Fragile Darkness (23 page)

I'm not sure why I looked away, maybe because the music was pounding faster, the tempo increasingly frenzied, or maybe because the truth reached inside of me, and scraped.

Choices.

Chase should not have been at Six Flags. We'd broken up. He'd walked away. And, crushed by his inability to trust me, I'd chosen not to go after him. I'd chosen to let the air clear and see what tomorrow brought. I'd chosen
not
to tell him my aunt was missing or that I'd finally figured out what I'd been seeing in my dreams.

I'd chosen all that, never imagining that instead of calling me or confronting me,
he
would choose to follow me.

Such simple, seemingly benign choices, but for the rest of my life I'd wonder what would have happened if I'd chosen differently. If I'd called him after learning my aunt was missing. If I'd let him know about Six Flags.

Would he have stayed away, stayed safe?

Or would he have made the exact same choice? Would he have gone anyway, wanting to be there …

“There he is!” shrieked the little girls in front of me as a masked horseman emerged along the parade route. Concealed from head to toe, with elegant gold robes and a feathery plume jutting up from his military-style helmet, he slowly surveyed the masses.

“Sometimes you have to let go and trust,” Dylan said. “You can't yank the sun from the sky just because it burns.”

The words whispered through me, even as the thrum of music drowned out everything else. I turned, the jam of the crowd locking us so close I had to look up to see him.

He answered before I could ask the question.

“My grandfather,” he said, steadying me with a hand to my back. “He has a saying for everything.”

For a second I could see them, a young Dylan with his wise, Navajo grandfather. It explained a lot, the things he said that I couldn't imagine any other eighteen-year-old saying, and his freaky sixth sense, not necessarily psychic, but more like he existed in his own harmony with the world around him.

Three more masked riders appeared, one in a uniform of purple, one green, one gold. Matching feather plumes swayed from their helmets.

“Is he still alive?” I asked.

“In New Mexico.”

“Do you see him often?”

“Summers.”

I could tell that wasn't often enough. “So does it work?” I asked. “Letting go, trusting?”

Against me, his body stiffened. “I trust.”

He didn't say anything about letting go.

Around us the crowd bulged, a group of guys mouthing off, shoving their way directly in front.

“Hey!” Victoria shouted, but Trey was already going down on a knee so she could climb onto his shoulders. “Here comes the king!” she called.

I squeezed in front of Dylan, watching the first float, a huge, ornate cake, roll by. The King of Carnival waved from an elaborate throne. Children in glittery gold robes with massive white feathers stood along the sides, tossing beads of purple and gold and green.

Victoria waved her arms, snagging a handful still banded together.

Dylan caught a second strand, and draped them around my neck. His body was alert, ready, but when his eyes met mine, warmth glimmered in the silver.

I smiled back before I realized what I was doing.

One float after another rounded the corner, a giant cow surrounded by masked chefs, a huge beehive surrounded by flowers, a castle swarming with pink and purple fairies, all throwing beads and coins and cups as fast as they could.

Children scrambled into the street. Feet stomped down on hands. Perched on ladders, women (beautiful and not so beautiful) did their own version of cage dancing in exchange for throws.

It was easy to lose track of time.

With a military-style marching band rounding the corner, Dylan was draping another strand of beads around my neck when I noticed Victoria stop shoulder-dancing. She stopped everything, actually. Stopped cheering, smiling. Stopped moving.

I turned in the direction of her stare, and saw Lucas.

Dressed in street clothes, he stood not twenty feet away, blasting her with his eyes.

Edging closer, I whispered in Trey's ear. “Lucas is here.”

He tensed, glancing not at Lucas but at Victoria. I didn't hear what he said, but I saw her shake her head. Then the most amazing thing happened: she lifted her chin and turned back to the parade, completely blowing her ex off.

Proud of her, I glanced at my phone, not paying attention to the crowd swelling against me. Until I heard the voice.

“Trinity.”

I saw her eyes first, once all sparkly and mocking, full of confidence and challenge and hate. Now they were stripped down and bare, exactly like they'd been when we'd both said good-bye to Chase.

“Jessica.” My mouth got really dry. She was the last person I'd expected to see.

“I thought that was you,” she said with a tight smile. “When I saw Victoria's check-in, I was hoping you'd be here.”

Vaguely I was aware of Dylan turning to look, and Victoria scrambling down from Trey's shoulders.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I wanted to make sure you're okay.”

Everything kinda wobbled.

“I-I saw that stuff on Victoria's Facebook,” she said as a group of her cheerleader friends, minus Amber, danced over.

Twirling a black and gold parasol, one of them, Teri, hooked her arm with Jessica's. “Quit wandering off!” she sang-shouted. “It's Quarter time!”

Jessica's eyes, so much more alive than only a few minutes before, met mine. “I gotta go,” she said. “But … be careful, okay?” And then she was gone, disappearing with her friends among a sea of jesters.

Not sure what to make of that, I glanced at my phone and saw the text that had not been there three minutes before. From Will.

I'm in the Quarter.

Come alone.

Text me and I'll tell you where.

I looked up at the swirl of color and motion and found Dylan standing in that unnaturally still way of his, watching. And without a word I knew he'd read the message and had no intention of letting me go anywhere by myself.

 

TWENTY-THREE

I grabbed him by the hand and pressed close, so he could hear me. “You have to let me do this. It's the only way.”

Through the slits of his Zorro mask, his eyes burned darker than before, and without a word, I knew he was seeing the video clip all over again, of me stumbling through the darkness.

“I'll be careful,” I promised, using my eyes to emphasize the words. “I won't take any chances.”

He dragged me back from the sidewalk, toward the center of the circle where the crowd didn't press so hard. “Ask him where.”

