The Danger of Being Me (40 page)

And I knew what my first editorial action would be.  Later today, I would calculate how much space remained in Ethan's layout after Ben's
Avalon Rising
review was excised.  I would spend the evening editing my own article to fill the spot.  I wouldn't leave the school tonight until it fit.  I would do exactly what Ethan had asked me to do.

Ben wasn't going to like that.  Not even a little.

I laughed, crossed the room to the back wall.  I opened my locker and heaved my bag inside.  It tumbled over and thumped to the floor of the narrow compartment.  The side pocket that had once held a five-shot Smith & Wesson now contained the wad of bills that I had reclaimed from the scruffy man with Steven Arendell's deep-set eyes.  He had looked away from the small television on the counter when I had walked into the office of the Gateway, staring at me like he didn't believe that I was entirely human.

I had told him that I had passed Go, and had come to collect my two hundred dollars.  He had laughed at that as if it had been the funniest thing he'd heard in a long time.  Maybe it had been.  He had pulled the binder out from under the counter, and pulled the bills out of the front pocket, and handed back the cash with a regretful little grin.  I had tucked the money into the empty side pocket of my bookbag, and had told him that he should probably have that painting removed from Room 16.

"What painting?" he had asked.  I still didn't know if he was serious.  But I had known that it was time to go.

I closed my locker and left the newsroom.  I headed back toward the main lobby, angled short of the entrance doors, and entered the main stairwell instead.  I climbed the steps and crossed the landings and I did not hurry.

I pushed through the third-floor doorway, and turned down the corridor behind the balconies that overlooked the auditorium.  For the last thirty hours, I had looked into an abyss that had looked unflinchingly back into me, and when looking had no longer been enough, I had crawled down into its oily entrails and smeared myself with its greasy blood.  I had gone all the way to the bottom of my own fractured psyche, and I had gone all the way back to the beginning of my own story.  I had gone all the way to the parking garage of the Carter Medical Center.

And after all the miles, I had come home again.

In the serenity of this hour, before the machinery of the world started itself up again, I wanted to savor the solace of the empty places one more time.  Because that was the one place I knew I could always find myself.  And I had a feeling that nothing else was going to be the same.

So I climbed the four metal stairs to the far door, hit the bar at the center, and spilled out into the morning.

I crossed the roof toward the rampart above the courtyard.

And then I paused.  The girl stood with her back to the door, looking out over the industrial landscape.  Waiting.  I shook my head.  I couldn't expect anyone to wait for me.  Not this morning.  I should have been surprised to find her here, but I wasn't.  Not really.  Not after everything that had happened.  After everything that had changed.

My footsteps crunched through the gravel rooftop.  Amber didn't react.  She made no move as I approached, and I made no attempt to catch her attention.  I didn't need to.  She knew I was here.  She had always known.

The door clicked shut behind me.  I reached the wall to her right, and leaned against the parapet, and looked out over the parking lot as it slowly filled with cars.  I saw a Nissan Sentra, and a lowered Dodge Neon, and a dark BMW with a vanity plate reading DUKE419.  I saw Mrs. Chandler's Mazda MX-5 parked near the gym.

I saw the twelve-foot-tall Scots Pine standing in the brick island between the courtyard's two stone staircases.  Where nothing but weeds should ever have grown.

I wanted to see Amber, but I didn't dare to look.  I didn't know what I could possibly say to her, so I said nothing, and waited for her to speak.  We stood there for minutes that stretched like eternity, and I had almost worked up the courage to break the silence when Amber said, "Ethan told me that whenever he had a problem he couldn't solve, he would come up here to think."

I smiled.  He had told me the same thing once.  Long and long ago.  But I didn't say so, because Amber wasn't done.  "He said the answer would usually come to him."

Now she looked at me.  And though it terrified me to do it, I turned toward her, because I wanted to see her face, to look into her eyes.  I wanted to give her that much.  She deserved it.  She watched me for a moment with caramel eyes that were as frostbitten as a January moon.

