Bloodstone (12 page)

Just forget about it and back off
.

“We should get some sleep,” he said. He walked to the window and stood there, looking out into the dark. The river ran below him, he could hear it gurgling, the water swollen from the rains. In the reflection in the glass, he watched Angel uncurl herself from the bed and put her feet on the floor.

“So you sat and talked,” she said. “You and Dr. Stowe.”

“That’s right.”

“What else did he say?”

“Nothing more, other than what I told you. There was a woman there with him when I came in, Myrtle someone-or-other. Big woman, acted strange when she saw me, ended up ducking out of there. Maybe I intimidated her with my dashing good looks.”

“Is she his wife?”

Smith laughed. “No, I’m pretty sure he’s single. I doubt she’s his type.” He studied Angel more closely, wondering what she was thinking. Something welled up in him out of nowhere, and his words came out too hard and fast. “He knows we’re not married. Maybe he’ll take you out.”

“That’s not what I was thinking,” she said. “I couldn’t care less what Dr. Stowe thinks about me.”

Smith turned around, not quite sure where that had come from, wanting to take it back. “Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to…just tired, I guess. It’s been a long day.”

It
had
been a long day, though that wasn’t the reason for the way he was feeling right now. Everything seemed to be coming down on him, all the things that had happened the past few months. He thought about Ronnie Taylor and his murdered wife and son, and the way Jeb Taylor had looked, sitting there at the bar with his shoulders set as if he were carrying a heavy load on his back. Those shot glasses lined up beside him like targets in a shooting gallery, Jeb picking them off, one by one. The taste of beer was in the back of his throat, so strong and sharp he could almost believe he was drinking again.

He could not look at her. God, he had hurt her after all, and yet he didn’t dare try and make it right. Something inside him laughed at the irony of it, the fact that his only weapon against his own loneliness, and later the isolation and brutality of prison, the hardening of his spirit and his heart, had turned against him here and left him helpless.

She sat there on the bed, not saying a word, and when he did not open his mouth again she stood up and left, closing the door to the other room and throwing the lock.

A whisper carried softly on air; come closer. I want to kiss
you
.

He was standing at the bottom of a long, gently sloping hill. It was evening, but the wind that blew in his face was
warm and smelled of flowers. Reminded him of something or someone he couldn’t quite remember. A dark form, bending over him in the night, rocking him to sleep.

He was looking for something missing. A part of him that had been gone for a while. He felt a little hollow without it, but the need wasn’t there yet, that awful, aching need. He followed the scent like a dog, nose up, sniffing the air. It led him up the soft gentle hill. He walked with his hands in his pockets, carefree, easy. Nothing bad could come to him on a night like this. The stars were out, peppering the black sky above his head with a myriad of shapes and angles and suggestions. He touched each sparkling gem with his eyes.

The hill was getting steeper. He leaned into it, his bare toes digging into the soft ground, the grass like soft green slippers on his feet. He came up to a gnarled, stunted tree. Its bare branches reached up toward the stars like the arms of an ancient, arthritic man. He struggled, grasping at the branches for balance, but the wood shattered in his hand and went to dust. Down suddenly on his hands and knees, tottering there, pinwheeling his arms for balance, and now it was a fight to reach the top of the hill, the angle almost straight up toward the heavens.

He clawed desperately at the ground, pulling himself up. Finally, he was at the top of the hill, and he lay there for a moment on his back, gasping. The stars had disappeared into a deep grayish haze. Gravestones lined the top of the hill, fencing him in. Several of them leaned in the coarse grass like drunken old men, their faces scoured by age and weather, the dates and names a ghostly pattern lined with green moss. He imagined the bodies piled one on top of another under the grass, limbs intertwined, flesh running together, a great mass of human bedrock. He stumbled from stone to stone; here was a pretty white one with an inscription he couldn’t make out, another with a tiny sculpted angel on either side, another that was almost black with dead algae. He felt the cold coming up over the hill with the fog.
The cold was a bone-chilling ache that settled around his shoulders, the kind that comes after an early snowfall.

