Following Christopher Creed

  "Go for the gold. Write a great story."

  I grinned, feeling the helium, blown-up feelings of being alone with a beautiful girl start to dissolve. She cracked a Diet Coke can and then stuck it in my hand. It was warm, having been in her carry-on bag, but it was my favorite fruit.

  "I have nightmares, sometimes, I should warn you," I said, trying to keep my smile peaceful. "I wake up yelling."

  She was back over at her terminal, I thought, to give me air.

  "Does it help to play the radio?" She hit the radio feed on her laptop. Some New Age music came through. RayAnn knows New Age music relaxes me. Thoughtful.

  "I got the feeling you weren't telling the whole truth to those kids out in the field tonight," she said.

  I chuckled, sipping the warm soda. "Frankly, it was none of their business."

  "I know. I thought you handled it well. But there was that part about your mother never touching you inappropriately."

  "What about it?"

  "You just got that click in your voice. That's all. I would notice it, but they wouldn't."

  "Nah." I shook my head with all honesty. "I lie sometimes—change the details to prevent myself from appearing accurately on people's blogs if I feel endangered—but that part is true. Mostly."

  "Well, mostly is a heavy term to throw in the middle of that. I'm not trying to pry, but..."

  But, but, but. I squirmed. RayAnn believed in the value of traditional therapy. I figured I would replay this one tape and see if I felt any better. "There wasn't much. Toward the end, Mom had gotten to like me brushing her hair at night. She would sit in front of her bedroom mirror and expect me to brush her hair for her."

  After a moment of silence, she said, "Ew."

  "Yeah, it was getting very ... borderline. She was drinking a lot. I'd been doing my own laundry since I was, like, eleven, and one night I reached in the washer to get my underwear load and toss it in the dryer, and it was like my underwear and her bras and panties. She'd thrown hers in on top of mine, saying the washer hadn't been full. It probably ... meant nothing to her."

  I watched RayAnn shove the laptop away to get her mind on this. She sank into the chair until her neck lay over the back of it and she stared at the ceiling.

  "I'm trying to think ... if I ever found my underwear in the same load with my dad's underwear. Yeah, I suppose that could have happened." She looked entranced. "I've folded my dad's underwear a hundred times."

  "So, I shouldn't have been rooted to the spot when I saw that," I said. "Because I did not want to fold my mom's underwear. I did not want to touch my mom's underwear."

  "Well ... my dad wasn't asking me to massage his scalp and then throwing his underwear into my personal wash load." She giggled thoughtfully. "It's very, very borderline, yes. I would call those, uh, boundary violations, if nothing grosser. Anything else?"

  "There were probably twenty little things like that," I said honestly, "but nothing major until Sydney. That's when things got insane. My mother would pace around in the night. I think it was the first thing that I ever did that she couldn't ... control. It was driving her crazy. A couple times, I woke up, like, around midnight, and she was standing right over my bed. Just staring into my face.

  "I would be all, 'Mom. What the heck are you doing?'

  "And she would grab me by the T-shirt and shake me, hollering, 'Give her up! She's bad! How can you do this to me after all I've done for you!'"

  "Oh, wow," RayAnn groaned, as if that one really got her. "Listen, you did the right thing. Just look at your life. Where would you be if you hadn't left?"

  "At home. With her," I said, and couldn't help adding, "but I would have my sight."

  I didn't know what I was trying to say by that. It was a thought I had when I wasn't busy reading, writing, studying, hanging out—when nothing was popping. Could I have moved faster away from that slung ball if I hadn't been riddled with a chronic, general feeling of guilt? I had actually seen the ball coming. And I froze.

  Was my sight the price I had been willing to pay for leaving home? Was it like a down payment on my freedom? If I'd been raised Catholic, would it have been like penance? Nothing is free in this world.

  I tried to correct myself, tell myself that a lot was free. That breeze from the window, my good self-esteem, my confidence in tomorrow, my dreams, my visions, my writing talents—they were free and available, simply because I wanted them, wanted to enjoy them.

