The Donzerly Light (30 page)

Mama Bear

It was the sound that dragged Jay up from sleep at just past three in the morning, taking him that first tentative bit toward the waking world. Glass breaking, his floating mind thought. Yes, glass breaking. It was a realization that might have pulled him all the way from the fog, but another thing altogether interceded.

Something pounced upon him.

“BASTARD!”

His eyes snapped open in that way that only fear can make one wake, the tornado siren screaming or the earth beginning to shake in the dead of night. But this was not that. This was not that at all, he knew, when he saw Mari atop him, straddling his chest, her legs pinning his arms and a look of perfect hate in her raging blue eyes. To his throat she held the business end of a broken bottle, stale beer dripping to his neck, the liquidy ticks making him think of the blood pulsing just scant millimeters from the jagged points. His blood. In her other hand she held a piece of paper, and even in the light cast upward from the lamp on the floor he could see it was one of his letters. It was crushed in her fist, and she was thrusting it at his face like a declaration of guilt.

“YOU GOD DAMN BASTARD!”

He couldn’t read what was on the letter through the maddened creases her deathgrip had pressed into it, but then he did not need to see the words to suspect what they were. What they were to her.

And in a sad and crazy way, he thought, it all still made sense, and seemed even more apropos this way.

Her blue, blue glare seethed at him, and she seemed the sum of a world’s loathing right then. She pressed the points of the bottle roughly against his throat and said, “December Thirteenth, last year—sound familiar? Huh, Jay Marcus Grady? Ring a bell?”

It did. Dates always did. But he did not respond. Despite her asking, he knew no answer was required. Or wanted.

“I remember it,” Mari said, her voice not so loud now. Above normal, but in that way an animal growls to warn just before a strike. The only difference was that animals did not hate, could not hate, and at that moment as she sat pinning this man to his bed, she hated. Yes, she hated. With all the fury of the cheated she hated. “I remember it exactly. Would you like me to tell you about that day? Hmm? Would you?”

Again, he made no reply, as none was needed.

“I was on a plane that day,” Mari began, her face lowering toward his so he would know the depth of her enmity for him. “I was on a plane with my husband, and with my little boy. My four year old son.” Her blue hate glistened right then. “My family. We were coming back from a trip to Minnesota, to the Mall of America, a really silly kind of vacation, you probably think.”

He didn’t, but made no effort at sharing that.

“Just my small family and our stupid little vacation. We had fun there, you know? The rides, the sights. But it was over, and we were coming home, and we were landing, only...”

Burning, and the roar of metal ripping, and the screams, God, the screams, and his arm afire, and the smoke, and then the nothingness, Jay remembered. Yes, he remembered. Flight 1601, left wing hit the runway, the 757 cartwheeling. A hundred and ten people had died. Except...

...except how could she have been on that plane? She was
alive
.

“We crashed, and everybody was dead,” Mari told him, accused him, tears welling now and dropping one by one from her blue eyes to his face, bathing him in her anguish. “My husband, my son. My little boy. Dead.”

Jay swallowed, the bottle’s edge pricking him as the bitter ball rolled down his throat.

“Dead,” she repeated, as if imploring him to understand what that meant to her. How much of a hole it had opened in her soul. “All dead. All dead but
me
.”

The last statement sounded almost a question, the way she spoke it, as if she wanted to know why that was. Why had she lived? Why was she not with them?

“I lived,” she said outright, perplexed by the fact. She pressed the bottle harder against the tender, vulnerable flesh of his neck. “I’m
alive
. Why?”

“To do this,” Jay said, finally speaking, and a bit more the shattered bottle pressed just below his Adam’s apple.

She glared at him through her agony, her loss, her hate, and she knew what he meant. The car had not done him in, so now it was time to finish the job. To fulfill some prophecy he had deduced from her age and the mileage on her Honda.

“Go ahead,” he told her, with all the sincerity he could ever have known. He wanted it to be over. He deserved this. Deserved to be thrust into his own personal nothingness. The coins had decreed it, so it must be done. He closed his eyes and said, “I’m sorry. I never wanted it to happen.”

