Towering (31 page)

At first, nothing happened. Then, I jiggled the key in the lock. The door opened to reveal . . .

A length of pipe?

Pipe? I did not understand. It was old, rusted. I released the key with my throbbing hands. At first, it stuck in the door. Then, it fell, down, down so far. It landed on the floor without a sound, right next to Wyatt.

Below, the water kept rushing, just as it had before. The rhapsody still bloomed. The dissenters came closer. Nothing had changed, nothing. Nothing except that my beloved was dead, and it was all for naught. I had done nothing. I knew that, soon, the men would have their hands upon me, and I didn’t care. I didn’t care.

I looked at the old, rusted pipe below me, and I began to weep, weep for my lost love, my lost life, my lost everything.

And with that weeping, I remembered the blonde woman’s words.
There is something else, something only you can do
.

And, with that, I began to weep harder. But now, I fixed my weeping eyes right over that old, rusted pipe so that the tears fell directly inside.

And then, I was crying harder, so much harder, like my tears had become a sudden rain shower, and they fell inside that pipe.

A cry went up from the mob.

I looked down below me. The men who had been climbing toward me stopped their pursuit. Indeed, everyone below me seemed silent, frozen, all staring at one thing, at the rhapsody plants.

The flowers drooped, turning from blue to brown before my eyes. The rhapsody was wilting. It was as if my healing tears had sealed up its ability to accept water. It was dying.

And so was my Wyatt. If he was not dead already.

I knew what I had to do.

Now that the job had been done, the mobs of people were moving away, streaming away to the stairs. The rhapsody dead, they were leaving. The man who had been climbing the wall stopped in his tracks, knowing now it was useless. But I could not watch what happened. I knew what I had to do. I knew they would not help. I wanted scissors, but I only had a key. A key with a sharp side. I grabbed a big section of my hair and began to saw upon it with all my might, using the key. I could see below me that it reached nearly to the ground. I sawed and sawed, and as I did, I was crying, weeping for Wyatt. Little bits, then, finally, the whole braid of hair gave way under pressure from the key. It detached itself from my head. I pulled it up beside me. Part of it was still braided, from the car. The rest was not. From where it ended, I began to braid.

Below me, I heard a voice, Mama’s voice. “Rachel!”

I looked down. It was her. It was really her!

I kept braiding, but I shouted, “Is he alive?”

She heard what I said and rushed over to Wyatt. She touched his neck.

A moment later, she said, “Just barely.”

It was enough. But I had to go, had to go now.

I looped the hair around the railing that held the platform in place, then knotted it. It was not completely braided, but it hung to the bottom, beginning to unravel. It would have to do.

I tested the strength of the knot. I could not help Wyatt if I fell myself. When I was certain it would hold me, I grabbed the rope, first with one hand, then the other.

Then, as I had the first day we had met, I slid down it, to Wyatt.

Once down, I rushed toward him. I felt weak, spent. I knew that my strength was gone and I hoped that my other gift, the one gift I still needed, was not. I had counted on it.

I reached Wyatt. He was bleeding in so many places. Yet, I could tell that he was barely alive, and even though I had used so many tears, I found more.

My tears touched his flesh.

I was floating, first just above my body, then high above, like the snow angels we had made that time only real. I saw Rachel turn the key in the lock. I saw the rhapsody wilt.

And then, I saw Rachel begin to climb down.

I was dying. And yet, it didn’t matter, for I had fought. This time I had fought. I had done the right thing, the good thing. I hadn’t let fear or even inertia stop me. I had done what I was meant to do. I closed my eyes. Even though I was bleeding, nothing hurt. I felt relaxed, at peace.

Then, there were hands on my body, on my face. Something wet. Tears.

I opened my eyes.

Rachel was there.

“My darling,” she said. “My Wyatt, it’s not too late.”

“You came back. I didn’t expect you to. I didn’t know if you’d still be able to heal me. I was willing to sacrifice, for you, for them.”

She kissed me and said, “Yes, but I’m so glad you didn’t have to.”

The room was empty. The rushing water had stopped, and the rhapsody, just wilted, was melting away. All the workers had streamed up the stairways and out the door, the Fox brothers behind them. It was as if the rhapsody had never been there. I held out my hand to Rachel. “Hey, your hair looks cute short,” I said. “And you’re pretty strong. Mind giving me a hand?”

She took mine. “Gladly.”

She helped me up and gestured to Mrs. Greenwood, who was standing nearby. “Mama, I think you’ve met Wyatt.”

She nodded. “Lovely boy . . . if a bit of trouble!” She reached for my arm. “I think you’re going to have to help me a bit with these stairs. The trip down was bad enough.”

We rearranged ourselves, one on each side of her, and started toward one of the staircases. “This one goes outside,” Rachel said.

But when we reached it, there was a girl standing halfway up. A woman, actually, about my mother’s age, with light blond hair.

“I thought . . . ,” she said, “I thought someone should come back to thank you . . . and to explain. You see I’m—”

“Suzie!” Mrs. Greenwood said. “Suzie Mills!”

“Suzie?” That had been the name of the old man’s daughter, the one who was missing.

“Of course I remember you, Suzie. You’re the one who brought my Rachel to me.”

“Yes,” she said. “I brought her to you, because, even though I was crazy, addicted, I knew it was wrong. They told me to kill the baby, and I couldn’t kill a baby. I just couldn’t. And, then, they told me this wasn’t just any baby . . .”

