After Obsession Part 23

One of his hands leaves his paddle and he leans over to grab the side of my kayak, hanging on to me so that neither of us floats away from the other. "Because?"

"People are dying on the river."

He repeats it. "People are dying on the river."

"It's-" I start to explain.

"I know what you're saying," he interrupts. "But I think you're leaping to conclusions here, Aimee."

"I know you don't want to believe it's true, but Dad, Mrs. Hessler showed me all these newspaper articles, and there've been all these weird deaths on this river over and over again. Maybe this whole place is cursed or something."

He lets go of my kayak and says, "I love you, Aimee. I just want what's best for you, but sometimes, it's so hard."

I nod. The current ripples the water, moving it one direction, then another.

Finally he says, "Do you still have those dreams?"

"Yeah." My voice is super quiet, so quiet he might not even hear it, but he knows what I've said.

"Did you dream this?"

"I don't know. I think so. It's why I don't want to sleep-that, and I can't ... I can't sleep 'cause I'm so nerved up by everything that's happening-the footsteps, Courtney, the ... everything. I just don't want to get as bad as Mom was, you know? I don't want ..." Something inside me breaks again, but not totally. One sob makes its way out, and my dad hurries his kayak toward me, slamming it into the side of mine. He reaches out and grabs me, holding on hard. Tears wash his face.

"I won't lose you, too, Aimee." He squeezes out the words. "I won't let you go."

"You won't," I say, then I repeat it. "You won't."

We cling to each other, aching inside with fear and love and loss for my mom. But we still have each other. We are alive and breathing and we love each other, and that has to be enough.

After a moment, we break apart. I reach out and wipe the tears off his craggy face and we start searching again, and the kayak feels lighter, like I suddenly weigh less, like I can suddenly move through the water.

I think of the river as brown, but that's not totally true. The river changes color. Sometimes it's brown like its muddy bottom, sometimes it's blue like the sky. Sometimes it's both, brown beneath but blue on the surface, and that's the way it is when I start paddling, turning my kayak sideways, trying to keep it in place, a horrible sadness pressing down on my chest as I stare into the water.

"Daddy!" I yell, and he looks at me, stunned, maybe because I have stopped, or maybe because I am suddenly using a name I haven't used since Mom left us and "Daddy" didn't sound right anymore.

"Daddy!" I give a few quick paddles, trying to maintain position on top of the water when the currents try to pull me another way. "Chris-he's here."

He stares. He brings his kayak over to mine and peers into the water. He can't see anything. "How do you know?" The muscles in his shoulders tighten. "Do you see him?"

"No," I say, "but he's here."

He adjusts his hat, squinting his eyes at me. "How do you know, sweetie?"

What do I say? I close my eyes so I don't have to look at my dad's face. "I don't know. I can feel him."

"Feel him?"

"It sounds stupid. I know it sounds stupid, but can you just believe me for a second?"

He nods. He believes. He pulls out his cell phone and calls a number. He uses his hospital CEO voice. Whatever he says works. My dad gets the Coast Guard. I don't know how he makes them listen, but he's good at things like that. He can talk people into things, my dad. That's his gift.

"I love you," my dad says after he hangs up. "You know that, Aimee, right? You know that I love you and your grandfather loves you and Benji loves you."

I dip my paddle into the water. The current ripples around it, separating, then coming back together. I nod.

"We'll get through this, pumpkin," he says.

"That's what Alan said."

"He's right. We will."

I nod. The Coast Guard boat engine sounds closer. "I love you, too."

The Coast Guard pulls the dead boy out of the water. It takes two divers. When they haul the boy up, my father and I watch from our kayaks. My dad holds us together, gripping my kayak's bow with his big hands.

When they bring the boy out, I start to shake. His arm is missing. So is his leg. My dad takes his arm off my kayak and grabs me by the shoulders. He pulls me to him in an awkward kayak hug, and somehow manages to not tip us both over.

Our life jackets b.u.mp together, which prevents good body contact. I can smell him though, an indescribable fatherly scent. For a moment, that's all I smell. I smell him more than the salt of the river, more than the crisp ache of death, more than the ripeness of mussels ready to be plucked from the mud. The eagle flies overhead and cries to us, a loud squawk.

The Coast Guard boat motors over and a guy says, "Young lady? Ms. Avery? Can you identify the body?"

My father keeps his arm around me, but I can feel the tension in his biceps, how they tighten. My father moves his neck and says, "Surely someone else can do this."

The Coast Guard man says, "It would make things easier. We don't know what shape the other boy is in. He hasn't even told us who this is. And it looks like there might be some dangerous marine life involved."

