Opposite of gray, p.12
Opposite of Gray, page 12
Go faster, daddy!
Go faster!
Cooper pressed his foot harder on the pedal.
What surprised Cooper on this trip was the odd little things he could recall. Things he hadn’t thought about in years, but remembered as he passed the places they’d happened. He remembered the exact spot his father had hit two deer at once. That must be some kind of record, he’d said almost proudly, and left the deer to flop out their last bits of life in the middle of the road as he drove away.
He remembered the guardrail his father threatened to throw his mother over when she accused him of fucking the church secretary. He remembered liking how the word sounded as it exploded out of his own mouth later when he hid in the woods.
He remembered the blue house with the purple trim where the little boy sat at a lemonade stand. Cooper asked to stop, but his father said we don’t have time. And Cooper had wondered how they didn’t have time to stop because they were on vacation, right? He felt bad for the boy as they drove past and wished he could hold up a sign in his car window that said I really want to stop but my dad won’t let me and I bet your lemonade is great so don’t give up.
Cooper grinned at the thought.
“What are you thinking about over there?” Lily said.
Cooper just sighed. Some memories were strange if you hadn’t lived them and therefore didn’t need to be shared.
They wouldn’t get as far as he’d hoped before stopping for the night. They had hit Lisa B’s early and left Lisa B’s way behind. But he tried not to think of it as behind—who was he, his father?—and instead searched his memories for a decent town they could hunker down in for the night.
Some things along the drive had inevitably changed from how he remembered them. There used to be a wooden walking path where people would wait to cross the road. He used to look out the backseat window and think the wooden path was a portal into a fantasy world, somewhere like Middle-earth with elves and hobbits and orcs, especially when the people waiting had walking sticks like Gandalf the Grey’s staff. But the path had been replaced with a concrete spiraling staircase of sorts to a footbridge that went up over the road. Probably more safe, but far less magical.
And the red brick bar and grill that once marked where his father turned off of that same road was now nothing more than a dilapidated pile of rubble on the corner. Cooper imagined that a wrecking ball had come and knocked the building over and the cleanup crew had left with the job unfinished because they’d found a stash of drugs and cash in the wall. It was a far more exciting story than the reality had most likely been.
“So can I ask a probably obvious question?” Lily said.
“Still wondering what I’m thinking about?”
“No. I’m thinking back to the river. You saw that woman as a Gray, yeah?”
Cooper almost laughed at the question. Not because it was funny, but because it hadn’t even occurred to him until now. In the chaos of the last few hours, they’d never even brought it up. The entire reason they’d come on this trip—to search for answers about Grays—and it hadn’t even been mentioned.
“Yeah,” Cooper answered. “Gray. You?”
“After she jumped, yeah. Was she gray for you before she jumped or was she gray afterwards, too?”
And if Cooper was honest, he didn’t remember. It hadn’t seemed to be an important detail. All he’d known was a woman had jumped to her death right in front of them, and then Lily had screamed that horrible, terrible scream.
Poor Lily.
“Why do you think we see people as gray at different times?” he asked.
“I think it would be easier to figure that out if we knew why they were gray.”
“Maybe it’s just that you and I are tuned in to different things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Have you ever seen that stupid drop out when you can’t hear anything anymore video test that goes around social media every so often?”
“Yes,” Lily groaned, “and there’s always that one pompous jerk who tells you he can hear the whole test, even though it’s physically impossible for a human to hear something above 20,000 Hertz…”
“Yes,” Cooper grinned, “that test. Some people—jerks aside—can hear more of that test than others. It doesn’t mean the frequencies aren’t there for other people, it just means not everyone can hear them.”
“So you think being able to see Grays is like that?”
“I don’t know. Have you ever thought about the fact that there might be more Grays than we can even see?”
“Considering the fact we’re leaning towards being gray pointing to something evil, doesn’t that thought freak you out?”
“Yeah. A lot, actually. But it doesn’t change the fact we can see them.”
Lily took a sip of her old coffee, cringed, and set it back down.
“What do you think her story was?” Lily asked.
“Whose?”
“The woman in the tree. I mean, if gray means evil…”
“I don’t know,” said Cooper. “The more I learn about people, the less surprised I am by anything they might be. What I do know is that it’s the first time we’ve been together and seen the same person as gray, even if it was at different points of their… existence.”
“But if I’m only seeing people as Grays after they die, that doesn’t really help. What does it help to know that someone is evil after they’re already dead?”
Cooper pushed his fingers through his hair and blew out a sigh. Why be allowed to see the color at all if you didn’t know what it meant? It was like being given a game piece, but not having the board to play on.
He sat up straighter in the driver’s seat, arching his back and rolling his head from shoulder to shoulder.
“Need to stop again?” Lily said. “I could use a fresh coffee.”
He continued to roll his head from side to side, feeling the scritch scratch of the connections in his joints. He was too young to feel this sore.
“Find me a hardware store,” he said finally.
“A what?”
