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Adam entered and placed his hand on Colin’s head. “What is it, little man?”
Maisie looked up, dark circles under her pained eyes. “He keeps calling for me, but every time I come near him, he starts screaming bloody murder. I don’t know what to do.”
Iris began rubbing large circles on her niece’s back. “There, there. We will figure out what is wrong.”
“Mama,” Colin said and reached up to tug Adam’s hand off his head.
“Do you think it may have something to do with this weather? I don’t know if y’all have been outside, but there is something really weird in the air out there.” As if it meant to punctuate his point, another flash of lightning lit up the window. Colin let loose with another wild shriek.
Ellen came and placed her hand on Adam’s forearm. “It isn’t the weather causing his distress,” she said and paused for a clap of thunder. “It’s his distress causing this weather.”
“Okay,” Adam heard himself saying. Every time he thought he had adjusted to all this witch stuff, every time he thought he had grown inured to the strangeness, the Taylors always managed to whip out one more little surprise. Adam’s phone rang, and he startled. He felt a flush of anger rush through himself. He hated showing his nerves, especially in front of women he had vowed to protect. He looked at the caller ID; it was the station.
He answered it on the second ring. “Cook.”
“Hey, Detective,” the voice on the other end said. It was Miriam, one of his favorite uniformed officers. “I am so sorry to disturb you, I know you are off duty, and this is a big night for you and your boy—”
“What is it, Miriam?” he asked, feeling for all the world like he had just had a lifeline to normality tossed to him. He clutched on to it like a drowning man.
“Can you meet me over at the hospital? We picked up a young woman a few minutes ago. She was wandering around naked and confused.”
“Drug-addled young people are hardly a novelty in Chatham County, Miriam.”
“Of course, Detective, I know that. Only I don’t think this girl is on anything. It’s more like she has been in an accident or something.”
He looked down at his watch. “No, my son’s party starts in less than an hour. I can’t make it right now.” Something struck him as odd. The baby who had been screaming at the top of his lungs had now fallen silent, and was sitting in his crib paying what seemed like very close attention to his phone call. “Why are you calling me about this?”
“Well, when we picked her up over off Randolph—”
“I’m sorry, where?”
“Randolph,” the officer repeated. “Not too far from the Baptist Center. When we picked her up, she asked for you.”
“She asked for me?”
“Yes, sir,” Miriam said; then Adam could hear the sound of the officer conferring with either a doctor or nurse at the emergency room.
“Who is she? What’s her name?”
“She said her name is Mercy. She said you will know her.”
“I’ll be right there.” Adam hung up the phone, never taking his eyes off Colin, who now sat before him cooing happily and clapping his hands.
“Mama,” the child said and giggled.
“Something has come up,” he said. Conflicting sets of memories began to fight it out in Adam’s mind. Somehow, he did know this Mercy, but somehow he knew the world in which he had known her was a very different place from where he now stood. A sense of free fall, the sight of the ground rushing up beneath him gave way to a sense of being caught. Mercy, the name acted like a key, unlocking parts of him that had ceased to exist. He tore his eyes away from the baby and focused on the women. “Tell Jordan and Oliver I will be back as soon as possible.” He knew Grace would be furious with him, but he couldn’t worry about that right now. “This is an emergency. I’ve got to see to it,” he said, backing up. The sky beyond the window caught his eye. In a mere instant it had changed from steel to cerulean. No, that’s not the name he knew that color by. He knew it as “haint blue.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
“So tell me, am I dead or not dead?” my cousin Paul asked, his complexion paling as he realized what my return could mean to him.
My aunts had been glued to my side from the moment Adam had walked me into the house. I sat now on the foot of Ellen’s bed, wrapped in one of her light robes. Oliver had spun the chair of Ellen’s makeup mirror around and stared at me in dumbfounded wonder.
I no longer had the nearly omniscient awareness of the line. I was no longer part of the line. I was just me. Mercy. Its secrets were no longer mine, and I was quickly forgetting the few bits of arcane knowledge I had brought back with me. I looked at my cousin, and searched his face for the boy I had known, the boy who had died. Two possibilities—alive or dead—balanced in the flux of what now passed for reality. My mind flashed back for a moment on Schrödinger’s cat. Here was a wave I intended to collapse once and for all.
“If you were dead, I don’t think you would be here to ask me that question.” Somehow Colin had managed to extract me without undoing the changes the line had made on my behalf. At least it appeared so for now, although time might prove otherwise.
“Of course you’re alive. We both are. We all are,” Oliver said as he abandoned his chair to come and stand before me. He put his hand under my chin and drew my eyes up to meet his. He held me there some moments, staring deeply into my soul. Finally he shook the finger of his other hand in my face. “Gingersnap, don’t you ever do that again.”
