After Ever (9 page)

My mind made up, I plow ahead, calling Brian’s name as I go. My voice carries on the wind and echoes through the trees. I try to keep to a straight line, but the terrain makes it difficult. The ground curves and dips. I trip over a hidden stump and go down to my knees. Get back up. Keep going. I look behind me only once, trying to tell how far I have gone. Impossible. The woods have closed in all around me. Skeletal branches hiss and clack. Pine boughs bend and shudder under the weight of the snow. I clench my teeth and look straight ahead. My feet feel like they are attached to cinder blocks. I walk another hundred yards and have to stop again. Breath rattles out of my chest. I wrap my arms around a thick tree and use it to hold myself up. Tears born from the wind leak onto my cheeks and freeze. I need to turn back. I should not have come this far.

The flash of red goes by so quick I think at first I have imagined it until I see it again. There, through the trees, I can see something moving. Brian has a red ski jacket. I picked it out for him before we came here. He wanted blue, his favorite color, but red was all they had so I got him a blue hat to make up for it.

“BRIAN!” I scream his name desperately. The wind catches my voice and slings it gleefully over my shoulder. I start to run, pumping my arms and snapping my knees up to my chest. My exhausted body reacts with one last surge of energy fueled by adrenaline. I don’t notice the trees have begun to thin out until I hit the ice hidden beneath the snow. It groans under my weight, an entire lake’s worth of frozen water. The forest fades away. Under the snow the lake looks deceptively calm. Sturdy. I don’t think twice about racing across it. Not until I hear the crack.

It is quiet at first, like a tinkling of glass. I can barely hear it over the roaring of the wind. Then it gets louder. The snow beneath my feet shifts and bucks, throwing me forward. I land hard on my right arm. It buckles beneath me, just as the ice is buckling beneath me, sharp and without warning. Kicking, screaming, crying I try to scramble away from the hole that is forming in the middle of the lake but it is too quick, too fast, too powerful. It sucks me forward with a ravenous hunger, tilting the ice under my body until for one fleeting second I am standing on air before I plunge into the darkness.

If I thought I was cold before, it is nothing compared to this. The cold steals the very air from my lungs. It streams out of my mouth in a series of white bubbles. I try to swim up, towards the glimmer of light I know to be the surface, but my hands won’t paddle. My legs won’t kick. Pain gnaws at my empty chest, filling the cavity with sharp needles that poke and jab. I claw with my fingers, fighting for every inch, every centimeter. I don’t want to die here. Not here, forgotten beneath a sheet of ice. Not now, when I have felt what it is like to be happy again.

I have to breathe. I have to. I have to. I make one last desperate lunge for the surface. My fingertips touch something solid. Something hard. The ice. I have reached it, but I have floated from where I first fell in. The surface is no longer my salvation.

I pummel the ice. I scratch and claw until the water blooms red with my blood and when I can’t fight anymore, when my body is limp from exhaustion, I finally allow myself to breathe. I breathe in the water. It floods my nose, my mouth. For some reason I expected it to taste salty, but it is fresh and sweet. I swallow convulsively. Spit it back up. Swallow again.

I begin to sink. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, spinning round and round. The light fades away. I keep my eyes open, straining to catch every last drop of it. And then the darkness swallows me and I see nothing.  

I am nothing.

CHAPTER SIX

When I surface from the darkness, Sam is there.

He hovers over me, his face pale and his mouth drawn tight. “Win?” he says, studying me closely. “Are you awake?”

I let the fact that my eyes are wide open and I’m staring back at him answer his question. My vision is blurry, as if I’m still underwater, but when I blink it clears. I am lying down on a floor, old carpet scratching against my hands and the back of my neck. Instantly I scramble to my feet and whirl in a circle. Water sloshes out of one shoe, but the rest of me is inexplicably dry.  

“Where am I?” I ask. My mind feels fuzzy, like I just woke up from a really deep sleep and am still shaking off the effects. I take in my surroundings, trying to orient myself.

It looks like I am in the lobby of some run down motel. The walls are white washed and plastered with tacky posters of places like Hawaii and Texas. In the middle of the room is an ugly blue plaid sofa with two matching chairs and a coffee table that tilts to one side. A fake palm tree, its plastic leaves coated in dust, sits in one corner and almost touches the drop ceiling. A water cooler occupies another corner, but it doesn’t look like any water I would want to drink.

