The Awaited

of me?” her voice rose and cracked a little, the woe and wonder the first true emotions she’d shown with Mr. Corder. He was surprised by the ambush; he couldn’t tell what to say next.

  Danielle took his turn. “I’m not dangerous. They should know that.”

  “I honestly don’t know why they would be afraid of a sweet girl like you.”

  It was true. When they walked into his office, they gave him the address, three hundred dollars, and the request that he’d get the girl out of the house. It was uncommon, requests like that, but what made it strange was the demand that her father gave.

  “Please,” he had said, wringing his hands so hard Corder was afraid his skin might tear, “get her out of that house, but keep her away from us.”

  Corder had asked him why, only to be confronted with blank, useless responses.

  He had accepted their job, and was now sitting with the one of the strangest patients he had ever had in his ten years of clinical psychiatry.

  And a migraine to boot.

  “They didn’t say anything to you about me?”

  “Nothing to explain why they wouldn’t want to be around you.”

  That was all they said for a long time. Danielle still traced in the dust. Mr. Corder watched as the finger moved in tiny ellipses and irregular polygons. Suddenly, he was fascinated by the pattern. He found himself staring intently at the swirls and angles the finger carved into the wood. It was a little bizarre the way the shapes would be drawn over themselves, being erased and remade, almost like one fish eating the other, or maybe a tapestry being repeatedly crumpled up. Mr. Corder saw the drawing finger was rigid, straight like a pencil, while the rest of the hand, the rest of her, was limp, wispy as if it didn’t exist and didn’t care if it existed or not. He wondered if that meant the tracings were supposed to say something, and that got him staring even more intensely at the sketching. For a moment before the finger erased it, he thought he did see something, an irregular oblong shape that he, at first glance at least, thought might have been a skull...

  Then the finger swept over it to make a curly-q, and stopped midway, falling the on the table, dead like the rest of Danielle.

  “It must be my mother,” she said, still staring at the table.

  “Your mother?”

  “They think I killed her.”

  “It was an accident though,” she continued after a second’s pause, “Anyone could see that.”

  “Well, Danielle,” Mr. Corder said, “Can you tell me what happened?”

  Danielle looked up, and this time she actually seemed to see Corder a little bit.

  “I saw her dead one night. In my head. It looked real, although I knew it wasn’t. I thought I was watching television. All I remember is watching that, but my father told me that I got out of bed and walked over to her room. She was sleeping. I stood beside her and hummed for a bit. It woke them up. She went all pale. Then she had a heart attack and died two days later.”

  Corder’s head still hurt, and he found himself rubbing his temples as he spoke, “You mean, you had a dream of your mother dying?”

  “No. I was awake. I saw her just as we found her. In the bathroom. And then in the ambulance, where she died.”

  “Do you think that this vision caused your mother to have a heart attack?”

  “They do. Maybe they’re right. She seemed healthy before then.” Her apathy seemed to falter a little. A little bit of grief seeped through the cracks in her eyes before she looked back down at the table, erasing herself once more. She was surprised. It was one of the strongest emotions she had felt in months.

  “Danielle. You have absolutely no reason to blame yourself for what happened to your mother.”

  “I know that.” Did her voice crack? Neither of them were sure. “I don’t blame myself at all. I don’t blame them either, though.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I would probably do the same thing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve always had this. We used to have a Dalmatian.”

  “And you had a vis—“

  Danielle nodded. “Yes.”

  “Danielle, you do realize that most people wouldn’t believe that you were having these visions if you told them?”

  “Like you?”

  Mr. Corder tried not to look surprised.

  “I know you don’t believe me,” Danielle continued, “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that they do, and now they’re gone and won’t come back.”

  “You really miss them, don’t you?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “Then why stay here? You’re twenty-three years old. You could just leave and look for them, you do know that?”

  “I’ve told you. I can’t.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know. Except that I have to stay here. I just do.”

  There was silence for a few minutes.

  “It’s so lonely in this house,” Danielle said.

  More silence.

  “They’re the ones who left,” she said, “So why are you talking to me? Why not them?”

  “What makes you say I didn’t?”

  “Did you?”

