Landing (22 page)

Gabe doesn’t know what Diana buried
for Canton when she assembled the first small pyramid of rocks and carved his
name onto the top stone. There was so precious little of his legacy left after
Diana fled her burning home with her three young children in tow and the
poisoned seed that was me in her womb.

Gabe’s given the question a lot of
thought, and his best guesses are that Diana buried one of the pictures she
kept on the bookshelf here in Farewell in the safe house Dr. Lee purchased for
them. Perhaps she also made a cassette of their wedding songs or scrounged
through the car and discovered a forgotten agenda from the classes he taught at
Stanford.

For Tammy, Gabe buried her leather
jacket, her favorite shot glass, and the diary she kept as a little girl. All
of these things Gabe gathered together in a little trunk that used to be in his
mother’s room. He amassed the stones, spent a day carving his sister’s name
into the top one and dug a deep pit for the trunk. Tarren, still recuperating
from Grand’s knives, refused to come. They had a terrible fight about it. Gabe
buried Tammy’s artifacts alone on a snowy day just a week before Christmas.

After Tammy’s death, only Gabe
continued the weekly trek to the grove. As far as he knew, Tarren never went
near this place again.

I push away these thoughts and
concentrate on the present. This quiet feels so thick, so final, that it’s
almost a shock when Tarren’s rough, shaking voice breaks it again.

“There were so many nights when Mom
was gone, or later, when Gabe and Tammy were out there with her hunting things
in the dark,” he says. “You can’t know how often I lay in bed at night, staring
at the ceiling and imaging what your life was like, all the things you had that
I would never get. Like…like a school to go to every day. Friends. A father. I
would picture you riding the bus to school, pedaling a bike that your parents
bought you for your birthday, eating in a cafeteria, drawing chalk horses on
the sidewalk with friends. Being normal and cherished.”

Tarren rises to his feet. He sways
but catches himself. He’s shivering, and blood is crusted all over the sleeves
of his jacket.

“I hated you,” Tarren says. “All
those nights while we were risking everything for no reward and no recognition,
you were somewhere far away, lovingly tucked into a big comfortable bed,
dreaming big comfortable dreams.”

He turns toward me. The purple
twilight digs trenches into the premature lines of his forehead and around his
mouth.

“I hated that my mother loved you
enough to spare you from the life we had to endure. So when we found Grand’s
laptop, I considered that it might be a trap.” The shadows take all the color
out of Tarren’s eyes. They look black. Empty. “But I figured after everything
we’d been through, all the times we’d risked our lives, all the bodies we’d
buried, that you owed us this one little assist.”

His voice drops so low that even I
have to strain to hear.

“I never meant for Grand to take
you. I thought you were safe on the campus, that he would never try something
that brazen. We had tracked you for days, and there was no trace of him. I
started to doubt that…it doesn’t change what happened. Only my intention
wasn’t…No matter how I felt about you, I would have never sacrificed you like
that. Never. You don’t know…can’t know how guilty…ashamed…after what he did.
What you became.”

I’m crouched behind a deep spray of
needles, and I don’t think he can see me in the growing darkness. Instead, he
just stares straight ahead, listing and shivering and drowning me in his
sadness.

I don’t know what to do, what to
feel, what to say. When did breathing become so fucking hard?

“Gabe trusted you. He loved you.
That’s the way he was,” Tarren says at last. I finally notice the 9mm Glock in
his hand. He must have taken it from the Murano’s glove compartment after
leaving Dr. Lee’s cabin.

“He couldn’t understand how
dangerous you were. What you were.” Tarren tightens his grip on the gun. “He
didn’t believe me.”

“Tarren,” I whisper. I don’t know
if he hears me.

“I was weak. I wanted to believe
too.”

Before tonight, I always thought
Tarren was the strongest of us. Odysseus. I believed that his granite façade
hid a dearth of emotion, not the opposite. And now, when it’s almost too late,
I finally understand what Gabe has always known. Why he always works so hard to
make Tarren laugh.

I remember Tarren’s begging eyes in
the warehouse. Those tears. His aura pulsing like a supernova, Pouring out his
love.

Whatever I was feeling before,
whatever animosity I’ve ever had toward Tarren is gone. I need to protect him.

I need to save him.

I jump out of the tree, land
cat-soft in the grove, and rise up slowly so I don’t spook him.

“I did what I had to do,” I tell
him. I don’t sound brave or powerful or sure of myself. I just sound like me
when I get scared and sobbish.

“I told you to run, to never look
back.” Tarren raises the gun, and I’m not sure which of us he’ll go for.

“Gabe would never leave you behind,
you know that. And neither would I.” My words surprise me, because they’re
true. The gun hones in on my voice, but I continue speaking.

