He entered, laughing and lightly touching the shoulder of Widow Brewer, the beatific old lady who had fed them slices of pie, cookies and great icy glasses of lemonade from her back porch on hot Saturday afternoons after they’d worked up a dirty sweat running through the fields, climbing trees, or playing in the creek.
Carrie watched as he helped the old woman sit down near the front on the bride’s side. She studied his face, looked for signs of pain, of discomfort, of something dark hidden behind that cordial smile. In the end, it was the eyes that gave him away. They were constant whether he was laughing or studying the pews for an appropriate seat. She saw the sadness there, saw the void in those eyes she knew better than her own. My blue eyes.
Beth chirped from behind with increased urgency. “Carrie, we’re running out of time.”
Carrie dropped her eyes, let out a breath. She closed the door and turned, her smile strained. “Yes, of course. Here…”
She reached out as Trish handed her one of the small plastic bottles.
“To Carrie,” Trish said grandly, “may she be happy forever.” The three girls tapped the plastic necks together, and drank.
Carrie downed the liquor in three swallows and gasped happily, staring at the empty bottle as if it held magic. “Whoo-boy,” she said, and they all laughed.
The alcohol burned her stomach pleasantly, lightened her head. A warm calm spread through her as she looked past her two friends and out the window that faced the fields. The September sky had turned a deep-sea-green and clouds were building like ink-stained cotton above the acres of stalks. The jostling crowd of plants waved gently, as if saying hello, or demanding her attention.
“Looks like rain,” she said quietly, and the gentle push of alcohol released the tether tying her memories to the old wooden dock of her past. And, so released, the memories drifted through the seaway of time, into her present.
“LOOKS LIKE RAIN,” she said.
He laughed. “You think?”
The rain fell in a deafening torrent all around them. A billion vertical broken lines of liquid Morse code repeating the same word into the earth: LIFE… LIFE… LIFE…
The repeated message was indefinable joy to their ears, the mad applause of every earthbound child. The riotous rushing sound of rainfall was disrupted only by the distant rumblings of an angry beast with a belly of white forked swords; a god who filled the sky, whose footprints were continents.
The gapped planks of the shed walls couldn’t hold out the chilled October gusts, but the corrugated tin roof kept the rain off their heads. They’d made a dash for it from Wilson Road, along which they’d been trekking on a return trip from a matinee that she’d loved and he’d squirmed through. An epic love story. When the sky broke they detoured through a patch of ripe pumpkins at a dead run and into the beaten shed, the doors too rotted to hold a lock, the contents too sparse to warrant one.
The minutes stacked as they waited for an abatement in the downpour, but the storm appeared strong and long for this world. Flashbulb lightning split the window-shade of infinite blue-green above the horizon. Carrie rubbed goosebumps off her bare arms while Eli knelt by the shed’s doorless entryway, stared at the growing puddles in the mud just outside their shelter.
“I suppose we should prepare some dinner,” she said, hoping for a smile or another laugh. But Eli seemed to have wandered again, away from her and toward the elements of the earth, his playthings, his special bond. “Perhaps a hot bath? If we had a basin I’m sure you could manage something.”
He stood smoothly, a long shadow tinted by the jade sky.
When did he get so goddam tall? she thought. They had both changed over the years, but even through life’s alterations they stayed close throughout high school (the mid-summer graduation already becoming a distant memory). Best friends forever, she supposed, and fought to define the swell of emotion she felt at the thought.
Despite his size, she still saw him as the little boy whose flannel back she’d followed on a ragged sprint through cornstalk fields; the pale, skinny brother-she-never-had who always let her climb one branch higher simply for the enjoyment of hearing her gloat, who lay at her side beneath a midnight sky shattered by stars, clumsily holding her hand before she’d finally pull it away, turning his tension to gloom.
Now this boy, this man, stared toward the heavens.
Studying the clouds, she guessed. Looking for his head, most likely.
“Hey! Eli!” she snapped playfully, tapping his broad back. “These jokes don’t write themselves, you know.”
He spun with a jerk and stared down at her, as if surprised at her presence.
She gave him a sardonic here I am look, turned her palms up. She never once thought of her sleeveless cotton dress – daffodils on sky blue – and the way it clung to her wet skin, how it might have been giving him x-ray vision. This was Eli, after all, and she just couldn’t relate to his perception of “them”, despite her best estimations of his feelings. Carrie refused to apologize or acknowledge something so shallow, especially when they were part of something so much deeper. And why doesn’t he see that?
“Funny as always,” he said, but his eyes slid off her, focused on a dark corner of the shed. He scratched his scruff of blond hair. “Getting cold.”
“Yeah, and I gotta get home. Promised Mom I’d help her decorate the house,” she said, using her hands to express her Halloween vision. “I’m thinking paper skeletons, a laughing jack-o-lantern, some serious cobwebs. The kids will eat it up, don’t you think?”
He nodded, his face a coal-black smudge against the backdrop of midday rain. “You figure it’s what… half a mile to your place?”
“I guess.” She shrugged. “I’m half frozen-to-death already, a little rain ain’t gonna kill me. Seems we got no choice, unless you wanna sleep here.”
He nodded again and turned toward the shed’s wide opening. His arms hung at his sides, thumb-pads resting against the hips of his overalls, fingers splayed. After a moment of thought, perhaps the making of a decision, or the solving of a particularly hard math problem, he raised his hands to chest-height and began to rub them together, as if rolling a ball of dough. Carrie felt the air stiffen, heard the sound of rain grow muffled. She flexed open her jaw at the sudden pressure on her eardrums.
Eli turned his palms upward, as if carrying two trays made from air, and stepped to the mouth of the shed. “Stay close, Carrie,” he said, and it sounded as if the words were spoken in a phone booth. Clear and intimate.
She pressed herself against him, pinched the back of his shirt. She clung to him lightly as they stepped onto the wet earth, and despite what she knew of his powers, she braced herself for the assault of ice-cold rain on her head and shoulders.
It never came.
He continued to walk, and after a few moments increased his pace. She clenched his shirt more tightly and stayed close as she could without tripping on his heels, as if he were holding an umbrella for them both.
After she fell into a rhythm with his steps, she let go of his shirt, slipped a hand onto his bare elbow to steady herself, then stared around her with amazement. She watched the spill of rain run off the surface of what she could only think of as a bubble; a protective shimmer of air he’d formed around them. Slowly she reached out, pushed her hand through the invisible liquid sheet of wind and rainwater. Rain splattered against her palm and she laughed with wonder. After a moment, she retracted her arm to the safety of the shelter, skipping to keep pace with his long strides over the soggy terrain.
They walked the half-mile wordlessly. She knew how much he needed to concentrate, having been privy to a thousand of his extraordinary enchantments over the years. When they finally reached her house, she stepped past him and onto the front step of the awning-covered porch. She danced up two more wooden steps and spun, wanting to embrace him and laugh at his miracle.
Her smile froze.
He was bent over at the bottom step, just under the lip of the porch roof. His breathing was hoarse and ragged, his face ghastly pale. He was shaking, as if burning with fever.
“Eli?”
