chapter twelve #2
hatred, and revulsion that I shiver.
So much for not recognizing me. “I heard you scream . . .” I try to explain.
Reaching her, Claire tugs on her sleeve. “Back up. Please. It could come closer.”
Victoria yanks her sleeve out of Claire’s tiny fingers. She steps backward, and her pointed black high-heeled shoes are only
inches from the void. “Let it come. It took my Sean.”
“Oh!” Claire sounds like a squeezed bird. “No! Not Sean! How?”
I look at the mass of reddish-brown that swallowed every item she lobbed at it and imagine it consuming a person. Sean, the cook from the diner. I don’t know who he is to her. Husband? Brother? Friend?
“We’d been careful. We knew the limits. It shouldn’t have grown so fast!” Victoria gulps in air. She fixes her eyes on me
and begins to stalk toward me. “It should be you in there. Nothing like this ever happened before you came!” Claire jumps
in front of her and puts her hands on Victoria’s stomach. She braces herself as if to hold the woman back, but Victoria pushes
past her.
On my bike, I tense. Everything inside me screams to turn the handlebars and pedal hard and fast in the other direction. But
Claire . . . I can’t leave her. Victoria advances on me as I dither. “The void left us alone. It didn’t move. But then, you
came to town . . .”
“Peter! The Finder . . . he can find him. Sean. He can find Sean!” Straightening the bike, I put my foot on the pedal—
Victoria kneels and then rises, holding a shotgun. She aims it at me. I’ve never had a gun aimed at me before. It’s an odd
sensation. Part of me, the sensible part, is screaming, It’s a gun! A gun! But another part of me sees a hunk of metal, a toy, a water pistol, a thing, and it doesn’t feel real. “Don’t move,” Victoria
says, her voice too calm for a woman with a gun. She should be shrill or hysterical, not alert and cold. “You caused this,
you ran, and now you want to run again. And you won’t. You caused this. Besides, the Finder won’t help us. He hates us.”
Claire slides her knife out.
“Claire. Don’t.” My eyes are glued to the gun.
Again, I feel split: part of me wants to run, doesn’t believe she’ll shoot or thinks that the bullets will fly on either side of me as if I’m the heroine of an action movie.
But the other part of my brain keeps me in place.
I like that part of my brain. I think it’s keeping me alive.
“The Finder doesn’t hate you. He saved you.
He brought you out of the void. He hates that you all blame him for being here when all he did was help.
And he can help again, if you’ll let me get him. ”
Victoria isn’t listening. “You deserve to be in the void. You deserve to dissolve into nothingness. You deserve . . .” She chokes on her words and swallows hard, but the gun doesn’t waver and I think, She’ll shoot.
She’s not calm and cold anymore. She could squeeze the trigger.
She may feel sorry later. She may feel sick. She may feel
guilt, regret, horror, but that won’t help me.
“I’ll go in,” I hear myself say.
I don’t know what part of my brain said that.
Go in?
Claire echoes me. “Go in?”
Victoria lowers the gun by an inch. “Sorry?”
Slowly, I step off the bike. I spread my hands in front of me. “I trust Peter to find me. And once he does, I’ll make sure
he finds Sean. Claire, please get Peter.”
“You cannot be serious,” Victoria says. “That’s insane. You can’t voluntarily—”
“She can!” Claire pipes up. Her eyes are shining. “She’s been in there before and come out! On her own!” She scampers to the
bike and climbs on. Her feet don’t reach the pedals. She frowns at her feet and climbs off. And then she runs. She’s fast,
a swirl of pink tulle.
“No one comes out of the void, not without the Finder,” Victoria says.
I look at the void and remember how I drove in and out of it again and again. A fluke? Or was Victoria wrong? “I want a guarantee
of safety.”
“The void will destroy you. I can’t guarantee—”
“After,” I clarify. “After Peter finds me. You can’t shoot me. You can’t knife me. You can’t sic a mob on me. You can’t tell anyone
you saw me.”
Victoria’s eyes widen and then narrow, as if she’s calculating. At last, she shrugs. “Fine. Bring me back Sean, and I’m not your enemy.”
“It’s not my fault the Missing Man left. I did nothing wrong. I don’t know why he left. And I hate living in fear because
of something I had no control over.”
“That’s nice.” She waves the gun at the brown-red dust. “If you intend to go in, then go in.” She doesn’t believe I’ll do
it. I can see it in her eyes. She thinks it’s a trick or a bluff or . . . But she doesn’t have other options.
It’s no big deal, I tell myself. After all, I drove into the nothingness over and over when I first tried to leave Lost. It didn’t hurt me.
The car didn’t disintegrate. It’s only dust. But it isn’t, and I know it isn’t. I’ve been deliberately avoiding it as I scavenge through the items it disgorges. I can’t
delude myself into thinking it’s a patch of bad weather.
It’s a servant of despair, Peter said once. It will destroy you if it can.
God help me, but I believe him.
If I delay long enough, Claire will return with Peter and then I won’t have to enter the soul-destroying nothingness. On the
other hand, if I delay long enough, Victoria could lose her sense of rationality and squeeze the trigger. She’s fidgeting,
and she’s pointing the gun at me again.
The gun promises instant death. The void . . . I know from driving through it that its death won’t be instant. I’ll have a
little time. And in that time, Peter will find me. It’s what he does. He’ll find her lost friend, and I’ll buy myself some
safety, at least from one unhinged gun-toting waitress, which is a start.
