I spring backward, releasing her shoulders.
Her face twists as she sees my expression. “Lauren, what’s wrong?” She reaches for me and sees her hand. “No! No, I don’t want to go! Lauren, don’t make me go!” But she’s fading. I reach for her, and my hands slide through her. I can’t touch her.
“Claire! Claire, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean...”
Mr. Rabbit and the teddy bears fall to the floor.
There are footsteps on the stairs.
I can’t face them. The Missing Man is gone. Claire is gone. I run across the attic room. Opening the window, I climb onto the sill, carefully stepping between the nails. And like Peter did weeks ago, I leap out the window.
I fall into the ocean below.
Chapter Twenty
I swim and then keep swimming until my side aches and my lungs burn. At first, I heard several people follow me into the water, splashing and shouting, but now I only hear a few, swimming steadily behind me. I hope they aren’t stronger swimmers than I am. I hope they don’t find a boat.
They’ll hate me now. I promised them salvation and denied it. Even I would hate me.
Ahead, a silver streak cuts through the waves, and I catch the dorsal fin of my dolphin. She pulls me through the waves so fast that the water batters away any and all thoughts. I let her pull me as far as I can, until my arms shake, and my hands slip, and I slide away from her. She leaps out of the ocean. Moonlight glistens on her flanks.
I tread water and look around. It’s night. I’m in the ocean. I don’t see any swimmers following me or any boats that aren’t drifting aimlessly. I paddle for shore. I’m exhausted, and every muscle hurts, but I swim until I crawl onto shore and collapse into the sand.
I lie in the sand for a very long time. The ocean kisses my feet. The desert wind chills my skin. I shiver in my wet clothes. I want Peter to come roaring in on his steam train to save me. But I sent him to save Claire, and he doesn’t know I need him.
A howl breaks through the steady sound of the waves. And then another howl—east and south, at least three, maybe more. I haul myself upright as another howl shatters the air. It’s much closer than any of the others.
Option one: I could retreat into the waves. But I don’t think I can swim anymore. My arms feel like jelly, wobbly slabs of flesh, and I’m chilled. Every inch of my skin is prickled with goose bumps, and it cringes away from my wet clothes.
Option two... Is there an option two?
I see a house nearby. It’s a run-down ranch with a half-collapsed garage. It looks familiar, and I think—I’m not certain but I think—it has one of Peter’s boards on its roof.
Getting to my feet, I ignore the way my legs are quivering. I don’t see any of the dogs, but the shadows could hide a thousand dogs intent on rending my flesh from my bones. I debate whether it’s better to walk and not seem like prey or run and get to the house faster.
I walk a few steps.
The howls don’t seem closer.
I continue toward the house as the dogs continue to howl. I wonder if they’re wolves, not dogs. I wonder which is worse. And then I realize one is behind me, between me and the ocean.
I don’t think.
I run.
I hear them bark to each other. I hear their paws scramble over the wet sand and the desert dirt. I throw myself onto a trellis with dead vines around it, and I climb. The rotten trellis breaks under my weight. I scramble my feet and grab the gutter. It’s clogged with muck and leaves, but it holds. The wolves hurl themselves at the house as I swing onto the roof. Panting, I lie flat on the shingles.
Safe.
But then I think: not safe. Someone might hear the barks. Someone might investigate to see what, or whom, they’ve treed. I scuttle across the roof and find the board that Peter left.
Even absent, Peter saves me.
I lift the board and lay it across to the next house. Sitting, I scoot along it. The wolves follow me below. I pull the board over with me and use it to cross to the next house. And then I use the rope ladder strung between the second house and an abandoned convenience store. And then another board. And a jump. A board. A zip line. Eventually, the dogs spot other things to sniff and hunt and chase, and I am alone.
Stretching out beside a chimney, I rest on the top of a house with black shingles. I stare up at the stars, the strange constellations and the fat moon.
I don’t know when everything went so wrong so fast.
