I look down at the counter where I’m resting my elbows. It’s actually a wooden railing salvaged from a shipwreck. There are hundreds of initials carved into the old wood, some enclosed in hearts, with equations like J.C. + B.R. = 4 EVER. Lexi calls it the love log.
“After your near-death experience, having coffin dreams is pretty understandable. Bringing a date along for the ride is an interesting twist.”
We sip our coffee and watch the rain.
I always tell Lexi my dreams, nightmares and other delusions. She’s great at analyzing them.
She was the one who found the pattern behind my shadow attacks. I’d always thought they just came out of nowhere, for no reason. But Lexi had the idea that there might be something bringing them on. Why did they happen when they did? Why so much time in between? What provoked them?
“Were you sick those times?” she asked me. “Upset about something? Depressed? Fighting with your parents? Think back. What else was going on? What led up to when your shadow turned against you?”
Those memories were still hyperreal, like if I shut my eyes I’d be right there again. Made me feel panicky revisiting them, until I forced myself to shift the focus to what had happened just before.
I went over the hours and days leading up to the attacks. Different places, different seasons, different moods. Nothing in common that I could see.
I missed the link. But Lexi didn’t.
It was right there in front of me. Just like the log I’m leaning on now, with all these equations adding one person to another. So many hearts and initials carved here.
But never mine. No love math for me. Because that was the link. The hidden pattern.
See, it all started with a valentine. My first crush, in second grade, was Scotty McNab. He sat behind me in class and was always getting me in trouble by making me laugh at the dumb jokes he whispered in my ear. He was a huge Hulk fan—every Halloween he went green—so the day before Valentine’s I decided to make him a card. It was going to have a cutout of a roaring Hulk with a word bubble saying “Be Jane’s valentine or I’ll beat the crap out of you!” I was working on it at the kitchen table when I went looking in the cupboards for some glue.
But I found the drain cleaner instead, and my shadow forced me to drink it. I never sent that card. I turned scared and silent after that, forgot how to laugh at dumb jokes. And my crush got crushed.
My first date was a movie. Pretty tame, since we were only eleven, and there was a group of us. But me and Charlie Watts sat together and shared popcorn. Held hands in the dark where nobody could see. He made my heart flop around like a fish caught in my chest. I couldn’t stop thinking about him after, and I was going to ask him over to play video games.
But the next day I found that fallen power line, and my shadow forced me to touch it.
Skip ahead to me at thirteen. Getting all hot and heavy with Jake Turner under the bleachers at the start of summer vacation. It was strictly over-the-clothes frisking and fumbling, but enough to get me in a fever.
Later that afternoon, while I was still flushed from Jake’s hands, my shadow froze me up on the train tracks.
Lexi connected all these dots for me, linking my few romantic highlights with the attacks afterward.
“So what are you saying?” I asked. “Every time I really like a guy my shadow sabotages it and tries to kill me?”
“I’m just going by the evidence.”
“But that’s …”
“Nuts?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“So tell me then—have you ever gone on a date, held hands, got felt up or whatever and your shadow didn’t attack you?”
I tried to think, wanting to prove her wrong. Searching for any kind of romantic moment that hadn’t ended badly for me. I came up blank.
“But what does it mean?” I finally asked.
“Maybe you’ve got a jealous shadow. It doesn’t want to share you with anybody. Wants to keep you for itself. And if you cheat on it—watch out. Sounds crazy, but it explains a lot.”
Even after she pointed out the link, I wasn’t convinced. The idea of me having a possessive shadow was plain insane.
The evidence was there, but was it really a pattern, or just paranoia? Or even coincidence?
I was never sure. Not until this last time, when my heart stopped and I flatlined.
Dying made a believer out of me.
The day I died the sun was shining and the sky was blue as a dream. After a week of wild storms that threatened to drown the town, with winds stripping the shingles off our roof, there wasn’t a cloud to be seen all the way to the horizon.
