Try Not to Breathe (18 page)

She stepped on the gas, swerved back into the road. “Anyway, Paula wasn’t our only shot. We have another appointment at three.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I decided to set up two appointments. I wanted to check one psychic’s reading against the other. So, we don’t have anything from Paula—oh, well. We’ll see how the second one does.”

From the way she set her lips, I wondered if we’d visit every psychic in the state. If she didn’t get what she wanted from this next one, where would it end? How many would she have to see before she gave up? I’d thought that after one or two, she would see how useless this was. I had stuck by her so she wouldn’t be alone when she hit that particular brick wall of reality. But now I was starting to think she might still be paying out money to psychics when she was fifty, traveling the world to find “the one” who could tell her everything.

“Nicki,” I said.

“Look, Ryan, if you don’t want to tell me what happened with you, I totally respect that. But then you can’t complain about me going to these psychics. If you won’t help me, I have to find someone who will.”

What if nobody can help you?
I wanted to ask, but didn’t.

SEVENTEEN

Nicki whipped out
another page of directions, and we followed them to a twisting, rutted dirt lane outside Kirkville. Some of the yards we passed had goats or horses in them. Most had dogs. The air smelled of clover, manure, mud, and grass—scents thick enough to taste.

I wouldn’t have expected a psychic to live out here. Psychics and farms weren’t connected in my mind. But then, none of the psychics had been what I’d expected.

Nicki took off her suit jacket, panting. Her shirt clung to her, and I tried not to look. For most of the day, I’d been able to forget what had happened on the picnic table at the rest stop. But at some moments, I would remember, and the air almost seemed to hum between us. I had no idea if she felt it, too, or if it was all me.

I didn’t plan to ask her, either. Especially while leftover feelings for Val were mucking up my brain.

Nicki pulled the truck into a muddy driveway full of holes. I braced my hands against the roof to keep from smacking my head. “Shit,” she said, “I hope I don’t get stuck.”

The driveway squeezed through a narrow slot between trees. We stopped to roll up the windows, and branches whacked the glass as we drove by. Finally we pulled up in front of a small brown house. Its porch sagged over broken lattices. A cat with clumpy fur, dotted with bald patches, blinked at us from the bottom step.

“Well,” Nicki said. “I guess we’re here.”

I waited for her to open her door. I always wanted her to know we didn’t have to go in these places, that she could back out if she wanted. I probably shouldn’t have bothered. Knowing Nicki, she was going in these houses no matter what.

She gripped my hand, wrapped her slippery fingers around mine. “It’s going to be okay, right?” she said, her eyes bright. Not happy-bright; more fever-bright.

“I don’t know,” I said, because I found it hard to lie to her. In the next instant I wished I’d said yes, because she so obviously needed a yes, but she laughed. The fever snapped; her eyes lost that hard glaze and came to life again. She slapped my shoulder, laughing.

“I can always depend on you,” she said.

I got out and went around the front of the truck, waiting, while she climbed down (not so easy with a skirt on, I noticed, catching a flash of vanilla-colored lace). I followed her up the steps, where the cat mewed and slithered around our ankles.

The woman who came to the door looked almost as young as we were. Her long blond curls fell down to her waist, and she blinked at us with big china-doll eyes. “Come in,” she said in an unbelievably high, tiny, little-girl voice, the voice of a mechanical doll. The sound of it sent a chill right up the middle of my back, as if I’d been stabbed with an icicle. If she really was psychic, her powers must be centered in her voice, as Paula’s had been centered in her eyes.

We stepped into a hot, airless room, so dim I had trouble seeing my feet on the floor. Celestia, the psychic, led us through the darkness to a small box of a room lit only by candles. At first I thought the room had no windows, but when my eyes adjusted I could tell that the windows had been blocked with dark towels or blankets. So far, this house came the closest to what I’d expected for communing with the dead, although I didn’t see any crystal balls.

At Celestia’s gesture, we sat in low chairs, across a table from her.

Nicki pulled at her sweaty shirt. I wanted to press my lips to her neck and tell her to forget all this craziness. I looked away from her neck, away from her altogether.

