Prom Night in Purgatory(81)

“Maggie. This ain’t Heaven, baby. Come on, Maggie! You gotta stay with me.” Johnny was frantic, his eyes never leaving Maggie’s face. He didn’t know if she would survive the drive to the hospital. He had to stop the bleeding. Her skin was pasty white, and her body was limp. It was probably a miracle she was conscious at all. The Bel Air was waiting, the engine rumbling, ready to transport her to wherever Johnny wished, but she was out of time.

He didn’t know if he could do it. But he had done it before. He slid Maggie so she was lying flat against the front seat. Then he knelt at her side, his legs folded awkwardly in the foot-well, and then he pressed both of his hands into her wound, remembering how it felt to gather energy, to feel it flooding his system like a hot white light. He remembered it so clearly now. Every moment of the last fifty-three years was stamped on his memory like a prison tattoo, permanent and fixed.

He had been riding in the back of that overcrowded truck, instruments and equipment pressing against him. He had known leaving Maggie was a mistake, and the farther from her he traveled, the greater the overwhelming sense of wrongness became. They were almost to his sister’s house when something had yanked at him, loosening him from his physical surroundings, as if he were tied to an anchor and dropped into a weightless sea. And like water, the knowledge of what had been drenched him in memory.

He was suddenly, acutely, aware. He remembered the loneliness of the last fifty-three years. He remembered the despair, the intense anguish, and yet...the opportunity. In Purgatory he hadn’t aged, but he had grown and changed. He had discovered an inner power and an inner strength. He had developed fortitude, patience, and perspective. He remembered it all. And most of all, he remembered Maggie.

He flew through their time in Purgatory, watching the relationship unfold, remembering the wonder he had felt at her friendship, letting the desire he had felt to join her in life resonate within him.

And then he had flown beyond Purgatory to the final moments of his old life, when he lay at Roger Carlton’s side, at peace in the knowledge that he had saved his brother. He and Maggie had saved Billy. “It is a far, far better thing that I do now.” The words of Dickens echoed prophetically in his head.

He watched Maggie as she struggled to descend the stairs, her blood spilling across the bodice of her dress, her attention riveted on the next step. She was doing everything in her power to reach him. In that moment, he had been well aware of his choice and what that choice would mean. Paradise or Purgatory?

He saw Maggie stagger as she reached the main floor. She cried out his name, and then she was gone. She simply vanished. Nothing remained but the trail of blood that stretched beyond her to the third floor, marking her path, verifying her existence. He knew where she had gone.

Paradise or Purgatory? The choice was easy. He chose Purgatory.

***





2011


Johnny bore down. Maggie hissed, the pain keeping her tethered to the present. He pushed away the doubt that said he had relinquished Purgatory and all that had gone with it. He remembered the spark that had shorted out Jillian’s computer. He remembered how quickly he had healed in the hospital after escaping Purgatory. He acknowledged the fire he felt burning just beneath the surface. Surely something from Purgatory remained.

Johnny called on that heat that lay beneath his skin and gathered it, coaxing it forward until it seared the skin on his palms where they were pressed into Maggie’s wound. The pain was shocking, but he used it. He used the intense pain in his hands, the overwhelming love in his heart, and the bottomless faith that there was purpose in Purgatory, and turned it outward. Light began to seep out from the edges of his fingers, as if he held his palms over the beam of a flashlight. The intensity grew and grew until light filled the interior of the old car and spilled out of the windows. The Cadillac, marooned in the dark parking lot, became a lighthouse to the lost, guiding Maggie and Johnny home at last.





Epilogue


Matching scars might not be much to build a future on, but Maggie and Johnny had earned theirs. And if scars are the reminders of the past, then the identical puckered pink circles high on the right sides of each of their chests bore witness of the hard fought battle they had waged through time and space. And Johnny and Maggie remembered all of it. The sacrifice, the sorrow, the race against time, all leading up to the moment Johnny chose Purgatory.....again. Like a movie with alternate endings, they not only knew what the world had become, but what the world had been like before, when two people, two worlds apart, had found each other and fallen in love.

No one in 1958 ever knew what happened to Johnny -- or Maggie, for that matter. Billy had gone for help, only to return to a bloody trail leading down the stairs from where Maggie had been shot and a pool of blood where Johnny had lain. And Roger Carlton, of course. He was dead, and very few grieved for him.

In the space of a few hours, the world had changed. At least a small corner of it. Billy didn’t die, and Roger did. Irene didn’t marry Roger, but many years later she married Billy. And there were some things that didn’t change. Sadly, Irene still gave birth to a stillborn baby, and she and Billy never had children of their own. Dolly Kinross still suffered, Chief Bailey still searched for answers, and the years still passed while Johnny Kinross languished in Purgatory, waiting for the day when Maggie O’Bannon would help him break free.

When a young Maggie came to live with her Great Aunt Irene and her Uncle Billy when she was orphaned at age ten, Billy commented on the coincidence that she was named Maggie and that she resembled the girl that still haunted his memory. But it had been so long ago, and it was beyond comprehension to think the two girls were one in the same. Billy, Irene, and Maggie traveled quite extensively with Billy’s work, but Maggie’s last year in high school found them back in Honeyville, back in the old family home, back where the story truly began. And then time resumed its track, Maggie found Johnny in Purgatory, and what was became what is.