She started to cry.

“You did the right thing,” Mrs. Greenwood said. “There’s nothing to cry about.”

“But there is. I had a chance to escape then, but I didn’t. I could have gone home, but the drug, it had such a hold over me that I went back to it, back to them, instead of going home to—”

“Your father,” I said. She was so skinny, maybe eighty pounds, and she was much older. I wondered if he would even recognize her.

“Yeah,” she said. “My dad. We fought all the time when I was a teenager, but I know he was right. I was doing crazy things back then, and it made me an easy target. That’s what they did, chose kids who were easy targets, runaways, or kids like me who were already in trouble. And I made myself one with a lot of partying, but it was nothing like the rhapsody.”

“Won’t it be hard without it, even now?” I asked.

She nodded. “Yeah. It’ll be hard, really hard. That’s why some of the workers there fought against you. They wanted it to stay the way it was, even if they had to be prisoners.”

“But you didn’t?” I said.

“No. I’ve seen how it is. People have been getting sick, they’ve been dying. The younger ones don’t know, but I do.” She sniffed.

“It’s all right,” Mrs. Greenwood said.

“I know. I’ll have to find the strength. We all will.”

“You will.” Mrs. Greenwood stroked her hair.

“I was just wondering . . . ?” Suzie said between sniffles.

“If we knew where your dad was?” I asked.

“Yeah. Is he alive still?”

“Yes,” I said. “I saw him, just yesterday.”

“Really?” she said. “So you can bring me there, to him?”

“I can. Or we can,” I said, starting up the stairs again. I turned back to Mrs. Greenwood and put my arm around her. “And, after that, we can go home and play Battleship and watch
Star Trek
—all three of us.”

All of us, Suzie first, then me and Mrs. Greenwood, with Rachel behind us, started up the stairs. It was a long walk, but considering what had been going on up until then, it wasn’t that difficult. When we reached the top of the stairs, we saw that it was daylight. I escorted Mrs. Greenwood to her own car, then, after I ascertained that she was okay to drive it, I took Rachel and Suzie to Josh’s old truck.

We drove east, into the sunrise.

In the week since Rachel destroyed the rhapsody and released the workers, a lot happened. That first day, we reunited Suzie and her father, with a lot of tears of happiness.

And then, the police brought charges against Carl and Henry. They weren’t able to bring drug charges against them, because there was no evidence at all that the rhapsody had ever existed or that it was a drug, but they brought over a hundred kidnapping and false imprisonment charges against them, including mine.

“I don’t think they’ll live much longer anyway,” Mrs. Greenwood said while we watched the news (which, conveniently, came right before
Star Trek
). “They were eighty if they were a day, even when I was a young girl. Obviously, they derived some sort of power from the rhapsody. It prolonged their lives.”

“And strength,” I said. “That old guy broke my arm.”

“Now that it’s gone, I suspect they will be too.”

I hoped so.

“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why I could communicate with Rachel. I mean, when she was in her tower. I heard her, and no one else could.” I remembered New Year’s Eve. Everyone else had been just as close to the tower as I was, but they were sure it was only a loon or maybe the wind. They didn’t hear anything.

“I’d thought about that myself.” Mrs. Greenwood paused the television just as the starry background came onscreen, before the announcer said,
Space: The final frontier
. “And the only thing I could think was that it was Danielle.”

“Danielle?” I said at the same time Rachel said, “My mother?”

“Yes. Rachel, I told you I had seen Danielle in my dreams, just a few months ago. She came in a dream and spoke clear as day. She said that Wyatt should come here, that he could help Rachel to fulfill the prophecy. I brushed it off, but the next day, Emily Hill called me.”

“She did?” I said.

“Out of the blue. I mean, we’d exchanged Christmas cards, and once, she came up to visit. But I hadn’t heard her voice in years. But that day, she asked if Wyatt could come stay here.”

“Did she know?” I asked. This was a big shock to me. I thought she’d just wanted to send me here to get me out of town.

Mrs. Greenwood nodded. “Just yesterday, I asked her, and she said she had had the same dream. She just hadn’t told me about it because she thought I’d freak out.”

“Good call,” I said.

“And then, when you came, you saw Danielle yourself.”

“Twice,” I said.

“Twice?”

Oops. I hadn’t told her about the second time. “So you think she, what, facilitated my communication with Rachel? Like a ghost or something?”

“A ghost or maybe a vision. I think she loved Rachel and wanted to help her, somehow.”

At this point, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that had happened. Not by a long shot. I said, “Do you think she’ll be coming back again?”

Mrs. Greenwood shook her head. “I don’t think so.” And then, she un-paused the television, the announcer’s voice, blasting:
These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise
.

The rest of the week, the town saw more action than it had probably seen in twenty years, as the police solved numerous missing persons cases, including finding Bryce Rosen, the guy on the Missing Person flier outside Hemingway’s. Dateline NBC was there and every news station in the country. Parents flocked to pick up their children, all believed dead, some for as long as thirty years. The Fox brothers had held them all this time, and now they were released, some to loving families, others to rehab centers.

And Mrs. Greenwood was right. The only one who wasn’t found was Danielle.

“Suzie told the truth,” Mrs. Greenwood said. “She really is gone. I never fully believed she was. I guess that’s why I never cleaned out her things. I should do it now.”