The Donzerly Light (34 page)

And he did.

“This is the really, really insane part coming,” he warned her, but she only held his hands more tightly. He swallowed, his gaze moving from her to the tabletop and back very frequently as he spoke. “A long time ago I could pick stocks, with that ability I mentioned. You see—really insane thing coming here—I’d get change sometimes, and all the coins would come up heads, and from those I’d get this...knowing. Which stock to pick.” She was still holding his hands, and still watching his as she spoke, and not a hint of shock or disbelief had come to her face. “And then one day, one night, actually, the heads turned to tails. And something new came from the tails.”

“The visions of death,” Mari said, and Jay nodded.

“It would hit me,” he began, looking her in the eye now, and he matched her grip upon his hands. “Like a wave. It would pound into me, the death that was coming for those people in the vision. I felt it all. Their pain was my pain. Their agony was my agony. I drowned with them, I burned with them, I fell with them. I knew their death, and in knowing it I died with them.” He paused there, testing her reaction, but she only waited for him to go on. “I died, Mari, and then I lived again. I know that’s impossible, but it happened. It happened again and again. Whenever there were tails I knew death was right around the bend.

“Then yesterday the tails were gone, and the heads came back, only this time they were showing me numbers. Thirty two and—”

“Two five five one one,” Mari interjected, her deduction getting an affirming nod from Jay.

“You remember,” he said.

“The day I turned thirty-two my car hit you when the mileage read twenty five thousand, five hundred and eleven. The mark of death for you, right?”

“That’s what I thought. I
believed
, Mari, really
believed
that I had killed all those people. Your family was among those people. Last night especially when you had the bottle at my throat it seemed even more true, more
intended
.”

He stopped, and she waited, looking at him, making certain he had told all he would tell before she spoke. “But, Jay, don’t you see now what was really happening?”

He shook his head.

“You weren’t killing, Jay. You were saving. Saving one life from certain death. You were dying for
that
person. You were suffering the death meant for them, so that they could live.” A wet sheen spread over her eyes now. “So that I could live.”

“I did what?” Jay asked, dumbfounded by what she was saying. By what she was proposing. This thing that was the complete opposite of all he had believed, of all he had feared the past eight years.

“Jay, when the plane I was on crashed, I knew I was going to die. There was no doubt in my mind. All there was around me was blackness, and noise, and screaming, and heat. And then flames. I couldn’t find my husband, or my little boy. I felt the heat, and the flames came at me, and I got burned.” She let go his hands then and pulled the left sleeve of her sweatshirt up, revealing the inside of her forearm. It was a long strip of gnarled and plasticky skin, twisted and discolored with a sickly, inhuman shine upon it. And for a reason he did not know, Jay reached out and very, very gently put his fingers to it, feeling her wound, her scar.

Mari eased her sleeve back down and took the hand he had touched her with in hers. “Jay, I was a dead woman, and then I felt myself getting out of the fire, and out of the wreckage, as if something was pulling me to safety. And now I know that that something was you.”

Creases stretched across his brow, lines of doubt, of puzzlement. Lines of desire, the desire to believe. He had
saved
?

“You saved one person for each letter you wrote,” she told him. “More even, for each time before you started ‘confessing’ your crimes. Only there were no crimes, Jay. Only acts of salvation.”

“I
saved
you?” Jay said, not truly doubting, just thunderstruck by the presentation of a new reality he had lived without knowing.

“You saved one person from each of those terrible tragedies, Jay. All of the things that happened were things that didn’t have to happen. The cruelest kind of death—unnecessary death. The articles I read said that each and every one of the things that happened were either proven human error, or strongly suspected to be human error. Utter wastes of human life, Jay. Life like my husband’s and my son’s.”

Chloe came to their table again, bringing their orders on two plates and setting a bottle of ketchup between them. Mari stared hard at her until she was gone.

Jay shook his head slowly at the table, digesting what he’d been told.

“It’s true, Jay,” she said to him. “And isn’t it a better truth than the lie you believed?”