Mari sniffled, her chest heaving beneath the sweatshirt, an adrenalin rush of hate and vengeful urges driving her, pushing her, telling her that he deserved it. That he had
killed
her family. That he was the
one
. That he was the
reason
she was here. All very proper things to feel, to think, except for one thing. Something he had just said.

She kept the bottle to his neck and asked, “What do you mean you never wanted it to happen?”

He opened his eyes. “I didn’t.”

She straightened a bit, easing back from him. All but the bottle. “You didn’t want any of it to happen?”

“No,” Jay said. “How could I?”

Now the bottle did move, a hair, away from his neck. “If you didn’t want to kill any one, then...then why would you?”

It wasn’t a question of ‘would’, or ‘should’, he thought. It was a question of ‘could’. Wasn’t it?

“How...how can you kill people if you don’t even...” She stared at him, perplexed, the anger in flux for that instant, rallying back and forth between belief and doubt.
He did it—he couldn’t have—he did it—he couldn’t have.
The bottle pulled back some more, doubt gaining. Wonder gaining. “I can’t understand how that could be.”

He watched her body tip back further, until she was upright astride his chest, the bottle still at his throat, but its threat now was tentative at best.

“No,” Mari said, looking at him, at the letter in hand, at the bottle, and then off toward the dark corner of the room near the door. She shook her head. “No, this can’t be it.”

“Just do it, Mari,” Jay quietly urged her.

She shook her head and pulled back completely, getting off of him, standing now half hunched at the side of the bed, the bottle in hand and held out his way but not at his throat anymore. Not ready to hurt anymore. “No, this can’t be the reason. Not to kill you. I haven’t driven all over half the country to come here and
kill
you. No. That just
can’t
be it.”

Jay hardly moved at all, just his eyes following her as she backed toward the chair and settled into it, the bottle in hand, still, but now clutched to her chest like some implement of defense. He touched his throat and felt the dampness of old beer, and the slick warmth of his own blood.

“No,” she said again, to herself mostly. She looked at the letter in her hand and let it fall to the floor. Then the bottle she put on the window sill. “I’m supposed to be here, but not to kill you. I don’t care what you believe. I know I’m not supposed to do that.”

Jay’s head raised a little right then. “Then why did you find me? Why did we find each other?”

Mari pulled her legs up into the old wingback and wrapped her arms around her knees. She looked at him, the skim of spent tears gleaming in her eyes. “Not for this. Whatever it is, not for this.”

He rubbed his throat, the thin film of the blood she’d hardly drawn greasing his fingertips. She was alive, and he was alive. His death had not come as he’d expected, as the heads had foretold. Only...

...maybe they hadn’t foretold that at all.

“Go back to sleep,” Mari told him, seeing his eyelids flutter as he stared off at something, in thought maybe. In regret. Or relief. “It was all a dream. Just a dream.”

A dream, Jay thought as his head sank back into the pillow. All a dream. Her lie was wishful, yes, but what a perfect lie. If only it all, all of the past eight years, could be just a dream. A dream, and not the waking nightmare that it was.

His eyes closed, and his breathing deepened, and Mari could tell the medication was still working on him. She had yanked him from its hold, but now it had him back, and that was good. Let him sleep. Let him forget. It should not have happened in the first place. He had not killed her family, in spite of what he thought. He could not have. Even if he
did
have the power he feared, she could not see it in him, the want of setting death upon others. He was not a killer. And neither was she, she now knew.

But they were something. Together for some reason. Yes, some reason.

She left the light on and hugged her knees tight, thinking ‘some reason’, ‘some reason’, ‘some reason’, until her eyelids grew heavy and she sank into a dream where a little boy laughed and a bigger boy clapped and all the world was right like it was long ago.

Thirty One

First Light

Sound roused Jay again, this time at nine in the morning, but when he opened his eyes this time there was no wild woman atop him, just sun streaming in the window and Mari there by the chair, stuffing the envelopes back into the box. He propped himself up, and realized right then that the painkillers had worn all the way off, gasping loud at the streak of fire that zinged up his shin.

