Sacred (37 page)

“Tucked in my arms?” asked Will.

“That too. But I meant by boat.”

“Sailboat or yacht?”

I considered. “Well, a yacht would be luxurious, but maybe it would feel too much like traveling in my living room. I’d choose sailboat.”

“Mm. Do you know how to sail?”

“Not really. But I’m a quick study.”

Will laughed, the deep, rich laugh I so loved. “I’ll sail the world with you,” he said. “I’ll be your first mate.”

“You’re gonna mate, Big Red?” For such a big guy, Connell was remarkably adept at a stealth attack. Before I even knew Will and I weren’t alone, he had sidled up right next to us.

“Hi, Connell. Bye, Connell,” I said. I felt Will’s arms tighten around my waist. I ran my fingers down his arm with the lightest of touches, trying to remind him without speaking to think of a different color.

Connell stayed next to us, his fists tight as if he was hoping Will would give him a chance to even the score. I knew how the dynamic worked: Connell was catcher to Andy’s pitches. He had Andy’s back.

But good to his word, Will wasn’t biting. After a moment, he even managed to loosen his grip on my waist. His face was turned in to my hair, and I felt his hot breath as he exhaled.

Connell tried again to bait him. “You know, you only took Andy down because you caught him off guard. Pretty sneaky, but not much of a surprise, considering your background.”

Will answered, but without turning his face away from
my hair. “Connell, are you insinuating that because I am Jewish, I am a sneaky, immoral fighter?”

I wasn’t sure Connell knew what
insinuating
meant, but he got the general idea. “You said it,
Cohen
, not me.” He managed to make Will’s last name sound like a dirty word.

“Do your research, White Bread. You ever hear of
Krav Maga
?”

Connell looked confused. He was about to spit out a response, but Mr. Steiner, chaperone for the day, joined our little party.

“Everything okay here?”

“Right as rain, sir,” answered Will.

Connell slunk off, his hands shoved deep in his pockets.

“Just watch it, Cohen,” warned Mr. Steiner.

When we were alone again, I said, “That was pretty good, Will. I’m proud of you.”

He kissed me just beneath my ear. “It wasn’t so hard,” he admitted. “Once I made up my mind to control myself, it got a lot easier.”

“So it wasn’t meditating on my lips that did it for you?” I teased.

“Well, that certainly helped too.”

I turned to kiss him but, true to his word, Mr. Steiner had his eye on us.

The museum was a large, brown shingled building perched on a cliff on the edge of the ocean. We had to take a bus from the port, and by the time we finally arrived, half of the kids were grouching about being hungry for lunch.

Mr. Steiner caved and let us take our lunches, which we’d each brought from home, across Ocean Boulevard to a park for a quick picnic.

The grass was damp, so the students spread out across the park to claim the various cement tables. At the far end of the grassy area was a skate park, and a bunch of the guys, and some of the girls, migrated over there to watch the local talent.

Mr. Steiner followed them to keep a watchful eye. He didn’t seem keen on any interaction between us islanders and the big, bad Long Beach locals.

Will and I sat near the edge of the park where we could glimpse the ocean. Even if we did live on a small scrap of land surrounded by water, I never could tire of the sea. Will didn’t say anything, but his body was stiff next to mine. He seemed on edge, keyed up. And then I heard the siren.

At the sound of the siren, my spine stiffened. After its first mad scream, the siren seemed to fade away, and I let myself pretend that I had imagined it. Then it came back stronger than before. There was a neighborhood nearby, populated with small cottages mixed together with apartment buildings, and from up the street, a small flood of people headed toward the park.

I smelled something in the air—acrid and smoky.

Will stood from his perch at the picnic table and walked away as if hypnotized, his eyes unwavering in their gaze as he made his way toward the street.

“Will?” I said, but it was as if he didn’t hear me. I stood
and followed him. He crossed Cherry Avenue, not even looking to see if any cars were coming in his direction. A man pulled up short, leaning on his horn. Will didn’t turn his head. I waited for the car to pass, then trotted to catch up with Will.

Just ahead of me, he started to jog and then flat-out run, his hands cutting through the air.

“Will!” I called, desperately anxious and scared.

He didn’t turn.

I felt the heat before I saw the fire. It was on the corner—a tall, thin wooden house, with two unit letters on its side—
A
on the downstairs unit,
B
on the upstairs apartment.

The flames licked the structure, spilling out the upstairs windows and consuming the plank siding. Lengths of the building’s gray paint curled back like birthday ribbon.

Behind us, the whine of the fire engine crested, intolerably piercing, before cutting short suddenly midwail. Firefighters shoved past us, rolling out their long, heavy hose.

“Back off!” they yelled at us, shoving us roughly into the street, away from the building. And then they turned on the hose and a fierce spray of water shot into the flames.

I put my hand on Will’s arm. “See, Will?” I said. My voice sounded frantic. “It’s okay. They have it under control.”

Will didn’t answer. Not once had his focus veered from the building—from one of the windows, specifically. He stood stock-still, as if paralyzed. Then, as if he’d come to a decision, he turned to me. “Stay here,” he implored.

And then he was gone, running around the corner toward the back of the building.

Too stunned to move at first, I looked at the spot where Will had been standing just a moment before. Now he was gone.

That was how it was.… One minute, someone can be standing right next to you. The next, they can be gone. Irreversibly. Intractably. Forever.

This last thought—
forever
—seemed to propel me into action. I followed the path Will had taken, making my way around the rear of the building. Will was nowhere to be seen. He had disappeared, and three firefighters had barreled around to the back entrance.

I tried to push past them, but of course they stopped me. “There’s somebody in there!” I screamed.

