Following Christopher Creed (10 page)

He left school, a deranged and guilt-ridden mess, a month later. I was back in January, with Lanz and a whole new attitude. Completely blind for the first three weeks, I had heard an audio version of Napoleon Hill's
Think and Grow Rich.
I felt the need to ask the nurse for a pen and paper, and I wrote down in tiny letters three things Hill suggested writing.

RayAnn had seen me play with these keys a number of times, had seen me reach into my pocket to feel that plastic strip dangling off it when I needed to find my center. She moved so silently, I didn't hear her until she sat down on the bed beside me.

"
New York Times
Executive," she read, as if it were brand new, her usual show of respect. It had been the answer to Hill's suggestion to "write a clear description of your major desire in life, your idea of success."

"Write great stories so that others grow with me," she read next. That second line was my best shot at a more difficult assignment: "Write a clear statement of precisely what you intend to give in exchange for that which you desire in life."

"THE ONLY ROADBLOCKS WILL BE THE ONES I ESTABLISH IN MY MIND."

That was the last thing Hill had said to write, and I had put it all in caps. The two eye surgeries that offered little improvement in the following summers did not become roadblocks.

"I still can't believe you wrote that back when you were completely blind," she marveled, touching the lamination with her finger. She always said that. My printing had been, unbelievably, as neat as if I could see everything. So Stedman had it laminated for me on a keychain.

"Why don't you forget about Chris Creed and write about yourself?"

"Too raw," I said, "though I've thought about it for maybe ten years up the road. Twenty years might do it."

"Mike, maybe you should get some therapy."

I had refused more traditional therapy after my accident despite having been offered it for free by Randolph even before I was approached by a dozen lawyers. My reasoning was that most psychologists try to get you to keep rewinding, going over and over your bad memories until...
what? You grow numb to them?
I certainly couldn't change mine. I had somehow fallen immediately in with the gurus who encourage you to fixate on your future and let go of the past. There were so many rags-to-riches stories out there. I'd read a slew of them. Many successful people had had rotten childhoods. Mine was certainly no worse. Generally speaking, I could not have asked for better results.

But "generally speaking" did not include a stellar mo
ment like this, when I was alone in a hotel room with a beautiful girl and my foremost thought was whether she would transform into a cobra and sink her fangs into my jugular.

I found a roundabout but very honest answer to her question.

"Writers often write to escape their personal realities. And yet there's this homing device for truth, for the concepts that define the truths you really understand, and it's your job to state those truths so that others will understand them too. I quoted Adams tonight, out in the Lightning Field, saying Chris had become somebody else. Lines Adams wrote on his website totally jumped out at me, because I've been there too. Writing about Chris Creed allows Mike Mavic to ... to..."

"To become somebody else. But if the person's a lot like Mike Mavic, it allows Mike Mavic to write about himself. Sorta kinda."

"That was pretty good, RayAnn."

"What you're doing is therapeutic. You should put that in your research paper too." She squeezed my knee and stood up.

"One research paper at a time." I smiled. "You know my pace is slower than yours."

"Go for the gold. Write a great story."

I grinned, feeling the helium, blown-up feelings of being alone with a beautiful girl start to dissolve. She cracked a Diet Coke can and then stuck it in my hand. It was warm, having been in her carry-on bag, but it was my favorite fruit.

"I have nightmares, sometimes, I should warn you," I said, trying to keep my smile peaceful. "I wake up yelling."

She was back over at her terminal, I thought, to give me air.

"Does it help to play the radio?" She hit the radio feed on her laptop. Some New Age music came through. RayAnn knows New Age music relaxes me.
Thoughtful.

"I got the feeling you weren't telling the whole truth to those kids out in the field tonight," she said.

I chuckled, sipping the warm soda. "Frankly, it was none of their business."

"I know. I thought you handled it well. But there was that part about your mother never touching you inappropriately."

"What about it?"

"You just got that click in your voice. That's all. I would notice it, but they wouldn't."

"Nah." I shook my head with all honesty. "I lie sometimes—change the details to prevent myself from appearing accurately on people's blogs if I feel endangered—but that part is true. Mostly."

