would have given a limb to make it go away, any residual anger at Grady’s selfishness now forgotten, but he just said ‘So you want to go over to Darryl’s? There’s no percentage in staying here.’
Grady tossed his cigarette butt. ‘Sure, why not? You got any weed? I couldn’t listen to Darryl’s shit with my head straight.’
‘Yeah, I got some. I don’t want to bring it to Darryl’s, though. Shit’ll be gone before I got time to find my rolling papers. Let’s go back to mine, pick up some beers, have a smoke. When your head’s in the right place, we can join the party.’
‘Sounds good,’ said Grady.
They finished their beers and left them on the bench, then scooted round the side of the bar so they didn’t have to see Kathleen Cover and her shitbird husband again. They got bitten some more on the way to Teddy’s truck, so back at the house Teddy hunted down a bottle of calamine while Grady put on some music – CSNY, Four Way Street, couldn’t have been more mellow if Buddha himself was on backing vocals – and then Teddy produced the Baggie of weed, and it was very good weed, and they never did make it to Darryl Shiff’s party but instead talked long into the night, and Grady told Teddy things that he had never told anyone before, including the story of the airplane that his father and Paul Scollay had found in the Great North Woods.
‘That’s it,’ said Teddy, through a fug of smoke. ‘That’s how you do it.’
He stumbled to his bedroom, and Grady heard closets being searched, and drawers being emptied on the floor, and when Teddy returned he was holding a business card in his hand, grinning like it was a winning Powerball ticket.
‘The plane, man. You tell them about the plane . . .’
That night, a message was left on the answering service for Darina Flores, the first time any such message had been received in many years.
It had begun.
14
In her dark bedroom, Darina Flores drifted in and out of consciousness. The painkillers disagreed with her, causing tremors in her legs that tore her from sleep. They also provoked peculiar dreams. She couldn’t have called them night terrors, for she was herself virtually without fear, but she experienced sensations of descent, of falling into a great emptiness, and she felt the absence of grace with a pain that was unfamiliar to her. The god she served was a pitiless one, and there was no consolation from him in times of distress. He was the god of mirrors, the god of form without substance, the god of blood and tears. Trapped in her misery, she understood why so many chose to believe in the Other God, to follow Him even though she saw in Him only a being as heedless of suffering as her own. Perhaps the only true difference was that her god took pleasure in agony and grief; at least, one might argue, he had a sense of involvement.
She had always considered herself to have a high tolerance for pain, but she had a fear of burns, and a reaction to them that was disproportionate to the severity of the injury. Even a minor burn – the careless brushing of a candle flame, a match held for too long – caused blistering to her skin, and a fierce throbbing that found an echo deep inside her. A psychiatrist might have speculated on childhood trauma, an accident of youth, but she had never talked with a psychiatrist, and any mental health specialist would have been forced to travel further back than distant memories of her childhood to find the source of her terror of burning.
Because her dreams were real: she had fallen, and she had burned, and somewhere inside she was still burning. The Other God had made it so, and she hated Him for it. Now her inner pain had its most ferocious external manifestation yet, the extent of it hidden from her by dressings and the refusal to allow her a mirror.
Barbara Kelly had surprised her in the end. Who could have guessed that she would prove to be so weak and yet so strong, that she would seek to save herself at the last by turning to the Other God, and in doing so would inflict such damage on the woman sent to punish her? My beauty, she thought, now gone; temporarily blind in one eye, with the possibility of lasting damage