Exit Point (3 page)

Love balloons inside my chest. It is like I am seeing my sister for the first time. My
love for her is a warm, bursting thing, a strange and unusual thing. I don’t think I have ever felt love this big before.

I whisper Amy’s name. She does not look up. I raise my voice just a little, automatically glancing at the teacher. Then I remember. No one can hear me.

“Amy,” I say in a loud, powerful voice.

Her eyes flicker. She sighs and stops writing. Then she starts up again.

I recall Wade’s words:
It takes skill to communicate with the living, and the living have to be willing to see the signs.

Obviously I lack the skill to send the right sign.

I feel a familiar snap of impatience with myself. Then I hear Wade’s voice inside my head.

Relax
, he says.
It’s not like you have to be anywhere
.

Yeah, right, I mutter, staring hard at Amy. I wonder who she’s scared of. I speak again. “Who’s bugging you, Amy? Tell me, okay?”

Slowly, like it is the most natural thing to do, I slide inside Amy’s mind. She is writing
the words of a story, but she is not concentrating. Her thoughts are a crisscross tangle. She misses me. She is scared she will die too. She is angry. At me for leaving, at Mom for being so sad, at Dad for pretending not to be. A piece of Hannah sits inside her mind too. Hannah has made her feel better about my death. I am grateful for that. Yet underneath everything is the blackness. The fear.

I stare at it, hard. It spills its poison through me in the same way blood flows through arteries.

Amy isn’t scared.

Amy is terrified.

And when I see who she is terrified of, I am sickened. I am shocked.

And then I am there beside him.

The cockpit glows with a million buttons, along the walls, in front of me, even on the ceiling. I recognize the airspeed indicator and the altimeter because once, when I was little, he gave me a tour of a plane. Outside the window, I see red lights flashing on the nose tip, wisps of clouds
trailing by. It is loud in the cockpit, and warm. But there is a thick, oily
something
hanging in the air that scares me cold.

It is the living, breathing presence of evil.

And it is coming from the rat bastard to my left.

Uncle Herb.

“Throttle back the engine,” Uncle Herb tells his co-pilot. “Prepare for landing.” He is annoyed. I don’t need to see the thin set of his lips to know it. He picks up a hand-held radio and speaks into it. “Ladies and gentlemen, Captain Underwood here. Due to heavy fog in Seattle, SeaTac airport is temporarily closed. We are being re-routed to Portland International Airport. On behalf of United Airlines, I apologize for any inconvenience.”

I register his words, but mostly I look into his familiar blue eyes. There’s a flatness behind them that stretches forever. I shudder. How come I never saw it before?

“Anyone who wishes to deplane in Portland and make other arrangements to get
to Seattle,” Uncle Herb continues, “please alert a flight attendant. Thank you.”

“We’re about eight minutes away,” the co-pilot tells him when he hangs up the radio.

Uncle Herb nods, busies himself with one of the control panels. “The tower expects us to be grounded overnight,” he says. “I was supposed to watch Brad’s basketball game. Son of a
bitch
.”

The air grows thicker and oilier with his curse. But Uncle Herb isn’t thinking of his son at all. He is thinking of Amy. She is going to the game too. He has plans for her.

Plans no adult should ever have for a kid.

For a little girl.

For
my
sister.

His mind slithers and crawls in a million ugly directions.

I don’t want to know, but his evil is too strong for me. It sucks me in. I see everything.

Too much.

Uncle Herb as a child. A teenager. An adult. Thinking perverted thoughts. Doing
disgusting things. Horrified, I try to pull back, to look away; I can’t.

I see him abuse Amy. I watch him cut up her favorite bear, Pookie, and bury it by his hot tub. I feel Amy’s terror as Herb says he will do the same to her if she tells.

But what scares me most is that I see the future.

I see how I was supposed to stop him. And how difficult it would be.

I see myself telling. I hear my father yelling, my mother crying. No one can believe— no one
wants
to believe—that Captain Herb Underwood is sexually abusing little girls. That he is sexually abusing Amy.

The family is torn apart. I am responsible.

Suddenly I know this is why I died. This is the future I did not want to face.

