Ghost Moon (23 page)

‘‘I’ll find Chloe and bring her home,’’ Olivia volunteered. To her surprise, her voice sounded almost normal. Right now, the best thing she could do for Callie—and Seth—was take care of Chloe.

Seth and Phillip both looked at her.

‘‘Take my car.’’ Without arguing, Seth dug in his pocket for the keys. He glanced at Phillip as he handed them to Olivia.

‘‘Give me a second here, will you?’’ Seth said.

Phillip and Seth exchanged a purely masculine look.

‘‘Oh. Sure.’’ Phillip nodded, the movement jerky, glanced again at Olivia, and withdrew.

Seth turned back to her. His gaze met hers, and his mouth twisted almost wryly.

‘‘You okay?’’ he asked.

Olivia nodded. ‘‘Fine. Go.’’ If he said he was sorry, she thought, she would want to die.

‘‘I’m going’’ was what he said. Then he leaned over to drop a quick, hard kiss on her mouth. ‘‘I’ll call you from the hospital. Try not to worry: I doubt if it’s anything serious. And don’t forget about Chloe.’’

‘‘No, I won’t.’’

Her lips quivered from that kiss. Even as she spoke, Olivia found that she was talking to his back. Seconds later he was gone, the door swinging shut behind him, and she was left standing there in the boys’ locker room, alone.

CHAPTER 33

No! GO FIND YOUR OWN PLACE! YOU CAN’T hide in here with us! You’re too fat! Your big butt will stick out, and we’ll get caught for sure!’’ The two girls giggled, blocking the way into their hiding place—a narrow space between a central air-conditioning unit and the stucco wall of the school—with a flattened cardboard box.

Left alone outside that coveted hiding spot, Sara backed away. Her lower lip quivered, but she bit down hard on it and refused to allow herself to cry. She should be used to it by now, but being called fat really hurt. Especially by Chloe, who was supposed to be her friend.

‘‘Ready or not, here we come!’’ Eric Albright and Jeff Stolz were ‘‘it,’’ and their yell galvanized Sara into looking around for another hiding spot. Not that Eric or Jeff would be looking for her, particularly. She wasn’t one of the popular girls. They would be looking for Chloe, and her best friend, Ginny, who was hiding behind the air-conditioning unit with her, or Tiffany, or Shannon, or Mary Frances, or Rachel.
Those
were the girls the boys liked. The thin, pretty girls who had lived in LaAngelle all their lives, and gone to school together since kindergarten. Sara was the only newcomer to this group in two years, and she was
fat
.

Being fat made everything so much worse.

Sara could hear the boys coming, laughing and calling out to each other as they ran to check all the likely hiding places behind the school, where the game was being played. The Fall Festival was going on in the building, and there was lots of activity at the front of the school and on the soccer field, but the kids had the playground to themselves. It was dark, but the boys had flashlights, and anyway there was enough light being thrown off by all the Fall Festival stuff that they would see her if they looked her way.

Panicking, Sara ran to the grove of trees that ringed the school property, and ducked behind one of them. Crouching down, she watched with bated breath as, flashlight in hand, Eric ran in her direction. Eric was really cute, and she wouldn’t mind if he caught her. But if he did, then she’d have to try to beat him back to base, and she couldn’t run very fast.

Because she was fat.

She hated being fat.

Her mom said she wasn’t fat, that she was perfect, but that was just how her mom was. Her mom would never tell her she was fat, even if it was true. And she knew it was. She could look at the other girls’ butts and her own butt, and see that hers was a lot fatter than theirs. It wasn’t rocket science.

Eric ran around the big snowball bush at the edge of the grove of trees, shining his flashlight under it. Then, finding nothing, he ran back toward the center of the playground. The beam of his flashlight bobbed and weaved over the ground.

‘‘There’s Shannon! I see Shannon!’’

Jeff’s yell came from the opposite end of the playground. The ensuing burst of wild shrieking and laughing told Sara that he was racing somebody home.

A wave of loneliness so intense that she almost cried again washed over her. She missed
her
school, and
her
friends. Even in Houston, though, some of her classmates had started teasing her at the end of last year about being fat. Which told her that it was perfectly true. Everybody wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. She wasn’t stupid. She knew that.
She was fat
.

But her
friends
hadn’t teased her. Kristen Staffieri had been her best friend since kindergarten. Sometimes— like right now—she missed Kristen and Polly and Grace
so much
.

Why had she ever told her mom she would move to this stinky place, anyway?

