The Book of Living and Dying (17 page)

Lightning lit up the room, thunder cracking menacingly on its heels. The lights in the house flickered. Sarah couldn’t help thinking that it was John, trying to terrify her. If he was going to come, why didn’t he just get it over with? She released the pressure on her eyes, dropping her hands with finality to her sides. Her fingers brushed against something
in her jacket pocket. She felt around, pulled it out and held it up to her face. It was the card Donna had given her. Turning it over, she saw that it was a small photograph. A photograph of Michael and Donna. Together.

S
arah ran through the rain, the lightning hiccuping in fits through the sky, illuminating the trees in lurid flashes. Along the street, the houses hunched like sullen dogs in the downpour. She was soaked to the bone, freezing. Sneakers flopping, photo clenched in her hand, she splashed across the bridge to the park, the rain gushing in deep channels past her feet and swirling over the sewer grate on the other side.
“That witch!”
she spat through clenched teeth, thunder punctuating her words.

The park grinned wickedly in the storm, the lightning crackling along the hydro wires, snapping up the towers. The rain hammered down, icy fists hitting her skin. It pooled over the grass in electric puddles. Sarah ran toward the parking lot, sloshed over the slick pavement, skidded, swore when her knee hit one of the cedar posts that circled the lot like savage teeth, then continued to run. Slipping and sprawling along the jagged path, arms wheeling for balance, the muck running freely, splattering her legs and her face, she screamed before she even reached the top of the hill. “Michael!” She stepped on the rock beneath his window,
sneakers squeaking as her ankle turned, sending her to the ground with a shout. She sobbed, the rain hitting her face, her chest heaving as she dragged herself up. Balancing on the rock again, she began smacking his bedroom window with her open hand. “Michael!”

When he did not appear the last of her reason was engulfed by incendiary notions of him with Donna, the two of them, together, plotting against her. She was searching for a rock to heave through the window when it clattered open.

“Sarah!”

She staggered back, reeling. “You liar!” she screamed.

His face disappeared from the window and in a moment he was running around the corner of the house, stopping short when he saw the look in her eyes.

“You liar,” she sobbed, throwing the crumpled photo at him. It fell into the mud, the edges unfurling slowly like an odd flower.

Michael picked the photo up and looked at it, confused. He stepped toward her. “Please, Sarah, I never lied to you.”

“Don’t come near me,” she warned, her eyes lit with rage.

“We never did anything,” Michael insisted.

“I trusted you,” Sarah wailed. She covered her face with her hands, the rain beating down on her, on both of them.

“Please, Sarah, it’s a mistake …” He reached out to take her hand.

“Don’t touch me,” she cried. “Now I know why Donna hates you so much. She always said you were a creep. You must think I’m a complete idiot—a fool! Is anything you’ve told me true?”

“This doesn’t mean anything, Sarah,” he said, waving the photo in the air.

“It means something to me!” she yelled as she turned and plunged into the night.

She didn’t stop running until she reached the bridge, her chest aching from the effort and the force of the rain. Heart jackrabbiting between hatred for Donna and contempt for Michael, she lifted her face to the sky, letting the rain pound her eyelids and lips. Now she understood the look on Donna’s face in the car. She wanted Sarah to see what a conniving liar Michael really was.
Okay, you won,
she thought, her mind whirling with a mixture of torment and fury.
You won.

And yet. And yet. Still the old woman’s words would not leave her.
Trust him.
But who was the
him
that she spoke of? How could Sarah be sure? She felt so stupid, so ridiculously small. The Fool. Wasn’t that one of the cards the old woman had set before her? Silly little fool. Pressing her fists into her temples, she let out a deep, frustrated yell, doubling over on the sidewalk, the rain gobbling up the sound. All she wanted was to be home, in her room, in her own bed.
But John could be waiting there.
The realization sent a shock wave of fear through her brain. “What do you want from me?” she howled. She crumpled onto the curb and stayed there until she was too cold and weary to care about ghosts, or broken promises, or anything else, and made her way home.

She noticed the wet footprints immediately, drying near the foot of her bed. His footprints. Grabbing a rag from under the kitchen sink, she furiously scrubbed the prints from the floor, her knees leaving their own wet marks, like dark sunbursts, where she had knelt. After, she slipped a roll of duct tape and a carving knife from the kitchen, taped her bedroom door closed, then waited, the knife blade glinting next to her in bed.

