Abandon (8 page)

He’d reached out as he said it to lay a hand on my shoulder — to comfort me, I suppose — but I sprang away at his touch, recoiling as if he’d scalded me, and retreated to the hearth, where I collapsed.

Forever?
I was going to be trapped here with him forever?

And why? Because of some arbitrary
rule?
Something called a Fury? He had to be joking. I could only imagine what my dad would say if he were here.
Don’t you know who I am?
he’d bellow.

Though I felt completely numb inside, I could still sense the heat from the flames against my back. How could I be dead if I could still feel?
How?

A second later, John was beside me, saying, “Here. Drink this. It will help.”

He put a cup of something hot in my hands.

But I couldn’t drink.

Then he sat down beside me on the hearth. After a while, I noticed he was speaking again.

“I know it seems bad now, but it gets better, I promise. Soon — not right away, but eventually — you won’t even mind. Or at least, you won’t mind as much. It’s not the same as not minding at all, I know. But at least you won’t be alone. That’s the important thing. That was the worst part. Being alone for so long.”

What was he even
talking
about? I lifted my bruised gaze and let it wander around the room, until it finally came to rest on the bed. It was only then that I noticed how huge it was. Built for two, really.

Oh, God.

Stay away from the pool in the wintertime, Pierce. Even with the cover, it isn’t safe.

This was the price I was paying for not listening to my mother.

I never thought it would be
this
high.

It couldn’t have been a coincidence that at that very moment, I noticed an open doorway through an arch across the room, just beyond the bed. Through it I could see a long hallway lit by
elegant wall sconces. Two stone staircases curled from it. One led up.

The other led down.

I hadn’t noticed it before, I was certain, because I hadn’t been wearing the necklace. He’d said himself that the diamond protected its wearer from evil.

It was already working.

There was really only one question in my mind: Which staircase would lead me as far away as possible from here?

I was just going to have to make that decision when the time came.

“Well,” I said, realizing that if I didn’t distract him somehow, I was never going to get a chance to make my escape at all. “I guess you’re right. I’m…I’m just being silly.”

He stared down at me, seeming a little shocked at my abrupt change in attitude. “Really?” he asked. “Do you…do you mean that?”

“Of course,” I said. Somehow, I even managed a watery grin.

Then I lifted the cup he’d given me as if I was actually going to drink from it.

That’s when he did something he’d never done in my company before that moment. Something terrible. Something that showed that, despite what he’d said earlier about knowing my nature so well, he didn’t really know me at all.

He smiled.

And then I did something that still causes my heart to twist in my chest whenever I remember it. Something that still haunts my
dreams. Something I can’t believe I did and, to this day, really wish I hadn’t.

Except that I had to. The way that bed was sitting there, and the way
he
was sitting there, and…well, what other choice did I have?

It’s just that whenever I remember that smile, my heart still breaks a little.

But I was so young, and so scared. I didn’t know what else to do.

So I did the first thing I thought of. The thing I’m sure my dad — and even my mom and the Westport Academy for Girls — would have wanted me to do.

I threw that cup of hot tea in his face.

And then I ran.

I
took the
staircase that twisted down, thinking it would lead me back to the lake. I remember — as clearly as if it were yesterday — that with every step, I’d felt as if my heart was going to explode.

That, the psychiatrists assured me later, was the epinephrine.

The next thing I knew, I was looking up at my mom’s face. I watched as her expression went from agonized, tormented grief to wild, joyous hope as I responded like a robot to the ER doctor’s questions.

Yes, I knew who I was. Yes, I knew who my mother was, and what year it was, and how many fingers the doctor was holding up.

I was alive. I had gotten away from there, wherever it was.

Away from
him.

Everything after that seemed to happen in a blur. The surgery for the hematoma. My recovery. The doctors. The psychiatrists.

The divorce.

Because of course Dad wasn’t the one who saved me, in the end. That was Mom. When she got home from the library and called for me, then looked around and finally found where I’d disappeared to, she was the one who dove to the bottom of the pool and pulled me out.
Her
lips were the ones that turned blue from trying to blow life back into my frozen corpse for the twelve minutes it took the EMTs to get there. It was
her
wet hair that froze, like icicles, to my face.

Dad didn’t even realize what was going on until he heard the sirens from the ambulance she had called on her cell. He was still on his conference call.

“But it’s a good thing,” Dad always says, “that the water in that pool was so cold! Otherwise, you wouldn’t be alive today. That’s the only way they were able to restart your heart, once they got you warmed up.”

He’s actually right about that, though. Thanks to the near-freezing temperature of the water, my physical recovery was complete.

It was my psychological “issues” that needed work. Especially when, as she was signing me out of the hospital after my recovery from the surgery, Mom said, “Oh, honey, I’ve been meaning to ask you. Where did this come from?”

And she dropped a necklace into my lap.

The
necklace. The one he’d given me.

“Where did you get this?” I asked, clutching it, hoping the horror I felt didn’t show on my face.

“They brought it out with your other things while you were being prepped for surgery,” she said. “After they revived you. Apparently, you were wearing it under your coat. I almost told them they’d made a mistake and it wasn’t yours, because I’ve never seen it before.
Is
it yours? Did you borrow it from Hannah or something?”

“Uh, no. It…was a gift,” I said. How was this possible? How could it have crossed over with me? Especially when every single doctor I’d told about what I’d seen while I was dead — my neurologist, the trauma surgeon, even the doctors who had strolled in to check on me over the weekend — had assured me that it had all been just a horrible, terrible dream —

But this meant it hadn’t been a dream. This meant that…

“Gift?” Mom was distracted by all the forms. Dad usually filled out the forms. But Mom had banished Dad from the hospital. The sight of him upset her so much that, though I didn’t know it then, she’d already kicked him out of the house.

