In The Falling Light (7 page)

But it wasn’t the wind.

And it wasn’t a chainsaw.

Dell McCall’s arms and back were a rage of
pain from hauling himself underwater along the rope, pulling
himself upwards to break the surface and gasp at wet air, clinging
desperately to the slick aluminum. Lyle Dawson’s orchid truck had
gotten stuck against a line of oaks a mile and a half down from the
ranch, and when the rescue boat slammed into its cab – the driver’s
seat was empty – it nearly flipped over. Half drowned, Dell crawled
onto the cab’s roof and then tore some shoulder muscle flipping the
boat the rest of the way over, fighting against the pull of the
water to hold onto it long enough to climb in. Ray Hammond had been
a man who cared for his equipment, and despite being submerged, the
big Mercury outboard fired on the first pull.

Now, that same Mercury growled against the
shriek of the storm as Dell guided the craft against the current,
one arm locked onto the throttle tiller. He stared with grim
purpose at the line of little shapes still clinging to the roof of
his house, and when Arlene saw him coming for them and raised one
hand, Dell shot his own triumphant fist into the heavens.

The hell with Texas, he thought. We’ll raise
sheep in Montana.

If you looked at me, the first word which
would come to mind is
cancer,
or more specifically
chemo
.
.
I wouldn’t blame you for making the
assumption. With my taut skin, pronounced neck cords and arms like
jointed pool cues, the next word would be
skeleton
. Hard to
believe when this all started I tipped the scales at three-thirty
and smoked like a fiend. Not cancer. Heart disease, the kind which
requires either a new pump, or a pine box.

They found me a new pump.

I didn’t ask where it came from until
later.

I have a dim memory of lying in the recovery
bed and seeing my surgeon in the room, speaking quietly with a man
in an Air Force uniform and lots of chest ribbons. Strange, this
was a civilian hospital and I’d never been in the Air Force. Some
of my family had, but just as many had worked at McDonalds, and
there wasn’t a fry kid talking to the doc. Later they told me it
was a hallucination brought on by the painkillers.

The transplant saved my life, and for a year
I felt great. I ate well, exercised, and got fit. My doc – my
regular physician, not the surgeon – was encouraging and pleased
with my progress. His enthusiasm drained when I started getting
sick again.

Rapid weight loss, nausea, hair falling
out…it had to be the Big ‘C.’ The doc sent me to an oncologist, who
pronounced me cancer-free. Fearing it was the new pump, he next
paired me with a cardiologist, who declared the heart was strong
and healthy. More testing followed; needles and stress tests and
sonograms and physicals. No explanation, but I continued to
deteriorate. Now there was joint and nerve pain, migraines, trouble
with my equilibrium. No, not a tumor either. They checked for
that.

“You’ve stopped your toxic behavior,” my doc
said. “I think it’s the new heart.”

“Is my body rejecting it, trying to kill
it?”

He took a long time to answer. “It’s the
other way around. It looks like the
heart
sees the
body
as the intrusion.”

That took some digesting. He sent me for
more tests, and when I came back three days later he reversed his
diagnosis. “Forget what I said about the heart, there’s nothing
wrong with it. You’re experiencing some kind of cellular problem,
or possibly a virus. We’ll sort it out.”

I didn’t like the way he couldn’t meet my
eyes. I also didn’t like the dark blue sedan with government plates
parked across the street when I left.

My body was becoming weaker, looking like a
stranger in the mirror, nearly hairless now with skin turning a
corpse shade of gray. I went back to the surgeon for answers.

“Where did the heart come from?”

“I’m sorry, but health information
confidentiality…”

“Doctor, please. Where?”

He must have felt my desperation, because he
looked around his office before whispering, “Roswell, New Mexico.”
He wouldn’t say more, and asked me to leave.

That evening, however, he called my house
and apologized, said he wanted to talk, and asked me to come see
him in the morning. When I got to his office there was a new
receptionist, a young man with a military-style haircut who
announced that the doctor had left on an extended vacation, and
didn’t ask if I wanted to see someone else. In the lot, a blue
sedan with two men in it was parked two rows behind my car.

