CHAPTER 20 UNDER THE FLOORBOARDS #2
I run my hand up Noah’s arm and my fingers brush against the threads holding his right hand to his wrist. The thread is already showing through the mortuary wax.
The skin is stretched apart and the inner pieces of severed muscle are visible.
The fingertips of his hand are slightly lower, like the internal sutures are loosening. A twinge of guilt ripples through me.
“We gotta find a better way to keep this attached,” I say. “It’ll fall off if we don’t fix it.”
Noah looks at his wrist, then quickly readjusts the sleeve of his jacket, hiding the wound. He shakes his head. “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says. There is something in his tone, a profound sadness that echoes through.
I lean in and press my lips to his. His skin is cold to the touch.
He smells like Smithfield’s. I hate that I notice all these little details but I remind myself that I don’t care about any of it.
I kiss him deeply, madly, like I’m gonna lose him if I stop, like I already have.
When he pulls away from me, I’m crying. He wipes my face with his hands and pulls me to him.
“I love you,” I say to him.
I don’t know why I had put off saying it.
I think about all the opportunities I’d had to tell him how much I care about him and didn’t because I just knew we had tomorrow or the day after or the day after that.
It felt like we would always have time but as it turned out, we didn’t have any time at all.
“I love you too,” he says. “I should have said it sooner.”
“Me too,” I say.
Noah sighs and holds me close. “Promise me something.”
“Anything,” I say.
“Promise me that no matter what happens, you’ll keep going.”
I stare into his big brown eyes that suddenly seem sad. “What do you mean?” I ask.
Noah presses his mouth in a hard line. “Just keep going,” he says. “If something happens to me, you have to save yourself, you have to help your dad.”
“Noah, I—”
Noah shakes his head and I quiet myself.
“Just promise me,” he says.
“I promise.”
The sky is still dark as we start the drive south to Roscoe.
The roads that wind out of Ithaca are slick with snow and it slows our pace when my mom steers us up the rolling hills and through the endlessly dark woodland.
People think of New York and they think of the city, the bright lights, the impossible number of people jammed into every available space, but outside the city there are forests as old as the Amazon, thousands of miles of wilderness sheltering ground that existed before dinosaurs walked the earth.
Monsters lurk here and I wonder if, in some strange way, my mom and Noah are now counted among them.
As my mom follows the GPS to Roscoe, the shadowy forms of tree-covered hillsides go by in a blur. The interior of the car is warm and my mom’s got the radio on. Noah is stretched out across the back seat.
“You want me to drive?” I ask.
Mom laughs lightly. “No, baby. I’m trying to get to where we’re going as intact as possible.”
“My driving really that bad?” I know it is. I just don’t like hearing it.
Mom doesn’t say anything. She just keeps her eyes forward and smiles. That’s all the confirmation I need really. I yawn and my eyelids feel like they might close on their own.
She sighs and reaches over to pat my leg. “Try to get some rest. I’ll wake you up when we’re closer.”
I don’t want to go to sleep. The familiar fear of sleeping creeps back in. I’d almost been able to put it completely out of my mind with everything else going on but now, as sleep descends, I almost don’t care if the nightmare memory will replay itself. I’m so tired.
Sleep consumes me and I fall into its gaping maw, my heart racing, my chest tight.
I’m in the car. My mother is looking at me in the rearview mirror.
The music plays on the radio. I see the strange man in front of the car, his face a terrible blur like too many watercolors mixed together.
Suddenly, everything changes. I am in the unfamiliar prep room and my dad is conducting his ritual.
The book in his hands, the same one I’d found in Grandpa Redwood’s coffin, glows green.
My mother’s body lies prone in front of him.
Her eyes are open but she’s not alive. Tears stream down my dad’s face as he dips the tip of some kind of pen or quill into the trail of blood that has dripped out of my mom’s mouth and collected on the table beneath her head.
I stare in abject horror as my dad uses the blood to write something in the book.
Smoke billows all around us as he takes a deep, wavering breath and recites an incantation, reading it directly from the book.
My head pounds as that strange sensation of buzzing rattles my brain.
My hands feel like they are on fire. I cry out as my dad continues to speak.
“Alive. Alive. Alive!” His voice is like a siren, and it splits the air around us.
The muscles in my hands seize involuntarily as I curl my fingers around my mom’s bare ankles.
The electric shocks reverse stream and instead of traveling up my arms, they shoot out of me and into her.
Her body jolts violently—once, twice, three times.
It’s as if she’s being electrocuted. Her hands ball into fists and her mouth opens so wide I think her jaw might come unhinged.
Her body jerks upright and now she’s sitting on the prep table.
She grabs me by the shoulders, digging her bloody fingertips into my skin.
“Let me go,” she says in a voice so mournful, so filled with sorrow and agony that tears well in my eyes and then spill down my cheeks. “Meka,” she gasps. “Let me go.”