He was standing on an island rearing up out of the mist. An island of graves.

The graves were placed in giant circles, one within another. He picked his way through them, unable to keep from moving forward. Searching for something. His hips bumped a heavy stone and sent it crashing to the ground. He moved faster. That thing he was searching for was close now, he could smell it. Finally, he reached the center; a series of three gravestones placed on the middle of the hilltop, one large between two small. A bundle of what might have been roses lay rotting in the grass, the stench of them filling the air. He read the inscription on the large stone with a morbid fascination;
Here lies Amanda Potter, wife and loving
mother, may she rest in peace
.

And the two smaller stones;
Judy and Todd Potter, loving
children, innocent victims of a heinous crime. Murdered
by William Smith in this the year of our Lord…May he
rot in hell
.

No
, he tried to say, Jesus, no. He fell back in the grass and closed his eyes, willing it all away, and then the car was coming at him again, the headlights in his face, the horn blaring and he so drunk that he couldn’t see. He felt the stomach-wrenching crunch of impact, metal screaming, twisting, tearing, glass shattering over his lap as he was thrown forward into the steering wheel.

As he opened his eyes he heard a sound like fingernails scratching in the dirt. A low ripping sound joined it, like a piece of cloth torn in half. He looked down at his feet, and through the mist that now covered the ground like a thin gray blanket he saw a set of bone-white fingertips wriggling like worms below Todd Potter’s gravestone. Tiny child-fingers pushing themselves upward through the dirt, tearing the sod. To his left he saw another set of fingers, and beyond that still more; all digging their way out of the grave to come for him.

He lay there as the dead climbed their way out. Two children, fresh blood on their pushed-in faces; they stood and grinned at him with bloody, toothless smiles, their limbs twisted at unnatural angles. Here and there he could see the tips of white splintered bone poking out of the skin. Todd Potter had been in the back seat and had taken the worst of the impact. His right leg had been severed at the knee. Judy, the little girl, had been in the front without a seatbelt, and she had gone through the windshield. Her face was nothing but a red pulpy mess. And Amanda Potter, wife and loving mother, had taken the hub of the steering wheel through the chest—

But when he looked to Amanda Potter’s grave he saw something else. He stared. The hawk-like, weary face of Jeb Taylor stared back at him.

The lizard eyes blinked. Jeb held up a flask.
Have a drink,
my brother? Just one drink. One for the road
.

A wave of self-revulsion welled up in him even as the thirst bit at the back of his throat. How could he think of that now after all that had happened? But he was weak. Christ, so weak.

Just reach out and take her, Billy. It’s easy. Come closer.
Give her a little kiss
. As he watched, Jeb Taylor’s face started to run like toffee in the hot sun, the features blurring, something else coming up underneath.

He screamed.

And forced himself awake to a dark room, where everything was blessedly sane again and the only gravestones were the ones in his mind.

Angel had heard him scream and had come over from her bed in the other room, and now she sat next to him again, like she had in the Motel Six in Gatesville, while he shivered silently. The dream had been different this time. Sharper, clearer. He was afraid that soon he might not be able to tell the difference between dreams and reality.

“They’re getting worse again for you,” Angel said. “Aren’t they?”

He nodded. Part of him felt like he was still deep in the dream, that he was being watched, that the stage had cleared and the lights had come up but the audience refused to leave.

“I haven’t had one in weeks,” she said, a little distantly. “I think maybe they’re leaving me alone because I’m trying to let go of things myself. The things that haunt me. Maybe you should try it, too.”

Let go?
he wanted to scream.
How can I let go? I killed
three people because I was a stinking, worthless drunk. And
yet I’ve never wanted a drink as badly as I do right now
.

But he just shook his head. “I can’t.”

“What do you mean, you can’t?”

“I mean I don’t have a choice. I’m
supposed
to remember. I don’t think we can change any of it. It’s bigger than us, don’t you understand? We’re just little parts of whatever is happening in this God-forsaken place.”