Instead I left Amy to face a future without me in it. A future with the rat bastard.

Unless I can figure out a way to stop him.

Chapter Five

“What do you mean, you won’t help Amy?”

“Not
won’t
, can’t. My job is to help you.” Wade sits across from me. The eerie glow from the sky has turned his frizzy brown hair into a halo around his head.

We are back in the round, white room. I don’t know how I got here, and here is still weird. The sky still vibrates and colors still quiver and ping, but I don’t care.

I’m happy to be out of that cockpit.

But I am not happy with what Wade tells me. “You can’t let that happen to Amy,” I tell him. “She’s just a little girl. You have to
do
something!”

My voice disturbs the soothing calm of the round place. The robed ones approach with their colors. Wade sends them away.

“I can’t change things,” he tells me. “People have free will. Besides, Amy has her own guides. Two, in fact.”

Wade sends pictures into my mind.

I see Amy’s guides. I know they are there because she is facing a lot in her life. I also know that if I stuck around and lived, I would have earned a second guide. And I would have needed it. Because I would be helping Hannah raise our handicapped son. And I would be revealing Uncle Herb as the rat bastard he really is.

Gran is right. The next two years would have been the hardest of my life.

But I would have faced my fears. I would have grown up. And I would have helped Amy.

Instead I was afraid to try.

Shame burns. I do not look at Wade. Of course it’s stupid. He knows what I am thinking. But I do not want to see the disappointment in his eyes.

“It’s time to move on, Logan. To accept responsibility for your actions.”

Wade wants me to go before the Council, do my life review and cut my ties to the living. But how can I leave Amy?

“There’s nothing you can do for her now,” Wade tells me.

He is right.

No one would have wanted to believe the truth about Uncle Herb when I was alive. They’re sure not going to believe me now that I’m dead.

Which leaves me dead out of options.

“Oh puuleese!” Gran is back in a burst of gold light. Her energy is so strong that the few robed ones who have been hovering nearby fade into the mist. She wears pink sweats. A cigarette dangles from her mouth. I know she has come from the track. “You can still help Amy. It’s just going to be a little harder, that’s all.”

I don’t
do
hard. Even when I swim, I favor the crawl. It’s the easiest and most efficient stroke for competing.

Narrowing her eyes, Gran turns to Wade. “I don’t suppose you’ve told Logan the real reason you want him to move on? How you’ll benefit from his decision?”

Wade’s angelic smile is at odds with the blue and red snakes that crawl up his arms. “No, but I’m sure you’ll fill him in.”

“When you move on, Wade’s job is done,” Gran says as she swings back to me. “He retires. No more following you around trying to make you do the right thing.”

Gran makes it sound like a life sentence.

“It was,” Wade reminds me with a chuckle. Even Gran smirks.

“How can you joke around at a time like this? Amy is in trouble.” I feel the oily stink of evil that lurks inside Uncle Herb. The thought of getting close to it again sends a cold shiver down my spine. “Gran, you have to do something! Aunt Susan is your daughter. Go back and tell her what her husband is doing.”

“I’ve been dead too long,” Gran says. “Besides, Susan won’t listen to me. I didn’t like Herb from the moment he set his slimy foot inside our house. I always told her there was something twisted about him.”

She hadn’t liked my dad either.

“True enough,” Gran admits. “He’s too much of a perfectionist.”

It is true. And with me gone, Amy will be in for more of Dad’s criticisms.

And more of Uncle Herb’s attention.

I love my little sister. I love her too much to leave her for the rat bastard. Except evil is more powerful than I ever thought it could be. I don’t want to face it again.

“Oh for heaven’s sakes, Logan, don’t be such a weenie.” Gran puffs impatiently on her cigarette. “You’re more powerful than Herb any day of the week. Go back and haunt the guy, I don’t care. Just stop him from hurting Amy.”

Wade looks at me. He knows what I am thinking. Either I go forward and face the Council or I go back and face the evil.

Both choices suck.

Especially for someone like me who is used to taking the easy way out.

Suddenly I am struck by a thought. “If this is heaven or something close to it, then that means there’s a God.”

