Her breath solidified, a block in her throat. She would have screamed, but what would Ethan think if she was afraid of simply getting to the ghosts, not just the ghosts themselves? Then his head popped up near her ankles. "Are you waiting for an invitation?" he asked, and she realized he was holding fast to a ladder that led into the pit of the quarry.
Ethan said there was a ghost here, a quarry supervisor who'd been killed by some crazy guy. He said seeing the spirit was a sure thing. He'd told her they might have to avoid a guard, but she and Ethan seemed to be the only ones around. Maybe that was luck, maybe it meant it was okay to be there. At any rate, Lucy started to climb down. Huge pillars of stone reared up around her, seeming to move in the lack of light. The soles of her sneakers skidded down a slope of granite, and she wound up in a heap on a pile of rubble. "You okay?" Ethan called. He probably turned around too, but it was too dark to see him.
She realized that this was what life was like for Ethan all the time.
They crawled through crevasses so narrow Lucy had to hold her breath, up columns of rock where their only foothold was hope, underneath listing piers and over great craggy tablets. They balanced on thin needles of stone, toppled like a giant's game of pick-up sticks. Every now and then their forward motion would dislodge some careful equilibrium, and the granite would crumble with a roar and a flurry of dust. "You all right?" Ethan's voice would float back to her, and then they would keep going.
Lucy's hands and shins were scraped over and over, and she had one really bad cut that she was afraid to even look at. She smacked into Ethan's back and realized that they had reached the other side of the quarry, across from the ladder. "We'll hang out there," Ethan said, and pointed to two fallen slabs of granite that had haphazardly formed an A-frame and a ledge.
He climbed first. Then Lucy grabbed onto his hand so that he could pull her up, but their fingers, dusty, slipped away from each other and with a tiny shriek Lucy landed on a crumbled bed of rock. "Jeez, Lucy, are you okay?" Ethan called.
Tears came to her eyes, but she made herself get up. "Yeah," Lucy said, and she made her way up to the ledge with great care, firmly jamming her feet between cracks in the granite before she released her handhold to climb again. On the ledge, she collapsed on her back and closed her eyes while Ethan set up his ghost-hunting equipment. When she'd caught her breath, she sat up and flicked on a flashlight, swinging its beam across the expanse they'd just traveled.
Lucy's eyes went wide at the spires and jagged edges, the sheer distance. The ladder they'd climbed down was so far away it might have been forever since they'd started.
She had already been braver than she thought she was.
"So what do we do?" Lucy asked.
"Nothing. Now's the part where we wait." They sat with their shoulders touching, shivering from the cold and the awareness of what they had done. "You know what a star is?" Ethan asked after a moment, and Lucy shook her head. "An explosion that happened, like, hundreds of years ago, but that we're only just seeing now."
"Why?"
"Because that's how long it takes light to travel."
Maybe, Lucy thought, it was the same for ghosts. Maybe sadness moved at a different speed than real life, which is why they showed up years after they'd died. She squinted up at the cloudy sky, trying to find a single star. When it happened-- the explosion--it had to have been loud and bright and terrifying. But what she saw, now, was beautiful.
Maybe everything looked better, with some distance.
Even before that radio thing that Ethan held in his hand began to beep, Lucy knew something was coming. She felt it in the weight of the air on her skin, in the hollow echo that came into her ears. The fine hairs on her arm stood up, and her stomach did a slow roll. "Is it me," Ethan whispered, "or did it just get about a hundred degrees colder?"
The little radio began to twitch like crazy. "Lucy," Ethan whispered. "Stand up."
She did. She walked all the way out to the edge of their ledge and she thought as hard as she could in her head, You can't scare me.
Ethan had told her that ghosts couldn't materialize without energy. Fear was a type of energy, the kind you wrapped tight into a ball. So Lucy summoned all the terror she'd tucked into the creases of her bedsheets and behind the wall of clothes in her closet. She thought of all the asthma attacks she'd had when a spirit got right into her face. She squinched her eyes shut and focused and a moment later, when she peeked, she saw a man walking toward her.