"Well,
mostly
is a heavy term to throw in the middle of that. I'm not trying to pry, but..."

But, but, but.
I squirmed. RayAnn believed in the value of traditional therapy. I figured I would replay this one tape and see if I felt any better. "There wasn't much. Toward the end, Mom had gotten to like me brushing her hair at night. She would sit in front of her bedroom mirror and expect me to brush her hair for her."

After a moment of silence, she said, "Ew."

"Yeah, it was getting very ... borderline. She was drinking a lot. I'd been doing my own laundry since I was, like, eleven, and one night I reached in the washer to get my underwear load and toss it in the dryer, and it was like
my
underwear and
her
bras and panties. She'd thrown hers in on top of mine, saying the washer hadn't been full. It probably ... meant nothing to her."

I watched RayAnn shove the laptop away to get her mind on this. She sank into the chair until her neck lay over the back of it and she stared at the ceiling.

"I'm trying to think ... if I ever found my underwear in the same load with my dad's underwear. Yeah, I suppose that could have happened." She looked entranced. "I've folded my dad's underwear a hundred times."

"So, I shouldn't have been rooted to the spot when I saw that," I said. "Because I did not want to fold my mom's underwear. I did not want to
touch
my mom's underwear."

"Well ... my dad wasn't asking me to massage his scalp and then throwing his underwear into my personal wash load." She giggled thoughtfully. "It's very, very borderline, yes. I would call those, uh, boundary violations, if nothing grosser. Anything else?"

"There were probably twenty little things like that," I said honestly, "but nothing major until Sydney. That's when things got insane. My mother would pace around in the night. I think it was the first thing that I ever did that she couldn't ... control. It was driving her crazy. A couple times, I woke up, like, around midnight, and she was standing right over my bed. Just staring into my face.

"I would be all, 'Mom. What the heck are you doing?'

"And she would grab me by the T-shirt and shake me, hollering, 'Give her up! She's bad! How can you do this to me after all I've done for you!'"

"Oh, wow," RayAnn groaned, as if that one really got her. "Listen, you did the right thing. Just look at your life. Where would you be if you hadn't left?"

"At home. With her," I said, and couldn't help adding, "but I would have my sight."

I didn't know what I was trying to say by that. It was a thought I had when I wasn't busy reading, writing, studying, hanging out—when nothing was popping. Could I have moved faster away from that slung ball if I hadn't been riddled with a chronic, general feeling of guilt? I had actually seen the ball coming. And I froze.

Was my sight the price I had been willing to pay for leaving home? Was it like a down payment on my freedom? If I'd been raised Catholic, would it have been like penance?
Nothing is free in this world.

I tried to correct myself, tell myself that a
lot
was free. That breeze from the window, my good self-esteem, my confidence in tomorrow, my dreams, my visions, my writing talents—they were free and available, simply because I wanted them, wanted to enjoy them.

RayAnn is a smart person. She could have come over to the bed and tried to invade my space to help me heal from having my space invaded. A lot of girls would have been that dumb, I think. Or maybe
dumb
is a harsh word. Maybe it's gut instinct for most women to want to reach out and touch. She either wasn't there yet, maturity-wise, or she was smart. She let her attention fall back to the laptop, and she mumbled some apology that she wasn't being insensitive but she had to surf for something.

"Now what are you after?" I asked, gratefully. The tape replay hadn't done much for me except make me want to change the subject. "Can you look up those articles the Haydens first mentioned about Steepleton? The cancer rate and the car accidents?"

"Sure. But I want to get this other thing first. Or I'll never sleep tonight."

"What is it?"

She was muttering to herself, hitting keys. Eventually she must have forgotten what we'd been talking about, because she looked engrossed, then frustrated. I finally heard her say, "Lightning stations. No ... lightning traps ... trapped lightning ... no..."

"What on earth are you doing?" I asked.

She sighed, and I heard her nails drumming the desk.

