In The Falling Light Page 5

  His shirt caught on debris, jerking him back, and Dell cried out, thrashing at the surface, coughing as water and leaves tried to choke him. He kicked and pulled, but it had him and his rhythm was broken. He curled up and reached back to free himself, knowing he was going to drown now, his head smacking against something, more debris.

  He hoped Arlene and the kids wouldn’t see him die.

  Dell’s knuckles rapped against metal and he tried to keep his head above the surface, shaking to clear his eyes. A big black shape was inches away.

  A tire.

  His shirt was hooked on the bumper of his submerged pickup.

  Dell let out a thankful cry and ripped the shirt away, scrambling up onto the undercarriage, feeling the capsized vehicle bob under his feet. Ray Hammond’s boat was close enough to touch, hung up on another tire. Branches cracked overhead, and he stood in a balanced, half-crouch in water up to his knees, seeing that the Chevy had lodged in the oak’s main fork.

  He didn’t look for the boxcar, didn’t want to. If it hit him, he’d never know it, and would prefer that to a miss, to seeing it tear his house and his family apart upon impact. He moved as quickly as the water allowed, examining the aluminum boat, seeing that the current had already put it on a helpful angle. He wouldn’t have to flip it completely over, only about three-quarters.

  And then what? Have the water rip it from his hands?

  He moved along the truck’s undercarriage to where the boat was actually sticking into the air a little, creating a dark, watery gap. Dell held his breath and ducked under, pulling himself up into the boat like a turtle in a shell. Darkness. No, not completely, a bit of gray light coming in through the gap. Flat seats now overhead, nothing else, all washed away. He felt the boat shift above him, the pickup shudder beneath him, and tensed.

  It all held.

  He pulled himself into the darkness towards the back, the space between the water and air narrowing. Dell had never been in Ray Hammond’s boat before, but he had been in plenty similar. There, the center seat, more than just an aluminum plank across the hull, this one a storage box. Kneeling in the darkness, he felt for the latches, found the one on the left, flipped it, cold hands slapping in the other direction. Found the second latch.

  The lid spilled open, gear falling out as if from a ruptured piñata, dumping into the water. Dell’s hands scrambled through it until they felt rope, a tightly rolled coil. He quickly wound one end around his waist several times, knotting it tightly. Then he crawled on his knees back towards the light and tied the other end to the front bench seat. Had there been a flashlight in the box? Probably, the kind that floated. He would need it to examine the outboard motor. He started back to look.

  Tucked inside the turtled boat, Dell didn’t see it coming.

  A forest green dumpster, half filled with water, heavy and floating like a boat itself, washed into the rear of the Chevy, striking hard and dislodging it from the tree. The pickup slid away from the oak as the dumpster turned over, hitting the rear of the rescue boat before it sank, knocking it loose from the tire which had held it in place. The current caught the aluminum hull and sent it spinning away. Dell, trapped inside the capsized hull, was pulled with it, his head and shoulder slamming into a metal wall, casting him into deep water as the boat moved off, the rope dragging him along the bottom behind it.

  Arlene and the kids screamed as they saw the dumpster break both the boat and the pickup free, and she shouted her husband’s name into the storm as the current carried the aluminum shape away from the house and out of sight. Dell’s head didn’t appear.

  Two feet below the family, the surface washed against the shingles as the hurricane sent waves of spray over their huddled figures. Arlene heard a metallic groan and looked over her shoulder to see the boxcar moving in the current, a rusting behemoth turning slowly on the surface, creaking as it moved past the house with only feet to spare. It rotated and then drove into the barn like a great torpedo, and in a splintering crash the structure was torn apart, the roof collapsing, a whole piece floating for a moment, then breaking up and slipping under. Hay and shattered planks vanished quickly downstream.

  Arlene stared into the storm, the shock of seeing the barn torn away quickly replaced with grief for her husband, for the children she would not be able to save, for the life they would never know. Her tears were lost in the rain.