Her mom liked it here. Her mom was happy. There was enough money, and the house was a mansion, and her mom had a good job. Plus she’d grown up here, and all her friends and relatives were here. Her mom belonged here.

Sara did not.

But it was good to see her mom happy. Her mom had always been worried before, about money and things. And her mom was home every day after school here. That was a big plus.

There were a lot of good things about here. Her mom being home and happy was really important. And Seth and Aunt Callie were nice, and Martha was nice, and Chloe was nice sometimes, too, when she wasn’t around her friends.

And just about the best thing of all was Smokey, her kitten. If she hadn’t come to live here, she wouldn’t have Smokey.

She guessed the only really bad thing about here was that she was fat. If she wasn’t fat, the kids wouldn’t be so mean.

But she would be fat anywhere she went.

It was hopeless.

Sara heard something. She didn’t know what, a foot-step or a rustle or
something
that made her look around.

There was this huge, big
thing
standing beside another tree just inside the grove. It was dark among the trees, really dark, not kind of dark like out on the playground, and she couldn’t see whatever it was clearly, but it looked kind of like a person and kind of not. It was too big, taller and bigger even than Seth, with a great big body and long spindly legs and a small bullet-shaped head and—and wings.

It looked like the thing that she’d seen standing at the foot of her bed the night she’d had the really, really bad dream.

About the vampire lightning bug king.

He was looking straight at her. He was
coming
straight at her.

For a second Sara was frozen in horror, watching him glide toward her. Then she jumped up from her hiding place and burst out onto the playground with an ear-splitting shriek.

‘‘There’s Sara! I see Sara!’’

Eric came pounding toward her from behind the swings, the beam of his flashlight drawing crazy arcs of light through the air.

Fresh from her encounter with the vampire lightning bug king, Sara nearly beat him to base. Not quite, but nearly.

‘‘Sara! Have you seen Chloe?’’

Suddenly her mom was there, and in all the confusion of finding out what had happened to Aunt Callie and getting Chloe and finding Seth’s car and driving home Sara forgot about the figure she had seen in the woods.

Until she fell asleep, that is. Then her subconscious remembered, and she had another nightmare.

And woke up screaming.

Stalking her was surprisingly fun, he thought, as he slid out her window and clicked the latch into place. Exhilarating, really. Walking swiftly along the gallery, he waited only long enough to see the light burst through the windows of Sara’s room before ducking into the room two doors along. He’d been watching her tonight, as he watched her lots of nights now, and he hadn’t been able to resist appearing in the woods at the school festival when he’d seen her duck into them, alone. Sensing her terror as she saw him, hearing her scream and watching her run away had been a thrill.

He wondered that he had never tried stalking one of them over a period of several weeks before.

Ah, well, he’d just added a new twist to an old game. That’s what made life fun.

CHAPTER 34

CALLIE WAS SINKING FAST. AN ADVERSE REACTION to the chemotherapy had caused her collapse, and the chemotherapy itself had been, of necessity, discontinued. Her cancer was now overwhelmingly aggressive, invading her body like a marauding army of killers. Her only hope of survival lay in a bone-marrow transplant, or in getting accepted for an experimental treatment being studied in clinical trials at several major cancer centers around the country. Her doctors had been frank in saying that she was not an ideal candidate for either. She was already too sick, too weak. Seth refused to accept their verdict. Since early Saturday morning, when Olivia had joined the steadily growing group of family and friends in Callie’s private hospital room, Seth had been constantly in and out as he worked the phone and the network of Charlie’s doctor contacts, calling specialists in Boston, in Houston, in New York.

‘‘Son, there are some things you just can’t fix,’’ Callie told Seth gently from her hospital bed. Dressed in chinos and a deep green polo shirt, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep but freshly showered and shaved, Seth was moving around the room, gathering up the last of her medical records to be faxed to Houston. The specialists at the big cancer treatment center there had agreed to at least look at her case. It was Sunday morning, and even getting people on the telephone was a trick.

Olivia had arrived at the hospital about an hour earlier, after dropping off Sara and Chloe at Sunday school. Martha would pick them up, and watch them until Olivia got home later that afternoon. Olivia had spent a moment with Big John in the Intensive Care Unit on the fourth floor, holding his hand and listening to the whoosh of mechanized breathing that permeated the ICU. He still didn’t know her, or anyone, as far as they could tell. Prospects for his recovery were not good, Charlie said.

