Chapter 33
There’s no time, no time at all. I see the black wetness under Ella’s head, and the woman is already grabbing for me.
Joel is behind her, his hand closes on her shoulder, his other hand is on his stomach where the blood has spread, and he seems to be moving in slow motion, struggling through the heavy air, seriously injured.
I can’t even worry about him; I can’t even react.
And then the woman’s whole body jerks, her eyes flung open in shock, whites flashing in the dim.
“Al,” I whisper.
But he is too late. Too late for Ella.
The woman chokes, writhes, fingers raking the air. She folds to her knees.
I turn my head and there he is, materializing out of the night, walking with a casual bounce in his step toward the platform where we have all collected like actors in a devastating play.
“Don’t worry, Tempest Dunlap!” he calls. “But I’m very sorry about that—your phone called and I had to make it stop calling. It was very confusing!”
I left him with my phone, so Mom could reach me in case of emergency.
Al is holding one hand up. Now he’s more visible, and he looks concerned. “Oh dear, oh dear,” he says. He lifts the other hand.
Joel cries out and I gasp as he falls.
“No!” I yell.
“No,” Al disagrees calmly in his rasping, friendly voice.
“I have to protect you. This is the agreement. How did there come to be two of them here?” The woman is trying to crawl toward me, or maybe toward Al.
She moves brokenly, her teeth gnashing, every tendon in her neck strung tight, a thin, keening wail of pain escaping her.
Joel is clutching his stomach, curled on the ground, his breathing harsh and labored; he moans in agony.
“Al, no! Don’t hurt him! Please!” I’m struggling to sit up.
Al reaches the bottom step, gets distracted.
“Ella the child! They’ve hurt her!” His hands fall momentarily as he stares at her, and the woman staggers to her feet, wobbles, and then flings herself forward.
She’s a streak of rabid desperation; she’s on him, they thrash into the grass of the field.
Now she’s screaming in pain. I am on my feet, stumbling. “Joel— ” I yell.
He has rolled onto his back. He opens his eyes, turns his head toward me. Somehow his glasses are still on, though crooked. “Oh God,” he says, looking past me. “Ella.”
I think I am maybe crying. But it’s hard to tell.
“You’re hurt,” I say.
The woman is still screaming—it’s ragged now, frantic.
Joel shoves himself up, drags himself across the stone.
The effort is visible in his face. I don’t know what to do.
I am standing there, standing over Ella where she lies.
He makes it to us. He is on his knees. He turns her face, which has broken on the corner of the column’s base.
Is she breathing? I ask myself. Can you tell if she is breathing?
I can’t tell.
Someone is roaring. Or screaming, suddenly, near me. The woman—I think—she’s come back up here. But no, it’s Dee. Her coconut-shampoo-with-undertones-of-coffee scent is unmistakable; it smells like home. How did she get here? My brain can’t make sense of things. There are too many jagged pieces.
Dee is panting, heaving, falling down beside Ella.
Here’s Mom rushing up the steps after her, yelling, “Chickadee!”
“Baby.” Dee is gasping. “Baby!” And then, to Mom, “Call 911.” Her voice is orderly again, somehow, efficient.
“I left it,” says Mom, her voice peaking. “I left my phone in the house! You ran out and I just ran after you!” She covers her mouth with both hands.
“Baby, baby, open your eyes,” Dee is saying, cradling Ella now.
But Ella’s legs are wrong, too, the way her feet hang in their loose-looking rain boots.
Her hand is wrong—I can’t look at it. “She has to be okay,” Dee tells me.
“She has to be okay. She has to be okay.” Her words fly straight into my body, each one puncturing a different organ.
“Let me.” Joel reaches for Ella. “Trust me. You need to trust me.”
“What— ” Dee stares up at him as though noticing him for the first time, even though he is right here, an unsteady block of giant dark. “What are you saying? Why are you here?”
Joel touches Ella’s face gently. He takes her face in his hands.
“He’s a doctor.” It’s the first thing that comes to my mind.
“Yes,” Dee says. “Oh my God, you have to help her!”
My hands twitch against their binding.
Mom is saying to Joel, “Please save my granddaughter. You can kill me if you want!” What a time for her to remember the other part of what I told her in the hotel room.
“What?” cries Dee, but Mom continues: “I’m the reason Tempest is—whatever she is! I brought her into the world! I fell for her asshole father— ”
“Mom!” I snap, and she stops.
There is a vibration in the air, an anticipation.
The field has gone silent and I can’t tell where the woman is, or Al.
Joel doesn’t talk, not like at the hospital, where it was official, where he was giving medical instructions.
Here on the platform in the dark he only closes his eyes.
His hands on either side of Ella’s damaged face begin to glow—phosphorescent, as though the dark air were murky water, rippling.
The light, which is not even exactly light, not a color so much as a visible hum, seeps into Ella’s skin.
For a few moments the terrible injury is brought into vivid relief—the bone of her skull, the torn skin, the severed blood vessels.