“I’m sorry for the childhood you
never had, for the mission you never wanted, for what happened to Tammy, for
the pain you have carried for so long…”

“Stop,” he growls.

“But I’m here now. You are my
family. You are my brother.”

Tarren’s hand is shaking so much
that I take a couple of steps toward him so he won’t miss if he decides to
shoot me.

“He trusted you,” Tarren says. “He
loved you.”

“Gabe isn’t dead.”

“Thirty-two seconds,” Tarren
whispers.

“I’m not a full angel.”

“Close enough. You didn’t get just
one injection, did you?”

We look at each other.

“Two,” I say. “Two injections.”

Tarren nods. “It’s my fault. I
couldn’t get out of the cuffs fast enough. I didn’t protect him from you.” The
shadows find his scar and fill it in black. “Why couldn’t I protect him?” He
chokes on his next words. “Gabe was the only good thing left.”

Whatever last vestiges of energy,
desperation, insanity or combination thereof that was holding me up dissipates
under the weight of Tarren’s words. My knees buckle.

I give up.

“Just kill me,” I say. I’m on the
ground. As soon as the first tear falls I can’t stop. I weep like the world is
ending and I’d better get all my tears out while I still have time.

After a while, I look up, and
Tarren is gone. Since I’m already fully committed to this breakdown, I just
keep going. I crawl over to the graves, read the names,
Canton Fox, Diana
Fox, Tammy Fox,
and I sob, and I sob. Will Gabe be next? Will we all end up
here, little boxes of our possessions moldering in the ground?

I lie on the cold earth gasping for
breath and listening to the sounds of the forest. Then I cry again, but I am
better now. Calmer.

Gabe will make it through the
night. I’ll make it through the night too. I’m pretty sure Tarren will hate me
forever, but that isn’t anything new. I’ll deal with it. Our fucked up little
family may be on the trembling edge of oblivion, but I will somehow pull us
back. I’ll find a way to save Tarren. I’ll make things right.

Chapter 34

Gabe has exactly three freckles on
this face. The most noticeable one is on his left cheek, just above the welt
from the vicious slap I gave him. There’s another one on his forehead below his
hairline, which is hard to see under his too-long bangs. The third freckle is
on his left eyelid. This one is small and pale.

These freckles become very
important to me over the next days. I use them like stars to orient myself
across the changing landscape of my brother’s face.

Despite the high calorie paste that
Dr. Lee pumps into Gabe’s stomach at regular intervals, my brother’s body
consumes itself to replace the energy I stole. What little fat he had is
stripped away, followed by the lean muscle he worked so hard to pack onto his
long, thin frame.

Those freckles anchor me as the
legacy of my touch hollows out Gabe’s cheeks, erodes deep gullies in his neck,
sinks his eyes into bruised caves, and turns his skin so translucent that I can
see the blue, green, and purple roadways of his veins running below the
surface. There is nothing left of him but an unsteady heartbeat.

No blue.

No Gabeness to speak of.

***

On the first day, I commandeer a
rickety office chair and wedge it in the corner of Gabe’s room, far enough so
that the low levels of radiation my body emits can’t harm him. I plant myself
into its lumpy, unwelcoming lap, latch my gaze onto those three freckles, and don’t
let go.

I incessantly call the extra cell
phone that Gabe always keeps stashed in the glove compartment of his truck. The
truck that was missing when I finally dragged myself home last night. Tarren
didn’t take his duffle bag out of the SUV, nor any of the extra phones we have
lying around the house. No note. No indication of when he would be back, hell,
if he would be back.

Each time I call, the phone goes
directly to voicemail. What to say?
Don’t off yourself, pretty please? Let’s
go get therapy together? I’m sorry that I may have killed the last precious
thing you had left in the world?

I decide to go with, “Tarren, pick
up the damn phone. Where are you?”

In the afternoon, Gabe’s heart
warbles once. Twice. I could hear it anyway, but the monitor announces it with
astonishing volume followed by a long, uninterrupted cry as he flat lines. The
funny thing—at least it’s funny to my crazy brain—is that nothing happens on
the outside. Gabe doesn’t move or wince or groan dramatically. It’s just that
one moment he’s here, and the next the machines tell me that he’s not.

Francesca rushes into the room,
probably because I’m hollering my head off. Dr. Lee limps after her. They get
Gabe back in a few minutes, but his pulse is irregular. I’m afraid of the
machine, of that high peal of noise it could emit again. So I get myself gone,
just for a little while, to go and look for some courage.

***

At home, I stand just inside the
front door and try to think of something to do. Taking a shower is too hard.
Cleaning all the clothes from our trip is out of the question. Actually, just
taking a single step forward suddenly seems like an impossible feat of
strength.

