The Love That Split the World(97)

I wake panting, my heart thundering, and when my eyes snap open, my whole body clenches painfully as I see the black orb floating overhead. “No,” I hiss, scooting backward away from it. “No, no. No.”

It’s starting: the end.

The orb drifts toward me, and I tumble out of bed, running to the dresser where my car keys sit. I don’t know what I’m thinking; all I know is I have to get away from that orb. I have to outrun this. I stuff my feet into the boots by the door and flee from the room, circle the house at a sprint, and jump into the Jeep.

“Grandmother,” I’m whispering under my breath. “Don’t let this happen. Don’t let this happen.”

I start the car and back down the long driveway haphazardly, jerking onto the country road beyond.

How do I stop this?

At first I head toward Beau’s, like if I can see him, tangle my fists in his hair and shirt, he can’t be taken from me. The Other Matt can’t be taken from me. Life as I know it can’t be pried from my grip.

But as I near the turnoff for the Presbyterian church, sweat breaks out along my hairline, my hands start shaking against the steering wheel, and I know exactly where I’m going, where I’ve been going this whole time. I pass the church and the high school, and still I keep driving, my mouth dry and heart speeding.

I try to think about nothing. I try to think about anything but my destination and the dread coiling in the lowest part of my stomach or the creeping sensation along my neck. I see it up ahead, and a burst of adrenaline shoots across the back of my tongue, metallic and cold.

Don’t think about it. Don’t go there. Don’t remember it.

I pull off to the shoulder, the headlights lancing over Matt’s memorial, startling me anew. I leave the lights on as I step out of the car, the only illumination besides the red glow of the stoplights strung across the road. It’s an intersection of two narrow country lanes with poor visibility due to the wall of trees on both sides of both streets. It used to be a two-way stop, but they changed it to a four-way and later added the stoplights after one too many accidents happened there.

My accident.

I run to the memorial, feeling all the way as if I’m being chased, hungrily pursued by the black orb, by a closing door trying to shut me out of Beau’s world, and Grandmother’s too.

But this is where it all started. Somehow I know that. Somehow I believe I can stop this.

I drop to my knees in front of the poster, my eyes pushing against the dark. I think about Beau’s hands sweeping over the piano and visualize my movement, but I can’t make the veil inside me drop so I can pass through.

“PLEASE,” I scream into the night. My eyes bounce down the bank to the mostly dry creek bed, my ears tuning in to the trickle of water over stones and the buzz of mosquitoes skating across the surface.

It’s like I’m back in the car, flipping endlessly, stomach lurching, tiny voice screaming as we careen into the water and the windows explode in a fine mist of glass. I find myself gasping for breath, reaching for something to steady myself as there are several sharp tugs at my stomach. When my hand touches the poster but instead finds cool stone, I realize I’ve finally broken through.

I don’t know to which world—Beau’s or Grandmother’s or some other entirely. A world in which purple and yellow wildflowers grow thickly around the telephone pole and beyond.

All I know is it isn’t my world. It can’t be mine.

Because below REST IN PEACE, the name engraved on the stone is NATALIE LAYNE.





29


I’m dead.

Somewhere, sometime, I’m dead.

There’s an epitaph too, but the letters jumble in my mind, unread. Rain clouds break apart overhead, and I feel myself gagging in front of the poster and run a few feet before the bile shoots up my throat and hits the slick, muddy grass between my boots. I shouldn’t drive, but I can’t stay here. All I know is I can’t stay here. I stumble back to the Jeep and turn around to drive back toward the high school, Beau’s house, my house, Megan’s house.

I find myself on the stormy gravel road, crossing the little bridge that leads to the Kincaids’. Next thing I know I’m outside Beau’s house—and it is Beau’s house, and the lights are on, but his truck isn’t there.

Still I don’t leave. Where will I go? Where will I be safe when I know that somewhere I’m dead, my body rotting beneath the ground, and that maybe tomorrow morning I’ll awake and that orb will have descended around me, cutting me off from the two people who can understand all this.

I turn off the car and that’s when I hear the screaming. Two hardly familiar voices shouting furiously at one another: Beau’s mom, Darlene, and her new husband, Bill.

Their words are impossible to decipher, muddled by the linoleum siding and drywall between them and me, but I can tell it’s serious, brutal, angry, and I don’t know what to do.

I start the car and drive away, backsliding again into my thoughts and my terror, until I find myself parked outside Megan’s house, my whole body trembling like a sapling in a tornado and my face striped with tears and snot. I wipe my nose across my arm as I get out and circle around the white, columned mansion to the basement patio and let myself inside, out of the rain.

The orb is gone, but I know it will be back. The second I fall asleep it will engulf me. I sense it. This is the end, and I won’t have any answers. I’ll have no peace.