Page 82 of Some Kind of Haunted

Everything in me stills. “What?”

“You were a baby.” His voice is gruff. Something that sounds almost . . . defensive? “But I saw you. Someone was always holding you or Logan, making a big deal over the Darling twins.”

“And it never occurred to you to mention that?”

His green gaze holds mine, somehow stern and compelling at once. “To what end?”

That he knew me as a baby is weird and wonderful and somehow revealing. It also makes me feel oddly vulnerable. I can think of a lot of ends, except I suspect they’re mostly feelings, so I focus on the other part of this story. “So you were in this mine, surrounded by blackness with no idea how you got there, and my mother just . . . showed up?”

It’s what she did, he said, and in my head I’m imagining her as some kind of superhero. I like it. It makes me want to cry, but I like it.

“She swam through the black to find me,” Jack says. “That’s the only way I can describe it. Somehow, she got to me. She wrapped her arms around me, and that was better. I didn’t feel the other stuff anymore, but the slurping . . . That was still there.”

I think of every dream I’ve had that was filled by those sounds. Of the encroaching black I have run from in dreams—both asleep and waking. To actually be in that blackness with no hope of waking up, to be a child actually in it, is horrifying in ways I can’t fully grasp.

Particularly since his experience was real, and mine has only been dreams.

I think about Cleo calling what I’d suffered trauma, because I didn’t know what I was experiencing. Even at four, Jack did. And still, this is all trauma. None of us are safe from it.

Jack is continuing on. He sounds measured, yes, but not unaffected.

“She talked to me. I could hear her voice in my head. It was like we were stuck there, but she was keeping me calm.” His gaze meets mine, direct. Pained. “Telling me stories about you.”

My breath catches. I can’t fathom this. That he knew I existed. That my mother talked to him. Knew him. Saved him. Hell, that Jack saw my mother hold me, and I have no memory of this. No feeling of it.

I’ve never even dreamed this.

Jack doesn’t shift his gaze from mine. “She told me that someday we would all grow up and become what we were meant to be. Just like her and your dad. I was four. I didn’t really understand, but it all felt comforting. Soothing.”

“Until you met me, you mean.”

His expression goes inscrutable. This Jack I’m more familiar with, though somehow, I question my reading of him now. Maybe that look on his face doesn’t mean what I think it does.

But I don’t know what else it could mean, I tell myself, even as my pulse picks up speed.

I could swear I see something in all that green that matches, but his voice remains measured. Gruff. “I don’t know what she did. I assume there was a sacrifice involved, because she got me out. She pushed me right out of there, but she got sucked back in. Or something—I don’t know. I wish I did.” The intensity of his gaze is almost too much for me, but I don’t look away. “I could hear her in my head, telling me to run. So I did. By the time I could get to my grandfather, it was too late.”

These are the details I didn’t want to read about in soulless newsprint. Not that any paper is likely to get into the slurping. Maybe that’s a good thing. But I realize as I stand here, taking in the scene Jack has set for me that I can see all too clearly, that she’s still a stranger to me. I feel sad about her. I feel sorry for her. The way I would about any sad story I read somewhere.

But I know Jack. I know how it feels to press against his back, the wind rushing at us, the fall landscape a colorful swirl around us. I know what it’s like to close my eyes against his shoulder. I have the scent of him from those motorcycle rides inside me now, leather and leaves.

I feel sad about my mother, but kind of proud, too, that she went out saving a little boy.

Especially this little boy.

Like she saved him for me. A gift from the past, delivered into this future. For me.

“Don’t you see, Lexi? I’m here because she’s not. She sacrificed her life for me.”

“And this is why you hate me?”

He full-on scowls now. “I told you I don’t hate you.”

“My mother saved you, so you knew who I was, and from the beginning you’ve been nothing but rude. Standoffish. Antagonistic.” But I know him now. I really do. “You’re telling me all this time I thought you hated me, and you were just being noble.”

This pisses him off even more. “I’m not fucking noble.”

But he is. To the bone. And I am . . . awed, by a myriad of things. I don’t have the words at first, but I have to act. So I move to him and put my palms on his cheeks. And then I know what to say. “You’re the most noble man I’ve ever known.”