I keep getting distracted as my
memories intrude. Gabe’s screams echo from everywhere. His wobbly little voice,
Why?

My own sneering reply,
Because I
want you to understand. I want you to forgive me for killing you.

My eyes land on the epic battle
taking place between the random assortment of figurines on the shelf above
Gabe’s computer monitors. I lurch toward it desperate to turn off my mind.
Painstakingly, I unbend plastic arms raised in aggression. I denude clenched
fists of broadswords, nun-chucks, machine guns, and clubs. I reattach heads,
twist broken arms and legs back into place. I raise the dead to their feet or
lean them up against the wall if they keep falling over. In this way, I slowly
weave a truce between the fighters. They stand together, Carebear and Conan
alike, little army men and Wolverine and the weird anime woman with the big
tits. Factions are forgotten. They are brothers and sisters now. Peace reigns.

***

Francesca tells me exactly what
they don’t know. Like if Gabe will ever wake up; if he sustained any permanent
brain damage; if he will be the person he was before. I hear the term “wait and
see” from her mouth so many times that I actually have this weird dream—there’s
a lot of other stuff going on, but this was a part of it—where Francesca is
walking around with a parrot on her shoulder, and it keeps croaking “Wait and
See!” “Wait and See!”

Dr. Lee comes by every hour to
check the compilation of numbers that Gabe has been reduced to. Occasionally,
the old man sits with me for long stretches. His aura is dark with worry,
though he keeps his face calm for my sake. We don’t speak.

The only exception comes late that
first night when Dr. Lee stands over Gabe, shakes his head, and says, “I don’t
make it a habit to indulge in self-pity, but there are times when I wish that
I’d been at the hospital that day the angels came for me.”

I don’t know what to say back, so I
pull my knees to my chest and clasp my arms around them. The mottled brown hues
in his aura are darker, and I still don’t know what it indicates. An illness?
Perhaps just the dregs of old age. I don’t ask.

Dr. Lee turns around and gives me
one of his penetrating stares. “When you lose almost everything, the little you
have left becomes precious. It can be a burden to care about something or
someone so much.”

“Maybe the solution is to stop
caring,” I murmur.

A wry smile forms on Dr. Lee’s
lips. “Give it a try and let me know how that works for you.”

***

The oxygen tube and heating pads
come off after the second day. The IV drip, feeding tube, and catheter remain.
This is the day I notice something different about Gabe. It’s not so much that
he’s got an aura again, but that the lines of his body are blurred, like there
might just be the faintest hedge of light trying to push up from the surface of
his skin. By the end of the day he’s got a grayish ring of smoke around him. An
aura as thin and weak as a thread, but it’s there, and each hour it grows a
little thicker, a little brighter.

***

Francesca is an angel, but not the
killing, super-powered, terrible kind. She’s the kind with wings, harp, and
cloud row seating. She takes such good care of Gabe, sitting with us in the
morning and at night after her classes. Her hands are so gentle, so careful
with him. When she cleans him, massages his limbs, and does her other nursely
things, I leave him in her care, sprinting the two miles home to shower, feed
and water Sir Hopsalot, go Godzilla on the poor, shrinking population in the
rat complex in the basement, and catch a couple hours of sleep.

I only deviate from this routine
once, riding Tammy’s motorcycle to Home Depot, making a purchase, and doing one
quick home renovation.

Francesca must be brimming from
head to toe with questions, but she only ever asks one. It’s the second night
that we’re sitting together in Gabe’s room. She closes her biology textbook,
leaves the room, and returns with a pile of Gabe’s clothes, which she sets on
the dresser.

“You can take these home,” she
says. I glance at the pile, which includes his blood-stained coat, scuffed
sneakers, and the gun and knife hostlers he’d had buckled to his chest, waist,
and legs. On top rests his lock pick kit missing two picks.

“It was the license plates,”
Francesca says in a small voice.

“Huh?”

“They changed their license plates
every couple of weeks. That’s how I knew they were lying about being software
salesmen.”

We look at each other. Her energy
is starting to get jumpy, which isn’t good at all, because I haven’t been
feeding much.

“There were other things too.”

“Francesca.”

“I asked Dr. Lee about it,” she
presses on. “He showed me the closet, told me that Tarren or Gabe might get
hurt one day. He said that what they do is very dangerous.”

“That’s why you weren’t surprised
when we showed up.”

Francesca looks down at her hands.
“He told me not to ask any questions. It would be better…safer.”

“He was right.” I make a big show
out of toying with the sleeve of my shirt while I try to think of something
other than how tantalizingly close Francesca’s energy is to me, how velvety
soft that blue looks, how blissful it was to drink from the human well.

“Gabe is crazy about you,” I say
for absolutely no reason.

Francesca looks over toward the
bed. “I know.”

