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“No,” I said calmly. “The bus was going over anyway.”
“You’ll never know that for sure!”
“No. I won’t.”
“And you’ll never change what happened.”
“No. But I can get off this ride. Forever.”
The back end of the bus disappeared over the edge. I held the boy in my arms safe from the flash of heat and from the sound of the explosion, knowing this was the last time I’d ever have to hear it. It’s all right, Blake. It’s over now. I’ll hold you and comfort you, and I’ll forgive you for being the lucky one. I forgive you for not being strong enough to hold that bus up with your bare hands and save them all. I forgive you for surviving. I held him tight, until I realized there was no one at all in my embrace. I was wrapping my arms around myself.
The ride was finally over.
I had made it out.
16
Reality Falling
The world—the real one, that is—takes a lot of abuse, but it just bounces back. Resilient—that’s the word. However we try to twist it, whatever weird stuff we throw at it, it still holds firm, always there.
The worlds of Cassandra’s park were not so resilient. In the end they turned out to be no more substantial than soap bubbles churned out by The Works. All it took to shut the whole thing down was a well-placed monkey wrench. All it took was one survivor.
As I stood at the icy edge of Colfax Ravine, the mangled guardrail beside me, the heavens and earth began to shake. Cassandra suddenly lost interest in me and looked up with growing dread.
It happened all at once: a sharp tearing of sky and splitting of earth. Gears ejected from the ground. The light of different skies poured into the tearing fabric of the dead gray clouds that covered this scene of my memory.
In the distance the Leaning Tower of Pisa tore a hole in the sky and crashed to the ground. Much closer, a healthy chunk of Mount Rushmore fell from above and took out the road less than a hundred yards away.
As the cracks in the ground widened into fissures, people began to climb out. Freed from The Works, they ran in all directions, delirious with—was it fear or relief? I couldn’t tell. Many fell back into the great fissures, unable to escape the park, but many more navigated the hazards to find the falling brick walls and shredding gates that once enclosed the park. I tried to find Maggie and Russ in the crowd, but there were just too many faces.
Did I do this? I had seen Cassandra’s Egypt dissolve, but that was only one ride. This was all of them coming undone, collapsing into one another. This was the entire park dying. A gear the size of a manhole cover exploded from the ground, and I ducked to keep from being beheaded. When I looked up again, there was Quinn, spilling from the barren world of black sky and confused road signs onto the cracking asphalt.
The second he saw me, he ran to me, giving me a cool high five and a less-cool hug. “You made it!”
I was too distracted to see Cassandra coming. She hurled Quinn out of her way and slid right up to me. Before I could make a move, I felt her hand on my chest, her nails like talons digging into my skin, growing toward my heart. I was frozen. Paralyzed. Quinn tried to grab her, but the power of her searing, freezing extremes jolted him like an electric surge.
“This isn’t over,” she hissed. “It can’t be over. I can’t be over.”
“Let me go.” My voice was so weak, I could barely hear it.
“You’ll take me with you.” Her other hand was cupped behind my head now, her nails in my scalp.
“No.”
“Because of you, I’ve found fear and have finally experienced loss. Because of me, you’ve found strength. We’ve been too much to each other. And so you’ll take me with you. I will sleep within you.” Her earthen shroud clung to me, dissolving into my flesh, covering me like a cocoon. She pressed closer still. “Your world needs me. Needs what I offer, needs what I take.” I could feel the cold and the heat of her soul beginning a migration into mine. “There’s always room for another theme park. There are always more who want to ride.”
She wanted a safe haven within me, lying dormant until she was strong enough to build a new park. I would not be a harbor for a spirit such as this. If my will was my strength, I must make mine stronger than hers.
“No!” I said, much more forcefully than before. I still couldn’t move my arms or legs, but there was fear now in her eyes. “There’s still one more thing you need to feel. One more experience left.” It was difficult, but I raised my arms. I fought to grip her shoulders.
“Experience it with me, Blake.”
“No,” I told her. “You’ve got to face this alone.” Then I shoved her with the full force of my will. She flew from me as if she weighed nothing at all and landed a dozen yards away on the cracking asphalt.
She pushed herself up, but only enough to look at me, eyes locking on mine. A shadow grew above her, but she didn’t move. Even from a distance, I could feel the extremes of her soul, but I felt them as something more human: fiery, passionate anger joined to a chilling and hopeless longing. But now both extremes were caught in a delicate balance, and she was unable to move as the shadow grew larger all around her.
“Good-bye, Cassandra,” I said as a farmhouse plucked from the plains of Kansas came down on her with a deafening crash.
And Cassandra was gone. Not so much as her feet stuck out from beneath the house.
“She was a bad witch,” said Quinn.