  Mr. Corder nodded, “I tried. They...listened a little, but I couldn’t get through.”

  “They’re afraid.”

  “I’ve recommended you, all of you, to family counsel, though. They’ve agreed to go.”

  “I won’t unless they come back... It’s very lonely here.”

  “Danielle, you must leave this house. Can’t you see what it’s doing to you?”

  “Nothing that hasn’t already been done.”

  Mr. Corder’s chair squeaked softly as he got up, an old woman turning in her sleep.

  “I won’t give up on you, but I feel this is all that can be done for today.”

  He turned to leave, and could still see Danielle from the corner of his eye when she said, “You can stay if you want to.”

  He looked at her. Her apathetic daze was still strong, but beginning to weaken. Trying to take its place was a look of sadness, pleading, and maybe a dash of hope.

  “It’s very lonely here,” she explained, “I don’t really care if they come back or not, but I want people in this house.”

  Mr. Corder just stood there, looking from Danielle to the direction of the hall. He didn’t think that it would be a good idea at all to leave her like this, but he didn’t want to stay there a minute longer.

  Suddenly, Danielle had a strange look of concern. She focused on Mr. Corder’s forehead.

  “Mr. Corder,” she said softly, practically a thought, “how long have you been having those headaches?”

  She didn’t hear his answer, if he even had one. She didn’t even see him anymore.

  She was not in her nice house. She was in a room with a large white machine. Corder was in the machine, she knew, although she couldn’t see him. The machine he was in was humming in a surprisingly soothing fashion, as if it were singing a lullaby. Then she saw the pictures, pictures of things she knew nothing about except that they would not be what Mr. Corder would want to hear.

  And all that time, she still heard the machine’s lullaby, that beautiful, wordless song, sung by an electronic angel, trying in earnest to coax her to a rewarding, much-needed sleep.

  “Danielle,” Mr. Corder said, “What are you humming?”

  She didn’t answer. She just kept humming and humming. It was a low, melancholy tune, and Danielle had one of the saddest expressions on her face that Corder had ever seen.

  A look of mourning, the sorrow of seeing a loved one die.

  Then she started crying, silently at first. The tears flowed down her cheeks, glittering, dew drops on the grass after a thunderstorm. Corder thought that they were both beautiful and disgusting. They were the liquid essence of lamentation.

  Corder became dizzy. He could feel a migraine emerging, this one with venom seeping out of its fangs. Danielle’s song began to get louder and brake; she
was about to fall apart. With each decibel the song grew, with each note that was broken, Corder’s pain worsened. He brought his hands to his skull and squeezed, as if he broke the bone and crush the brain, his pain would be relieved.

  The song just became louder and more chaotic. The pain was spinning and shredding its way through his mind, now. He couldn’t open his eyes or his mouth, the white hot buzz saw was tearing at them. He felt that they would just rupture, burst open, and white lava would come streaming out of every orifice in his head.

  Danielle finally broke down and started sobbing, uttering cries that seemed to stem from a pain even worse than what Corder was feeling at that moment. They drilled into his brain and began chewing and cutting at it like the talons of hell-bound eagles.

  He screamed. He ran, eyes only opened to slits so that he didn’t run into the door. He burst through to the outside, still screaming. He didn’t stop screaming. It didn’t dull the pain, didn’t release any part of the migraine’s force, but it did drown out that girl’s weeping, if only a little.

  Danielle ran after him to the door, but stopped, watching him as he ran to his car and drove off.

  All that time, she wept. She screamed. She yelled, “No! Mr. Corder, don’t go! Please, Mr. Corder! Stay! Please! Don’t leave me here! Don’t leave me! Mr. Corder! Stay, Mr. Corder! Do go! Don’t leave me! Don’t die! Stay! Mr. Corder! Mr. Corder!”

  As she watched his car speed down the driveway, her cries become louder, harsher, until they were nothing less than screeches.

  “MR. CORDER! MR. CORDER! MR. CORDER! MR. CORDER!”

  Then she stopped. Mr. Corder’s car had reached the end of the driveway, and turned onto the road. All feeling left her. She put a hand up to her face and jerked it back,