"You left," she told me.  The uninflected observation felt like an accusation.  Because that's what it really was, and both of us knew it.  She stared at my brushed-chrome eyes for several seconds, waiting for an answer I wasn't ready to give.  Then she turned away, looked out over the wall.  She shook her head, and said, "You just left."

I didn't look away from her.  There was no reason.  There was nothing else worth looking at.  A bitter breeze threw her dark hair across her forehead as she squinted against the dazzling light beyond the borders of the world.  I had no answer, so I told her, "I came back."

She didn't react.  A meaningless note from a car horn pierced the sky from below us.  Somewhere in another life.  I ignored it.  Amber said, "I don't know if that's enough."

That was fair.  I couldn't expect anyone to wait for me.  Better she learn this ugly truth now than have to pretend that it's not true later.  "It's the best I can give you."

She shook her head again, and glanced down toward the courtyard tables.  "After what happened to Ethan…" she said, and sighed.  She didn't need to finish.

I nodded.  "I know," I whispered, because I did.

She might not have heard me over the bitter breeze.  She turned her face back up to let the fierce sunlight splash across her skin.  Her eyes glittered like splintered glass thrown across a snowbank.  She stood poised at a point where two roads diverged into a yellow wood, looking down each as far as she could, to where they bent into the undergrowth.  I waited on one of those roads.  I didn't know which.  Her choice made all the difference.

Then I felt cool jasper lying against my breastbone, and my heartbeat slowed inside my throat.  I drew in a long breath, and let it out.  I stood away from the parapet, took two steps across the gravel to close the distance between us.  I told her, "There was something I had to do."

I reached to my collar and lifted the thin steel chain that hung around my neck.  The cool blue stone carved into the Italian horn slid out of my shirt as I pulled the chain over my head.  Amber turned to me.  She started to speak, perhaps meaning to ask what had been so important that I had disappeared in the middle of the night to do it.

But then her eyes found the
cornicello
dangling from its thin steel chain.  And whatever she had meant to say came rushing out in a long, sighing breath.  That bitter breeze carried all of her unsaid words off into the troposphere, where they became one with all things and lost forever.

Amber's eyes softened.  That unforgiving frostbite thawed, and she looked up at me.  I took one last step to her, moving in so close that our foreheads almost touched, and unhooked the clasp on the chain.  She said nothing as I reached around the side of her throat and under her hair, fastening the clasp again at the back of her neck.  I glanced down to see the blue stone lying delicately above the cleft of Amber's breasts.  Then I looked back up at her.

And I told her, "I'll always come back."  Because I knew at that moment that it was the truth.  My truth.  The only truth that had ever really mattered at all.

A thunderstruck look bloomed across her face.  Her throat worked and her lips moved.  She tried to speak, but the wind whipped the words out of her mouth again, and all I heard was the name
Ethan
.  It was enough.  She closed her mouth, swallowed, and started again.

"Ethan said you would," she said in a hoarse whisper.  "The night at the Morris.  Just before."  She searched my brushed-chrome eyes, and I could see how important it was to her that she make me understand this.  "He said he needed someone to help him keep an eye on you."

She laughed then, and tears streaked down her cheek.  "He called you a full-time job.  Said you were capricious and maybe a little undependable.  He said it was because you were a Libra, but also because you were still finding your way out of a creeping darkness all your own."

She laughed harder at the absurdity of it all, and so did I.  Icy tears stung my skin, and I left them there.  I could give her that much.  She had waited for me, after all.  Now she turned those caramel eyes on me as she told me, "He said you've got miles to go before you sleep, but no matter how far you wander, you'll always come back."

Tears ran down to her lips.  "That's just what he told me," she said, and her knowing smile looked so much like Ethan's that it broke my heart.  "'
He'll always come back
'."

Ethan had known long before the rest of us.  I smiled.  Then I laughed.  And tears streamed down my face.  Of course Ethan had known.  He had written the story.

I watched Amber laugh with me, and watched her cry.  And that was okay.  She looked down at the blue jasper stone hung over her breastbone, and touched it with her fingertips.  Like she couldn't believe it was real.

