Breath (11 page)

Lex sucked on his pacifier.

“I’ll take your thoughtful silence as complete consent.”

Xander settled into the rocker-glider, made sure Lex was propped up on his lap, and then opened the book and began reading to his brother.

“Big rig. Cement mixer. Pickup truck,” he said, pointing to the picture. “Remember, for a pickup truck, you need a pickup line. Repeat after me: ‘Hey, baby, come here often?’
”

Lex dropped the pacifier and said, “Bbbbbbpbt.”

“Very good,” said Xander, scooping up the pacifier. He frowned at it, decided that being on the carpet for two seconds wasn’t enough time for deadly bacteria to infest it, then popped it back into the baby’s mouth.

Lex spat it out again.

“Come on, kid. Give me a break.” He put the pacifier into Lex’s mouth, and Lex spat it right back out.

The brothers stared at each other.

“You know you’re a pain, right?”

Lex began to cry.

“Aw, come on, I didn’t mean it. What, you want a bottle, maybe? Is that what this is about?”

Lex cried harder.

“I’ll take that to mean, ‘Yes, you idiot big brother, I’m hungry because I wore most of my mashed peas instead of eating them, feed me now.’ Come on,” Xander said, and sighed, picking up the squirming, squalling mass that was his brother. “Let’s get a bottle ready.”

He brought Lex into the kitchen and plopped him into the highchair, strapping him in and settling the tray into place. The baby began to play with the toys affixed to the tray.

“Let’s hear it for a short attention span,” Xander muttered. He began to prepare the bottle. “So what do you think: Should I ask Riley to come by tonight?”

In his highchair, Lex kicked his feet.

“Yeah, I know,” said Xander, mixing in the formula. “I’m wrecked, and my head’s been all weird. Seriously weird. Like, losing time weird. Blacking out, Ted says. Thinks I’m drinking too much. I think he’s stupid. And he smells. Even so,” Xander said, screwing the bottle top into place, “maybe I should take it easy tonight. Maybe text Riley instead of make face-to-face plans. Go to bed early. What do you think?”

Lex banged on the highchair tray.

“Yeah, it’s hard for me to think on an empty stomach too.”

He gave Lex the bottle. Xander watched his brother drink, and he smiled, thinking about how sweet it must be to live in the now, to want only the basic comforts—food when hungry, warmth when chilly, a place to sleep—and not have to worry about friends hurting him and . . .

He blinked. Where had
that
come from?

Xander dug at the thought. Why would he think that one of his friends was hurting him? He remembered Suzie’s odd text, remembered Izzy’s conversation with him—well, no, he remembered part of it, something about how Izzy had heard shouting at the party—but that was it.

Wasn’t it?

Ted at his front door, looking exhausted and wane.

Xander frowned. Was there something about Ted . . . ?

Lex pushed away the bottle. “Bbbbbpbtt.”

“Yeah. I hear you.” Distracted, he burped his brother, and then cursed when the kid spat up all over his pajamas and Xander’s shirt. One of these days, he’d remember to get a bib on the baby.

After the third pajama change for the night, he got Lex settled into his crib. “Bedtime, kid,” said Xander. “When you’re a little older, we’ll talk about how to wheedle Mom and Dad into letting you stay up later. Love you. Sweet dreams.”

The baby blinked up at him. Xander couldn’t be sure because of the pacifier, but he thought Lex was smiling at him.

He turned on the baby monitor, then quietly walked out of the nursery and shut the door. He tiptoed his way to his bedroom and threw himself down onto the bed. He was exhausted. Taking care of a baby was hard! No wonder his parents went to bed practically at nine o’clock. And here he’d thought it was just because they were old.

He glanced at the clock—not even eight p.m.—and then he grabbed his cell phone. It was completely dead. With a sigh, he plugged it in. He really had to be out of it to forget to charge his phone.

There were seven texts waiting for him. Most were from Suzie, who wanted to know if he was all right. And one was from Izzy, wanting to know the same thing.

Xander stared at the texts, and he wondered what exactly had happened last night at Marcie’s party that had everyone so concerned about him.

