Voices

  Mom walks toward the bedroom door, stops, and turns toward me. She stares without moving for a few long seconds while the lines across her forehead deepen.

  “What is it?” I ask.

  Tears flood her eyes. “I’m worried about you. That’s all.” She straightens herself up, smoothing out her gray uniform as if her hands are an iron. “I’ll be home at six, okay? I’ll make you some soup before I leave again for the second shift. I’ve got a new office to clean tonight.”

  I feel like crap that Mom works so much, but it’s not like someone knocks on our door and randomly gives us cash. I really want to help. I’d even get a job. But no one around town wants to hire a crazy, especially not a mascot-maiming teenage boy. I’m pretty sure everyone in Franklinville has seen the grizzly-killer take down video. Being famous in a bad way limits my options.

  “Okay,” I mutter.

  “You sure you’ll be alright?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good.” She darts back to me, delivers a kiss on my cheek, and then disappears out of the room.

  I stare up at the ceiling, waiting to hear the sound of the front door.

  No voices. No Bouncer. No Honesti. I should smile, but I’m not happy.

  When the front door shuts, I push myself out of bed to check my backpack. I unzipped it in a hurry. The bottle and the pills are still there.

  Epic reset.

  My plan is back on.

  chapter nine

  The air is perfectly still this afternoon at the pond.

  “Who’s there?” I ask.

  There's no response. I hear only the bushes swoosh thirty feet away from me, as if the wind is forcing them to move.

  Could it be stranger? A coyote? The crazy kid?

  I ready my cell phone to call Hank, but realize that’s stupid, since it’d take him at lease thirty minutes to get here. I prepare to take off running towards Uncle’s house.

  I hear the noise again. Rustling. Footsteps. Someone or something is definitely getting closer.

  “Hello?” I say louder.

  Blood pumps through my veins with force. I forget to breathe. I’m ready to run. A second before I take a step, a deep, bellowing groan echoes across the pond. Then I see her.

  It’s Uncle Pete’s black and white milk cow, Miss Aggie.

  I sigh and take another moment to calm down. A cloud of Old Spice cologne reaches me before I see Uncle Pete and I relax completely.

  “Aimee?” Uncle Pete calls out.

  I sigh. “Hi, Uncle. You had me a little freaked.”

  “Oh dear. Sorry about that.” Uncle places a rope loosely around the old milk cow’s neck and rubs her. “Come along, Miss Aggie. We should let Miss Aimee paint. She’s busy working on my masterpiece.”

  Uncle is a nice old guy—seventy, maybe seventy-five. He spends most of his time tending to the animals and the land around the ranch and hardly any time on himself. Once in a great while, I’ll find him sitting on his porch, smoking his old pipe and kicking his feet up. But those occasions have become fewer as he’s gotten older.

  “She’s not bothering me. Besides, I think the pond is more hers than mine.”

  “You get back to your painting now. Your mom tells me you’re quite the artist and I want to see for myself.”

  I shrug. “She exaggerates.”

  “Oh, knowing your mother, I doubt that very much.”

  I gesture toward my painting. “You want to take a look?”

  Uncle Pete smiles. “Sure, I’d like that.” He ties Aggie to an oak tree branch and walks over to me as he pulls reading glasses out of his blue denim shirt pocket. “Do I get this one?”

  “Not sure yet. I want to give you the best one of the summer.”

  Uncle Pete peers through his thick glasses and mumbles something, then says, “I love the colors you used for the pond. By God, I think you’ve really captured it.”

  I smile and feel my face heat up. “Thanks, Uncle.”

  He continues gazing at the painting. “Your mother is a smart woman. You’re an excellent artist.”

  Uncle Pete walks to the edge of the pond and looks out over the dark green water. His eyelids are pink around the edges. I pretend not to notice. But I ask anyway. “Is everything okay?”

  Uncle Pete snaps out of his momentary trance and nods. “I apologize. Just old memories, that’s all. I suppose thinking about the past is what you do when you get old.”