It was a lazy Sunday October afternoon, and I dragged a lawn chair out so I could catch some of those rare autumn rays in the backyard. It was just warm enough for me to get away with wearing my bikini.
Dad was up on the roof trying to repair the damage before the next storm blew in. The quiet was broken by the bang bang bang of him nailing in new shingles.
I was deep into reading a thick and juicy romance novel of tropical lust shipwrecked on a deserted island. But my mind kept drifting away.
So I just lay there with my eyes closed, soaking up the sun, reliving a little forbidden thrill I’d had the day before, when I was over at the Blushing Rose.
* * *
I was watching the shop by myself while Mom dropped off some funeral wreaths.
The sound system was driving me nuts. Mom always plays this soft classical crap. She says it makes a soothing and nurturing atmosphere for the plants. It was soothing me into a coma. So I switched to the radio and found the throbbing beat of dance-club music.
With that cranked up loud, I got to work spritzing the plants around the shop. The air shuddered with the deep bass, vibrating my eardrums and the thousands of leaves, fronds and flowers around me. Felt like being inside some giant green beating heart.
Dancing and misting my way down the aisles, I was spraying the ferns when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. I wasn’t alone.
I froze midspritz.
There he stood. Ryan. My secret sex god. Smiling at me.
Deafened by the music, I gave him a little wave. He waved back. Then I ran behind the counter and cut the noise.
“Sorry,” I said into the sudden quiet. “Been kind of a slow day.”
“Don’t stop the party for me.”
I could feel a blush heating my cheeks. “I’ve probably traumatized the tulips now. Shocked the lilies.”
“Plants like a little rhythm. Gets the sap pumping.”
I had to break away from his blue-green eyes. So I focused on the computer like I was checking something.
“So what can I do for you?”
Or do to you? Or can I just do you?
“Delivery,” he said. “The truck’s out back. I was beating on the door, but you had your own beat going on in here.”
“Right, delivery. Come on in back. I’ll open up for you.”
I’ll open up for you? I turned away quickly so he couldn’t see my new blush.
He got busy unloading the shipment and I distracted myself making room in the cooler for the new order. Ryan had me sign off on the invoice.
“How did you get that?” he asked, pointing at the scratch across the back of my hand.
“Got in a fight with a cactus today.”
“Hold on. I’ll be right back.”
I watched from the door as he disappeared into the back of the truck. When he jumped down, he was holding a potted plant with long, thick pointy leaves. “For you. Aloe vera.”
“Why?”
Setting the pot down on a table, Ryan broke off one of the leaves where it was thickest. “Let’s try this. Give me your hand.” When I gave him a doubtful glance instead, he smiled. “Trust me.”
I held out my wounded hand, and he took it. He squeezed the leaf with his free hand till it bled a few drops of clear liquid that dripped slow as honey onto my cut. Then he dropped the leaf and used his thumb
to gently smooth the gel into my scratch.
“Old-school healing,” Ryan told me. “Thousands of years old.”
“You a witch doctor now?” I teased, trying to cover my full-body blush and racing heart.
Up close I could smell the green on him, a dizzying mix of all the plants, herbs and flowers he handled.
“In some parts of Asia they call aloe the crocodile’s tongue, for the shape of its leaves.”
“Really?” Could he feel my speeding pulse with his palm against mine?
“You wouldn’t want a crocodile licking you, though. Their mouths are infested with parasites and bacteria. And their saliva …” He trailed off. “I’m kind of killing the mood, aren’t I?”
We shared a nervous laugh. I could’ve listened to him talk about reptile spit all day.
“Keep going,” I said, meaning the aloe rubdown. Meaning whatever.
“Well, if their bite doesn’t kill you, all those nasty critters in their saliva will. It’s because of the croc’s bad dental hygiene, which makes their mouths breeding grounds for all kinds of germs and diseases—” He broke off and let me have my hand back. “I’m going to shut up before I make you nauseous. Anyway, I gotta go. More deliveries down the coast.”
