Pyxis: The Discovery (Pyxis Series) (12 page)

“Yeah, I smell it,” he said, looking past me to the meadow. He started guiding me back toward the bonfire. “I think it’s starting to dissipate. But we better get out of here.”

“What is it, Mason? How could that
smell
be here? What’s going on?” I was practically begging him to answer. My heart raced, and I couldn’t seem to catch my breath. Mason moved faster, towing me by the hand until we reached the edge of the tree line. He stopped just outside the circle of light created by the bonfire.

“Corinne, it’s okay,” he said, holding me firmly by the shoulders. I turned to look back toward the meadow, certain I would see a dirty black cloud billowing toward us. He pulled me around to face him again. “There’s nothing coming after us. We’re okay. Just take a couple of deep breaths.”

I nodded and obeyed. “How did you know to come? Did you smell it from the beach?” I asked once I felt a little calmer.

“No. I just got worried when I couldn’t find you after a while,” he said, but his eyes darted to the side, and I suspected there was something he wasn’t telling me.

“What’s happening, Mason?” I whispered.

“I don’t know. But I don’t think we’re in real danger.” I couldn’t help silently tacking
yet
onto the end of his statement.

“Okay, if you say so,” I said, not trying to hide the doubt in my voice. I looked back at the meadow. The cloud of pinpoint lights was brighter than before, but it no longer appeared to be bulging toward me. The air smelled fresh again, and my pulse began to slow. I closed my eyes and pressed my fingertips to my eyelids. “God, I feel like I’m losing it.”

We rejoined the group around the bonfire, and Mason didn’t leave my side the rest of the night.

When Garrett and Jesse dropped us off at my house just before midnight, Mason silently followed me inside and downstairs. We listened to music, flipped through some of the magazines piled under my desk, and talked about everything except what had happened in the meadow. Eventually, exhausted from all the craziness of the day, I stretched out on the bed and let my eyelids slide shut. Mason seemed to be doing the same in the purple chair. I awoke briefly sometime in the night and realized he’d turned off the light and stretched out next to me on the bed.

I somehow knew the nightmares wouldn’t bother me as long as Mason was there.The next morning, Mason went out the basement door before anybody else was up. Not that we really needed to sneak around, but it just seemed easier.

After breakfast, Mom sat in the passenger seat while I drove her Subaru around Tapestry to practice complete stops and parallel parking. We got on the highway that led out of town so I could do some freeway driving. The first part of the highway twisted through the mountains. It was the most dangerous part of the road between Tapestry and Danton, especially in winter. Every year, there was at least one serious accident along that stretch. I wasn’t worried, though, with winter long past.

“Are you ready for the written test?” Mom asked.

To her credit, she wasn’t clutching the armrests in a death grip. Dad freaked out when I was driving because I almost missed a stop sign once. Like anything would have happened. The speed limit around Tapestry was twenty-five miles per hour, and there hadn’t been any cars within half a mile of us anyway. Ever since then, he’d just sit there and cringe whenever I was behind the wheel.

“Yeah, I think I’ll pass,” I said. “I’m going to study the book a little more tonight.”

“Driving is a really big responsibility, Corinne.” Uh oh, here came the lecture. “It’s not just about your safety. It’s also about all the other people on the road you could hurt if you’re not paying attention.”

It was annoying, but I knew she had to say these things. It was like her duty as the mother of a teenager.

“I know, Mom,” I said. “I promise I’ll never text or play music too loud or anything while I’m driving. I’ll be careful.”

I was surprised that she left it at that.

“Do you know Harriet Jensen?” I asked suddenly. I watched my mom’s reaction out of the corner of my eyes.

“I know who she is. She has some kind of natural medicine store, I think.”

“Do you know if she knew Grandma? Or Aunt Dorothy?”

“I don’t know how well they were acquainted, but Harriet is a distant relative of theirs. And ours, too, obviously.”

It was all I could do to keep the car between the lines. I curled my hands tightly around the steering wheel and tried to ignore the sickening lurch in my gut.

“Oh, really?” I managed.

“Her last name’s Jensen. Same as your great-grandmother. I think she’s Ruth’s cousin’s granddaughter. Or something like that. Why the sudden interest in Harriet?”