But Callie’s sudden deterioration was the more immediate crisis. Seth was an almost constant presence at her bedside, and Ira was almost as faithful. Otherwise, people were sitting with Callie in shifts, with everyone from Belinda to Keith to friends such as Augusta Blair and Charlotte Ramey taking a turn. Everyone was heartbroken at what was happening, and no one wanted her to have to face it alone. Not even for a minute.

‘‘But we don’t know that
you’re
one of those things that can’t be fixed, Mother,’’ Seth replied just as gently. He stopped striding around the room, and bent over his mother, taking her hand in his. Frail in her blue hospital gown, Callie clutched his hand tightly, her fingers that were now so bony she’d had to remove her wedding ring to keep it safe curling around his.

‘‘Oh, Seth.’’ Her head barely denting the thin hospital pillow on which it rested, Callie smiled up at him. ‘‘You’re a fighter, just like your father. I’ve always admired that in both of you. That’s one thing I never was.’’

‘‘You are too a fighter, Mother. You’re going to fight this. And you’re going to win.’’ Seth bent down to kiss Callie’s thin cheek, squeezed her fingers, and, with a quick, unreadable glance for Olivia, tucked the file folder with the gathered papers under one arm and left the room.

Olivia had not spoken to him alone since he had left her in the locker room on Friday night. He had spent the past two nights in his mother’s hospital room, sleeping—or not sleeping—in the big recliner that had been placed near the head of her bed. Olivia was sitting in it now. During the day, he’d been talking to doctors, making phone calls, searching the Internet, doing everything he could to find the solution to the problem of saving his mother’s life. His attitude was, there was bound to be an answer out there. They just had to find it.

‘‘That’s the worst thing, I guess: I know he’s going to have a hard time dealing with my being gone, and it just tears me up to think about it.’’ Callie’s head had turned toward the door as her gaze followed Seth from the room. Now she was looking at Olivia again, unshed tears bright in her eyes.

‘‘Oh, Aunt Callie, please don’t talk about being gone like that,’’ Olivia pleaded, reaching for her aunt’s hand. ‘‘Plenty of people survive cancer nowadays. The numbers are going up all the time.’’

‘‘Olivia, honey, I don’t think I’m going to be one of them.’’ Callie grimaced and groped for the dial on her tubing that allowed her to self-administer a dose of pain medication. Olivia turned it for her. After a moment Callie took a deep breath and produced a wavery smile. ‘‘I’ve had the feeling since early this morning that pretty soon now I’m just going to slip away. If I had my druthers, I’d really druther stay right here on earth, but I don’t have my druthers, so the only thing to do is face the truth, however unpleasant it is.’’

‘‘Aunt Callie . . .’’ Olivia said helplessly, leaning closer. Tears sprang into her eyes as she looked at her aunt. Callie’s skin was ashen yellow now, and she was almost completely bald. Olivia realized with a sense of shock that Callie’s state closely resembled that of the woman they’d seen being wheeled down the hall in this same hospital when Olivia had driven Callie in to see Big John. Remembering Callie’s reaction to the woman, Olivia shivered inwardly. She was sure her aunt had had a premonition even then of what was to come.

‘‘I can’t talk like this to Seth, because it upsets him. He’s my only child, my son, and I love him more than anything in the world. But he can’t deal with this very well. Men don’t handle pain as well as women, haven’t you noticed? They’re babies, even the best of them.’’

Olivia could find nothing to say to this, so she simply held Callie’s hand. Callie glanced past her out the window, where sunshine poured brightly down from a celestial blue sky. A pair of black starlings swooped into view and were just as suddenly gone, flying swiftly one after the other past the small, rectangular peephole onto the world beyond that room, where ordinary things were still important.

‘‘You know what I hate? I just hate it like the dickens that I’m going to miss Christmas. The idea that I won’t ever see a Christmas tree again—that really bothers me. That’s stupid, isn’t it? To grieve over a Christmas tree?’’

‘‘Oh, Aunt Callie.’’ The tears that had been swimming in Olivia’s eyes overflowed. Her hand tightened on Callie’s. ‘‘No, it isn’t stupid.’’

‘‘Now you’ve got me crying, and I’ve got you crying, and the upshot of it is going to be that I’ll wind up spending some of the most precious hours of my life with a stuffed-up nose and a raw throat.’’ Callie took a deep breath, and managed a weak chuckle. ‘‘Oh, Olivia, I’m so glad you came home when you did, and brought Sara with you. Your being home again at this time has been a blessing to me, it really has.’’

