Sacred (32 page)

“Then why did you break it off with me that day in the theater?” Even remembering the event caused tears to spill from my eyes.

Will wiped them from my cheeks. “I got scared, Scarlett,” he confessed. “Maybe you should be scared too.”

“What are you talking about?” I
did
feel scared—scared that he would leave me again. But I also knew that I had pulled myself together in the wake of his departure, and if it were to happen a second time, I would not die. I would not break.

“My dad told me about my mother’s death.”

The room seemed to grow fractionally more still. I waited as Will gathered his thoughts. He cracked open a soda and handed it to me, then opened another and took a long drink.

“Remember how I told you I’m pulled to certain situations?”

I nodded.

“Well, I always thought that there was something wrong with
me
—in the way I was wired. It didn’t start until after my mother’s death … did I tell you that?”

“Yeah, just after you turned thirteen.” Every word of the conversation we’d shared in the Yellow Room was imprinted in my mind.

“And I told you how she died?”

“In a car crash. You and your dad were with her.”

Will nodded, his face twisted in a way I couldn’t translate. “There was more to the story, it turns out. If I had known sooner … but my father just told me the rest of it, over winter break. Listen, Scarlett, we didn’t just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. My mom put the car exactly where she intended it to be.”

I was confused. “She
wanted
to be in an accident?”

“She wanted to stop a crime.” Will was quiet, letting his words sink in. Then he continued. “After the accident, when we were all at the hospital, a police officer who was interviewing my dad was trying to comfort him. He told my dad that even though Mom’s death was a terrible tragedy, she probably saved the life of a pregnant lady who was walking up the street.” Will’s eyes were looking into middle distance, as if he was remembering the scene. “The driver
who hit our car—the driver whose car Mom blocked with ours—was an angry ex-boyfriend, and he’d threatened the woman twice before. Of course they couldn’t know for sure, but it looked awfully suspicious that his car was barreling at sixty miles an hour down a residential street just where his ex-girlfriend happened to be walking.”

I didn’t know what to say. “But that means—”

“That my mom knew what she was doing. Do you see, Scarlett? My mom, she had it too. She must have. The pull … I’m not the only one to feel it.”

“What else did your father tell you?”

“That night with the car wasn’t the first time,” he said. “It had been going on for years, ever since her pregnancy with me. It started off slowly, just with people right around her, in our neighborhood. Domestic violence, mostly. Dad thought there was something wrong with her, some undiagnosed mental illness. What kind of a pregnant woman gets herself in the middle of a knife fight?” Will’s laugh was brusque, humorless.

“He thought it got better after I was born, but later he figured out that she’d just been ignoring the pull. I was a baby—she didn’t want to be a hero. She just wanted to be a mom. But the headaches must have been just terrible, Scarlett.” He looked at me, his eyes pleading—for what? “I didn’t understand any of that,” he confessed. “I thought she was lazy. Selfish. She spent so many hours in her room.…”

The image of my mother’s closed door flashed in my mind. “But you didn’t know,” I said, trying to comfort him.

Will shrugged. “I was a pretty normal kid, I guess, until
after Mom died. I didn’t spend too much time trying to see things from my parents’ perspective. I was all wrapped up in my own problems.” He laughed again, more gently this time. “Like I had any idea what problems were. Grades, friends, girls …” He shook his head. “After Mom died, then I knew about problems. The fishhook worked its way into my brain not long after the accident. Or the not-accident, I guess.”

My head was spinning. So Will’s mother had experienced the same drive to protect the innocent that compelled Will. I could understand why he was upset to learn this, but what did it have to do with me?

Will seemed to guess my question. “Dad told me all this over winter break,” he said. “He wanted me to understand how it could be dangerous for you to be close to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, my mom wasn’t alone in that car when she crashed. Dad and I were there too.”

“I still don’t get it,” I said.

“Don’t you see? My mom was willing to risk her own family to stop that guy from running over that lady—a total stranger! What if I was to do something like that to you?”

His face looked tortured, as if he were envisioning me, broken and dead, his fault somehow. “I couldn’t bear it, Scarlett, if anything I did hurt you.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “You’d never—”

He cut me off. “I might. Look at who my mother saved—an unborn baby, a mother. She did the right thing. I’m glad she did it. I may not have been old, but I’d already
lived thirteen years. If I died, at least I’d have had something. That baby never would have even seen the light of day.”

“I’m sure your mother must have known that you’d be okay,” I argued. “After all, you said you were sitting behind the passenger seat, right? So your mother must have known that she’d take the brunt of the accident.”

Will shrugged. “Maybe. But it was a gamble. I don’t want to ever gamble with you.”

I felt anger rising in my cheeks. “That’s awfully chivalrous of you, Will,” I said, “but I’m no princess in an ivory tower, you know. I get to make my own decisions. And I don’t want to be protected from you. I want to be
with
you.”

Will smiled, and he curled a strand of my hair around his hand. “I want to be with you too,” he admitted. “Obviously. I’m here, aren’t I? I shouldn’t be. But Scarlett, the connection I feel to you …”

“You came to me on the trail,” I whispered.

His brow furrowed. “That’s something I don’t understand,” he said. “And my father doesn’t either. There’s no reason I should have known that you were out there in the storm, that you were hurt.” He looked at me, his green eyes piercing. “But I did. I was lying there in my bed, and clear as anything I heard you calling my name.”

I remembered something. “Your dad said you had a headache that day.”

Will nodded. “I didn’t know why, at the time. Now, I think maybe I was supposed to go out on the trail and stop the accident. I know it’s different than anything I’ve experienced before—it was an
accident
with the horse, not
a crime—but it’s the best explanation I can think of.” He shrugged.