How did I not notice the same last names? My mind raced. “I, uh, just heard her name and thought she sounded like an interesting character. You know, because of the natural medicine thing and all.”

As soon as we got home, I texted the news to Mason and Angeline. None of us knew what it meant, but enough had happened over the past few weeks that I knew I couldn’t pretend it meant nothing.

I passed the afternoon checking assignments off my homework list, proud that I could set aside all the mysteries swirling through my brain for a few hours.

When Mom, Dad, and I sat down to our Sunday family dinner later that evening—lasagna again, yum—Bradley still hadn’t shown. I passed the basket of garlic toast to my dad, and the front door slammed. Slightly out of breath, Bradley slid into his chair.

“Sorry about that,” he said, and flashed his ever-so-charming smile.

My brother and I looked a lot alike—very dark brown hair, light olive skin, blue eyes, slim frame—but he took more after my dad, personality-wise. My dad was a people person, and his charisma had as much to do with the café’s success as his food. Our kitchen skills seemed to be one of the only things my dad and I had in common. In other ways, I took more after my mom, who was a lot more reserved. My mom didn’t have too many friends. But then, she worked really long hours and had that awful commute between Tapestry and Danton, so it probably wasn’t entirely her fault she didn’t have more of a social life.

“How’d Grandma’s house look?” Dad asked me.

“Everything seemed okay to me,” I answered. “Hey, do you happen to know Harold Sykes, an old guy who lives around there?”

My dad looked toward the ceiling, chewing and thinking. “I do. I haven’t really talked to him in years. I know he didn’t make it to the funeral because he was in Danton for some health issue. He and your grandma knew each other from way back when they were young.”

“How’d they know each other?” I asked, hoping for some useful information.

“Back in those days, Tapestry was so small that everybody knew each other pretty well,” he said. Well, that didn’t help.

After dinner, I read through the driver’s manual one more time and took a practice test on the DMV website. I was confident, but I didn’t want to take any chances. If I didn’t pass the test, I’d have to make another appointment and get Bradley to take me to Danton again.

I only missed two on the practice test, so I figured I was prepared. Poor Ang had to do the driving part twice last fall. She’d been so nervous the first time that she forgot to use her turn signal, and then later, she scraped a curb in a parking lot.

Right before I went to bed, Mason texted me:

Sykes wasn’t home when I went by. Think I should stay home tonight. Will u be ok?

I wrote back:

Asked my dad about Sykes, but he didn’t seem to know anything. I think I’ll be ok. talk 2 u tomorrow?

His reply a few seconds later:

I’ll come to the basement tomorrow nite. C u then. Sweet dreams.

Ugh, sweet dreams? Was he trying to be funny?

I woke up once in the night when I thought I heard something outside my bedroom window, but if I had any dreams, I didn’t remember them.

* * *

Mason knocked on the basement door the next night just as I finished mixing a batch of cookie dough. I let him in and he followed me over to the basement kitchen.

“Hey, I’m making cookies for Aunt Dorothy. You know, with the
stuff
in them,” I said, even though there was no one else around to hear.

He sank onto the sofa. “I really hope it works.” He stared at a spot on the floor.

I understood his grave mood. If Dorothy couldn’t help us, what would we do?

“What do you think would happen if I ate one of them?” he asked as I slid the cookie sheet in the oven.

“Your guess is as good as mine. You want to try it?” I was going to feed them to my elderly great-aunt, so I didn’t think they were poisonous or anything.

“I’m curious, but I probably shouldn’t,” he said. “We don’t know enough about what could happen. In your dreams, your grandmother never told you to give
me
any of those, did she?” He gestured toward the
pyxis
.

I shook my head. “Not that I remember.”

We flipped through channels while the cookies baked. I had a nervous urge to talk about my grandmother’s letter some more. Try to formulate plans or something. But there really wasn’t anything more we could do.