When she woke, to her horror, the tape was gone and so was the knife. Fighting back hysteria, she searched the room, beneath the bed, under the sheets. She even checked under the rug that covered the trap door. When she could not find the knife, she bolted into the kitchen, tearing open the drawers. The knife shone in the cutlery drawer, exactly as she had found it, the tape in its usual spot, one drawer down. Gaping in terrified disbelief, she convinced herself that it hadn’t happened at all and kicked the drawers shut with her sock foot.

The sound of Mr. Kovski’s voice was eroding her mind. It was almost as bad as the questions that dogged her waking hours and tracked her ceaselessly in sleep as well. How long had they known each other? Why hadn’t Donna said something about Michael before? And what had made her decide to hate him? Sarah stared out the classroom window. She could feel Michael’s eyes on her, the way they used to be before they had started seeing each other. Only now she wouldn’t acknowledge him. She couldn’t stand to see the pained look on his face, couldn’t control the grenade blast in her skull whenever she thought of him with Donna. To stop the pain in her heart, she dug her fingernails into the palm of her hand. Would she ever learn the truth about the situation?

There had been a note slipped through the gills of her locker. She hadn’t read it, hadn’t even opened it in case she might be swayed to reconsider. In an act of bravado, she’d
crumpled it, thrown it into the garbage as she’d walked to English class. Then thought about it all day. Thought about retrieving it and sneaking away to read it. It infuriated her that she cared. But she did. She couldn’t deny it. Now she was sitting in calculus, waiting for the lesson to end.

It didn’t surprise her to see Donna in class. Come to rubberneck the damage, no doubt. She wasn’t striking her usual delinquent pose but was facing the front of the class, pretending to listen to the lecture. She hated that Donna had been right about everything. Hated the underhanded way she had used to expose Michael. She decided not to tell her about finding the photo. Let her sweat it out. The worst part was that Donna was being so nice, waiting at her locker, speaking in saccharine tones, tiptoeing around Sarah like she had just discovered that she was dying of some horrible disease. Wasn’t that what happened with John? All at once, everyone treating him differently—his friends, her mother, the nurses and doctors—all speaking in falsetto, mincing around, as though he were a bomb about to explode.

Their expressions animated with feigned cheerfulness, quaking voices reaching for a higher timbre. Until eventually the strain wore the façade of levity away to reveal the true face of enduring grief.

Sarah thought of Michael, of everything that had happened between them: the video, the photo, his admission of love. Donna was jealous, she concluded. Wasn’t that obvious? Still, there was the fly-buzz of doubt, the faint possibility that perhaps Donna knew something that she didn’t, that she’d been acting the part of the good friend. Maybe Sarah had been wrong, dismissing Donna’s concerns because she
wanted to believe the best about Michael. It made her sick just thinking about it, the argument whirling around and around in her head until she thought she would scream. It would be easier to assume that Donna had acted out of jealousy. Michael couldn’t possibly be interested in her, no matter what the photo implied. But he was a liar too, keeping such secrets from her. Maybe they were perfect for each other. This last conclusion nearly broke her.

She fingered her journal listlessly. She had tried to recall the old woman’s words, writing down as much as she could remember. Recording the images as best she could. After class, she planned to do some research in the library to find the meanings of the cards. Looking down at her page, she saw that she had drawn dozens of spirals over the margins.

Mr. Kovski stopped to consider the brilliance of his last statement, then turned to the board to prove it in chalk dust. Sarah held her head in her hands. She was so tired. She could hardly keep her eyes open. If she could only put her head down, rest her face against the cool wood of her desk. She was thinking this when she became acutely aware that everyone was staring at her, including Mr. Kovski. He stood, chalk poised dramatically in the air.

“I’m sorry, what?” she asked.

“Are you feeling all right, Ms. Wagner?” he asked, icily. “You appear to be in some sort of distress.”

The blush crept into her cheeks. “No, sir.”

“No, you are not feeling all right?”

“No, I—I’m not in any distress.”

“Good,” he said. “I would hate to think that I was boring you.”

She opened her mouth to speak but the bell trilled sharply.

“Stupid prick,” Donna said as she stood over Sarah’s desk crunching on an apple.