  “Memories?”

  An awkward moment passes. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so probing.

  He rubs at his chin. “When I was your age, I used to come here, you know. I spent more hours than I can remember fishing for crawdad. Your grandma called them crawfish when she was alive, but I never saw ’em swim like no fish. A pinch of meat tied to a long string. That’s all it took to catch ’em. Them mindless critters clung to it as if it was solid gold. Up, out, and straight into the water bucket they went, one by one. Momma turned ’em into meals during the hard times, you know: crawdad fettuccine, crawdad chowder, even crawdad cornbread. My mouth waters just thinking about it . . . How time flies, don’t it now?”

  “I loved Grams’ pies. Especially during the holidays.”

  “Oh yeah, that grandmother of yours made the best apple pie in the county, probably even the state, if you ask me.”

  “My favorite was lemon meringue, but her chocolate pie was nearly as good.” I feel my mouth water.

  “I do miss her,” he says with pain in his eyes. “I miss them both.”

  We’ve always been Uncle’s only nearby family. Two funerals in three years, Mom said it had been hard on Uncle. First his wife, Auntie Dee, died from cancer, and then Grams died soon after.

  Uncle taps a rock with his boot from the pond’s bank and it plops into the water. “Spent a great deal of time dreaming here. A wonderful place, this pond . . . Been in our family for over a hundred-fifty years. Before that time, Wesley Rush owned all the land for miles all around Franklinville. They say he had himself a mansion right near here.” Uncle Pete squirts out some spit away from the pond.

  Gross.

  “This pond was some kind of fancy lake back in the days before Wesley deeded the land to Grandpa Lester.”

  “What happened to the mansion?”

  “Your Grams told me stories when I was a boy that the township mayor had flattened the place not long after Wesley got committed to the old lunatic asylum. Grandpa Lester took over the land. He worked it as his own.” Uncle spits again but discreetly, so I don’t get grossed out. But I’m still grossed out.

  I look past the oak trees and watch grass swaying in the breeze. There’s no evidence of any mansion.

  “Tragic really. Poor old man. The stories say he wasn’t the same after his wife, um, let me see. Her name was . . . Ethel, I think. They say Wesley completely fell apart after she passed during childbirth.

  “His only son made out better than he did, that’s for certain. Thomas was his son’s name, kept Rush as his last name. But our great-grandparents raised the boy.”

  “What do you mean raised him?”

  Uncle Pete’s eyes are glossy, as if he’s time traveling. “Your third great-grandfather, Lester Murdock, raised Wesley’s son, Thomas. Wesley took a liking to Grandpa Lester and gave him most of the land you see around us.”

  “Why did Wesley get committed?”

  “They say he heard voices. He was mentally ill or some such thing. Poor man died shortly after they stuck him to the asylum. That’s when Grandpa Lester and Grandma Jane took in his son, Thomas. They also took on another thousand acres around where Wesley had lived before the township redistributed the rest of Wesley’s holdings—the mayor never did find Wesley’s will. Grams used to say if a Last Will and Testament existed, we might own all the land and historic buildings in Franklinville.” He grins, as if imagining what it’d be like to own so much land. “Those was hard times in those days to raise an adopted baby, but Lester and Jane managed.”

 
Uncle Pete’s face goes blank. He squats down and picks up a handful of dirt, then lets it sift through his fingers. “It’s a damned shame.”

  “What do you mean, Uncle?”

  “This land has been in our family for over a century and a half. I can’t work it no more and your mother can’t afford to keep it. Times have changed, I’m afraid . . . I’m putting it on the market in the fall. The Isak Sarov Corporation wants to turn the land into some kind of housing community and golf course.” He sighs and stands. “I suppose that makes sense.”

  Uncle Pete’s words hit home. I gaze at the still pond, its lush surroundings, and guardian oaks.

  I squint at him. “Can’t you just get help?”

  “Wish I could. The bigger problem is I can’t afford to pay the taxes no more. The county keeps raising them every year. If I don’t sell, they’ll come in and take her next year anyhow.”

