A Catch in Time Page 30

John Thomas slumped in Laura’s arms, his breath coming in shallow gasps. Catherine placed two bottles of Eli’s homemade wine with glasses on the table and requested that Fawn bring cornbread and honey from the kitchen, and turn off the teakettle.

  Kate began lighting lamps. Mohammed drew the drapes against the twilight. Josiah asked John Thomas to start a fire, and while John Thomas knelt at the hearth, Josiah spoke to him quietly.

  As Laura watched, she felt lightheaded and remote. The pills Catherine had given her had dulled the stabs of panic.

  The others appeared to move in slow motion, drinking wine, ignoring the food. Kate seemed to float across the room to hand Josiah a glass, firelight splintered on the glassware. Eli’s absence fell upon Laura without warning. He was not there to pour, to hold a glass to the light, to quiz them about color, scent, density. Eli was back with the soulworld, his fear of death put to rest. I told you it was all right, Eli. I told you.

  Kate tried to feed John Thomas a piece of cornbread, but he balked after one bite. Catherine said he’d slept less than an hour since Mack had gone. So Kate helped John Thomas upstairs, and he was asleep by the time she tucked the blankets around him.

  Catherine resumed her story, and Laura found her anxiety mounting once again. Catherine spoke of regaining consciousness and seeing Mack holding Lily tightly while he barked his instructions. Laura was sickened by thoughts of Mack’s hands on her child.

  “His demands. They are barbaric,” said Catherine, faltering.

  “For God’s sake, what does he want, Catherine?” cried Laura.

  “He wants Conrad, in exchange for Lily. Did he know you were going to visit Conrad?”

  “Hell, no!” Kate exploded. “We wouldn’t have told that fucking monster anything. We didn’t even know we were gonna see Conrad.”

  “He wants Conrad?” Laura interrupted, confused. She turned to her brother. “You know Mack?”

  Conrad nodded, his face pale.

  “He’s the man who flew the plane that took us halfway across America,” explained Mohammed. He nodded for Conrad to speak, but Conrad didn’t. Mohammed had never told anyone what Mack had done to Conrad; that was Conrad’s burden.

  “I didn’t know Conrad was to be here,” said Catherine. “And yet, here you are. How could he know you’d be here?”

  “Fate,” said Mohammed quietly.

  Everyone looked at Conrad. “No,” he whispered. “I can’t.”

  Laura gasped. “Conrad, please. We’ll make a plan. He won’t get you. But I need you to help me get her back.”

  “I can’t, Laura, you don’t understand what he did to me, what he—” Conrad’s eyes fell. “I can’t … I’m sorry.” He rushed into the kitchen and shut the door, but they could hear him vomit, over and over.

  Fawn started to follow him. “I don’t know,” she said helplessly. “He’s never said anything to me.” She went into the kitchen.

  They turned to Mohammed, who was sitting on the floor, but he kept his gaze on his hands in his lap.

  Kate sat close to Laura and put an arm around her. “We’ll get her back, even if that sonofabitch won’t help. We’ll leave as soon as the bastard calls, and we’ll get her back.”

  Laura’s eyes burned. “If he’s hurt her, I swear I will kill him.”

  “I believe you,” said Kate. Restlessly, she stood, then crossed to Mohammed. “You know something we don’t. Why does Mack want Conrad?”

  “Easy, Kate,” said Josiah.

  “I don’t know,” Mohammed answered her truthfully. “How is one to know the thinking of an evil man?”

  “Shit.” Kate dropped cross-legged to the floor next to him.

  “What did Mack do, Ali?” Laura asked. “Conrad said Mack did something to him.”

  “This is for Conrad to tell,” Mohammed said firmly. He was distracted because the elder, Catherine, had said something that had confused him, in part because he hadn’t fully understood her words. But it had to be important because, by her account, it had been the turning point for her and Eli’s actions toward Mack. And it had something to do with Lily.

  “A question, please?” he entreated Catherine. She nodded.

  “What is meaning of post-blackout?”

  Catherine pursed her lips.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Josiah told her. “Mohammed and the others don’t know about Shaitan.”

  Kate huffed. “They know Mack—at least, Conrad and Ali do.”