  An hour passed, and the water was now touching their feet, the spray a relentless whipping, and all three kids were crying now. Arlene reached out to pull them to herself, and got them started with a prayer. Above them, around them, the storm closed in to finish the killing. In the end, the wind became the sound of a ripping chainsaw.

  But it wasn’t the wind.

  And it wasn’t a chainsaw.

  Dell McCall’s arms and back were a rage of pain from hauling himself underwater along the rope, pulling himself upwards to break the surface and gasp at wet air, clinging desperately to the slick aluminum. Lyle Dawson’s orchid truck had gotten stuck against a line of oaks a mile and a half down from the ranch, and when the rescue boat slammed into its cab – the driver’s seat was empty – it nearly flipped over. Half drowned, Dell crawled onto the cab’s roof and then tore some shoulder muscle flipping the boat the rest of the way over, fighting against the pull of the water to hold onto it long enough to climb in. Ray Hammond had been a man who cared for his equipment, and despite being submerged, the big Mercury outboard fired on the first pull.

  Now, that same Mercury growled against the shriek of the storm as Dell guided the craft against the current, one arm locked onto the throttle tiller. He stared with grim purpose at the line of little shapes still clinging to the roof of his house, and when Arlene saw him coming for them and raised one hand, Dell shot his own triumphant fist into the heavens.

  The hell with Texas, he thought. We’ll raise sheep in Montana.

  REJECTION

  If you looked at me, the first word which would come to mind is cancer, or more specifically chemo.. I wouldn’t blame you for making the assumption. With my taut skin, pronounced neck cords and arms like jointed pool cues, the next word would be skeleton. Hard to believe when this all started I tipped the scales at three-thirty and smoked like a fiend. Not cancer. Heart disease, the kind which requires either a new pump, or a pine box.

  They found me a new pump.

  I didn’t ask where it came from until later.

  I have a dim memory of lying in the recovery bed and seeing my surgeon in the room, speaking quietly with a man in an Air Force uniform and lots of chest ribbons. Strange, this was a civilian hospital and I’d never been in the Air Force. Some of my family had, but just as many had worked at McDonalds, and there wasn’t a fry kid talking to the doc. Later they told me it was a hallucination brought on by the painkillers.

  The transplant saved my life, and for a year I felt great. I ate well, exercised, and got fit. My doc – my regular physician, not the surgeon – was encouraging and pleased with my progress. His enthusiasm drained when I started getting sick again.

  Rapid weight loss, nausea, hair falling out…it had to be the Big ‘C.’ The doc sent me to an oncologist, who pronounced me cancer-free. Fearing it was the new pump, he next paired me with a cardiologist, who declared the heart was strong and healthy. More testing followed; needles and stress tests and sonograms and physicals. No explanation, but I continued to deteriorate. Now there was joint and nerve pain, migraines, trouble with my equilibrium. No, not a tumor either. They checked for that.

  “You’ve stopped your toxic behavior,” my doc said. “I think it’s the new heart.”

  “Is my body rejecting it, trying to kill it?”

  He took a long time to answer. “It’s the other way around. It looks like the heart sees the body as the intrusion.”

  That took some digesting. He sent me for more tests, and when I came back three days later he reversed his diagnosis. “Forget what I said about the heart, there’s nothing wrong with it. You’
re experiencing some kind of cellular problem, or possibly a virus. We’ll sort it out.”

  I didn’t like the way he couldn’t meet my eyes. I also didn’t like the dark blue sedan with government plates parked across the street when I left.

  My body was becoming weaker, looking like a stranger in the mirror, nearly hairless now with skin turning a corpse shade of gray. I went back to the surgeon for answers.

  “Where did the heart come from?”

  “I’m sorry, but health information confidentiality…”

  “Doctor, please. Where?”

  He must have felt my desperation, because he looked around his office before whispering, “Roswell, New Mexico.” He wouldn’t say more, and asked me to leave.

  That evening, however, he called my house and apologized, said he wanted to talk, and asked me to come see him in the morning. When I got to his office there was a new receptionist, a young man with a military-style haircut who announced that the doctor had left on an extended vacation, and didn’t ask if I wanted to see someone else. In the lot, a blue sedan with two men in it was parked two rows behind my car.

