“Gee, thanks.”
Following a long, thoughtful silence, Rain asked, “Hey, Coach … how worried should I be right now? With Friday and all that stuff today?”
After a few steps, Yo-Yo said, “It’s something to think about. Maybe talk to someone about.”
“Yeah, maybe,” said Rain. “I can’t help thinking about it, but I don’t know how to think about it. Does that make sense?”
“Nothing makes sense tonight,” said Yo-Yo.
Rain was about to reply when Yo-Yo suddenly slowed and pointed.
“Hey, is that Joplin’s building?” she asked.
Up ahead, the lights inside the mist had changed, shifting from the distorted hues of headlight white and brake-light red to a dark purple that pulsed and slashed back and forth. It took Rain a few more steps to realize that the color was a blend of the blue and red of emergency lights.
Police lights.
And ambulance lights.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
They ran as fast as Yo-Yo’s shoes would allow, and with each step, forms appeared and defined themselves in the mist. The hulking shapes of police cars and an ambulance. Crowds of people. Whatever was happening centered around the brownstone where Joplin lived, two doors down from Rain’s. She tried to find him in the crowd, but he wasn’t there, and panic sparked in her chest.
She got her cell out and punched his number and got voice mail. “You’ve reached Scot Joplin. One T, no relation. I’m either not here or not all here, so leave some words and numbers and I’ll get back to you.”
Rain turned away, pressed a palm to her other ear, and half bent to find a bubble of relative quiet in all the din. “Joplin, I’m outside of your place and something’s happening. There are cops and ambulances and all that. I hope you’re okay. Please give me a call as soon as you get this.”
As she hung up, she remembered that he was supposed to be in the city for something related to his paintings, staying at his sister’s. She hoped so.
Rain and Yo-Yo drifted to the edge of the crowd and stood watching as a pair of burly EMTs carried a stretcher out of the front door and down the steps. The wheels dropped down, and the EMTs rolled it toward the ambulance. No one seemed to be in much of a hurry. Strapped to the gurney was a black rubber body bag.
“Ah, jeez,” breathed Yo-Yo.
The EMTs passed within ten feet of them. Rain stared at the body, at its shape, and at its length.
“God, Yo, I think that’s a kid,” she murmured.
Yo-Yo gripped Rain’s wrist. “Someone you know?”
Rain tried to think if there were any kids in Joplin’s building. She barely paid attention to her own neighbors and couldn’t come up with many faces or names or identities of the people here.
“No,” she said. “No, I don’t know…” Her sentence drifted off. Neither of them said another word, though, as they watched the EMTs load the body into the back of the ambulance. The crowd also fell silent as they, too, saw and understood what was happening. As the doors chunked shut, one EMT, a woman, looked over her shoulder in Rain’s direction. Rain stiffened. The woman looked almost exactly like the nurse from the diner. Same face, same black curly hair, same cat-green eyes, same dark red lipstick. It was unlikely, even impossible. It couldn’t be the same woman. Except that Rain knew it was. Just as she knew who it was.
It was his nurse.
It was her. The woman who had …
Rain’s mind ground to a halt, gears stripped, engine blown, tires flat.
The nurse.
Long ago, after Rain had given birth to Dylan, after the terrible trauma of that birth. After the surgery and everything else, she’d had that one dream. Or hallucination. Or vision. Or … had she actually seen it? Doctor Nine and this woman, the doctor’s nurse, holding her baby. Holding Dylan. Taking him away. Doing things to him. Owning him.
On impulse, Rain removed the old woman’s glasses from her purse and slipped them on, angling her body so that Yo-Yo wouldn’t see what she was doing. The EMT was gone from sight, though, having gone around to the driver’s side of the ambulance. Rain scanned the crowd, not knowing what she was looking for or if she was doing anything at all except feeding her own parasite. There was a clatter behind her, and she looked over her shoulder to see a kid get onto a skateboard and roll away from the lights and crowd. She recognized the backpack and tried to remember where she’d seen him before. Earlier that night? A local kid? She wasn’t sure. Some small thing, almost a thought, tickled her, but it was gone in an instant and she turned away.