"Marine life? How?" my dad's voice powers out.

"There are long slash marks around his wrist," the man says. "Appendages are missing."

"We don't have sharks here," I say.

"Not only sharks can do this," Coast Guard Man agrees. His face shows how upset he is. His muscles are all so tense. The skin below his eye twitches. All his rugged handsomeness has turned into fright.

I pull my head away from my father's T-s.h.i.+rt and open my eyes. I swallow air that tastes like gasoline from the boat, not like my river. Where has my river gone?

The Coast Guard man stares at me. I know him. He's married to the lady at Finn's, the nice waitress, the one everyone calls Cookie, who winks at everyone and gives you chocolate chip cookies when no one in charge is looking.

His mouth moves, but I don't really hear him because everything seems m.u.f.fled somehow, like my ears are full of water. His mouth moves again. I think what he says is, "Aimee ... please?"

His eyes are sad, too-another man with sad seal eyes. Water collects in them, but it hasn't moved past the borders and down the cheeks.

"Okay," I say.

The boy's name was Chris Paquette.

His s.h.i.+rt is gone. Maybe the river ripped it away and took it out to the ocean with the tide. His skin is pale, pale like all Maine boys' skin is until August, when the sun finally gets through to them. His lips are blue. The ends of his left-hand fingers are blue. Tiny hairs spread across the middle of his chest like eel gra.s.s. His blond hair is darkened by the water. A yellow thermal emergency blanket covers his bottom half. But it's the large gashes-five of them around the remaining wrist-that kill me. The gashes are so deep.

I swallow again and try to speak, but I don't have to.

"That's Chris Paquette," says a voice, and I realize it's my dad. "He's a junior at the high school. He lives on Pioneer Farm Way. His mother works for me at the hospital. She's a nurse. This will kill her. That boy was her world."

"It's a hard thing," Coast Guard Man says.

My dad straightens up because he's finished with this. "I'm taking my daughter home now."

Coast Guard Man nods. "The reporters might be calling. The police definitely will. Your daughter's a hero, Mr. Avery. We could've lost two boys today."

My father nods back, and for a second I imagine they are both bobblehead dolls on a car's dashboard, nodding, nodding, nodding away.

"She's a good girl," Dad says.

He does not say I'm a wimp, but it would be truer. A good girl, but a little cowardly, is what he should have said. She has dreams, you know; sometimes they come true. People think she might be crazy like her mother.

My dad and I paddle home together past the sh.o.r.es of the Union River, where there are still more trees than houses.

"Are you mad at Mom?" I ask.

"Sometimes," he says. We move across the water. "Mostly I just miss her."

"Me, too." I stop paddling for a second to get some hair out of my face. "Do you think you could hang out at home a little more? We kind of need you."

"I promise I will, Aimee, and I am sorry that work keeps me so busy ... I ... I love you all so much, and this ... this craziness that's going on ... it reminds me of what happened just before your mother left us, and it scares me. I hate to say it, but it scares me, and denial and false blame isn't going to make it go away. I am sorry I did that to you," he says, his paddle slicing the water. I start to tell him it's okay, but he raises a hand to stop me and instead says, "The boys will be waiting for us."

We paddle some more; we're almost home, but I'm really slowing down. I'm so tired, and my head is so full, and my stomach feels like it's full of river water-murky, salty. Every time I take a breath I think of Chris Paquette's body. Every time I stop listening to my heartbeat, I hear Noah Chandler shouting, "My buddy! My buddy!"

"Do you think they were drunk?" I ask my dad.

"Maybe. Maybe drugs." He turns his kayak into a current that carries him faster than me. I follow. "It's such a calm river this afternoon. I don't see why they'd capsize."

We have a floating dock. When you walk on it, it sways with your weight. Sometimes when a big boat powers by, it makes a wake that b.u.mps the dock all around. You have to try hard to stay balanced. It would be easy to wind up in the water; one misstep, that's all it takes. There are a lot of things swimming under the water, but that's not where I look right now. I look up, toward the eagle, toward the sky. I don't know why the eagle reminds me of my mother. Usually it's the seals that make me think of her.

My mother used to write little notes in my lunch box. She'd draw pictures of cats and dogs, cartoon mice and birds on sc.r.a.p pieces of watercolor paper. She'd color them in with watercolor pencils and write things like: Have a happy Tuesday! I can't wait to pick you up from school and give my good girl a great big hug. x.x.xOOO Love, Mommy.

