Note: So much for weekly updates. Thank you so much for your patience! I'll try to update more regularly over the summer now that my writer's block is fading.
Also: Poor Ellie. :(
September 1993
The golden autumn sun hung high in the sky, filtering down through the branches of the massive trees around us and casting dancing shadows across the ground. The day was chilly. Every so often, a little gust of wind would come up and nip right through my fuzzy sweater and leggings, but I didn't mind the cold. The forest smelled like dirt and pine needles and dry leaves. Gray was having a lot of fun with the leaves. He kicked them up with every overactive step he took, and every so often, he would jump and stomp, relishing the crisp sound they made as they crackled and crunch beneath his sneakers.
The forest was quiet, very quiet. Aside from the whisper of the wind through the trees, the only sounds were the ones that we made.
Naturally, we made a lot of noise.
"I'm not a pirate," I protested, one hand on my hip. "I'm a ninja." To prove my point, I brandished my sword in my hands. Well, to be honest, it wasn't really a sword—it was a stick, and a very fine one at that, long and straight and perfect for whapping against tree trunks as we passed them, and maybe for occasionally poking Gray when he wasn't looking my way. "Mama said I make a great ninja. See?" I whipped the stick back and forth through the air. It made a satisfying whistle as it moved.
"Yeah, well," Gray said. "You're not very sneaky. Mama said ninjas have to be sneaky!"
I thought about that for a little while.
"I'm a knight," I announced to the world at large.
"What about a shield?" Gray said. "You gotta have a shield to be a knight."
"Hmm." I looked around the forest. I spotted a huge chunk of tree bark that had separated from the trunk of a great pine tree. I picked it up. It covered my entire arm, but I couldn't figure out how to hold it like a shield. A few moments later, it crumbled to pieces in my hands. I rolled my eyes as Gray laughed.
"Knights are boring," I said, poking him with my sword. "Ninjas are cooler."
"Hey!" he whined. "No, they're not. Pirates are the coolest. Yarrrrrgh!" He picked up his own stick and poked me back, right in the belly. I giggled and brandished my sword, parrying his next poke. Undeterred, he poked again, and this time I dodged and gave him a little thwap on the shoulder. He darted backwards and hid halfway behind a tree, sticking his tongue out with a big ol' "Nyaaaaaa!"
I took a menacing step towards Gray and he took off running.
"Gray!" I laughed. "Get back here! I'm gonna get you!"
I chased after him, jumping over fallen logs as I went. Gray skidded to a halt near a giant granite boulder and turned to fight; he got in a good stinging whap or two before I ran around the boulder. He followed, but I was ready for him. When he came around the rock, I jumped forward and tackled him to the leafy ground with a loud omph! I landed on top of him, but then we rolled around and I found myself underneath him. We wrestled, and after a minute or so, Gray ended up on his back; I straddled his chest and pinned him to the ground by his arms.
"I win," I said, grinning.
"Aww, c'mon, Ellie!" he groaned. "Let me up!" He tried to push himself up, but with his arms pinned, he couldn't get enough leverage to dislodge me.
"First," I said, grinning, "say that ninjas are cooler than pirates."
"No way," he said.
"I'm not letting you up then."
"Come onnnnn," he whined. He tried getting up again. It was no use. I was heavier than he was, and I was on top.
"Say it!" I said.
"No!"
"Then we're gonna be here all day."
"Fiiiiine," he said, defeated. "Ninjas are cooler, okay?"
"Now say 'Ellie is a great ninja'."
"Ellie! Let me up!"
I considered holding him down longer, but I doubted I could get him to say much more and I was getting bored anyhow, so I sighed, all dramatic-like, and stood, offering my hand. We brushed the leaves and dirt off our clothing (and, in my case, out of my hair), gathered our sticks, picked a direction, and started walking. I led, as usual. That was just how things went with us.
For a minute or two, it was just us and the forest, and then Gray piped up.
"Hey, Ellie?" he said. "How come Mama got so mad at you this morning?"
