Brighter Than the Sun

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  For Alexandra

  Thank you.

  Thank you.

  Thank you.

  Acknowledgments

  This novella was a long time coming, and it owes a lot of thanks to a lot of people. Just to name a few (in no particular order): Jennifer, Alexandra, Caitlin, Hillary, Eliani, Lorelei, everyone at Macmillan and St. Martin’s Press, Kit, Celeste, Theresa, Jowanna, Dana, Netter, Danny, Jerrdan, Casey, and The Grimlets. Thank you for the storming of the brains, the calming of the nerves, the general care and feeding of the driven.

  And thank you to everyone who wanted to hear Reyes’s side of the story.

  1

  I’m curled in a corner of the basement, shivering like a little bitch and licking my wounds from the latest encounter, when I hear my sister crying at the door. I try to assure her I’m okay, but the edges of my vision darken and a beckoning light appears in the distance. I collapse and drift toward it. Weightless. Ethereal.

  I always drift toward it.

  Not literally. I’ve been locked in the basement by a psychopath. I don’t get out much. But mentally.

  You should probably know that even though I’m twelve, the circumstances of my existence are not normal. The things that happen to me are not normal. The things in my head are not normal. And the light that I’m drifting toward, the warmth I feel from it, the … forgiveness for all my abnormalities, is as abnormal as I am.

  I’m three the first time I see it, and in a very similar state. I follow it. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, and drift toward the white-hot pinprick of light burning the back of my eyes. The closer I get, the brighter it becomes until, just when I think I’ll never see again …

  … she appears.

  This tiny being peeking out from between a lady’s legs. I don’t know what to think at first, besides I shouldn’t be looking between a lady’s legs. But she is dying, the lady, so I figure it’s okay. I wouldn’t look at her bad anyway. My head doesn’t always work right, but even at three, it knows not to look at a lady bad.

  Anyway, she’s shaking. The lady. Not shivers like if she’s cold, but deep shakes like if something’s wrong. Her head is thrown back and her body is stiff. The nurses hold her down as a doctor pulls at the light. At the thing. The tiny being that was in the lady’s belly, and suddenly it all makes sense.

  Not the light, but that whole “Where do babies come from?” thing.

  It’s disturbing, but not so disturbing as the lady. One of the reasons my head doesn’t work right is because I feel what others feel. Could ever since I was a kid. A littler kid. I can feel other people when they’re mad or pissed or in pain. That’s how I know when to stay away from Earl. When to run and hide. It doesn’t always work, but it’s damned sure worth a shot.

  But right now, I feel the lady’s pain and it hurts and I almost leave if not for the light. I try to catch my breath once more. To be near it. Near her. Just a little longer.

  She comes out in a whoosh of baby and liquid and a light so bright, I can hardly see—and I’m mesmerized. Then the pain stops and I can breathe normally again. The lady is still. A solid, constant note sounds in the room, and people gather around her and the baby. Everyone except the man holding the lady’s hand. He is doubled over. His shoulders shake, and I realize the people around the baby—most of them, anyway—are dead. They’re people from the past come to see the light. Ghosts. Dead.

  Their faces are full of wonder, but they are blocking my view, so I push them aside and drift closer. She is wailing like babies do. Then she sees the lady. Her mother. The woman standing beside the doctor, looking down at her. I’d never seen anything like the emotion in the mom’s expression, and I think how it must be love, because it’s soft and caring and tender.

  I’m glad for the baby and sad at the same time. The mother touches her face. The baby’s. Tells her to be strong. Stronger than she was. Then she kisses the man’s bowed head, and I think about how I didn’t know ghosts could cry. Then she does the impossible: She steps into the baby’s light and is gone.

  I watch as the baby goes still and then gasps and then starts wailing again, and I wonder if she’s crying for her mother. The doctor cuts a cord that goes to her belly button, but it doesn’t hurt her. I’d have felt it.

  Another doctor is trying to bring the mother back to life. He works on the lady with a bunch of nurses. They don’t know she is already gone. Already on the other side. There is no coming back from that.

  This is the second time I see somebody die. The first was a man. It happened before I was tall enough to piss in a toilet. The man got in a fight with Sir. Earl used to make me call him Sir. He still tries. He fails.

  I don’t know what the fight was about, but when he went to heaven, a light opened up around him and he disappeared. The baby is like that light, and I wonder if she swallowed it. I’m three at the time, remember. I wonder about a lot of strange shit. Either way, she’s special. I know that beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  She stops crying and looks at me—right at me—her eyes wide and curious. They sparkle like a diamond ring and I can see things in them. Stars and ribbons of light. Shimmering gold rivers and purple trees. And I realize she is from there. That place I’m seeing. She was sent here, and she’s showing me her galaxy. Her universe. And I don’t know how, but I know what she is. The seeker. The one who searches for lost souls.

  A name pops into my head. It’s in another language. Aramaic, maybe. It’s supposed to be something like D’AaeAsh. No, that’s not quite right. D’MaAeSH? No. There’s more to it. Either way, I can hear it in my head. I just can’t pronounce it, so when I tell her what she is, it comes out “Dutch.” I know a lot of words I can’t pronounce at that age in a lot of languages. Earl gets mad when I talk about it. He calls me a liar, but I’m not.

