Undercurrent (5 page)

I wave back like an idiot.

The heavy door swings shut. I’m alone with Nurse Barbara, a scene completely drained of any sexiness.

“Sorry,” I say, still tasting the lipstick that must be smeared all over my face. “Look, I didn’t invite her in. She just showed up—I don’t know why.” I laugh and shake my head. “To tell you the truth, I don’t even know her that well.”

I don’t know why I’m bothering. Nurse Barbara isn’t interested. Upon finishing her duties, she only turns to scowl at me before leaving.

I lie there for a while, holding the covers tight around my neck. I don’t think that was a dream—it felt too real. But come on. Things like that don’t happen to me. Something is wrong.

Turning toward the window, I see that the curtains are still open. I wonder if Ivy is out there, sitting in a parked car and watching me at this very moment. I can’t tell—I don’t even know what her car looks like.

But what I do notice with a start is the figure in the Crocodiles jacket strolling down the parking lot. His hood is up, and I can’t see his face, but he’s definitely looking in at me. It’s the same figure I saw just before Bryce came in.

This time I could swear even that walk is Cole’s.

Well, I’m pissed. I don’t know what he’s pulling, but it’s not funny at all. And I’m definitely not playing along.

Legs aching, I get up and pull the curtains shut.

I hear voices out in the hall.

I cross over to the door and listen for a while. It’s all just the talk of bored workers over the noises of a working hospital. But then everything goes silent. Silent like a morgue.

On the way back to bed, I pick up the unused bedpan. And though it’s not quite as hefty as I’d hoped, it’s still made of some sort of metal. A person definitely wouldn’t want to get hit in the teeth with it.

I tuck it under my pillow, just in case, and begin waiting out the rest of the night.

CHAPTER 6

More than once, I fall asleep. I awaken each time with a jolt, my
hands gripping the cold bedpan. But no one comes anywhere near me—I don’t think my door opens even once. Which is strange, I think, because don’t the nurses have to check on people?

Apparently not on me.

When morning comes, I begin to wonder if I’ve been making a big deal out of nothing. Maybe I’m just shaken up from the accident. Who wouldn’t be?

Still, it’s a happy moment when my mother arrives. Shortly afterward I get taken for some tests. Then there’s a wait before the all clear to go home.

“If you’re free of symptoms for a couple of weeks—no funny stuff like vision problems or nausea or anything—I see no reason why you can’t play sports,” the doctor says.

“Great,” I answer, as if this is somehow a priority for me.

Whatever—I’ll nod and smile at anything if it means getting out of here. And from the looks I get on the way out, I’m not the only one who doesn’t want me hanging around any longer.

An orderly pushes me to the exit in a wheelchair like we’re in a race. He dumps me outside—no “get well soon,” “best wishes,” or any of that. He just abandons the chair and heads back in. My mother even notices and glares after him.

“Hey, what a nice day,” I say, hoping to distract her from the fact that the whole hospital hates her younger child.

“Yeah, sunny, huh?” she answers, helping me up.

It hurts to walk, and I’m limping as we cross the parking lot to my mother’s car. “Oh, you poor thing,” she says, looking at me. “You should have waited in reception. I would have driven up.”

“I’m fine, Mom.” It’s probably mostly just stiffness from lying around for so long, I tell her. My joints do feel swollen and sore though. But no wonder—I fell over a waterfall and must have been thrown around like a rag doll.

Mom unlocks her trusty but rusty red hatchback, which she bought for five hundred dollars shortly after we arrived in Crystal Falls. My brother, a self-proclaimed auto expert, poked around its insides and gave the car a year’s life, max. But somehow it refuses to die. We used to joke that you could probably drive the car off a cliff, and it would still run.

Well, it turns out that the little rust bucket and I now have something in common. The car doesn’t return the fond feeling, however, making me pull four times before giving me enough slack to buckle up. Pain shoots through my shoulder, and again I feel like the stitches on my head are about to pop open.

Safely secured in the cozy little death trap, I try to relax. It really is a nice day, I notice through the grimy window. Crystal Falls is beautiful in the fall, I’ll admit. And as the cool nights drive off most of the campers and tourists, you can finally get a parking spot on Main Street and seats in the diner whenever you want. By November the town is ours until the weather turns mild again in May.

Well, maybe not completely ours.

It’s funny how you can spend four years in a place like Crystal Falls but still be an outsider. Even Bryce, who moved here when he was five, isn’t “OT”—an Original Townie. Meanwhile there are families with streets named after them: the Mayfields, the Daniels, the Wiltons, and the Guises. Those are the names that mean something in Crystal Falls.