Then she looked up at me again, reached for my face, brushed her fingers against my cheek.  She looked at me like she wasn't sure that I was entirely human.  But she smiled, and it was beauteous and it set me to rights.

"Are you a fleeting image in my dream?" she asked me, and I felt her hands on my waist.

My laughter faded, and I considered.  Maybe I was.  Maybe I was nothing more than a phantom that had crawled up out of the flooded subbasement of Amber's fractured psyche.  Maybe I was not at all what I would seem.  Maybe I was just a figment of her imagination.

I smiled at that thought, and saw my own twin reflections in her caramel eyes.

"If I am, I don't know it."  But the truth was that I didn't really care.  Not even a little.  So I laughed again.

Because that was the only truth that mattered.

POSTSCRIPT

If it takes a village to raise a child, then this book is the offspring of a very large community indeed.

If I'm being fair, then I ought to simply thank every person I've ever met during the course of my life.  I have stolen shamelessly from all of you, and my only hope is that I have used the pieces to build something great.

But if you believe that you have recognized yourself within these pages, then I assure you that you're wrong.  That wasn't you.  Because this story may be true, but this book is most certainly a lie of the greatest magnitude.

It is only right that I give credit to my wife for her part in the creation of this narrative.  Without her infinite patience and unflinching support, this book would quite literally not exist.  Her faith in me has never wavered, not even when my faith in myself has dimmed.  She made me a better writer, but more important, she gave me a reason to become a better person than I believed I could be.

If I am the father of this book, she is unquestionably its mother.  And if you know me as the man that I am today, then you owe her a bit of your gratitude as well.

My First Readers Assessment Team, otherwise known as the FRAT, deserves mention.  They include Mac Flythe and Peter Troshak and Ashley Hall, and my fellow author Bernard J. Schaffer, and, of course, the gloriously honest April Fuchs.  Those people tripped over all of my mistakes so that you wouldn't have to, and they all did their level best to keep me from making a public fool of myself.

The errors that remain belong solely to me.

Bernard in particular has earned an additional measure of gratitude.  He's got his own life and work and writing going on at a blistering pace, and yet he responded quickly to every email, answered every question I asked him, gave every opinion, offered every scrap of advice, connected me with the right people. He found me in the dark wilderness, and he handed me a lantern and a compass and a map.

If my wife and I are this book's parents, then Bernard is its uncle and godfather and sunglassed bodyguard.

Further thanks are also owed to Keri Knutson, who is one of those Right People.  She composed the phenomenal cover for this work, rescuing the western wall of my office from an unfortunate encounter with my head.  I'd also be remiss if I didn't extend a degree of appreciation to David Schrader, whose exceptional photography was used.

Eternal thanks, of course, are due to my entire family.  None of you asked to be related to me, but you have all done surprisingly well under the circumstances.  My sister and brother in particular could write books of their own, and I sincerely hope they never do.  I rarely made it easy, and for that you have my abiding apologies as well.

I must also thank my grandfather, because he gave me his light, and my grandmother, because she gave me her home.  My wife may have given me a reason to become a better person, but my grandparents gave me the ability.

And I thank my mother.  Because there was a woman in my life once who was plagued by a creeping darkness, and my mother destroyed her.  We are never defined by who we once were, but only as who we choose to be.

If there is an argument to be made for the Life Work school of thought, then surely this book is it.

The oldest files attached to this novel – a treatment and two character profiles – are dated 22 June 1998.  I originally conceived this story as a screenplay titled
Junk Yard Dogs
, and I wrote it as one over the course of the next three years as I attended Allentown College of St. Francis de Sales as a second-year member of its TV/Film Department.

I eventually failed out of Allentown College at roughly the same time that I abandoned my dream of becoming a Hollywood screenwriter.  Shortly before I left school for the last time, I had a conversation with a fellow TV/Film major.  I admitted that all of my failures were my own; there was no one else to blame.  I admitted that my own Libran laziness had finally gotten the better of me.  And I admitted that that was just "the danger of being me."