“You should sit down,” Sam says, gesturing to the sofa.

I sit gingerly on the very edge while he takes one of the chairs. The sofa cushion sags under my weight. A plume of dust shoots up and with it the smell of must and mold and old things. “Where am I?” I repeat.

“What is the last thing you remember?” Sam leans back in his chair and crosses his legs at the ankle, revealing matching brown socks. One long arm stretches along the back of the chair next to him. He looks oddly comfortable, as if he has been in this small, cramped lobby before. He also has on a new sweater vest. This one is dark green and stands out against his plain white t-shirt.

I think about his question. What
do
I remember? Running. I remember running. And cold. The cold was like a knife, slicing through me right to the bone. Something cracking, like a gunshot. Falling. Water. And then…

“Nothing.” I jolt forward and almost slide off the sofa. Panic claws at my throat, making my voice come out tinny and high. “I don’t remember, Sam. What happened to me? Where am I? How did I get here? Are we in the resort somewhere?”

“No,” Sam says slowly, drawing the word out. “We’re not in the resort.”

I’m starting to get a little annoyed now. What kind of game is Sam playing? “Just tell me where we are,” I demand. The feeling that I am forgetting something huge is unshakable. It dances at the edges of my mind, taunting me.
Remember
, I order myself fiercely.
Just remember. It’s not that hard. Remember. Remember. Remember.

Sam mutters something under his breath, too soft for me to hear. His gray eyes flick to the left and I turn my head, following the direction of his gaze. In an adjoining room, visible by a large cutout in the wall, sits the fattest man I have ever seen. His triple chins wobble and sway when he looks up, as if sensing we are staring at him. His eyes, dark and pig like, narrow to slits and almost disappear into the fleshy doughiness that is his face.

“Get on with it,” he growls.

I wonder if he is talking to me, but Sam nods stiffly, acknowledging the comment was directed at him.

“Winnifred,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“I have to tell you something and it’s going to be kind of a… shock.”

“Tell me what?” I ask blankly. What could Sam possibly have to tell me that would be shocking? Something about his cousin? Something about him? We don’t exactly know each other well enough for anything to be considered shocking. Do we?

The fat man coughs. It is not a regular cough but a loud, obvious one. A
hurry your ass up
kind of cough. Sam draws in a breath so deep it fills his chest and pushes it out. The seconds tick by, counted out by a clock hung high on the wall behind his head.

“Well,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck and looking down at the worn carpet between his feet, “this is harder than I thought it would be.”  

The feeling that I am forgetting something comes back with a vengeance. It nags at me, a blur of images and muffled sound. I nibble on my pinky finger, worrying a tiny sliver of broken nail between my teeth. Something to do with Brian, I think. Brian and water. Did he go swimming? Is he at the pool? Oh God, did I forget him at the pool?

“Win!”

“What?” I ask, startled by the intensity in Sam’s voice.

His gray eyes wide and slightly wary, he says, “I have something to tell you and it’s going to be really –”

“Shocking,” I interrupt. “Yeah, you said that already.”

He smiles, but it is a sad smile, so sad it strikes a painful chord in my chest. The same chord that tightens every time I see a commercial for the Humane Society with all the poor animals or watch
The Incredible Journey
. The original, not the remake. I don’t like the one where the animals talk.

“Winnifred, the thing is…” He hesitates. Looks at the fat man. Clears his throat.

I wait impatiently, strumming my fingers on the edge of couch. Miniature dust clouds float up every time my fingers strike the scratchy felt surface. “The thing is…” I prompt.

Sam looks down at his hands. He looks at the poster above my head. He looks at the dust coming up from the sofa. When he finally looks at me his expression is apologetic and slightly pained, as if he is about to tell me something he knows I will not want to hear. “The thing is… Well, you’re dead Winnifred. I’m really sorry.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

You’re dead Winnifred. I’m really sorry.

You’re dead, Winnifred. I’m really sorry.

You’re dead. Winnifred, I’m really sorry.