“Back away, miss,” one of them ordered, his voice stern. They looked like three fierce aliens in their helmets and heavy fire gear, and their faces were serious and absolutely immovable.

“You’ve got to get him out!” I was crazy with fear. Black smoke poured from the window that had so hypnotized Will. I beat my fists against the firefighter’s chest, sobbing, and coughing from the smoke.

“Calm down!” The firefighter grabbed my hands and forced them to my sides. “Everyone is out. We asked the residents.”

But his logic did not assuage my fear. Will was in there—I knew it—and when the window exploded, shooting glass shards down upon us like spiked confetti, and the firefighter tucked me against him, turning his back on the flames to protect me, my howl was wild and piercing and my heart felt like it would explode too.

And then the door behind us flew open, and there he was—Will, clutching a baby close to his chest. His clothes were blackened, the curls around his face singed.

The baby shrieked loudly, his fat little arms flailing. At first I thought the baby’s skin was darkened from soot. Then I realized I was seeing his burns. Wordlessly, Will handed the baby to the firefighter who had sheltered me from the falling glass.

Our classmates, chaperoned by Mr. Steiner, returned to the island on the ferry. But Will and I were shepherded into an ambulance to be examined at the hospital. The emergency-room doctor was puzzled; somehow, Will had made it through the fire unscathed. The baby was burned but would survive … thanks to Will. When the doors to the emergency room opened again to admit a motorcyclist who had crashed, the doctor had to cut his examination short. As he turned away from Will, he said, still puzzled, “Well, you’re a very lucky young man.”

The baby had been forgotten by his babysitter, who watched three small children every weekday in her one-bedroom apartment. She had been drinking—“Not a lot, I swear!”—and had left her cigarette burning on the arm of her couch when she went to answer a telephone call in the kitchen. She’d fled the building with two of the three children. Whether she’d actually forgotten that there was a third child in the apartment or whether she’d chosen not to mention him because of fear or stupidity, no one knew.

Will pulled his sweater back on—it reeked of smoke—and
stood up from the examining table. Our parents would be coming to collect us; we were to wait at the hospital for them.

We found seats in the crowded waiting room. A television mounted high in a corner played the canned laughter of a sitcom, but neither Will nor I heard the dialogue.

I wanted to ask Will about what had happened back at the fire. What he had done went against everything he had told me about his abilities … there had been no violent crime, for one, and for another, nothing he had told me had hinted that there was any reason he should have been able to walk unharmed through a burning building.

But I felt shy somehow, and I waited for Will to share with me whatever he could, so I pretended to watch the show.

At last, Will spoke. “It was different this time,” he said. His voice was hushed, and his eyes were wild as he remembered the fire. “I knew there was a problem, but it wasn’t like I had to go. It was different. I had a choice. I
wanted
to go. I could have walked away. But I didn’t. And inside, in the building, I heard him, Scarlett. I heard him calling to me.”

“You mean you heard the baby crying?”

He shook his head emphatically. “No. I heard his
voice
. I don’t really know how to describe it. It was as if some part of him was calling out to some part of me, guiding me. And there he was, sitting in a playpen tucked in a corner of the bedroom, by the closet. Under the window that I’d seen from outside. And when I came in, he reached his arms up to me. He knew I had come for him.”

I didn’t know what to say. I took Will’s hand and caressed his palm with my thumb.

“It felt good, Scarlett. It felt wonderful. Not just to save him … I’ve saved people before. But to
choose
to do it.”

“You could have been killed,” I murmured.

Will shrugged. “But I wasn’t,” he said. “It’s different, Scarlett. Things are changing for me. Since Dad told us his theory about me—his idea that maybe I’ve been here before—I’ve been thinking a lot about what happens to me. And I’ve started to see things differently. Do you know how I talked about responsibility being like a jacket?”

I nodded.

“It’s like this. This curse—this gift—was always mine. I guess I’ve accepted it, and by owning it, by not fighting it anymore but recognizing that it’s part of me, it’s part of who I am, I’ve changed it. I can feel things, things I wasn’t aware of before.”

“You can feel
more
than before? Are you in pain, then, all the time?”

Will shook his head earnestly. “No,” he said. “It’s weird. I still feel pulled, but it’s not painful anymore. And it’s coming from all different directions. Over the last few weeks, it’s been like nothing I’ve ever experienced. Sometimes I hear voices speaking in my head, calling for my help, but I don’t know where to turn to help them. Some of them seem to be coming from really far away, way farther than anything I’ve experienced before. But the urgency, Scarlett, the headaches, the pain … it’s all gone now. In its place, there’s this … I don’t quite know how to put it … there’s this
knowledge
that there is suffering out there, all around me … and that I can end it, or help to end it, if I can learn how.”

I didn’t know what to say. “How are you going to learn how to save the world, Will? You can’t stop
everyone’s
suffering, you know.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know everything, not by a long shot. But, Scarlett—it’s okay. It’s okay that I don’t have all the answers. I’m going to find them.”

He looked so sure—so strong, so absolutely certain that the answers were out there for him. Perhaps they were.

“The thing is, I didn’t choose this—this calling, this curse, whatever it is. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a choice. I
do
—I can choose to embrace it. It can be a burden, or it can be a blessing.
I
get to decide.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but I didn’t know what I would say. Will’s eyes were shining with the truth of his words, the hope he seemed to feel. And then the doors to the emergency room slid open. In came our parents—my mom and dad, with Martin right behind them—and for a moment Will and I were just kids again, safe in the warm embrace of family.

TWENTY-TWO

B
y the time our parents had filled out the requisite paperwork and ushered us out of the hospital, the last ferry of the day had left for the island.