  RayAnn is a smart person. She could have come over to the bed and tried to invade my space to help me heal from having my space invaded. A lot of girls would have been that dumb, I think. Or maybe dumb is a harsh word. Maybe it's gut instinct for most women to want to reach out and touch. She either wasn't there yet, maturity-wise, or she was smart. She let her attention fall back to the laptop, and she mumbled some apology that she wasn't being insensitive but she had to surf for something.

  "Now what are you after?" I asked, gratefully. The tape replay hadn't done much for me except make me want to change the subject. "Can you look up those articles the Haydens first mentioned about Steepleton? The cancer rate and the car accidents?"

  "Sure. But I want to get this other thing first. Or I'll never sleep tonight."

  "What is it?"

  She was muttering to herself, hitting keys. Eventually she must have forgotten what we'd been talking about, because she looked engrossed, then frustrated. I finally heard her say, "Lightning stations. No ... lightning traps ... trapped lightning ... no..."

  "What on earth are you doing?" I asked.

  She sighed, and I heard her nails drumming the desk.

  "I swear I've heard of this before ... I just can't think of what it is called," she said. "You look fried. Why don't you go to sleep, huh? This is freaky, and you're freaked out enough right now."

  I said, "Now I'm curious."

  "No, you're not." She typed. "You're not this curious, trust me."

  Three's a charm. I asked a third time, "What?"

  She threw her hands up in an Italian gesture of frustration. "I need to know what would explain this thing that happened just as Chief Rye showed up, right after Kobe Lydee stopped that godforsaken chanting that was making me so seasick. It's some ... thing where lightning gets trapped underground and maintains its charge until an animal or person comes along and collapses the trap. It has to do with rocks ... some kind of rock or ... stump. I think it can start a fire up to a year later, but I can't remember what the heck the phenomenon is called."

  Okay ... I knew what she was looking for, but I had no idea why. I waited until she finally spilled it.

  "You guys were looking behind you, but I already knew Chief Rye was there. I saw him coming fifty paces off. I just happened to be looking out at the woods, right where Kobe had those field glasses pointed during his chants. A light flashed, flashed again, and then went to black. It looked like lightning, only coming up from the ground. You would have to think that a spirit of some sort was trying to manifest itself, if you were a believer. Which, of course, I'm not."

  NINE

  I OFTEN HAVE THIS RECURRING DREAM in the dark hour, as my mother used to call it—the hour right before dawn, when the moon is low and the world outside is black and unmoving. In it, Mom appears to me, though the scenario changes. Sometimes, she comes out of the closet in my dorm, and sometimes through the window, sometimes up through the blankets of my bed.

  The Lightning Field drew me back in the dream, and I stood by the first tree that I had touched there. I was breathing and sending confident thoughts out to the universe while running my palm over the weathered bark and lightning crystals.

  My eyes began to feel icy, and suddenly my vision opened, as if I had never been blind—always a prelude to coming attractions in this dream. I was calling Chris Creed, and I could sense a movement somewhere in front of me and to the left, and I saw a long shadow behind the nearest dead tree. The shadow had legs and arms, but its head was hidden, even in shadow.

  "Come here
to me," I told the shadow. It didn't move. "I need to ask you some things. Nothing awful. It's all ... off the record."

  The shadow moved, but with a step back, not a step forward. I pretended I didn't see it.

  "Are you dead?" I asked. "I really need to know."

  Things are distorted in shadow, and the longer I stared, the more I realized this manifestation was Chris as a younger kid. A lanky younger kid, and his legs were trembling under his jeans, sending little shudders into the shadow.

  "Come out," I said, and when the shadow didn't move, I added, "Are you dead?"

  The head appeared on the shadow as he pushed back a little from behind the tree, and the head nodded yes.

  Yes, yes, yes. Dead, dead.

  "I don't believe you," I whispered, and went on a rant that came out as a whisper also, despite my anger. "It's not a 118 great story if you're dead! If you're dead, you're an accident. You're a pity. You're not a hero. I can't write a great story about a kid who is worms. Do you read me?"

  The shadow didn't move. I supposed he didn't care about me or my writing. Why should he?

  "Well, if you're not going to help me, then get the hell out," I said, louder this time. The shadow leaned in to the tree but didn't totally become part of it. He wasn't helping me at all. Might as well be dead.