  “Post-blackout,” explained Laura suddenly, “means after the blackout. Lily was born after the blackout, not before, like we told you.”

  “Ah.” Mohammed turned to Kate. “You lied, then.”

  “Damn right,” said Kate. “How was I supposed to know you live in a nest full of Shaitan kids and don’t even know what they are? Listen, kiddo, Mack’s Shaitan, and there’s a shitload of others just like him. Shaitan—that’s a name someone else made up for those things, not me.

  “Everything born after the blackout is Shaitan.” She leaned her face into his. “Except Lily. You need to know this. Lily is no Shaitan.”

  Mohammed shrugged. “Yes. I understand,” he said. His thoughts whirled. Mack was evil. That was certain. Kate and the others believed that same evil was now spreading into this world. He felt immeasurably depressed. The elder—Catherine—must also believe this, so she could not possibly know what he knew. The soul-force was Allah’s gift. It was not possible for anything to be born without this force impelling them into existence, creating the very matter they inhabited.

  The elder’s gaze still rested upon him.

  “We do not know, for a fact, Mohammed,” said Catherine, “that everything being born is like Mack Silby. However, in many places, people slaughter every child born after the blackout. That’s why we’ve told no one Lily’s true birth date. We know she is not Shaitan. We do not know why she seems to be the exception.”

  “It’s because of the epiphany,” Laura said stubbornly. “I remembered. Remembering protected her somehow.”

  “Epiphany?” Mohammed repeated the strange word. His body tensed. “You remembered … what?”

  “Don’t get her started,” Kate said, then slapped her knee. “Fuck me! Sorry, Laura. Go ahead, honey, talk all you want. I’ll shut up.”

  Laura shrugged. “Doesn’t matter.”

  Kate said quickly, “Laura thinks—I mean, Laura’s sure—the blackout was caused by this … revelation that hit everybody at once. Everybody suddenly knew everything. There was no more, um—barrier—is that right, Laura? —that kept us from knowing what things are like after we die.” She mistook Mohammed’s increasingly odd expression as disbelief.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said hastily. “And there’s a lot more—about souls and cell-life and all kinds of shit, that really, kinda …” She faltered.

  Josiah said, “It makes so much sense I wish I could believe it. Eli—” He stopped abruptly.

  Mohammed jumped up, chest heaving. “You know,” he said to Laura.

  Kate grabbed his arm. “Take it easy, she’s not an infidel or anything.”

  Mohammed shook his arm free and turned a look of fierce joy upon her. “She remembers!” he cried. He squeezed his eyes shut, fell to his knees, and prostrated himself. Arabic prayer tumbled from his lips.

  Kate gaped at him.

  Mohammed sat back on his feet and stared at Laura. “I, too, remember,” he told her. “I thought no one else did.” Laura gasped. “You … remember? The epiphany?”

  “I do not know this word,” he grinned, “but I remember the vision that came during the blackout.”

  Laura raised a trembling hand to her mouth.

  “Holy shit,” Kate said. “I don’t believe this. You mean—”

  “Many people claim to remember,” Catherine interrupted. She nodded a plea to Kate to diminish the drama. “We’re overwrought. It’s not the best time to discuss it.”

  Laura’s eyes were feverishly bright, her face splotchy; her body trembled. Kate also saw
that Laura, focused on Mohammed, hadn’t heard Catherine.

  “Let’s take a break,” suggested Kate.

  “No.” Laura protested. She crawled across the floor to sit with Mohammed. “Tell me what you know,” she demanded.

  “All of it,” he nodded eagerly. “All of it is Us. We—” “We made it all, from the first cell—” Laura’s voice shook.

  “And the next, and every different form from then—”

  “We direct. We—”

  “—create!” Mohammed beamed joyously.

  “It’s all Us.”

  They clasped hands.

  Kate turned to Josiah and Catherine. “Holy shit!

  Will one of you explain this?”

  “Kate,” Josiah said. “A little more wine, please?”

  She snatched the glass from his hand. “Okay, only first—”

  “For Laura, too,” instructed Josiah.

  Kate grumbled, “Fetch the wine, Cinderella, sweep the hearth, Cinderella.” She moved swiftly to the sideboard.