Wade and Gran nod. For once they agree on something.

“And I assume that God is good?”

They nod a second time.

“Then why would a good God let a bad thing happen to a girl like Amy?”

Gran and Wade exchange glances. Then Gran speaks. “I don’t have all the answers, Logan. All I know is that you were supposed to help Amy when you were alive and you messed with the Big Plan. The Council has given me permission to come here and talk some sense into you. If you don’t get down there and fix things, Amy’s going to pay the price.”

I have no choice at all. Amy is what matters.

“You said it takes skill to communicate with the living,” I tell Wade, “so show me how to do it.”

Love destroys evil.

It will also help me communicate.

Wade has told me this.

I am in my dining room, and dinner is being served. Cutlery clinks against plates; Dad pours water into glasses. We—they—are having store-bought lasagna and bean salad from the deli. I smell tomato sauce, garlic bread. I know the neighbor brought the meal over; Mom has no interest in cooking.

Slipping into my chair, I concentrate on the love I feel for Amy, for my parents, for Hannah. I pull it around me like a cape I wore when I pretended to be Superman as a kid.

I want to be Superman now.

Or at least alive.

Instead I’m a dead guy trying to stop a live guy from hurting my sister.

Mom pushes her food around her plate. Her appetite died with me. She doesn’t know how to live now that I’m gone. The only thing keeping her a little bit sane is Amy. “How was school today?” she asks.

Amy shrugs. “Fine.” She does not want to talk.

Come on, Amy!
I will my sister to open her mouth and tell our parents everything Uncle Herb has done to her in the last eight months. Instead she pushes a piece of pasta around her plate and refuses to say a word.

I want to shake her, yell in her ear, slam my fist on the table and make everyone jump.

But I can’t.

Just like I can’t materialize in my chair and tell them I’m okay but Herb isn’t.

Dead people do materialize. Wade has told me this. But it’s rare. Done under special circumstances. And only if a person has earned the right. Earning the right doesn’t come down to how much money you’ve got when you die. It comes down to how much love you gave away when you were alive.

Wade forced me to think hard about that. After a while, I had to face it: The only kind of love I thought of giving away when I was alive involved Hannah and our couch. I haven’t earned the right to do much of anything, never mind materialize.

But listen, it’s not like the dead are completely useless. We can touch people’s minds, go into their dreams, create wind.

No, not that kind of wind. The breeze kind.

I was disappointed until Wade pointed out that dreams can change lives and breezes can grow to be pretty powerful.

I just hoped mine would be powerful enough to stop a rat bastard. And to let my parents know I was okay.

“John, in accounting, gave me tickets to hear the Village Voice choir in Leavenworth next weekend,” Dad says before shoving bean salad into his mouth. He is stuffing his feelings, pretending life is normal. “I thought we could go and do a little skiing, maybe wander the village. Herb offered to watch Amy overnight.”

Of course he did. The slime bucket.

Mom tenses. She doesn’t want to leave the house, my things. Amy’s stomach flips. She can’t stay there, not again. Dad repeats himself, rattles on about Leavenworth. He is desperate to get away, to forget my death happened.

I concentrate on love and a breeze. The love is supposed to make it easier for the living to see the signs. The breeze is supposed to knock the water jug over, or at least shake the water enough to slosh on the table.

I can’t even create a ripple.

“It would be good for us to get away,” Dad continues. “Herb says the village is really beautiful at this time of year.”

Panic radiates from Amy. She can hardly swallow, she is so scared. I stare at the water jug and try again.

Nothing.

Dad scrapes up the last of his lasagna. “I’ll book the hotel.”

That’s when I see it. A single salt crystal rolling across the table. It stops at the water jug.

It’s hardly the breeze I wanted.

And it’s hardly enough to stop a rat bastard.

I have my work cut out for me.

Chapter Six

That night, I go into Amy’s dream.

Wade has told me how to do it.

I cannot make a dream for her. I have to arrive in one she makes herself. And I must slide in sideways, all natural, like I belong there.

But I also have to make her remember.

I am so desperate to do it right that I am almost afraid to try. Gran’s words mock me.
Don’t be a weenie, Logan.