I followed him to the back door. “Am I healed?”
“Your witch doctor prescribes a few drops twice a day.”
As he was getting in the truck I called, “Thanks for the tongue.”
He gave me a wave. “Any time.”
* * *
“He said that? Any time?” Lexi asked, when I replayed the whole thing to her over the phone that night.
“Yeah. What do you think he meant?”
“He meant any time, anywhere, anything.”
That was what I was hoping, what I was scared of.
“I wish, but I can’t. You know what’ll happen to me if I get hot and heavy with him.”
“Yeah, I know. You’re scared it might set off your psycho shadow. But look, you flirted, you touched, he gave you a rubdown—and nothing bad happened, right?”
“But if I try anything, what if it brings on another attack? You were there last time, with the train. You saw.”
“That was like four years ago. And I really don’t know what I saw. Maybe it was some weird hallucination we shared. Who knows? But it’s been a long time, and that thing never came back. Whatever it was. The whole jealous-shadow theory was my stupid idea.”
“Maybe.”
“You’ve been a total nun. You can’t live in fear forever. Go for it.”
Lexi’s advice, Ryan’s touch and my own feelings came together as I was lying in the sun in the backyard that October day. I knew what I had to do.
The afternoon had gone quiet. Dad was taking a break from nailing shingles up on the roof and had gone inside for lunch. It was just me, the sun and the clear blue sky.
Should I call or text Ryan? I had his number and contact info from the shop. Texting seemed safer. If I called him I might say something dumb I couldn’t take back. Say too much, or say it wrong.
The night before, Lexi had told me I should just show up at the greenhouse. It would be like our Garden of Eden. I would play Eve to his Adam. She’d said to just grab Ryan, throw him down in the flowers and feed him one of those hothouse apples. Or in my case—Lexi said, playing the snake—give him my cherry.
Sending him a text was less risky, and less raunchy.
So I got up and headed inside for my phone. I felt kind of dizzy, maybe from too much sun or just from standing up too fast. But by the time I reached the steps to the back porch, I had to stop and steady myself. Waiting a moment for the feeling to fade only made it worse.
Then my legs started to shake.
Trying to focus, I noticed the tools Dad had left out on the porch. There was the nail gun he was using for the shingles, loaded with one-inch nails. It looked big and bulky, like some kind of alien weapon.
Everything was going fuzzy around the edges, my mind hazing over, but I couldn’t stop staring at it.
I wasn’t going to touch the gun. But my shadow had other ideas. With the sun at my back it was sprawled across the steps.
As the shadow of my arm stretched out, it pulled my left hand along with it, that darkness reaching to wrap around the handle. I fought against it.
My hand shook in the air above the gun, and I almost thought I could beat the thing. It was a tug-of-war. But an electric whine filled the air, tunneling through my ears into my head till I couldn’t struggle anymore, and I could only watch as my left hand joined its shadow on the handle, lifting the gun to my head.
The cool muzzle pressed against my skull, just behind my ear. My finger found the trigger. There was a loud pop when it fired. Then a sharp sting.
I dropped the gun. It banged off the stairs and landed on the ground at my feet.
The numbing fog that held me made everything seem very far away. Even the pain was just a mosquito bite. Staring down at the gun, I saw something dripping on it.
Red paint? I thought in a daze. Where’s that coming from?
I noticed more paint running down my left arm and side, felt its warm wetness. I started to look up, like it might be raining red from the sky. As I stretched my head back, the mosquito bite flared into a white-hot needle in my skull.
Falling to my knees, I stared at the ground, the dirt soaking up the blood spurting from me. I knew if I looked over it would be there. My shadow. Standing near me. Waiting.
Then I felt myself being lifted up. My shadow was taking me away now. I was done. My eyes were closing forever.
But before they shut I saw a face above me. Mom. I was in her arms.
“Stay with me!” she was shouting. “Hold on!”
