Be Not Afraid (31 page)

To
see
the good. Despite the horror and the blackness, despite everything else that insisted otherwise.

Stepping forward, I threw my arms around the girl, holding her with both arms, the good and the bad one, and clutched her to me. Her skin was like ice, the tips of her fingers black again. Cassie gasped for breath, writhing under my touch. I gripped harder, pressing her against my chest, burying my face against her horrible, icy form. A strange, rotting smell drifted from her pores, and a wheezing sound came out of her mouth. Every cell in her body, every bone, muscle, vein, every inch of her was suffocating, dying.

My body started to shake as Cassie arched away from me and began to scream, a hoarse sound, devoid of air.

I held on tighter.

I believe you are bigger than the evil I see.

I believe you are good.

I do. I believe.

Behind me, the priest’s words got louder as he recited more prayers, the volume turned up, a torrential litany of salvation and deliverance.
“I adjure you, profligate dragon, in the name of the spotless Lamb, who has trodden down the asp and the basilisk, and overcome the lion and the dragon, to depart from this child, to depart from the Church of God!”

I believe that what is inside me is stronger than you.

I retreated slightly as Cassie grew limp under my hold. Oh my God. Was she dead? I stared as her head fell back between her shoulders and a pinhole of light appeared right in the center of the bowl of blackness inside her skull. It was so small that I almost missed it—until in the next second it expanded a fraction of an inch more. It swelled and then faded a third time as the priest intoned his prayers:
“Tremble now, serpent, and flee!”

I kept my eyes fastened on it and held Cassie tighter.

You are in there. You are.

I can see. I can touch. I can heal.

“Be gone to hell, from whence you came!”

I know who I am.

Cassie contorted once, twice, her muscles relinquishing all their strength as she slipped out of my hold. We fell to the floor in a single, jarring movement. I righted myself quickly, but Cassie’s limbs twitched spastically, her legs and
arms jerking with such violence that I screamed, sure the girl’s body was going to split in half, terrified that the real end was near. And then, with a final, howling shriek, Cassie clasped both sides of her face with her hands and lay still.

No one moved. I was not sure if anyone in the room was even breathing. Cassie remained motionless, her arms ribboned with blood, one of them flung over the top of her head, her chest rising and falling in violent tandem. Another pungent smell, something like vomit and excrement, filled the room, but the cold began to dissipate, the iciness leaking out like a stream in the wall.

“What—” Dominic whispered.

But Father William only raised his hand, signaling him to wait.

After an interminable amount of time, Cassie opened her eyes. With difficulty, she raised her face and stared out at us. The horrifying mask had left; her eyes were back to their usual roundness. The skin along her arms and face was still raw, but there were no more bulging shapes pocking it, no more tightness along the bones. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out.

“Cassie?” Father William whispered.

She blinked. “Why am I on the floor?” Her voice was soft. A stranger in her own body. “What happened?”

Father William rushed over to a satchel in the corner and took something out. When he returned, he was holding a round, silver object. It looked like an old-fashioned stopwatch, complete with a link chain. He pressed a tiny
button on one side, and the top sprang open. “Cassie,” he said. “Kneel and receive the Body of Christ.”

It had to be a test of sorts, what he was doing. If the demon was still inside her, Cassie would not be able to receive Holy Communion, would not perhaps even be able to continue being in the same room as the Host. But the demon had fooled us before, just moments earlier. What if this was the same kind of thing? I pressed my fingers to my lips and waited, holding my breath.

Father William got down next to the girl and helped raise her to a kneeling position. She looked confused and uncertain, glancing around the room fearfully, as if she were on some strange planet. I stared, straining until my eyes smarted, but I could glimpse nothing of the previous blackness anywhere inside her. There was the purple glob along her tongue, exactly where it had been before, and the small red cuts along her arms. The cut on her cheek glowed a soft rose color under her skin, but that was all. Nothing else. Nothing black.

“The body of Christ,” Father William said. He held up the tiny white wafer in front of Cassie, and paused as she regarded it with both eyes.

