Endless (2 page)

“Ow.” She touched her temple. “I’m okay, I think. What happened?”

Amber glanced at Tiffany, but no one in the circle would make eye contact with Jenny.

“Come on—what happened?”

“Dude, that was some screwed-up shit!” Gary finally said.

“What are you talking about?” Jenny asked.

“There was a message.” Amber was excited, but Jenny had been right; there was fear there, too. “It answered our questions.”

Jenny nodded slowly. “Right. Like you could even see the board with your eyes closed.”

“Her eyes weren’t closed,” Alvin said. “I mean, they were for a minute, but she opened them when the pointer started to move.”

“When the pointer started to—” Jenny stopped, sighing. “Oh, I get it. You guys are messing with me. Ha, ha. Very funny. You’re hilarious.”

“They’re not.” It was Heather. She was quiet, which made sense since she was Gary’s girlfriend and he never shut up. “The pointer moved. It answered Amber’s questions, but you were … I don’t know.” She shrugged. “Out of it, I guess.”

“I wasn’t out of it,” Jenny protested. “I just closed my eyes like Amber told me to and then I opened them when it was over.”

“Not exactly,” Tiffany said carefully, her eyes shadowed with worry.

“What do you mean?” Jenny asked.

“Your eyes were closed for at least ten minutes. We thought you were doing it on purpose until … well, until this.” Tiffany bent to a piece of paper on the coffee table and slid it toward her.

Jenny shook her head, trying to find the answers in Tiffany’s eyes before she picked up the piece of paper. Writing covered most of one side. Words jumped out at her, words like
coming
and
warden
and even her name
Jennifer
, but she couldn’t pull it together enough to make sense of it all.

She looked around the room. “What is this?”

“I asked if someone was here,” Amber started, “and—”

“I remember that,” Jenny interrupted. “Nothing happened.”

“Nothing happened
at first
,” Amber corrected her. “But after a couple of tries, the pointer started to move. So we kept asking it questions.”

Jenny was still trying to connect what Amber was saying with what had happened to her in the abyss of unconsciousness. But a shiver ran up her spine when she looked at the words scrawled across the piece of paper.

She dropped it back onto the coffee table and stood up, grabbing her bag. “This is such bull. I’m out of here.”

She dug around for her purple crocheted hat, pulling it down over her dirty blond hair before turning to leave.

“Jen, wait!” Tiffany’s voice stopped her.

Jenny turned around. “What?”

“Amber’s telling the truth. She had to ask a couple of times, but something did answer,” Tiffany’s voice was gentle as she held out the piece of paper. “I ... I know it sounds crazy, but I think it was a message for you.”

“Hey,” her dad said, turning off the car. “You sure you’re okay?”

Jenny nodded. “I’m just tired. I want to sleep in my own bed.”

She hadn’t told him what happened. If there was one person who would be more freaked out by the episode at Amber’s than Jenny, it was her dad. Everything in his universe was carefully controlled. Even her. There was no room for unexplainable things, unanswerable questions. It was why he was a good architect. Why he pushed her to use her talent in that field instead of the landscapes and portraits she liked painting best.

Her mother had been a painter and they both knew where that had gotten her.

“Oh, I’m meeting a new client in the morning,” her dad said, leading the way up the perfectly manicured walkway to the porch. “Farmhouse renovation.”

“In Stony Creek?”

“Well, not right in town,” he said. “But, yeah. Near the old mill. Want to come?”

“Is it a big project?” She was stalling. Stalling because she knew it was more than a simple invitation. Saying yes would mean a continuation of their ongoing but unspoken agreement. An agreement that required her to accompany her dad on architectural outings and pretend she wanted to follow in his footsteps instead of careening down the path of angsty artist.

“I don’t know yet.” Her dad opened the door and stepped into the foyer. “I haven’t seen it.”

“What time?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“Okay,” she said. “I have to work, but not until two.”

It would mean less time to touch up her paintings before her shift at the bookstore, but it was probably for the best. It would force her to stop obsessing a little earlier so everything would be dry when they installed her pieces at the show.

“Great. We’ll definitely be done by then.” Her dad smiled, and Jenny had a wave of remorse. He just wanted to spend time with her. Being with him shouldn’t be so hard. He loved her. She knew he did. But he only seemed to understand the mechanics of parenting. Like a dancer who got every move right but conveyed no feeling, he didn’t grasp the nuances. He made sure her homework was done and that she had money for field trips. He even told her he loved her before bed every night. But he didn’t know what to do when things went wrong. When she was sad or worried or anxious. When she became lost inside her own dark places.

When she was too much like her mother.

He didn’t know what to do so he just didn’t ask, and after a while, she stopped telling him. It was too scary to see the uncertainty in his eyes. If he didn’t know what to do, who did?

“Well, good night.” She leaned up on tiptoe to kiss her dad’s cheek before heading up the staircase.

“Good night, honey. I love you.”

She turned to look at him. “Love you, too, Dad.”

He didn’t move as she continued up the stairs. She felt his eyes on her until she reached the second-floor landing.

She continued down the hall until she came to the closed door of her room. It was the only messy one in the house, a refuge against order. She greeted it with a sigh of relief, closing the door behind her.

Crossing to the dresser, she pulled off her hat. Her eyes were drawn to a silver-framed photograph of her mom in college. She was standing with Morgan Frazier, her best friend, on a long stretch of green grass, an old bell tower rising behind them. Jenny’s mother clutched a book while she looked straight into the camera, like she was trying to tell Jenny all of her unspoken secrets.