Celestia bent toward us. In her place, I would’ve been afraid to get singed by the candles, especially if I had as much hair as she did. But she thrust her head fearlessly between the flames and rested her arms on the table. “I understand you’re here to contact someone specific.”

“Yes,” Nicki answered, while I thought about what Celestia had said. Didn’t everyone come to talk to someone specific? Did anyone drive all the way out here to talk to random dead people, just any old spirit who happened to be hanging around between worlds?

I forced myself to concentrate on what was happening in front of me.

Celestia shut her eyes and began to drone, if anyone with her shrill voice could be said to drone: “O spirits, we call upon you especially the one spirit our dear friend Nicki most greatly desires to speak with. O spirits, please hear her call and direct to us in this room at this very moment that very spirit. O spirits, please clear the way and let that one come forth, O spirits—”

Nicki’s eyes darted around the room, as if the spirits might materialize and answer Celestia at any moment. I struggled to breathe in the dense, humid air. Sweat wormed its way down my back. The candles seemed to make the room hotter, small as the flames were.

Celestia’s head dropped. Nicki and I glanced at each other. I got ready to jump forward and smother Celestia’s head if her hair caught fire.

Silence. Just the buzz of cicadas outside, a droning that made me sleepy. The blood seemed to thicken in my veins.

“I hear them,” Celestia murmured.

“What?” Nicki said.

Celestia’s chin came up, and she opened her eyes. “We have made contact.”

“With my dad?”

“With those spirits who are willing to appear. Do you wish to hear their message?”

Nicki nodded.

Celestia glanced at me; I didn’t move. She closed her eyes again and said, “All right. We will hear the messages.”

She took a breath and began that weird drone again. “Speaking on behalf of the spirits you have summoned, the invisible ones the ones who have answered your call, we give you some of the wisdom we possess and share with you what we see that pertains to you and to your life and to your future happiness. There is a bond between the two of you here before us, a bond that must not be ignored because it is not merely an earthly bond but a spirit bond as well, a bond forged for your true spiritual purposes, and you must each learn and teach and exchange the gifts of your spirit and act as spirit messengers toward each other.”

“Wait,” Nicki said. “Are you talking about me and Ryan? Because I didn’t come here for relationship advice. I want to talk to my father.”

“The answers you have been seeking are not where you think they are and do not look the way you think they should look. In fact you may have seen them and overlooked them already. Pay attention to your spirit messenger and the message he carries and do not despair if the answer is not what you thought it would be. It is time for you to know the truth.”

Celestia rambled on that way for a while, but didn’t say much of anything new. The gist of it seemed to be that Nicki and I had some sort of destiny together. I guessed that was why most people came to Celestia: they wanted to hear that love was right around the corner, and she told them what they wanted to hear. But I didn’t know why she hadn’t listened to Nicki about what Nicki wanted, which was to know something about her father. Couldn’t Celestia make up something that sounded like a father message?

Finally, she opened her eyes and sighed. “It’s exhausting,” she said, “to act as a vehicle that way, to use my living energy to support their message, but I do it because I believe it’s important work.”

Nicki just gaped at her.

“Was Nicki’s father in there anywhere?” I asked.

Celestia smiled. “When people pass on, they are no longer in their fully human, fully separate form. They merge to some extent with the psychic energy of others. And I can’t always distinguish exactly who is there—but I believe he may have been. I felt a very urgent energy wishing to communicate with the two of you.”

Nicki’s lips puckered.

“I can see that you’re upset,” Celestia said, “but listen, truly listen, to the words I’ve said. The answers are all there for you. You’ve been fooled over and over—you’ve been walking right past the answers, because they don’t look the way you expect them to look.”

Nicki paid. Whatever else Celestia had or hadn’t done, she had given a hell of a long reading. We came out into the glare of the afternoon sun, blinking, and paused on the porch while the scrawny cat inspected our feet.

Nicki opened her mouth, but shut it again. She pulled out her car keys and stepped down to the truck.

