Falling (5 page)

My mind processed all this with calm, numb thoughts. “Maybe I’m in shock,” I whispered to myself, trying to catch the thin chains in my hands and failing. They were almost see through and I could push them to the sides with the palms of my hands and pull more chain from under the door by lifting my hands above my head. But when I tried to grasp them they dissipated like smoke then reformed.

I sat back down on the closed toilet lid and folded my legs underneath me. With a fearful reluctance, I thought back to my last dream, trying to bring forth all the details.

Jordan had held my wrists, had grabbed them, really. And hadn’t I thought something about that felt unusual? But what? And what had I promised? What
exactly
had I promised?

My head snapped up at this because I knew exactly what Jordan had promised—my brother back. And here I was sitting the bathroom like a zombie when my brother was somehow back from the dead and waiting for me, hurt, in a hospital bed.

I threw the door open and nearly plowed down the nurse waiting on the other side. “Sorry,” I said, politely shoving past her.

“Just a second,” she replied, grabbing my wrist. I froze, staring at her hand. The smoke chain seemed to drip from the back of it. I held my breath as she slid an ID band below the bracelet and secured it with a little plastic snap.”For security reasons. He’s being admitted,” she said apologetically, making no mention of any gauzy smoke chains.

I nodded mutely and made my way back to Lincoln’s bed.

The head of his bed had been raised and he was sitting up drinking a plastic cup of apple juice. Grandma sat next to him, smiling so wide I could see almost all of her teeth. He set the juice down when he saw me looking in. “Bixby,” he asked,”are you okay?”

I felt my eyes tear up and my chin tremble. “Yeah,” I said, sitting down at the foot of his bed. “I should be asking you that.”

He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “Yeah, I guess I’m fine. I mean, obviously I am, I’m okay now.” He bit his lip, a rare nervous gesture from him. Lincoln was never nervous—about anything. It just wasn’t his personality.

I took a shallow breath then asked the question I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to. “Where were you?”

“I was ... I was at a homeless shelter. I was with all these guys and I slept on a cot and drank this really awful coffee.”

I closed my eyes in relief. It didn’t really explain anything that had happened, but it was better than him saying, dead, or heaven, or the afterlife, or just plain old nowhere.

“Linc,” I said slowly, “do you know how you got to the homeless shelter?”

He bit his lip again and shook his head.

“Has anybody, um, explained anything to you?”

“Explained what?”

Grandma took Linc’s hand and looked at me expectantly. I took the other hand and a deep breath. “You and Ben were going to the swim meet in South Bay. You took his car and on the way there they think maybe a deer ran out in front of you guys.”

Linc stared at me blankly and I continued. “He must have swerved, because the car went off the road and hit a tree. It … it caught on fire. They said something about a fuel pump, or poor maintenance or something.” I swallowed hard, not knowing how to say the next part. “It was pretty quick and there was nothing anyone could do to help, the fire was too hot—”

“Is Ben dead?” Lincoln gasped, jerking up. Grandma just looked at me.

“He is, but—”

Lincoln just shook his head and started crying again. He and Ben had been close, always playing the same sports and riding to most of the games together. They usually took Ben’s crappy Honda because it got better gas mileage than Linc’s beefed up Isuzu.

“Linc,” I said quietly. “There’s more.”

“Why didn’t I get him out of the car?” he wailed.

“Nobody got out of the car,” I told him. “I ... I don’t know what happened, but both of you ... we thought you both died.”

Something registered on his face. “Was that were I was? Dead?” he asked wonderingly.

“Of course not!” I snapped, frightened. “You must not have been in the car. Or you must have ... been thrown.”

“How long ago was this?” he asked.

“A week and a half,” I replied quietly.

“Didn’t anybody wonder where I was for the last week and a half?” he asked, tearing up again.

I couldn’t help it, I started crying again too.

“We thought it was you in the car. We buried you a week ago.”

Linc’s face was paling and he didn’t say anything for a long while. “Like, with a funeral and everything?”

I just nodded.

“Everybody thinks I’m dead?” My strong, macho brother trembled and turned white. “So, if I’m not dead, then who did you guys bury in my grave?”

Now the blood was draining from my face. I could feel it. “I don’t know,” I whispered.

Grandma got up and left the curtained room. I was too shocked to chase after her or to be grateful when she returned with a nurse.

I explained in a whisper a short history of what had seemed to happen and she left to get the guy with the clipboard. He in turn listened and left to call the state police. When the two cops showed up, they were already familiar with the accident and seemed as confused as I felt. They only talked with us for a few minutes before leaving to call a supervisor.

The afternoon dragged into evening. Linc was transferred to a private room, thankfully complete with a real armchair and couch. The interviews with the police continued and were supplemented by exams with more doctors and nurses suddenly concerned Linc may have been thrown from a car. Both were interrupted occasionally by the lab people drawing more blood or a tech coming to take him for another X-ray or CAT scan. I left the room only once, to call my home answering machine and change the message to tell my dad to call the number to the hospital. He had a cell he brought with him on the road but it almost never had service.

Grandma and Linc were both asleep when the nurse finally came to tell me I had a call.

“Hey Dad,” I said quietly, aware everyone at the nurses’ station was pretending not to listen.

“Bixby, what the hell is going on?” he bellowed into the phone.

I turned my back on my audience and cleared my throat. How was I supposed to explain his dead son had come back to life and that we needed him when none of that made any sense? Dead people don’t come back to life and we hadn’t needed Dad since he had pretty much bowed out of our daily lives after mom died. “Me and Grandma are at the hospital in Grand Rapids. There was some awful mistake—well, not awful now, but it has been for the last couple weeks. Well, I mean, now it’s going to be awful for someone else—”

“Bixby!” my dad shouted.