Morgan had given Jenny the photo. She had searched it for a long time, looking for a sign of what was to come. After a while, she’d give up. The answers she wanted weren’t in a photograph.

Still, Jenny never stopped being grateful that Morgan lived in Stony Creek. Other than Jenny’s dad, Morgan was her only connection to her mother.

Jenny leaned in to examine herself in the mirror. She thought she might look different. Like the experience at Amber’s might have visibly changed her. It hadn’t. She was still the Jenny with hazel eyes and prominent cheekbones under a mane of wavy brown hair. There was nothing remotely interesting about her face. In fact, the only notable thing about her appearance was the small starburst-shaped birthmark on her collarbone. She was always surprised that no one else seemed to notice it when she was so acutely aware of its presence.

Sighing, she turned away from the mirror. She sat on the bed, rummaging in her bag until she found the piece of paper from Amber’s, the words inside visible as scrawled and faded shadows. She wondered who had done the writing while she and Amber had their hands on the pointer.

Assuming, that is, that the story was even true.

And was it? Part of her didn’t want to look, didn’t want to know. But that wasn’t really an option. She had felt something during her brief semi consciousness. The presence, a message conveyed but not quite understood. She needed to know if she’d imagined the connection or if it had been real.

She opened the paper, pulling her legs onto the bed as she read.

The writing was sloppy, almost illegible in places. It was obvious that whoever had done it had been in a hurry. Either that, or their handwriting had never progressed past that of a five-year-old.

She read through it quickly first, skipping the words that were too difficult to make out or didn’t make sense. When she had most of it, she pulled a pen from her bag and went back to the beginning, trying to piece together the words she couldn’t read based on the ones around them, crossing out words and inserting new ones until she thought she had it right.

When she was done, she read again from the beginning.

I am Dolia, warden of time.

I have a message for one among you.

Do not despair. He is coming.

Be prepared and remember.

Open your soul and remember.

Open the door to the past and remember.

He is coming.

She knows to whom we speak.

Jennifer.

Jenny didn’t realize she was shaking until she’d finished reading. The paper rustled and moved in her hands as her body trembled. Her skin was both cold and clammy, the way it was when she’d had the flu the year before and had spent four days in bed, kicking off the covers only to huddle underneath them five minutes later.

He is coming
, the paper said.

And then her name.
Jennifer.

She didn’t know what it meant. Was it somehow connected to what had happened to her when they’d been using the Ouija board? A completion of the message she hadn’t been able to grasp?

She stared at the words, but the answers didn’t come. Growing frustrated, she folded the paper in half and shoved it back into her bag, pushing it away from her like that would make the questions go away, too.

She went to her easel, dropping onto the stool that sat in front of it. This was where she felt most at home. Where she didn’t have to wonder if she was doing or saying the wrong thing or letting someone get too close. Her art was a puzzle she could always solve.

She took a couple of seconds to let go of everything that had happened at Amber’s. It was still there, but she pushed it to the back of her consciousness, putting it in a little box in the attic of her mind. Then she tipped her head, studying her newest painting with critical eyes.

Like most of her work, the scene had come from one of her visions. She knew it would sound crazy if she said it out loud, which was why she never did, but she had been falling into weird dream states for as long as she could remember.

It wasn’t totally random. She had to touch someone, usually with the palm of her hand, for it to happen. When she was younger, she’d stuffed her hands in her pockets or folded her arms across her chest, but when she’d overheard her sixth-grade teacher tell the school social worker that the other students found Jenny “standoffish,” she’d finally gotten wise. Fingerless gloves in every conceivable color had littered her room ever since, and while she was sometimes asked about it by kids at school, her dad, always preferring denial over confrontation, had never confronted her about it. He probably thought it was some kind of fashion statement.

Jenny had been working on the painting in front of her since the day she’d accidentally touched Hunter, Mr. Bradley’s grandson, at the bakery in town. She’d been getting croissants for Sunday morning breakfast while her dad went to the General for coffee. She’d taken off her wet gloves, hoping they would dry out a little while she was inside the store. Hunter, not yet two years old, was toddling around the store, occasionally falling to his padded-diaper butt with a squeal of surprise. Reaching down to catch him as he stumbled had been a reflex. Jenny’s hands had closed around his plump arms just before he hit the floor, and the icy, barren fields had instantly reached out to her from his eyes. Then, she was standing in the snow, feeling the cold seep through her clothes and skin as if she’d been there forever. As if the warmth of the bakery and the town of Stony Creek and little Hunter were a million miles away.

She wasn’t sure why she was there. She never knew why she was transported to strange places, but she always had the vague sensation that there was something she was supposed to do, someone she was supposed to find.

In Hunter’s snow-covered field, she knew that something was lost in the landscape. Lost forever. She felt it like a punch to the chest. An ache that would never go away. She felt it until the scene folded in on itself and she’d found herself back in the bakery, Hunter toddling away like nothing had even happened.

She’d been trying to recreate the scene on canvas ever since, trying to make it right in time for the show. She’d spent more time on it than on any of the paintings that lined the walls of her room, but she still hadn’t been able to figure out the problem. On the surface, it looked like the field in her vision, but something was missing. And she was almost out of time. With only one day until installation, she was pushing the drying time on her oils.