I walk into the dust.
It melts around me. I expect grit in my eyes, but I don’t feel any.
The air feels soft on my skin. It’s like diving into water, except it’s neither hot nor cold.
I don’t remember it feeling like this when I drove into it.
It had felt like dust then, hadn’t it? I look behind me, but the dust has closed around me.
It looks the same in every direction. Everything has blurred into reddish-beige.
“Sean? Sean, can you hear me?” My words don’t echo.
They’re absorbed by the void as if it’s a sponge. It deadens sound.
I continue to walk, though I have no sense of direction in this soup. Even up and down feel arbitrary. It’s more opaque than
night because even though it isn’t black, there’s no light to cast any shadows or create any depth. It’s like soaking underwater
with my eyes closed. It reminds me of how I used to spend hours every summer immersed in the ocean. I’d swim out beyond the
white-crested breakers, I’d float on my back, my ears underwater, and I’d look up at the crystal-blue sky until I fuzzily
heard my mom calling me from shore. She’d slather me with sunscreen every time I returned, and then I’d wriggle away and run
laughing toward the water again.
In those moments, I felt like I had all the family I needed. It didn’t matter that I’d never known my father or that I had
no brothers or sisters like other families on the beach. With my mom, on the beach and in the water, I was complete.
But here in the void I am very incomplete. By now, I’ve probably been fired.
Or pronounced dead.
Or at least missing.
Maybe I am missing. Maybe this won’t end. I won’t escape. I won’t find Sean. I won’t find a way home. The Missing Man is still
gone, and there’s no sign that he’ll ever return.
Stop it, I tell myself. I have to think positively. To do otherwise . . . I can’t do otherwise. I have to believe that I’ll escape someday. But maybe there is no hope.
Maybe it’s over.
Maybe I’m in hell.
Or purgatory.
Maybe I’m dead.
Maybe I can never return.
Maybe this is it.
Slowly, I stop walking.
I don’t see the point in continuing to walk. I’m not walking toward anything. I haven’t seen anyone or anything. The odds of my finding Sean are . . . Well, I can’t. I’m not a Finder. I can’t find anything. Not Sean. Not Mom. Not myself.
Mom will die without me. Maybe she already has. The test results had to be bad. They asked her to come in; they wouldn’t tell
her over the phone. The cancer was back, and worse. I knew it, even if I didn’t let myself think it. Sure, I told myself over
and over: think positive. But thinking positive can’t change facts.
Mom is sick.
I am lost.
But I couldn’t face the truth. That’s why I left, why I drove straight, why I left Mom alone to face the news by herself,
why I let myself play house with Claire and Peter. What kind of person does that? A person who deserves this. A person who
deserves to lose what she treasures. I deserve to be lost, to never see home again, to never swim in the ocean again.
I feel as if the ground is dissolving under me. I look down, and my legs look oddly transparent. At first, I think the dust
is merely enveloping me, but then I spread my hands in front of my face. I can see through them.
Oh, God, what’s happening to me now?
This isn’t what’s supposed to happen! I’m supposed to find Sean, wait for Peter, and prove to Victoria that I can be trusted,
maybe earn a little good will to help me survive longer until the Missing Man returns so I can return to Mom and tell her
that I’m sorry that I left her when she needed me most and I won’t ever leave again. I picture Claire waiting for me in the
desert, and Victoria beside her, waiting for her Sean . . .
My hands waver, and then suddenly they’re solid again. I look down, examining my legs . . . and I see a glint of silver from
near my feet. I bend down and pick it up. It’s a ring. I examine it. A dark blue opaque stone mounted on a silver band.
As I stick it in my pocket, I hear a loud noise.
It sounds, oddly, like a train. It chugs louder and louder, and I hear a whistle.
I can’t tell what direction it’s coming from—it seems to be from everywhere at once.
The dust whips around me, and sand flies in my eyes.
Squinting, I block my eyes with my arms. Around me, the dust grows brighter.
I peek through and see a light heading straight toward me.
Is that . . .
Holy shit, it is a train.
I don’t see tracks. I don’t know which way to move. If I move left, will I be hit? If I don’t, will I be hit? I freeze. And
the train barrels out of the dust toward me.
I have to move. I can’t not move. Suddenly unfreezing, I lunge to the left. And I feel myself yanked off my feet. Strong hands hold my arms. I’m pulled
onto the train. Wind whips past me. The train is screaming, crying, howling, as it thunders through the void. The whistle
blares, obliterating the silence.
“Hold on!” Peter shouts in my ear.
He releases me, and I cling to a metal bar. The train is a black steam engine, the kind from an old movie. I see bits and
pieces of black iron through the dust. I’m holding on to the side of it, near where the engineer should be but isn’t.
Peter climbs onto the top. He holds his hand out.
He wants me to climb?
No. No, no, no. That’s insane.
He crouches and holds his hand lower. He’s grinning wildly, and I feel my face curl into a smile. I can’t resist the look
in his eyes. It’s full of joy, infectious, wild joy. It reminds me of waves crashing onto the beach.
I take his hand, and he pulls me up. I crouch on the top of the engine. He whoops at the top of his lungs, and the whistle
blares as if answering him. He’s standing. His feet are firmly planted on the top of the train. Slowly, I stand beside him.
And we ride the train out of the void.