Her face flushed an angry red. “No. That’s not true. You’re saying that whatever is going to happen to us has already been decided, and I don’t believe it. We have a choice, we can change things, damn it.”

Somehow, he thought, the tables had turned; wasn’t he the one who had taken her against her will just a few weeks ago? Wasn’t he the one who had been the leader, the one who had literally forced them forward to get to this point? Christ, he had handcuffed her to the door to keep her from running, he could hardly believe he had done that to her.

But now he was drained and on the edge and he couldn’t give anything more, and maybe it was only natural that she would begin to take over.

“They were—” he started, stopped, started again. “Crushed. The blood—I never saw so much blood.” His stomach rolled and clenched with the memory. “I hit them in the side and the girl was thrown out the window and the boy was pinned
and the mother took the steering wheel in the chest and I got out and tried to help them but it was too late. The police came and pulled them out and covered them with a sheet and I just kept puking into the bushes, blood all over me, my blood and theirs together. I kept thinking that it should be two different colors, you know? That I had no right to have the same color blood as they had.”

She sat there on the edge of the bed and stared out the window at the darkness. He didn’t move, didn’t even wipe the tears that wet his face. They were cool on his cheeks. Below them the river still ran, softer now, underneath a blanket of stars.

She shifted on the bed, a little closer to him. “I went out earlier to look at the stars,” she said quietly, “and I walked around the square for a while in the cold. It was strange being out there alone. I hadn’t really been alone since this whole thing began, you know? It gave me a chance to think. I thought about everything. I thought about why we were here. I didn’t really figure anything out—at least I don’t think so—but I realized that I didn’t want the drugs anymore. That’s strange, isn’t it? I mean, only a couple of weeks ago I couldn’t go a couple of days without a fix. And now…nothing. I felt clean, healed. New.”

“It’s not possible.”

“I know it’s not. But it’s the way I feel, all the same. So I decided that it didn’t matter
why
we were here, just that we
were
. The rest of it will come. That’s when I realized that I had let go of my past, all of it. For good. My brother’s death, my life in Miami. Everything. Those things don’t matter anymore to me. They have no power over me. You have to let it go, Billy. It’s not easy, I know, but you have to stop punishing yourself for something that happened years ago. Maybe that’s part of this whole thing, maybe now’s your chance to make up for everything. Our chance. But you have to accept what happened and don’t
waste another second, because another second may be all we’ve got.”

“I wish I could,” he whispered, and in that moment he meant every word. “I really wish I could.”

He sat there, rigid, unable to move. Then he felt her hand on his arm, cool and smooth and soft, and when he turned to her she was crying, and the look on her face was so painful he could hardly bear to witness it.

“Why won’t you let me in?” she whispered. “You talk like you want me to understand, but you don’t, not really. Can’t you see I don’t give a damn about anybody else, that I don’t care how we got here or what happened in the past? I feel like we’ve known each other forever, Billy. Maybe that’s part of what we’re going through together, but it doesn’t really matter. Can’t you see…don’t you understand that I’m falling in love with you?”

He felt the muscles in his arm tense, and resisted the urge to pull away, all the time thinking,
my God, how could this
happen, she’s just confused, that’s all
…

Her hand reached his face, cupped his cheek, turned it toward her gently. He felt her warm breath and then she was kissing him, the wet salty taste of her tears mixing with the softness of her lips, and she was whispering softly, “My poor, sweet Billy, stop killing yourself, let me help you let go, can’t you feel that it’s right, that we’re meant to be together?”

And he did feel it, a great loosening within him like a dam about to burst, and that scared him more than anything else. He felt like he was losing control of the one thing that had kept him going, the anger and self-loathing that was so strong and ran so deep it had been the only thing keeping him alive. Knowing that only by remembering, playing it over and over again in his mind, would he truly pay for what had happened to those two children and their mother.
My
own private hell, baby, bought and paid for
.