And then there are the Holdens, of course, one of whom blows by in a luxury SUV as we exit the parking lot. Their liquor business has been here for 130 years—even operating in secret during Prohibition, I heard, inflating their fortune tenfold. And now they practically own the town.

Which might explain why Mrs. Holden—whose bleach-blond hairdo I glimpse behind the wheel—feels entitled to drive sixty in a thirty-mile-an-hour zone. The road now clear, my mother pulls out. I stare blankly out the window as we head down Main Street.

“Wait!” I suddenly exclaim. “What happened to Electronica Veronica?”

“Pardon?” my mother asks.

“Electronica Veronica,” I repeat. It’s a store that Bryce and I spend a lot of time in, as it’s the only place within a half-hour drive that sells video games. Craning back, I can see the familiar storefront, but the letters of its old seventies sign have been removed. The windows look completely dark.

“Electronic what?” she asks.

But I don’t reply. Because I’m noticing other businesses that are gone, like the coffeehouse where some of the older kids go. In its place is a repair shop with a graveyard of vacuum cleaners behind its front window. And there are more that are gone, too, I’m sure of it, either shuttered up or replaced by what look like struggling businesses.

“What the hell happened to Main Street?” I shout. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mom shoot me a worried look. But I can’t help myself. “Okay, this is ridiculous!” I cry. “Where did Burger Delight go?”

“Are you feeling all right, Cal?” Mom demands.

“Sure. Why?”

“Did they give you any sort of medication before we left?”

“No.”

“Well, you seem odd,” my mother says. She puts on the brakes, stopping to let a group of power-walking seniors cross the street.

“I’m fine, honestly.” But I’m lying. Looking around, I don’t feel okay. At all. I put my head down and rub my temples as my mother begins driving again. When I look up again, we’ve left Main and are on the road leading out of town. As we pass the church, I’m stunned: The normally bright white clapboard is dingy and in need of a paint job, and the always well-maintained lawn is wild and weedy.

“You’re sure you feel okay?” my mother asks again. “I can turn back, you know. We can get you checked out at the hospital. . . .”

“No!” I shout. “No!”

The outburst only scares my mother even more. She pulls over onto the shoulder, about to turn the car around.

“Seriously, I’m fine,” I tell her. “Sorry for yelling. Let’s just go home.”

“All right,” she says. “Put the seat back and try to relax, Cal. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

I recline as far as the uncooperative old seat allows. Feeling woozy, I crack the window open a little too. I can see the bridge up ahead. Soon I can even hear the great
whoosh
of the crashing falls themselves.

A few seconds later, we’re crossing the dizzying drop over the gorge, the falls visible on the right.

“Don’t look at them, Cal,” my mother begs me. “You’re only traumatizing yourself.”

But she has no idea—no idea that my trauma is not coming from morbid thoughts or awful memories but from a much darker place, from the disturbing question hanging over everything:

What the hell is going on?

I turn and look out the passenger window at the gorge and the turbulent river snaking away to the left. I was just hallucinating before, I tell myself. I hit my head, and it messed me up. It’s my brain playing tricks on me. None of it is real.

The thought is no more comforting.

When we reach the other side of the bridge, the sign shows the turnoff to the campground along with the large billboard that reads:

HOLDEN DISTILLERY, 8 MILES. VISITORS WELCOME!

I close my eyes and keep them clenched shut until I hear the familiar crunch of the tires on our gravel driveway. Only then do I decide it’s safe to open my eyes again.

Unfortunately I’m wrong.

I’m too shocked to scream.

Everything is different.

Yes, the number by the front door is still 4275. But the house is no longer green—it’s bright blue. And the whole property has been cleared of trees, except for the magnolia out front. In their place is just grass—a flat expanse of mowed grass.

“How are you feeling?” my mother asks. “Any better?”

“Yeah,” I manage to say, though it takes every ounce of my will. “Much better.”

“Well, you go on inside, and I’ll get the things out of the trunk.”

But I don’t want to go into the house alone. I’m too nervous.

“Things?” I ask. “What things?” Other than the clothes I’m wearing, I don’t remember having anything at the hospital.

“It’s just a few groceries, Cal. Don’t worry, I can manage them. Here, take my keys. Go on up and see your brother.”

My brother’s home from school? It figures he doesn’t come to visit me at the hospital yet still wrangles a day off when I’m discharged.

Trembling, I get out of the car and head toward the front door. Untangling Mom’s keys, I unlock the door and open it, afraid of what I’ll find next. But there’s nothing particularly unusual inside, other than the absence of Cole’s big sneakers, which I usually trip over. I stand in the entranceway, my body tingling all over.

I don’t want to see Cole, I decide. Not yet, at least. Maybe I should lie down for a while. Maybe then things will snap back and start making more sense. I climb the stairs, clinging to the railing as if the whole house is on an angle.

