Decimate, p.14
Decimate, page 14
So far, Claire’s awareness of her visions has felt like grief, a sudden shock that keeps returning to remind her that her life has been forever altered. It feels just like those first waking moments when she thought her mother was still clinging to life in the hospital bed they’d moved into the living room, and then a little voice would say, Mom’s gone. The living room’s empty. And it stayed that way for months as old likes, hobbies, and obsessions all tried to captivate her the way they used to, only to be chased off by that crushing reminder. The same thing is happening to her now. Her anger toward her father, one of her frequent pastimes, barely has time to consume her before a little voice in her head says, Sure, but you’re going nuts.
This time, she talks back to it. Since when is suddenly being able to draw like you went to art school evidence of going nuts?
“I did what I thought I had to do to rattle the right cages,” her father finally says, jerking her back to the present.
“Who would those cages be? The government? The Pentagon?”
“If you don’t want to talk about her, stop sounding like her.”
“Meaning?”
“Stop talking to me like I’m bonkers.”
“I never said you were bonkers. I said you lied.”
“Everyone was lying about me!” He slams the steering wheel with one fist, causing Margot to jump in the back seat. “Everyone was saying I got shit-faced and let my own kids almost get eaten by a bear.”
“They were speculating on the most probable theory based on the evidence. You, on the other hand, made up things—”
“What evidence? Not a single claw mark on either one of you. Not a single bite! There was no damn evidence of what they were saying, but they ran with it and made me sound like I was some fuckup—”
“We were miles from where we should have been,” Claire says, “and you had to leave us for hours to get help! You had broken every promise you made to my mother. We weren’t at a designated campsite. You didn’t check in with anybody. And you were drinking. Nobody had to invent that story, Dad. You did all of that on your own.”
They’re traveling uphill. The woods close in around them; the snow’s lighter now but still pelts the windshield every now and then. For some reason, her father has chosen to enter a twisty mountain road in the middle of the night, far from where he supposedly lives. Are they headed to some secret commune of fellow cranks living off the grid somewhere above? Should she jump out of the car now?
“She knew,” Abram finally says.
“Knew what?”
“She knew you were connected.”
Claire wants to interrogate him, demand to know exactly what he means. But she knows, and it feels like a crushing defeat. Her dad contacted her the minute her classroom incident made the national news, because it revealed a secret he’d been keeping most of his life. And now he’s telling her that her mother had kept that secret as well.
“When?” she asks.
“She figured it out when I did. In the hospital.”
“The hospital. You mean the night it happened—”
“Well, she didn’t get there the night it happened. It took her another day before she—”
“You know what I mean.”
“We figured it out while you were both in the hospital. It was your arms, at first. You’d each broken one, but you were both complaining about how both your arms hurt. They were worried about how much pain meds they were giving you both for it. Then when she went to tell Poe that she was going to try to take you both away from me and he lost it, your heart started racing so fast the nurses came in. You were twitching. You even started to cry. We kept testing it. Your mother didn’t want to believe it at first. But you remember how you asked to be put in the same room as Poe and she wouldn’t even ask the hospital? It’s because she was seeing it and it scared the shit out of her and she thought it would get worse if you guys were closer together. So we decided to separate you.”
“Separate us? By getting divorced?”
“The divorce was going to happen no matter what. You two were another matter.”
“You agreed to this?” she asks.
“I thought once we did it, she’d realize she was wrong and the connection wasn’t going to go away no matter what we did, and then she’d come back. You’d both come back. And we’d all be together again. Instead, you all found your own ways to suppress it.”
Now Claire sees that long-ago lunch, the last time she saw her father, in a new light. Had he really been letting her go that day? Or had he been staying quiet, biding his time before a reunion that never came? And her mother’s words upon learning that Poe had run away. He can’t come here. That’s not how it works. Had the it in that sentence been her plan to keep Claire from her brother? And over the years, had her plan gone from trying to sever a psychic connection between them . . . to hiding it?
But these are distractions, Claire knows. Distractions from the sense of bone-deep betrayal she feels.
She knew. Her mother, who’d forbidden all talk of that night, who’d talked about her father like he was some backwoods lunatic, had known all along that something unexplained connected her children, and she’d swept it under the rug. And in response, Claire had stuffed her real suspicions about that night down deep, not even sharing them with her many therapists over the years. Focusing instead on a minute analysis of the maybe-not-panic-attacks that had consumed her, obsessed her the way that night had obsessed her father. And her mother had let it happen.
“Guess she never told you any of this?” Abram asks. “Too busy trashing me, I guess.”
“And you asked me to fly here just so you could trash her memory. Today of all days.”
“And there’s my answer.”
“And you never told Poe.”
Now it’s her father’s turn to stay silent.
“He figured it out, you know,” she says. “The connection thing. Once he got sober, he could feel it more. That’s what he told Phil, at least. He started spying on me using my brother-in-law to see if he was right.”
“Your stepbrother-in-law,” he grumbles.
