After Obsession

  Considering the circumstances, I figure Mom will understand. We go back to the office and I tell Ms. Murillo, “I’m going to the hospital with my cousin.”

  “Me, too,” Aimee announces. “He’s my ride today.”

  Ms. Murillo has a perky voice and a short, sassy haircut. She’s obviously heard all the excuses kids can think up. “I can’t let you leave unless someone checks you out.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m going,” I answer. “I don’t want to be rude, but really, I’m not asking. I just thought I should let someone know.”

  “Let me call your mom and see if it’s okay with her,” she suggests, reaching for the phone on her desk.

  “I can’t—”

  “Alan, it’s better this way,” Aimee says. “I’m sure your mom will be okay with it, and it’ll keep you out of trouble.”

  “What’s the number?” Ms. Murillo asks.

  I start writing my name under the names of other students who were checked out by parents. There’s a line for the adult to sign. I leave it blank as she finishes calling my mom.

  “Aimee, let me call your dad,” Ms. Murillo says. A few minutes later we’re in my truck and Aimee is telling me how to get to the hospital.

  • 13 •

  AIMEE

  “This is it?” Alan says.

  “Yeah.” I rub a hand across my eyes, trying to see it the way he would, trying not to think about how nice Blake was in the cafeteria, how he comforted me when Court went crazy. It was like he snapped back into nice Blake again. I hate that. Life would be so much easier if people were like buildings—if they didn’t ping-pong back and forth between nice and mean, angry and loving.

  Maine Memorial Hospital is solid and steady. It’s not a huge hospital by anybody’s standards. It’s brick, and kind of squat and sprawling because it’s always a big ordeal to raise money in the capital campaigns to add stuff like a new maternity wing or an ER. It doesn’t have any double-decker parking garages or fancy things like that.

  “I know it’s not big, but it’s a good hospital, I swear. They’ll take care of Courtney here. I mean, they’ll do the best they can and everything, but—”

  He interrupts. “It’s not something a stethoscope and a blood test can fix.”

  “Right.” I nod and point to a section of parking lot. “You can park there. That’s Dr. Mason’s Mini Cooper and that’s Doris Bailey’s sedan. Doris is my dad’s administrative assistant. She’s worked at the hospital for fifty years. She’s sixty-eight. She’s never had another job. She makes really good pie. I’m babbling. Oh … I’m sorry I’m babbling. I’m just so worried about Courtney.”

  He unhooks his seat belt after he parks and pulls me into him for another hug. I kind of wonder if Oklahoma people are big on hugs or if it’s just him. Does it mean something? He says, “I know. Me, too.”

  It is our second hug ever. The good smell of him drifts into my nose, although it’s mixed a little bit with cafeteria cheese.

  His breath brushes my hair. My hair is happy. “I know.”

  I pull away and just say it. “I’m so worried about Court, but I’m scared of going in there. I’m scared of what might happen. I mean, I’m scared of her—not her, but … what’s inside of her, you know?”

  His hand reaches down to my cheek. “Me, too.”

  “Really?”

  He nods just the slightest of nods.

  I try to gather up my strength. “Blake still likes me.”

  His arms stiffen around me. “Do you like him?”

  I let myself think about it for a second, just to make really sure, but then I say, “No.”

  We wait there for a second. A cop car pulls under the emergency room platform. Sgt. Farrar unfolds his giant body from the car and steps into the building. He looks busy and worried, stressed. Someone said the cops have been super busy lately. I can’t remember who it was, though.

  “Do you want to tell me what you’re thinking about?” Alan asks.

  I shake my head like a little girl but I tell him anyway. “I was always afraid of being a freak again.” I tell him about the séance. His eyes tell me he understands. Believes. “I was always afraid of people thinking that I was crazy like my mom. But it’s not me. It’s Courtney. I mean … she’s become what I was always afraid of becoming … And Blake? He’s not that kind of crazy, but he’s not nice right now. He’s mean and he’s threatened me and you and … We can’t like each other, Alan. It’s not …”

  I don’t have a word to put in there. It’s not … Safe? Right? Time?