Claire.
The Missing Man.
I need to talk to Peter, I think.
I pry myself up. After he fails to find Claire in the void, Peter will look for me at the yellow house, and when he sees that the mob is there and I’m not, he’ll look for me at our other favorite place. Staying in the sky, I head for the art barn.
Silently, quickly, I move from roof to roof. I listen for howls—I don’t hear any. I watch for people—I don’t see any. When the houses are too spaced out to stay above, I drop to the ground. I hide in the shadows and creep toward the barn. Across a short patch of open ground, it sits, untouched by the void or my ocean. I skulk toward it, watching the shadows around me. Shooting looks right and left, I slide open the door, and slip inside.
“Peter?”
No answer from the darkness.
A thin sliver of light seeps in through the gap in the door. As my eyes adjust, I don’t see any movement. I don’t hear any breathing. I think I’m alone. I close the door.
I pull a sheet off what I know is the Rembrandt, and then I strip off my wet clothes down to my underwear and curl up in the sheet. Exhaustion is settling into my bones. I can’t string thoughts together to even form coherent questions anymore. I hope I’ll be safe here. I don’t know if I’m safe anywhere.
But I do sleep.
And then I wake.
I’m alone in the barn, and sunlight is seeping through the gaps in the boards. I toss off the sheet and put my still-damp clothes back on. My mouth feels gummy, and I miss my toothpaste. I think of Claire and I miss her.
I wonder where Peter is. He should have returned from the void by now. He should have checked the house and seen the intruders. He should have, unless something happened to him. Feral dogs, the townspeople, the void, the Missing Man...
I don’t want to think anymore. Leaving the sheets on the ground, I inch open the door to the barn and climb into the nearest house through a kitchen window. I use the bathroom, though the toilet doesn’t flush. There isn’t any toothpaste, but I find a stray mint tucked into a crevasse between couch cushions. I eat it. I then investigate the junk pile in the backyard for breakfast. I find a bicycle tire, half a cookie, a juice box, and an uncooked steak. Sadly, I leave the steak—I can’t do anything with it right now. I also find a collection of tiny teddy bears with keychain hooks on the tops of their heads. Claire would have liked them. I take them and the food with me back to the barn.
In the barn, I arrange the tiny bears in a circle. Alone in the center of the vast barn, they look sad and lonely. I dart outside again to fetch the bicycle tire that I saw, as well as a post from a picket fence. I also find a fedora hat, a brilliant blue tail feather, a spool of ribbon, and a welcome mat. I carry them all back to the barn.
I arrange the tiny bears on the spokes of the bike wheel, and I tie them on with the ribbon. I stick the feather into the hat, but it’s not enough. It still feels sad and lonely and small. I scurry outside again, each time returning with more oddball treasures. I add to my sculpture almost frenetically. More height. More color. More movement. I don’t think about what I’m doing. I just...do. Finding some tools, I affix the bike wheel with the bears to the picket fence post so that it can rotate. I position the feather in the hat so that the bears kick the feather as they spin by. I decide I like it. Moreover, Claire would like it.
I stop.
What the hell am I doing?
I lower my face into my hands.
“You’re glowing.” Peter, behind me.
I raise my head and look at my arms. Soft white light dances between my arm hairs like static electricity. My breath catches in my throat, and I nearly laugh. Irony or bad timing? I choke back the laugh, afraid it will morph into a sob. “I lost...art?”
“You lost yourself,” Peter corrects me. “You lost your dreams, your future, your way when your mother fell sick. Your art is symbolic of all that.”
“Oh.” I stare at my sculpture and want to feel happy, whole, complete. But I can’t. “Claire’s gone.”
All the blood drains out of his face. “Claire?”
“She’s okay. I think. I think I...sent her home.” I explain what happened, how I’d accidentally mimicked what the Missing Man had done with Colin, how she’d faded and then disappeared. She’d tried to cling to me. I remember her fingers grasping at me and slipping through my sleeve, and the look on her face as if I’d shredded her world into pieces. I look at my hands. “You need to find the Missing Man again. Please. I can go home now. I can make sure she’s okay. I have to.”