I haven’t left the house in three weeks now.
I weigh eighty-nine pounds, can barely make it to the bathroom
without screaming, and the air feels thick and hard to breathe.
When I dare to look in the mirror I see my head has enlarged, along
with my light-sensitive eyes. I don’t dare look out the window,
because I know they’re watching, waiting to see what happens
next.

So am I.

She comes to me through shaded corridors

long legged and sleek

red satin sliding over her curves

I wait with pen suspended, a single drop of
ink

falling to the page

black in the candlelight

Her fragrance touches the stillness, and I
tremble

longing to feel her press against me

crimson lips at my ear

breathing darkness

My name whispered from the hall

and as the click of her footfalls approach I
wonder

high heels

or hooves

Excited shouts and the laughter of children
bounced off the wall of the elementary school like a ball,
rebounding onto the playground. Fourth and fifth graders staked
their claims to swings and monkey bars and hopscotch grids, stormed
colorful, half-buried concrete pipes and sat in small clusters
playing games. Though they kept to their little groups, they
remained a whole which belonged, and Emily remained on the
outside.

She sat on the edge of a brick planter,
hydrangea at her back, her body tensed as if to run, watching the
children she wanted so badly to join, and searching everywhere else
for the reason she couldn’t. An observer might have said she looked
haunted. Emily would have chosen the word hunted.

Miranda was out there, probably watching her
right now.

Emily chewed at her thumbnail, a habit she’d
picked up recently and one which her mother pronounced “nasty.”
Sometimes she gnawed her nails to the quick, making them bleed. She
didn’t notice anymore. Her eyes settled on three girls sitting in
the shade of a maple, talking and giggling. Brittney, Shay and
Addison – the Power Pack. She was supposed to be one of them, would
have been, but now didn’t even dare approach them for fear of their
taunting, disgust and contempt. And not just from them, from all
her classmates. It would be a while before the word
ostracized
appeared in the vocabulary lessons.

And it was all Miranda’s fault.

The double doors banged open and Emily
jumped, letting out a high squeak and snapping her head right. Miss
Colon, the pretty blonde teacher in charge of the fourth grade,
emerged with a bag of red balls over her shoulder and glanced
briefly at Emily. She didn’t smile, and looked away quickly without
a word, heading onto the playground. Even the teachers didn’t want
to have anything to do with her.

“That’s because I have a parasite,” Emily
said, watching the young woman trot away. Parasite was a word she
knew.

“A pair of what?” said Miranda, sitting down
on the edge of the planter to Emily’s left.

Emily squeaked again, recoiling and sliding
away, making a face.
God
she smelled so
bad!
“Parasite,” she repeated through clenched teeth. “What you are.
Something nasty that latches onto something good and sucks all the
good stuff out of it.”

Miranda’s heavy brow creased as she tried to
process the word, her normally bulging eyes – Emily didn’t know the
word
thyroid
yet – nearly closing with the effort. Then she
opened them. “That’s a bad thing.” She stared hard at Emily for a
moment, and then her face split with a broad, bucktoothed grin.
“Aw, you’re teasing me, Em.” She spit a little when she said
‘teasing.’ “That’s just another word for friend.”

“You’re
not
my friend,” Emily hissed.
“Because of you I don’t
have
any friends. Because you
leeched onto me and you’re a troll and why don’t you just go away
and leave me alone!” She wrinkled her nose at the girl’s limp, oily
hair and Salvation Army clothes and slumped shoulders. “You’re so
ugly!”
Emily said, on her feet now. She brushed at her
sequined Ed Hardy top and Banana Republic jeans as if whatever
horrid something Miranda had might be airborne, and might have
settled on her.

Miranda just looked at her and wiggled a
finger up her nose.

