The Binding (24 page)

Nat crouched over her, his ear near her moving lips, but he couldn’t make out anything. He rubbed her cheek and saw some color returning to her face, crimson leaking slowly into the flesh.

Her eyes came open, and Nat saw that it was Becca’s gaze, the composed look in her eyes that he recognized.

“Dr. Thayer?”

“Yes,” he said, “it’s me.” He felt a rickety smile across his lips. Why did this girl make him feel like a fumbling schoolboy?

She reached up and he took her hand—
Too cold, Jesus
—and lifted her into a sitting position. She looked down at the rain slicker, spotted her nylon hat on the ground, and picked it up. She reached for her hair, tendrils of which had come out of the bun and were now blowing in the gusting wind. She tried to secure them with a rubber band brought up from her pocket, but gave up. Finally, her eyes looked past him to the field beyond. When her eyes came to the museum, they registered nothing except confusion. The hatred was gone.

“Where am I?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“No. I . . . I . . .”

He felt her move, as if to get up. Nat reached across her shoulders and slowly began to stand, pulling her up as he went. Now that she was talking, he felt how the coldness of the ground had deadened his legs. “Are you okay?”

She stood up uncertainly. “Yes.”

“You’re not too far from the old town square.”

“I know where I am now. I must have gotten lost.”

He stared at her.
Are you really going to pretend you were out for a stroll and took a wrong turn?

“Becca, what do you remember about the past hour?”

Her eyes swiveled to his. “I remember everything. I wanted to get some fresh air.” She looked around. “It started to rain. And I got lost.”

Nat said nothing, but their eyes locked and she looked angry.
This has happened before
, he thought.
She wakes up in strange places, but she doesn’t want to know why.

“You were following me . . . ?” she said, and something about how she said it made him laugh.

“Not really. I was trying to
catch
you. There’s a difference.”

“Why?” she said, and began to walk.

Without waiting for an answer, she strode away, heading toward one of the old Victorians they had passed.

“I wanted to see you,” he said, catching up.

She was up ahead, her long hair flowing out behind the turned-up collar. She looked back at him, suspicion in the widely spaced brown eyes. The ground was making sucking noises as their feet pulled out of the mud.

For a moment, the notion that she would be furious and refuse to see him anymore had crossed his mind, and he found himself fearing it. Seeing her walking—no, driven—through the streets, a haunted marionette, had touched him. Unnerved him. What else was at work in her was beyond his experience, but now he believed it did exist.

“I thought we agreed I could help you,” Nat said.

They reached the street, and with the end of the rain, a little life had returned to the neighborhood. An elderly couple was coming down the stairs of their house, the man holding a madras-patterned umbrella. A burly Dodge pickup came rolling past, its wheels making a sizzling noise on the wet tarmac.

“Help me do what?” Becca said as they turned onto Garmin.

“Find out why you feel the way you do.”

He was walking next to her now on the pebbled sidewalk. He could hear the swish of her slicker and found that her strides were smaller than his. She was walking normally again.

“I know what’s wrong with me.”

She’s nineteen
, he thought.
She’s a teenager. I have to remember that.

“Your father . . .” He felt her tense. “He’s gone. You have no one else here.”

She said nothing. When they reached State Street, he led her to his car, and she came, though not eagerly.

“Come on, I’ll take you home.”

She got in, and soon they were heading back to Endicott Street. In the ride back to the Shan, he could feel her intently looking at him. But every time he smiled at her, Becca would glance away and he would see that profile marked by the flattened part of her nose that looked almost broken.

When he pulled up to the house, she stared ahead, not looking at him.

“I want to ask you a question,” she said, her voice low.

Nat felt uneasy. To lose her . . .

“Okay,” he said.

Finally, she looked at him and her eyes were filled with an urgency. “How did your parents die?”

His eyes went wide. “How did you know—”

She shook her head, as if to block out his words. “Please just answer the question.”

Nat stared at her, confused. “They died in a car accident, Becca.”

