“Yes,” Melissa whispered, “there was a lot of pain. Even after I came to this place.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am too,” Melissa said.
She tugged at his hand to continue forward but he pulled back. He choked on his words on his first attempt. He needed to speak the forbidden words out loud.
“That day, the day I…killed you. Everyone said it was an accident. Just one of those tragedies. But that’s not the truth.” He let the tears fall down his cheeks. “It was my fault.”
“You were reckless.”
“Yes,” he whispered. “I was rushing to a meeting about…something, I don’t even remember what it was. Talking on the phone, not paying attention. I knew I was going too fast, but the meeting. I had to make the meeting.” He tried to steady his voice. “I saw you on the bicycle, you know. All the way down the road, but by the time I was at the end of the street I forgot about you. It wasn’t until you were lying there, bleeding to death on my windshield that I realized what I had done.”
“Go on.”
“It wasn’t enough that I killed you, but I let them cover it up. The police. They knew. There were eye-witnesses. But I let them cover it up. You were poor so they looked the other way and I let them. I let everyone believe I was innocent, even my wife. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing seventy on a residential street full of kids. I didn’t pay for my sin. I’m so ashamed.”
The girl was silent for several seconds “The people here told me I should never forgive you. That I should make you pay for what you did. I listened to them. It’s the reason I’m still here.”
Only then did Jack notice the dark forms of people moving in the walls around him. But they weren’t really walls, just dark edges of his vision. The world there was different than where he walked hand-in-hand with Melissa. The place in the darkness was deep and thick with its own viscosity. A black environment where shadow creatures struggled like insects caught in the sinewy stickiness of a spider web. “What is this place? Who are those people?”
“Purgatory. Limbo. Ether. Choose a name. It’s a place for those who are not ready to go home because they don’t want to leave home. Do you understand?”
Jack looked down at the little girl, realizing the small figure was misleading. Melissa Gonzales, killed at the age of eight when she crushed her chest cavity against the front bumper of his car and smashed her head open on his windshield, was no longer a child. She was much more now.
“They are holding on to their lives before they…before…Melissa?”
“Yes, Jack?”
“I died in the river, didn’t I?”
The girl stopped and pulled his hand toward her until his face was even with hers. Leaning forward, she kissed him on the cheek. When she pulled back she gave him a smile so beautiful that Jack felt he might cry. “I forgive you for killing me. I forgive you for everything. I want you to know that.”
Jack choked down a sob as the weight of his guilt dissolved with the girl’s words. He felt shame at his reaction even as he felt awed at her gift to him. ”I don’t deserve it.”
“We all deserve it. I learned that here.” She grasped his hand tightly. “What I told you before was wrong. It doesn’t work to run from the devil. You have to face him and defeat him. You can beat the devil, but only if you’re strong for your family.”
As she spoke the words images flashed in Jack’s mind. The pages of scribbled numbers Sarah wrote with the word ‘run’ scrawled across the back. Albert James whispering in his ear, warning him to take his family away. The voice in his head the night Huckley almost made him take a baseball bat to his family. Jack put it together. “It was you? It was you all along trying to warn me?”
“I’ve stayed to help you, to show that I’ve forgiven you. The men who want to use your daughter must be stopped. There are many here who cannot go home until those men are destroyed. You can stop them. You have to stop them.”
The light ahead of them blossomed, a brilliant flower of light that reached out for them, begged them to walk forward, pleaded for them to surrender to it. Jack was mesmerized but the girl tugged on his hand. She pointed behind them. Jack turned and saw a pale point of light, no more than a candle that seemed a mile away.
Motion. The sensation of falling. The point of light sped toward him, suddenly as big as the sun. And the heat. His skin burned. Jack covered his face to block the pain. But his lungs were filled with fire. It was melting his insides.
God, he was going insane from the pain. He had to get it out. He turned to his side and heaved, expelling the fire, expelling the pain.
When he inhaled, he expected more heat but it wasn’t. It was air. Cool, sweet, beautiful air.
Lonetree’s voice floated into his stirring consciousness, “There you go. Breathe now, breathe.” Jack’s eyes fluttered open and Lonetree’s face hovered over him, a wide smile pasted on it. “You had me a little nervous there. Thought you were gone for good.”
Jack tried to smile, rolled on his side and threw up again.
He was alive. And whether he deserved it or not, he had another chance to make things right.
SEVENTY-EIGHT
While Jack recovered Lonetree told him about his own part in their shared adventure. Just like Jack, he had tumbled along with the current, sure that he was one lungful of air away from death. He saw small pockets of air on the ceiling but the river moved too fast for him to take advantage of them. The limestone walls were worn too smooth for him to grab hold, but it didn’t stop him from trying until the very end.
It was at the end, right when he thought his lungs might either collapse or explode that the impossible happened. When he reached up to try and grab hold of the ceiling, his hand broke the surface of the water. With a violent kick, he pushed himself up just as his lungs gave way. Instead of sucking down water, he breathed air.
Getting his wits about him, he splashed his way over to the side of the channel, swinging the light from his miner’s helmet over the rock face. It was only three or four feet high but there was no way he could climb it, not with the current rushing him past it. But then he saw the steps carved into the rock. He swam toward them with everything he had left, knowing it was probably the one chance he was going to get to save his life. He reached the steps and caught his breath in time to pull in the rope as Jack’s body floated by.
“You weren’t breathing. No pulse. You didn’t respond to CPR either. I worked on you for a while,” Lonetree looked away. “To tell you the truth, I gave up on you. I’m sorry but I thought you were gone. I had already pulled the backpack off your body and was checking my gear when you started to puke all over yourself. I pumped the rest of the shit out of you though,” he added defensively.
“Thanks,” Jack said. “I mean it. If you hadn’t fished me out of the river I’d still be floating to God knows where. You saved my life.”
They sat in the cave for a few seconds, both men alone with their thoughts. Lonetree decided to speak his out loud. “You could have let go of the rope when I fell in the river. I saw how you wrapped it around you. It wouldn’t have taken much to get out of it.”
Jack shrugged. Lonetree had made his observation the way someone might describe any commonplace thing. But Jack understood there wasn’t a question buried underneath the statement, and there was nothing else to be said about it. He couldn’t help but smile as he realized Lonetree had just thanked him for trying to save his life, even though he had failed miserably.
“I know you think you’ve got the market on crazy stories,” Jack said. “But let me tell you what happened to me. Well, what I think happened anyway.” He told Lonetree as much detail as he could remember from his near-death experience. He hadn’t decided if the label was accurate but he had to label it as something. A hallucination? A discharge of electrical impulses in his brain that created one final dream? Those rationalizations didn’t feel right. Even considering them made him feel like he was betraying Melissa Gonzales again, belittling her act of forgiveness. He wouldn’t do that to her. He had to believe that what he saw was real.