  "You're a wimp," I told him. "I've always thought that."

  He didn't answer, but I realized his fingers were moving. He was making little sign language symbols, the ones I'd learned just this year in a sudden blast of empathy for other people with disabilities. He was making little letters of the alphabet, and I had to stare with all my ability to read them. L-O-O-K O-U-T B-E-H-I-N-D Y-O-U.

  I froze, feeling her breath on my neck, too close, as always. I could feel myself shrinking, or maybe Mom was growing. I could smell her, smell laundry detergent, smell the acid breath of someone who drinks early and bends over your bed at midnight. She had a hatchet. I don't know how I knew that.

  "You can't touch me. You can't hurt me. It's only a dream," I said.

  "But I'm your mother. Your mo-ther" she said, as if mothers move in and out of dreams, in and out of real life with ease. "And you know the truth, my favorite. You always were my favorite, my precious. If I can't have you, nobody will have you."

  "Leave me alone. Stop touching me."

  She hadn't actually touched me yet, but I could feel it coming, and suddenly her hand cupped my neck, my cheek, where she always put her hand, where I swore if another person ever touched me I would punch them out. Nobody touched my cheek, my neck, my ear like she always insisted on doing—not ever. Her hand felt cold and scabby. When I turned, her eyes were her own, but the rest was the rotted flesh of a semirecent corpse. The skin on her arm dangled in tatters and only bones and corroded flesh touched the side of my face that had been her favorite stomping ground.

  I ducked and threw my arm up to block her, but her bones flew into fifteen pieces in the air, then joined back together and touched my face again.

  "Don't, don't," she crooned. "Come over to that flat stump. Let me do it in one clean blow. Don't fight me..."

  I spun and looked for Chris, but he was gone, evaporated. Little wimp. You never thought of anybody but yourself. It's good I never got a chance to write about you.

  "I'm tired, Mom. I'm so tired."

  "I know, darling. Come over to the stump. Just lay your little head down, and I will sing you to sleep."

  I did it. I was there suddenly, kneeling, laying my head on the stump, just to get her slithering fingers off the crook of my neck. I could see the hatchet, which she laid just in my view, and she started to sing.

  Don't cry, my baby, don't cry this eve,

  The fairies are coming from make-believe.

  Her favorite song from when I was little. I'd loved that song when I was three, but she was still trying to sing it when I was ten. My head suddenly weighed a thousand pounds. I couldn't lift it, couldn't get away. But a shadow moved into view, huge like some superhero's, only more foreboding, more ominous, stronger. She stopped singing, obviously aware of it, and started weeping. Disappointed sobs fell out of her rhythmically, like kitten mews, and she beat the forest floor with her bony fist until the earth banged and bumped and started to crumble under its power.

  It's me. It's my shadow, I told myself. Mike Mavic will come to save himself.

  But Mike Mavic was not powerful enough. This shadow of redemption was somebody else—

  ***

  I shot straight up in the bed, huffing, trying to drown out the earthquakes and cat screeches. The cat turned into RayAnn hollering, "...on earth is going on?"

  My vision blacked out totally from sitting up so fast, and I had to wait a few seconds to see her back and shoulders beside me. Last I remembered, she was talking to her dad on the phone, and I was lying here, trying not to spiral. She now sat up with the blanket around her waist, her sweatshirt sleeves fluttering as she stood and moved to the thundering noises.

  "Don't answer the door!" I said quickly, realizing that the earthquakes were someone pounding, slowly and methodically.

  Lanz kept growling and moved to sniff the door, and catching his long nose in my vision calmed me. He stuck his nostrils right up to the crack in the door, inhaling with great pulls, which he would not have done if it were someone truly dangerous. Dogs know these things.

  I rubbed my hair to get the sleep out of my head and moved past RayAnn, who had dropped the blanket, causing me to stumble over it.

  "Who's there?" I asked into the door.

  "Let me in," a man said. "You want to talk to me or what?"

  "Talk to whom? At..."

  RayAnn finished. "...at four-fifteen in the morning."

  "Who are you?" I demanded again.