  “Laura,” said Catherine.

  Mohammed and Laura were engrossed in each other.

  “Laura!” Catherine said louder.

  Laura turned to her. “Do you see now? It’s all true.”

  Kate got Laura to sit back on the couch and handed her a glass of wine. Catherine, admonishing Mohammed to give them a moment, placed one hand on Laura’s brow and took her pulse with the other, asking if the pills she’d taken earlier had had any effect. Laura described her momentary calm, now gone.

  Catherine sighed. “Our medications have exceeded their expiration dates.”

  “We have some prescriptions from Reno,” Josiah offered. “They’re in the car, in the cooler.”

  Kate was already moving. “I know. Fetch the cooler, Cinderella.” Mohammed watched her leave, then turned a puzzled look on Josiah. “Cinderella?”

  With a small smile, Josiah said, “A legendary maiden, fair of face and tiny of foot.”

  “Ah. Like Kate, then.”

  Josiah snorted into his wine. “Yeah, sure.”

  Kate brought the cooler and Catherine found sleeping pills as well as Josiah’s personal prescriptions. Kate took the cooler to the kitchen and was startled to see Conrad and Fawn, sitting at the table. They’d slipped her mind.

  Kate transferred the medicines to the refrigerator, then glared at Conrad. “You’re a real chickenshit,” she said, and marched from the room.

  “Josiah and Catherine are coming with us,” Laura told Kate. “They’re going to help us get Lily back.”

  “Of course we are,” Catherine said.

  “Catherine won’t let me and Ali talk about the epiphany,” said Laura.

  “Don’t exaggerate,” said Catherine. “Lie quietly, now. You and Mohammed will have time.”

  The drug was strong and Laura was thankful to feel her terrible fear and worry blunted. Drowsily, she let herself feel the happiness of knowing the epiphany was shared by another. There was so much to talk about.

  She slept.

  CHAPTER 40

  JOSIAH WAS THE FIRST TO WAKE. HIS EYES SNAPPED open and he was slapped by the awareness that Eli was dead and Lily was the captive of a madman.

  The grief jerked him upright. The things he’d wanted to tell Eli would remain unsaid.

  He imagined how terrified Eli must have been, as death—Mack—came at him.

  He remembered how much Eli had dreaded the idea of his own death. Of life dancing on without him … forevermore without him. An unspeakable sadness filled Josiah.

  Sitting on the bed, in the darkness, he finally understood why Eli had tortured himself with regret about the inevitable. In his sorrow, he bound his thoughts as closely as he possibly could to his friend and, for the first time, felt Eli’s terror of being denied forever a presence in the universe, a loneliness so unbearable it immobilized his world. Josiah gasped a breath, shattering the vision.

  He lit the candle on the nightstand and attached his prosthesis, mourning for Laura, who would wake to the same smothering awareness. Lily gone. Eli dead.

  Looking around the room, he saw that a transfer of his belongings had been completed. His old backpack lay in the corner.

  He’d carried that backpack with him everywhere in the months following the blackout. It was worn, stained, misshapen. A reminder of those first months in which his and Eli’s friendship had formed and strengthened. He picked it up and opened the plastic catch, trying to remember what was inside.

  Smoothing the bedcovers, he upended the backpack and stared at the jumbled result: a tattered paperback map book, pencils and notebooks, trail mix, a knife, a Power Bar, a miniature tape recorder, four packs of Trojans, a tube of sunscreen, a jar of aspirin, medical tape, matches. And a small pouch.

  He’d forgotten about the pouch. Suede, dyed a brilliant turquoise, tiny white and yellow beads encircled the drawstrings that closed the top of the pouch. He’d found it in an abandoned store the day after the blackout, the day he and Eli had wandered through the ravaged city, and had shoved it into his pocket. He hadn’t remembered the pouch again until that night, in the empty house in which they’d taken refuge. Feeling it in his pocket as he’d sat down, he’d pulled it out. Eli had suggested that he hang it around his neck, like an Indian medicine pouch. Collecting powerful “medicine” could be fun, Eli had said, then, with a laugh, he tossed him pocket nail clippers as his first totem.

  Josiah blinked away hot tears.