It was a man, but it wasn't a man. This one was transparent, like the lady who came to her bedroom, and Lucy could see the jagged edges of rocks right through his shoulders and spine. He was dressed weird, too, in a striped shirt that looked like an old mattress and a pair of pants with no loops for the belt, and a vest with a shiny gold pocketwatch. He had a mustache that twirled at the ends like a circus strong-man's, and his hair was plastered down to his head. Get to work, he said, right in the middle of her mind.
Lucy felt her knees shaking so hard they knocked into each other. Get lost, she thought right back at him.
To her surprise, the ghost did exactly as she'd asked. He took two steps forward, one of which brought him directly through her, icing her bones and her blood so thoroughly that for a second she was still as these rocks surrounding her, and then he vanished.
Lucy smiled. She even laughed a little. She looked around, but there was nobody else haunting this pit. And sure enough, the tightness in her belly was gone. Slipping into their cave again, she sat down beside Ethan, who was banging the side of the EMF meter into the slab of granite. "Well," he said, "this is a piece of crap."
Lucy stared at him. "You didn't see anything?"
"Nah, it was a false alarm." He glanced up. "Why? Did you?"
"Yeah," Lucy said with wonder, and she sat down to tell Ethan all about it.
Shelby had been saving up words for this: velutinous, sybaritic, hedonic, effulgent. She had imagined them painted across the ceiling--paroxysm, tumult, fillip, whet. Yet as Eli's hands skimmed over her skin, as her nails dug into his back and urged him closer, Shelby found that she could not think at all.
His body was long and lean and sculpted, his touch as light as the promises he whispered. She followed his lead through the moment when she was certain she would not recall what to do or how to do it right, and by the time their limbs were tangled together, Shelby could not remember ever having doubts.
He kissed his way from her ankles up, calves and knees and thighs, until she was shaking for him to settle. When he did, when his mouth came over her, she arched into him and closed her eyes to see vistas of gold, glowing emeralds, scatters of rubies. They burned hotter, smaller, into quasars and novas and filled a universe. Eli moved as if he had all the time in the world. Then, just as she could not hold on any longer, he was suddenly above her, forcing her to look at him so that she would know exactly what road her life was heading down. "Where have you been?" Eli murmured, and he filled her.
Their bodies rocked at a fulcrum; their rhythm told a story. And at the moment they both let go, Shelby lost every word she'd ever learned except for one: Us.
When Eli fell asleep heavily in her arms, Shelby slipped out from beneath his weight and curled up against him. She tried to memorize the constellations of his freckles and the crooked line of the part in his hair. She smelled herself on his skin.
Something bit into the soft side of her thigh, and she shifted, trying to get comfortable. But whatever it was moved with her, and Shelby reached down between herself and Eli to grab a small, sharp item. She held it up to the pink sliver of daylight that fell diagonally across the covers and frowned. This particular setting, this combination of stones, was all too familiar.
"Hey." Eli reached for her.
"Hey yourself," Shelby said against his lips, forgetting everything but Eli as she dropped the diamond solitaire Ross had once given to Aimee, and then lost months ago in a room at her own house.
It was the prettiest thing Ethan
had ever seen--the thin pinks and creeping salmons, the rosy flush that swallowed the stars, the line where the night became the day. Ethan wanted the dawn to happen all over again, right now, even if it meant that he would be another day older and closer to dying.
Lucy had still been asleep when Ethan crept onto the ledge. He sat cross-legged, his arms held out in front of him, each degree that the sun hiked in the sky causing another blister to rise on his skin.
But, God, it was worth it. To witness the arrival of the morning, without a pane of glass between him and it. To feel a sunrise, instead of just to see it.
His left arm was an angry red now, itching like crazy. Lucy came up beside him, yawning, and then looked down at his arm. "Ethan!"
"It's no big deal." Yet it was. Anyone could see. Suddenly something glinting on the bottom of the quarry caught his eye. A silver button--or buckle, maybe. It was a baseball cap, and when Ethan leaned over the edge of the granite ledge he could make out the writing on it. "That's weird," he said. But before he could point out to Lucy what he believed to be his uncle's cap, it exploded before his eyes.