She opened her mouth and closed her eyes as Father William placed the Host on her tongue. And when she swallowed, the small group of us closed around her, our arms fencing her in, and let her weep.

Every once in a while, I let myself go back and think about all of it again. Sometimes it doesn’t feel real, as if it was just one long, terrible dream; other times, I have to fight to keep breathing as the pictures come flooding back. Afterward, as the memories subside, I get the distinct feeling of having been snatched back from the lip of hell, of someone pulling me back just as I was about to fall.

And sometimes, I think I know exactly who that someone was.

My eyes have stayed the same. I still see the shapes and colors of pain inside people, and maybe I always will. A new therapist I’ve been seeing, a middle-aged lady named
Cindy, who actually believes that I can see pain, seems to think it might have developed as a kind of reaction to Mom’s suicide. She says there’s proof that things like that have actually happened to people. Apparently some kind of sixth sense develops after certain kinds of trauma, the brain’s way of trying to make sense out of incomprehensible situations. And she says that it might even go away, a little at a time, as I keep learning how to deal with Mom’s suicide and how to move forward.

Sometimes I wonder if and when that time will come. I still think about Mom. A lot. I hope she’s not too disappointed in me that I never got to see her pain, or that if I had, I probably wouldn’t have known what to do with it. I hope she forgives me. I hope she knows that I’ve forgiven her, even though she didn’t say goodbye. Dad and Cindy have told me at least a hundred times over that things weren’t my fault, but I still feel guilty. I can’t help it. She was my mother. And I failed her. Little by little, though, I’m starting to come to terms with that, which is what Cindy says I have to do, even though I’m not too sure what that even means. I guess in the long run, I just hope I can learn to let it go. Because holding on to it—especially for this long—hurts too much.

Sometimes I let myself imagine that it was Mom who extended my blessing to me somehow, a kind of final communication between us that we missed doing while she was alive. Not the way the demon suggested, of course, but the
opposite, born out of a love so strong that when I looked hard enough, I could see it.

Feel it.

And for right now at least, that’s a part I know I never want to let go of.

A few weeks later, I rode my bike to Lucy’s house to help her get ready for prom. We were in her room; Lucy was giddy with excitement. She whirled around the perimeter of the bed in a pink dress that looked like a cupcake with sprinkles, a sweet, powdery scent drifting out from her hair. She had on heels, in which she did not navigate very well, and her hair had been professionally done that morning, complete with baby’s breath and miniature pink roses.

“How late do you think you’ll be out?” I was sprawled across the bed in jeans and a T-shirt, eating spoonfuls of peanut butter cookie batter right out of the bowl.

“I don’t know.” Lucy leaned into the mirror for the hundredth time, adjusting a loose sprig of baby’s breath above her ear. “My mom says I have to be home by eleven,
but everyone’s going to Lizzie Sweitzer’s house to watch movies after, and then to Ted’s Diner for breakfast, so I don’t think that’s going to happen.” She turned around, squeezing her hands together. The yellow dot in her stomach was almost completely gone, the red blob in her mouth healed after a trip to the dentist. “You know this is absolutely the first and last prom I’m going to without you, don’t you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh, Marin, come on! I know you said it was too late this year, but now you don’t have an excuse. You’re coming next year, and that’s the end of it.”

“Lucy, no one even considered
asking
me to prom this year. What makes you think it’s going to change next year?” There was Dominic, of course, but I hadn’t seen or heard from him in weeks, not since that last day with Cassie and Father William. There had been a single text that night, a “How are you?” to which I’d answered “Okay,” and then nothing.

Nothing at all.

“Because you’re different now.” She turned back to the mirror, unperturbed. “Better different, I mean. You lost the sunglasses, for one thing. And you look at people now. You hold your head up. People won’t be so afraid to approach you.” She winked. “It’ll happen. You’ll see.”

I rolled my eyes, scooping out another blob of cookie dough with my finger. It was true about the glasses; I’d stopped wearing them for the most part after Cassie’s
ordeal, since nothing I saw anymore could come close to what I’d seen during those days. I kept them in my purse, at the ready in case of really big crowds, like school assemblies and going to the mall. Places like that were still overwhelming, requiring some kind of barrier. Without my sunglasses, though, I was even plainer-looking with my boyishly short hair and forgettable features. Lucy might have had big plans, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

The doorbell rang. Lucy’s hands froze above her hair. “He’s here?
Already
? It’s only five-thirty. I told him not to come until six!”