“Of course,” he said. How could it not be? “So this is why you found me?”

“I don’t know,” she said, letting go his hand with one of her own and slipping a fry past her lips. “To ease your pain, to make you see the truth, to—”

“To get my attention,” Jay interjected.

“Yeah,” Mari agreed, smelling the food now, her hunger gurgling in her stomach. “I got it, didn’t I? You mind if I...”

“Go ahead,” Jay told her, and she dug into the food as though she hadn’t eaten in days. And maybe she hadn’t. How easy could life on the road be? And her jeans were a bit big on her, weren’t they? Yes, but...

...but why would she have been put through all that to come and set him straight? Why set him straight at all? Was it over? Not his part in this, but the realities of the big wide world? Were there to be no more senseless tragedies? Were no more people going to die in that way?

Of course more people would die senselessly. That
was
life. Bad things happened in life. So why stop saving? And why had anyone been saved at all? It was life after all, and death was a part of that. A cruel part, even.

So how could this be it. Bing, bang, boom, thank you for your good work Mr. Grady, you can punch out now. What, was there some rotation or something? Would someone else jump in? Were there other crazy bums about who passed out magic to others just so it would bend and weave its way to some kind of knowing that would
save
people? Was it that?

God
, Jay thought, feeling like Mari had the night before,
this can’t be all it’s about.

“Aren’t you hungry?” Mari asked him as he stared at the food. Hell, she could eat for both of them, she was sure.

“No, I am,” Jay said, taking a few fries at first, putting his worries away for the moment to get some food into his body. A body that had subsisted on water and Darvon for over twenty four hours now. Yes, there were questions still, but he was hungry, damn hungry he realized when the taste of the fries hit him, and he dove into the meal.

Ten minutes later, their plates cleaned of all but the smallest crumbs (Jay had even pecked the bun’s wayward sesame seeds from his plate with the moistened tip of his finger), Chloe was back at there table with the check. Jay’s eyes ballooned. He didn’t have a cent on him. All the money from his can collecting the day before was still in the hospital bag with his tattered jeans.

He looked to Mari. “I don’t...”

She reached into her pocket. It was she who had dragged him here, after all. Her hand came out with a pair of bills, a five and another five which she laid atop the check as she smiled sweet-sweet-sweetly at the rude and sour face of their waitress, who left shaking her head.

“Is she always like this?” Mari asked.

“I never notice,” Jay answered, and he hadn’t. Usually in here he avoided looking at anything. Lest that anything be a gathering of tails. But now, did he have to worry about that anymore?

“Do you feel better?” Mari asked him. “About all of this?”

Jay thought for a minute, his face belying the fact that, if he did, there was something still not sitting right with him. “If it’s true, and I do think that you’re right, that I didn’t kill anyone after all, then I can’t settle myself with why it would end now. Did senseless death decide to take a holiday?”

Now Mari’s expression changed, cooling a bit. She had been so enamored of the beauty of her discovery that what remained in its wake had not occurred to her. “I didn’t think about that.”

“You said something about there having to be more to this. Maybe there is still more.”

“What, though?” Mari asked, looking away from Jay for a moment as Chloe the sourpuss brought her her change. She reached for it, ready to leave just a nickel for a tip (a too generous tip at that, she thought), when Jay’s hand wrapped suddenly around her wrist. Her eyes snapped back to him and saw that his face had tensed, all the muscles about it edged at some readiness, and his tired green eyes were gaping at the...

...at the change.

She looked and saw it, too.

The nickel she’d planned to leave Chloe as a tip, it was a head. As were the nine coins that lay with it.

Thirty Five

Mile Marker One

“Jay,” Mari began warily, “the really, really insane thing is happening.”

“I know,” he said, letting go of her wrist and gathering the coins into his fist. He held it up a bit and let them all fall.

Mari sucked a fast breath when she saw that the nine coins, the three quarters, one dime, one nickel, and four pennies, had come up heads again when they settled after the fall. “Jay...”

