Where I End and You Begin (23 page)

T
error is a strange thing. Once you’ve felt it, it is forever anchored to that first moment when it filled you. You remember it. Everyone has a moment like that, unless they are very lucky.

I remember my first terror.

I think, sometimes, that there is a piece of me trapped in that moment. She’s always there, mindless with fear, running from room to room, her hands empty, empty. She always thinks she should be holding something, doing something. The emergency operator said to go outside, to wait for the ambulance, but she’s in the office at the back of the house, and she can’t find her way out. The world has tipped on its side, become a maze, a labyrinth. She’s trapped.

We’re still connected, me and her, so sometimes I am her again. In moments of great fear, I run, but I don’t know where to go, because nowhere is the place where it hasn’t happened yet. And sometimes I think she switches places with me, and that’s why I find myself in places without knowing how I got there, and no memory of the last minute, and I’m lost because it’s the wrong house anyway. I turn the wrong way, lose time, lose direction. We must have swapped over for a moment, her and I. A little do-si-do in time.

That’s a ghost, too, I think. When I’m dead and gone, there will be that piece of me left behind, forever running, forever mindless, forever mute, caught in that moment, over and over and over.

T
anya is still talking. “Bianca’s her first name. She goes by her middle name. Did she tell you to call her Bianca?”

There’s a fire escape outside of Lana’s room,
I think.

My hands are empty. I should be doing something.
Anything.
Anything but be trapped here, locked into a future as indelible as the past.

I turn back to my desk. I grab my keys, throw on my coat, and dart out the door. I hear Daniel repeat my name, and I hear the shock in his voice.

“Annie?” he says. And, “Then where’s Annie?” And then, with realization and horror,
“Where’s Annie?”

He knows.

I run down the hall and knock on Lana’s door, but there’s no answer. I try the knob and it opens.

I slip through her room, past the mega-bed, past her huge set-up of her computer and a keyboard, and to the window. It groans in protest as I open it, and the cold comes in. We’ve only just banished it and I have to let it in again. I whisper an apology to her and climb out the window, closing it as much as I can behind me, but it will be freezing by the time she gets back.

The old rickety fire escape clangs under my feet and fear spurs my heart up into my throat.
Don’t hear me,
I think.
Don’t see me.

The fear makes the world sway around me, but I cling to the railing of the fire escape as I stumble and descend the steps, keeping myself from falling more than once with a grip of death on the metal, so cold it numbs my hands.

I reach the bottom and run to the back lot where my car is parked. Snow is still piled around it, but I scramble inside and turn it on and it starts. The wheels spin, but then catch and move, and I’m backing out. The dark is falling, so I turn on the headlights. The radio is loud—it’s always loud—but I see, from the corner of my eye, someone running toward me.

I can’t help it. I look.

Daniel. He’s wearing a pea coat and a scarf, looking so adorable I want to stop and get out and throw myself into his arms.

But I can’t. Instead I throw the car into gear, peel out of the parking lot, and drive away.

I don’t know where I’m going. The future is behind me. But I can see the past clearly, and I will walk backwards as long as it takes to get away.

I drive.

I don’t care where I drive to, only that it is
away
. The landscape whizzes past, and I am numb, inside and out, not thinking, not feeling...but after a while I’m not shocked to find myself in Nompton, drifting through the streets, like a ghost returning to the place she knew best when she was alive.

I hate myself. I’m such a coward. My hands are shaking on the steering wheel, and my feet are trembling on the pedals. I know there’s nowhere for me to go but back home, but right now I can’t. I have to be alone. Truly alone.

The old church.

The thought floats through my mind. Perhaps put there by Jibril, or by our quick drive-by last weekend, but as soon as it presents itself I know there is nowhere else I should go. Nowhere else that would be right to go.

I turn through the streets, trying to remember where exactly it sat.

I stumble upon it almost by accident. The sun is going down, but the power is back and the clouds are clearing away for once, so it’s easy to see the ramshackle building squatting behind its chain link fence. I park my car and get out.

Slowly, I walk the perimeter. The air is cold, but the wind is slight, and it’s easy to find the spot to slip through the fence. It’s been left behind by others, and I forge my way through the dead weeds to its side.