  "The bogeyman."

  Ten seconds earlier I might have believed it, but I opened the door a crack and found the face on the other side. It was a kid, his eyes darting madly to one side. I would have pegged him at about thirteen until his eyes found mine, peering around the door. They betrayed years, sharp intelligence, a crusty need for sleep.

  "You're Mike?" he asked, his voice less deep this time.

  "Yeah."

  "Kobe the Creep sent me."

  I was already opening the door. Justin Creed lumbered past me as if it were perfectly normal to come into a motel room in the middle of the night without being asked. I remembered tales Adams wrote of Chris's not understanding "boundaries," of Adams punching Chris in the face back in sixth grade for taking his expensive guitar without asking, standing on a desk, and doing an Elvis routine. And then there were all the stories of the Mother Creed barging into the kids' bedrooms without knocking. This "boundary challenge" still seemed to run in the family, but it didn't do Justin much damage. He looked kind of impish and made you want to laugh.

  He was short but stacked. He had a neck like a linebacker's, though the rest was covered in a Stockton sweatshirt. He looked all around with energy that spoke of assurance but not invasion. His eyes stopped on RayAnn as she stood by the desk illuminated by the lamp she'd clicked on. He raised and lowered his eyebrows quickly.

  "Not much on romantic sleepwear, are you?"

  "I call this dorm-wear," she said sleepily, glancing down at her Randolph sweatshirt and sweatpants. I thought it was a pretty good comeback... considering it was four goddamn o'clock in the morning.

  Justin had Chris's alleged undying grin, but with a sharpness to it, though the rest of his framework was his own. The "mean" side of him that Katy and Chan had spoken about earlier tonight either was buried in exhaustion or only came out for cheering onlookers. I figured it was a little of both. He stared, frozen, down at Lanz, whose nose was pressed against his jeans while he sniffed and sniffed.

  "If this dog were going to rip off my package, I take it you'd be pulling him away."

  "He's a service dog," I said, as RayAnn giggled.

  "What kind of service? Not like ... the breakfast patrol for carnivores, right?" r />
  "I'm visually impaired. Lanz..." I patted my thigh for him to come while fumbling for my glasses, and RayAnn moved for another light switch. Too much light at once could give me a knife-through-the-eyes effect.

  I heard Justin plopping into the chair with a sigh. "Would you mind not putting on any more lights, please? No need to flood us out. He's some sort of blind, and I'm, well, in more need of darkness than light." He seemed a little wound up, drumming the arms of the chair and bouncing a bit. "Wish I had the Ring of Power. I could just ... put it on and walk around town invisible, ya know?"

  Lord of the Rings was my favorite trilogy, so that sucked me a step or two closer, studying him through my trusty lenses. His eyes told me he wasn't on anything in spite of his nervous drumming. He obviously had things to be nervous about. I suggested, "You're hiding from someone."

  I expected him to dive into a load of grief about his mother, but he said, "Mostly from myself. Even though that's not possible. Ha. How did they put it in rehab ... all these wonderful speeches about 'assuming responsibility for yourself.' Endless, wonderful speeches. So. What is it you want to talk to me about?"

  "I was actually thinking of a different time ..." I tried.

  "You want to know about my brother, right?"

  "Correct. I want to write about him."

  "It's about time somebody else wanted to write about my brother. A couple other college dudes came around over the past couple years, but nothing was ever printed. You gonna make it?"

  "I'll make it."

  "'Cuz he's different than me, but he's my brother, and I think he's awesome."

  I moved my eyes to RayAnn, who raised her eye brows at me, obviously noting how Justin just used the present tense.

  "You think he's alive?" I asked.

  "Of course he's alive."

  "But ... he hasn't contacted you, right?"

  "Wrong," he said. "Among other things, I've had two e-mails from him."

  I was speechless. "You're ... sure they're from him?"

  "It's a long story, but trust me on this one. I'll show them to you, if you want. But it'll have to be later. They're on my hard drive at home. Well hidden." He grinned broadly. "My mom still checks my e-mail every day, if I forget to cover my keypad when I change my password. She's got a video cam hidden somewhere near my terminal, so she can see me change passwords."