“A hardware store.”
“That’s a weird place to get coffee.”
Lily reached for her phone and did as Cooper asked. When the search loaded, she directed him to Trixie’s Hardware in New Holly, six miles away and not far off their route.
“Perfect,” said Cooper.
“Wait. Why do we need a hardware store?”
“Because we need to look at paint samples.”
* * *
Trixie’s Hardware was the smallest and least busy hardware store he’d ever seen.
“Paint samples?” Cooper asked an employee.
“Back of the store,” she pointed. “Turn at the faucets.”
It felt good to stretch his legs. It felt good to walk around. Cooper never remembered this part of the road trip.
“Planning to paint your grandpa’s cabin? Or are you gonna fill me in on why we’re looking at paint samples?”
“Well, I got to thinking,” said Cooper. “Are all your Grays the same shade of gray?”
“I’ve only seen three in my life, way less than you. But yeah, same gray. I’d never forget that shade anywhere.”
“Right. Mine are, too. But that doesn’t mean the shade of gray you’re seeing is the same shade I’m seeing. And how in the world do I know what shade of gray you’re seeing? I can’t see with your eyes.”
“I don’t know if the shade of gray that we see even matters—”
“I don’t either. I just know that answers can be anywhere when you don’t even know what the right questions are.”
They walked past an end cap of mailboxes, another of multi-colored duct tape, and then turned at the faucets. At the end of the aisle were shelves of primer and paint, and a display of cardstock samples of colors.
“Jesus, it’s a good thing you’re not painting the cabin,” said Lily. She ran her finger along the price tags on the shelves. “Paint is expensive.”
“We’re not buying anything, we’re just looking.”
“Okay, dad,” she teased.
Cooper shrugged her off and flipped through samples.
Silver Ice Cube
Soft Kitten
Spot of Gray
Ash Mountain
Smoke and Mirrors
“Who names these things?” Lily asked. “Wouldn’t that be the best job? Naming colors?”
Pewter Pete
Nickel
Metallic Magic
Foggy Dawn
Cooper noticed lots of colors classified as gray that he found too blue or too lavender or too green. They just weren’t gray enough. Was gray such a hard color to find? It sure wasn’t a hard color for him to see.
Flint
Silver Bullet
Mourning Dove
Steel Wool
Wait.
He went back.
That’s it.
Steel Wool.
“This,” said Cooper, holding up the rectangle of color. “This is pretty much what I see when I see a Gray.”
Lily looked at his color, then dipped her eyebrows inward.
“That dark?” she said and then pointed to a lighter shade. “What I see is more like this Silver Half Dollar. But… not exactly.”
“Yeah. Exactly. There’s no exact match here.”
Which made sense. Could you match paint on a wall to the color that someone’s skin, hair, eyes, lips, everything turned when they turned evil?
Or whatever this all signified?
There had to be something more to it. Wetzinger didn’t turn evil during his bath. He’d been a shitheel from the very first day he arrived at Angels of Mercy.
Cooper shook his head. “I feel like the more we dig into this, the less we know.”
“Well, we figured something out. You and I don’t even see the same shade of gray.”
“Which makes me feel we’ve gotten further away from an answer.”
“Have you ever thought that maybe the problem is we’re just looking too hard?”
He sighed at the rack of paint samples.
Why was she always right?
Finding someone else who saw Grays had reignited his hunt for explanations and tossed his brain into overdrive, digging for answers. But most of the quasi-answers had brought up additional questions, and he had allowed no time for anything to sit in his head and ruminate. He knew sometimes things needed to simmer together like a good stew for an answer to bubble to the top.
“Listen,” said Lily, grabbing his hand. “It’s okay to rest your brain for a bit, okay? We have two whole weeks.”
He squeezed her hand and then shoved the Steel Wool paint sample in his back pocket. He looked at his watch. 5:32 pm.
The day’s adrenaline dumps had beaten up his brain and exhausted his body. He was ready to admit he needed something dull and mindless—with a side of pizza.
“What do you say we find the next town with a decent hotel and some kind of food and call it a day?” said Cooper.
Lily smiled and mouthed something that looked like perfect, but Cooper didn’t hear the actual word.
Because what he heard were angry voices coming from the front of the store.
And what he heard was yelling and screaming at the front of the store.
And what he heard were gunshots at the front of the store.
“Jesus Christ!” Lily said, dropping her paint samples.
Cooper’s immediate reaction was to find an exit, but he didn’t know the store. He pulled Lily down to a crouch and they ducked behind the paint mixing station a few feet away.
They scrunched beneath the counter, barely breathing.
Sirens.
More voices.
More gunshots.
Moments stretched out, each dragging itself behind the next, and the harder he tried to hear what was happening at the front of the store, the more the sounds escaped him. Like he was six years old again, holding his breath and sinking under the bathwater, trying to drown out his parents’ discussion outside the bathroom. Their words were a jumble of softened consonants and muffled vowels that made no sense to him, like unidentifiable lyrics.