The crowd looked like every other crowd gathered to witness pain. They might have come from central casting for any TV or movie scene of people watching a fire, a cleanup after a drive-by, or something like this. Death. The faces were mostly blank, and in the strange light, everyone’s eyes looked black and as dead as mannequin eyes.
Out of the corner of her eye, through the slice of glass on the outside half of the left lens, Rain saw something that caught and held her interest. On the far side of where the emergency vehicles were clustered, a man and boy stood near the edge of the crowd. They were about a yard away from the next closest person, as if they did not want to be part of a crowd, or as if they could not be. A crazy thought, but it popped into Rain’s head.
The man wore dark glasses despite the fog and the night.
The boy stood with his head bowed as if looking at something on the ground in front of his feet. She couldn’t see his features at all, and the flashing emergency lights splashed him in red and blue over and over again. He looked to be about ten. The same age he’d appeared to be on the street in Manhattan that morning. If it was even the same boy. If that was even possible.
Looking through the cracked lens made Rain’s head ache. She felt a tingle in her nose and touched her nostrils, expecting to see blood, but there was nothing.
The boy suddenly looked up and turned this way and that, searching the crowd. He did not look directly at Rain, but she could see that he had a strange expression on his face. Confusion was part of it, but there was a feral anger that was palpable. The round face was dirty, bruised, and hostile. There were greasy food stains on his cheeks and shirt as if he ate like an animal, rough and selfish and too fast. There was something else, too. Even though Rain did not get a good look directly into the boy’s eyes, there was a light there. Small, faint, flickering. But there.
Still there, murmured one of her inner voices.
On the heels of that whisper, Rain thought she could hear the chains on the Box of Rain begin to groan as if something bad inside was trying very hard to get out. Or was nearly out. She shivered.
“Yo,” she breathed, “do you see that guy with the kid?”
Yo-Yo glanced at her and then followed the line of her gaze. “What guy? Oh, wait. The tall man wearing sunglasses?”
“You see him?”
“Sure, why?”
Rain grabbed her friend’s wrist. “Do you see the kid?”
“Sure, but … hey, ow!” Yo-Yo stiffened. “Wait that’s the kid you’ve been seeing?”
Rain’s mouth went totally dry, and her heart beat so hard and fast that it made her feel like she was going to faint. Or have another heart attack. The man placed his hands on the boy’s shoulder. He wore thick winter gloves even though it wasn’t cold enough for them. He smiled and turned away, pulling the little boy after him. They were gone from sight in an instant.
Yo-Yo started forward as if she were going to follow him, but Rain caught her by the elbow and pulled her back. “Don’t.”
They looked at each other, and instead of asking why, Yo-Yo nodded.
Then she frowned. “Hey,” she said, “your nose is bleeding.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It wasn’t a bad nosebleed, but it took time and ice and patience to stop it.
Yo-Yo escorted Rain to her apartment, but when Rain told her that it was okay, that she didn’t need to stay, her friend left with only a small pretense of op
position. She apologized for flaking out, but Rain all but shoved her out the door. They both needed to be alone, to end the evening, to go process it all and make decisions about what they understood and believed. Rain got all of that and so, it seemed, did Yo-Yo. The nosebleed was slowing anyway, and it was late.
Bug was freaked out by the smell of blood, and she danced and barked and got in the way. Eventually, the dog calmed and watched with great interest as Rain went through the familiar steps of dealing with a nosebleed. Rain sat up straight with her head tilted slightly forward; she used her thumb and forefinger to pinch the soft part of her nose shut. When it slowed even more, she got an ice pack and pressed it to her face with one hand while pinching with the other. She held it all in place for ten minutes, timing herself by the clock on her phone. When she removed the pack and unpinched her nose, there was no renewed flow.
“Good,” Rain told Bug. “See? Mommy has it all covered.”
