The Resurrected Compendium (11 page)

All these lives, cascading like a fistful of cards in a trick. Pick one, any one. Some days you get the king, others the joker.

Life with my parents alive was a long series of disappointments culminating in my complete and utter lack of success as a human being.

Life with my parents dead…was glory.

All spread out before me, the world to be gripped in my two hands, but not for my own pleasure. Not to raise me up for my own sake. No, I was to do the work of my true father, not the man who’d impregnated my mother and had happily spent his life with grease under his nails and his breath smelling of cheep beer. I was supposed to make a difference in the world. That’s what the voice told me.

The voice of God.

Not the one from vacation bible school, some old man with a long white beard and robes. My fathergod didn’t speak from a burning bush. My fathergod didn’t ask me to martyr myself so the sins of others would be forgiven. People needed to be responsible for their own sins.

No, my fathergod told me it was my job to bring a light to the world and show people how important it was not to follow the words some men had written down eons ago in texts that have been ruined through interpretation over the years. It’s not important to read.

It’s important to listen.

My parents died when the gas line to the stove my mother never used perforated, leaking gas into the kitchen that was ignited by a spark of unknown origin, maybe something simple like the phone ringing or the shuffle of my dad’s sock-clad feet on the carpet, making static. There were a lot of rights and lefts in that scenario; the voice showed me the myriad ways it could happen, and in the end it didn’t matter how. Just that it did.

The house was gone, and so were they, but there was plenty of money for a guy who didn’t need much. All I needed was my voice, and people to hear it. The problem was, I was still invisible.

So came the clothes. White suit, white shirt, white tie. Top to toe. The cadence of my words became an up-and-down lilt, and the message came next, shared in a way people were familiar with even if there were many who mocked.
 
I became a caricature, just like the ones I was so good at drawing.
 

The Christian folk castigated me because I was making everything they ever believed into a lie. What they didn’t know was that they could keep on with their water into wine. They didn’t have to give that up. The non-believers mocked me and lumped me in with the Jesus sellers when that’s not at all the story I was telling. They didn’t have to take that on.
 

All they had to do was learn to listen.

I started with the website. Blog. A Connex account, a personal page not one for a business or a celebrity, because I wanted to connect with people as myself, not an entity or corporation or someone on a pedestal. I wanted everyone I connected with to see me as someone they could message and talk to, tag in their statuses. I replied to everyone, every time. I gained connexions at a startling rate. Social media, the hand of the voice.
 
I started an internet radio show with only a few listeners at first, but as the things the voice told me to share became true, the numbers grew steadily every day, week, month. My videos went viral, reposted and reblogged and retweeted and shared all over the world.

I wasn’t invisible any more.

I saw the storms coming, of course. Not their origin, that was kept from me, but how they would tear through the country and all over the planet. The devastation they’d leave behind. The people who’d die. I saw these things when the voice whispered them to me…how my every left or right led this way or that. Different choices. Different paths.

It’s not narcissism if the world really does revolve around you.

I died for real, not just in a vision, and I came back, and the voice of my fathergod hadn’t told me that would happen. Hadn’t warned me of the pain. Maybe that was on purpose; maybe if I’d known in advance how much it would hurt, I’d have made different choices. I’d have moved along a different path.

I could’ve saved a lot of people in my avoidance of agony, that much is true. I could’ve turned left instead of right at several points along the way and saved lives. Property. I guess even the world, if the world had deserved saving.
 

But in the end, I didn’t.

13

Abbie had been through roadblocks before. She’d been pulled aside and passed roadside sobriety tests, always to her own surprise and probably that of the cops, too. She’d never had to inch her car past a pair of tanks before, or watched armed soldiers waving her through to the highway beyond.

The damage she’d seen in Oklahoma had been horrific. She’d driven from Ada and had seen evidence of other tornados in other towns, all equally terrible, but none of the damage had seemed worth this sort of nationwide government attention. Yet she couldn’t bring herself to roll down her window and ask the soldiers what had happened to make their presence necessary. She couldn’t even bring herself to listen to the radio.