  His eyes are so deep and brown and solid. They are nothing like the river. “You can’t help who you like.” He takes a deep breath. “You ready?”

  They don’t let us see her. We go talk to Doris, but she tells us they’re running MRIs and CT scans on Courtney’s head, checking for tumors; we aren’t allowed in during all that. Courtney’s mom doesn’t want Alan to have to see it, or Courtney, right now. She thinks it’s too disturbing. Alan shakes a little with worry, but it isn’t until we’re back in his truck that he completely loses it.

  “I should be in there.” He pounds his back into the seat. It shudders from the force. “I can help. They aren’t going to find any freaking tumors.”

  “I know.” I try patting his arm. It doesn’t seem to work.

  “I can’t believe they’re trying to protect me. I should be the one protecting them!”

  I take a deep breath. “Alan, it’s not like love and protection are one-way streets.”

  He does a double take. I raise my hand before he can object and soldier on.

  “No. Seriously. Listen. You love them. You want to protect them. That’s good. But you also have to respect the fact that they love you and want to protect you.”

  “But they can’t—not from this.”

  His anger fills the air, hot and dangerous. He punches his steering wheel. It makes the whole truck shake. Two Goffstown police cars pull up and an ambulance follows them in. It must be an assault victim or something. Rob, this nurse with 1970s rocker hair, all big and curly, gives us a thumbs-up and yells, “What’s happening?”

  I wave back and do the whole polite smile thing.

  Once he’s gone Alan looks sheepishly at me. “Did I scare you?”

  “A little.”

  His hand swallows mine up. Then he reaches for me and folds me into him. “I would never hurt you, Red.”

  “I know,” I mumble, but I never thought that Blake would hurt me, or Court, and they both did. I say more clearly, “I would never hurt you either.”

  We pull apart a little bit and he studies my face. “I believe you.”

  “Good.” I laugh and try to lighten the mood. “Why don’t we go to my house? I’ll show you the river.”

  He agrees, but I can tell it’s hard for him to drive away from the hospital.

  “She’s with doctors. She’ll be okay. They’ll do their best to take care of her, and your aunt and your mom, too,” I promise. “And we’ll go back. As soon as your mom calls. C’mon. You know you hate it in there. It’ll be good for you to be outside, for us to be outside. You’ll have your cell. It’ll be okay.”

  He shudders a little, like the decision is that hard, but then he pulls out of the parking lot and we go.

  “This is amazing,” he says as we climb up to the tree house. He touches the plywood where Benji and I have drawn things. He finds the knight with the long dark hair right away. He smiles. “Is that me?”

  I nod, but I’m embarrassed. I turn away and step farther onto the little porch. I point toward the river. “Those are our kayaks down there. I used to kayak every morning, but now … you know … the river is kind of freaking me out.” I stop.

  He turns me back around. “Aimee …”

  My hands seem no longer under my control, and they move up to his face. It’s a bit of a reach. He sighs when I touch him. I sigh, too.

  He takes one of my hands and kisses each knuckle. “You’re nervous.” r />
  “I babble when I’m nervous,” I say too fast and too jokey, but I have to be jokey because the way I feel is too intense, too real. It’s like he’s some super-strong magnet and all I want to do is press against him.

  “It’s not babbling, but it’s nice, and you only do it when you’re nervous.” His breath brushes against my hand with every word. He straightens up a little. I move with him. “Do I make you nervous?”

  “Yes. No. A little. Not because I’m afraid of you, but because … it’s … oh …” I lose my words because he’s kissing my knuckles again. “I still have paint on my hand.”

  He flips it over and kisses right where there’s a bit of dried sky blue. “I like it. I like everything about you.”

  I swear my knees are about to buckle. I grab for him.

  He laughs softly. I can’t believe he did that. I can’t believe I feel like this. It’s so different from Blake, so much bigger. I force myself to sound teasing, like my feelings aren’t in some big swirly jumble. “What? Like you’ve never made a girl weak-kneed before?”

