CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX #2
The thoughts are so devastatingly painful. The grief is so indescribable. I feel pain and only pain and nothing but sorrow and guilt. So much guilt and I know I should remember why, and the answer is there, but I can’t place it.
All I know is my boy is made up of butterflies and his eyes aren’t full of life like they used to be.
I reach out to him with trembling fingers.
I’m so close to touching him, and it’s suddenly all I want to do.
All I have to do. I just want to touch my boy, to hold him again because I think I haven’t done it in so long.
I just want him in my arms. I want to watch him grow.
I think I can do this. I think if I touch him, I can find a way to keep him forever—
But the second my fingers begin to touch him, his body scatters before me.
He breaks apart before my eyes, and my grief is silent but ear-shattering in my soul.
The butterflies that made his form flutter around me, wings beating furiously in all directions.
I scream into the void, trying to snatch them, trying to grab a hold of a butterfly because it’s a butterfly made of him.
It’s my Rowe.
He disappears before my eyes, the butterflies rushing together now, moving fluidly as one whole. I twist around as the other forms break apart in thousands of butterflies. Together, they become whole and stream away from me, moving fast in one direction.
There is such a flurry of them, I close in on myself. I drop my head to the ground and wrap my arms around myself. I squeeze my eyes shut, feeling the rapid sweep of the air as it rushes around me for seconds that feel like a silent eternity.
Then there is stillness.
I look up, cautiously. My damp eyes blink around me, at the nothingness. The forms are gone. I’m alone again, and there’s so much pain in that.
I untangle my limbs and stand.
When I turn to look back at the wall with the shadows, the force is gone. I take a step to that wall, and it’s easy. It comes like second nature.
But when I stop and look back at where the forms were, the direction where the butterflies rushed together as one, the force is back, warning me not to venture down the dark corridor they fled out of.
But what’s back there?
Now that I know they left through there, I wonder what’s there.
Rowe is there.
The man with the blue eyes is there, and my heart aches. I feel…I feel like he is important like Rowe is. I feel…like I love him passionately. I know I do. I know him and I lost him, and he held me once and told me I was his world.
And the crying girl?
I’m not sure about her, but I want to know more. I need to. Because I think…I think there’s someone else I might see if I follow their trail.
I fight against the force as I take one step at a time in the direction of the butterflies. It takes forever. I think I’ve been in this cavernous room so long that I’ll never get out, but I don’t stop myself from moving, nor do I forget the way Rowe broke apart before me. I shudder at the memory.
I reach the corridor pitched in darkness and halt as I peer into it.
Instead of only blackness greeting me, I see something in the distance. I see…something twinkling. Flashes of light that beckon to me.
Now I try to move faster, uncaring of the force that grips me by the shoulders like sharp claws, trying to pull me back into the dark mouth of that room with the shadows. I scream soundlessly against it. I move, and move, and I don’t stop moving.
Every step I take, I’m getting closer and closer and—
Light hits me suddenly. It’s so blinding, my eyes hurt as I throw a hand over my face and stop, expecting to be burned. I tense, waiting for something bad to happen. I’ve ventured too far from the shadows. I should turn back because the light—
It doesn’t hurt like I thought it might.
It…feels warm, actually.
I blink rapidly, adjusting to the light. It comes all around me, in beautiful colors. I feel like I’m inside a rainbow. I’m momentarily awed as I look around me, hardly able to believe this place existed so close from where I was.
The force that pulled at me inside the shadow den is gone. The whispers of disobedience are muted here, in the light. I look up, eyes glistening at the sun in the brilliant, clear sky. I turn slowly, eyeing my landscape. The lush green grass between my bare toes. Fields of white flowers, swaying—
I freeze when I see a figure standing in the field, their back turned to me.
They’re not made of butterflies.
They’re…
I instantly know who it is. The weight that grips me isn’t the same as the one in the shadowy cave.
This weight is grief.
I move slowly, cautiously, terrified the figure will burst into butterflies.
But this isn’t a form made of butterflies. This figure is solid. Whole. This figure has the same hair I do. The same height. But that is where the similarities end. Because this figure has wider hips and longer hair. Dressed in the same loose clothes to hide a beautiful figure I always envied.
Tears fall down my face as I approach my sister.
“June.” I’m startled at the sound that escapes my mouth. I have a voice in this place, and she can hear me.
She can hear me because she turns around, her brilliant brown eyes torn away from the sky to look upon me, the sister that wasn’t there for her at the end.
I expect pain, but she’s smiling. Her eyes are bright and her cheeks are rosy.
She’s the same sister I watched get lowered into the ground, but the difference is she’s happy.
The sort of happiness I haven’t seen in so long.
My chest constricts at the sight of her.
Tears continue to fall as I gape at her, taking every inch of her in.
I’m scared to move closer because she might disappear.
“June.” I say it again because I need her to respond. To tell me she’s real.
She nods once. “Daisy.”
At once, I want to fall at her feet and weep. I have wanted to hear her voice for so long. Instead, I choke out, “June, I miss you. Please, please, come back.”
I don’t know why it makes sense to me at that moment that she can come back with me. Come back with me where? She’s dead. She’s gone. But right now, standing before her, I feel like we can make this happen. It’s possible.
She seems to know what I’m thinking because she shakes her head. “I had to go, Daisy. I had to give you a chance to get out.”
My face twists with confusion. “I don’t understand.”
She watches me, allowing me a moment to reflect, but all I can remember are her final words to me.
I had a dream. I can make this right.
My heart beats harder as I whisper, “Is this like your dream?”
“My dream was different.” She pauses, thinking. “It showed me a path. One where you had a chance.”
“Chance at what?”
“At stopping him.”
Her eyes remain hard on mine as she delivers the truth I already knew.
“It could have been you.”
The second she says it, I understand. I could have been the one in the ground. It hurts to breathe as I whisper, “Isn’t there a way we can exist together?”
Her smile fades. Her voice carries the same pain as mine. “Not in any path I was shown. If I stayed, I lost you. If you lived, you lost me.” Her eyes soften. “But we had our time together, didn’t we?”
I shake my head, refusing to accept that. “He took you from me.”
“He could have taken you from me too.”
“It was for nothing,” I retort, furious now. “You left, and I’ve lost even more—”
“You’ve changed things,” she cuts in gently. “Each time, you move something. You save something. But not enough to change where it ends.”
“What do I do?”
She steps closer until we’re hardly a foot apart.
“You stop going back to the shadows.”
I don’t understand.
“You trust what you know,” she continues. “You stop running from it. You fight back before he can take the rest of them.”
I think of Rowe and the beautiful man. I think of the weeping girl and the countless faceless figures.
“What about the others?”
“Some are already gone,” June says. “But some are still within reach.”
“June,” I breathe, understanding what she is telling me. “If I don’t do this…”
“Then you lose them all over again.”
“I have to save them.”
“You have to fight for them,” she confirms, and then she wraps her arms around me. I feel her warmth, her embrace tight and full of love. I shut my eyes and hug her back. It feels like home. It feels like peace. It feels like happiness and all the beauty I’ve missed about existing.
“Stay in the light,” she whispers, and I know she’s going to leave me. I hold her tighter, begging her with my touch to stay with me. “Stay in the light, Daisy, and save them.”