  Doesn’t matter anyway. Dutch will work for now.

  She seems to like it, but I feel like she’s scared when she looks at me. Just a little, so I hide. At first, I imagine a cape like Superman’s but decide against it. Too bright. Too flashy. Instead, I imagine a cloak like the knight in my comic book wears. It’s thick and black with a hood. As I think, it appears around me like a big, black sea and settles around my shoulders. That’s the great thing about daydreams.

  The doctor “calls it” and checks the clock. The nurses clean the girl—Dutch—and take her to a room with other babies, and she stays there for three days. The man comes and goes. He doesn’t stay long. But that’s okay. We keep vigil. Me and the ghosts.

  She likes them. I can feel it. Even the one with a big hole on the side of his head. But when I get close, she winces, so I call forth the cloak and watch her from a corner of the ceiling. I watch until the man comes to take her home.

  His sadness hurts my chest and makes it hard to breathe. He whispers into her ear. Something about just the three of them now, and I remember that the man has another daughter. He was tel
ling a nurse as he looked down at Dutch. As he held her for the first time. As he balanced a bottle in his big hands. As he cried and cried and cried.

  I remember wondering why nobody ever told him it’s not okay for boys to cry.

  Then she is gone, taken to be with her family. What’s left of it. And I wake up from the dream. The dream about a girl made of pure light. You’d think that since it was a daydream and not a night one, I could’ve controlled what happened. I should have tried harder. If I’d thought about it, I would’ve made the lady live and be with her little girl. If I’d thought about it.

  2

  When I wake up, I’m not in the basement anymore. Groggy and disoriented, I don’t recognize my surroundings. It takes me a minute to realize I’m in a hospital. A hospital. I stay still when a nurse comes in. Checks my IV. Tells me I had a seizure.

  Okay. That’s all fine and dandy, but I always have seizures. I’ve had them since I was three. Since I first saw Dutch’s light. Why am I in a hospital? I’ve never been to a hospital. I’ve never even been to a doctor. I’m in a blue gown and my arms are taped up. One has an IV in it. The other has a bandage that runs from elbow to wrist.

  Earl is sitting beside me. His cheap cologne hovers in the air around me like teargas. Inside, he is furious. I can feel it like red-hot needles on my skin. Outside, he’s all smiles. A smile on his face is a scary thing. He flirts with the nurse. She laughs and ducks her head. He pats my arm with his sandpaper hands and calls me Alexander. Then he gives my arm a tight squeeze as if I don’t know what the fuck “Alexander” means.

  Eyes down. Mouth shut.

  My first thought is for my sister, Kim. She’s not my real sister but definitely the next best thing. She’s all I have, and Earl knows it.

  “You took quite a spill,” the nurse says.

  I don’t say anything. I just nod.

  “I’m Gillian.” She checks my bandages. “Goodness.” She pulls back in surprise. “Almost healed. How on earth is that—?” She stops and fixes her expression. “That’s amazing. I bet you’ll be able to go home soon.”

  I nod again and wince at the longing she feels for me. She wants a kid. A boy just like me. Sweet. Polite. Respectful. She has no idea what I am. How filthy I am. How bad. I feel sorry for her.

  “You ready to go home, sport?” Earl asks me.

  He ruffles my hair. My fucking hair like I’m a two-year-old. Heat wells inside me. Burns my skin. I bite down and nod like the good little bitch I am. His words. Little bitch. I just happen to agree with them.

  Gillian laughs. Her eyes sparkle when she looks at me. I turn away. She needs to save that for someone a little more deserving.

  “It could be a few more days, unfortunately,” she says. “We still don’t know what’s causing those seizures. But I bet you’ll be out of here in no time.”

  Earl’s anger peaks to a new high.

  “You have some interesting markings on you,” she says. She wants to look. To see them again. To examine them more closely.

  I don’t encourage her. Earl doesn’t like it when people notice them. My birthmarks. The curves and lines that cover much of my shoulders and back. They were really light when I was a kid. Barely noticeable. They’re getting darker, though, and the shapes have started showing up in my dreams. Like they mean something. Like they lead somewhere. Probably into darkness.

  Earl nods. “Been there since he was born,” he says, like he would know.

  “Well, I’ll let the doctor know he’s awake.” Her smile is innocent like sunlight on a flower.

  A man comes in, a custodian, as she writes on the chart. He glances at her, grabs the trash, wipes down the counters in the bathroom, and glances again. I look at him hard. Then I look back at Gillian. Then back at him.

  His name is Donald. He has oily brown hair and thick glasses, and he is going to stab her to death in a few weeks. He wants her to go out with him. She’s nice. Nobody is nice to him. But when she tells him she only wants to be friends, he’s furious. Calls her a tease. Calls her a slut. He’s waited so long for her. Hoped for so long. If he can’t have her, no one will.