  “I’m weak-kneed, too,” he says.

  “Really?”

  “Swear.”

  “Let’s go inside. I have to show you something. I was going to show you at lunch but it all went crazy,” I explain. “I even thought we could talk to Court about it, too, because, you know … she was getting better.”

  We go back inside the tree house. Alan can’t really sit up straight unless he’s in the absolute center, so he half lies across the floor, propped up on an elbow. I hand him the folder.

  “Mrs. Hessler gave it to me. She’s our librarian. She was friends with my mom. She asked if Court had any sores. I think she knows something.” I start to leave.

  He reaches out and touches my ankle. It’s a light touch. “Where you going?”

  “I was going to let you read. I didn’t want to bother you.”

  His hand strokes my foot and calf lightly and I swear it sends these good shivers all through me. It’s ridiculous. Blake never made me feel this way; never made me feel as if the whole world had gone static-electric and power-charged.

  Alan rumbles out, “What did Doris say when you apologized for asking about Courtney? ‘You’re never a bother.’ She’s right.”

  He grabs on to my ankle and tugs gently. I laugh and flop down next to him. He rearranges himself so that he can sit up better. I curl against his side and close my eyes, listening for danger, listening for any signs of badness, of evil. What stinks about it is that I don’t have any idea what I’m listening for. Does evil have a sound?

  Alan wraps his arm around the front of my shoulder. His voice is husky-deep and smooth-slow and melt-worthy. “Is that comfortable?”

  “Yep.” It’s all I can manage. “Read it, okay? Do you mind?”

  He kisses the top of my head. “Of course not.”

  I settle in for the duration and try to keep my mind off of Courtney and how worried I am. I try to keep my mind off Alan, too, and how good he smells, because, let’s face it: now is not the time, right? At least not in my little brother’s tree house, anyway.

  • 14 •

  ALAN

  She feels so right nestled up against me. The smell of her perfume, shampoo, and girliness is very distracting as I open the folder and try to concentrate on what’s inside. My arm is around her, my forearm against her chest, my hand on her shoulder. I’ve never been this comfortable with a girl before. I can’t believe it’s only been a couple of days. We’re so comfortable that for just a minute I start to let myself think that all this is okay, that we can just be a couple. I can’t think about that now, though. I mean, Aimee just broke up with a guy, and Courtney’s dad just died, and … there’s just too much happening.

  Instead, I focus on the open folder in front of me. It looks like printouts of old newspaper articles. I read the first one, then the next few. One is much newer, and I feel Aimee kind of flinch a little when I uncover it. I read it quickly.

  “Your mom?” I ask. She nods but doesn’t say anything. I look through a few more pages, all relating various deaths that have something to do with the river. Finally, I close the folder and kiss the top of her head again. “You okay?”

  “Mm-hmm.” She snuggles her shoulders up tighter against me and all I want is to kiss her, but it’s too soon, way too soon.

  Instead, I clear my throat and say, “This is the river right here? Where your kayaks are?”

  “Yep.”

  “I was there the other day, before I saw the shape in Courtney’s room. It seemed so peaceful.”

  “Usually it is. It’s tidal but it feeds off some lakes up in the country. The ocean’s not far that way. That’s where Courtney’s dad died.”

  We’re quiet for a minute, both of us thinking, I guess. She turns her head to look at me and suddenly our lips are millimeters apart.

  She inches back, but only like a centimeter, and says, “The whole town thinks that my mom killed herself, that she was really crazy. People teased me about it when I was little. They said that I was crazy, too.”

  I want to kiss her so badly, to just once feel her lips against my lips.

  “You’re not crazy, Red.” My voice surprises me. It’s about eight octaves deeper than normal. Her face is so close. Her eyes mist up. She blinks hard like she’s trying to hold back tears.

  “We shouldn’t do this,” she says. “I mean, I want to do this, but we—it’s—I want …”

  I swallow so hard and so slowly that it’s like my Adam’s apple gets stuck halfway down my throat. Her eyes turn into some sort of plea.