Emily’s face lit with rage. “I hate you!”
she screamed, pointing at this
thing
that insisted on
talking to her and being around her every day, every minute, who
had turned her into a social leper. “I wish you would just
die!”

Some of the kids on the playground stopped
to stare, including the Power Pack, who immediately began
whispering and giggling. Emily flushed and her eyes welled, and she
ran from Miranda, crashing through the school doors to find
someplace to hide.

At 1:15, Miss Crane’s fifth grade class was
half way through their social studies section, a week-long module
on the first fifteen presidents. Emily, seated in the back left
corner, was listening and filling in information on a worksheet as
she followed along in her textbook. She liked social studies.
Sometimes she wished she lived in one of those long-ago times. Any
time other than this one.

“Emily,” Miranda whispered.

She ignored it.

A poke in the shoulder. “Em. Emily.” Poke,
poke. “Em.”

“Stop it.”

Miranda, big for her age and overweight –
the biggest kid at P. Beckham Elementary by far – used an
adult-sized desk. For reasons both unfair and incomprehensible,
Miss Crane had placed the girl at the back, directly behind Emily.
All day Emily had to listen to her stuffy nose and mouth breathing.
When she had asked to be moved and explained why, Miss Crane told
her she “wasn’t going to put up with any nonsense,” and sent her
back to her desk. She hadn’t asked again.

Another poke. “Emily. How many z’s are in
president?”

“Leave…me…alone,” Emily whispered
tightly.

Corbin Harding, a good-looking, dark haired
boy sitting to her right, looked over and made a face. She didn’t
look up, just kept her head down and tried to pay attention to the
lesson. In addition to being fat and ugly and smelly, Miranda was
often disruptive in class, and Emily frequently took the heat for
it, as if she was somehow encouraging the Beast in the Back.
Guilt by Association
was another phrase she hadn’t learned
yet, but she understood the concept well enough. What she didn’t
understand was why Miranda hadn’t been put in one of the special
classes. They had their own little trailers out on the edge of the
parking lot. That’s where she belonged, not here, hanging over
Emily’s shoulder and stinking up the air.

It just wasn’t fair. Emily was pretty, she
knew it, and popular with the other kids. The Power Pack had been
sizing her up, checking to see if her clothes were cool enough,
testing to be certain she listened to the right music – Bieber, of
course – and knew all his lyrics, verifying that she knew the
coolest phrases. Preparing to make her one of them. Emily did well
in class, and even the teachers had all liked her. Then
she
butted in, this half-a-retard who could barely read and dressed
like a hillbilly on a TV show. Miranda had decided they were
friends, and that had been the end of everything. No Power Pack, no
cute boys wanting to talk to her, no more teachers being nice to
her. She was a pariah, a word which wouldn’t appear until high
school English.

And Emily couldn’t get rid of her.

Miranda waited for her on her walk to
school, insisting on following her. She came around at recess, and
wanted to sit with her at lunch time, and even showed up on the
weekends when Emily was playing in the neighborhood. The troll-girl
with her cheap Wal-Mart shoes always found her and wanted to talk
to her.

And that was the biggest problem of all.

Miranda was crazy.

The things she talked about…lighting little
fires and melting doll faces with matches, and killing a cat she
had lured into her back yard with a can of tuna. Emily wasn’t sure
that one was true at first, but the more crazy things Miranda said,
the more she believed. The bigger girl said she heard people
talking to her, people that weren’t there. Lately, Miranda had been
saying worse things, things that scared her and made her sick to
her stomach and feel like she wanted to cry. And Emily had come to
another realization.

Miranda wasn’t just crazy.

Miranda was dangerous.

“Hey,” she whispered, close to Emily’s ear.
“Brittney said if I took a knife and cut myself, peanut butter
would come out. Is that true?”

Emily ignored her.

“I think if I cut Brittney’s throat, Pez
would come out. She eats enough of them. Do you think so?”

Emily struggled not to hear, to listen
instead to Miss Crane.

The girl grunted “Pez,” and chuckled.