“There is more,” Jay said softly to the coins, his voice almost a whisper. More.

She looked to him, fearful, their moments of pleasant revelations swept away by the coins, by what they could mean. “Heads are good, right, Jay? Heads don’t mean...”

“No,” he said, his voice very even as he stared at the—

The number zapped him as it came, a small shudder zipping through his body.

But the second one did not, appearing in his knowing as gently as the moon coming from behind a cloud. His attention had been got already.

“Jay?” Mari could see it, see something on his face, in his eyes. In the way his whole body had jumped there a second ago. “Jay, what...are you seeing something? It’s not bad, is it?”

Another number came.

And another.

And...

846

...more.

Jay shook his head, mildly stunned by what had come. By the
number
of numbers. How many numbers had come? Six? No, seven. Seven numbers that he could still see. Still see, yes, but how long could he remember them?

“Mari, do you have something to write with?”

She instinctively patted her pockets, though nothing of the sort useful for what he was requesting was there. She needed a pen, or a pencil, and something to write on. Something like...

She scooted fast out of the booth and ran to the counter where the waitress stood with her back to the room. “Hey!”

Chloe turned around, surprised.

“Give me your pen.”

“My pen?” Chloe reacted, glancing down at the Bic clipped to her apron. “Now why would I give you my
heyyy!
”

Mari had already tired of the incensed refusal that had begun and would surely drag on, so she simply reached over the counter and snatched the pen for herself. “Back in a jiff, love.” She blew Chloe a loveless kiss and hurried back to the booth.

“Okay, Jay. What?”

“You have something to write on?”

Noooo
, but... She looked around, hearing dear old Chloe complaining to the cook about some bitchy little customer with that crazy guy, and decided one of the throwaway menus tucked behind the salt and pepper shakers would do. “Got it. What am I writing?”

“Seventy.”

“Seventy,” she repeated. A number. It was a number. He had said something about seeing numbers. Her mileage, her age, and he saw them when heads came up. And with these heads there was another—

“Twenty seven.”

“Twenty seven,” she wrote, thinking more than just one, obviously.

“Fifty six.”

“Fifty s—”

“Two eighty se—”

“Slow down,” she told him, and finished writing 56 on the back of the menu, right next to the beverage prices and the warning that the management would not be held responsible for lost or stolen articles. “Okay, two eighty what?”

He went through the rest, 287, 40, 846, and the strangest one, 0001. Mari wrote them all, and when she was done she looked to him. “Any more?”

Jay picked up the change again and dropped it. The nine coins scattered randomly, heads, tails, just ninety four cents laying on the table.

“It’s not heads anymore,” Mari said.

“We got what we’re supposed to have,” Jay explained. “Their job is done.”

Mari looked down at the numbers scrawled on the back of the paper menu. “This is all new to me, Jay. Would you mind telling me what we got?”

“We got numbers.”

“I see,” she said, nodding, scanning what had been ‘gotten’. “What do they mean?”

“I don’t know,” he said, now uncomfortable in that state of ignorance. The last time he hadn’t known what the coins meant he was just about killed. And now, with these
seven
numbers, what was the thing they were pointing to?

“Am I supposed to go out and hit some more people?” Mari asked him, a bit of gallows humor to cut the mood. She clicked the pen shut and held it up in the air. A few seconds later she felt it snatched away without ever seeing Chloe approach.

“They mean something,” Jay said. “They always mean something.”

“Almost any something,” she said, taking a good long gander at the numbers. “I mean, I’ve seen more numbers in the past four months than...” Her eyes came up to Jay, blue and shrewd, like the quiet pulse of a firework’s light just before its thunder struck.

“What?” Jay pressed, after her keen silence lingered on.

“It can’t be that simple,” she said, to him, to herself, to nothing and no one in particular, just a pronouncement of wonder to be taken as it was. “Can it?”

“Can what?”

“Come on,” she said, and slid quick out of the booth, that energy showing again.