A strange light glowed around us now, hurting my eyes, making it difficult to see anything.
Quinn looked aside, seeing something that I didn’t. “Mom?”
In a flash he was gone, and I felt myself tugged backward into the light. It engulfed me, dissolved me. For a moment I could feel myself stretched apart—my thoughts, my feelings refracting into a rainbow, then refocusing into white light.
The white light of dawn. It shone in my eyes, and I had to squint against it, turning my face away.
I was pressed tightly against a pillow, but it wasn’t exactly a pillow. I couldn’t move.
“We’ll have you out in a second,” a voice said beside me. I could hear the tearing of metal, like I did when the park broke down.
A fireman knelt just outside the smashed window of my Volvo. He and a second fireman worked with a massive pair of pliers. The Jaws of Life. I’d seen those things on rescue shows. I tried to shift, but I was pinned by the air bag.
A few yards past the firemen, Maggie talked to a paramedic who was hell-bent on examining her. “I’m all right, really. No, I don’t want to sit down, okay?”
“Where is most of the pain?” one of the firemen asked me.
“I don’t feel any pain.”
The two rescue workers looked at each other ominously, then one went off to prepare the back board they planned to carry me away on. I wiggled my toes to make sure I wasn’t paralyzed. Then I fought down the air bag to have a look at what I had hit.
In front of the car was a thick oak tree. I knew that tree. I had almost hit it before we arrived at the park.
“Lucky that tree stopped you, or you might have gone over the edge.”
We were in the woods at the edge of the quarry. I’d totaled my car against that tree.
I began to get angrier and angrier as I considered what it all meant. The park was not a hallucination. It wasn’t even remotely like a dream. My clothes still smelled of smoke from the dying park . . . but couldn’t that be from the smoking wreckage of the car? I could still feel the ache from Cassandra’s grip on my chest. .. but couldn’t that be from the crash?
No. I refused to accept a car crash as an explanation.
“There was an amusement park,” I told the fireman. “There were hundreds of kids ...”
“I’m sure there were,” he said, like I was delusional or something. “You can tell us all about it after we get you out.” Well, what did I expect? Did I think he would take my claims seriously? How could he?
That’s when the truth hit me, and the truth was so simple, so complete, it was obvious. Of course all these things could be rationally explained. It could be no other way. Like I said, reality bends and twists to make room for anything, but in return, the real world demands an explanation for all things. And when there is no explanation, it’s obliged to create one. Reality merely bent itself a little further than usual to leave me wrapped around this tree. I’m sure if I came home with one of Cassandra’s rings clasped in my hand, one of the firemen would just happen to be missing one just like it. Reality prevails at all costs.
The universe was having a little joke on me.
I laughed. The firemen thought I was in pain, and a paramedic arrived, ready to administer triage. “Just another second. Try not to move.”
They peeled away the ruined door, and while they hurried to get the back board in place, I stepped out and stood up. They just looked at me, stunned. I suppose people would call it a miracle, walking away from a wreck like this, and I began to wonder if, perhaps, every time someone walked away from a totaled car, they were also subjects of a “reality correction.”
Now the paramedic who had been so intent on Maggie came over to me and joined with the others to persuade me that I was gravely injured—no matter how uninjured I felt—and that an observational stint at the hospital was in order. I agreed to undergo whatever mandatory medical attention they required if they would just give me a few minutes to see to my friends.
Maggie stood against a tree, just staring at the wreck, like she couldn’t take it in. I went up to her and found myself taking her hand like it was the most natural thing in the world to do.
She looked at me, searching for something. I knew what she needed to hear.
“Yes,” I told her. “We were there. It happened.”
She relaxed and held my hand tighter. There were a million things we could say to each other. But sometimes, when you get the connection right, those things have even greater value when they’re left unsaid.
She looked at my Volvo, which had so valiantly sacrificed its crumple zone for us. “Too bad about your car.”
I shrugged. “Who needs a car in New York?”
“So you’re really going, then?”
I took her other hand. “I’ll fly home every few months. If I don’t, Quinn might start thinking he’s an only child.”
At the mention of Quinn’s name she began to tremble. “Quinn . . . is he—”
“Out.” I said. Simple as that. No explanation needed.
“Good.” She reached into her pocket and handed me her phone. “Call your mom. Just to be sure.”
I dialed Mom’s cell phone, and she picked up on the first ring.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Oh, thank God. I tried the house. No one was home. Where are you?”
“Out with Maggie and Russ. I couldn’t sleep.”
She went on to tell me how comas are such strange things. One minute you’re dead to the world, and the next you’re sitting up in a hospital bed playing Scrabble with your future stepfather. Apparently Quinn had woken up a short time ago and immediately asked for ice cream, knowing that kids in hospitals got whatever they wanted.