Like every other morning when Angel Quarry blasted for granite, the computers set off the first explosion of dynamite, pausing to let the rock settle for minutes before the next charge was detonated. Boulders flew and fine particles rose in a mushroom cloud; rock dust blanketed the roof of Ross's car. In the wake of the first blast, the second one rang out. One spike of granite smashed into the windshield, shattering it. "Oh, God," Meredith cried, and she opened the car door while Ross was still driving, stumbling out and breaking into a dead run toward the quarry where her daughter might be.
Great slabs of granite fell like dominoes, knocking other pillars of stone from their pedestals and sending up such a thick cloud of silver grit that Meredith couldn't see two feet in front of her, much less into the base of the quarry. Ross came running up to her. "I can't find Az," he said. "I don't know how to stop it."
She was breathing in rock; she was covered with residue. Meredith hooked her fingers into the chain-link fence. "Lucy!" she yelled. "Lucy!"
The only answer was another round of bombardment, a one-sided war. The roar of rending stone was even louder than the blasts of dynamite, and rang in Meredith's ears. Then there seemed to be a detente, several long seconds of absolute silence, punctuated by the gravel avalanche of shifting granite.
Another person might not have heard it--the small gasp that preceded a sob--but Meredith would have been able to pick that sound out in the middle of a holocaust. "Lucy," she whispered, and she strained to see some evidence that her ears had not deceived her. She found it, huddling on a stone ledge--the thinnest flash of color through the haze, a magenta stripe of Lucy's T-shirt that hadn't been covered with gray powder. Meredith leaped onto the fence and began to climb.
"Meredith!"
She heard Ross's voice, before he simply stopped in mid-sentence and started after her. There was every chance that the dynamite hadn't run its course yet, that this was a lull to let things settle. Meredith could have cared less. She set her sights on Ethan and Lucy, down in the pit and five hundred yards away, and started her descent down a ladder drilled into the quarry wall.
At the bottom, she hesitated, daunted by fallen stone obelisks six times taller than she was. Determined, she scaled the first one and began to chart a course, the shortest distance between herself and her daughter. The rock scraped up her palms, and her own blood made it harder to grab hold. She slid down hard on one ankle and cried out, and at that moment Lucy caught a glimpse of her. "Mommy!" she heard, that and crying, and she forced herself another fifty feet forward.
A horn went off, three long blasts. "Get back," Meredith yelled, urging them into the hollow of the cave they'd found. She covered her head, as if that might make a difference, just as the charge went off on the other side of the pit. The explosion was far enough away from where she huddled, but reverberations made the ground shake beneath her hands and feet. She felt the stone slide beneath her, her slick fingers scrabble for purchase, and then she was falling and landing all wrong, her bad leg brittle as a twig, as it snapped beneath the weight of the granite plate that pinned her.
Not again.
Ross saw the dynamite burst in slow motion; he heard the scrape and drag of rubble reshifting and it echoed in his ears with his own racing pulse. He could not speed up time; he could not make his arms and legs move fast enough. The entire world was being blown to bits around him and he was hypersensitive-- the blasts louder, the explosions more brilliant-- yet even in this cataclysm, Ethan's cry for help rang clear above everything else.
Ross was not aware of the unstable ground, the oncoming detonations, the sheer odds of getting across safely to the other side of the quarry pit. All he knew was that he would not let someone he loved die, again. That Ross was the only person who could save him. That this was what had to be done.
That history was not going to repeat itself.
By the time he reached Meredith, his calves were shredded to ribbons from the jagged granite. Blood ran down the side of his face where one flying shard had cut his temple. She was trapped beneath a shelf of rock as large as a grown man. "The kids," she gasped, and he nodded at her.
He jammed his boot into a fissure between two stones, stretched out with his hands, and then hauled himself forward.
Again, and again. Sometimes the rocks would move beneath his feet or his hand would slip; from the bottom of the rubble Ross got up and kept inching forward. He kept his eyes on Ethan and Lucy, standing on that ledge behind a screen of dust, waiting for him.