  I close my eyes. Try unsuccessfully to block out the scene that unfolds inside my head. A scene I can envision only because he is going to hell as a result of it, and I can see the thing that brands people for hell. That first horrible act they commit that sets their fate. I know the names of everyone going to hell, and I know if a person is going there the minute we meet, whether the person has committed the sin yet or not.

  Hell is not a good place. I’ve seen that in my dreams, too. In my nightmares. Most of them are about Earl. About his hands and his nails and his teeth. But sometimes I dream about hell. About the fire and the agony and the soldiers. The devil’s army. I see them from on high as they march. As they battle. I command them as though I’ve done it for centuries, and that just can’t be good. There’s only one way I can see such things. I’m bad. I’m evil, because only an evil person would know things about hell.

  I want to tell Gillian about Donald, but I can’t. Not with Earl right there. She wouldn’t believe me anyway.

  Earl’s anger rises when the nurse tells him it will be a few more days, and I know I’m in even more trouble. But that’s okay. I can still feel the light. It permeates the crust. The outer shell. Sinks deep inside me. He can’t take that away. I want to dream about her some more, but the minute the nurse leaves, Earl rips out the IV, throws my clothes at me, and tells me to get dressed. Quietly. Or I know what will happen.

  Damn straight, I do.

  3

  I don’t see the light for a while after that. I’m in the basement for days and everything is blurry. Kim stands guard. I can hear her moving around behind the door.

  My throat hurts because Earl choked me. He doesn’t normally do that. Goes to show how pissed he was. Not even at me. He’s mad because the girl he was seeing found me in the basement. That’s how I ended up in the hospital in the first place. Earl had gone out for beer and she went to the basement, looking for a washer to do his laundry. She was going to surprise him. Kim must have been in the shower. She would’ve explained that I was okay. But since I was unconscious, she thought I fell, so she called 911 before Earl got home. He had to go along with it, I guess, but he got angrier than I’ve ever seen him.

  Sometimes I wonder why he has girlfriends. He doesn’t like them. He pretends to. Tells them what they want to hear. They never last long, though. He gets tired of them pretty quick. This last one made a huge mistake. I’ll never see her again, and I liked her. She didn’t smoke and she smelled like peppermint and made me spaghetti.

  I lie back against the concrete and think of Dutch. Of the girl made of light. Of the people in her life who didn’t work out quite as one would expect.

  When she is about a year old, her dad brings home a girlfriend. I don’t like her. She is too much like Earl. She’s fond of the dad well enough, and Dutch’s sister, but there is something strange about the way she looks at Dutch. She oohs and ahhs when the dad is around, but when she is alone with Dutch, something isn’t right. I feel contempt come off her. Jealousy. Why would a lady be jealous of a baby?

  I don’t understand people. They smile when they are mad. They hug people they hate. They steal from people they genuinely love. And they are jealous of babies.

  Dutch’s eyes sparkle and her light is brighter than ever. A dead lady is pretending to eat her toes and Dutch laughs and laughs. Her dad laughs, too, but it makes the lady angry. That’s when I know for sure what the woman is. A problem.

  4

  I’ve died a hundred deaths, but I’m alive. Because of her. Because of her light. Because of her smile. Every time I die, I float toward her, and I am saved. I am healed. Her light soaks into me. Oozes inside me. Fixes all the broken parts, accomplishing something all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could never have done.

  Sometimes I’m grateful. Sometimes I’m not, because I know it will happen again and ag
ain, and I figure there comes a time when it needs to end. When I just need to die and stay dead. But she saves me whether I want to be saved or not.

  And now she’s doing it again. I am at her house, drifting toward her light. She brushes past me in the hall and turns around real fast, like I’ve startled her. She’s wearing a summer dress and sandals, and her hair has been pulled up into a ponytail.

  I stay back. I always cover myself in the hooded cloak and try to stay back, but she stands there with her gold eyes wide and her pretty mouth open. She’s nine going on thirty. Full of sass and spark and secrets. She shimmers with life. She is the exact opposite of me and I’ve grown to understand the “opposites attract” thing.

  Her lips are pink and full and her cheeks warm. If she weren’t so scared of me, I’d try to steal a kiss. But she’s terrified, and that just seems wrong. Like something Earl would do. I shudder at the thought.

  Then the problem lady, aka her stepmom, stomps into the hall and grabs her arm. They are going to be late and she is in a lot of trouble, little lady. Why is she wearing that dress? She told her not to wear that dress. It’s too chilly. She’ll just have to freeze. Maybe she’ll learn a lesson.

  Anger bubbles up inside me, and Dutch’s eyes grow wider and wider. The lady looks at me, too, but she all she can see is the wall at my back. Nobody but Dutch can see me in these dreams.

  They are married now. Dutch’s dad and the problem lady. Dutch was happy about it at first. I don’t know why. The woman has never liked her. And Dutch is like me. She can feel indifference. Apathy. Contempt. But she doesn’t understand why her stepmother has such harsh feelings for her. She hasn’t seen what I’ve seen. Some people are just bad.

  When the woman doesn’t see anything, she whirls Dutch around to face her. “You have to stop this. I mean it.”