Pictures of You (30 page)

Sam ran harder. Every step he took, the air seemed to thicken. He sucked in air, shuddering.

It felt as if no one was in the world but him right now. The streets were empty, and there were no lights in any of the houses. No cars traveled past him. He heard a crash of lightning, the sudden boom of thunder, and then the sky split open into a thousand jagged pieces and there was a shower of cold rain. His steps smacked against the pavement. A scrap of paper from the sidewalk caught in the wind and rose up in the sky like a giant bird.

Sam’s heart was beating too fast. His pants were already so wet that they were dragging on the ground, and he was shivering hard. Bits of something flew into his face, biting his skin, shooting into his eyes so he had to snap his lids shut.

“When you’re scared, think of the facts,” Charlie had told him, but every fact he knew frightened him even more. Lightning could strike you while you were in the shower. It could race through the pipes, lighting you up like a firecracker. People had been struck by
lightning and some people had lived, but some people hadn’t. Sam ran faster, slipping on the sidewalk, skinning a hole in his pants. He was alone in the world. Isabelle wasn’t an angel. His mother was really dead.

“Mommy!” He screamed, but no one answered. No one would ever answer, not now. He thought of his mother’s face, her hands, the way she tickled him under the ribs, and every thought tore him in two. “Mommy!” The wind covered up his voice. Sam tugged himself up and ran again. The lightning seemed to be coming closer, following him, punctuating every step with a sonic boom of thunder. Yellow sizzled in the sky, and he felt his bones turn to water.

“Dad!” he screamed, but the wind gulped down his voice. Fear pinballed inside him. He sucked at the air and it felt like he was inhaling a wet washcloth. His lungs were crunching up. Sam felt for his inhaler, but it wasn’t there, and that made him panic even more.

His hair sluiced against his face. Running into the wind, he pushed on. There was a big tree up ahead, the branches like arms scratching at the sky. Then he heard a sound, like the world splitting open.

The cracking sound grew louder and then he heard a whooshing, and there was a bolt of lightning tearing across the sky, zigzagging and connecting with the tree. He craned his head, staring, frozen in place and the whole tree seemed to light up. One of the branches shimmied with light as it broke off. Sam felt something crash against his side, toppling him to the ground. A hot sting zoomed through him.

He glanced down and saw a flash of red streaming down his arm. Blood. There was blood. He bolted up, his arm throbbing, and it was then that he saw the tree branch, like an extra arm, fallen beside him, and a huge open gash in the tree. He ran, not thinking, grabbing his arm, stopping the blood with his fingers.
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t look
. He ran with his eyes closed. He
told himself not to think about the pain, not to think about his mom or his dad or Isabelle. All he had to do was get to someplace safe and he had to do it fast.
I can’t breathe!
he thought.
I can’t breathe!
He gulped at air.

The school loomed in front of him. He had an extra inhaler there, locked in the nurse’s office. He banged on the door, screaming. “It’s Sam! It’s Sam!” The pain made him shake and wheeze so that he couldn’t shout anymore. He couldn’t bang on the door as hard. “It’s Sam!” he tried to scream again, but the world suddenly began to suck him down until everything narrowed into black.

They screamed Sam’s name, all the windows of the car open, the rain pelting in and soaking them as they drove. How had he run so fast? Before she had seen him, Isabelle had felt something, like a charge in the air, and then she had pulled free of Charlie and there was Sam, standing there with his mouth open, and her heart had broken.

“We should have told him,” Isabelle said. “We should never have kept things so secret.”

“He wasn’t ready!” Charlie said.

“But this makes it worse! How can we explain it to him now?”

Helpless, Charlie turned another corner. “He’s nine years old.”

Isabelle glanced out the window, the booms of thunder so loud they seemed to crack open the sky. “We’ll find him,” she said.

They left a note for Sam at home. They drove to the places Sam loved: the beach, where the sand was wet and heavy; the diner, which had closed because of the weather; the playground, which was deserted. They couldn’t find him anywhere.

Charlie called home every few minutes. They went to the police with a photograph. “He’s severely asthmatic! He’s nine years old!” Charlie screamed.

The officer looked at Charlie. “We’ll get right on it,” he said.