As if on cue, Mrs. Cooper knocked on the bedroom door.

“Don’t come in!” Lucy yelped. “I’m not ready!”

“Oh, come on!” Mrs. Cooper said on the other side of the door. “I’m dying to see how gorgeous you look! Plus, your date has the most unbelievably beautiful flowers I’ve ever seen. I’m totally jealous.”

Lucy rolled her eyes and stood up. “I’m almost ready. Tell him I’ll be right there!”

“Don’t keep me waiting!” Mrs. Cooper’s voice bubbled down the hall. “I’m getting the camera!”

“Okay.” Lucy turned to face me and squared her shoulders. “Final once-over. How do I look?”

I got up off the bed and stood in front of her. “You look beautiful,” I said, arranging a wayward curl along her shoulder. “Really. Like a princess.”

Lucy flushed, and then pressed my hand. “Thanks,” she whispered.

I followed her out of her room and down the hall, wincing at the loud clacking sound her high heels made against the hardwood floors. She looked a little like a stork, lifting her knees too high so as not to fall over, but I didn’t say anything.

Tomorrow night, Dad and I were going to get some new tulip bulbs from Lowe’s, maybe a handful of iris ones, too, and plant them in the garden, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to spend the rest of tonight. It was Saturday, though. Maybe Nan would want to go to the movies.

Lucy stopped walking so suddenly at the bottom of the stairs that I bumped into her, almost knocking her off her feet.

“Dominic?”
she asked.

She said the name so quietly I almost missed it, until I looked up and saw him standing there in the doorway. He was dressed in khaki shorts and a green button-down shirt. His hair had been brushed and parted, his skin scrubbed pink. In his arms was a beautiful bouquet of flowers, peonies and roses, hydrangea and clematis, little purple budded ones and the pink kind, too, the stems wrapped tightly with silk ribbon. But I only had eyes for the iris, a single white one in the middle, like a moon.

I took a step around Lucy and swallowed, as if that might dislodge the ball blocking the words inside my throat. It didn’t work.

“Hey, Marin.” His voice was soft. “Your dad told me you were here. I hope you don’t mind.”

I shook my head, blinking. He had to be here to talk some more about Cassie. Maybe thank me again, although he would have to be stupid not to think that the hundred and two times he’d done it that night hadn’t sufficed. But then, maybe that was what the flowers were for. To thank me. Again. In a different way. His sister was better; his family was back to stay. Yes, that was it. Flowers. To thank me.

“I was … wondering if you would go to the prom with me,” he said. “Not at the school or anything. It’s too late for all that. There’s a place in the park, though … under the willow trees. Next to the tennis courts? You know, where we were supposed to go that day and never ended up. We could sit and talk, just chill. Maybe have our own prom there. Sort of.” He looked embarrassed, mortified even, as if this might have been a good idea when he first thought of it, but now, said aloud, it sounded like the stupidest thing in the world. He coughed. “Um … anyway, it was just an idea. It was—”

“I’d love to.” I stepped forward so as not to lose my nerve. “It sounds perfect.”

Lucy squeezed my arm and I stopped, remembering. Her date hadn’t arrived yet, and there were supposed to be pictures, ones that Lucy wanted me in too. I’d planned to wave as she left in the stretch limo, watch as the black corner of it disappeared around the block, text her throughout the night to see how things were going. “Have the best time,” she said, throwing her arms around me.

I squeezed my friend with both arms. “You too.”

“Call me tomorrow!” Lucy said as I stepped out onto the porch. “We’ll compare notes!”

I smiled as the door shut behind us, staring at the flowers as we made our way down the sidewalk.

“You like them?” Dominic asked.

“I do,” I said. “They’re beautiful.”

“I didn’t know what kind to get. There’s so many different types out there. I was a little nervous.”