Oblivion (14 page)

Elijah and other girls is nothing new. But John’s changing everything.

I wonder if Elijah tastes John Fogel when he kisses me.

I wonder if Lindsey can smell him on my body.

It’s only a matter of time before my world erupts, and I feel powerless to stop it.

John doesn’t—or perhaps can’t—understand what Lindsey means to me, and Lindsey, despite John’s blatant disinterest, won’t give up on him. She’s used to getting what she wants, and I don’t want to be the reason she fails this time. Thus, I’ve talked John into doing what Lindsey says she wants—the four of us together at homecoming.

Strangled by cords
.

“Promise me you’ll show up,” I say.

Elijah tenses, then he touches a thumb to the dent in
my cheek, where a blue topaz stud used to be. “Yeah, I promise.”

“Come to the door.”

“Wearing a sport coat.” He tickles my ribs. “On time and everything.”

His fingertips lazily graze over my flesh.

“God …” He pulls me up, so I’m straddling him and he’s staring into my eyes. Yet still, he’s holding me close, pressing my body to his. “I love you, you know that?”

My lips brush against his as I speak: “I know.”

He fingers the scar on my right shoulder, lightly at first, then applying some pressure. “I wish I’d always been there to protect you.” His gaze won’t relent; he wants me to talk, to admit I relive the moment the mark came to be there.

I break the stare when I feel heat climbing up my neck, flushing my cheeks. I don’t know why the reference to the scar embarrasses me; if I’ve learned anything from Warren Ewing, it’s that it’s Palmer’s shame, not mine. “I’m okay.”

His tongue ripples against mine.

Scenes flash in my mind—partial recollections, anyway, as it happened so fast—of the altar, of Palmer pulling Andrew Drake away from me, punching him square across the jaw. Recollections of the labyrinth, of the fountain. Of the belt across my back.

As Elijah’s fingers now caress the spot my father connected with, my tongue dips to feel my sometimes boyfriend’s four crooked teeth.

Holy water stings when it meets with raw wounds.

My eyes well with tears when I remember the pain.

Elijah rubs away a tear, while his other hand worries my scar. “I wish I could have stopped him from hurting you.”

Finally, his fingers trail away from the mark on my shoulder.

“Elijah?”

He laces his hands into my hair.

“Hannah Rynes was in the fountain that day, the day he took her.”

He brushes his cheek against mine, and his fingers tense against my scalp. “You don’t know that, baby.”

“Right now it’s more of a feeling than testimony, but I
do
know. I’m remembering things. Flashes.” The pair of yellow floral-print cotton underwear—wet—darts through my mind. On the floor of the garden house.

I withdraw from his embrace, grab my notebook and pen. Stand.

“Callie?” He follows me toward the dark hallway.

The police tape still quarantines the area, although I know it’s only because no one’s come to take it down. The department has everything they need from this area—the four pens I’d used over the course of those thirty-six hours, as well as photographs of every inch of the walls on which I wrote. They have the little bit of clothing I was wearing, which is probably still caked with inches of lakeside mud. The only thing they found in this room and don’t
have sealed in an airtight evidence bag is me.

I dip under the yellow tape and cross the threshold into the bathroom. Harbor lights shine through the lone window, illuminating the walls.

I’d written the same thing over and over:

I killed him I killed him I killed him.

Some other nonsensical poetry is interspersed, but Ewing says I wrote it
—I killed him—
a total of one thousand two hundred forty-six times.

Elijah spins me around, props me on the old-fashioned, pink porcelain sink, which stands on two thick porcelain legs and is skirted in a faded blue gingham print. It’s been there as long as my earliest memory and is just as tattered.

The words on the walls race around me, becoming red blurs.

My hand begins to ache. A dull pain registers in my shoulders. I yank off the pen cap.

Dig. Sift. Chink.

Someone’s digging in the labyrinth behind the garden house.

I can’t see her, but I hear her sobbing, hear the sift of dirt in the pan of her shovel.

I can just barely see over the brick ledge of the open-air bell tower, but I can’t see past the garden house. Too many tall shrubs.

I press my hands to my ears to block out the sound of her wailing, as my eyes well up with tears of my own. They
dampen my cheeks, blur my vision, stuff my nose.

It’s pure torture to hear your mother cry … and not know how to soothe her.

“Shush, Callie.”

I recoil, back away from the hands attempting to calm me.

“Callie! Callie, come on, baby. Relax.”

Elijah.

I release a held breath and blink away hot tears.

The red words racing around me come to a screeching halt the moment he stops me from spinning.

I shake out my throbbing hand, sore from gripping tightly to a red felt-tip, and stare down at what I’d just written:

Strangled by the cords of daisies. Close the crimson door in your mind. Escape from the world of the crazies. Tear off the ties that bind.

Elijah lowers his mouth to mine.

An image materializes in my mind, but threatens to fade.

I knot my fingers in Elijah’s hair to keep him right where he is. I’m safe and secure while he’s kissing me, despite the vile thoughts entering my mind.

Focus.

Highland Point.

Near the steep, rocky shoreline, where John Fogel and I crossed the line.

That’s where it happened.

Long ago.

A body.

***

When I get home, Lindsey’s light is on, and a Said the Whale ballad pumps from beyond her door. Still, I’m careful to be quiet as I pass her room, in case she fell asleep while reading—or whatever it is people like Lindsey do before going to bed.

“Dude, get in here.”

I’m exhausted, but I can’t help smiling at Lindsey’s desperate-sounding demand as I push her door open.