They got back in the car, the rain drumming against the windows.
Charlie dialed one hospital after another, and with every call, his voice seemed more faded. He couldn’t let go of Isabelle’s hand. “Do you have a nine-year-old boy there, an asthmatic?” Charlie cried into the phone and Isabelle moved closer to him, trying to hear what the voice on the other end might be saying. Charlie nodded yes, and he listened.

“He’s okay,” Charlie said, finally, hanging up the phone. “They have him. He’s in an oxygen tent. Cuts and scratches, but he’s okay.”

“Let’s go. We’ll be there in five minutes,” she said, but he shook his head.

“I’ll drive you home. I can’t think straight. I’ll call you.”

“Charlie, please! Let me go with you! Don’t you think I’m worried, too?”

A sheet of rain poured across the car. The windshield wipers squeaked. “I know you’re worried, but he’s got to be furious with both of us. It’s better if it’s just me right now.”

He put one hand on her shoulder and she felt a shiver of cold. She looked out the window. The streets were empty. “Why? Why is it better?” she said quietly.

His whole body seemed to be shaking. “Isabelle, my son is in the hospital! I can’t have a conversation about this now. I’ll call you when I can,” he said. And then he started the car, and the whole way to her place, neither one of them spoke. When Charlie dropped Isabelle off, he pulled away almost immediately and she was left standing in the soaking rain.

S
AM WOKE UP
with a thick plastic oxygen tent around him and his arm glowing with pain. Doctors ringed his bed. He turned his head away from the light. “You’re one lucky boy,” one of the faces said. Sam bit down on his lip so he wouldn’t cry, because after all that had happened, how could anyone in his right mind ever say that Sam was lucky?

“Oh, yes,” said another face. “I’m Doctor Stamper. The school
janitor found you. He knew who you were and he knew what to do. He drove you here. We gave you something for your asthma and the oxygen should help, too. But this arm! Your arm’s been hurt before, buddy, hasn’t it?”

For a moment, Sam was back in that day, his mother wheeling around the car, yelling at him to get back inside the car. “I fell,” he lied.

“Looks like some of these cuts are right at the same spot,” the doctor said. “Now what’s the chance of that happening, I ask you?”

Dr. Stamper patted Sam’s shoulder. “Your father’s coming,” he told him. Then he reached under the plastic and gave Sam a shot, making him woozy. The room was floating. He kept craning his neck, looking around for his dad.

He slept off and on, but he didn’t dream, and every time he woke up, it was a shock to be back in the hospital. And then the door flew open and there was his father, soaking wet, and there was no Isabelle. There was no Mom. It was only then that Sam began to cry as if he would never stop.

His father drew a chair close beside Sam and took his hand. “I’m so sorry,” Charlie said.

“Mommy’s dead!” Sam wailed, “She’s not coming back!”

His father swallowed. “I know,” he said.

“I thought I could talk to her, just one more time! I thought I could see her!”

His father moved in closer, so that Sam could see the droplets of water sparkling on his skin. “You know that isn’t possible.”

“You and Isabelle lied to me!”

His father rubbed Sam’s hands between his. “This is all my fault. I should have told you that I was seeing Isabelle,” his dad said. “I should have let you know what was going on.”

“Do you like her more than Mom?” Sam blurted.

His father gave him a pained look. “Sam, no one can replace your mom for me.”

“Then why did you like Isabelle that way?”

“I was just trying to move on. I was trying to make you and me happy again. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. “

Sam struggled to sit up in bed. “Nelson …” he said, pained.

Charlie looked surprised. “Nelson is at home.”

“He’s okay?” Sam could hardly dare to believe it.

“Of course, he’s okay.”

Sam tugged himself up further, wincing. “No, no, rest,” his father said.

“I have to tell you something,” Sam said.

Sam told his father everything about the day of the accident. It all spilled out of him—how he had hidden in the car that morning with his mother, how it was surely his fault because if he hadn’t had asthma, she wouldn’t have stopped. “She wouldn’t have died,” he said.

His father looked as if he were frozen to the chair. “She wasn’t taking you?”

“I hid! And then I had an attack and I spoiled everything!”

His father looked dazed. “It’s not your fault,” his father said, but his skin had no color and he wouldn’t stop looking at Sam as if he somehow didn’t know him. “None of it is your fault,” he repeated.