She was afraid she already knew.

She had every reason to be nervous the first time the soldier waved her to a stop and gestured for her to roll down her window. She wasn’t drunk or high, but she
was
driving illegally. When he took her driver’s license from her, his eyes scanned it and then her face, but he handed it back without questioning the expired date. He looked inside the car, passenger seat, back seat. Then at her again.

“I need to get home to my family,” Abbie offered even thought the soldier hadn’t asked. “That’s all. I’m afraid…something’s happened.”

Other soldiers were moving along the line of cars behind and beside her. They were looking, too. Maybe for something, she thought, or maybe for nothing. Maybe they didn’t know what to look for. She had to swallow hard to keep herself from crying.

“Lots of things are happening,” the soldier said after another half a minute ticked by. His expression never changed. His eyes looked dead and hard, but when they flickered over her face again she saw a hint of something that might’ve been compassion deep in his gaze. “You should stay off the highways.”

She thanked him, and as soon as she’d passed that roadblock, Abbie took the soldier’s suggestion. She kept to the back roads, her trip made longer and more complicated but without as much interference. She drove with her hands clamped so tight to the wheel her fingers ached. Her foot moved from gas to brake. She obeyed the speed limit and traffic signs. She took breaks when her body forced her to eat, to pee, to sleep. But mostly, she drove and drove with her eyes on the road and her mind shut down against the memory of what she’d seen in that farmyard.

She drove for three days.

She could’ve chased away the image of Cal’s mouth yawning open, the black cloud surrounding him. With a bottle or so of whiskey, she could’ve kept away the dreams of Marnie’s infant chewing its way out of her body with its tiny, toothless mouth. But drinking would’ve made her stupid and sick, incapable of getting up at the crack of dawn to get on the road as soon as she could so the tires of her car could eat up the miles toward the home she’d left behind.

So, instead, at night she dreamed and woke, never screaming, with her hands clapped over her mouth and nose in silent terror. She could still taste that…stuff…whatever it was that had exploded out of Cal and Tony and Marnie. She’d coughed it out, but the thickness of it lingered in the back of her throat. It weighted her sinuses.
 

The days she’d spent in the hospital after her accident had always been blessedly blurred. Whatever pain she’d felt in those first days had been dimmed by delicious narcotics, and later she’d welcomed the agony because it wouldn’t let her forget the magnificence of her mistakes. That pain, the one of being unable to forget, was worse than the physical, and that’s why she kept it close to her.

One thing she’d never forgotten was of how she’d fought for every breath. Her lungs had been damaged, and unlike other wounds that could be healed, ruined alveoli didn’t grow back. She’d been weaned off the oxygen, eventually. Warned that travel to high altitudes could be painful. Told not to smoke.

It hit her in odd moments. She yawned a lot even when she wasn’t tired, because yawning is a reflex to the body’s perception that it isn’t getting enough oxygen. She couldn’t scream on roller coasters. Weeping left her lightheaded and dizzy. So did climbing steep stairs or any sort of strenuous activity. She couldn’t dive into the deep end of the pool, and though she’d never gone scuba diving, she was sure that had become impossible too.
 
She’d learned to breathe in short, shallow breaths when she got too excited, to maximize her intake and prevent herself from fainting.

Abbie tried that now, sipping delicately at the air inside of her car. It smelled of fast food grease and the orange juice she’d spilled two mornings ago. She breathed in through her mouth, blinking rapidly, to keep her vision focused. The road swam in front of her. The stench of whatever that stuff had been made her gag and choke. She pulled to the side of the road and stumbled from the car to bend over, dry heaving into the weeds.

Whatever it had been, it was still inside her.

At the thought of it, acid hurtled into her throat. She heaved again and spat bile. Then a thick black goo tinged with blood. It left her throat raw, her mouth sour. With shaking fingers she wiped her lips and studied the smears of black and maroon. Something writhed in it, or else her eyes had gone unfocused, and she let out a breathless, guttural moan and shook her hands. The ooze clung to her skin until she swiped at the ground, grinding her fingers into the dirt. She pulled them away, her fingernails encrusted with filth. The ground shifted.
 

