led her to a child’s tree house. To remind her to love as a child loves. Because children don’t go to Hell.
sCratch sCratch sCratch
She heard the deer outside, but they couldn’t get her up here. And she still had a few hours until her mother would be awake. So, she could set the alarm on her phone and just wait for the deer to go away. Then, she could go home safely. Yes. That’s what she’d do. She would sleep inside the tree house. And in the morning, she would be safe as a child in her mother’s arms.
sCratch sCratch sCratch
Mary Katherine ignored the deer and set her alarm for two hours. She laid her head on the floor of the tree house, and she suddenly felt as snug as a child in bootie pajamas. Warm and safe as if Jesus were holding her. Spooning her the way they do in movies. Telling her that she was forgiven. And that she was loved. She curled up, and as she fell asleep, she dreamed that she could almost hear Jesus whisper in her ear. His voice was soft.
Almost like a woman’s.
Chapter 47
Christopher sat up in bed. He looked outside his window and saw the Mission Street Woods in the wind. The bare branches swaying back and forth like arms in a church, worshipping. He could feel the itch stirring in the breeze.
Waiting for the town to wake.
Christopher took a deep breath and tried to quiet his mind. The last trip to the imaginary side had made the itch much more powerful. But with it came the pain. Christopher had gotten used to the headaches and nosebleeds.
But this fever was a little scary.
The heat rose from his skin like steam off highway asphalt. His temperature climbed until the town started going to bed. Christopher thought he could feel lights being switched off. Televisions going dark. And with the silence, his temperature dropped a little. The itch died down. And the flash cards slowed because most of the town was sleeping. But he knew that when the town woke up, the flash cards would come through his mind like a jackhammer. And he couldn’t let that happen. He had to focus on one thing and one thing only today.
He had to find the message David Olson left for him at school.
But making it to school was another matter entirely.
Christopher didn’t know how much of a fever he had, but he knew it was bad enough to make his mother keep him home. So, he dragged himself out of bed and walked down the hall. He tiptoed past his sleeping mother to her bathroom. He climbed onto the sink, opened the medicine cabinet, and took out the bottle of aspirin she kept on the top shelf. He had gone through the kitchen supply a long time ago. He took other bottles, too. Aleve, Advil, Tylenol, and any cold medicine with the term “non-drowsy” on it. After wrestling the childproof caps off, he took a few pills from each bottle to avoid the suspicion of an empty. Then, he returned them all to the cabinet and tiptoed back through her room.
“Honey? What are you doing?” the voice asked.
Christopher turned and saw his mother sleeping.
“I had a bad dream,” he lied.
“About what?”
“I dreamed you had gone away. I just wanted to make sure you were still here.”
“I’ll always be here,” she whispered. “Do you want to sleep here tonight?”
Yes.
“No, thanks. I feel better now.”
“Okay, I love you,” she said and rolled back over to dream.
Christopher went back to his bedroom and waited for morning to come. He would have read his books to pass the time, but the truth was that he had memorized all of them already. He saw them all like flash cards in his mind. Pages turning like generations from birth to death. Beginning to end. Trees to paper.
As dawn broke, the itch broke with it. And with it, the pain. Christopher felt his neighborhood wake. Each stretch and yawn. Cups of coffee being poured and cereal crunching. He wondered how there could possibly be enough coffee for everyone to drink all the time. He remembered his father loved coffee and doughnuts with sugar on them. Christopher thought about his father’s funeral. How there were white headstones as far as the eye could see. He wondered about all those graves. If every soul who ever lived took up a grave, then eventually…