Bug wagged her tail and went over to stand beside her empty food bowl. Rain fed her, then got cleaned up. She opened her laptop and clicked one of her playlists on iTunes. Beyoncé began singing about kicking some guy’s ass for being a two-timing dick. Rain did the dishes and looked around for something else to do. It was a small place, so there wasn’t much room to putter, but she kept at it because doing mindless busywork like straightening magazines and watering her two anemic houseplants was better than thinking about the little boy in the body bag.
It was like trying not to think of elephants.
Harder. Worse.
The man with the dark glasses leered at her from the shadows every time she closed her eyes. She wanted the boy, the one with the man, to look at her, but he never did. Not down on the street and not in her imagination. Who was he? Why was he showing up in her hallucinations? Or visions … or whatever they were.
She’d started having terrifying visions before she even started drugs. They were one of the reasons she got high in the first place. The first one came to her while she lay in her hospital bed and watched the steady swirl of activity on her floor through the window. She hadn’t had a window like that in her real room, but she did in the dream. If it was a dream. Through it, Rain could see the nurses’ station and one of the elevator doors. In the dream, she was very sick. Not merely tired and sore from the long hours of labor, the heart attack, the C-section, and the rest. No, in that dream, Rain was dying, wasting away and nearly gone. As she lay there fighting to breathe, trying to stay alive, she watched the people beyond the glass; saw how alive they were. Working, talking, laughing. Each of them with a future. All of them ignoring her.
Then a doctor in a white lab coat walked past. He was tall and thin and wore …
… black …
… sunglasses …
The doctor stopped and turned slowly toward her. He was smiling. Of course he was. Doctor Nine always smiled. He gestured to someone Rain could not see, and a moment later, a nurse stepped into view and stood beside him. His nurse. The nurse. Black curls and green eyes. She carried a newborn in her arms. The baby was naked, still smeared with the red viscous muck of delivery. He was squirming and crying—screaming, really—but no one else out there seemed to notice or care. No one turned to look at the baby or at the nurse, who was holding him like he was hers. Doctor Nine stood apart, his smile flickering into distaste every time he looked at the infant.
“No,” whispered Rain.
The doctor cupped a hand behind his ear, his face contorting like a mime pretending to listen. Comical in all the wrong ways. His expression encouraged her to speak up, to repeat herself.
“No!” she cried.
His smile got wider.
“Let me have my baby!” wailed Rain.
The doctor looked surprised and pointed from her to the screaming baby and back, eyebrows rising above the rims of his sunglasses in inquiry, as if to ask, Is this yours?
“Please, give me back my baby. I didn’t mean to … I don’t want to let you have him. Please,” she wept, “I take it back. Let me have my baby.…”
The doctor turned to the nurse and gestured for her to give the baby back. She looked at him and then at Rain. Without taking her eyes off of the teenage girl in the bed, the nurse bent and licked the child’s face. She did it slowly, unrolling a wide, pink tongue and drawing it across the baby’s face.
Rain screamed.
The nurse continued to lick, her tongue flicking and slurping up the blood, cleaning it all from the tiny child’s cheeks and nose and forehead and …
Rain’s throat suddenly locked tight as a fist around the next scream. With each lick, as the blood was cleaned away, the child’s features vanished, too. Soon there was nothing left except skin that was as smooth and featureless as a lump of plastic. No … it was the unhealthy pallor of a worm.
The scream burned in her chest, needing to spill out, needing to shatter the window glass so she could grab her baby and …
The smooth pallor changed with a final lick across the lower part of the baby’s face. Instead of nothing, now there was a long, curved, red line. Like a wound, except that it did not bleed. Worse, it opened to reveal teeth—tiny and white and wet. The lips of the wound became the lips of a new and alien mouth. A familiar mouth, though in miniature. The baby—her baby?—smiled in perfect harmony with Doctor Nine. Exactly the same except for scale.
The rest of the baby’s face was still blank, and all that Rain could see was that dreadful smile.