Mari turned when she heard him. She pulled her sleeves down and crossed her arms nervously, wondering how he was going to remember what had happened. How he was going to react.

“Good morning,” she said, and he nodded as he tried to get to a sit. She went to him and put a hand under each arm, helping him so his back rested against the headboard. “There.”

“Thank you.” He noticed as she stepped back, cinching her sleeves down as she seemed obsessively to do, that the front of her sweatshirt was dark with dampness. It was going to be a hot one again, telling by the box of intense yellow light slanting through the window (top and bottom windows, he saw, realizing she had let the shade all the way up), but as yet it was still pleasant. Dawn cool, his mother had always called it, that chill of early morning that faded slow as noon drew closer. The dampness could not be sweat, not yet, and besides she just ‘thought cool’, didn’t she?

Mari noticed him staring and spoke up to explain. “I washed up in the sink. I only saw one towel and I didn’t want to use it when I knew you’d need it.”

“Oh,” Jay said, understanding. Her hair was down now, not in that scrunchy kind of thing that had gathered it like a rubber band. Now that implement circled her left wrist like a bracelet. “Did you sleep?”

“A little. Listen, Jay, I want to do something.”

Her eyes seemed bright this morning. Blue bright with energy, the sadness and rage that had tinged them in the night them a distant, receding storm. “What kind of something?”

She pointed to the box. “I made sure I put all the letters back in the right envelopes, so they matched with the postmarks. That’s important to you, right? Kind of the point of mailing them to yourself?”

“Right,” Jay said. He hadn’t explained it to her in detail—at least he didn’t remember doing so, though he might have considering the way the pills had hit him—but she had put two and two together to figure out that the postmark would affirm the date of the vision inside, and his notation of the exact time on the letter itself would have to stand on its own. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it made him feel that at least he was making the record, so that one day people might know what he had done...
without wanting to do any of it.
Right, he thought. A question of could, not would. Right.
Right?

“Well, I was wondering if it would be okay if I took these with me?”

“You’re leaving?”

“No. No. Just for a while. A few hours. I want to try to...figure something out.”

“What?”

She thought, then shrugged, cinching her sleeves down immediately. “I don’t think I’ll know what I’m looking for until I’m looking.”

“Looking at what?”

“When I was driving into town I saw this building that I thought had a sign on it that said it was a library. But there were no cars in the parking lot, so I thought maybe I was wrong.”

“No,” Jay said. “You weren’t wrong. It is a library.”

She snorted. “Is it nice?”

“I’ve never been inside it,” he answered. Just in the parking lot when the recycling truck came by. And right then he realized that the sack of bottles he’d been carrying when he was hit was probably gone. Picked up, thrown away. Then again, he had wanted to be dead not so many hours ago, so what the hell did some bottles matter now?

“So?”

“Oh.” He looked to the box, then to her. “Does this have something to do with last night?”

Embarrassment flushed her face briefly, and she nodded. “I don’t know how to apologize for doing that. For trying to...”

“So you don’t believe me?” Jay asked.

“No. I don’t believe that you killed anyone. I don’t believe you’re capable of that.”

“Am I just crazy then?”

She smiled. “You and me both, maybe. So, can I take the box?”

“Sure,” Jay told her, wondering what it mattered. Something to her, at least, and he figured that made it worthwhile. “Be my guest.”

Mari lifted the box and hugged it to her hip under one arm. “You’ll be okay here?”

“You mean where I live?”

“I’m sorry, that’s just the mother in...” And she stopped there, the unexpected path she’d taken her thoughts one she was not ready to travel. Not yet. “Listen, why don’t you come with me?”

“Me?” Jay asked, glancing down at his attire as though some strictly enforced dress code might bar his entry into the library.

“Just change your shirt,” Mari said, touching the loose flap of material torn free of the garment’s right shoulder. Her doing, she knew, and apologized with a look as her hand drew back. “Come, please.”

“I don’t know. There’s no reason for me to go, really. I mean, if you have something to do...”