Maybe he’d had more to drink last night than he’d thought. He hoped he didn’t do something completely stupid. As tempted as he was to ask Suzie or Izzy or Ted for details, he realized that he didn’t want to know.

Some things were better left forgotten.

He laughed uneasily. Talk about melodramatic. Ted would have been impressed. Smiling, shaking his head, he texted Riley.

Whatcha doing?

He hit Send and fired up a computer game while waiting for a response.

Three lives later, Riley still hadn’t texted back.

Xander checked on Lex, found the baby dead asleep, and then went back to his room. He thought about eating, but he had no appetite.

Riley still hadn’t gotten back to him.

Something dark and cold wormed its way into his brain, and he wondered yet again what had happened at the party last night. Did it have something to do with Riley?

A sound like a screech of tires.

He flinched, waiting to hear the telltale crash, but there was no impact. A near miss, maybe.

He blew out a breath. He was being ridiculous. So what that he hadn’t heard from Riley yet? Not everyone was glued to a cell phone. Maybe Riley was in a place with spotty reception. Maybe Riley’s phone was off, or the battery had run out, like Xander’s had.

Maybe, maybe, maybe. Tons of maybes. A world of maybes.

Sometimes, a hint of
maybe
was all that mattered.

His head began to throb, so he grabbed a bottle of aspirin from the bathroom medicine cabinet, then went into the kitchen and poured himself a glass of water. He’d have a quiet night tonight, he told himself as he downed the aspirin, would go to bed early. He’d been stressed out and sleeping poorly, even before Lex’s morning wakeup howls had begun in earnest a month ago.

Xander was sure the stress was due to his decision to drop Carnegie Mellon. When he had turned the school down, that had been ugly. Colleges, as it turned out, didn’t like it when you reneged on early admission.

And he’d had to keep it quiet for so long. He hadn’t said a word to his parents, let alone to Riley or his friends.

It had all been worth it—the lying, the silence, the stress. The sleepless nights.

He was going to Stanford to be with Riley.

It wasn’t the best art school, not like Carnegie Mellon or Yale or any of those, and it was insanely expensive; he didn’t have any scholarships, and the thought of how he was going to foot the bill was enough to give him a minor heart attack. But he’d figure it out. Stanford was where he was supposed to be—because Riley would be there.

He just had to figure out when to share the news, and how to do it. His folks were going to be mad, but eventually, they’d come around. The two of them had fallen in love in high school, even though they dated other people in college and didn’t get married until their midtwenties. Xander knew all this because he’d heard their love story plenty of times. His parents would understand that when it was love, you had to listen to your heart and not be tied up by your brain. All the planning, all the hopes for the future—none of that mattered, not when it came to love.

Love didn’t conquer all; love
was
all. Love was everything that mattered.

He’d do anything for Riley Jones.

Absently rubbing his head, he drank the rest of the water. Between the stress over his secret college plans and his choppy sleep, he was a bit of a mess. No wonder he was having so-called blackouts, and never mind the drinking. All he needed was some quality sleep, then everything would be fine.

Sleep, and figuring out when to tell Riley he was also going to Stanford, that they didn’t have to worry about a long-distance relationship.

They were going to have a happily ever after—starting right now, he decided, setting down his water glass. He’d tell Riley everything. No more waiting for the right time, waiting to come up with the right way to say it. He’d just blurt it out.

He marched back to his room and checked his phone.

Still no text from Riley.

No matter; he wanted to say it, not text it. He punched in Riley’s number, then hung up when he got voicemail. This wasn’t voicemail news.

Nuts. Looked like he had to wait after all.

Sighing, Xander went to the window and glanced out. He liked looking at the cityscape at dusk, just as the sun was beginning its slow descent from today to tonight. Granted, he didn’t care for being thirty stories up, but he was behind glass, safe. So he watched the colors play across the sky—the blues darkening and bleeding into purples streaked with pink like the air had gone punk. Clouds stretched lazily as they striped the sun. Xander looked, amazed by how easily something so radiant could be muted, subdued. Molten gold marred by cotton white, framed by twilight skies whispering promises of starlight and first wishes.

Xander made a wish, made it with all his heart.