“Tell me everything,” Lexi said, when I came back from the dead. “What did you see? The light? Spirits? Dead relatives? Dead pets?”
I told her what I’d seen. But only her. Mom and Dad were worried about me enough already without more evidence that their daughter was deeply disturbed.
Good thing my shadow’s aim was bad. The nail just missed an artery or I would have bled out before I got to the hospital. Even then it was almost too late to save me. My heart stopped after it ran out of blood to pump.
I blacked out before Mom got me into the car. After that I remember nothing until suddenly, like coming wide awake from a dreamless sleep, I found myself floating above a bed in the emergency room. Below, the doctors were working frantically on me.
But I had a ghost’s body now. Lighter than air, with hands I could see through.
Mom was close by, leaning on Dad like he was the only thing keeping her from collapsing. Her shirt was soaked with my blood. Dad’s mouth hung open as if he was fighting for each breath, trying to breathe for me.
I wanted to tell them sorry. And say goodbye. I had no voice, but I was still trying to speak, when—
There was an explosion of light above me. I looked up and found a blazing brightness.
It shined through me—like it was taking an X-ray of my soul. Burning away all my panic and pain.
So beautiful and intense, it made me feel like I’d been blind since birth and was seeing for the first time.
I felt its pull and started drifting upward. This was it. I was going away, forever.
Taking one last glance at that empty body, I looked at the doctors and nurses struggling to bring me back. At Dad, so shocked and pale he seemed like a ghost himself.
And that was when I saw it! Standing next to him was my shadow.
I recognized it. The thing that had haunted me since I was little. My childhood assassin. Here to watch me die, with hungry, wet black eyes. It was three-dimensional now, dark and shiny, like a body dipped in paint.
Its stare was locked on me. Not me in the bed, but up where I was now, rising toward the light.
I looked away from it and gazed up into the whiteness. I was leaving my shadow behind with everything else. There was no darkness where I was going.
>
Reaching up, my phantom arm passed deep into the glow, melting into it. Sending a thrill of warmth down through me, soothing away my sadness. I lifted my face to taste that perfect sunshine. So close.
But then everything went wrong.
I was grabbed from below. Even in this body made of nothing but air, I felt something pulling me back.
I looked down into the dark eyes of my shadow. It had one arm raised to catch me. I kicked out to free myself as it held tight, dragging me away from the light.
A shock of cold ran up my leg.
This thing ate the light. It was sucking me in too. I couldn’t break away. It was like a hole cut out of the air, a mouth of darkness.
And it swallowed me up.
I found myself surrounded by blackest night, cold nothingness. I’ve never felt so hopeless and despairing.
But I wasn’t alone. I could sense something near me, hidden in the dark.
When I was little I once asked Mom if my shadow had a life of its own. Now I knew it did.
Later I told Lexi it was like that thing they do on Star Trek—a mind meld. Where you share someone else’s thoughts.
Because just when I thought this night might last forever, something reached out and grabbed hold of me. That cold touch ignited a flash of light.
And then it was like having a slide show projected inside my mind. I saw a series of pictures go by.
But somehow I knew they were more than just pictures.
Memories. Of faces I’d never seen, places I’d never been. Pieces of a stranger’s life melding into me.
First, there was a view of a rocky coastline not so different from Edgewood’s, a harbor with a small blink-and-you’ll-miss-it town. I spotted a little blue house. There was a woman standing in the front yard, looking off down the road as if waiting for someone to come home.
Who was she? Sadness flooded through me. The ache of loss and loneliness. Somehow I knew what her laugh would sound like, and her voice too.
It was surreal, feeling all this for someone I’d never met.
Then, I saw inside the blue house. And upstairs, a room that wasn’t mine, but where everything was so familiar. Everything from the star map on the ceiling that would glow when the light was turned off to the terrarium with a little frog sitting in a pool of water. From the poster on the wall of a model in a bikini lying on some tropical beach to the small basketball hoop hung on the closet door to the view out the window of the woods behind the house.