“Yeah,” Sarah mumbled. She automatically glanced over at Michael, caught herself and turned her back to him. He would try to catch her at the door or at her locker. She would take evasive measures. She pushed her books into her knapsack, her journal slipping out and dropping with a low clunk to the floor. It flopped open, the pages fanning to her most recent entries.

“What’s this?” Donna asked, retrieving the book from the floor.

“Nothing.” Sarah grabbed for the book but it was too late. Donna was already studying her illustrations of the cards.

“‘Ten of Swords,’” she read aloud. “Someone must have been pissed to stab this guy ten times in the back.”

I know how he feels,
Sarah thought grimly, reaching for the book again. Donna manoeuvred it just beyond her grasp. She bit the apple dramatically, chewing it loudly.

“The Magician. The Emperor. The Lovers. The Fool.
Death.
She emphasized the last entry with a nod. “These drawings are pretty good.”

“I’m glad you approve.” Sarah snatched the book away and stuffed it into her bag.

Donna walked beside her, still eating the apple. Sarah noticed Michael standing at the end of the hall. Head lowered, she monitored the movement of her feet until she reached her locker. When she looked up again, he was gone. She felt the sharp pinch of disappointment but squelched it instantly with a slap of anger. That was the way to do it. That was how she would protect herself. Whenever she felt like forgiving him or seeing him again, she would kill those feelings with a carefully aimed shot of rage.

Donna crashed her locker open, throwing her books to the bottom. The half-eaten apple stuck in her mouth, she grabbed her coat and slammed her locker shut. She extracted the apple, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Cup of j at Her Majesty’s palace?”

Sarah regarded her coolly. “No, I don’t think so. I’ve got work to do.”

“More cards to draw?”

“Maybe.”

“Come on. I’ll buy.”

“No, thanks, Donna.”

“Maybe later? After you’ve finished …
your work?”

Sarah detected a hint of sarcasm in her voice and made a mental note of it. A scorpion can’t hide its true nature. “Sure, maybe later,” she agreed, putting on her coat. “But don’t wait for me,” she added, slinging her knapsack over her shoulder and securing her locker.

“I’m looking for books on tarot cards,” Sarah said in a low voice.

The librarian sat primly behind her desk. She didn’t look up but continued to type on her computer, her mahogany hair scraped back in an orderly bun, like a nurse, her tor-toiseshell glasses reined with a burnished silver chain and balanced fastidiously at the end of her nose. “Occult section, second floor,” she answered, rather loudly.

Sarah winced, pushed away from the desk and moved through the congregation of books toward the stairwell,
past the liquid eyes of old men reading newspapers draped like medieval tapestries on polished oak rods, through the quiet hum of information, the hush of people thinking, of order and antiquity, the scratching of pens on paper—the unacknowledged sounds of everyday things.

The efficient tapping of shoes down polished halls, the bell from the nurses’ station, the clatter of laundry carts. The intermittent
ding
of the elevator, its doors opening with a low
whoosh.
The voice of a patient crying out. An audible sigh. The resonance of dreams relinquished andforsaken.

Sarah preferred the public library to the one at school. It was bigger, older. Steeped in history. It even had a ghost of its own. Some jilted lover hanged from one of the beams in the widow’s walk, the stairwell to the walk boarded over for decades since. At least, that was the story all the students told. Even with the ghost it afforded more privacy than the library at school with its prying teachers and nosy students. There was no Internet access at either library, though. She could have surfed the Net at Michael’s if she hadn’t been on the outs with him. She felt the knife jab in her heart. No. Books would have to do.

Climbing the stairs, she had to stop several times on the way up to catch her breath. The oak door greeted her at the top, offering a bevelled fly’s-eye view of the floor. The brass handle was cool to the touch. She eased the door open, using her shoulder to brace it so she could slip through. The door closed heavily behind her, the vacuum lifting several papers from a desk against the wall with its breath. A girl from Sarah’s media arts class sat perched on a wooden chair to the immediate left, whizzing through microfilm.
Slipping noiselessly into one of the aisles, Sarah hid behind the books and spied as the girl cranked the black plastic reel on the projector, the history of Terrace playing out in old newspaper images flashing dizzyingly across the screen. The idea of spying on her fellow student caused her to giggle uncontrollably. Michael would find it funny, she thought, and was at once overcome with grief. How could he have betrayed her?