  “I know we shouldn’t do this,” she says again.

  She sucks in her lips a little bit and totally changes the topic. She tends to do this, I’ve noticed. Her brain jumps around. “Do you think the River Man is him, that first guy, Emulus Black?”

  “No.” I say it without hesitation, which surprises her and me. “Some places attract evil. Some things in nature have evil souls, just like people. Maybe this is an evil river spirit.”

  “Like a nymph, but a man?” Her breath is warm and sweet-smelling and I want to keep breathing it into my body as soon as it comes out of hers.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “So, this thing has maybe been here forever?”

  “Maybe. Maybe somebody called it from somewhere else and bound it to the river. Maybe it just found the river, found people here, and stayed.”

  “It seems like it’s affecting everyone. People are cranky, fighting. It’s like some sort of virus of evil, you know?” She shakes her head and sighs. “What can we do?”

  “That’s the question, isn’t it?” I say. “That’d be easiest. Just turn it all over to someone else, someone who knows what he’s doing.”

  “What’s the other option?” Aimee asks. Her eyes, so close, are huge and green, like a meadow filled with sunshine. “Can we make it leave Courtney alone? Can we make it go away completely, so it won’t ever hurt anyone else?”

  “I don’t know.” I explain to her about the stages of possession.

  “The acne?” she asks.

  I nod. “It’s the obsession stage, and it seems to be getting stronger. Yesterday, I think she was totally possessed for a little while when she threw the door open. Then she passed out. Maybe the spirit was exhausted. It spent all its energy possessing her before she had submitted to that stage, really. That’s why she was able to be so normal the rest of the day. The thing wasn’t strong enough to harass her anymore.”

  “And now? What happened today? Is she completely possessed?”

  “I don’t think so. She’s normal sometimes. Once the possession is complete, she won’t be herself at all. Ever.”

  “Will … will he kill her then?”

  “I don’t know. He might just use her to spread his evil for a long time. Or maybe not …,” I say. We talk for a second about how it seems to be affecting other people, too, sort of bringing out their worst traits somehow, making them m
eaner. It’s not as full-on as it is with Courtney, but people are being arrested for domestic violence, people are getting in fights at school. Good people, Aimee says. People who have never been in trouble before. She thinks this might even be why her brother and grandfather are having such intense moments of crankiness lately, why her dad’s not been coming home as much, why Blake freaked out.

  “What can we do?” she asks, nestling in against me.

  “You remember I told you I was scared?”

  “Yes.” She sounds so serious.

  “I’ve been thinking that maybe there’s a reason I’m here. You know, maybe it’s more than Mom wanting to move in with her sister. Maybe the Great Spirit sent me here to fight this thing.”

  “That’s deep, Alan.”

  “Yeah. Maybe it’s all bull. Maybe I’m being, I don’t know, arrogant, thinking I can fight this thing.”

  “Can you?”

  “I really don’t know. I’ve never done anything like this. It’s not like all members of Native American nations are mysterious, magical shamans …”

  I tell her my whole story. I tell her what I’ve always known and how much I really don’t understand. “I’m just a half-breed bastard who can’t even get a tribal ID card. The little bit I know about Ghost Sickness, the ghost dance, medicine, and all that is from the Internet and books, and no self-respecting one of us would ever publish the really important stuff.”

  “Your guide, though,” Aimee says. “She called you Spirit Warrior.”

  “Yeah, but wouldn’t I need training?”

  “Maybe it’s a calling,” she says. “You know, something that’s innate in your nature and just comes forward when you need it.”

  “That sounds too easy.”

  “What exactly does it mean, ‘spirit warrior’? Is it like an exorcist?”

  “I think it’s more,” I answer. “Like a shaman. You know, everything from making charms to doing exorcisms. But … I don’t know. Who am I to do any of that?”

  “If you were going to try to do something, what would it be?”

  I can’t help but smile at her psychological tactic. “If I tell you what I would try if I really was a shaman, then you’ll just tell me I should try it.”