The Space Between (22 page)

I kneel by the bed so I can look directly into her face. “Do you know what you were hiding from, or if it was bad?”

Raymie scowls, shaking her head. “I don’t know what it was.”

Truman gives me a sharp look, still holding the package of socks. “She just spent at least four weeks in a storage shed, in sub-zero weather,” he says in a low voice. “She didn’t
eat
for a month. If her mom thought the best solution was to put her in a cardboard box and leave her there, then yeah, it was bad.” He drops the socks on the bed, watching me carefully. “Maybe even the same thing that killed Deirdre.”

His expression is challenging, like he’s waiting for me to tell him all the secrets of Dark Dreadful. But I find myself reluctant to describe her. It suddenly seems reckless even to speak her name.

“Deirdre was the victim of a terrible attack,” I say, keeping my voice flat and matter-of-fact. “We don’t know who or what killed her.”

“What about that rosary? Myra said they found it on the—” His voice falters then and he looks past me, toward the window. “She said it was with your sister.”

I remember Myra’s nervous behavior at the Prophet Club, fidgeting with the token Moloch had given her. “You mean the string of beads?”

“Yeah, only it wasn’t beads. I mean, they were
beads
, but it was a rosary.”

The word is Latinate and only marginally familiar. I know the meaning, but not the significance. “Are you saying the thing that killed Deirdre adorned her body with a holy artifact?”

Truman shrugs, looking apologetic. “Not exactly an artifact, more like an accessory. I mean, they’re pretty common. People—Catholics—use them for church all the time.”

As soon as he says it, my skin goes cold and I’m transported back to the dream of my brother, bound to the table. Church. The rosary—whatever it signifies, whoever left it—came from a church. For a moment, I only stare up at him. My eyes feel wide and dry and electric.

“Hey,” he says catching me by the arm. “Why are you looking like that? What’s wrong?”

“We need to go to Las Vegas,” I say, forcing myself to stand still when what I want is to wrench away from him and start packing. “Myra’s there. She has the rosary and maybe she can tell us what it means. It must be some kind of a clue to finding Obie.”

“Wait, what? How are we going to Vegas?”

“I’ll draw a jump-door. We just need an east-facing wall.”

“Daphne, do you realize that you are totally not oriented in reality?”

I grab the book bag off the bed and shove it at him. “Just pack, please. We have to go.”

He puts the socks in the bag without conviction. Behind him, Raymie just sits placidly on the bed, watching us. He reaches for the package of undershirts next, then stops.

“We. I’m assuming
we
means you, me, and her. Christ, I can see so many problems with this. I can’t go.”

“Why not?”

“I just—it’s too weird and school’s starting back up and I live here and I barely know you.”

I want to tell him that I’m worried about him. That he’s come too close to dying too many times and that if I leave him behind, he’s going to manage it eventually. But that’s not the only reason I need to bring him with me. His dreams are crucial, the only link to my brother, and no one in my family has the slightest knowledge of holy articles or churches. None of us are equipped to handle this.

I suspect I need him almost as much as he needs me.

“Please come with me,” I say, and my voice sounds very small. “I need your help.”

He takes a deep breath and glances from me to Raymie and back again. “Can I think about it?”

“That depends. How long will that take?”

He touches his mouth, looking someplace else. “Daphne, this is a big deal. I can’t just walk away from my life.” He says it like he’s trying to convince me, but when he looks back at me, his face is stoic and resigned. We both know that he can.

1 DAY 10 HOURS 10 MINUTES

D
aphne was pacing around the room, gathering up the things on the bed and tossing them into her bag.

Truman watched her open a package of plastic barrettes, drop them, pick most of them up off the floor, and shove them into her coat pockets. He felt a surge of sympathy for this new version of Daphne, a twitchy and agitated version. Her eyes were wide and unfocused. It was a stare he recognized—that glassy, panicked look, like the room was shrinking.

“Daphne,” he said, keeping his voice low and calm. “Daphne, stand still. It’s going to be fine.”

She stopped pacing and looked at him. Her eyes were wide and she was breathing fast and shallow. She glanced away and whispered, “Things aren’t fine.”

“Okay, that’s okay. But just for a little, let’s pretend they are anyway. Do you know how to do that?”

She shook her head, still giving him that wild, uncomprehending stare.

“Okay, you start like this. Whatever is freaking you out, stop thinking about it.”

She gripped the bag with both hands. “What do I think about instead?”

“You think about whatever comes next. Think about what you have to do to keep going.”

“Is it really that easy?”

“Yes,” he said. But it wasn’t.

He’d spent all afternoon while Daphne was out trying not to think about her and mostly failing. It was impossible not to think about her, and thinking about her led to other things. Thinking about her meant thinking about home and Charlie and Dio’s bathroom floor and before that, the bathtub and the hospital and her brother.

Finally, he’d bitten the inside of his cheek, and that helped a little. Then he sat down on the floor across from the baby, who was still wet-haired and dripping, wrapped in a ratty bath towel. Truman propped his elbows on his knees and they sat looking at each other.

She was nothing like the babies whose mothers lived in the Avalon. Those ones were sticky and neglected-looking. They screeched or cried and their noses were always red and dripping. Raymie was grave. That was the only word for it—grave, and a little severe, and now, without the layer of dirt from the storage, very clean.

They sat across from each other on the dusty carpet like they were waiting for something. Truman desperately wanted a cigarette, but if one thing had been drilled into him, it was that you were never supposed to smoke around babies. Probably even crazy-looking nightmare babies with metal teeth.

