Tighter (Page 45)

Got out and staggered uphill by foot the rest of the way.

The house loomed. I’d never hated it as much as tonight, and I ached with homesickness. I saw myself with the twins, shining flashlights from our backyard tent. There was Mom clapping her hands when I finally braved the slide at the playground. And Dad inventing the lyrics to a holiday carol as we added gumdrops to a kitchen-table gingerbread house.

Those days seemed very far away, and not entirely mine.

Isa was sleeping. Probably Connie, too. Milo was nowhere. I opened the door to his room. The same unused bedroom I’d discovered that first day.

The yellow room, Isa had called it. A nondescript guest room, neat as a pin and minus a guest, and yet Milo did live here, in his own way. He’d been real enough, a terrifyingly intimidating boy who spoke to all my own fears of what those Little Blyers were “really” like. Milo had made perfect sense to me. He’d been easy to control.

Until he had stopped being Milo.

I continued down the hall to my room, where I fell sideways across my bed. Shaking off my shoes, listening to them drop plop, plop.

How long did I sleep? An hour? I swallowed the last of my own pills and then tiptoed downstairs to Connie’s bathroom. I could hear her coughing through the wall. I scooped handfuls of her drugstore meds and swallowed them dry.

In the study, I closed the door. In another version of tomorrow, there would be a scene. It was unavoidable. The phone call from Miles McRae. Followed by one from Mom and Dad. The indignant thpeeth from Connie. A quick decision, an online ticket, a silent drive to the ferry. I didn’t care. I was so past caring and I didn’t want tomorrow.

So I’d forged another tomorrow. And now I stretched out on the couch, dozing easily, and when I woke up, Peter was waiting for me in a haze and ripple of burning gasoline. I could feel the oil slick on his skin and soaking his clothes. I breathed myself inside his moment, when he’d crashed from one world into another.

Up close, Peter’s pale eyes weren’t particularly kind. But he hadn’t been a particularly kind person. Nor frail and combustive like Hank, nor too frightened of this world, like Uncle Jim. Who were also here, in a sense, though it was only Peter’s presence that counted tonight, as real and true as the moment he’d shifted into the negative, imagined space that had contained Milo.

But Milo had been a story and a secret. A fight in the mirror, a tussle with my insecurities, a scapegoat when I burned the pages of my journal, a reproving smack across my own cheek when my emotions threatened to destabilize me. Whereas Peter’s soul was separate. And now he was here. Now, he had come for me.

I wanted to ask him things, and yet my questions seemed worthless, so I didn’t. I stood and I followed him out of the study, through the front door and onto the porch. My feet were bare, but the sharp driveway pebbles didn’t bother me, nor did the rough grass as we began to climb. I was gliding through a painless void, I’d leaped safely to an in-between place where nothing bothered me, not anymore.

Higher and farther. I knew where we were heading. I’d seen my destiny on my very first afternoon at Skylark. It hadn’t been Jessie and Peter who’d jumped. It had been Peter and me.

The wind seemed to lift me from my toes—I felt as if I were floating. Peter’s rhymes made a song in my head Peter Peter pumpkin eater had a wife and couldn’t keep her put her in a pumpkin shell and there he kept her very well … A pumpkin shell, that didn’t sound all bad … a shell was safe, a quiet place to crawl inside. I’d been looking for one myself.

“Isa,” I murmured. Her falling nightmares had been warnings, and in the sound of my voice, I caught a rough snag of memory that woke me into the freezing gust of ocean spray stinging my face, the scream of nerves in my cut and bleeding feet, the animal fear beating in my chest as I saw that we’d come to a stand high on the outcropping of rock.

I closed my eyes.

A rejection of everything that is known, for an embrace of everything that isn’t.

What a strange trade.

From far away, I thought I heard someone call my name.

TWENTY-SEVEN

I left Little Bly unconscious. Maybe that was the right way to go? Spirited from one underworld and into another. I’d once read that for some of us, all of life is a rehearsal for this instant. For others, it’s pure impulse. No note, no warning. Only the moment.

The last thing I remember thinking, before I jumped, was that now I fully understood both paths.

When I came out of the coma, days later, I was first aware of my two fists, soft and empty, furled and stubborn, as my eyes opened on the green walls of Boston University Hospital, and I was reborn into a pain that screamed its massive appetite into every damaged cell of my body.

Days in, days lost. But eventually I surfaced, more or less, and I learned the nuts and bolts of what I had become. There was an implanted chest tube for my semi-collapsed lung. A steel rod in my femur where I’d fractured it in multiple places. A figure-eight splint around my shoulders to hold in place my snapped collarbone. One arm was encased in plaster and a sling. And as many dings and bruises as there was space on my body to show for them.

In other words, lucky to be alive.

“We’re all going to get through this together, Jamie.” At first, my mother’s voice was my only universe. A familiar whorl of sound days before I could comprehend what she was saying, as I allowed her to creep slowly into my consciousness.

At some point, I also noticed that the ringing in my ears had stopped. It was one of the first questions I’d asked, and it had an answer: the noise had stopped because the medication—the correct medication, Dr. Shehadha stressed—was working.

“Auditory delusion is one in a network of controllable symptoms,” she’d explained during one of those early-days rounds. “And it’s easy to treat.” She’d been so easy with the information, as if remarking on my left-handed serve or the chip in my tooth. Just another thing about me.

Shehadha, that was a pretty name, and something lifted in the recesses of my memory. Once I’d read a storybook about an Egyptian girl with that same last name, or similar.

“Egypt?” I hadn’t even thought she’d heard me as I’d stared fuzzily at the letters on her name tag. It was an out-there question, borne on sedation. My thoracotomy tube had been removed earlier that morning, and my throat was a tunnel of sandpaper, my voice a croak of escape from it.

“You mean, as in the origin of my name?” She looked pleased. “Is that what you said, Egypt? You’re right, it’s Egyptian.”