She looked straight ahead again, and her gaze was fogged over, as if she were trying to re-create the accident, to see it. “What happened?” she said.

“They were driving home from my mother’s parents in Vir
ginia. They’d been visiting just before the holidays while I was off on a school trip to DC. They were ten miles away when the car went off the road. Why are you asking me this?”

She turned back, her head bobbing quickly. It was as if she were hearing some other explanation in his voice.

“It was an
accident
, Becca.”

Her expression was inexplicable. Pain and . . .
wanting something
. Her eyes brimmed with tears.

“I know you’re worried about me, Dr. Thayer. And that means a great deal to me. But what you don’t know is that I worry about you, too.”

“You do?” he said. He was surprised by how happy he was to hear that. “I had no idea.”

Her eyes were on his. Nat wanted badly to kiss her, but the last vestiges of professional training held him back.

“I do,” she said, her voice low.

He took her hand and squeezed it, and a smile appeared at the edges of her lips. Her eyes closed briefly.

“Please be careful,” she said, and she was out the door before he could respond.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

C
harlie was in his room, looking at his Captain America book. He’d heard the
Jeopardy!
music from the living room, so he knew Mrs. Finlay was in there watching it. She had trouble with the questions, but she loved Alex Trebek, so she never missed a show.

He turned a page. This was
The Courageous Captain America
, his official favorite book. He turned back to the first page and lingered over the words.
America had always been the land of opportunity. People came from all over—

“Cleopatra,” Mrs. Finlay barked suddenly.

Charlie looked up.

“No, I’m sorry, the answer is,” Alex Trebek said, “ ‘Who was Queen Elizabeth the Second?’ ”

Mrs. Finlay made a disgusted sound.

A train hooted in the distance. Charlie turned to the window. Set low in the wall, it looked out on a big backyard filled with trees, now throwing long shadows in the evening light. Beyond the trees, there were the playing fields of Bishop Carroll. In seven years, he’d be out there in the spring, playing lacrosse. There was no talking in lacrosse, that he’d seen anyway, and it was invented by the Indians, and he liked Indians.

Charlie picked up his Captain America book and walked across the worn carpet, stiff-legged. Waiting for him, propped against an old Nike box, was Buzz Lightyear, the king of Planet Earth of the future.

Charlie.

The voice had come from inside his head, but far away inside it. Charlie looked up, startled. No one had ever talked to him inside his head before. Not even his daddy. Only the Magician, who’d visited twice.

The window shades were pulled all the way up and he could see leaves blowing over the white snow in the backyard. The trees shook their branches in the wind back and forth. Who would be in the backyard? The Kittinger boys next door had stopped sneaking over to throw rocks at his window, ever since his father found out what they were doing and went over to have a talk with Mr. Kittinger. He never even saw the boys in
their
backyard for six months after that.

Charlie?

The voice was closer now. Charlie squinted his eyes, and suddenly his heart skipped a beat. There was something out there, in the back corner of the yard. One of the tree trunks had gotten thicker at the bottom. There was something extra on it. No, standing next to it. Not moving, pretending to be part of the tree trunk.

Charlie scuttled back against the back wall across from the window. The open doorway was three feet away to his left. Should he get Mrs. Finlay to come in here with him? Or should he go out there and sit and watch
Jeopardy!
with her? Charlie turned and through his doorway saw the circle of light from Mrs. Finlay’s reading lamp on the living room carpet. He could be there in three seconds.

Charlie turned back. The dark shape was gone, but now, four trees closer, he could make out someone standing in the snow. It was a girl. She was wearing a hood that made a teepee shape over her head.

His stomach grew cold. He looked again at the glow of light from the living room, but his eyes came back to the girl. What did she want? And how could she talk inside his head?

What do you want?
he said, without moving his lips.

He could hear the girl’s voice. Raggedy, as if there were something wrong with her breathing, as if she had something caught in her throat.

Please help me, Charlie.

