CHAPTER FORTY

I climbed the stairs out of that basement, and I felt like I was rising up out of the depths of my own private hell. Maybe I was doing exactly that, and strangely enough, I felt lighter and calmer than I had felt in years.

If there had been any infected in that house, they would have had me without a fight, and I would have gone willingly.

But I was finally, truly alone.

I guess you know by now that Tessa wasn’t the girl next door, at least, not in the traditional sense. I didn’t meet her in her backyard. Hell, we didn’t even have neighbors within half a mile of our house. The thing was, somewhere deep down I knew that all along. I just needed to believe otherwise, and for several years her presence was the only thing that pushed away the terror and the red-tinged cloud and kept me from a return trip to the psychiatric facility where I’d spent the first few weeks after my father’s death.

So there’s the irony. After murdering my own father in what some would say was self-defense, to remain sane I had to invent a sister who had died many years ago to be my best friend and companion. And she had served as the better part of me ever since.

A week or so after my father’s death, my mother came to see me in the institution where I’d been committed for observation. The doctors had decided that the best thing for me was to have her keep her distance for a while, since every time I caught a glimpse of her puffy, swollen face, I started screaming.

But after a week she’d had enough, and she showed up at the front gate and insisted on seeing me. The building was an old stone behemoth, Gothic and cold and intimidating, but she stood her ground. I didn’t know any of this until she told me about it later, but apparently she made quite a scene, and the director of the place had to come out and personally escort her inside.

They had me sedated enough that I didn’t recognize her at first. We sat in a private meeting area, white walls and furniture bolted to the floor. There was a television mounted to the wall, and it flickered soundlessly at me. I remember that much. That television was always on, and the sound was always muted, and I remember thinking that the people on-screen had an important message for me, if only I could hear what they were saying. But they never spoke out loud.

From what she told me later, I imagine it this way: my mother sitting uncomfortably in a chair opposite me, her back aching, cradling her broken arm. The swelling in her face had gone down by then, with only the ghost of a bruise around her right eye to mar her normally perfect skin, but she looked hollowed out and defeated.

I was restrained, and I’m sure that cut her like a knife. But she didn’t reach out to touch me, or try to loosen the straps. I had been violent, and had tried to hurt myself, and the staff was still being overly cautious. An orderly was watching through an observation window, and any contact would have surely brought him running and ended the session before she could express what she had come to say.

“Your father,” she said. And then she stopped for a bit, because this was difficult for her. I wasn’t in any shape to protest, and that probably made it easier, because when she began again, she didn’t stop until the entire thing was out.

“You asked me once why he hated us so much,” she said. “Our family wasn’t always in such a terrible place. When you were just a baby, things were different. Your father still had his moods, but there was kindness inside him too, and a lot of that was reserved for your older sister, Tessa. She had him wrapped around her finger from birth. She liked the smell of wood shavings and would sit with him for hours in his workshop, watching him put together his projects, and he made things for her like dollhouses and carved wooden birds they would paint in bright colors and use to attract other birds to the feeder in the yard.

“And then hell came to White Falls. You understand me? I can’t explain it any better than that. Whatever evil thing rose up was never clear to any of us, but it left dozens dead, the dam shattered and the town flooded and in pieces in the aftermath of that terrible storm. And in the middle of that darkness, your sister Tessa lost her life.

“The official cause of death was drowning in the creek that had overrun its banks in our backyard. She was only five years old and I…I was with her at the time. But I couldn’t save her. It was dark and she was screaming and something just reached up out of that water and it took her down. Maybe it was just a dead tree branch, but it looked like it was moving, like it grabbed hold of her. And I couldn’t find her again until it was too late.

“After that, your father retreated from us. The town was rebuilt and our lives went on, but he never came back. Maybe he blamed me for Tessa’s death, or maybe he blamed himself. He started drinking more heavily, and the occasional shouting match turned into slaps, and that progressed to worse things. There was something in both of our faces that set him off: maybe we looked too much like her. But when he got to drinking and we were in his way, we suffered for it.”

Telling me all this must have been difficult for my mother to do. They never spoke of Tessa in our home; all photos of her had been removed. I never knew I had a sister at all. For years she’d kept this secret from me, and the entire town was complicit in it, because I’d never heard mention of her name from anyone.

But she was unburdening herself because she thought it might help me to understand my father better, and to know that it was possible to go on, even with such a devastating wound as the death of a child.

Grief is sort of like a scar; the wound heals, but the damage remains, and when the timing’s right it can ache like a ghostly memory of something sharper and more immediate.