  I haven’t left the house in three weeks now. I weigh eighty-nine pounds, can barely make it to the bathroom without screaming, and the air feels thick and hard to breathe. When I dare to look in the mirror I see my head has enlarged, along with my light-sensitive eyes. I don’t dare look out the window, because I know they’re watching, waiting to see what happens next.

  So am I.

  MUSE

  She comes to me through shaded corridors

  long legged and sleek

  red satin sliding over her curves

  I wait with pen suspended, a single drop of ink

  falling to the page

  black in the candlelight

  Her fragrance touches the stillness, and I tremble

  longing to feel her press against me

  crimson lips at my ear

  breathing darkness

  My name whispered from the hall

  and as the click of her footfalls approach I wonder

  high heels

  or hooves

  AVOIDING MIRANDA

  Excited shouts and the laughter of children bounced off the wall of the elementary school like a ball, rebounding onto the playground. Fourth and fifth graders staked their claims to swings and monkey bars and hopscotch grids, stormed colorful, half-buried concrete pipes and sat in small clusters playing games. Though they kept to their little groups, they remained a whole which belonged, and Emily remained on the outside.

  She sat on the edge of a brick planter, hydrangea at her back, her body tensed as if to run, watching the children she wanted so badly to join, and searching everywhere else for the reason she couldn’t. An observer might have said she looked haunted. Emily would have chosen the word hunted.

  Miranda was out there, probably watching her right now.

  Emily chewed at her thumbnail, a habit she’d picked up recently and one which her mother pronounced “nasty.” Sometimes she gnawed her nails to the quick, making them bleed. She didn’t notice anymore. Her eyes settled on three girls sitting in the shade of a maple, talking and giggling. Brittney, Shay and Addison – the Power Pack. She was supposed to be one of them, would have been, but now didn’t even dare approach them for fear of their taunting, disgust and contempt. And not just from them, from all her classmates. It would be a while before the word ostracized appeared in the vocabulary lessons.

  And it was all Miranda’s fault.

  The double doors banged open and Emily jumped, letting out a high squeak and snapping her head right. Miss Colon, the pretty blonde teacher in charge of the fourth grade, emerged with a bag of red balls over her shoulder and glanced briefly at Emily. She didn’t smile, and looked away quickly without a word, heading onto the playground. Even the teachers didn’t want to have anything to do with her.

  “That’s because I have a parasite,” Emily said, watching the young woman trot away. Parasite was a word she knew.

  “A pair of what?” said Miranda, sitting down on the edge of the planter to Emily’s left.

  Emily squeaked again, recoiling and sliding away, making a face. God she smelled so bad! “Parasite,” she repeated through clenched teeth. “What you are. Something nasty that latches onto something good and sucks all the good stuff out of it.”

  Miranda’s heavy brow creased as she tried to process the word, her normally bulging eyes – Emily didn’t know the word thyroid yet – nearly closing with the effort. Then she opened them. “That’s a bad thing.” She stared hard at Emily for a moment, and then her face split with a broad, bucktoothed grin. “Aw, you’re teasing me, Em.” She spit a little when she said ‘teasing.’ “That’s just another word for friend.”

  “You’re not my friend,” Emily hissed. “Because of you I don’t have any friends. Because you leeched onto me and you’re a troll and why don’t you just go away and leave me alone!” She wrinkled her nose at the girl’s limp, oily hair and Salvation Army clothes and slumped shoulders. “You’re so ugly!” Emily said, on her feet now. She brushed at her sequined Ed Hardy top and Banana Republic jeans as if whatever horrid something Miranda had might be airborne, and might have settled on her.

  Miranda just looked at her and wiggled a finger up her nose.

  Emily’s face lit with rage. “I hate you!” she screamed, pointing at this thing that insisted on talking to her and being around her every day, every minute, who had turned her into a social leper. “I wish you would just die!”

