American Goth (28 page)

But before that happened, part of what I had to do was to keep that fool’s errand called hope alive for others. And I couldn’t help but think in some small part of me that this… Really. Sucked.

Those things that nature denied to human sight,

she revealed to the eyes of the soul.

—Ovid

I brought my Da’s trunk from the library to my room so I could thoroughly investigate it, and I searched everything. There was no key to be found anywhere. I suppose it would have been easy enough to get a razor and slice through the covers to open them, but I couldn’t do that: they had been my Da’s and he’d taken good care of them—I couldn’t so blatantly disrespect that. Instead, I discovered framed photos I hadn’t seen in years. These included two of my Da, one in his dress uniform with his graduating class on his Day of Assignment. He looked happy and proud and I had to admit Uncle Cort had been right: my father was so young in that photo, and without the length of hair framing my face, I very much favored him.

The other photo I suspected had been taken by Mr. Moretti, not too long after my first “official” haircut. I stood next to my father with my head no higher than his waist. We had the same stance, our hair had been parted and brushed similarly, and our matching navy blue polo shirts made our eyes a deeper shade of blue.

The last picture I found was one I remembered. My Da had taken it after a swim meet the winter before he’d died, and it was strange to see that, the girls I’d known, Nina and Fran, myself, in such a different context. I stared at those happy smiles, the innocent affection and pride on those tiny faces frozen in time. God, the things we didn’t
know
then… My head filled with a strange buzz as I arranged the frames on my dresser.

“It’s finally starting to look like you actually
live
here,” Fran commented with a smile when she came up for a break later that morning. She touched my shoulder lightly as she went over to investigate, and I grew a little nervous, wondering what she would think, what she would feel, when she really saw them.

I watched as she looked through them, pausing a moment at the group shot, and I watched as she reached, then changed her mind to select a different one to examine. I understood her reasons. She took the one with me and my Da.

“You were adorable!” she said then grinned at me. “You have his eyes.” She set it carefully back in the place I’d originally put it, then reached for another.

“That’s my mom,” I told her quietly. “Mom and me.”

She held her breath and let it out slowly as she scrutinized the photo. “You have the same smile,” she observed, and I couldn’t help but smile myself. That I knew.

“I kinda guessed,” I said and came to peer over her shoulder as she stared.

Fran touched the glass lightly with a finger tip. “You have her hands too,” she told me. “See?” She pointed to the photo where my mother’s hands caught mine.

“Really?” I edged around her as she turned to hand it to me, and it bumped into my stomach, jarring the wooden frame.

At that moment, the back popped off and Fran reacted automatically—she tried to catch whatever she could with her free hand, gashing her palm wide open on the glass as it sliced its way down.

“Christ!” I didn’t think—I tossed the frame onto the bed and clutched her hand to my stomach, heedless of the blood that spattered as I tried to put some pressure on it.

“I’m all right,” she said as I used my other hand to pull my tee over my head, slip it down my arm, then wrap her hand as best I could.

“No—you’re not,” I told her, part of me incredulous that we were arguing as her blood soaked through the gray material.

I held the drenched cotton over her hand as tightly as I could, hoping that it was at least doing some good as I led her down the stairs. Her pain and my alarm must have reverberated through the house, because even though I didn’t call for anyone, Elizabeth met us at the landing.

“What happened?” she asked, her face as calm as always, but there was a fierce concern she couldn’t completely hide in her voice.

I explained as between us we got Fran seated in a chair in the dining room, her hand wrapped, raised, and still held firmly against me. Elizabeth took a towel out of the sideboard and tore it into wide strips to place over the soaked shirt.

The bleeding seemed to slow or at least didn’t come through the additional makeshift bandages, but it wasn’t until Uncle Cort burst into the room and I caught the expression he wore that I had any idea of what this looked like.

I hovered over Fran in my bra and jeans, my skin streaked with her blood, while she sat there composed and pale, occasionally protesting that she was fine. There was a visible trail of droplets that led out the entry, and I was certain there was more on the steps.

“Let me take a look at that,” Cort asked, his voice slightly gruff as he reached for her hand. He focused as he held it, then slowly unwrapped the bandage.

The glass had sliced across the pads of her palm, just under her fingers, leaving a line that gaped then filled red as he pulled something out of his pocket. “It’s nasty looking, but it’s not truly deep,” he said quietly as he squeezed a small tube along the opening of her skin, then gently pushed the edges together, where they stayed closed.

“Crazy Glue,” he said nonchalantly as the bleeding stopped. “Liquid stitches—I’ve cut myself a time or two, and it’s a great trick.”

“Thank you,” Fran said quietly.

I couldn’t help myself, I hugged her head to me and kissed its crown as a flood of relief washed through me, cooling nerves I only now realized had kicked into overdrive.

“You’ll want to be careful for a few days—but it should heal up nicely, not even scar,” Cort continued and I understood why he knew that.

I’d completely forgotten what he and Elizabeth had taught me, that it was possible to monitor and evaluate another’s bodily functions. What if it had been worse and those moments had been critical?

I shook my head, angry with myself for forgetting something so basic.

“Rest here a moment, let’s make sure you’re steady before you go charging off,” Elizabeth said to Fran, who nodded in quiet agreement. “Why don’t you go wash up and get a fresh shirt?” she then suggested to me.

“Yeah, yeah. Good idea,” I agreed, my brain still numb.

I felt Uncle Cort’s eyes on me as I left the room, and the question he wanted to ask followed me as I walked past the dark red drops that had fallen on the floors, to the larger ones on the stairs, and finally to the spatter in my room.