“Whatever. Poe had a whole notebook full of events. Big things happened to one of us, and the other one felt it too. It’s why he was flying to LA. To tell me everything. So, you know, good move keeping it a secret and all.”
The silence in the car is electric, and Claire can feel Margot tense up. Too late, she realizes what she’s just said. Shame blooms inside her, but she can’t find her voice through it. Feels herself rationalizing the accusation even as its poisonous burn moves through her: Poe never would have been on that plane if her father hadn’t kept all this to himself. She feels like a hypocrite. How many times has she lectured her students on the difference between taking accountability for one’s actions and trying to shoulder the blame for a chaotic universe?
“You think I got your brother killed?” He sounds calm, but it’s the false calm produced by someone rushing to speak before all the breath leaves their lungs. She’s not sure, but she thinks she sees the glisten of tears in his eyes.
“Well, you’re wrong,” he says. Then he taps the rearview mirror. “They did.”
She’s afraid to look up at first, afraid some new vision will assault her. Instead, she sees what he means. Yards behind them, following them up the twisty, ice-flecked mountain road, is a giant SUV. With its headlights off.
“I think it’s time to ask them some questions, don’t you?”
The next thing Claire hears is squealing tires, and suddenly her entire world is tilting sideways. A turnout, she realizes. Her father must have been waiting for one to appear before he made his move. As the Jeep spins, its headlights stab across the ghostly SUV that’s been following them, like lights from a submersible suddenly falling across a shipwreck under the sea. Only the shipwreck’s coming straight for them. When she realizes they’re suddenly in a game of chicken, Margot starts shouting Abram’s name.
A gun is on Abram’s lap. A gun he must have pulled from one of the pockets on the inside of the driver’s door. It all makes sense suddenly. His jittery nature, his insistence on driving, his deflective talk—it was all designed to distract them as he landed them on an isolated road late at night.
Suddenly the inside of the Jeep is a blaze of white light, fierce and unrelenting, terribly familiar. She tastes dirt, feels memories of broken bones. But she can make out the outline of rack lights along the top of the approaching SUV. A cold blast hits her, and she realizes her father has rolled the window down, and that’s when she and Margot start screaming.
The approaching SUV swerves out of their way. Suddenly her father is speeding downhill in the opposite direction and the SUV that was tailing them a moment before is flying past her father’s open window, its own windows ink black and still rolled up. The gunshot is a thunderous boom accompanied by a muzzle flash. By the time Claire realizes her father’s just taken a shot at a car driven by strangers who may or may not be following them, her world is upended. The windshield is flying toward her in a shower of broken glass, and when her stomach rises up into her throat, she realizes the Jeep is somersaulting downhill.
Her father is bellowing, as if years of rage and frustration have been loosed from him by their glass-shattering plummet. And then the spinning comes to a sudden stop and the seat belt is like a river of fire across her chest, exerting terrible pressure on her right breast. Her head feels like it’s full of water. She is hanging upside down in her seat.
This time when she sees Poe, she doesn’t tell him to go away. The passenger window is shattered, but he’s leaning down, peering through one of the intact sections, and the juxtaposition between his orange jacket and the dark, snowy woods is stark, like a drive-in movie screen still showing its film despite being gnawed on by a tornado.
But she is doing what she was too afraid to do before, because she’s exhausted. Because she is desperate to escape the biting pain in her chest and the spinning in her head. She is gazing into her little brother’s eyes, watching them turn a bright shade of blue that starts to coat his entire face. It’s coming from his little hand too as he reaches out for her. There’s still a part of her mind that tells her not to reach for him. But she can’t resist. Anything other than this, anything other than this ruined car and the terrible sense that her accusation made her father do something fatally reckless.
Claire reaches for her brother’s fingers. The glass seems to vanish, as if they are truly about to touch across some great divide. But at the precise second when their fingertips should brush past each other, the blue light swallows her and all she hears is music. Cheerful, melodic music that once made her mother get up off a bench and dance.
“Bear?”
She’s moving. She fears the Jeep’s started tumbling downhill again, but she’s flat now, not dangling or somersaulting, and the motion is smooth, easy and regular. And there’s something under her. Arms. Small arms. She’s being held. Claire opens her eyes, stares up into her little brother’s face. Only now, no glass separates them. A sob wells inside her chest. But something is missing. Her brother’s face is only inches from hers, but his breaths don’t tickle her nose and mouth.
They are lying on the floor of a carousel, surrounded by a controlled stampede of brightly painted horses, as “Hooked on a Feeling” pours from the speakers all around them. The horses are riderless, but they rise and fall with a lazy rhythm.
“It’s real. Promise.”
“Can’t be,” she says.
The carousel starts to slow down. As Poe helps her sit up, she takes in more and more of the world beyond the carousel’s edge. There are the weathered boards she’d glimpsed in her full-length mirror. The wooden staircase to Pier 39’s second level. She sees patches of the sky, thick blankets of fog that part in places to reveal a sky of such universally bright brilliance it seems to have no single, remote sun. And this brilliance is blue, as blue as the light that came from her brother’s eyes when she reached for his hand.