  Some of the kids on the playground stopped to stare, including the Power Pack, who immediately began whispering and giggling. Emily flushed and her eyes welled, and she ran from Miranda, crashing through the school doors to find someplace to hide.

  At 1:15, Miss Crane’s fifth grade class was half way through their social studies section, a week-long module on the first fifteen presidents. Emily, seated in the back left corner, was listening and filling in information on a worksheet as she followed along in her textbook. She liked social studies. Sometimes she wished she lived in one of those long-ago times. Any time other than this one.

  “Emily,” Miranda whispered.

  She ignored it.

  A poke in the shoulder. “Em. Emily.” Poke, poke. “Em.”

  “Stop it.”

  Miranda, big for her age and overweight – the biggest kid at P. Beckham Elementary by far – used an adult-sized desk. For reasons both unfair and incomprehensible, Miss Crane had placed the girl at the back, directly behind Emily. All day Emily had to listen to her stuffy nose and mouth breathing. When she had asked to be moved and explained why, Miss Crane told her she “wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense,” and sent her back to her desk. She hadn’t asked again.

  Another poke. “Emily. How many z’s are in president?”

  “Leave…me…alone,” Emily whispered tightly.

  Corbin Harding, a good-looking, dark haired boy sitting to her right, looked over and made a face. She didn’t look up, just kept her head down and tried to pay attention to the lesson. In addition to being fat and ugly and smelly, Miranda was often disruptive in class, and Emily frequently took the heat for it, as if she was somehow encouraging the Beast in the Back. Guilt by Association was another phrase she hadn’t learned yet, but she understood the concept well enough. What she didn’t understand was why Miranda hadn’t been put in one of the special classes. They had their own little trailers out on the edge of the parking lot. That’s where she belonged, not here, hanging over Emily’s shoulder and stinking up the air.

  It just wasn’t fair. Emily was pretty, she knew it, and popular with the other kids. The Power Pack had been sizing her up, checking to see if her clothes were cool enough, testing to be certain she listened to the right music – Bieber, of course – and knew all his lyrics, verifying that she knew the coolest phrases. Preparing to make her one of them. Emily did well in class, and even the teachers had all liked her. Then she butted in, thi
s half-a-retard who could barely read and dressed like a hillbilly on a TV show. Miranda had decided they were friends, and that had been the end of everything. No Power Pack, no cute boys wanting to talk to her, no more teachers being nice to her. She was a pariah, a word which wouldn’t appear until high school English.

  And Emily couldn’t get rid of her.

  Miranda waited for her on her walk to school, insisting on following her. She came around at recess, and wanted to sit with her at lunch time, and even showed up on the weekends when Emily was playing in the neighborhood. The troll-girl with her cheap Wal-Mart shoes always found her and wanted to talk to her.

  And that was the biggest problem of all.

  Miranda was crazy.

  The things she talked about…lighting little fires and melting doll faces with matches, and killing a cat she had lured into her back yard with a can of tuna. Emily wasn’t sure that one was true at first, but the more crazy things Miranda said, the more she believed. The bigger girl said she heard people talking to her, people that weren’t there. Lately, Miranda had been saying worse things, things that scared her and made her sick to her stomach and feel like she wanted to cry. And Emily had come to another realization.

  Miranda wasn’t just crazy.

  Miranda was dangerous.

  “Hey,” she whispered, close to Emily’s ear. “Brittney said if I took a knife and cut myself, peanut butter would come out. Is that true?”

  Emily ignored her.

  “I think if I cut Brittney’s throat, Pez would come out. She eats enough of them. Do you think so?”

  Emily struggled not to hear, to listen instead to Miss Crane.

  The girl grunted “Pez,” and chuckled.

  Then there was a long silence, and Emily sighed, thinking she might get some relief, some distance from Miranda, a rare thing indeed. In order to keep away from her, she’d found herself running home from school each day, taking different routes, dodging through yards and peeking around fences like a soldier in a war movie. Sometimes it worked. And sometimes she felt a small measure of victory and felt good about being so clever, but usually she just felt tired, drained. Most people did not think children could feel stress, real stress. They were wrong.