I saved every single one of those notes in the first Harry Potter book. If you open the book, they flutter out of the pages like wishes falling all over the floor.

The first thing I do when we get back is head up to my bedroom. I find that Harry Potter book in my bookcase, tucked between Buried and Looking for Alaska. I open it up. All the lunch box notes are on the same type of paper, a lightweight watercolor paper. But there's one note in there that's on yellow lined paper, like from a legal pad. It's always been in there; I just never got it out before. I always thought it was some of her insane ramblings. I never understood what it meant. Now I think I might.

It flutters out. I unfold it.

Aimee, I am trying to stop him. It might not work. But I have to try, honey. I have to make him stop haunting us all. Your father can barely sleep anymore because of my dreams, and I know ... I know you have them, too. Know I love you, that I'll always love you, no matter what. XOXOX to infinity and forever. Love, Mommy.

My lips fold up and in. I say out loud, like she's here sitting on the braided rug right next to me, "An ax was an incredibly stupid idea. You cannot kill a ghost thing with an ax. And he dismembers people. What were you thinking?"

I can almost hear her soft whispery voice say, "I don't know."

I shake it off, stand up, and look out my window. A Coast Guard cutter is chugging up the river, going slow but leaving a monster wake.

Benji bursts into my room. His eyes are wide. "Aimee, are you okay? I heard you found a dead guy." He throws himself across the room and into my arms, toppling me back into the bookcase. "You better not do anything stupid."

"What are you talking about, Benji?"

He shrugs.

"Don't do anything stupid," I repeat. "Sometimes you sound just like Gramps."

I muck up his hair.

"Gramps is right sometimes," he says.

"True," I admit, tucking the yellow paper into the pocket of my fleece.

He puts his hands on his hips and eyes me like he's some eighty-seven-year-old man. "So, you aren't going to do something stupid, are you?"

"Why do you think that, Benji?"

He squints. "Because I'm brilliant, that's why."

* 20 *

ALAN.

The smell of sage fills my room. It's just the incense. I'm saving the bundles I bought at Craft Barn for the actual ceremony. Now I'm sitting cross-legged on a rug on my floor, a smoking incense burner on either side of me, and my face is painted with black and red Halloween makeup. I'm wearing only a pair of shorts and my medicine bag.

The rug, about four feet square, is an off-white color with a black medicine wheel on it. It is the wheel of life, outlined simply in black-a circle divided into quarters with thick lines indicating the four directions. I sit in the center, facing North. The North quarter of the wheel is white; East is yellow; West is black; South is red. I do not fully understand the wheel, but I know that each direction represents a different phase of life. Since my vision quest, I have begun facing North during meditation. This is the direction of adulthood.

On a shelf above my bed, a small stereo plays a Yeib.i.+.c.hei song. It's on repeat so the song will not stop. The chant, recorded in the 1930s, rises and falls, rises and falls, playing a repet.i.tive, melodic sound.

I've painted my face with an arrow pointing up from my chin, around my nose, and between my eyes, its tip aimed toward the sky. It symbolizes my conscious thought rising up from my body. Small cougar tracks-not drawn very well-mark Onawa's path from my hairline down my left cheek and neck to my chest, ending over my heart.

I hope Onawa will come to me.

Rolled in a sock in the back of a dresser drawer is a plastic bag with a few dried pieces of peyote. I was tempted to use it, just a tiny piece under my tongue, but even a small piece can produce a psychoactive response for several hours. I'm already suspended from school. No way I can let Mom come home and find me "stoned" on my "Indian drugs." The incense, music, and symbols will be enough.

Hands folded in my lap, I close my eyes and try very hard to clear my mind. It isn't an easy thing to do. Aimee keeps creeping in. Her smile, her red hair, her emerald-green eyes. Then I think of the scratches on her perfect skin, the dirt caked under her eyes, and the horror she must have felt as the dust storm chased her.

I focus on my breathing. In ... out ... in ... Thoughts dissolve and crumble away. The sound of the music and the smell of the burning sage become muted and vague. Out ... in ...

"Onawa." I whisper it into the darkness behind my eyelids.

In ... Eyes in the darkness of my mind. Green eyes. Out ... Aimee? No. Feline eyes. Feral, but not malicious.

In ...

"Onawa."

She's there. Her golden face looks back at me, illuminated by the light coming from her green eyes. Around me I feel s.p.a.ce closing in, pressing against me as Onawa looks at me impa.s.sively. There is a message in her eyes, but I can't read it, not with the very air squeezing me.

Then I get it. Danger. There is danger all around me.