  The next day, Josiah began to fill the pouch with useless, evocative objects, compiling a minor time capsule—something that would relate a sense of the time those objects were important. Every time he’d added an item, he’d codified a vague promise to himself not to look in the bag but to save it for some future date.

  Sitting on the bed, he tried to remember what was in it. It hadn’t been that long. Only six years since the blackout. Six years of knowing Eli.

  He tentatively opened the pouch, then spilled the memories from it. Eli’s pocket clippers. A small photo of three children he’d removed from the hand of a dead woman. The yen he’d offered Laura, payment for her thoughts. A delicate gold chain necklace he’d found, limply draped over a wreckage-strewn curb.

  A newspaper clipping. He unfolded it carefully. A grainy black-and-white photo of a fireman being awarded a medal.

  A miniature cassette tape.

  Josiah remembered fishing the tape out of the trash can where Eli had thrown both it and the small tape recorder, the third day after the blackout. Josiah thought the tape was from Eli’s grandmother, speaking from a time that would never return, and had never listened to it. Josiah had saved it for Eli, who might one day regret having discarded it.

  Now Eli was gone, but Josiah would not let something meaningful to Eli be lost.

  He picked up the small recorder from the bed, inserted the cassette, and pushed Play. Nothing; the batteries were dead. He found spares in his dresser drawer, reloaded the recorder, and heard the spools whir. Sitting on the bed, he waited to hear Eli’s grandmother.

  But it was not a female voice.

  It was male and it was unintelligible. Disappointed, Josiah thought even this small way of honoring Eli’s memory had been snatched away. He watched the spools spin and heard nothing but gibberish. No wonder Eli had thrown it away.

  But that didn’t account for the look on Eli’s face when he’d pitched it into the can. A look Josiah vividly remembered. It was the emotion he’d seen twisting Eli’s face that had caused him to save the tape.

  Josiah listened more carefully. The voice pitched higher, until it cracked. There was heavy breathing. Then, a single word, spoken in a sob. The hairs on Josiah’s neck prickled. Eli? Was that Eli? He stopped the tape, rewound it fractionally, then replayed it to catch that one word, straining to make it out through the sobs.

  “Unbelievable,” the voice said. Josiah replayed it. “Unbelievable.” It was Eli. Heart racing, Josiah let the tape continue.

  For an hour
, Josiah barely moved—at times, barely breathed—as he listened to the entire tape, not even trying to make sense of the garble, intent on the parts that were clear. When both sides of the tape finally finished, he sat, overcome, shaken. It was clear that Eli had recorded these words immediately upon regaining consciousness after the blackout. The second side of the tape, which was almost entirely intelligible, was full of his impressions of what he was seeing and hearing as he looked at the destruction on Doyle Drive in front of him and the Golden Gate Bridge behind him.

  Hands trembling, Josiah flipped the tape back to the first side, pushed Play, knowing now that this side of the tape held the very first words Eli had spoken just minutes after regaining consciousness.

  He listened over and over to the confused passages, Eli’s nearly incoherent revelations, and was eventually able to understand that Eli was describing his mind’s images and emotions. His words tumbled in broken sentences, like someone’s impressions of a vivid dream from which he’d just woken, a dream so full of visual and emotional detail he was unable to keep up with the story line, dropping one thought to grasp another before it faded.

  No wonder Eli had thrown the tape away, Josiah thought. Eli had recognized his own voice but not his own words. To himself, he must have sounded terrifyingly insane.

  Listening again and again, Josiah was finally able to make sense of the unrelated snatches, at times fantastically descriptive.

  It was Laura’s epiphany.

  Laura had spent the night on the couch deep in a drug-induced sleep. She awakened slowly, her body sluggish, mind heavy with despair. She sat up, wrapped her arms around her knees, and rocked with grief, her desperation welling. There was nothing she could do right now to help Lily.

  “Laura.” Josiah stood in the doorway.

  Startled, she looked up.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” she whispered, thinking, Oh, God, I can’t take anymore.

  Josiah, dazed, limped slowly to the couch. “It’s true,” he said. “It’s real—epiphany—that’s really what happened during the blackout. I believe it, but it’s so—unbelievable.”

  Laura looked at him uncertainly. Is he trying to make me feel better?