The sun, still bright behind its barrier of clouds, stung his eyes. He blinked and turned to the right, catching a partial view of the balcony off the living room.

And he blinked again.

A man was sitting on the balcony ledge.

(the Pale Rider)

Xander’s eyes watered, and he frantically wiped away his tears.

There was no one on the balcony.

Of course there wasn’t, he told himself, and so what that his heart was screaming and his head was throbbing and it felt like he couldn’t breathe? There was no one on his balcony. The very thought of it—

(the Pale Rider comes)

—was ridiculous.

Panicked, and feeling stupid for his panic, he grabbed the baby monitor and ran into the living room, over to the glass door that opened to the balcony.

And there he saw a man in green and white striped pajamas sitting on the rail. The man was facing away from Xander, his long blond hair catching the wind and whipping around his shoulders.

In Xander’s mind, a dead man made of shadow whispered his name.

He squeezed his eyes shut—

***

—but he sees the glaring lights and a dark shadow reaching for him and there’s a face in the shadow a face made of shadow and he screams because there’s a voice whispering his name and telling him to kiss them all goodbye because today’s the day the world ends and—

***

“The Pale Rider comes,” Xander whispered.

He opened his eyes.

He saw a man perched on his balcony railing, ready to jump off the high board and plunge thirty stories into the cold. And he saw beyond that, saw that the man was not a man at all. He saw a ghost, like the blue nudes—trapped in a moment, frozen in rage and grief.

His heart thudding in his ears, Xander approached the glass door of the balcony. He unlatched it and slid it open.

“Hey,” he said, his voice sounding tinny and far away. “What’re you doing?”

The man’s head and shoulders bobbed, as if he was silently laughing. “Contemplating.” His voice was cold and deep, and Xander felt it echo in his bones.

“Okay,” Xander said, feeling very small. “Contemplating what?”

“The end of everything.”

“Yeah, I sort of got that, given that you’re sitting on the balcony rail. If people want to admire the view, they tend to do that from a window.”

“I’m not a person,” said the blond man.

“Yeah, I got that, too.”

And he did. Xander recognized him for who, for what, he truly was. He wasn’t sure how he knew, but he didn’t question it. It felt right.

Just as the blond man sitting right there on the railing felt wrong—tragically, horrifically wrong.

Something was going to happen. Something bad.

Without knowing why he was doing it, Xander stepped forward. This close, there was no way to mistake the blond figure for a person; there was a presence about him, something alien that spotlighted his humanity as a mask, a disguise. Part of Xander wanted to retreat—actually, his brain was screaming at him to get the hell away and not look back—but he kept walking until he was next to the figure. He carefully placed the baby monitor on the floor, and then he leaned over to rest his elbows on the railing. He was terrified of being so close to the edge—it would be so easy to just lean down and let gravity take him.

But this wasn’t about him at all.

Xander looked over his shoulder at the man who wasn’t a man. He was thin with scruffy hair and beard stubble, and if he was nervous about being so high up, he hid it well. Then again, someone like him probably didn’t have to worry about accidentally overbalancing. Xander, a longtime Nirvana fan, wondered for a moment over the similarity of the man’s features to those of a certain dead alternative rock star, and he distinctly thought,
Kurt Cobain is about to take a swan dive off my balcony.

Except Kurt Cobain was dead, and the figure sitting on the balcony railing was not him and never had been; Xander knew this without understanding how he knew it. He also knew that the figure next to him was in pain.

Pain was something he could understand.

“So,” he said gamely. “Want to talk about it?”

“Not really,” said Death.

“Okay,” Xander said. “Mind if I stay here?”

“Knock yourself out.”

That wasn’t too far from the truth; Xander was already feeling lightheaded enough to faint. People weren’t meant to be this high up.

As if picking up on his fear, a gust tore across the balcony. Xander clenched the railing and squeezed his eyes shut and prayed for the wind to die. He had Death right next to him, so he didn’t think his prayer was that unrealistic.

He counted to ten, realized the wind had, in fact, stopped blowing, and then opened his eyes.

From beneath his mop of blond hair, Death was peering at him.

Xander felt his cheeks heat. Sheepishly, he said, “I’m afraid of heights.”