“So,” he said, after a long pause. “Obie was your dad, huh?”

Raymie nodded solemnly. “Did you know him?”

“Yeah, I knew him.”

“Were you one of the wounded?”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Wounded. Hurt, injured. A process in which the skin is cut or broken.”

“No, I know what it
means
, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Raymie stared up, blinking at him. “He helped people sometimes, in the hospital. They were wounded. Did he help you?”

Truman looked back at her. “Yes,” he said.

At the hospital, they’d sewn Truman back up, pumped him full of someone else’s blood. They gave him pain medication that made his wrists numb and his dreams terrible. Surgery had saved him, but before the operating room, there’d been Charlie, dragging him out of the water, slowing the blood. Alexa, with the phone to her ear, speaking rapidly. Truman himself only had vague recollections of hands, voices, sirens, an oxygen mask. Nothing.

He’d been afraid of a lot of things—afraid that he would go to Hell and that he would ruin Charlie’s life. He’d been afraid that his mother, watching from some undetermined location, would be disappointed and ashamed of him. He’d been afraid it would be messy and disgusting and weak and cowardly, but never at any point had he been afraid that he would survive. That first night, he lay in the adjustable hospital bed and watched the beat of his heart blip up and down across a black screen.

Obie had come into the room very late, in his chalk-green scrubs, bringing water in a plastic cup. It was Obie who made the whole thing seem much more real than Truman’s stitches or his blood in the tub or the sick way the room seemed to spin around him.

“So,” he said that first night, when Truman was still dizzy from blood loss and painkillers. “Worst day of your life, huh?”

And Truman had laughed at that, because something was building in his chest and laughing was, of course, easier than crying. Then he began to cough.

Obie offered him the water, shaking his head when Truman tried to raise a hand to take the cup himself. “Don’t,” he said. “You’ll disturb your sutures.”

He held the cup while Truman drank from a straw with an accordion joint. He rested his hand on Truman’s shoulder and the weight of it felt warm through the fabric of the hospital gown. That was the part he remembered best. How, when Obie touched him, it hadn’t hurt.

“I see you went for the bleed-out.” The look on his face had been knowing and wise and very sad. He’d smiled and then turned away, busy with the monitors and the IV drip.

Hearing
bleed-out
said aloud felt like being hit hard in the stomach. Truman had begun to cough again and Obie came across to him and pushed the button that raised the bed.

Truman closed his eyes and when he opened them again, Obie was still there, standing over the bed, looking down at him. Obie’s hair was shaggy, longer than the way most of the other men on staff wore theirs. He clasped his hands behind his back as though he were waiting for something.

Truman winced. “How are my arms?”

“You’ve got a bunch of superficials and a couple not-screwing-arounds. You would have died if your stepdad had stopped to pick up a newspaper or something.”

Truman cut his eyes away, taking in the linoleum floor, the pastel garden wallpaper. “Where’s Charlie?”

“I don’t know. Home, maybe.” Obie was still looking down at him—intense gray gaze and sad, indeterminate mouth. “What do you remember?”

Truman stared up groggily and shook his head. “Like . . . before the tub? I remember waking up. There was ice on the windows because the furnace is broken. Charlie was still at work. I didn’t go to school.” Other memories surfaced slowly, and he winced. “I remember getting drunk—really drunk.”

He looked away, waiting for Obie to point out that drinking before five was bad news and drinking before noon was just sad but drinking before eight in the morning was completely unstable.

Obie didn’t mention it though. He only sat down on the foot of the bed, looking expectant. “But that’s all? Nothing unusual or strange? What about after?”

Truman glanced away. He didn’t point out that pretty much everything about the day you decided to kill yourself could be considered unusual. “Nothing. I don’t know.”

That wasn’t quite true. He remembered the flooded bathroom and the oxygen mask. He remembered a dream of a girl. She had wide, dark eyes and black hair. He imagined reaching for her hand, grasping it in his, and smiled dazedly at the ceiling.

Obie leaned close, snapping his fingers in Truman’s face. “No, no, no, you’re getting dopy. Focus. I know it’s hard, but stay with me. I need you tell me what you remember.”

“
Nothing
. Please, I can’t think. I need to sleep.”

Obie raised his eyebrows. “You really don’t remember anything—anything at all?”

Truman shook his head, trying to forget the chaotic dreams of blood loss. The girl was still there, pale and perfect, surrounded by a huge smear of metallic gray. “Nothing.”

“Okay, that’s all I needed to know. You did good. You can go to sleep now.”

And with a kind of miserable relief, Truman did
.

Later on was when the night got bad. The shadow of the dresser seemed to stretch out, oozing over the floor, filling up the room, and then he heard a voice. A real one, and not the kind that echoed up out of drug states or dreams.

And as drugged-up and exhausted and afraid as he was, he’d gone. Despite the monitor wires and the IV, he felt himself stand up and cross to the corner of the room, only mildly surprised that when he looked back, he was still lying in the hospital bed. Then he’d stepped through the black door and into a derelict church, where the shadow man and his own smiling cadaver were waiting for him.

In the days that followed, his room was full of nurses and orderlies. They wandered in and out constantly, but Obie was the only one who looked at Truman like he was actually seeing him—all of him—and not just what he’d done. Obie told jokes and stories and laughed easily, smiling his wide, rueful smile. Holding Truman’s hands still while he shook, careful not to tear the sutures. Truman slumped sideways over the bedrail with his head resting against Obie’s shoulder. It had been more than a year since he’d let anyone touch him like that, not like a stranger, but like family.