CHAPTER 4

                                                                COLLEGE AWAKENING 

     The night smelled of rain and petrol and the particular metallic sweetness of wet asphalt — a smell that Kai associated, for reasons he had never examined carefully, with the feeling of things about to change. He walked home from the late train with his collar up and his hands in his pockets and his mind in the familiar quiet country he inhabited most evenings: not thought exactly, not feeling exactly, but the space between them where Summer's absence lived.

He heard the tires before he saw the headlights. A sound that was wrong — not the normal friction of braking but the panicked, overcorrecting shriek of a car whose driver had lost the conversation with physics. Then light, flooding across the wet street from the wrong angle. Then the impact: metal and glass and the awful finality of something solid becoming suddenly, irreversibly something else.

     He ran without making the decision to run.

     Later, he would not be able to explain clearly what had driven him toward rather than away from the sound. Some part of him had simply moved and the rest of him had followed, and he was across the street and at the wreckage before his conscious mind had finished processing that there was wreckage to go to.

     The car had mounted the kerb and met the stone bollard with its front driver's side, which had crumpled inward in a way that made the geometry of the vehicle suddenly wrong. Steam rose from the hood. The windscreen had spiderwebbed but held. One headlight still worked; the other faced the sky at an incorrect angle.

     She was half-out of the passenger door when he reached her — she had been trying to exit, or perhaps the impact had opened the door against her weight. Blonde hair, dark with rain. A cut at her hairline from which blood was moving in thin rivulets, dividing around her eyebrow and tracking down the side of her face with terrible patience. Her hands were braced against the door frame. Her eyes were open and present in the terrifying way of eyes that are present too completely — seeing too much, processing nothing.

He pulled her clear. He got her arms over his shoulders and his arm behind her back and he moved her to the pavement, to the dry shadow under the pharmacy awning, and crouched with her there while her breathing made broken, sawing sounds.

     "Don't let me die." She said it without dramatic intonation, quietly, the words falling out of her with the pressure of a belief too large to keep inside. She was holding his sleeve. Her fingers were white with grip strength.

                                                                                  * * *

     "You're not dying," he said. He said it with the specific certainty he reserved for things he needed to be true. He pressed his jacket against her temple and held it there. The sirens were already beginning their distant, crescendoing approach.

Her name, she told him in the ambulance, was "Lilith"

     She said it with the precision of someone establishing something important — not just identifying herself but asserting that she was a person with a name, that she existed and had a right to exist and wanted the person holding her hand to know this. He held her hand and told her his name and she repeated it back to him once, quietly, and then closed her eyes and didn't open them again until the hospital.

     He sat in the corridor outside her room for two hours. He did not know why. She was no one to him — a stranger he had pulled from a car on a wet street. He had given a statement to the attending paramedic. He could have left. Instead he sat in the blue plastic chair under the corridor's fluorescent light and felt, for the first time in months, something other than the specific weight of Summer's absence. Not happiness. Not relief. Something more like utility — the blunt, temporary comfort of having been needed.

She woke screaming.

     He heard it from the corridor — a sound that came from somewhere deeper than fear, from the substrate of the nervous system where the body stores things it has decided are not safe to forget. He went to the door. Through the small window he could see her sitting upright in the hospital bed, hands rigid at her sides, eyes open but seeing something that was not the room.

The nurse was calm and practiced. She settled Lilith back down. She adjusted something on the monitor. She patted her hand and spoke in the low, even register of a person accustomed to this particular kind of terror.

     When he was allowed in, Lilith was sitting with the blanket pulled to her chin, hair pulled back, a square of white gauze taped at her temple. She looked younger than she had on the street. She looked like something that had been recently broken and had not yet figured out how it was going to reassemble.

                                                                                   * * *

     "They told me you stayed," she said.

     "Yes."

     She considered him for a moment. "Why?"

He didn't have an answer he was ready to give. He said, "I wasn't in a hurry to be anywhere," which was true in every way and meant nothing in particular.

     She nodded slowly, accepting this. Then, in the same quiet, matter-of-fact tone with which she had told him her name in the ambulance: "I keep dreaming of a girl disappearing. In every nightmare, she's at the edge of something — a platform, a window, a doorway — and then she's not. I don't know her. I've never seen her face. But she keeps being there and then not being there and I always wake up screaming."

The room was very still.

     Kai's breath moved through him with deliberate, controlled slowness. The pendant was in his pocket. He was aware of it with the awareness of a bruise.

     "That's a strange dream," he said.

                                                                                  * * *

     Lilith looked at him with eyes that were still a little raw around the edges from the nightmare. "It feels like a memory," she said. "Like something that actually happened to someone. Like I'm borrowing someone else's grief and can't find the return address."

He looked at his hands.

     "Get some sleep," he said. "I'll be outside if you need anything."

     She didn't ask why again. She just closed her eyes. And in the corridor, sitting in the blue plastic chair under the merciless light, Kai pressed the pendant between his palms and thought about thresholds and about girls who stood at the edge of things and about the dreams of strangers and about how grief, apparently, was not as private as he had always assumed it to be.

                                                                                      ✦

                                                                        Volume I - Complete

                                                     End Of Volume I - Stayy Tuned for Volume II

                                                                                 ⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕⁕

                                                    ( We will continue from chapter 5 to 8 in Volume II)