  I don’t know what to say. The ranch has always been a place for me to spend summers. Horseback riding. Milking cows. Feeding chickens. Collecting eggs. Swimming. The pond was bigger in those days, before the drought.

  Uncle suddenly snaps out of his time-traveling gaze. He looks at his pocket watch, then back to me. “Oh dear, look at the time. I best get Miss Aggie back into the barn. It’s ’bout milking time.”

  I can’t imagine the farm not being here. Where would Uncle Pete go? Where would Miss Aggie go?

  “Thanks for the history lesson, Uncle. Mom never told me about Grandpa Lester.”

  He smiles. “This pond is all that’s left of the lake. Damned drought. It shrinks every year.”

  Uncle walks back to the barn with Miss Aggie by his side, shaking his head and grumbling under his breath.

  I dip my brush and turn up the volume on my cell phone.

  I remember how beautiful Grams looked the day I died. Smiling so big with rosy cheeks and soft gray curls. Her entire body glowed with a magical shimmer. Each word she spoke felt as if it were wrapped in love and delivered with kindness. She filled me with excitement and joy, as if all my life’s problems were simply experiences and there were many more experiences to live. She told me that any choice I make could never be the wrong choice. But with each choice I make, there are consequences.

  She’d know how to help Uncle keep the ranch.

  I dip my brush, then stroke to the rhythm of the cello vibrating from my cellphone. Dip. Stroke. Dip. Stroke.

  I miss you, Grams.

  WELCOME TO THE CLOUD

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  chapter ten

  Midnight. I grip paint cans in both hands and shiver in front of another perfect gray canvas—the towering brick wall of Theodore High’s gym.

  Security drives by at 4 a.m. Mom comes home from her nightshift job at 5 a.m.

  It’s time to get busy.

  With my eyes shut, I wait for an image to form. Spraying with meds in my system has never worked before, but I have to try one last time before returning to the pond to carry out my plan.

  I wait. And wait for a vision to come. But nothing happens. All I visualize is blank grayness.

  After twenty minutes, I finally give up. Nothing is happening. Damned meds. I’d hoped it would be different. I wanted it to be. But I still can’t spray. I don’t even know where to start.

  I loosen my grip on the spray paint cans. “Bouncer? Honesti?”

  Silence. Static. Nothingness.

  I’m alone, a creative blank, a zombie. All I see is a brick wall. I try to make sense out of it. Why can’t I paint when I’m on the meds? It feels like I’m trying to solve some kind of Moser math class truth equation relating to my sanity.

  No meds equals creativity. No meds equals insanity. Insanity equals wicked-spray-beast. Meds equals no voices. Meds equal I suck.

  Moser would be impressed with my effort, but I still can’t figure out an acceptable solution. I’m sick of the bullshit. Screw it. I’m done. I shove the spray cans in my backpack and run.

  Bouncer will get his wish when the sun comes up.

  chapter eleven

  I remember gazing down at my body as if I was watching a hospital reality show.

  Code Blue. CPR. Code Blue.

  Doctors pounded on my chest. I hovered in the corner above the room, watching the busy ER but feeling no pain. I just floated above it all. Hearing their panicked voices, but feeling calm. Watching stressed faces work. Feeling nothing but peace.

  I drifted into a bright light like a moth in summertime. Drawn toward the glow—a beacon outside of a dark void. It sounds cliché, but the tunnel thing really happened. How did I feel so alive when I was dead?

  My cell phone groans like a cello.

  “Hello?”

  “Just touching base, honey. How’s your afternoon going?”

  “Fine, Mom.”

  “I emailed a few pictures of your paintings to the art teacher at the junior college, Mrs. Hackett.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes and guess what?”

  “What?”

  “She just called. She loves your paintings, honey!”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, she wants to show them when you get about a dozen.”

  “Show them? To who?”

  “To the kids on campus. Mrs. Hackett will help us organize an art showing in the library. You can get extra credit for doing it.”

