When the Sky Fell on Splendor(97)

Wayne shifted back from him and reached for the hem of his own sleeve. He pushed the flannel to his elbow, revealing an intricate pattern of scars that extended beyond where we could see. He reached for the other sleeve and pushed that up too, and we stared as he undid the topmost button of his shirt and pulled it down enough for us to see the tail end of more purple scars, like octopus appendages clinging to his skin.

“It was worse,” Wayne murmured. “In the beginning. It’s been shrinking some every day since it happened, since I found it.” The eyes I’d always thought of as cold and dead turned to me. They were dark but full of life, so much pain and hope that I shifted under their weight.

I saw what I’d missed before. The hollowed-out cheeks, the dark circles, the pale sheen of his skin. Wayne wasn’t a monster; he was sick, in pain.

Like I had been every time the power coursed through me.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper, folded into a smooth square. He held it out to Arthur, and Droog licked affectionately at the man’s wrist.

“I’d never drawn a day in my life,” Wayne said. “And then, a couple of weeks ago, I was out in the woods. Kids kept knocking down my fence, but there was nothing I could do without involving the police. So I took to walking the perimeter. That’s what I was doing when I saw it fall, this disc, filled with light. And when I touched it, something strange happened. Something . . . extraordinary. It was nighttime when I found it, and then I blinked and it was dusk.”

Arthur took the paper and began gingerly unfolding it.

“You were out almost twenty-four hours?” Levi asked.

“He got a whole consciousness,” Sofía said. “Each of us, we only got a sixth. Not to mention whatever stray bits hit the cows and the birds, and Droog.”

Arthur had the paper unfolded now. His shoulders hitched and his eyes scrunched tight, his hand covering his face as a silent wave of tears hit him.

“Arthur?” I whispered.

He shook his head, unable to speak, and blinked against the tears streaming down his cheeks as he held the paper out to me.

I moved forward in a trance to take it from him, and a sound died in my throat.

I clutched my necklace, but I was unmoored anyway as I stared at the drawing. Understanding crashed over me, but I was too scared to accept it. The pain would tear me in half if I was wrong.

The sketch was of me and Arthur, like the ones in the cellar. Much younger, mid-jump, hovering over my bed, the Milky Way painting half-visible across my ceiling.

“I couldn’t stop drawing them,” Wayne said. “I didn’t know what it meant. I knew who you kids were, but not why it was happening. I thought maybe it was guilt, about the accident. That it was driving me out of my mind. Or maybe I had some tumor pressing just right on my brain.”

I was barely hearing it, barely aware of Sofía and Levi and Remy and Nick crowding around me to see the drawing.

I stared at the initials scrawled in the corner.

M.S.

The drawings in the cellar weren’t stolen. Wayne had done them, the same way he’d built the spiral, the same way Nick had played the song.

With someone else’s memory.

I looked toward the sculpture, the massive Fibonacci spiral, proof the universe was in order, that some things might change size but they never lost their true shape.

That things could be hidden but never truly erased.

He was here. Some part of him, a passenger in Wayne Hastings.

“Mark,” I said.





THIRTY-FIVE



TEARS SLID DOWN MY cheeks, hitting the lead on the page, diffusing it, but I didn’t look away. I didn’t want to stop seeing it, to stop feeling both my brothers here with me.

“We found the others in your cellar,” Arthur said thickly. “There must have been dozens of everyone else, even Droog. But there was only one of me.”

“It was something about the eyes,” Wayne said. “I must’ve tried hundreds of times. I tried for days, but I couldn’t capture it.”

Arthur closed his eyes and buried his face in the crook of his elbow.

“I started to think it meant something,” Wayne wheezed, from physical pain or emotion. “That I was supposed to protect you or something, so I followed you one night, and you went to my old house. Where we lived when Molly was alive.”

“You lived in the Jenkins House?” Remy said.

Wayne nodded. “It was too much after I lost her. All the memories. The death threats and graffiti. I couldn’t blame anyone, but I wanted to be left alone. So I moved back here. I hadn’t been to that house until the night you found that disc, and I didn’t stay long then either. But the next day, I heard there’d been some kind of incident there. And it didn’t take me long to realize the same thing had happened to you that had happened to me. I didn’t know what to do, whether it was really dangerous, or what it meant. I didn’t know how to reach out to you, after everything that had happened. I tried to put it out of my mind. I focused on—on this instead.”

He gestured toward the sculpture. “I didn’t know what it was, only that it mattered. Before I found the disc, I’d spent five years wanting to die. I wanted to forget what happened five years ago, but I couldn’t. This was the first thing that had mattered in a long time, but when I finished it . . . I just wanted it all to be over. I heard the tornado sirens, and I thought maybe it could finally be. I could stay up here and wait.”