“Maybe your head hurt because you should have come to me before that,” I suggested. “Maybe your heart was trying to tell you to do this.” And I leaned across the space that divided us and pressed my lips against his.

“Maybe,” he said, his voice husky, when we broke apart at last.

“Your head doesn’t hurt now, does it?” I teased, kissing him again.

He shook his head. “Nope. Feels pretty good, actually.”

We kissed some more, but my mother must have thought that we’d grown too quiet, because she began whistling in the kitchen and banging the dishes as she unloaded them from the dishwasher.

Will laughed quietly. “Your mother’s not big on subtlety, is she?”

“Not one of her stronger traits,” I agreed.

“There’s something about you, Scarlett,” Will murmured, leaning his face into my hair. “Something wonderful.”

I rested my face on his shoulder. “You too,” I said. I could have said more—so much more—but I didn’t want to talk. I just wanted to be there, with Will, and breathe in the scent of him, and be warmed by the press of him against me.

Of course, our silence brought Mom back around again. “Knock, knock,” she said before she pushed open the door the rest of the way.

Will and I straightened and separated. The places where my body had been touching his felt the loss of him.

“Well, Will, I think it’s best if we let Scarlett get some
rest,” my mom said. I would have argued, but the set of her mouth convinced me that she wasn’t budging.

“Okay, Mrs. Wenderoth.” Will seemed to agree that I looked tired. “I’ll call you later, okay?” He stood and leaned over to me, placing a kiss on my forehead even though my mother was right there, watching. “Thanks for letting me in to see her, Mrs. Wenderoth.”

After he had gone, my mother looked at me appraisingly. “I missed quite a bit, I can see now,” she murmured. Then she pulled my blankets up around me. “Get some rest,” she said. “We’ll have dinner soon.”

This time, in my dream, the sand rose more quickly around me. I felt the tiny grains caught in my eyelashes, seeping into my nose, mouth, and eyes. My hand struggled for the surface, finding no purchase in the sand.

At last, something gripped my hand. It felt like a stick or a branch, but with strong fingers that grasped my wrist.

I held on and felt myself emerging from the sand. I gasped for air and wiped sand from my eyes, spat it out of my mouth. Finally, I looked up—and bit back a scream as I stared into the face that peered down at me.

It had the hair of a woman, long and brown, loose curls, and the eyes—green eyes, beautiful and bright—but aside from those two features, the face was just bone, a sun-bleached skull.

With the grace of a dancer, the skeleton woman knelt beside me, her flowered dress pooling at her bone feet. She reached out as if to touch my face, but I recoiled, reanimated by my fear.

The skeleton woman tilted her head as if she was asking me a question. She sat very still, her arm outstretched, her long bone fingers extended toward me.

This was all wrong. The skeleton woman had pulled me from a sandy grave, as if she was the living and I the dried-up, husked-out remains of a finished life. Perfectly still, the skeleton woman waited. By measures, I controlled my breathing, harnessed in my fear. Her wide, unblinking green eyes watched me.

At last I extended my hand and brushed the tips of her bony fingers. They were neither warm nor cold. Somehow my touch was too much, even though I had gripped her hand as she pulled me from the sand; it was as if my touch released her, and I watched in shock as her bones disintegrated right before my eyes. For a moment her form was held together by memory, I guess, of what it had once been—and then a breeze, just the slightest breeze, ruffled her dress, and her body, now no more than sand, rained down on the beach. The breeze became wind, and her dress lifted off into the sky like a kite.

And then I was awake, but I didn’t open my eyes. I knew who the skeleton woman was, and I wanted to hold on to my vision a little longer.

Mom made steak for dinner, with her signature mashed potatoes. It was nice to sit at the table with my parents; I listened to them making plans for the spring season. Mom wanted to get new quilts for three of the guest rooms, and Dad made noises about buying a few new koi for the pond.

When we were finished, Dad insisted on doing the dishes.
Mom looked at me with a strange expression—bashful, almost. “We never did open our Christmas presents,” she said.

“We can always save them for next year,” I answered.

She laughed. “No, no. Come on downstairs. I want to show you something.”

I was a little wobbly on my feet as I made my way down the stairs. I grasped the handrail and descended like an old lady, one step with one foot, then bringing my other foot to the same step before taking another.

Mom led me down the porch steps and around the side of the house to the back garden. I saw some sparkling lights, but it took me a moment to figure out what she had done.

There was a little tree just next to the gazebo; Mom had wound lights around the trunk, and then threaded them through the foliage. And she’d hung our Christmas ornaments—all of them—on long ribbons so they dangled at different lengths from the tree’s branches.

Our little pile of gifts rested at the base of the tree, and Mom had spread a quilt just near them for us to sit on.

The twinkling lights shone too brightly when seen through my tears. “It’s beautiful, Mom,” I managed to say. “Thank you.”

And as we sat together to open our presents, two months late but still in time, I noticed a new ornament, dangling somewhat lower than the others. It was a family of reindeer—three of them—labeled
John, Olivia
, and
Scarlett
. And in the sky above them flew a white bird, with
Ronny
written across his wings.

NINETEEN

O
ne thing I’d learned from Ronny’s death was that life moves on regardless. So although I had been absent from school for a whole week, and returned the following Monday feeling that I had been gone a whole lot longer, I wasn’t surprised that the high school machine had trudged on just the same without me.

Banners and flyers decorated the hallways and the cafeteria; Valentine’s Day was almost upon us, and with it the requisite flower and candy deliveries sponsored by the sports teams. For two dollars you could have a single rose sent to your crush during fourth period; for fifty cents, the girls’ basketball team would deliver a box of those disgusting, chalky heart candies to your boyfriend during homeroom.