The two leaning blocks that had formed a shelter for Lucy and Ethan suddenly collapsed. Lucy screamed and stepped as far out onto the ledge as she could. "Hurry," she cried. "Please!"
After a thousand years, or maybe a heartbeat, Ross reached the base of the crumbling hill. He stretched for a handhold, and wedged his boot against the rubble, and started to climb. One hand over the other. One foot at a time. When he lifted his head, he could see the toes of Ethan's black sneakers.
A blast thundered behind his back, and then Ross was falling along with the wall he'd been trying to scale. He rolled to the left, a guess, and covered his head as rocks rained down in five-foot square cubes. Lucy's sobbing was louder now, and he could hear both Ethan and Meredith yelling his name. He stood up, wildly looking around to see how much damage had been done.
The ledge where Ethan and Lucy had been was still standing. But between it and the rock where he now stood was a chasm. A space six feet across and fifteen feet deep ran the length of the quarry, isolating the children on an island of stone.
Ross looked in both directions, and then into the new, vaulted pit. Its steep walls had been cut along the grain of the granite, a sheer drop. The only other way around was to cross all the way along the fissure to the southern edge of the quarry, scale the walls to the guardrail, and climb back in on the far side of the gap. "Listen to me," Ross yelled across. "You're going to have to jump."
Meredith had seen the whole thing--Ross's amazing progress across the devastated wreckage, his careful climb up toward Lucy and Ethan, the terrifying moment when the very mountain he was on deteriorated under his feet. When he disappeared out of her line of sight, she screamed for him, trying to turn so that she could locate him and setting off a wave of pain in her leg that nearly rendered her unconscious. Fighting to stay alert, she'd watched the ripple effect as a canyon split the bottom of the quarry in half, with the children on the other side.
It would be impossible for Ross to get all the way to the quarry wall and climb out, not before another explosion hit. He was right--the only way to save Lucy and Ethan was to catch them, once they leaped. Ethan would do what his uncle had asked. But Lucy--well, Lucy wouldn't jump. That required a depth of bravery that her daughter had never possessed.
Tears came to Meredith's eyes. "Lucy," she yelled, "do it!"
They would die here, she and Lucy, buried by the rubble. Sh
e wished for courage, something that she might wing to her daughter. And just as she was thinking about fearlessness and taking flight, Meredith saw Lucy take a step back, run for all she was worth, and soar into the air.
She landed hard in Ross's arms, knocking them both down; and on the side of safety now, she did not seem capable of letting go of him. Delighted, amazed--he hadn't expected her to jump, not before seeing Ethan make it to the other side--Ross kissed her forehead. "I've got you," he whispered into her hair as she sobbed against his shoulder. "You're all right now." He peeled the little girl away from him. "I need to get Ethan, okay?"
"Okay," Lucy sniffed. She wrapped her arms around her knees and ducked her head, still shaking.
Ross stood up again, cupping his hands around his mouth. "Ethan, I won't let you fall." He watched his nephew nod, race as fast as he could to the edge, and jump.
Ethan was Superman, and he was flying, and nothing-- nothing--could stop him from saving the world, or at least himself. With his eyes closed he didn't have to look at how far away it was where Uncle Ross was standing, or at the broken-toothed rocks that were just waiting at the bottom of the pit. He stretched the tips of his fingers as far forward as they could go, and he chanted silently in his mind: I am a bird; I am a plane; I am already there.
When his fingers brushed something solid, he blinked right away and found himself hurtling into his uncle's embrace. He grabbed on tight and that was when the tears came, so quick and thick he couldn't even speak. His feet slid down Ross's legs, planting themselves firmly on the ground.
"You," Uncle Ross gasped, "are punished."
And that was when the ground disappeared beneath them.
Ross felt them skidding down the slope into the crevasse, and he turned his body at the bottom so that he would bear the brunt of the fall. Ethan landed hard on top of him, and rocks dug into his legs and back. "Get up," Ross said, hauling his nephew to his feet. "Are you all right?"