I'd Rather Not Be Dead (28 page)

He frowns, but holds me tight
and nods.

Fray and I start to move to the
other place, Finn clings, and then we're all standing in the middle
of the local emergency room.

Finn looks around. “And now I'm
in Shadow?”

“Yes,” Fray answers, giving a
wry look to all the people around us who failed to leap up
screaming about someone appearing out of thin air.

“I don't feel any different.”
Finn sticks his arm out as an old lady hobbles by. He shudders.
“Okay, that's strange.”

“It's also incredibly rude,” I
tell him as the woman stops to wrap her cardigan more tightly
around her. “That poor old lady's going to think she caught a
chill.”

“Not the first thing she's
caught,” Fray says easily. “She used to be the local
prostitute.”

Finn and I stare at him until he
shrugs and moves toward the sliding doors between the waiting room
and the actual medical area.

We find Cris by the simple
process of locating the nursing station and looking over some
shoulders. People in scrubs stand outside his room talking about
chemical compounds. The names don't mean anything to me, but I
understand when one of them says, “Either he was trying to kill
himself or he didn't know what was in those pills.”

“It's a high dosage not to be
suicide,” one of the others says, sounding slightly confused but
not at all upset.

“Yeah, but this kid's got a
history,” the first counters with the same lack of alarm. “He
probably has a tolerance. He'd have been okay without the
impurities.”

Finn prods me into the room and
Fray goes to look over the charts.

Cris lies in a bed, the center
of a system of wires and the focus of a host of machines. He looks
tiny and wasted, appears more dead than I am.

I plaster myself against Finn,
who puts an arm around me and walks me until we stand at the foot
of the bed.

“The papers don't say much,”
Fray says apologetically. “It's all in the computer now.”

“What do they say?” Finn asks
him.

“He has no known allergies.”

“Helpful,” Finn grunts.

Fray gives a little hum. “It is
if we wanted to inject him with something.”

I feel as if I should want them
to shut up, but their voices are anchoring me.

The door opens behind us,
letting in a nurse. And the other me.

TOM stops, gasps. The look on
her face... It's as if her entire world just shattered. Finn
stiffens and I don't blame him. If he looked at anyone else like
that, it'd destroy me.

Tears running freely down her
cheeks, TOM rushes to the bed and sits in the chair beside it,
staring at Cris like her heart's breaking. “I'm sorry,” she
whispers, reminding me they've been fighting.

“She thinks it's her fault,” I
say, not that I think the others were in doubt of it.

She reaches out for his hand,
hesitating at the needles stuck in it. His hand looks so fragile
with those there. She holds it lightly, reverently. “You can't
leave me here, at the mercy of the hillbillies and the Jesus
freaks. I won't let you.” She tries to sound bluff and brave, but
her pain is too vibrant to be hidden.

“Drew?” he mumbles, his eyes
still closed.

“Crispin?” she cries, leaning
over him, her eyes wide and expectant.

The nurse gives her a pitying
look. “He's talking in his sleep, honey. He's not going to wake up
for a while yet. Probably a few days.”

“But he will wake up?” TOM asks
her.

With a gentle smile, the nurse
nods and relief flows over me. “He should.”

There's a smile on TOM's face,
though new tears run down it. She squeezes Cris's hand and he
smiles for her, a small but meaningful smile. His eyes flutter open
ever so briefly and focus on her. “Love you, Drew.”

I bury my face against Finn,
little pieces of my heart breaking off.

“Wow,” TOM breathes. “You can
lie in your sleep.”

But she stays next to him,
holding on until the nurse says she has to go.

We don't say anything about the
scene before we leave. Fray brushes his hand across my cheek and
whispers, “You can get yourself back home,” before he vanishes for
his own.

I wish me and Finn back to his
room. Our room... Finn walks into the bathroom and turns on the
faucet, sticking his hand into water. My hand wouldn't get wet if I
did that, but his does. He's out of Shadow, back in the land of the
living. Where he belongs.

He closes the door and I hear
the shower start.

The ferrets are sleeping and
Finn... Well, he deserves a few minutes to himself.