It’s much bigger up close, and more solid looking. A true prairie church, with small thin windows—now broken and half boarded-up—and a stout bell tower. I wonder if what Jibril said was true—if there’s a way into the church through the floor. Then again, I wonder why the door would be locked after all these years.

I complete my circuit of the church. There is a door in the front, beneath the bell tower, and a door in the back, where the altar must be. I pull around to the front and look at the wooden steps leading up to the front door. They were painted gray once upon a time, and they look solid enough.

I put a foot out and test them. They groan and creak, but they don’t crack. Slowly I transfer my weight. The steps hold.

I climb them, one at a time, testing them with each step, and when I hit the top I realize my heart is pounding halfway out of my chest. Reaching out, my bare fingers close around the metal handle of the door, and I give it a pull.

It opens.

Shock rocks through me. I hadn’t expected it to open. But then I think,
Of course it opened.

This is fate.

I step inside.

The bell tower section is first, just a little entrance. The floor creaks under my feet, but it holds. The doors to the sanctuary are old and solid and decorated with simple carvings, just little swirls and curlicues. No scenes of hell and carnage, no flood, no biblical tableaus. I try the sanctuary doors, and they open even more easily than the front. I step into the sanctuary.

It takes my eyes a moment to adjust to the dim interior. Dust is everywhere, as are broken timbers and broken lights. The windows are boarded up from the inside, but only halfway up, leaving the top of each window exposed so the wind can howl and whistle through them. Just like every other dead building, there are dry leaves everywhere, and the furniture of the old building, though solid, is sad and raggedy. The pews were lovely once, and in the back is a gorgeous old altar, ringed by a low railing. It looks nothing like the churches my mother took me to, after our world shattered. The church of demons was just a little square room, and the churches afterwards were sterile and new, without soul.

But this...this had been a beautiful place, once upon a time. Now it is dying. I love it more than any other place in the world right now. I want to clean it out and let it decay with dignity.

Maybe I will. Maybe I will come back one sunny Sunday morning and fix the old place up. A flight of fancy, but one that makes me feel better, one that has nothing to do with my current reality.

My current reality is that I want to go somewhere to hide, and never come out again.

I move back into the bell tower.

There is a small, narrow door in the wall of the bell tower, and I suspect it houses stairs. The bell pull is still there, but though there are holes as big as my hand in the low ceiling I can’t see up there. It is too dark.

I try the door, and to my surprise, this one is locked, but the wood of the wall has rotted away and with a few kicks and a mighty heave I manage to open it.

I was right, there are stairs, and they are the tiniest, narrowest stairs I have ever seen.

Do I dare?
I wonder. Small structures tend to be far more stable than large structures...

So yes. I dare.

I brace myself on the splintering wood wall and put my weight on the step in front of me. It creaks, but holds quite well, far better than the steps out front. Encouraged, I put my hands out and find the wall on the inside of the stairs, and then I begin to climb.

The stairs are so narrow that I almost feel as though I am suffocating in the walls. The dust is poisonous in my lungs and eyes, and I pause more than once to cough until I retch. But I keep going. The tiny stairwell carries me around, over the door to the sanctuary, and then over the entrance, and still up and up and up until I finally reach the top.

A huge hole in the roof, not visible from outside, lets light in. The fading light of the sun. The growing light of the moon. A lone bell hangs in the rafters, its long rotted rope disappearing down into the darkness below. The floor is square, with a square hole cut out of the middle for the bell to hang in and the rope to move freely. The whole space is maybe four feet tall—far too short to stand in.

The bell shines dully in the fading light.

Hardly daring to breathe, I test my weight on the little floor and it holds. I crouch down, keeping my head away from the rafters that no doubt have sharp edges and splinters and tetanus, and crawl on my hands and knees across the little floor.

Slowly. Slowly.

It groans under me. But it holds.

I crawl over to the hole in the roof. Rearing up carefully, I peer out.

Forest extends beyond the church. Forest and plains. Old open prairie. Tilled land. Dense woods. It all gleams silver and pale in the twilight.

This is a beautiful world,
I think to myself,
and I am glad I am in it.

And I am.

Beneath me, one of the boards gives a tiny
crack.

My heart leaps into my throat. Taking care to distribute my weight equally, I sit down and lean gingerly against one of the heavy tower supports. It bears me up, and I close my eyes, breathing in and out and wondering if I can still achieve Buddhist enlightenment in the remains of a Christian church. Surely every place is just as holy as another?