Finally she stands, reaches for a horse’s head to bring herself to her feet, realizes it’s higher than it should be. In one of its large reflective eyes, she sees she’s the same age she was during their trip, bundled in the 49ers jacket their dad bought her. Her straw-colored hair is in the french braid her mother made before they left the hotel because she insisted that if Claire was going to wear a man’s jacket, then she would have to sport a hairstyle that was suitably feminine.
There is a low clamor of warm conversation, but it sounds distant, like background noise in a movie, something weakly remembered. It has to be coming from the silhouettes that move leisurely throughout the pier. They sit on benches; they stroll around the carousel. Their details are a blur of shadow, fringed in places by glittering traces of blue light. She can’t help but look toward the bench where her mother and father sat while she and Poe rode the carousel and explored the shops. When she sees them, she goes still—two silhouettes posed just like her parents that day, her father leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, her mother’s arm braced behind him and on the back of the bench, as if she were constantly fighting the urge to pull him into an embrace. But like the other circling shadows, whose feet, she sees now, do not touch the ground, they are featureless and vague. She’s reminded of the shadows of people that were burned onto walls when Hiroshima was bombed. Only these versions move and chatter.
“It’s not them; I checked,” Poe says quietly.
“Because it’s not real,” she says against her will. “None of this is real.”
“No.” Poe turns her to face him. “We’re real, and we’re here. Both of us now. It’s all memories, Claire. Our memories.”
“My memories.”
“All right, fine, then. Whatever! I picked Traffic Cone Poe because you always thought he was cute, so I figured he wouldn’t freak you out. Lot of damn good that did. How’s this?”
A new version of her brother stands next to her. He looks around thirteen. That would put him at an age when they barely spoke and traded no pictures. His hair is shorn into a sidewall like a junior ROTC recruit. His face looks long, his features slightly misaligned by a sudden growth spurt. He’s wearing a T-shirt she’s never seen him in. The word AC/DC is divided by an illustrated tear in the fabric that reveals the words The Razor’s Edge against a blood-red background.
“Yeah, sorry. There was a whole retro metal period after you left,” Poe says. “It was kinda loud. Be glad you were spared. But Dad said it was too pricey for me to be into bands whose only souvenirs were collector’s items, so he told me to either become one of Lady Gaga’s little monsters or get a job.”
She can’t take her eyes off the shirt. Were its little snags and stains put there by her brother after she and her mother moved away? She has never seen this version of Poe, and if she made him up, the detail is extraordinary.
“What’s it going to take, Claire? I mean, I know you organize your pencil drawer by color and size and all, but what’s it going to take for you to let go and admit this is really happening?”
He turns her by her shoulders. She looks at herself in the horse’s mirrored eye again. She sees herself at fifteen, sees she’s changed in tandem with her brother. The french braid and football jacket are gone, replaced by the Jennifer Aniston–style shoulder-length hairdo she thought made her seem so sophisticated and mature when she was a teenager, and one of the polo shirts she used to favor because the other girls her age were going for halter tops that made her feel naked.
“See?” he says. “Here, we can be whoever we’ve been.”
It’s the clarity of it all that convinces her. Claire has never dreamed like people in movies do, mistaking her dreams for reality until she sits up in bed. Her dreams have always had a stark unreality to them—halting, surrealistic montages that seem to fall apart and fade the minute she wakes. Everything about this experience is clear. Vivid. Her brother’s voice ringing in her head. The acrid smell of San Francisco Bay wafting up through the boards, blowing in on the wind she saw tousle her brother’s hair in hallucination after hallucination.
Vision after vision, she realizes.
“Poe . . .”
“It’s me, Bear.”
Then she’s sobbing and his arms are around her. There’s the clarity of everything around him, but there’s also the sense that she is the same person, that her emotions have traveled with her from the overturned Jeep to this place. And the grief she’s been holding in for hours comes pouring out of her as Poe embraces her. Some of it feels like relief over being reunited with him again, but they have not been reunited in a place she understands, so the relief comes weighted with a stronger version of the sadness she’s been battling since the plane crash. They have been reunited in a version of the past.
Their past.
She feels the shift instantly. Realizes the carousel horses around them are lower because they’re both taller. When she pulls back, Poe has the face of the man she kicked out of their mother’s funeral, only he seems healthier and more radiant, and his outfit’s clean and neat. Is it what he was wearing when the plane went down? She places her hands on his cheeks, feels a warmth there. Not the sweaty heat of flesh. It’s the warmth of a campfire, the warmth of a pure spirit. In his eyes there’s a subtle blue glow, a muted, almost hidden version of the radiance that spread across his face when she raised her hand toward the window of the tumbled Jeep. She raises her fingers in front of his face, testing a suspicion from before. No breaths come from his nostrils, and as she studies him, she sees the subtle signs. His chest doesn’t rise and fall, his nostrils don’t flare.
She places her hand against her face. The same isn’t true of her. She can still feel breath filling her lungs. Her heart races in her chest. Or this otherworldly version of it anyway.
She is still connected to some sort of physical body.
