The truck tilts to one side with a sloshing thump.
A long dark pause fogs my thoughts as my head struggles to comprehend what’s happening. Ears ring. Only the dull short huffs of my breath anchor me to the present.
The headlights now shine in the direction we came from. Relentless rain punishes the pavement. A dark object lies in the road just out of the light’s reach.
Not a single dead bird anywhere in sight.
Then I switch the truck beams on high. Rook’s body lies lifeless on the ground.
“Oh, God, no.” I shoulder open my door and out into the pouring rain. It bounces off the inky surface of the road. Scattered taps against the ground as the night sky weeps. Rook’s black jeans are suctioned to his soaked legs. Long black eyelashes thick from the wet. His moonlit skin flawless as always.
“Wake up.” I shake him, but he doesn’t move. “Wake up!” I try again, but he only flops limp.
I lean in closer to him, trying to hear that soft whisper of his soul-song. The song I’ve tasted on my lips, drank into my body, and the life I’ve breathed back into him once before.
Once is all you get.
A little voice inside my head reminds me.
“No! No! No!” I try to make Rook sit up, but his arms are like slippery noodles in my grasp. “Wake up!” I scream. That’s when I notice.
There’s no blood.
No bruising.
There’s not so much as a scratch upon Rook. He’s perfect and beautiful and everything my heart desires.
And he’s not real.
Everything I held to be true floats away. Rain drizzles down my face. I close my eyes, and I’m back in the comfort of Adaire’s room, nose to nose with her. Her ghostly words whisper in my head. You have to let me go.
From my pocket, I pull out a raggedy feather, one I keep for just such occasions. I make a wish to set Rook free.
And I let it go.
“Wake up! Ma’am, wake up!”
My eyes flutter open to find a strange man hovering over me. Confused, how is it I’m lying on the side of the road in the mud? Driver’s-side door wide-open. A single foot still lodged in the doorway.
“Ma’am, are you alright?” the man asks again.
From my right, I hear a murmuring. Or, more precisely, it’s the slow disjointed musical sound of a soul-song, calling to me. Through the truck cab, I see Grandmama slumped against her door. A silty mud from the embankment oozes through the cracks in her window. A trickling of blood dribbles down her face.
A blinding bright light pierces the night from the middle of the road, causing even the man who woke me to turn toward it.
We both watch as the glowing blue light glimmers, remnants of Rook’s soul letting go of this world. Freeing him.
A figure steps through the brightness and calls my name.
Crackling, garbled voices swallow me into the dark.
TWENTY-ONE
Do Right by the Miracle
I can smell the death rolling off Grandmama, even through the hospital’s wired glass. Doctors say if she makes it through the night, she’ll have a good chance of living.
I don’t bother correcting them.
It’s a slow trickling of death that lasts the night and most of the next day. Inch by inch, it claims another piece of her. I can hear her soul-song fading, a feeble, pathetic sound. I’d always imagined it to be a loud pounding of a church piano or a fierce rumbling like thunder. Instead, it’s the wheezy, raspy tune of a struggling accordion.
I could have talked the death out of her pretty easily when we arrived at the hospital.
But I’m waiting.
I’m not sure for what. Maybe I want her to suffer in this state of limbo between living and dying for as long as possible. Or maybe I haven’t decided if I’m going to save her at all.
Down the ICU hallway, Bone Layer snores away in one of the stiff waiting room chairs. I have no idea how he can sleep upright like that. It was a trucker who found our wrecked vehicle wedged between the ditch and the embankment. Not five minutes behind him was Oscar, bringing Bone Layer home.
I knocked my head when we hit the tree; mild concussion, the doctor said. They gave me some pills to nip the headache. If it wasn’t for Grandmama being at the edge like she is, they would have kept me overnight as well.
“How much longer?” Aunt Violet says quietly beside me as we watch the machines monitoring her mother’s fading life.
“It’s probably about that time,” I say.
I make my decision right then and there.
“Don’t do it.” Aunt Violet grabs my elbow as I move to go into the room with Grandmama. “She doesn’t deserve your kindness.”