He approaches my sculpture, and he spins the bike wheel. The bears revolve. I begin to feel silly making a sculpture of bears and bike parts when there are masterpieces around me.
“It’s called ‘found art,’” I say.
“Appropriate.”
“Will you do it? Will you find the Missing Man again? For me? For Claire?”
“I already found him.”
“Again, I mean. I need you to find him again.”
He looks at me as if I’m dense, and he holds up one finger. “You find what will heal the lost.” He holds up a second finger. “You send the found home. One plus one equals... ‘“She can’t do addition. Can you do subtraction? Take a bone from a dog: what remains?” Alice considered. “The bone wouldn’t remain, of course, if I took it—and the dog wouldn’t remain; it would come to bite me—and I’m sure I shouldn’t remain.”’”
“I’m not the Missing Man,” I say.
“‘“Wrong as usual,” said the Red Queen, “the dog’s temper would remain.”’”
I spin the bike wheel, and then I look up at the Rembrandt, Storm on the Sea of Galilee. I love the light on the clouds and on the water. And I understand. I have the same power as the Missing Man. “So all I have to do is click my heels three times and say ‘There’s no place like home’? I can send myself home?”
“No!” He shoots toward me but stops short of touching me. “You can’t! I mean, yes, you can, but you can’t. Lost needs you. The people here need you. You’re what stands between Lost and the void. We are, you and me, Finder and Missing Man. If you leave... You can’t leave.” There’s panic in his voice, fear, real fear.
“I have to. My mother is dying. She needs me. Claire needs me.”
He shakes his head. “You have lives here that depend on you.”
“They need the Missing Man. I’m just...me. I’m not interesting. You know that.”
“You can’t save your mother,” he says bluntly. “You can save the people here.”
His words are like bullets in my gut. “Maybe I can’t save her, but I can be there with her. She shouldn’t have to die alone.” Saying it out loud makes my stomach roll.
Peter looks as if he wants to shake me. “These people will face worse than death without you. They’ll fade. They’ll disappear. You could stop it!”
“I can’t! I have responsibilities that come first.”
“Responsibilities you fled from.”
“And that was a mistake! I shouldn’t have come here...”
“You were meant to be here.” He takes my hand. “Meant to be here with me.” He stares into my eyes and steps closer. I can feel his breath soft on my face. He leans his forehead against mine.
Suddenly, I feel as though I can’t breathe. My hand shakes. It’s still on his arm, and I know he can feel it shaking. My whole body trembles. “You’re only saying that because of these...‘powers’ I have, whatever they are.”
“I went to see the Missing Man to know if you could stay. I couldn’t let myself care about you if I thought you might leave. And here you are, with his powers, still talking about leaving. Can’t you see how much they...how much I...need you? I’m tired of being alone, Lauren. So very tired.”
I feel a lump in my throat. I swallow hard. His voice sounds so raw. His eyes... I want to reassure him. But I can’t. “I’ll come back. When I can. I won’t... I’ll come back and help. But I have to do this first. Please, try to understand.”
He steps back from me. “You won’t come back. You’ll sink into your life again, and you’ll convince yourself this was a dream or hallucination. You’ll assume the Missing Man will take care of it, that it’s not your responsibility. You have your own life, dreams, future. This isn’t real. That’s what you’ll tell yourself. And meanwhile, you will be destroying us. This. Me.”
“My mother needs me. My mother. Has there ever been anyone like that for you?”
He draws his hands away from mine. His expression is unreadable. “No.”
I suck in a breath, but I don’t know what to say to that. “No one?”
