Headlights(121)

Egyptian plover. Little bird in crocodile teeth.

Time I stop fighting who and what I am.

No, I say. Wait. Are you—

Images flash to me.

Us in the Stanley Hotel. In bed. In the bathroom. Her hand in mine in the car. At the jail. At Woody Creek, in the three-sided shelter in Aspen, the first moment she turned and locked eyes on me out the car window at the FBI office, us in Whileago Manor when neither of us trusted each other. Us running together on the trail.

Hannah and me together.

I love you too, she says.

As the dark pulls me, even as I start to understand, start to make sense of what she’s doing, saying …

No! I call out. Try to—Hannah, stop!

But I can’t see. I can’t see because her light is blinding. Because there is nothing now but Hannah’s light, Hannah’s pain.

Hannah’s pain because she’s luring the Witchwalker somewhere else. Because she’s hurting enough for it to follow her, protect her. That’s her plan.

Symbiotic relationship. Light so bright, so full of pain.

Hannah’s pain because she’s leaving me.

HANNAH, NO!

The light shines and sears and fills every atom of the universe, and I open my mouth and scream.

HANNAH, PLEASE!

I can feel something new ripping open, a way out, a way somewhere else.

You can’t go!

The connection between us, growing tighter, growing dim.

There’s another way, there has to be—

Then …

Please!

Blinding light, and then suddenly,

I’m alone.

No Witchwalker. No Hannah.

They’re gone.

It’s dark.

Quiet.

Snow.

A motel, and me. In the endless night.

Hannah—I call out again. But the dark is pulling at me, and …

Nat Tillman’s voice sounds in my head as the world tilts. As I fall all the way to the ground, lie down in the dizziness, the world spinning. Tillman’s voice saying, Eyes to the skies.

I look up, delirious, through the swirling snow.

Blink. And I realize.

It’s not snow.

It’s the sky.

Galaxies, stars, universes. All around, above, below, everywhere around. Suspended, falling, no up and no down. Everywhere in the night.

Stars. Light.

And before me, the glowing orange-yellow motel suspended in all of it. The Happy Inn.

The Happy Inn existing between worlds because of the hole I ripped in it.

Whileago Manor. Nat and Josie’s house. Hannah’s cabin.

Sitting on a planet in a galaxy in a universe in a dimension.

Denver. Colorado. Earth.

The darkness comes to claim me. And it’s the last thing I see.

Our own little cubbyhole of light.

And it all shines so bright.





VI

POEMS, PRAYERS, AND PROMISES





1



I open my eyes to pink-orange light shining through the window, spilling over the bed, pulling me from sleep. I’m in my old room at Whileago Manor, the small one. On the bedside table sit the two copies of The Shining. I read half of it last night, my mom’s copy, her notes in the margins about me.

Danny saw my mother today, told me that she said she loved us and missed me and that she’s happy on the other side. That she’ll be looking out for us.

My little boy is astounding.

The memories came again when I woke in the hospital after the motel.

The river, with Rose, at the John Denver Sanctuary in Aspen. Everything Calvin said in the jail. The chemical smell I remembered, the one that kept coming back to me. I blocked it out because that is what a child with trauma will do. The chemical smell of BC Powder, aspirin poisoning.

You know I love you, right?

That night at the Happy Inn, she had written Calvin a suicide note. Explaining why she was doing it. He had hurt us so much, she was taking us somewhere he couldn’t touch us. She thought the note would get to him after she’d done it. I know because she wrote practice notes in the back of the book, over the pages of text.

You can’t take my boy from me. How could you? Calvin had said.

Calvin saved my life. Calvin killed Rose to protect me from her. Rose wanted to kill us both to protect us from him.

And I had the answer here the whole time. To my life, my past. I just didn’t want to look at it. I just couldn’t face myself and the truth. And I don’t know if she was really going to go through with it. I guess I’ll never know.

Halfway through the book is a photograph. Rose, and me, at a western bar. Each wearing matching cowboy boots and hats. She’s laughing, her hands in mine, facing the camera. I’m looking up at her like she is the whole light of the world.

I push back the sheets and wince. Stab wounds, dislocated shoulder. A couple fractured bones. One leg, one arm. The ghosts somehow did it. The same leg, higher up, that stab wound from Father Sky. My tongue is healing, should fully heal, they said, but it will take time.

I’m missing one finger.

I can’t think about that. I can only think about that.

Please, I say, out into the other-space.

Nothing.

I slowly limp out of bed and down to the basement. I’m in this shoulder sling and these casts for a while. I was in the hospital a week. They wanted me to stay longer, said recovery could still be weeks, months. Said I’m lucky to be alive.