Thinking myself into a black
cotton nightshirt, I crawl into Finn's bed, cold and numb and
exhausted. I listen to the wind wail outside, banging tree limbs
against each other. It shakes the house's siding, rattles against
the windows, and fills the night with a surreal eeriness.

My eyes close for just a second.
But when they open again, the room is bright with sunlight invading
from around the blinds. Finn's curled up behind me, one arm under
my neck and the other holding me against him. I hug that arm to me,
relieved to find it there.

The doorbell rings.

What is it with people annoying
Finn first thing in the morning? He stirs, but snuggles against me
and makes no signs of ever getting out of bed. Which would be fine
with me.

There's a knocking on his door
and his mom calls through it, “Finn, honey? Are you awake?”

He sighs but yells back, “What
is it?”

“Rain says she needs to talk to
you as soon as she can,” she says through the closed door. “Says to
tell you it's about her sister.”

Finn's feet are on the floor by
the end of the first sentence and he's pulled jeans on over his
boxers by the finish of the second. My clothes shift to presentable
with a quick thought, in case Finn's mom forgot her pills again.
But she's cleared the hallway before we hit it.

Rain's huddled in an armchair in
the den, a teddy bear hugged tightly against her chest. “It's
today,” she whispers.

“Where is she?” Finn demands.
“The hospital?”

“Probably.” Rain rubs a shredded
tissue against her nose. “She's really upset about Cris.”

“I know.” Finn's answer is
dull.

My sister sniffles. “That
doesn't change how she feels about you.”

He gives her a soft smile. “I
know that too.” His eyes shift to me, silently repeating the words.
“And I'm not letting her get hurt.”

Then he's charging up the stairs
again. He finds a long sleeved shirt, trades it for the t-shirt he
slept in. I grab his boots for him, find his jacket while he's
putting them on. “So, this is it?” I whisper as I hand it to him.
My hand's shaking. I'm terrified, but I'm not sure why.

Finn tosses the jacket onto the
couch and takes my face in his hands. “You'll be okay, Drew.”

“The worst that happens is I
die, right?” I ask. “I'm already dead. It's not bad.”

“Right.” He tries like hell to
smile for me.

My eyes search his, trying to
see what he's not saying. “What happens if I don't die?”

He drops his hands and retrieves
the jacket, starting to pull it on. “Don't know. Never heard of it
happening.”

“What do you think happens?”

At first, I don't think he's
going to answer, but he makes himself meet my eyes and say, “It'll
be like you never died. Like you were never here.”

“We won't remember?”

Sighing deeply, he shakes his
head. “How could we? It wouldn't have happened.”

The idea stabs me straight
through the heart. “Stay here.”

“What?”

“Let me die!”

He stares at me. “I can't.”

“I don't want to live!” I yell
at him, aware I'm sounding melodramatic but not giving a damn. “I
want you!”

One side of his mouth curls up.
“Then you'll have to trust me. Trust we'll figure it out
again.”

I shiver. “The Shadow Lord said
I had to trust you to save me.”

“There you go, then.”

His misery belays the message
he's trying to send me. He thinks saving me will be the end of us.
And how can he think otherwise, with the other me still hating him
and being so upset to see Cris hurt? She's spending every moment
worrying about Cris, thinking about him. She's forgiven him for the
girl in the sweater set, for Bobbi, for every wrong he's ever
committed. If the two of them both make it through this, how could
she possibly spare a second for Cooper Finnegan?

Chapter Twenty-Five

I take Finn to Cris's hospital
room. My friend has a little more color than he did yesterday but
still makes for a pitiful sight. “There's no way he's going to be
pushing anyone off a cliff today,” I say.

Finn gives me a slanted look, a
wordless comment on my tone of voice. I said those last words
without any of the told-you-so sarcasm I'd have expected them to be
filled with.

“Yeah. I didn't think I agreed
with you either.” But obviously part of me had believed Finn, had
thought maybe Cris would cause my death. He wouldn't have meant to.
He would've regretted it like crazy. But the possibility of him
snapping for just one second, the one second it took to end an
argument by hitting me... Even though he'd never done that
before... Yeah, it was possible.

