Chapter Thirty-Four
Thirty-Four
THE SIGHT OF IMANI RACING away on her snowboard was both irreparable and inevitable.
He could not fix it. He never could have fixed it. He had not been able to fix any aspect of this day from the moment he first opened the front door. This day had been cursed since Uncle Ricky first drove him to the doorstep of his grandmother’s lodge.
Sharise glanced up at him, desperate: Now what? Her lips opened, gathering breath—
Urgently, Johnny pressed his hand to Sharise’s shoulder to warn her not to yell out for Imani. He hadn’t been able to restrain his own reflex, but he didn’t want Sharise to repeat his mistake. They might draw the Creature toward Imani, or them.
And calling to Imani was pointless. Stupid.
He should have known that she wouldn’t give up.
She wasn’t the one who’d promised to ignore every instinct burning in his bones and leave Tasha behind.
If he had been alone, he would have risked everything to find Tasha—but should he have taken the girls with him to find her?
Left them in the tree to fend for themselves?
Johnny was swinging by a thread from the top of the world, dizzied by this maw of helplessness. Every choice was damnation.
Tasha’s screams had ripped away the remnants of his confused veil, and reality was jagged and sharp.
And unforgiving. The pain in Johnny’s head fought past the slim barrier of aspirin he’d swallowed, which still felt like chalk in his throat.
But the squeezing sensation in his chest was barely perceptible.
Instead, his body felt energized. On alert.
“Go,” he whispered to Sharise. “Get your snowboard on. Stay with her. Be careful.”
Sharise dropped her snowboard to mount it. “What about you?”
“Tell her to wait,” he said. “Right behind you.”
The landscape before them forked, with the descent toward the escarpment veering right of the wider uphill climb toward the mountain’s peak, a visual contradiction.
Imani’s speed grew as she got closer to the cliff a football field away from him.
Johnny looked warily at the shadowed, craggy surface she was racing toward.
How long would it take him to catch up? Too long, he decided.
If they were getting close to its nest, the Creature might strike right away.
“Here,” Johnny said, taking off the rifle strap. He held the rifle out to Sharise. “Take it.”
Sharise gazed up at him with startled eyes, wondering if he was clearheaded. Apparently deciding he was, Sharise strapped the rifle across her shoulder and found her grip. “Imani’s better with it,” she said.
“Then give it to her,” Johnny said. “Go on. Stay together. Hurry.”
Neither of them remembered to say I love you. Decisiveness was the only love now.
Johnny hated the sight of Sharise leaving with the rifle she barely knew how to use, trying to protect her sister when he could not. She struggled to gain speed on her snowboard, not as fleet as Imani across more level ground, but she was moving faster than he could on foot.
And both of his daughters were still in sight, unhurt.
Despite Johnny’s growing dread with each step toward the mysteries in the caverns, his sense of resolve soared like the white peak breaking through the clouds with a halo of morning light.
This was the only right thing to do, as hard as it sat with his spirit.
No one left behind to fend for themselves.
He either had to accept it or be clouded with fear.
Whether he liked it or not, he and his daughters were in a real war together today.
These thoughts marshaled Johnny’s conviction as he followed his daughters’ tracks toward the gray-faced cliffs, which were wreathed in a light fog, as surreal as the hollow tree.
He hoped to see the Creature’s tracks to give him a clue where to search for its entrance to the caverns, but they must have been buried in the earlier snowfall, or else they were not close enough to its route.
Sharise gained speed, closing the gap between her and Imani, keeping her balance with the rifle secure in both hands.
The snow had stopped its insidious erasure, so he would not lose his daughters.
With each new thought, Johnny found more stamina to carry his feet across the snow, widening his stance for better balance without his ski pole.
Far ahead, a figure on top of the cliff made Johnny skip a step while he stared. A man was standing at the edge of the cliff directly in their path, stark against the snowless sky. Johnny frantically waved his arms, nearly calling out to him.
Then he noticed the man’s dark cowboy hat. The man gestured impatiently instead of returning his wave: Come on, boy. Was this Uncle Ricky’s visage again?
“No…” Johnny whispered. “No.”
So much for his clear head. So much for trusting his judgment.