Yes, something like that.

“I want you to understand that it’s not your fault,” she said. “That you’re not to blame for any of it, and that your father wasn’t the monster he seemed to be, at least, not at first. But that kind of pain damages a person permanently, Petey, and now we’ve all tasted it. We’re all damaged in that sense. I only hope you can find a way to live your life without letting it bring you down the way it did your father. If you have to blame anyone, blame me.”

I don’t remember much of that conversation, but that’s the way I imagine it. And something must have gotten through to me, because that night, after my mother left the hospital, I saw Tessa for the first time.

It was much like I’ve already described it, except, of course, it wasn’t in her own backyard or anywhere near my home. I was unusually calm and lucid and the orderlies had left me free in a common room to stare out at the rain. I stood at the reinforced glass door and I saw my Tessa dancing out there in the mud, her hands outstretched and her face up and open to the raindrops.

She was as real to me as anyone else I’d ever seen. You have to understand this, if you’re going to understand why I’ve told this story the way I have; somewhere in my own mind, I guess I knew she wasn’t really there. But to keep my own sanity, I had to find a way out, and she gave it to me. I pushed what had happened to my father way down deep, along with what my mother had told me. And before long, Tessa was as familiar to me as my own skin, and there didn’t seem to be any way back.

I tried the door that night and found it unlocked, and I went out there with her in the rain.

From that moment on, she was always with me, and I was never alone.

They called it a miraculous recovery. The director of the facility, when he sat me down to do his own version of an exit interview a couple of weeks later, said that he’d never seen anything like it.

“I’m still a bit skeptical,” he said, leaning back behind his large polished desk and crossing his arms behind his head. “I was worried about you, young as you are, coming in here the way you did. You required serious corrective medication. Neuroleptics are nasty things. They make you sleepy, put your mind in a fog, make you hallucinate. Weight gain, agranulocytosis, tardive dyskinesia, tardive akathisia, tardive psychoses. These things can begin slowly, but are not easy to reverse. To be honest, I suspected you would be a lifelong resident. That does not give me any pleasure to say, you understand, it’s simply the truth. But this…”

He leaned forward so suddenly as if to pitch straight out of his chair. Maybe he was trying to get a reaction. But I did not flinch. I got the feeling that I’d flustered him, and that I was peeking through his carefully polished exterior to what really lived underneath.

“You’re not fooling with us, are you?” he said, looking me in the eye. “Because we’re experts here. We’ll see through it. You’re a bright young man, and you’ve passed all our tests with flying colors. I just find it all…hard to swallow.”

I held his gaze. “No, sir,” I said. “I’m not fooling you. I do believe I’m better now, thank you.”

Although he did not know it, Tessa sat next to me, holding my hand the entire time, and I felt safe enough to smile and nod and thank him again for his help.

A day after that, my mother came to check me out.

I wrote earlier about being at crossroads in life, and how hard it is to see them at the time. For a while I’d thought the crossroad in my own life was the day Tessa appeared to me, and I made the choice to take her in. Then I ended up trapped in the bomb shelter with those I considered my best friends. And after witnessing things that would defy belief, if I had not seen them with my own eyes, I had to shoot three of them, to stop them from killing me.

If that’s not a crossroad, I don’t know what is.

I also wrote that being friends means you might know something embarrassing about each other, or whom you have crushes on. But you don’t know their most private thoughts, the things they don’t share with anyone else, the things that make them bleed.

My best friends thought they knew me, but they were wrong. Hell, I didn’t even know myself. That game I’d been playing, the one where I laughed at all the jokes and kept on going as if the entire world were a punch line, it was rigged. There were house rules, and I was just a guest with a line of credit that had run out.

But like my father said, life was about survival. The world didn’t care if you lived or died; fate was strictly a human invention. Like it or not, I was the last man standing, and now I had a second chance to make things right.

As I left my house and climbed back into the Jeep, I thought about just lying down in the dirt and giving up. And then I thought about change, and second chances. I thought about crossroads. It was a hell of a long way to Alaska, but if I played my cards right, if I finally faced down my own demons and owned up to who I was and what I’d done, maybe I just might make it. And if I didn’t, at least I’d go down knowing I gave it my best shot, on my own terms.

Dan’s voice drifted back to me from the night before:

I want you to promise me that you’ll do everything you can to survive. I don’t want it to all end for nothing.

And so I climbed into that Jeep and I kept going, and I fought to the end for the sake of my friends.

They would have wanted it that way.