She’s lying with her back on the floor, one ankle resting on the opposite knee. She’s wearing rainbow, over-the-knee socks—the type with individual toe spaces—hot-pink boyshorts, and a white tank top scrawled with a fuchsia
I Kissed a Farm Boy
. Her ebony hair fans on the carpet like a peacock’s tail, and her MacBook is open on the floor to her left.

Without awarding me so much as a glance, she shifts the laptop toward me. “Help.”

I toss my backpack to the floor and kneel on the plush carpeting next to her. “Oh. Wow.”

On the screen before me is a poor attempt at communication with John Fogel, who apparently sent her an e-mail this evening.

I temper the jealous gremlin kicking up dust in my gut, demanding that I stake a claim to John. It’s evident by the words on the screen—
I’m totally excited for homecoming. I should switch with Brittany, so I can ride in the same car as you in the parade
—that my pseudo sister’s connection with him is more superficial than shallow. A soft spot churns inside me. The night on the Point with him was a spiritual experience; mistake or not, it was more than a cheap encounter. And he’s writing to another girl because I told him to.

I want to be angry. But angry with whom, if not myself?

“Why can’t I just say what I want to say?” Lindsey taps her fingers against her thighs in time with the music.

“What do you want to say?”

For the first time, she glances up at me. “Whoa.”

“What?” I peek at my reflection in the full-length mirror on the back of her door. I don’t need to hear her reply. I look as spent and flushed as I feel.

She’s up now, legs in butterfly position, pressing the back of her hand to my cheek. “You look like shit.”

“I’m okay. Just a headache. Long walk from the marina.”

“Dude, tell the soccer stud to drive you home. You don’t have to worry about the serial wine taster and the workaholic golfer hearing the car pull up.”

But Elijah’s foster parents will hear him roll out of their driveway, if he drives. Elijah’s on a tighter leash than Lindsey and me, so he always crawls out his window, travels on foot to the depot, and hops the train that runs along the shoreline.

I type:

John
,

Backspace and retype:

Jon
,

“What do you want to say to him?” I ask.

“That I’m totally excited.”

I type:

I’m inspired by the possibilities, all the places we may go, all the things we might see, everything we may someday be to one another
.

Hugs
,

Lindsey

“You’re a genius,” she says.

I hit send.

Kiss Lindsey on the forehead.

“Love you, dude.”

Head down the hall to bed.

These days, sleep doesn’t come easily. I toss and turn over scenarios in my mind—some things in my past, some things in my future, some things in my imagination.

I’m not the only girl Elijah’s into. I wonder if I ever was.

What kind of a girl am I if I sleep with him anyway?

What would John think if he knew what I’d done with Elijah tonight?

Palmer said I was a nymph, a servant of the devil, put on God’s earth to lure good men to the dark side.

He put me to work on the altar the Saturday night I’d turned fifteen. He said hard work serving the Lord would help purge me of unclean desires. I scrubbed and polished every chalice, every square tile of every mosaic, every plank of that altar table, whilst he ordered my mother to the confessional.

I’ll never forget the way her black eyes settled on me the moment before she turned to follow him—as if she knew things would never be the same again.

Their cries of sex filtered down from the balcony and echoed in the nave.

No amount of volume on my iPod, which Palmer had loaded with a selection of preapproved Christian-based music, could drown out the sounds.

“Don’t you touch her!”

I startled, dropped a brass chalice when I heard my mother scream that.

“Don’t … you … touch her!”

Unable to listen to another syllable, I’d run out of the sanctuary and directly into the arms of Andrew Drake, whom my father had been grooming to take up the word of Holy Promise.

And then I kissed him for the first time.

I still don’t know why I did it, why I kept doing it for weeks after.

A dollop of regret sinks to the pit of my stomach when I think of that night. Here I am—life in shambles—and Drake’s now twenty-three and studying to be a minister, taking my father’s place in the pulpit.

He regretted it, he said, because I was too young. But he didn’t regret it enough. We hooked up a few times after that, too—a few heated kisses in holy places, nothing as major as the trouble I get into with Elijah, but to a man like my father, even kissing is a sin—especially with a man seven years my senior, bound to another and bound to God.

I wonder if Palmer was right, if I’m here only for the pleasure of others.

My phone buzzes with a text from John:
u write beautifully
.

I return:
???

John:
the note from L. u wrote it
.

Me:
have other things 2 do
.

John:
c me?

Me:
when?

John:
look out ur window
.

I traipse across the room, toward the bluish glow illuminating my window. Mr. Hutch’s koi pond is lit with blue bulbs, and he always forgets to turn them off at night. I
pull back the draperies, sit on the windowsill, and stare down at the pond, where John Fogel is concentrating over his iPhone.

My phone buzzes again:
must c u
.

When I return my attention to the yard below, my gaze trips into John’s.

A smile spreads over his face.

I return:
answer first, y u were digging the nite u found rosary. Y listen 2 a mystic?

He looks up at me, shrugs.

I text again:
y?

He replies:
what if Hannah Rynes is the body of an angel?

“
D
ude, just wear it.”

Lindsey’s decked out in a jade velvet strapless gown with a trumpeting bottom that flares from her knees to her strappy Claiborne shoes. It’s one of four new formals in her wardrobe, and if it doesn’t accentuate the unusual color of her eyes, I don’t know what might. She looks like a mystical mermaid, complete with sparkling, glittered skin.

Two of the other dresses—one red, one smoke gray—are hanging in her closet. The fourth, however, hugs my body like a second skin. It’s a dusty rose halter of satin and crepe, and it boasts a slit from my right ankle to mid-thigh.

“I feel funny in it.”