Sign Here(95)

I don’t know if she was already dead or if she died right there in my arms. I honestly don’t know. I couldn’t feel a heartbeat when I pulled her out, but it all happened so fast.

After the cops showed up and arrested me, I talked to my lawyer, in hypotheticals. He said, hypothetically, if I saw someone abandon her that fucked messed up out in the middle of a lake, that person would be responsible for her death. Especially if that person was also responsible for the concussion they found during her autopsy. Or at least the people who own the property, with the underage drinking and all. My parents have nothing to do with this, and my brother has his whole life ahead of him, with a baby on the way. He didn’t mean for her to die. He doesn’t even know it was his fault. As much as it kills me to say it (and it might kill him even more to admit it himself), he thinks I did it. Just like everybody else. So I didn’t say anything, and here I am. And that’s okay.

I don’t want to live in a world without Sarah. I’m sure I would’ve met plenty of other interesting girls if things had played out differently, but they wouldn’t matter. I just know it. As crazy as it sounds, if she’s gone, I need to go after her. And if that means my family gets to live their lives, all the more reason.

I’m sorry I needed to tell you all of this. It is way up there at the top of all of the things I’ve been feeling sorry about lately. I can deal with the world thinking I killed Sarah Kelly; I really can. I can even deal with my family members thinking it, even if they won’t admit it. But I can’t deal with you thinking it. Not you.

I will be with her soon, Gavin. And I swear to you, if there is somewhere after here and I am able to find her, I won’t let anything happen to her ever again.


Sincerely,

Philip Harrison





PEYOTE





CAL LANDED ON THE float, but I came to in the water, which was more of a shock than I expected it to be. Atmosphere doesn’t affect me anymore, what with breathing no longer being a requirement, and temperature matters less and less as the millennia wear on, temperatures in Hell testing the limits of the imagination. It wasn’t any of that. Honestly, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, it was the darkness. On the darkest night, the sky offers light simply because the earth is not alone. But even the floodlights of your planet’s neighbors couldn’t reach down there in the murk and the silt. Down there, there were only me and Mickey.

Her hair hovered above me on the surface of the lake like the wide, smooth body of a stingray, each strand alive and seemingly primed for touch. Until I went to touch it and nothing happened.

“Mickey! Wake up!” I yelled when I broke the surface. She was underwater except for one arm over the float. I reached under her shoulders and tried to push her back up, but I couldn’t. I am not built for that kind of interference.

After I’d spent so much time watching her, it was the first moment I actually felt her skin. We aren’t supposed to make unnecessary physical contact with the marks. But humans are thigmophilic creatures, aren’t you? You try to say you’ve evolved beyond it, but you’ll always be hungry for touch. It used to gross me out, if I’m being honest. Do you know how many people die by that particular want? Or kill, for that matter? If you didn’t want to be close to one another above all else, you’d all be a lot healthier. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that. Nor was I thinking about Cal, silently staring. Truthfully, I wasn’t thinking at all.

I pushed back the hair around Mickey’s face and took her cheeks in my hands. She was cold, colder than the water, and her eyes were closed. I could feel her heartbeat, but it was weak.

“Come on, kid,” I whispered. “This isn’t how it ends.”

I turned her face to the side and pressed my lips against her temple. It had been eons since my lips had touched anything but flatware or the plastic handle of my toothbrush. I had forgotten what they felt like against something organic. Something that gave back.

The truth was Mickey was the closest I ever came to love without my soul. I felt the wisps of the feeling, the way perfume stays on pillows. But it was the strongest I had, and therefore it was everything.

“Just one more try,” I said, my teeth catching on her skin. “Please. Just give it one more try.”

At first, I thought it was over. I thought I had lost her. But then she coughed, and it propelled her mouth just beyond the surface, just enough so she could get out one word.





LILY





ONCE SHE GOT THE rifle down from the hook in the tree, Lily walked quickly but quietly through the woods toward the flashlight beam, until she could see the firepit. Ruth was huddled near the water, wrapped in a towel, and Silas stood near her, largely in shadow. She couldn’t see Sean or Mickey, and while she hoped that meant they were still at the Watersons’, she knew they weren’t.

Gavin stood in the middle of the clearing, so illuminated by the moon it was as if he himself were a source of light, of gravitational pull. Looking at him, Lily recognized all his parts but not his whole. It was like someone else had put on his skin. But it must’ve been the other way around. The person she knew was the impostor, and now he was gone. She had fallen in love not with a man but with a sheath. A holster without its gun.

It went against every instinct she had not to storm the clearing. But she didn’t know where her kids were, and if she wanted to be in control, she would have to wait. Luckily, Lily thought as she trained the rifle sights on Gavin, she was no stranger to the patient side of terror.