I listen to the sound of crows, the sound of the wind in the branches of the trees, the sound of the old building settling, slouching back into the earth.

I let the world pass by.

When I hear Daniel’s car, I wonder if one can achieve enlightenment on a deadline.

He calls my name.

I don’t answer.

Go away,
I think.
Go be happy somewhere without me.

The chain link fence jangles as he finds his way through it. After a moment his footsteps creak up the front stairs. The door opens and he is inside the building, just below me.

I can practically hear him thinking, figuring out where I am, and when the stairs of the bell tower creak I know there’s no escaping, no hiding now. I could leap out the hole above me, but the roof would never take my weight. It’s borne the brunt of the elements for God knows how long, and I don’t trust it. I have no choice but to await my destined meeting.

The bell tower groans, and his footsteps come closer, and closer, and closer.

I let my eyes crack open, just as Daniel’s head appears above the little bell tower floor. He looks about. Spots me.

For a long moment we are both quiet.

“Annie,” he says at last.

But that isn’t right. “My name is Bianca,” I tell him.

He inhales, sharp, unsure. “I know,” he says. “Are you all right?”

Why does everyone always ask me that?

“I’m fine,” I say. Why wouldn’t I be fine? Everything is fine.

“Okay,” he says, but it is clear he doesn’t believe me. “If you’re all right, why are you hiding in a bell tower that could collapse at any moment?”

“To get away,” I say, and that, at least, is true.

“Bianca...”

“It’s fine.”

But it’s not fine, and everyone knows it.

Daniel clears his throat and inches upward. Carefully he puts his weight on the floor of the bell tower.

Another
crack!
This one louder.

Hurriedly he backs up until he is able to kneel on the top step of the little stairwell, breathing hard.

I wish he would go away and mind his own business. I wish he would leap across the space between us and grab me, hold me tight until I don’t remember why I wanted to come up here in the first place.
Love me into forgetfulness.

“It’s dangerous up here,” he says.

“I know,” I tell him,

“You should come down, with me.”

“No.”

I see him swallow, gauging the distance between us. His face is white in the rising moonlight, a cold sheen of sweat on his brow.

“Bianca?”

“Yes?”

He doesn’t meet my eyes. He is staring at the bell rope, disappearing down into the darkness below us. “Why did you give me a different name to call you than the name you gave to everyone else?”

I smile, not looking at him. “Remember when I said drinking was like a vacation from being myself?”

“Yes.”

“Being with you, being Bianca, that was like being on vacation from being Annie. Annie has a lot of problems. My name is still Bianca. It’s the name on my ID, on my transcript, on the class rolls. But Annie’s a pretty miserable person. I wanted to try being Bianca for a while.” I swallow. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he says. “You just... now that I know... does anyone else call you Bianca?”

I shake my head. “No, no one. I’ve always been called Annie.” I have to smile a bit. “Did you think I was a ghost? Just for a second?”

To my surprise, he laughs. “Yeah,” he says. “I did. Just for a moment.” Then he pauses. “Annie,” he says, and he lets it roll around on his tongue, through his mouth as though tasting it. “Annie.”

The silence stretches out between us. I know it’s coming, and I try to brace myself for it, but even when it comes it’s still like a blow across the face.

“Annie,” he says. “That story about the ghost in the hospital. That was you. The little girl, I mean.”

There’s a lump in my throat, and I nod.

“And the other ghost stories? Were those you, too? They were always the same, a kid losing their father. Which one of them is the truth? Did he die in Iraq, or here? Did he play the piano, or did he drink and drive and wrap his car around a tree or whatever it was?”

I don’t know what to say. Sometimes I tell people my father died in the war, because it’s true, in a way. The war surely killed him.

But he was home when the bullet in the brain finished him off.

“He fought in Iraq,” I say. “And he left messages for me in the bathroom mirror back when he was still in the States. And he did drink, a lot, when he came back. And he played the piano, too.”

I take a deep breath. “And he shot himself in the head in front of my mom and me, right in the middle of the living room.”

There. I said the words. They never get easier. I hate saying them, remembering that they are true. It isn’t fair that those words are true. Why is he dead, and other people alive? People who don’t deserve it, like rapists and murderers and all the old men that sent him off to war in the first place? And none of it mattered in the end. It was all for nothing.