The girl stepped behind a tree and disappeared. Charlie searched the window frame frantically.
Maybe she’s hiding
, he thought. He started to crawl toward the windows, his fingers scraping across the nub of the carpet. As he passed a Captain America figure sprawled on the rug, he picked him up in his right hand and carried him along. The room suddenly seemed huge and the window far away. He was small and down low, like an ant crawling on the floor.

He heard breathing in his head. Ragged breathing.

Help you do what?
he thought.

“Rhett Butlah,” he heard Mrs. Finlay say, but she seemed far away now. He couldn’t hear Alex Trebek’s answer. His ears filled with a low staticky sound.

He reached the window and propped Captain America up against the wall beneath it. He put one hand up on the white paint of the little window shelf under the glass pane. Then the other. He lifted his head up and brought his nose up and peeked from just above his hands. Where did she go?

His eyes shifted all the way left, but all he could see were the blue-gray shadows of the trees on the snow and the green shape of the Kittingers’ garage and the front end of Mr. Kittinger’s Mustang through the chain-link fence. His eyes came around slowly to the right, scanning, pausing, and scanning again. There was the bird feeder on the pole that his daddy had put up. The tool shed with its two big Xs on the doors. Hanging on a wire, an old sack full of clothespins that his mommy . . .

Suddenly, he felt her. His eyes froze, then shifted slowly all the way right.

Please, please, don’t let it . . .

The girl was standing right outside the window. Her skin was blue, and her eyes were looking at Charlie with some awful expression, as if there were someone standing right behind him with a . . .

Charlie swept his head around. Nothing but his own room, empty. He was panting now, his heart racing.

He turned back to the girl. Her mouth was open, and she was pressing her fingers against the glass, as if she wanted to come in. The fingers were pale as French fries when they go in the oven. Charlie’s heart leapt and froze at the same moment. His eyes were riveted on her pale neck.

The throat. There was something wrong with it. It was ragged and black with dried blood.

That’s why you can’t breathe good
, he thought.

Yes.

Somebody hurt you?

Her breathing.

Come with me.

Charlie stared at her. The glass seemed to disappear, and it was as if he were out there in the cold, standing next to her, the freezing wind blowing right through his jammies and goose-bumping his skin.

The
Jeopardy!
music rang in his ears, just the faintest trace. Mrs. Finlay’s voice came to him from far away, but he couldn’t tell what she was saying through the wall of static.

The girl stared at him, the eyes round and horrible, glistening. Why could he feel her terrible breath on his face?

Watch, Charlie.

She closed her eyes. Her head sank down, the greasy hair hanging at both sides. Charlie’s eyes were bugging out, but he knew she wanted to show him something. He tried to turn toward the door, but his head wouldn’t move now. The muscles were frozen like when he fell asleep in his daddy’s chair.

Are you . . . watching?

Charlie let out a whimper and shut his eyes slowly, the light flooding out until there was nothing left.

He was in a basement, lit by a naked bulb. Clanging behind him. Like something walking. The basement was filled with old broken furniture and a box that said
Morgan’s Apples
and an old-fashioned thing that heated up water and it was dark and cold.

I don’t like it here
, he said to himself.

A fat teenager walked straight past him, carrying a wooden box. He blotted out the light from the bulb, and then he was past it, a few feet in front of Charlie. He set the box on the ground, then stepped up on it. Charlie saw something dangling above the boy’s head that brushed gently against his hair. Was it a vine, one that was growing on the inside of a house, and how could that be? Charlie couldn’t see the boy’s face, but he felt that he knew him. The boy moved and the thing above him . . . It was a rope, tied to one of the beams above, a rope with a little circle at the bottom of it.

Too sccaaaaarrrry.

The boy began to chant something. Charlie listened, but the words were strange and not even English. The boy took the rope and looped it slowly over his head. It fell onto his back with a little thump, and the coil was thick as a snake. The boy began to pull the rope from the other side, like Charlie’s daddy putting on a necktie and pulling it tighter and tighter around his neck. He was chanting those strange words. When the rope was as tight as it would go, puckering the skin on the back of his neck, the boy leaned forward.