Mason stayed until the cookies were done. It was unspoken between us, but we both knew he was hanging out with me partly to provide some sort of … reassurance, maybe? It was odd, but I could tell he felt a need to see me, hang out, just be there. I wanted him there, too, and it had nothing to do with what happened at Solstice Fest before he left. It probably was more a sense of being linked together in something scary that we didn’t understand. I realized I didn’t feel the same way about Angeline, even though she was linked to all of this, too. Yet another thing I couldn’t begin to explain.

I carefully folded half a dozen cookies into a piece of waxed paper, wrapped the package in foil, and set it on top of my homework in my bag, where it wouldn’t get crushed.

All our hopes rested on Aunt Dorothy.

|| 19 ||

I FOUND BRADLEY IN the student parking lot after school the next day, and we headed to Danton. My appointment was at three forty-five, so we’d have to book it to get there on time. But the weather was fair, and there wouldn’t be any real traffic on the highway this time of day.

He cranked some college band I didn’t recognize, and I thought about how to bring up the topic of visiting Aunt Dorothy. The cookies were tucked into a side pocket of my bag. I’d checked about twenty times during the day to make sure they were still there.

After a couple of miles, I hollered over the music asking Brad if I could turn it down for a minute.

“What’s up?” he said, keeping his eyes on the road.

“I was really hoping that after the test, we could stop by and see Aunt Dorothy,” I said. “I just feel
so
guilty that I haven’t seen her in, like, forever. I mean, even if she’s not all there, it’s still sad that nobody visits her, don’t you think? I don’t want to stay long, just a few minutes.”

I knew I was laying it on a little thick. Bradley glanced at me with his eyes narrowed. I must have looked sincere enough, though, because he answered, “Okay, as long as we’re in Danton, I guess we could stop by. I mean, I love Aunt Dot and everything, but last time, she didn’t even know who we were. It’s not that I don’t want to see her, but it’s like it’s not even
her
. Plus, being in there with all those senile old people is depressing, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” I agreed. “But it seems like the right thing to do. We can make it quick.”

When we arrived at the outskirts of Danton, I was reminded that living in Tapestry really wasn’t so bad. Danton had all those ugly strip malls and gas stations. With the sheer number of Starbucks in the city, not to mention all the other coffee shop chains, I wondered if my dad’s little café could survive there. And nature basically disappeared in a sea of pavement. I couldn’t imagine living in the middle of that. It smelled funny, too, like a mild mix of car exhaust and trash. In Tapestry, I was spoiled by the clean mountain air.

My phone buzzed, and I pulled it out of my bag. Ang.

Good luck on the test! I know you’ll pass! Call me l8r & tell me how it went.

I made it to my appointment on time and flew through the written exam in about fifteen minutes. I only missed one question. Then it was on to the driving test. My tester was a mellow guy a little younger than my parents. I did all the maneuvers, and since he didn’t ask me to repeat anything, I knew I’d passed.

I combed my fingers through my hair, put on some lip gloss, and smiled for my mug shot. We were out of there five minutes later, my new license safe in my bag. It was kind of crazy, but I was looking forward to the visit to the retirement home more than I’d been anticipating getting my driver’s license.

We parked in one of the visitor spaces and found the reception desk. The place smelled like a mix of bleach, old-people ointment, and pee. I felt a sharp pang of sadness for Aunt Dorothy. Even if she didn’t know who or where she was, this was an awful way to live out her last days. As much as I missed Grandma Doris, I was glad she hadn’t ended up here.

The facility smelled icky, but it was clean enough. They had tried to spruce the place up with artwork and plants, but even that was sort of depressing. An orderly led us to the Rec Room, although I really couldn’t see any recreation going on in it. Most of the residents sat in wheelchairs, the majority of them just staring off into space. A few were circled around the TV, and one woman sat by the window working on some needlepoint.

I spotted Aunt Dorothy sitting in a wheelchair parked at one of the round tables. Her back curved over in a hunch and her face and arms looked much thinner than I remembered. Her hair was pulled back into a disheveled bun at the base of her neck. There was a puzzle in front of her, but she stared vacantly at the wall.

She reminded me so much of Grandma Doris, and it hit me: the day my grandmother had died, I’d really lost both of them. I gulped back the lump growing in my throat, squared my shoulders, and tried to smile. Bradley and I sat in two of the chairs arranged around her table.