I stare at her aura, hoping for
some rich purples that would signify complementary feelings. The colors shift
around her, but they are pale lilac. Friendship. Worry. Not love.

“But you’re attracted to Tarren.”

Francesca ducks her head, sending a
curtain of dark hair down across her face. “I uh…Tarren told you?”

“He didn’t. I’m an observant
person.”

Francesca doesn’t look up. Dark,
wine-colored hues whisper through her aura. “He is handsome and polite…and,
and,” She fumbles for the word, but then it comes to her, “mysterious.”

I could almost laugh. That he is,
indeed.

Francesca says in a breathy voice.
“I…well, at least at first I was…yes, attracted to him.” She tucks her hair
behind her ear. “Last year at school, there was a dance.”

“And you asked Tarren?” I blurt
out, incredulous.

Francesca nods. “He said no. I
mean, not directly, but he said he had other responsibilities, and he said
something else.” She frowns, “…that he wasn’t good for me and neither was
Gabe.”

My first instinct is to refute, at
least for Gabe’s sake, but I realize that I can’t. Gabe wants to protect
Francesca as much as the rest of us; actually, more so. He’s unsuccessfully
hidden his heart from her for years just for this reason.

“I just want to know…” Francesca
looks at me straight in the face. I admire her for that, especially because her
hands are shaking and her aura is jumping up high. “You are criminals then?”

“No.” I try and offer her a
friendly smile, but my lips are about as flexible as iron rods. “It’s
complicated and, well, difficult to believe. Francesca, just know that Tarren
and Gabe are the good guys. They’re heroes. They save people.”

“And what about you?”

“I, uh…I’m kind of in the middle,”
I tell her, though I know this doesn’t make any sense to her at all.

There are a lot of reasons to hate
Francesca. She’s beautiful. She’s kind. She’s never lied to me. In other words,
she’s just about damned perfect, which makes messy, flawed, coward me feel just
great about myself. But when I’m here, wobbling on this ridiculous high wire
I’ve strung up, she doesn’t prod and doesn’t push. She lets me cross over in my
artless way, and I owe her for it and for what she’s done for Gabe. I think
I’ll even eventually forgive her for not loving him the way he deserves.

“And you?” I ask into the long
stretch of silence between us. “What are you doing all the way out here in the
boonies? I mean, look at you, you’re gorgeous. You belong on magazine covers,
or lounging by a pool wearing huge sunglasses and cradling a tiny fluffy dog.”

Those butterfly lashes pump up and
down, and heavy streaks of yellow crack through the smooth blue polish of her
aura.

“I was in a very bad place once,”
Francesca says. “Dr. Lee helped me. I used to clean his house part-time, but
when I had nowhere else to go, he offered to let me stay here. I…” More
butterfly lashes, now with dew drops hanging off the ends.

“What bad place were you in?”

Francesca is quiet for a moment.
Her hands come up and tug as a strand of her black hair. “I have my own
secrets,” she whispers, and we leave it at that.

***

During the early hours of morning
on the third day, while the rest of the house sleeps, I cradle a pencil in my
upturned palm and try to move it with my mind. Somewhere in my rewired angel
brain my power lurks. I concentrate. The pencil doesn’t move.

I concentrate harder. The pencil
still doesn’t move. I stitch my brows together, thrust out my jaw, and grunt
with some gusto as I try to get that mother fucking pencil to dance for me.

After an hour or so of this, the
pencil sails across the room, powered by….my arm and followed by many hurled
epitaphs. I curl up in my chair, suck down a bottle of water, and think about
what Kyle and Jane said. Human energy is the true sustenance of angels and the
key to powering their abilities.

Kyle and Jane. Their faces linger
in my mind. I push them away into the dark place where I keep the rest of my
painful memories.

Afterwards, I stare out the window
and wonder where Tarren is, how he is solacing himself at this time. I don’t
think he would really kill himself, at least not directly. And that’s my
answer. He would keep on with the mission, throwing himself into as many
reckless situations as possible, beckon death on the wings of heroic sacrifice.

I fear for him, I really do. Not
just him getting himself bruised and broken and bleeding and dead, but his
mind, that little bit of Tarreness that was still left inside of him. Gabe
culled and protected that flame so carefully, and now who is left to make sure
Tarren can still laugh, to check on those shy smiles that make such rare
appearances? How can I ever try to help him when my entire life has been a
juxtaposition against his misery, when I have turned into the shadow of Tammy,
when I drained his last best hope in front of his eyes?

I make a call.

***

In the evening, Lo clomps into the
room wearing a black trench coat and heavy combat boots. He’s got a new stud in
his chin, and that thick, black hair is wild as ever around his head. He stops
just inside the room, looks toward the bed, and then hits me with a sour
expression.