Blood had sheeted over the glass that had cracked in the corner when it hit the floor, still covering the photo, while the backing had twisted to an odd angle when it fell. I squatted down near the pile; all the right edges of everything were painted in drying blood. I edged the cover glass carefully over with a fingertip, not wanting the pieces to scatter, or to cut myself—again.

That cut, my first cut…driven by anger, by a voice that told me I could dare to question everything, had been a vicious slash that had first run a heavy thick red, then eased, the sting and burn a mockery of what ripped through my chest. How could it be possible to hurt so much and
not
bleed?

I couldn’t, I didn’t understand it, and the surface pain had taunted me with its pale comparison. It had been the second cut, and the third behind it, the ones that had gone beyond exterior—they’d hurt with a grim satisfaction even as the world had flickered before my eyes in hazy shades of red. It had been fury, fury as cold as my blood was hot, that had driven the final cut. Even now I felt the beginnings of an icy flame lick at my edges as I contemplated the dark spots on the floor and the glass, blood on my things, Fran’s—that stopped me cold. Fran.

It was my Frankie who hurt for the reasons I did, who’d willingly bound herself to me, unhesitatingly had become a part of this strange mess I called my life, who even now sat downstairs with Uncle Cort and Elizabeth, her hand gashed open due to my clumsiness.

I shook my head, trying to physically dispel the cold burn as I picked the picture up by a corner.
That’s strange
, I thought.

Behind it lay a thin sheet of white corrugated cardboard, and it had a faint line beveled outward, as if something had pushed it from the back. I reached for it and heard a faint scratching noise as I drew it to me. I turned it over, and taped behind it was an envelope, a light blue one such as used for airmail. It was overstuffed and had been addressed in a handwriting I recognized instantly. It was my Da’s, and it was addressed to Samantha.

My heart hammered against my ribs almost painfully as I shook it lightly and I knew, before I carefully slit the fold with my finger and unfolded the pages and pages covered in his handwriting, what I would find at the center even as it slid out into my bloody palm: it was a key.

I held it carefully and smoothed the top page out.

My Samantha,
I read,
I’m sorry, so sorry I’m not there with you. You’re probably in England, safely in Cort’s and Elizabeth’s hands, and wondering what the hell kind of a guy your Da is that he didn’t tell you so many things.

I could hear his voice, almost feel his hands on my shoulders as I continued, unable to stop smiling here and there where he’d written something that showed how very well he’d known me.

I learned that it had taken a few years before my parents managed to have me, and that it had been the very specific result of ritual. I read about the car accident—and I wasn’t surprised to discover it had been a hit-and-run—that had cost my family the sister my mother had been certain she carried, then my mother herself perhaps forty-eight hours later. I’d been in the car too, and no one knew what I’d seen or remembered because apparently I’d said “Mommy” at the scene of the accident itself, then didn’t speak another word for two years.

My Da wrote about how my mother was adept in her own right, as was Law, as was required of those sworn, to be bound in spirit and body only to those of equal stature, to those equally bound to the Light and the Law, and that her gift was an affinity for metal. She could pick up traces left in the structural matrices and, depending on their strength, discern thoughts, emotions, even clear pictures, and link through to the person who’d left them.

He told of his own gift, what he referred to as “reading the threads.” He could see potentials, flashes of what could and what would be.
But remember, Sam-Sam,
he cautioned,
if this is
your
gift, there are infinite possibilities, controlled by the very real limitation of varied levels of probability, and in this world or any other—it’s the probabilities that count.

I suspect, though,
he continued,
that you’ll either take after Amanda, because you’ve no idea how like her you are, or inherit a variant of my gift, perhaps a purer version. Who knows, maybe you’ll get your grandmother’s—ask Cort about that sometime.

I wondered about that and put the pages down to finger the charms that hung from my neck. I focused more on the ankh, and it gave such a burst of mixed thoughts and images that I felt the beginnings of a headache between my eyes. It would take me hours to concentrate on any one sense long enough to see if my father’s suspicions were correct.

I shifted my attentions to the miniature claymore, and as I ran my fingertips across it, I braced myself for the razor-cut pain that always, always accompanied my deliberate playing with it. I tried, I really tried, to move past that, to open beyond the crystal pure burst of light, the icy sense of loss, the warmth of communion I’d had the one time her lips had touched mine. I tried until I didn’t know which would burst, my head or my chest, and I was forced to stop. I could hear my blood pounding in my ears from the effort. I took a centering breath, released it slowly, then read some more.

Now let’s talk about you,
the next line read,
because there are things you have to know, the things I’ve learned that I don’t think anyone else knows yet. So much of what we in the Circle do is aimed at preventing things from becoming manifest in the Material, but I think that’s all about to change.

But first, and this is from me as your Da, because I want you to be happy, as happy as you can. It is possible.

Your friends are important, Sam. You need to keep a bond to the Material, and you’ve always had pretty good judgment. Trust your gut, trust your senses, and trust me, even though I’m not beside you. Fran…what did I tell you? I was right, she did like you, and she’s got a heart like a lion. I hope you’re still friends. And hey, did you ever tell that other girl you liked her? Nina, right? She’s something special, that’s for sure. Well, I hope you did, because Sam? You can’t turn back time, and there’s so little of it. Don’t waste it.

My eyes pricked and stung, but I didn’t want to cry, refused to, because I wanted to read the rest and there wasn’t much left, these words, from my Da to me, written because he knew he wouldn’t be there to say them.

I love you, Samantha. No matter what happens, no matter what grows and stops and changes, that never will. Even in the multiplicity of Universes, even in the uncertainty of ever meeting again in this life or any other, my love for you is a constant. It’s the one thing no one leaves behind.