Except this time Cooper wanted to hear what was said.
And he couldn’t hear anything.
Lily crouched next to Cooper, her eyes blinking rapidly as they darted around the small area where they sat. Her breaths weren’t deep enough. She was shaking.
Cooper knew it all scared her.
Cooper also knew he couldn’t make it any better for her.
Cooper was scared, too.
He slid his hand across his thigh and grabbed her fingertips. They were freezing.
“We have to get out of here,” Lily whispered, her eyes glossy.
“We are not moving from this spot. Not until I hear something that isn’t yelling or gunshots.”
“I don’t hear anything right now.”
“That’s not necessarily a good thing. We have to wait.”
He locked eyes with her, persuading her to focus on him, to inhale when he drank air and to exhale when he let it all out. And she did. And they stayed there together, listening to the silence.
The intermission.
The nothing.
Breathe in
Breathe out.
But then in the distance,
new sirens.
Breathe in
And then closer,
new voices.
Breathe out
And within a few minutes, the space was again filled with the buzz of air and the hum of voices that weren’t angry, and Cooper thought it was the most beautiful noise he’d ever heard.
A voice crackled through the loudspeaker to announce the situation had been resolved, and moments later a chalky, shaken employee appeared around the corner of the paint mixing station.
“It’s safe now. Follow me.”
They stood awkwardly, sore from holding a silent squat for what seemed like forever. He motioned for them to keep up with him, and they followed him past restrooms and out a side door.
“What happened?” Cooper asked.
The employee led them to the parking lot where a small crowd had gathered, craning their necks to see what the emergency vehicles hid from view.
“I don’t really know,” he said. “A man came in with a gun. Tried to shoot at a customer.”
“Did anyone get hurt?” Cooper asked.
“…the cops were following him. Then the cops shot. Oh my god, how did this happen here…”
“Did anyone get hurt?” Lily repeated.
“A little girl…” he trailed off, his lip wobbling.
The parking lot crowd pressed against the boundaries the police tried to maintain, so Cooper cut through the other side, weaving through the throng like a snake. From his new spot he saw a gurney slid into one ambulance, a small pink shoe with purple laces just barely visible before the back door closed.
There was chaos all around the area, but in the midst of it, a young officer sat on the sidewalk, his head in his hands.
He drew Cooper’s attention for many reasons, but the most obvious to anyone else would have been that he seemed to have completely withdrawn from the surrounding disorder.
Adrenaline?
First call?
Mental breakdown?
He didn’t look much older than Cooper. He was awkward in the way he filled out his blue uniform. Incomplete, really. Like he’d dressed up in his dad’s clothes.
But that wasn’t the only thing he noticed about the young officer.
Cooper had no idea what had actually happened, but could tell from the mayhem that it was a holy mess for the small town. The kind of thing residents would hear about on the news happening somewhere else. The kind of thing they saw in movies. The kind of thing that simply didn’t happen in small towns like New Holly.
Cooper watched a husky older officer approach the younger one. He bent down until he was eye level with him and said something. The younger officer never looked up. The older man stood and walked to a squad car.
The back of another rescue vehicle closed and the brake lights came on as it shifted into drive and pulled away from Trixie’s Hardware.
The parking lot crowd dissipated, like rats scattering in slow motion. As Cooper continued to watch the young officer, he noticed that Lily hadn’t moved. He realized Lily was staring at the same man.
“Hey,” Cooper said.
But she didn’t move. She didn’t acknowledge Cooper’s presence. She just stared at the officer who had looked up and was now staring back at her.
“You ready to get out of here?” Cooper asked.
She sucked in a hitched breath.
“Oh my God,” Lily said.
“Lily, it’s okay,” said Cooper, rubbing her shoulder. “Everything’s going to be okay—”
“Tell me you see that, Cooper.”
Cooper looked at the officer on the sidewalk. He knew what he could see…
“See what, Lily?”
“That officer. He’s gray.”
“Wait,” Cooper said, spinning her by the shoulders, “you see that?”
“I see it, Cooper.”
“But, he’s alive…”
“I know! And I see it!”
“We both see the same person as gray?”
“And he’s alive? He’s actually alive, right?”
“Well, either that, or I’m seeing him dead.”
The officer rested his elbows on his knees and put his head back in his hands. A minute later, another squad car pulled up. An officer in a white shirt got out and exchanged a few words with the younger man. Two more officers helped him to his feet and walked him to the passenger door of the vehicle that had pulled up.
“I’m shaking, Cooper,” Lily said. “I saw a Gray who is alive! Do you know what this means? I mean, what does this even mean?”
Cooper had no idea what it meant, and couldn’t wrap his head around what had happened. But he knew something was different—he could feel it. Like a click, a pop, a palpable shift in perception.
Which meant answers—and inevitably, more questions—were on their way.
Chapter 18: Lily
Lily set her duffle bag on the first of two full sized beds. Cooper stood at the further one, rummaging through his suitcase.