Reaching the landing, I turn right toward my bedroom door, with the peeling sticker that says: Hazardous Zone—Do Not Enter. It might’ve been funny back when I was twelve, but the warning is getting old these days.

Opening the door, I notice that something is different about my room, but at first glance, I can’t tell what. I don’t care. I’m getting dizzy and feeling totally nauseated. I just want to lie down. Leaving on the shoes I forgot to take off at the door, I fall forward onto my bed. I bury my face in my pillow for a few seconds, but the sensation immediately reminds me of Bryce’s attack, so I turn on my side, breathless. The wound on the back of my head throbs, and my whole body aches.

I’m lying like this for only a minute before I hear my mother come in downstairs. After dumping her bags in the kitchen, she calls for me from the bottom of the stairs.

“Callum?”

At least she has my name right for once. It’s only a small return to normality, but I’ll take what I can get.

“Cal, are you okay?”

“I’m in my room,” I shout back. “Lying down.”

“Okay, sweetie. Just let me know if you need anything.”

I keep my eyes closed for a while, hoping it will help my nerves settle. I start thinking again about the possibility that there’s a complication to my brain injury and that I might be wasting time just lying here. Maybe I have internal bleeding or something, and it’s screwing up my memory.

But the doctor said it himself: My brain looks fine. Everything is completely normal, the scan said. Still, I think of the stories I’ve heard about people hitting their heads and having all sorts of unexplained symptoms. Like the story my biology teacher read from the newspaper, about a woman in England who woke up speaking with a Chinese accent. If that’s true, surely anything is possible.

Forget it—I don’t want to think about that sort of thing right now. I just want to get a grip on myself. Keeping my eyes shut, I find myself wondering where Cole is. He must have heard me open the front door. But maybe he’s out. Maybe he took Jess for a walk—he’s probably been stuck with the job because I haven’t been around. And it would explain why she didn’t come running when I got home.

No. I hear my mother opening the basement door and the dog bounding out. We can’t leave her alone in the house or she’ll chew something to pieces. So whining or not, she has to get locked up.

The clicking of Jess’s nails on the kitchen floor makes me feel better. She’s excited that someone is home and is probably getting a treat for being cooped up for so long. This is the home I remember. This is the home I know.

My breathing slows, and I feel better. I just want my dog.

I open my eyes and sit up.

Something about my room still feels wrong. What is it? Wait—books are missing from my shelves. Half of my collection, maybe more. In their place are weird things: magazines, ugly golden trophies, and a black case. Frowning, I get up out of bed, step over, and open the case. A trumpet? What am I doing with a trumpet? Then I look at the thick stack of magazines lying where the books should be. I pull one out.

I can’t believe it. It’s another goddamn
Sports Illustrated
!

Just then I begin to feel really uncomfortable. It’s like someone is in the room watching me. I spin around.

To my shock, a large, half-naked woman is looming over me. It’s a poster of a chick wearing a bikini and crawling on all fours, a tropical surf roaring up behind her. Who the hell put this up in my room?

Okay, it’s hardly a difficult mystery to solve. It has to be Cole—who else has such a stupid sense of humor? But it makes me mad all over again. Instead of coming to visit me in the hospital, he stayed home to screw with me, like this is some big, hilarious episode. Does he have any idea how serious things were? How close I came to dying?

Brain-damaged or not, I’m not so out of my mind that I can’t figure out what’s happened here—Cole has replaced my stuff with his own. Which means he’s here somewhere, hiding and cackling to himself. Ha-ha. Well, he is going to pay. He is going to pay dearly at the points of my sharp knuckles.

I check my closet—he’s not there. So I storm out into the hall.

“Cole!” I shout. “Cole, you ass-wipe!”

I hear my mother running up the stairs. “What’s going on?” she asks, when she meets me at the top.

“Where is Cole?” I want to know. “Where is he?”

My mother goes white. “He’s in his room, of course.” Her mouth begins quivering. “Where else would he be?”

I thunder past her, down the hall to Cole’s bedroom door. I throw it open and see that the room is pitch-black inside.

So he wants to play around, huh? Jump out at me or something? Well, let’s see how funny he thinks it is when he gets a punch square in the face. . . .

I flick on the overhead light—and stand there, stunned.

Because his room is all wrong too. The queen-size bed that ate up most of the space is gone. In its place is a twin, made up perfectly. His desk is also gone. There are no more posters on the walls, no babes, no football heroes. And no Cole.

Instead I see the original wallpaper from back when we first moved in.

“Omigod—kittens! Really?” my fourteen-year-old brother shrieked at the time. “You have got to be kidding me!” Meanwhile my parents and I killed ourselves laughing over his shoulder.