No matter how I play the six words back in my head I can’t change their meaning. I sit frozen on the dusty sofa, my eyes pinned to Sam’s face, seeing but not seeing. What kind of whacked out dream is this, I wonder? Because it has to be a dream. It can’t possibly real. Dead? I’m not dead. Of course I’m not. I would
know
if I was dead. This is just a dream. Just a sick, twisted, really weird dream.

Then why does it feel so real? And why does it feel like I’ve just remembered what I had forgotten?

I stretch out my arms. I wiggle my fingers. I look down at my clothes. Black sweatshirt. Dark blue jeans worn through at the knees. Both familiar pieces of clothing. I slide my feet across the linoleum floor. Tug on the ends of my hair. Wiggle my lip ring. I am me. I feel. I hear. I smell. I see.

You’re dead Winnifred. I’m really sorry.
  

I touch my forehead. My skin is cold and clammy. My fingers drift lower, to the curve of my jaw. I press in, feeling for a pulse. I almost expect to find nothing, but it is there. A steady push push push against my fingertips. I sag in relief and press my palm flat against my chest, only to sit bolt upright a few seconds later.

“Sam! Sam, I can’t feel my heartbeat. Why can’t I feel my heartbeat?”

He watches me steadily, his gray eyes unblinking. In them I see a world of wisdom, wisdom a normal seventeen year old boy should not possess. “You need a stethoscope,” he says.

“Oh.”

“We can’t stay here much longer. Someone else will need the lobby soon.”

Someone else. “You mean… another dead person?” I whisper. The words sound funny coming out of my mouth. I want to laugh and just manage to hold it inside. The absurdity of everything is just too much. My future therapist will have a field day with this dream. When I wake up I will have to write everything down before I forget. Until then, why not go along with it? I start to stand up. My legs tremble and shake and I have to sit down. Hard. My tailbone strikes the edge of the sofa. It should hurt – nothing hurts worse than falling on your tailbone – but I feel nothing.

They say to wake up from a dream, to really wake up, you have to pinch yourself. I roll back the sleeve of my sweatshirt and pinch the tender skin on the under part of my forearm. I pinch and pinch and pinch. I pinch until the skin turns an angry red and when that doesn’t work I dig in with my fingernails until blood, thick and red, runs down my arm in jagged lines.

“I can’t feel pain,” I say in amazement. “Sam, look. I can’t feel it. I can’t feel pain.”

“Stop it,” he says fiercely. I glance up at him. His face is drawn and white as snow. Abruptly he stands and jerks me upright, grabbing the hand that I had been using to mutilate myself. “We can’t stay here,” he says, breathing heavily. “This room isn’t for us. Not anymore.”

He drags me towards a back door I had not noticed before. We pass in front of the fat man, who wheezes out a chuckle. His chins jiggle in rapid succession.

“You got yourself a live on there, Sam my boy. Good luck with her,” he says.

I smile at him and wave. Sam says nothing. Grim faced, he pulls me through the door into a dimly lit hallway. It smells like spices and fried food. My feet sink into a thick maroon carpet. I can’t tell if the gold lines etched across it are meant to be or if they are stains. Meant to be, I decide.

The door to the lobby slams shut and locks. Other doors line the hallway. One, two, four, eight… So many doors I lose count. Sam shuffles me through the one directly in front of us. There is a flash of light. A faint jerking in my abdomen, as if I am being pulled towards something. Another door slams. And just like that, we’re in my fifth grade classroom.

I recognize my new surroundings because of the writing on the chalkboard. My fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Swain, has the most beautiful cursive I have ever seen. For months I tried to copy it: the swirling S’s, the elegant C’s, the perfect M’s, before I finally gave up and resigned myself to the fact that I was destined to have bad penmanship. ‘Chicken scratch’, Mrs. Swain used to say when she loomed over me, her belly pressing in the corner of my desk and her long fingernails tap tap tapping against my paper in disgust. Suffice it to say fifth grade was not my favorite school year.

It is warmer here than it was in the lobby. I shrug out of my sweatshirt and wrap it around my waist. A discreet glance at my arm reveals it is no longer bleeding. Just crusted over and nasty looking, with purple and blue bruises already forming. I push a finger into the heart of the wound, testing. Still nothing. Sam clears his throat and I link my hands guiltily behind me back.