Flowers bloomed.

Abbie pinwheeled her arms and took a few steps back. Her heel caught on something and she went to the earth without so much as a hand out to catch herself. Her ass hit first, then her back, hard enough to clatter her teeth together. She bit the tip of her tongue, and the pain was bad but the taste of her own blood washed away the sourness, and she was glad for that.

She lay on her back, staring at the sky. No clouds. Nothing but bright blue. A sky like that should look down on picnics and parades.
 

By the time she got to her feet again, the flowers had died and returned to the ground, leaving nothing but the faintest scent. It had been delicious in the farmyard, but here it only made her choke and gag again. She rolled onto her side and waited for a car to stop and help her, but the road was as quiet as it had been for miles. She waited for her head to explode.

Minutes ticked past, and she timed them against the beat of her heart, the in and out of each shallow breath. She closed her eyes and pressed her face into the dirty roadside grass. She wished for a drink, and not of cold, clear water that would wash the bitterness from her mouth. No. As usual, she wished for the bite of liquor.

Abbie had taken her first alcoholic drink at twenty-one, in celebration of her birthday. A glass of champagne at dinner with her parents. Sure, she’d had friends who drank in high school and throughout college, but she’d never felt the need for it. It had gone down smooth, so smooth, that having another hadn’t seemed like much trouble at all. She’d been pleasantly tipsy at the end of the night, had woken the next morning with the taste of it still in her mind. The bubbles. How it had made her feel, warm and dizzy and like she loved the world and everything in it.

She’d been dating Ryan then, already dreaming of a white wedding, a house in the country, babies and pets and car payments. She hadn’t counted on planning a wedding being such a painful thing. She hadn’t anticipated losing her dad to inoperable lung cancer three weeks before she walked down the aisle, or having to deal with Ryan’s family dramas. She’d never thought vodka would become her best friend.

Abbie wasn’t an alcoholic. Drunks were frowzy, stumbling women with smudged lipstick and slurred words who waved their cigarettes around and made scenes in the supermarket when they couldn’t find the brand of baked beans they wanted. Alcoholics reeked of booze, couldn’t manage a shower or clean clothes. They certainly didn’t volunteer for the PTA or be Cub Scout troop leaders, they didn’t organize bake sales to benefit the junior tennis team. Didn’t make homemade Halloween costumes and cookies from scratch. So what if she added a splash of Stolichnaya to her orange juice in the morning? Bailey’s to her coffee? What difference did it make if she treated herself to an afternoon rum-and-coke, a glass or three of wine with dinner? So what if she spent her days in a haze, moving from one drink to the next and counting the minutes in between them until she could convince herself it was okay to have another?

She was very good at it. The drinking. Keeping it hidden from Ryan and the boys, making sure nobody ever saw her take more than one drink. She blamed the hangovers on the flu, allergies, whatever bug was going around. Because only drunks sprawled on the couch all day and didn’t get up when their kids came home, Abbie never allowed herself to give in to the headaches or nausea. There were pills for that — combinations of vitamins and minerals you could take while you were drinking, other combinations to combat the sour stomach and blinding pain behind her eyes. Her world never stopped spinning, and that was okay, because as long as the world spun, so did Abbie.
 

She didn’t want to listen when Ryan told her she had a problem. What did he know? He was never there. Content to leave the daily grind of domesticity to her, he left the house at eight in the morning and didn’t come home until after six. He never had to worry about laundry or balancing the checkbook or waiting around for the repairmen to come when the appliances broke down, or getting the oil changed or school conferences to deal with Benji acting up in class and Jordan’s sudden plummeting grades.

“Who takes care of all that?” Abbie challenged him, her back against the kitchen counter, a glass of Jack-and-Coke in her hand that she desperately wanted to gulp but forced herself to sip nonchalantly, as though she didn’t care. “I do, Ryan. I do all of that, and that’s fine, someone has to. But I do it and you don’t, so don’t tell me how I need to go about getting through my day when you have absolutely no idea about any of it.”