Without the confusion of dizziness and fledgling hypothermia, Johnny wrestled with the existence of this stubborn hallucination.
He tripped on his feet, forced to catch himself with his splayed hands plunging into snow, his wrists twinging when they hit a crustier level underneath.
He had controlled his panic, but the man waving on the clifftop unspooled him.
Imani and Sharise had glanced at each other like he was crazy when he told them he had found the tree with help from Uncle Ricky, and how could he blame them? Yet, every encounter with Uncle Ricky had steered him clear of danger. Or led him where he needed to go.
“I am not crazy,” Johnny whispered, to hear the words’ assurance. To try to believe.
He stood up and covered his left eye. Blurriness swallowed everything, including the cliff.
But when he covered his right eye, his left contact lens sharpened the black cowboy hat and green army jacket Johnny unintentionally must have modeled when he first saw his own puffer jacket on the L.L.Bean website.
Uncle Ricky was there. But no one was there. Sharise and Imani would be yelling with excitement if they saw a man standing high above them. They would be waving back.
“It’s a ghost,” Johnny said aloud again, because this time he needed to fuse that fact into his brain, no longer dismissing it the way he had dismissed the Creature for so long.
Why was his mind so reluctant to embrace what he couldn’t explain?
Why had it taken encounter after encounter for him to speak those words and truly believe them?
His mother had called his dorm at six in the morning Iowa time when a sheriff’s deputy confirmed that Uncle Ricky was missing after a hunting trip.
He had left stew heating in a Crock-Pot, expecting to return in a few hours.
Mom hadn’t called to comfort him, but because she needed comfort.
At only nineteen, Johnny had been horrified to hear the parenthood stripped so thoroughly from her, to feel the weight of her expectations while he insisted, I’m sure he’ll show up. You know how he is.
The truth was, Johnny had cried on his dorm room floor that night his mother called about Uncle Ricky. He had loved him more than any other man in the world. That had made Uncle Ricky’s betrayal sting as much as his grandmother’s hot comb.
Instead of honoring his promise to keep Johnny in his cabin with him, Uncle Ricky had folded to his mother’s demands.
After the hot comb, Mom had explained to Johnny that Uncle Ricky had been like a guardian angel to her, protecting her from their mother’s temper, and she had believed he would protect Johnny too.
He never could pull away from her, but he didn’t let her turn him into what she was, Mom said. Forgive him, Johnny.
A sob tugged at Johnny’s throat. He waved again to Uncle Ricky’s visage, the closest he could come to forgiveness today, no matter how far Uncle Ricky’s spirit had traveled to aid him.
Too fucking little, too fucking late. If Uncle Ricky had told him Mazelle’s secret, Johnny would not be here with his family—and if Johnny couldn’t save his children, he would curse his uncle until his dying breath.
Johnny was afraid that Tasha’s visage would appear beside Uncle Ricky on the cliff top, freshly mauled from the Creature’s killing floor.
Who knew what had happened to Tasha by now, and what sight was awaiting them if they found her?
Was his dread of finding precious Tasha in pieces why he’d been so eager to keep his promise to her and get the girls as far away as he could?
If Tasha was truly gone (and your baby—don’t you dare forget your baby), Johnny would never forgive Uncle Ricky.
His secret had razed Johnny’s present and future to dust.
Tasha’s with me in the bone room, Johnny, Uncle Ricky had told him under the trees.
With Tasha, at least he and the girls would have the closure his mother never had with her brother. Johnny could have guessed that Uncle Ricky’s hint was leading him to the caverns, but Uncle Ricky should have given him longitude and latitude and drawn him a fucking map.
Now, finally, Johnny knew what his mother had died without ever learning.
He had found Uncle Ricky’s resting place.
Imani’s panting body was tired, but she would have pushed on if she hadn’t seen Sharise racing behind her with the rifle, lagging by thirty yards. Dad, farther back and more indistinct, was plodding in his snowshoes. If she didn’t die today, she thought, Dad would want to kill her.
But he had given Sharise the rifle, so he understood that the plan had changed—not that she had given him a choice. He wasn’t going to treat them like helpless little kids. They were doing the right thing now. Or the wrong thing. Anything but leaving Mom behind, all alone.