  “How does that work?”

  “A high school elective, I guess. I’m not sure. She’ll talk to you about it when you’re ready. Maybe this weekend we can meet with her?”

  I notice the paint is beginning to dry around the edge of the painting. I dab my brush in more paint. “I better go, Mom. I’m almost done with a painting.”

  “Okay, dear. Just be home by five tonight, okay? I’m cooking again.”

  “Alright. What’s for dinner?”

  “Cheesy mac and ground gobble.”

  I smile. Mac and cheese with ground turkey.

  “Quick and easy, but it’ll stick to your ribs for days.”

  Mom usually adds a slab of cheddar into it, sometimes a few hot dogs. Sticking to my ribs is a nice way to describe the effects of her comfort food.

  “Sounds good. Bye, Mom.”

  “Love you, honey.”

  Only a few more bushes to add and the painting will be done. I sit back with my arms folded and peer at it. It does look pretty good. I think I’m actually getting better with each painting I do. Mixing the colors is the key. Having the right brush, too. Once I’d figured those things out, my paintings started looking more life-like.

  I wonder if I can make my paintings look more like Reizo’s sketches. A 3D tree would be cool, maybe a 3D fish jumping out of the pond at the viewer? I laugh, imagining a life-like fish in the middle of a conservative pond painting. Massive shark teeth, large dark round eyes, and a top hat, maybe a small cane.

  I wonder if he’ll come back?

  My mind drifts as I detail another bush.

  He’s cute. Shy even. I doubt he’s crazy, probably just different. Aren’t we all? There’s nothing wrong with it. I can vouch for that.

  Reizo Rush.

  My stomach suddenly goes weightless and
the ground feels shifty. Weird. Emotions hit me, one after the other. Uneasy. Nervous. Anxious. Scared. Worry. The intensity takes my breath away.

  I hear bushes rustling again as if they’re hit by the wind. Miss Aggie? Uncle Pete? My heart takes off in a sprint jumping over a hurdle, then another, and another. I recognize the energy.

  Reizo pushes through the bushes and gives me a quick wave, but doesn’t smile.

  A wave of heaviness hits me.

  He doesn’t look too pleased to see me.

  Oh hell. My plan is burnt toast again.

  Aimee doesn't hear me at first as she paints a landscape near the edge of the pond. But when I crunch a pile of dead leaves and emerge from the surrounding bushes, she glances over her shoulder.

  I freeze and consider turning around and bolting, but what’s the point? She’s seen me already. I’ll make up an excuse, then do an about face and rework my plan.

  “Hi Reizo,” Aimee says, as her blue eyes brighten. “What brings you to the pond this afternoon?”

  “Just getting some air,” I reply.

  I try to force myself to turn around and walk away, but my feet saunter toward her and my body goes along for the ride.

  Wow. Aimee’s painting of the pond isn’t bad. She brushes her canvas with two brushes, each with a different shade of green. I notice she’s blended the top of the tree like I mentioned the last time I saw her. She has even added texture. Props. Very nice.

  She looks at me with wide eyes. “What do you think?”

  I inspect the shading of the bushes she’s painted around the pond and take longer than I should to respond. “It’s good.” Actually, its way better than good, but I play it cool and fold my arms. “Nice fish. Too bad it’s not in 3D.”

  Honestly, her painting is awesome and her fish looks realistic, action contrasting with calmness, a slimy fish jumping out of the pond to snatch a hovering fly.

  She examines her painting. “I was thinking the same thing. But I have no idea how to paint in 3D like you do.”

  Aimee peers at me as if she’s trying to solve the world’s hunger problems and I have an unlimited supply of cheeseburgers in my backpack.

  This girl is seriously cute.

  “Can you show me how you do it?” she asks softly.

  Show her? A slight tingle starts at the top of my spine, spreads to my shoulders, and ends up causing tremors in both hands. Oh hell. Of course she’d ask me when Stewart’s drugs are flowing through my veins like kryptonite blood.