I did.

Will's response came seconds later.

Not yet.

Not until you're closer.

“Dylan,” I said quietly. “Don't make this harder than it has to be. Don't back me into a corner. You have to trust that I'll be careful.”

“It's not about trust.”

I kept my eyes on his. “No,” I said. “It's about letting go.”

His eyes flashed.

“And that's what I need you to do.” I made myself step back. It shouldn't have been hard. I had to do this alone. I knew that. It was what Will wanted, and Will was the one in trouble. “Let go and trust.”

The warmth of Dylan's body fell away, leaving the breeze to swirl between us.

“Where's your phone?” I asked.

Watching me, he slid it from his pocket.

With another step back, I tapped out his number. “Two minutes,” I mouthed.

His phone started to ring.

“Then you can follow.”

Never looking away, he pushed the answer button.

“You can hear everything,” I said over the hard slam of my heart. “It'll be like you're right there with me.”

He lifted the phone to his face. “No, it won't.”

Through the phone, the words, so raw and threadbare, scraped in ways I didn't want to feel. “If anything happens…”

“I'll be there.”

It was all I could do to breathe. Because I knew he would. Dylan would be there.

He always was.

Not trusting myself to stand there one second longer, I turned and darted into the crowd.

One minute, two, it didn't matter, not with the swell of people cramming from all directions. Seconds, a heartbeat. That's all I needed to lose myself.

All it took to change everything.

“Talk to me,” Dylan said.

My heart kicked, hard. “About what?”

“Anything. Just let me hear your voice.”

Seven words. That's all they were. Words through a phone. But with them the racing inside me quieted, and I had something to hold onto. “Tell me more about your grandfather.”

“What do you want to know?”

Up ahead, the parade continued along St. Charles, toward Canal Street. I darted right, away from the noise and the congestion. “Anything. What's he like?”

“My dad calls him the old tree,” he said, and I couldn't help the quick smile that flashed through me. “But to me he's more like a mountain.”

An intersection waited up ahead, fairly quiet given the chaos behind me, but in my mind I saw the starkly beautiful peaks of the Rockies, jutting against the vivid blue of a Colorado sky. “Why?”

“Because he's always there.”

Always.
“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Four weeks ago.”

And for a second there, it was all I could do to breathe. Four weeks ago was two days …
after.

“Did you go see him?” I made myself ask.

“No, he came to me.”

I walked faster.

“That's when he told me I couldn't pull the sun from the sky.”

Just because it burned.

I started to run. I didn't know why. I only knew that walking was too slow, and Will was waiting, and I had to talk to him, about bliss and the things he knew and the disturbing X-ray shadows, and the words from my journal:
Time running out.

I sprinted onto an eerily quiet Magazine Street, shoving at the hair blowing into my face. “Where are you?” I asked breathlessly.

“Not far.”

I twisted around, scanning the broken sidewalk behind me. “It's so quiet,” I said. “Like everyone in the world is at the parade.”

“Not everyone,” he said, and with that I swung back toward the jumble of shops crammed along the famous shopping district.

“Trinity.”

Cars lined the streets. Shadows slipped from alleys. “Yeah?”

“You don't have to run,” he said and with the quiet words, I would have sworn he was beside me again. With me. “Slow down and take a deep breath.”

Somehow I did.

“But don't stop talking,” he added, steady, always so steady.

I scrambled for another question. “What do you do … when you're not helping me?”

We'd never talked about that, because he never stuck around after danger fell into normalcy.

“I work construction, and I'm taking some online college courses.”

Last month, he'd told me he'd had to drop out. “In what?”

“Criminal justice.”

My smile just kinda happened. That explained a lot.

“Did you…” I hesitated, not sure if I should ask. Then I took a leap of faith, or recklessness, and did. “Did you ever tell me not to put a dragonfly in a jar?”

He laughed. “Yeah.”

“You were only eight,” I said against the play of memory. “Was that another of those Native American things?” Why he always seemed so in tune with the world around him.

“No.” His voice roughened. “There's no age requirement for knowing what happens when something can't breathe.”

And then the hitch was mine.

He'd been eight when his mother died, had that already happened when he came to see me that summer? Had he and Jim held all that inside? Was that why he knew what happened when you couldn't breathe?

“What was the best thing that ever happened to you?” I detoured.

I think he laughed. It was a soft sound, something garbled from his throat, and for a heartbeat I could see the silver glow of his eyes.

“Hasn't happened yet,” he murmured.

His voice was all smoky, as if even though it hadn't happened, he knew
exactly
what the best would be.

I didn't let myself think about that. Instead I fished for another question.

“What about the worst?” I rolled along, not thinking, not thinking about all the things that littered his past, until the question already lay between us.

The edge of his breath roughened the quiet, dragging seconds into eternity. Maybe more. I didn't think he was going to answer.

Then he did.

“When I had to leave you beside the roller coaster,” he said woodenly, “then answered my phone a few minutes later and heard you screaming my name.”

The words sliced through me like shards of glass, slicing away little bits and pieces of me everywhere they touched.

“
And hearing him,
LaSalle, threatening you, and knowing how far away I was.”

Everything inside me tightened.

“And running,” he said, and with the word I could hear his breath coming faster, harder, as if he was living it all over again.

Running.

Shouting.

“Hearing you scream, hearing
him,
what was happening—and knowing I should never have left you alone.”

Oh, God.

Oh, God.

“And that I might not get there in time.”

And then I was running, too, not through memory but across Canal Street to the edge of the French Quarter.

“
That's
why I was there the other night,” he added roughly, and I felt it, the words and his voice, shred all the way through me. “Why I can't let you try to help Will by yourself. Because I'm not going to turn my back on you again.”