Artie kept his hands on the wheel and his eyes fixed on the road as he drove past the Portland city limits, heading into the deep, dark woods outside. The trees pushed down on us from all sides, swallowing the ambient light, leaving us dependent on the headlights’ glare.
According to my Aunt Rose, a lot of people die on that road. She ought to know. She died on a similar road more than sixty years ago, and when we’re talking about death, we know to treat her as the expert that she is.
“This is going to be a long drive if you don’t talk to me,” I said.
Artie didn’t reply. The shell around his thoughts was like a wall, built solely to keep me out.
Vexed, I shot a quick arrow of thought at his ramparts. You say you missed me, but this doesn’t feel like missing me.
“Oh, come on, Sarah,” he snapped. “You know that’s not fair.”
“So you can hear me.”
“I can’t help hearing you.” He kept his eyes on the road. I guess it seemed easier than looking at me. “I hear you even when you’re not around. I hear you having opinions on things I’m reading, and I hear you complaining when people talk during movies, since it’s not like you can read the actors’ minds and know what they were trying to say, and I hear you making nasty gagging noises every time I choose chocolate over strawberry. I hear you all the time. But you weren’t hearing me, or you would have called.”
“I called as much as I could,” I said in a small voice.
“Then you didn’t hear me, because I needed you to call a lot more than you did.”
I closed my eyes, sagging in the seat. “Phones are hard. I can hear what you’re saying, but I can’t hear what you mean, and it makes my brain itch. I like text more. Text is always flat. It doesn’t have tone or nuance; it just has what the person on the other side of the keyboard said. I texted you all the time.”
“I’m sorry the phone made you so uncomfortable, but I needed to hear your voice a lot more often than I did.” Artie abruptly smacked the steering wheel, the sound echoing through the cab. “I thought you were dead, and then I thought you were gone forever, and then I thought . . . I thought you didn’t care about us anymore, because you were never coming back. I thought a lot of things. And you wouldn’t let me see you, and so the thoughts didn’t go away. They didn’t get any better.”
“Artie.” I opened my eyes and reached for him. If I was touching him, he wouldn’t be able to keep me out. I could finally make him understand why I’d stayed away, and why I’d come back; I could show him, and he’d see, and this would all get better. We’d get better. We’d—
The truck came out of nowhere, roaring down a side road that was barely more than a logging trail. It slammed into the passenger side of my cousin’s ancient Camaro, sending us spinning out of control. Artie shouted. I screamed. There was a roaring crash as we hit a tree, the front end of the car buckling. Glass filled the air, and for a moment it seemed to stop, shining and spinning in front of us, unable to touch us. Then my head hit the dashboard, and everything was darkness.
Five
“Disaster’s not like a rattlesnake: it doesn’t give you any warning before it strikes. It just happens, and you’d better hope to heaven and hell at the same time that you’re not in the path of its glory.”
—Frances Brown
Somewhere in the woods outside of Portland, regaining consciousness after a bad accident
SOMETHING STICKY COVERED MY cheeks and forehead, and there was a sweet, almost floral taste in the air, like someone had been spraying perfume inside the car. I sat up with a groan, feeling the seatbelt dig at my waist. I was going to have bruises in the morning, ghostly webs of broken capillaries that wouldn’t show very clearly from the outside but would sure as hell hurt.
Everything was dark. I couldn’t even see my own hand when I waved it in front of my face. It was possible I’d hit my head hard enough to leave me with a temporary form of traumatic blindness, but it seemed more likely—a lot more likely—that it was just a natural consequence of being in an accident in the middle of the woods at night.
An accident. I’d forgotten. That seemed impossible as soon as the memory came back, but trauma can do strange and terrible things to the way the brain processes information, and for a moment, I’d forgotten about the truck, the way it had roared out of the darkness, and—
“Artie!” I reached out frantically, with both my hands and my mind, and sagged in relief as my fingers found his shoulder and my mind found the distant, blurry shadow of his thoughts. Unconsciousness isn’t the same as sleep. A person who’s been knocked cold can sometimes seem to disappear entirely, as good as dead, unless I know exactly where to look—or I’m touching them. To test that theory, I took my hand away from Artie’s shoulder, and winced as his thoughts seemed to wink out in the same instant.
Okay. He was alive. He was hurt, and he was unconscious, and he was probably bleeding; the floral taste in the air was from his pheromones working overtime to protect him from the presumption of a threat. I needed to get us out of here.
My backpack was on the floor by my feet. I tried to reach it. The seatbelt pulled me up short, tightened to its absolute limits by the crash. I fumbled for the belt. If I could just get to my bag, if I could get to my phone, I could call Annie. She and Elsie hadn’t been too far ahead of us. They’d be able to double back and help, preferably before some Good Samaritan happened across the crash and decided to call the police.
Artie was leaking liquid love, and he wasn’t awake enough to control the negative aspects of his influence. I was bleeding something that looked more like antifreeze or spinal fluid than human blood. Any cop who responded to this accident report would get a lot more than they were bargaining for, and they probably wouldn’t enjoy it. We needed to keep this in the family, both literally and figuratively.
The seatbelt was jammed, presumably also by the accident. I took a deep breath, trying to keep the panic from rising up and overwhelming me. I knew that cars didn’t explode nearly as often in real life as they did in the movies, but something was ticking, and something was dripping, and I wanted to get out of here. I wanted to go home. I wanted—
I could feel my thoughts getting wild around the edges, slipping through my mental fingers like snakes and slithering toward the endless equations that had kept me company through my convalescence. I stopped and took another deep breath. This is nothing like what happened before, I told myself sternly. Your body is hurt, not your mind. My head ached from its impact with the dashboard, and there was a chance I’d suffered a concussion, but those were injuries to my surface self, not to the strange, obscure structure inside my brain that controlled the parts of me that weren’t a mirror to humanity. I wasn’t going to lose control of my telepathy over this. I wasn’t going to lose myself again.