“Everyone always leaves me.” He turns his back on me and studies the bike-wheel bear sculpture. He spins it. It looks like a carnival ride, all the bright colors blurring together. “That’s what I’ve lost, Lauren. Everyone. When my parents died, I was alone. So I came here and became the Finder. This town became my family. People I found became my aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, friends. And then one by one, they left. Returned to their real lives. But this is my real life. This is my home. Finding people is who I am and what I do. And leaving me...is what everyone does. I thought you were different. Claire thought you were different.”
“I’ll come back.”
“You won’t.”
“I will.”
“I should have left you in the void. I should have let you fade. He would have stayed here if it weren’t for you. He wouldn’t have—”
“You’re blaming me now?”
“Yes! You’re choosing to leave!”
He isn’t going to understand. “I’m sorry,” I say. I cross my arms and put my hands on my shoulders. It’s the nearest I can come to approximating the Missing Man’s position. I don’t know if that’s essential, or if it’s just the words, but I do it anyway. “You were lost...”
He whips around at my words. His coat billows around him. His eyes are as stormy as the inside of the void, dark and swirling. He looks wild, as feral as the dogs that hunt in the alleyways. “Don’t.”
“You are found,” I finish.
He’s saying words. I can’t hear him. But his mouth shapes the words “Come back.” And then “I love you.”
I look into his eyes as he fades, as the paintings fade, as the walls fade, as everything dims and disintegrates around me into blackness.
Chapter Twenty-One
Beep, beep, beep...
I can’t breathe.
Oh, God, I can’t breathe! I try to inflate my lungs, but my throat feels stuffed shut. Whoosh, I hear. Air suddenly floods into me, and my chest expands. My eyes fly open.
I am lying on my back looking up at a tiled ceiling. One of the tiles has a water stain. The overhead light holds the shadows of a few dead bugs. Beep, beep, beep. I can’t breathe again. I try to gasp for air. My hands fly to my mouth. I hear a ripping sound and feel a sharp pain in my arm. An alarm wails. My hand touches my mouth. A tube runs into it, filling it. Whoosh, again, and my ribs expand as oxygen is forced into my lungs.
I hear doors fly open, slam against the wall. Footsteps. Faces press over me. Men and women in scrubs. “She’s a
wake,” one says.
“Calm down,” another says. Her voice is even, a faint hint of a Mexican accent. It’s a musical voice, soothing, as if it has practice calming wild horses. “You’re in a hospital. You’re all right. We’re taking care of you. Steady. That’s it. Steady.”
A hospital. It smells like a hospital. I know this smell—antiseptic. But I’m not supposed to be in a hospital bed. I hear the whirr of equipment around me and the beep...my heart rate, faster than it was. Air again pushes into my lungs with a whoosh.
“You have a breathing tube in you.” The same woman speaks calmly. She holds down my hands so I won’t claw at the tube. “If you try to tear it out, you’ll hurt yourself. Do you understand me?”
There are tears in my eyes, blurring my vision, but I nod. I can’t talk. I feel as though I am gagging. I want to vomit. Whoosh. And then the sound of a bag deflating. I feel air sucking around my mouth as a nurse prods me with what looks like a dentist’s tool. “We’re suctioning the excess secretions so we can remove the tube,” the doctor explains in her soothing voice. “This will pinch.”
It feels like my lungs and intestines are being yanked out my throat. I want to scream but I can’t. Pain radiates through my entire body, blanking out every thought. I inhale a ragged, shaking breath on my own, and I cough so hard that my entire body shakes. The alarms sound again as the IVs shake in my arms. Someone places an oxygen mask over my mouth. I breathe. My lungs hurt. My ribs hurt. I ache everywhere. But I can breathe. I open and shut my mouth, and then I gesture at the oxygen mask. It’s lifted from my face. I breathe again, and I don’t cough this time. My tongue feels thick and dry and swollen. I swish it around in my mouth. I know I should say thank you—but I don’t.
Beside me, a doctor with bouncy auburn hair and green scrubs pats my hand. “How do you feel?” She’s the one with the soothing accent. She checks the monitors and feels my neck for my pulse.