you. But once the cycle restarts and I come to guide you I can’t remember.”

“That’s not exactly encouraging,” I told him honestly.

“I don’t know how many times I can repeat this to you, but I know it’s going to be fine…
if
you reach your Destination. I can’t give you a reason, but I know it’s bad to fail these tasks and it’s good for you to get to your Destination, and for now that’s going to have to be good enough for you.”

It wasn’t good enough for me
, but I didn’t think saying that to Hayden would really help anything, so I kept my mouth shut. I was already putting my life (or my second life) in the hands of this complete maniac, but now I just had to trust that I was doing it for a good reason. We were the blind leading the blind.

Hayden must have sensed my trepidation because instead of making fun of me, he came and sat next to me on the hospital bed.
Not quite supportive, but not mean either.

“Thank you for saving my life today,” I told him again, this time actually meeting his eyes.

“I need to get the merchandise to its Destination safely,” he said simply, his eyes holding significant meaning that he wanted me to understand. He was
not
doing this because he cared about me. “I’m nothing more than a deliveryman.”

“Understood,” I answered, giving him a little salute and trying not to look too offended.

We were both silent for a while; me swinging my dangling feet, and Hayden silently brooding.

“This task today reminded me of my brother Tuck,”
I said after a long time.

I was
unable to handle the silence anymore and wondered why the snow seemed to be taking longer and longer to show up lately. All that did was give me more time to make small talk with a man who was not a fan of small talk.

“You used to go to the junkyard with him all the time when you were younger because he fancied himself an inventor,” Hayden said in a monotone voice.

“If you’re going to say it like that, why don’t you just let me tell the story?” I asked in annoyance.

He had a knack for making my memories seem so mundane, no matter how
brilliant they were in my mind. If he had access to my memories, why couldn’t he feel how special they were to me? Or maybe he could and that was why he tried to belittle them…because he was a mean person.

“Anyway,” I said, looking over at Hayden pointedly and silently daring him to interrupt me again. He raised his hands in surrender and beckoned for me to continue. “Tuck thought he was an inventor because he’d seen some infomercial about submitting inventions to this company, so he’d always drag me to the junkyard with him while he built little things out of the scraps.”

“It sounds like you had a magical childhood,” Hayden said sarcastically.

I guess playing around in a junkyard didn’t really seem like a dream come true for a kid, and even though we’d grown up
without a lot of the things other kids had, I’d never once felt poor. It didn’t matter that Hayden pitied my childhood or whatever he wanted to call the disdain he had for me. I enjoyed every second of my life.

Until that last second right before my brand new truck smashed into a tree.

That second wasn’t so great.

“You know Tuck saved my life once?” I asked.

“I didn’t,” Hayden said, sounding a little surprised.

“Very funny,” I countered.

“No, I’m not joking,” he said, sounding even more puzzled than before. “Why don’t I know that?”

I wasn’t sure why he couldn’t recall
a memory that was, perhaps, one of my most important ones, but it was fun watching him lose a little power over me.

“Since my memories are so mundane I guess I won’t tell you,” I teased.

“You’re just making this up, right?” he asked, still troubled.

“Of cou
rse I’m not,” I answered with a laugh.

Oh yeah, I was enjoying this way too much.
I was sure I should be more concerned about the fact that Hayden mysteriously couldn’t recall one of my memories, but the fun outweighed my concern.

By a lot.

“Tuck and I went down to the river one day during the summer. It was incredibly hot and humid out and we couldn’t afford to go to the community pool. Tuck felt really bad that I was so miserable so he promised me we’d find some way to go swimming,” I began, relenting and just telling Hayden the story.

It was nice to actually have a story to tell him that he didn’t already know. Suddenly I was excited to relive this
experience.

“We went down to the river, which was pretty disgusting by the way. The water was kind of dirty, but it was cold so we didn’t really care.
I think at first we were just planning to put our feet in since we were wearing clothes and not bathing suits, but eventually we ended up just splashing and swimming around, not caring that we were getting our clothes soaking wet.”

“Swimming in rivers and playing in junkyards. If you’re trying to convince me that you aren’t an unrefined hick
, you aren’t doing a very good job,” Hayden joked.

I rolled my eyes at his statement.

“So,” I said loudly to drown out anything else Hayden might say. “Tuck was swimming in the river and I got it into my head that it would be a good idea to jump off of a tree into the water. Just like the diving board at the pool.”

“Of course you did.”

“Tuck kept begging me not to jump, telling me it was too shallow. He even got out of the water and started climbing the tree to get me down, but I got scared that he was really coming up to push me in so I jumped,” I said, remembering the sensation of falling through the humid heat then suddenly being engulfed by icy water.

“The current was really strong and I was a little disoriented from the jump
, so I couldn’t remember which way was up. I actually ended up hitting my head on a rock and then the world went really fuzzy and dark. For a while I thought my shirt was covering my face in the water because I couldn’t see and my skin felt like it had all fallen asleep. I remember telling myself over and over not to breathe, no matter how much I wanted to.

“I kept trying to bring my hands up to feel my cheeks because the feeling seemed to be gone from them
, but I couldn’t move my body at all. After a while, I couldn’t feel the water around me and I knew I was on dry land, but I still didn’t want to breathe.”

I paused for a moment, realizing for the first time how similar this memory was to one I had just created a few days before.

“I had the strangest dream while I was passed out. I was sitting in the tree branches above Tuck, and I could see him trying to bring me back to life. My face was muddy and there was blood all around me from where I’d hit my head on the rock. I kept thinking I couldn’t go back and I couldn’t take a breath, but suddenly I wanted nothing more than to tell Tuck I was okay. The desire to see him again was so overwhelming that I forced myself to take a breath.”

I stopped speaking. My eyes were burning at the thought that my latest story ended quite differently from this one.

“And?” Hayden asked, sounding more interested than I’d ever heard him, which was good. I couldn’t bear to have him belittle this memory that I held so dear.

“And I woke up,” I said simply. “Tuck was kneeling over me. Praying I think. And he looked white as a ghost. I got ten stitches at the nape of my neck and grounded for a week for swimming in the river when Mama and Daddy had told us not to. I still have a scar.”

I gathered my hair up and turned my back to Hayden to show him the now small scar just below my hairline on the nape of my neck.

He traced it with his finger for a moment, not making any comment on my story. Though I guess he wasn’t making fun of me either so
that was something.

“Tuck was always the stereotypical protective big brother. He was always there to keep me safe,” I said, my voice catching unexpectedly
as I faced Hayden again.

“He’s still alive,” Hayden pointed out, obviously misinterpreting my sadness.

“But he couldn’t save me this time,” I explained.

“Yeah
, but it wasn’t his fault that you died.”

He still
wasn’t understanding me.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said, my voice shaking
as my eyes watered. “He’ll blame himself for not being able to help me. That’s just how he is. He feels like it’s his job to keep everyone safe. He works nonstop to contribute to the family. He never took his football scholarship because he was worried that if he left, Mama and Daddy wouldn’t be able to make it on their income alone.

“He’s selfless.”

I wiped the few stray tears away from the corners of my eyes, not wanting to think about Tuck anymore. Or how I’d never see my family again.

Hayden didn’t respond to my story
, but he very slowly moved his hand over on the bed so that it rested on top of mine. As small as the gesture was, I knew it was a big deal for Hayden to show any sort of support, and I appreciated it immensely.

“You know, every time you talk about dying, you talk about how it’s affected everyone
, but you. Why is that?” he asked after a moment.