Page 117 of Call Off the Dark

His words reached the darkest corners of her heart and filled them up with light again. Here she was, finally, sitting across from the man who had loved the pilgrim soul in her, and the relief was all-encompassing. And then an even more magical thing happened: Tyler began to tell Helen things without even saying the words aloud. As she absorbed it all, the tears trickled down her cheeks. He told her that throughout her lifetime, so many others could and would love the pilgrim soul in her. All endings were also beginnings, and she would reinvent herself as many times as she wanted. Old versions of herself would rest in peace.

Why did it have to happen though? Helen’s soul, not her lips, asked the question, and as his eyes melted into hers, she understood then that it wasn’t that simple. Tyler’s life had been full of so many beautiful moments, so many of them with her, and that night had been one bad moment. That was all. Everyone’s life was made up of good and bad moments. His just happened to end on one particularly terrible one, but that didn’t make it more important than everything that came before it. She was spending too much time reliving the wrong moment. There were better things to remember.

Tyler finally spoke aloud again. “You can let go at any time.”

His body began to flicker, fading in and out of this world and the next.

“But I need you here,” she said.

He smiled, this time sadly. That wasn’t how it worked.

“But you could come see me,” Helen pressed. “Visit me. Like this.”

He looked at her with such tenderness and affection. “I shouldn’t even be here now, darling. You aren’t meant to be staring out windows or standing on riverbanks, waiting like this. We don’t haunt the ones we love.”

“We need to be together,” Helen said. But even as she said the words, even as they came out like a plea, she understood something on a deeper level. Somehow there were things Tyler was still communicating to her that he wasn’t able to say with words. Because all of a sudden, she understood that all those times she’d wondered if she was hearing him in the whispers on the wind and feeling him in the leaves on the breeze, he truly had been there. He was inside her and all around her, and her connection to him would continue to evolve throughout her lifetime.

“We’ll be together someday. But not today,” Tyler said. “It’s time for you to be brave.”

She nodded, because she now also understood that someday she would reconnect with him in some other time and in some other space that was too extraordinary for her to comprehend while she was with the living.

As that knowledge flowed into her, it filled her with peace she didn’t know was possible.

In the next moment, Tyler was gone.

Chapter Fifty

Alone in the grave, Helen began to hear the destruction from above again. It was Wade’s shouts of pain and the sounds of breaking boards.

He needed help.

Helen wasn’t ready to leave the slipstream of her past though. She covered her face with her hands, and the memories of Tyler came flooding back to her along with the understanding that while she now knew that he was somewhere safe and pure and sweet, she was still here in this broken existence without him. And how many years would she have to go on without him? Forty, fifty, sixty? A sobering length of time.

She screamed, so loud it was almost inhuman. It wasn’t a scream of pain or anger exactly. It was a scream of everything that had been bottled up inside of her for two long years. It finally all released, and the animals and the land absorbed her cry so she wouldn’t have to carry it all by herself anymore. Many miles away, owls on branches turned their heads in commiseration. Coyotes tilted their heads back and screeched along with her. Leaves broke free and fluttered to the forest floor, and ripples formed in the pond.

When Helen’s scream finally stopped, everything around her was silent.

Her body felt firmly rooted to this time and place. She inhaled the musky smell of the freshly dug dirt, and that connection to the earth flooded her with the fortitude she needed to face this. She straightened her spine. She could be brave. It was time to call off the dark.

She grabbed the Edgar Allan Poe book and tossed it out of the grave. Next, she tossed the dead raven out, then picked up the gun and hesitated briefly. The grave was so deep that climbing out would be a challenge. She set the gun on the grass above and placed her palms on either side, dug the front of one shoe into the yielding dirt wall for leverage as she lifted her opposite leg, and then hoisted as hard as she could. She rolled onto the grass and felt the heat of the nearby fire immediately.

Grabbing the gun, she sat up on her knees. There was destruction all around. Wood panels torn from the side of the house; the wheelbarrow, buckets, and trash scattered about.

The entire garden was burning, and Wade lay unmoving on the grass. She didn’t think he was dead though. She’d seen death before and it felt different.

Isaac faced Helen and asked, “What will it be?” He’d ripped their entire property to pieces and beat her husband unconscious, yet Isaac didn’t have a mark on him. He looked the same as always, ready to sit down to dinner with her.

Only minutes earlier, she’d tentatively confronted Isaac with a trembling in her core, but now the fear was gone. From Tyler, she’d drawn the strength she needed. When her body had crawled out of the grave, an important part of her soul had crawled back from the dead too. All that buried courage and hope. It was still there, deep inside her. It had never really abandoned her after all; she just hadn’t been able to feel it for so long, but now she could. She knew what she needed to do.

Helen stood up, holding the gun at her side. “I want to thank you, Isaac.”

“Thank me?” He smiled in faint amusement. “Go on then. Thank me.”

“You showed such curiosity in my thoughts and feelings. I don’t know if that was real or if you were just enjoying messing with your brother’s wife, but it doesn’t matter. Because it made me feel a certain way, and it woke me up. So thank you.” She inhaled fortitude and stood up straighter. “But now I want you to leave.” The heat of the fire prickled on her face.

“Leave? But we were just getting used to each other’s darkness.” His eyes looked sad, and she believed the reaction was genuine.

For a moment, Helen considered the man Isaac might have been if his father hadn’t beaten him, if his mother hadn’t died when he was a little boy, and if he’d learned to be friends with his brother instead of rivals. Or if he’d simply done what so many other people in this world managed to do: endure life’s worst challenges instead of letting the devil on their shoulder win.