“Linc’s not dead,” I blurted out. “He’s hurt, and he must have been in the car crash and he has a head injury and doesn’t remember anything but he’s not dead,” I said in rush.

“I’m in Iowa,” my dad said. “I’ll be there in five hours.”

“Kay,” I whispered before he slammed the phone down.

I snuck back into Linc’s room but could have probably paraded in on elephants. They were both out cold, snoring like it was a competition.

I curled up in the armchair with a thin blanket and closed my eyes. I felt myself starting to drift when a little icicle of fear stabbed me in the chest.

I had no idea what was going to happen when I fell asleep.

I popped the chair out of the reclining position. There was no way I was going to let myself go to sleep.

Morning, and my dad, found me red eyed but awake. I got a cursory hug from him then he went to stand awkwardly at the foot of Lincoln’s bed. I excused myself to do what freshening up I could with water and the caustic soap provided in the tiny bathroom.

Dad was talking to a doctor in the hallway when I made my way back. I overheard the words “recovery” and “miracle” but dad shooed me away with a glare when I tried to stop and listen.

“Everything okay?” I whispered to Linc back inside the room.

He shrugged. “I guess so. You know Dad.”

Yeah, I did.

When my dad came back in, all he said was,”Take your grandma home and get some sleep.”

I opened my mouth to argue but his glare stopped me. I kissed Linc on the forehead and stalked out of the room, Grandma at my heels. Truth was, I didn’t appreciate my dad’s intrusion. He was never around, he was never involved. He crawled into a shell when mom died and never came out, not even when Grandma started going downhill and we started having to take care of her instead of the other way around.

“He’ll be gone in a few days,” I muttered to myself.

Walking out of the hospital, I started to feel sick. My happiness was being sabotaged with questions I didn’t have the answers too. Was he really going to be okay? Where had he been? I looked down, realizing I had been fiddling with my bracelets while walking and had to swallow back bile. It wasn’t possible some dream guy had brought my brother back from the dead and now had some type of claim on me. I vowed to find the bolt cutters as soon as we got back home then ran to catch up with Grandma.

It took me three attempts to safely back out of parking spot without hitting the cars that had evilly parked next to and behind me. I could feel Grandma eyeing me and ignored her best I could. When we safely got onto the highway, she finally spoke up.

“What will we tell everyone?” she asked.

I groaned. That question hadn’t occurred to me yet. “I don’t know, Grandma.”

I was exhausted by the time we finally got back home and parked the truck practically in the middle of the front yard. I offered to make Grandma breakfast but she ignored me, choosing to curl up in her armchair. The couch was tempting but first I had to the search the garage.

The bolt cutters were on the shelf above Dad’s workbench. With one of the elongated handles pinned beneath my knee and the other resting against my shoulder, I carefully placed the delicate bangle in the sharp beak of the tool. The tight fit of the bracelet wedged the points into my wrist and I swallowed hard before I carefully brought the one handle down. The bracelet was caught and pinched ... and nothing. I shoved the handles together harder and still nothing. With the leverage from my upper body I could crank the handles together almost a foot closer but the bracelet stayed intact. Frowning, I sat back, wiped the sweat off my face and inspected the bracelet. Not even a scratch. I experimentally clicked the handles together in the air and the little metal beak snapped together like it should have. A thin piece of chain snaking out of one of the workbench drawers was clipped like a piece of overcooked spaghetti. So I knelt back onto the garage floor but placed the other bracelet in harm’s way.

I heaved and pushed on the handles more desperately as I started to realize what shouldn’t have been possible. The bracelets were real, I really got them in a dream and they really weren’t coming off. With a final, panicky attempt, I snapped the handle down as hard as I could. It sprung out of my hand and skittered away on the garage floor. I saw the blood before I felt the pain.

It oozed steadily from my wrist and I grabbed a dirty shop towel to press to it rather than let a drop drip to the floor of my dad’s garage. His garage was sacred; he even laid down card board when working on any of the cars.

Despite not being very large or deep, the cut wouldn’t stop bleeding. With the towel wrapped around my wrist, I sat down on the couch to time myself for ten minutes of applying pressure.

Grandma’s gentle snores had me almost asleep when my dad banged in the door.

HE DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING, JUST came in and turned on the news. The forecast showed perfect autumn weather for the coming week then switched back to the newscasters. “An incredible story we’re working on here tonight,” the man began.

“That’s right,” the woman with the huge hair said, taking over. “Two weeks ago a terrible car accident took the lives of two young West Michigan athletes and tonight we hear there are new developments in the case. We’ll go to Marty outside St. Worth’s Hospital.”

“Oh, no,” I groaned.

“Thanks, Jessica,” the grunt said, standing in front of the hospital’s huge sign. “Michigan State Police have released a statement verifying that a person involved with that September nineteenth car accident has been admitted to this hospital for treatment of injuries sustained in that accident. They are not releasing the name at this time or how the person was involved in the accident. It was previously reported that it had involved only one car and both passenger and driver were killed on impact. The State Police are asking anyone with additional information to call and we’ll keep you updated as new information comes in.”

Dad folded his arm and turned towards me. “You know what this means?” he said.

He looked angry and for the life of me I didn’t know why. “No?”

“Because,” he shouted. “We can’t explain this and there’s going to be a ton of people crawling up our asses until we do!”

“Okay,” I said slowly. “So what?”

“Look, Bixby,” he snapped. “You may not think it’s a big deal watching your grandma and the house while I’m gone on the road but anybody else would. We’ve talked about this, don’t you listen?”