"I swear I've heard of this before ... I just can't think of what it is called," she said. "You look fried. Why don't you go to sleep, huh? This is freaky, and you're freaked out enough right now."

I said, "Now I'm curious."

"No, you're not." She typed. "You're not this curious, trust me."

Three's a charm.
I asked a third time, "What?"

She threw her hands up in an Italian gesture of frustration. "I need to know what would explain this thing that happened just as Chief Rye showed up, right after Kobe Lydee stopped that godforsaken chanting that was making me so seasick. It's some ... thing where lightning gets trapped underground and maintains its charge until an animal or person comes along and collapses the trap. It has to do with rocks ... some kind of rock or ... stump. I think it can start a fire up to a year later, but I can't remember what the heck the phenomenon is called."

Okay ... I knew what she was looking for, but I had no idea why. I waited until she finally spilled it.

"You guys were looking behind you, but I already knew Chief Rye was there. I saw him coming fifty paces off. I just happened to be looking out at the woods, right where Kobe had those field glasses pointed during his chants. A light flashed, flashed again, and then went to black. It looked like lightning, only coming
up
from the ground. You would have to think that a spirit of some sort was trying to manifest itself, if you were a believer. Which, of course, I'm not."

I
OFTEN HAVE THIS RECURRING DREAM
in the dark hour, as my mother used to call it—the hour right before dawn, when the moon is low and the world outside is black and unmoving. In it, Mom appears to me, though the scenario changes. Sometimes, she comes out of the closet in my dorm, and sometimes through the window, sometimes up through the blankets of my bed.

The Lightning Field drew me back in the dream, and I stood by the first tree that I had touched there. I was breathing and sending confident thoughts out to the universe while running my palm over the weathered bark and lightning crystals.

My eyes began to feel icy, and suddenly my vision opened, as if I had never been blind—always a prelude to coming attractions in this dream. I was calling Chris Creed, and I could sense a movement somewhere in front of me and to the left, and I saw a long shadow behind the nearest dead tree. The shadow had legs and arms, but its head was hidden, even in shadow.

"Come here to me," I told the shadow. It didn't move. "I need to ask you some things. Nothing awful. It's all ... off the record."

The shadow moved, but with a step back, not a step forward. I pretended I didn't see it.

"Are you dead?" I asked. "I really need to know."

Things are distorted in shadow, and the longer I stared, the more I realized this manifestation was Chris as a younger kid. A lanky younger kid, and his legs were trembling under his jeans, sending little shudders into the shadow.

"Come out," I said, and when the shadow didn't move, I added, "Are you dead?"

The head appeared on the shadow as he pushed back a little from behind the tree, and the head nodded yes.

Yes, yes, yes. Dead, dead.

"I don't believe you," I whispered, and went on a rant that came out as a whisper also, despite my anger. "It's not a 118 great story if you're dead! If you're dead, you're an accident. You're a pity. You're not a hero. I can't write a great story about a kid who is worms. Do you read me?"

The shadow didn't move. I supposed he didn't care about me or my writing. Why should he?

"Well, if you're not going to help me, then get the hell out," I said, louder this time. The shadow leaned in to the tree but didn't totally become part of it. He wasn't helping me at all.
Might as well be dead.

"You're a wimp," I told him. "I've always thought that."

He didn't answer, but I realized his fingers
were
moving. He was making little sign language symbols, the ones I'd learned just this year in a sudden blast of empathy for other people with disabilities. He was making little letters of the alphabet, and I had to stare with all my ability to read them. L-O-O-K O-U-T B-E-H-I-N-D Y-O-U.

I froze, feeling her breath on my neck, too close, as always. I could feel myself shrinking, or maybe Mom was growing. I could smell her, smell laundry detergent, smell the acid breath of someone who drinks early and bends over your bed at midnight. She had a hatchet. I don't know how I knew that.

"You can't touch me. You can't hurt me. It's only a dream," I said.

"But I'm your mother. Your
mo-ther
" she said, as if mothers move in and out of dreams, in and out of real life with ease. "And you know the truth, my favorite. You always were my favorite, my precious. If I can't have you, nobody will have you."