But it was his fault. Of course it was his fault, and then there was nothing left for Sam to do but tell his father more of the story. How he had seen Isabelle at the accident, how he had thought she was an angel and how sure he was that she would know where his mom went, that she would let him talk to her.

“But Mom’s dead!” Sam’s voiced tore from his lungs, flooding with tears. “She isn’t coming back! She’s dead! She’s dead! And Isabelle can’t help us talk to her!”

Charlie moved his chair closer to the bed, stunned. “You thought Isabelle was an angel?” He took Sam’s hands in his. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell Isabelle?”

“You wouldn’t have believed me. And the books I read said you’re not supposed to tell, you’re not supposed to talk about it.”

“Kiddo,” Charlie’s voice was pained. “Isabelle isn’t an angel. She’s just a person, like you and me. She doesn’t have any secret knowledge and she can’t bring your mother back in any way. No one can.”

“But I saw—she had a halo! I heard wings!”

“Sometimes you think you see things that aren’t there,” Charlie said quietly. “Sometimes you wish for them to be there so much, you believe that they are.”

Sam stared down at the hospital sheets, threading his fingers tightly together. Then he looked back up at his dad.

“Do you hate me for the accident?”

Then, to Sam’s surprise, his father climbed up onto the bed and lay beside him, just outside the oxygen tent, but still so close that Sam could smell the soap he used, right through the plastic sheet. Charlie wrapped as much of Sam as he could in his arms and rocked him. “I love you,” he said. “Wherever you are, whatever you do. I’ll always love you.”

T
HE NEXT DAY
, Isabelle rode the elevator up to the children’s ward. What a horrible thing, a children’s ward of a hospital. How could anyone work here and not have their heart broken every day? The walls were painted with brightly colored murals of animals. The staff all wore smocks with teddy bears on them, and though everyone was smiling, Isabelle still felt affronted.

Sam shouldn’t be here. Not in this place.

She was tense and worried. Charlie had called her only once, rushed and apologetic. “I’ll call you back,” he promised, and when he hadn’t, she called the hospital herself.

“We can only give information to family members,” a stern voice said.

Isabelle protested but the voice was unmoved. She hadn’t wanted to call Charlie, but she couldn’t just sit around, so she grabbed her jacket and now here she was.

She rounded a corner, toward Sam’s room, and saw Charlie in
the waiting room. He looked terrible. His hair was lank, his clothes rumpled. When he saw her, he glanced at her as if he didn’t know who she was.

She sat down beside him, and when she touched his arm, he looked at her. “What are you doing here?” he said wearily.

“I came to see Sam, I came to see you.” Something about him seemed suddenly missing to her. If she touched him right now, she wasn’t sure he wouldn’t dissolve under her fingers.

“You can’t see him. He’s in an oxygen tent,” Charlie said.

“Then I’ll sit out here with you. I love him, Charlie, and I love you.”

Charlie met her eyes and for a moment she thought he was going to stand up and take her into his arms, but instead, he sank lower into his chair. “He looks so little in that bed.” He half shut his eyes. “I haven’t slept, I can’t eat. His asthma’s getting worse and they don’t know why. All I keep thinking is that if we hadn’t been together, this wouldn’t have happened. That it was my fault.”

Isabelle touched Charlie’s hand, but his fingers didn’t reach for hers. “Please don’t shut me out of this.” She pulled up a chair and sat beside him.

He shook his head. “I’m not shutting you out. I just don’t have a lot of room right now for anyone but Sam.”

“Charlie, please.”

“He told me he thought you were an angel, that you were some link between him and his mom so he could talk to her, that you could make her manifest so he could see her.”

“What?” Isabelle started. “I never told him anything like that!”

“The day of the accident. He said you had a halo of light, that it looked like the pictures of angels in books. He said he heard your wings.”

“Oh my God. I wish I had known. I wish he had told me!”

Charlie swallowed. “He told me something else about the day of the accident. April wasn’t taking him. He hid in the back of the car to surprise her. She was leaving both of us. Both of us!”

Isabelle felt herself dissolving. She tried to touch Charlie again, but he moved back, almost apologetically. She was about to try to pull him back to her, when a doctor came into the room. “Mr. Nash? Could you come in Sam’s room for a moment, please?”