Doctor Nine touched his fingers to his lips and blew Rain a kiss. He turned away and nodded for the nurse, who lingered a moment longer, her lips smeared with blood and mucus. Then she licked the gore from her lips and swallowed, her eyes fluttering as if the taste of it drove her to the edge of orgasm. Then she, too, turned away, taking the baby with her, leaving Rain to finally release that scream.
She felt her heart break. She felt her hope for her child crack and fall away in brittle pieces. That’s how she thought of it. Hope as a fragile and vulnerable thing, cracking apart. Not all of it, though. If it all went, she wouldn’t have felt anything or cared at all. A little hope remained, and it was as sharp as broken glass. It cut into her heart and did not budge except to cut deeper.
The drugs she had been taking when she had that dream, the ones prescribed for her by caring doctors, kept her trapped, and it replayed the dream over and over again.
Hell must be like that.
When they released her from the hospital, Rain went looking for a different kind of high. Anything that would take her mind completely out of gear. Void did it, but there were dangers there, too. Crack was her salvation for a lot of years. Now she was clean, and she had no defenses at all for the dreams when they came.
And the dreams came every night.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
IN DREAMS
Rain often dreamed of a little girl named Bethy. She was sure there had never been such a child in her own life. Only in dreams.
That night, she dreamed of Bethy again. It was a kind of dream she often had, unfolding in sections, like chapters in a book. If she woke up, the dream would be waiting for her when she fell asleep again. Not always the very next night, but soon. Inevitably, soon …
Bethy sat awake nearly all night watching Millie die.
She thought it was quite beautiful. In the way spiders are beautiful. The way a mantis is beautiful when it mates and feeds. If her sister thought it was something else … well, so what? Bethy and Millie had never seen eye to eye, not once unless Bethy was lying about it. Bethy was a very good liar. All it took was practice. It was a game they had started playing just a couple of hours after they all got home from camping. Mom and Dad were already asleep in their room, and Bethy had convinced Millie that it would be fun to stay up and pretend that they were still camping, still lost in the big, dark woods.
Millie thought that would be fun, too. Millie was easy to lead, though she truly had a completely different sense of what was fun. Millie thought Pokémon was fun. M
illie liked her Barbies unscarred and her Ken dolls unmelted. Millie liked live puppies. Millie was blind to the sound of blood, the song of blood.
Bethy said that they could pretend that Doctor Nine was going to come and tell them spooky campfire stories. Dad’s big flashlight was their campfire. Millie, sweet and pretty in her flannel robe with the cornflower pattern, her fuzzy slippers, agreed to the game even though she thought that Doctor Nine was a dumb name for an imaginary friend. Well, to be fair, she truly did think that Doctor Nine was imaginary and that Bethy had no actual friends.
The clock on the wall was a big black cartoon cat with eyes that moved back and forth and a tail that swished in time. Millie loved that, too. She called it Mr. Whiskers and would tell time according to what the cat said. “Mr. Whiskers says it’s half past six!”
Mr. Whiskers was counting out the remaining minutes of Millie’s life, and wasn’t that fun, too?
Bethy looked at the clock and saw that nearly an hour had gone by since Millie had drunk her warm milk. Plenty of time for the Vicodin to enter her bloodstream through the lining of her stomach wall. If Millie was going to get sick and throw up, it would have happened already, but … nothing, and that was good. It kept this tidy. Getting her to take the pills had been so easy. Once mashed with a hammer from the cellar, the powder was easy to dissolve. It was no matter if it made the milk a little lumpy, as Bethy had brought big cookies upstairs as well. Cookies to dunk in the warm milk. Just perfect. Millie had swallowed all of it. Bethy only pretended to drink hers.
Now it was time to watch and learn. Bethy took out her diary and her pen and sat cross-legged on the floor and watched.
That was how the Bethy dreams always started. There was more, but by the time that dream ended, Doctor Nine was outside waiting for the little girl to leave her dead sister’s body behind, go downstairs, and join him.
Rain dreamed of Bethy many times. Of the little girl with the curly black hair and cat-green eyes. A girl who was born innocent and became … what?