“So what do you think?” I asked as she cranked the engine. I was curious whether she would find some meaning in that stream of words, or if she would invent meaning, build something for herself from it. Which was probably the way Celestia operated to begin with.

“Shut up,” Nicki said. The truck bucked as she turned us around. “If you say ‘I told you so—’”

“I wasn’t going to.” I braced my hands against the ceiling as we jounced back down the driveway. “I really want to know what you thought all that stuff meant.”

She sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. “What did
you
think it meant?”

“I don’t know. It’s your father, not mine.”

She pressed on the gas, and the bouncing got so violent I thought my head would pop off the end of my neck. We wallowed a minute in the mud near the entrance, then shot up onto the more level surface of the dirt road. Nicki sped down the street, the tires spitting gravel.

We hadn’t gone far before she pulled into the lot of a little gas station–deli place. “I need ice cream,” she said. “I must’ve melted off two pounds in that house, and I’m roasting.”

We got big ice-cream sandwiches filled with chocolate ice cream and ate them in the parking lot. They began to drip the second we unwrapped them. I was glad we couldn’t talk, that we needed all our concentration to lick the fast-melting sandwiches. When we were done, I went back into the store and bought a big bottle of water. I poured some over our sticky hands, let Nicki drink from it, and drank some myself.

“I feel almost human again,” Nicki said. She took another swallow of water and burst into tears.

I didn’t know what to do. I’d thought she was calm now, that the crisis had passed. I stood there stupidly while she clutched the bottle and sobbed and swiped at her cheeks.

“Nicki—” I took the bottle and tried to pat her back. I was terrible at touching people, afraid to do it too softly or too harshly, afraid she would shake off my hand. My hand hovered an inch above the damp cloth of her shirt.

She snuffled, choked down her tears. “I’m all right,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“You okay to drive?”

She nodded, and we got back in the truck. But we only went a couple of miles before she pulled off the road again, this time into the parking lot of a local cemetery. The lot consisted of just a few spaces, dirt and pebbles surrounded by blond weeds, and ours was the only vehicle there. Nicki walked straight into the graveyard and lay on her back in the shade of an enormous maple. I sat next to her.

“My dad isn’t buried,” she said.

“Oh,” I said, for lack of a better answer.

“He was cremated. We threw his ashes off the top of Mount Pembroke.”

At Patterson I’d met kids who had thought a lot about what they wanted done with their bodies after they died. I hadn’t cared much about what happened to mine—I only wanted to rush to the ending, where I wouldn’t have to make any more decisions. Burn me or bury me; what did I care?

“If we’d buried him instead, and I could visit his grave, do you think I’d feel closer to him? I don’t feel anything at Mount Pembroke.”

“I don’t know. Two of my grandparents are buried, but we don’t go to their graves. They’re kind of far away.”

Nicki turned her head toward me. “Celestia said the same things about you that I said.”

“What?”

“It didn’t occur to me at first—but she said practically the same thing I told you when we left Paula’s. That you’re the connection to my father.”

Sweat collected on my forehead and inside my collar. “She didn’t say that.”

“She said you were a spiritual messenger. Same thing, right?”

“I don’t think I have any spiritual messages.” I wanted to smooth her hair where stray curls stuck up above her forehead, but I was scared to touch her. I was very aware of her breasts against the white fabric of her shirt, the curve of her hips, and the way her skirt had ridden up her thighs. I tried to forget the glimpse of her underwear I’d gotten earlier. And I hated myself for noticing any of this when we were, for God’s sake, in a cemetery talking about her dead father.

“You do. You just won’t tell me!”

“Nicki, what do you think I can say? I already told you what happened in the garage.”

“You told me
what
you did, but you didn’t say
why
. I want to know why.” Her eyes fixed on mine, the pupils small black holes trying to draw me in.

What could I tell her? That some of the things she was asking for, I hadn’t told Dr. Briggs, or even admitted to myself yet? That sometimes I didn’t understand what the hell had driven me, and other times I thought it was way too obvious?

“What do you want to know?”