The pink coat stained dark, rabbits suspended in shocked flight.
The three of us have fallen completely still. No one can look away.
And then Ella’s skin, all of it, grows iridescent, glinting from inside.
And there is a feeling that emanates from her, that radiates from the place where his hands connect with her.
It’s a feeling of standing on a rock and looking out over the size of the world—the trees are a fuzz like moss and the shape and scale of things emerges, the land weaves its way into the sky.
It’s endless: the ocean, storms that hold the power to wreck cities, the cycles of the moon, the wearing down of stone, the inching up of a mountain levered by centuries upon centuries of incremental adjustment, the drift of winter toward the spring that always lies inside it, the drift of spring toward the summer that always lies inside it, the drift of summer toward an inevitable fall.
It’s strange and unknowable, a sense of relentless infinity that a mind might break on, the whirling magnitude of silent galaxies, the incomprehensible distance between solid bodies.
I’m tipping, trembling.
The ever presence of a billion variations of pain, of cruelty, of sorrow.
The possibility in a newborn—I’ve seen it—the moment when the eyes connect, when the soul flares in them.
The gravitational imperative within the machine of life, pulling toward change. Every leaf, every brain, every cell, poised—a participant in movement that can only be felt generationally, only over the soft, massive swells of time.
It’s a holy feeling.
Sacred.
The feeling of God?
Is God here, now? Maybe God has always been here, the whole time, just quieter, more diffuse.
I manage to look at Dee, and her face is blanked out and wide open with awe. She is someone seeing something impossible, witnessing a miracle. She is someone who will never be able to go back to seeing the world the regular way, the non-miraculous way, again.
And as I watch her, she glances at me, and I know that something has changed between us. That she believes me now. But it doesn’t matter.
Nothing matters except for Ella.
I have the sense that time has paused to pay better attention. The sky has fallen still, the night has drawn a breath that it won’t release until Joel is done.
It wasn’t anything like this in the hospital room.
Is this what he is, underneath, always?
Could be an angel, says Grub in my mind.
I can see him for a second as though we’re in the same place, as though we’re together for the first time, but it’s natural, because we’ve always been together.
His greasy hair straggling from beneath the cap, the wide gap between his eyes that made his face look babyish, permanently sweet, no matter how hard he tried to be surly.
Ella’s cheek has reknit itself beneath the film of blood. A separate filigree of blood is spread over her forehead, across her nose, speckling her teeth, which show through the frightening laxity of her lips.
The glow recedes with tidal slowness, and the dark reestablishes itself hand over hand. The moon, which was meaningfully bright before, seems to have been reduced to the smolder of a dying flashlight.
Joel moves. He lifts Ella in his arms, and it seems for a moment that she has moved, too, curling inward toward him. He’s sitting there, bent over her. Her feet seem different— there is potential in them.
For a moment, the three of us—Mom, Dee, and me—are all standing there, in a ring around Joel and Ella. Then Dee reaches out, says, “Is she—?”
Joel says, his voice fibrous and ragged as though he hasn’t spoken in a long time, “She’ll be all right.”
“Is he bleeding?” Mom asks me.
And at that moment, Joel wavers, starts to fall forward. Dee is right there, grabbing Ella. Joel catches himself with a hand flat on the stone.
“He needs to go to the hospital,” I say.
“I’ll take him,” Mom says.
I remember something Dick Face said. “Why can’t you heal yourself?” I ask him.
“Too tired,” he mumbles.
“We should take Ella to the hospital, too,” I say.
“No.” That’s Dee in her boss voice, being firm. “We’re going home.” Just as Ella says, soft as a leaf settling on the ground, “Mama?” the way she did when she was a toddler.
“Where’s Al?” says Mom abruptly. “And who was that woman?”
I spin around, but I don’t see anyone in the field. “He was right there.”
Joel makes it to his feet, wobbly. He will need to walk all the way to the road. I move reflexively toward him.
“T, your hands!” says Dee, startled. A second later, she’s directing Mom to get the knife from the ground, the one with Joel’s blood on it, and cut me free. Mom does it. I shake my hands out gratefully. I reach toward Joel.
“Tempest,” he says, his voice a gravelly blur, and something inside me flutters at my name in his mouth. Even here, even now. “I don’t think you should.”
“What— ” I start.
“Unless you want it to really work this time.”
I yank my hands back. He’s right. If I touch him now, in his weakened state, I probably will kill him. Mom takes his arm, they go down the steps. Dee carries Ella and they follow, me alongside them. Exeunt. The bloodstained stage will soon be silent.
Dee says to me, “Don’t ever fucking do that to me again. That thing you did, where you controlled me.”
I nod.
She says, “It’s true? About curses? About . . . magic?”
“It’s true,” I say.
And then Mom gasps. And we are down the steps, where I can see them at last: the two of them, spread flat in the grass, their hands locked together as though they have, in death, become friends. The pain demon and the angel. As though they hope never to be parted.