Yet, still, the threatening tears shook in the corners of my eyes as I spoke, “Where were you twelve years ago when I needed you?! Where were you before I killed Johnny? Where were you before the hollow took me? You have no right to do that to me. You have no right to come here now and feed me false bullshit when I can’t go back and change anything. The facts are still the same. What’s done is done! I can’t go back and undo it! That was a very nice speech,Fallon!but you’re twelve years too late!” I screamed, releasing her, shoving her away before I did or said something more I would regret. I fisted my hands at my sides, turned my head. “Get in the car. I have to take you home.”
“Coward!” she spat.
“Monster,” I corrected, taking off to my room for a shirt.
Fallon followed behind me. “Hypocrite.”
“Guilty.” I snatched a shirt from my bed, slipped it over my head.
When I turned to face her, tears were rolling down her heated face. “Don’t do this to me,” she whispered desperately. “Please, Julian, don’t let them take you.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
Brave headlights shone out in front of us only to be swallowed by the night. An anxious silence filled the inside of the cabin as I drove to the Morgan Property. If Fallon could become the car door she was pressed against, she would have. She kept her eyes looking out of the fogged window, her gaze connecting the stars.
I wondered what was going through her mind. I wondered why she was shivering though I had the heat blasting. I wondered if she would one day forgive me for this.
And when I pulled into the driveway, I almost changed my mind.
“I love you, Julian Blackwell,” she whispered, her gaze locked on the house before us. “Nothing’s changed. It’s always been you. Every time.”
Fallon pulled the lever on the car door, and my chest clenched. The car door opened, and a pain throbbed in my heart. She planted one foot on the ground, and I couldn’t bear it.
“Fallon, wait,” I blurted, grabbing her arm.
The car door hung open, and I grabbed the back of her head, looked in her eyes. All the things I wanted to say were burning in my windpipe. I closed my eyes. Opened them. I swallowed, feeling the tightness in my throat. The words wouldn’t come out, and Fallon shook her head and yanked herself from my grasp.
I slammed my palms against the steering wheel before dropping my head in my hands, unable to watch her walk away.
Chapter 38
Fallon
The painI’d been holding inside me was cold and heavy, like cement drying in my chest.
I didn’t want to enter the house. I was stuck between Julian in the car behind me and the eerie emptiness of Gramps not being there on the other side of the door in front of me. Misery in the shape of a needle injected my chest, and heartbreak sliced my back like a whip. I couldn’t escape this pain coming at me from both sides.
As soon as the door clicked in place, a foreign wail pushed up from my throat. I fell back against the door, slid down to the wooden floors. And when I thought there were no more tears left, there were.
Oh, how there were.
An endless sea of them, and each one as hot as a blue flame.
The house was cold and heavy, too, like everyone had packed up and left. Gramps’ body wasn’t here. Gramps’ spirit wasn’t here, and I’d been lying here, curled at the bottom of the stairs in front of the grandfather clock. It chimed every three hours, reminding me time was passing. Without Gramps. Without Julian.
When Dad died, I’d been confident there was no greater pain. At that point, nothing else mattered. The things people said about me, the way people treated me, nothing. Nothing hurt as badly as realizing I’d never see Dad again, even more so because he never came to visit me.
Then Marietta died, and I thought I was prepared, since I had already experienced the greatest loss. But I was wrong. There was an entirely new level of pain. Like when a mother would say she didn’t realize how much love she had in her until she had a second baby. I didn’t know how much pain I was capable of feeling until I lost again. And again. And again. When did it ever stop?
The house was so quiet that I fell asleep here, on the ground, but only because I couldn’t bear to stay awake any longer, waiting for his spirit to come. Hours passed. Athump!at the door woke me when I forced myself onto my feet, still wearing Julian’s shirt, Julian’s too-big pajama pants that hung from my hip bones and covered my feet. I opened the door, and the morning newspaper was laying ironically over the leaf-covered doormat. I stood there, staring at it. It was ironic because the mail kid had finally learned to get the news to the front door, but only after Gramps couldn’t be here to see it.
Fucker. Or as Gramps would have said:dunderhead.
I suppose it was true. It wasn’t until after you were dead when people started to listen.
As if I’d done it a thousand times, and with the newspaper clutched in my hand, I made it to the coffee pot, started it. Freddy in the Mournin’ played in the background, talking about Halloween, the Samhain festival, some other things too, I was sure. None of it mattered.
Then I finished the crossword puzzle for Gramps because he couldn’t, arrested to this routine as if it were a sick twist of Gerald’s Game—a book written by King about a girl who was handcuffed to a bed in a secluded lakehouse by her husband just before he died of a heart attack. Just like her, no matter which way I looked at it, I was still here. I was stuck. I was alone because Gramps spirit still hadn’t visited me.