‘‘I’m glad I came home, too.’’ Olivia could hardly get the words out around the lump in her throat.

‘‘It’s going to be all right, honey, you’ll see. In the end, it’ll be all right.’’

Mallory walked into the room then, carrying a huge bouquet of pink roses in a white china vase, her high heels clicking over the terrazzo floor. Olivia released Callie’s hand and murmured a polite greeting to Mallory. As usual, the other woman was perfectly groomed, in a gray silk suit and pearls. She looked like she’d come directly from either church or work.

With a quick smile for Olivia, Mallory walked up the opposite side of the bed from where Olivia sat and placed the roses on the bedside table. Their scent perfumed the air, temporarily masking the medicinal smell of the hospital.

‘‘How are you doing?’’ Mallory asked Callie tenderly, bending over the older woman for a hug. The sunlight flashed on her diamond engagement ring, the ring that was the symbol of her and Seth’s love. Olivia was reminded again that Mallory was going to be Seth’s wife. No matter how hot it had been, that kiss in the locker room had been an aberration, not a promise, and, she told herself, she would do well to keep that firmly in mind.

‘‘I’m fine,’’ Callie replied, summoning up her usual brisk manner for Mallory. ‘‘Now, you just sit right down here and tell the latest news on the wedding. Did you get that caterer you wanted?’’

‘‘Well, their estimate was a little bit higher than I expected . . .’’ Mallory began, availing herself of Callie’s invitation to sit, in a metal-framed chair on the other side of the bed.

The three of them chatted about the wedding— which was
not,
at the moment, Olivia’s favorite topic— for a little while, and then Ira arrived, along with Phillip and his wife. Olivia had seen Phillip at the hospital twice since he had come upon her with Seth. Not by word or glance had he indicated that he remembered anything about what he had seen. Olivia was grateful for that.

‘‘Olivia.’’ Callie caught her hand as Olivia stood up to leave. She was whispering as the others talked among themselves. ‘‘Bring Chloe up to see me later today, would you, please?’’

Looking down at her aunt, Olivia read the clear message in the now-faded blue eyes. She nodded as if making a solemn promise, and Callie released her with a tired smile.

When she returned with Chloe, it was just before suppertime. The curtain over the window was closed, and the room was only dimly lit. Callie appeared to be asleep, and Father Randolph was sitting beside the bed, reading silently from his Bible. Cute in jeans and a denim vest over a white T-shirt, her blond hair caught back from her face Alice-in-Wonderland style and tied with a blue ribbon, Chloe had been voluble all the way into Baton Rouge. But she fell silent upon entering the hospital room, and her hand found its way into Olivia’s. Olivia held that suddenly cold little hand tightly. Father Randolph looked up and saw them. He smiled, coming to his feet and walking over to join them as they stood rather awkwardly just inside the door.

‘‘What have we here?’’ he whispered, nodding at the object Olivia held in one hand.

‘‘Olivia thought Nana wanted a Christmas tree,’’ Chloe sniffed, regaining some of her spirit. ‘‘I don’t know why. It’s not even Halloween yet.’’

Father Randolph exchanged glances with Olivia. In his eyes she read an exact understanding of the situation.

‘‘It’ll make her a wonderful night-light’’ was what he said. Taking it from Olivia, he set the foot-tall, fully decorated, artificial pine tree down in the center of the bedside table, moving Mallory’s roses to the larger table in the corner in the process. Then he plugged in the cord so that the tree was suddenly resplendent with twinkly red and green and blue and yellow lights.

Olivia had bought it at a garden supply center after leaving the hospital.

In the bed, Callie stirred, awakened no doubt by their voices, and opened her eyes. Her head turned to the side, her attention apparently attracted by the blinking lights on the bedside table. When she saw the Christmas tree her eyes widened, and she went very still for a moment, just looking at it. Her lips trembled, and then a slow smile stretched her dry lips. Looking around, her gaze sought and found Olivia, who was standing with Chloe at the foot of the bed.

‘‘Thank you,’’ Callie said, and then her eyes were all for her granddaughter.

‘‘Chloe.’’ Callie’s voice was noticeably weaker than it had been earlier that day. With an effort, she hitched herself up a little higher in the bed and held out her hand to the girl.

‘‘Nana,’’ Chloe said on a sob, and then rushed around the bed to take her grandmother’s hand.

Olivia and Father Randolph exchanged glances, and, together, silently withdrew to the hall, leaving the old woman and the young girl to say what Olivia thought would almost certainly be their good-byes.