“Gift from whom?” Mom had asked, absently flipping the forms in front of her. I’m not sure if it was because I was holding the necklace that I had the wisdom to answer the way I did or if I just knew better than to tell her the truth.

“Just a friend” was all I said at the time as I stared down into the blue-gray depths of that stone. I was too upset to say more than that.

This meant it was real. It was all real.
He
was real.

Thank God I didn’t tell Mom the truth. Thank God she was so distracted by the divorce, she never mentioned the necklace again. Thank God I always wore the diamond tucked inside my shirt after that, too confused by what its existence in this world implied about my so-called “lucid dream” to share it with anyone.…

Well, except for what I mentioned to Hannah about it when I got back to school. And even that had quickly shown itself to be enough of a mistake that I learned to keep my mouth shut.

But not as bad as the mistake I made a week or two later, when Mom was “unavoidably detained” by Dad’s lawyers from picking me up after an outpatient appointment, and I found myself wandering into a jewelry store I’d spied on the same block as my doctor’s office while I waited for her. Gazing absently at all the “gray quartz” they happened to have for sale, I must have unconsciously pulled out the diamond and started playing with it, since the man behind the counter noticed it and commented on its beauty.

Blushing furiously, I’d tried to tuck it away, but it was too late. He asked to look at it more closely, saying that he’d never seen such an unusual stone.

What could I do? I let him look but kept the chain around my neck, as always. I’d never removed it since Mom had given it back to me. I don’t know why. The stone fascinated me. It never seemed to be any one color or another but was constantly changing. Even as the man behind the counter held it, it was turning from a pale silver to a deep, rain-cloud purple.

The next thing I knew, the guy behind the counter said he just
had
to show it to his boss, who was in the back, having his lunch. He was going to
love
it.

I don’t know what I thought was going to happen…or why I had such a strong urge to run away.

I should have listened to my instincts. I should have seen what the stone was trying to tell me.

But I didn’t.

After the assistant disappeared, the head jeweler came out, wiping his mouth on a napkin. By that time, I could see that my mom had pulled up in her car across the street.

“Actually,” I said, a surge of relief rushing through me. Now I had an excuse to leave. “My ride is here. I need to go. Sorry —”

The older jeweler had already seized the end of my pendant by then, though, so I was trapped…held suspended across the glass counter by the gold chain.

That’s when several things seemed to happen all at once.

Something went cold in the jeweler’s gaze when it fastened on the stone. The closer he bent to look at it, the more nervous I got…and the darker the diamond seemed to turn at its heart. My own heart began to beat very hard.

And though I couldn’t turn my head all the way to look because the jeweler had me almost literally by the neck, I could have sworn I saw, out of the corner of my eye,
him
standing outside the store, looking at us through the window.

“Do you have any idea what this is that you’re wearing, young lady?” the jeweler demanded. And then he launched into some kind of bizarre diamond speak. “This is a fancy deep gray blue. If
I’m not wrong, it’s probably worth anywhere from fifty to seventy-five million dollars. Maybe more if its provenance can be proven, because it looks uncannily like one I’ve seen somewhere before.”

What could I say? The stone had turned ebony. I tugged gently on the chain, hoping he’d let go.

Except of course he only held on more tightly, keeping me a prisoner in his store.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really do have to —”

“You shouldn’t be walking around the streets wearing this,” the jeweler interrupted. “It belongs in a safe-deposit box. By rights I should confiscate it, if only for your own safety. Where did you even get it? Do your parents know you have this?”

It had been only a month since the accident. Everyone at school was already beginning to treat me differently because I’d been acting so weird since coming back from the dead. I’d lost all interest in going to the mall and working with the animal rescue groups I used to love. I’d said that odd thing to Hannah about how I’d always protect her from “the evil” (I’d been referring to my necklace, of course, but she hadn’t known that). Soon I would lose the part of Snow White in the school play.

I was already slipping into a glass coffin of my very own.

But somehow I still found a way to assure the jeweler, in a stammering voice, that the necklace was a family heirloom, thank you very much. And that my mother was, in fact, waiting for me in the car outside and that I needed to go meet her right now. Though I was actually more frightened at the idea of walking outside that store and possibly running into
him
than I was at staying inside with the extremely irritable jeweler.

That’s when I heard the bells on the shop door tinkle behind me, indicating that someone was coming in.

My heart sank. No. Please,
no.

“I don’t believe you,” the jeweler said flatly. “In fact, just so you know, my assistant is on the phone in the back with the police right now. They’re on the way. So your mother — if she
is
waiting outside, which I sincerely doubt, since you’ve clearly stolen this — can come inside and join us, if she cares to, and watch you being arrested for grand theft.”

Except that my mother was never given the opportunity to do so. Because John stepped forward.

And the walls of the shop seemed to turn the color of blood before my eyes.

“Excuse me,” John said in his deep voice, which sounded completely out of place in such a small, upscale boutique. He
looked
completely out of place in it, already so menacing because of his size but even more so now because of the black leather jacket and jeans he was wearing.

I thought I was going to pass out. What was he doing there? Had he come to take me back because I’d broken the rules? Was that why the stone in my necklace had turned black, to warn me?

The jeweler glanced over at him, annoyed. “My assistant will be with you in a moment, sir,” he said.

“No, thank you,” John said, as if he were refusing an offer of peanuts on a plane. “Let go of her.”

The jeweler’s eyes widened slightly. But he didn’t let go of me.

“Excuse
me,”
the jeweler said, looking indignant. “But are you acquainted with this young lady? Because she —”

That’s when John — not looking angry, or annoyed, or anything at all, really — reached across the counter and took hold of the hand the jeweler was using to hold me captive in his shop, as if John were feeling for his pulse.