TOM's not in the room. It's just
Cris, the machines, and his mother keeping vigil in the company of
a very worn copy of the King James Bible. I want to hug her, but
that's a waste of energy.

“So now what?” I ask Finn.

He shrugs. “Where else could you
be?”

“I could be in the waiting room
if I'm not in here because of the visitors' policy.” Frowning at
the door, I think about it. “I'm not at home or Rain would have
known were I was. I don't think I'm stupid enough to be trying to
figure out who supplied him with this stuff.”

“You are.” Finn walks to the
door and then stands staring at the knob, unsure what to do with
it.

“Just go through it,” I
snap.

He turns his head until he can
see me, his eyes crinkled in confusion. “You're mad at me.”

Rolling my eyes, I walk through
the door and start up the hallway. But Finn catches up quickly and
pulls me to a stop. “Drew?”

“What's the point?” I ask, numb.
“What's the point in talking about what's going on if neither of us
will remember it tomorrow anyway? Why waste time better spent
saving us from having to be together?”

When I wrench my arm free and
stomp away, he doesn't try to stop me. And it hurts. Hurts a
lot.

I stop myself, turning back to
look at him. He's staring at me, lost and shattered.

“If the living you saw me here,
she'd yell at me for it. I've thought about just talking to her,
asking her to be careful, begging her not to leave home today.
Following her if she refuses, trying to protect her. But she'd
bellow and curse and act like I'm the devil. She'd probably be
willing to leap off a cliff just to get away from me.”

His eyes hold me as immobile as
physical restrains. “Do you really not have any idea how hard it is
for me to let you go back to being her?”

“Then don't,” I whisper, feeling
tears start to form.

“Is that really what you want?”
Finn asks, inching closer to me. “To spend the rest of forever in
this town? Be seen by only a handful of people? Never eat or drink
or feel the weather? Never see the rest of the world? You want
that?”

A million needles of pain prick
my eyes, a million tears being born. “I want you.”

He continues toward me, each
step only an inch or two long.

“I'm alive. I'm going to get old
and I'm going to die. And most people don't end up in Shadow. When
I die, I could leave you. Forever.” He's close enough to touch me
now and he does, cupping the side of my face with both palms, his
fingers entwining in my hair. “I can't stand to think of you
trapped here alone.”

“I'd go into The Spirit,” I
whisper, certain that I would.

“Can't stand that either.” He
leans his forehead against mine, stares into my eyes from
millimeters away. “Do you still not get it? I love you, Drew.”

It's not news, but he's never
said the words before. They reach inside me, calming some of the
turmoil. “I love you, too,” I tell him back.

He smiles. “I know.”

“How sweet,” Fray comments.

Finn and I both start, pulling
our faces apart, and I turn a glare to the interruption. “What are
you doing here?”

With a harrumph and a pout, he
pretends to be insulted by my attitude. “I just thought that you
might like to know where you are.”

“Where is she?” Finn grabs the
bait.

“Lobby.” Fray's head jerks
toward the elevator. “Getting coffee from one of those machines.
From what I've heard, that could kill her, though I don't know how
the cliff comes into play.”

Finn looks expectantly at me and
a second later we're holding hands in the lobby while the other me
mutters darkly at a coffee dispenser.

“Here, let me try.”

Both versions of me stare at
Ricky Woodman, who gives TOM a smile he probably thinks is charming
and motions her aside.

“I know how to use it.” TOM
glowers fiercely, but moves to make room for Ricky by the
machine.

“Sometimes you have to enter
stuff in a different order,” Ricky says. “I have no idea why.”

He pauses and looks at the
buttons with uncertainty until TOM says, “Milk, no sugar.”

The look she delivers when the
machine beeps happily and starts to gurgle is truly nasty. “You a
frequent shopper?”

The Crusader takes a long
breath, watching coffee start to drip into the cheap plastic cup.
“Spent a lot of time here when my mom was sick.” He swallows, his
shoulders quivering ever so slightly with emotion. “A lot of
time.”

The living me has the grace to
look guilty about her antagonism. “She was sick a long time?”