I shrugged. "She wasn't mad. She was just—upset." I thought back to all the times when Mama had been really mad—not just exasperated or irritated, but actually, truly mad, which was always scary to see because after the initial outburst she got so deathly quiet and intense. I could only recall a few times she'd gotten that angry, like maybe the time I had used our dial-up modem to log into the university's servers late one night using Mama's username and password. I wasn't supposed to know her password, but I had seen her type it plenty of times, and once she'd accidentally typed it into a terminal window instead of the password prompt, and I'd memorized it before she even noticed. So I'd used her password and had started playing with some of the commands I'd seen Mama use before and I'd ended up crashing the server...and the entire department network. Mama had been furious. Not for crashing the servers—I think she'd been proud of that, in a weird way—but for using her password, and for tying up the phone line late at night (way past my bedtime, too), and for sneaking the keyboard lock key from the desk drawer in her study so I could use the family computer in the first place.
The next month, with lots of lectures and without access to a computer, had been really boring.
In comparison to Mama's fury back then, her little scolding this morning was nothing. But it was still odd, because Mama usually didn't tell me off so harshly just for being a little noisy.
"So...why was she upset?" asked Gray.
"I dunno," I said, shrugging. "You know how she gets when she has the meetings at the university."
"Yeah," Gray said. "She gets all nervous and stuff."
"Nu-uh," I said. "Mama doesn't get nervous. She just gets super serious."
We came to a little babbling brook. I hopped from rock to rock to cross it and Gray did the same thing just behind me. We began climbing a hill, following an animal trail that went diagonally upward among the trees.
"I think she's nervous," Gray said. "Remember when the Dean and the grumpy guy came to visit? Or when she was showing everybody her programming...thing at the school?"
"She was serious then too," I said. "She wasn't nervous. Mama can't be nervous."
"Whatever," Gray said.
As we neared the top of the hill, the ground became rockier. Moss-covered granite boulders stuck out of the dirt at odd angles. There was a huge one a little ways down from the crest of the hill, and I mean huge like thirty feet across and tall. It was flat like a table, with a single jagged crack running through it, and it was tilted, so that one end was buried in the hillside and the other was high above the ground. We climbed up the boulder. At the pinnacle, we could see out above the treetops. We had a great view down into the valley. Gray stayed back a few feet from the edge of the boulder, but I went up as far as I could, put my hands on my hips, and gazed outward at the valley and the mountains beyond. I felt like I owned the world.
"You're not supposed to go up to the edge," Gray said. "Mama said so."
"Mama's not here," I said. I peered down past my scuffed red Mary Janes at the forest floor far below. I took a step back. All right, maybe that was quite a drop, but that wasn't going to keep me very far away. "C'mon, it's fine."
Gray hesitated, then shrugged. He went over to the edge of the boulder a few feet away from me, leaned his weight back, and hurled his stick outward with all his might. It flew for maybe fifty feet, then hit a tree and became lodged in the branches.
"Aww," he said.
"There's like, a thousand other sticks here," I pointed out.
"We should bring some paper with us next time," he said. "Then we could make paper airplanes! I bet they'd go really far."
"Only if we pick them up when we're done," I said. "Mama wouldn't like it if we left them. Let's pick some really bright colors so we can find them when they land."
"Sure," Gray said. "Hey, can I throw your stick too?"
I handed him my stick. He went back over to the edge, keeping enough distance between us so he could swing his stick nice and wide. He put one foot forward, right at the edge, and the boulder cracked beneath him with a sharp pop!
I watched, wide-eyed, as the rock beneath his foot slid away. He dropped the stick, arms windmilling. "Gray!" I shouted, leaping to my feet. "Look out!" I ran forward, reaching for his arm, but he was tumbling backwards. Our fingertips brushed. I saw Gray's terrified face, frozen for an instant in time as his fingers grasped at air, and then he was gone, screaming downward, until something went thud.
"Gray!" I shrieked. "GRAY!" I was afraid to get too close to the edge to see what had happened to my little brother, so I ran back down the boulder to where it met the hillside. When I got near the bottom, I tripped and landed hard on both knees. My leggings tore, and there was blood, but I got back up and kept running. I doubled back around the boulder and ran down that hillside like my feet had sprouted wings. My heart thudded and icy fear coiled in my gut. I ran and ran, yelling my brother's name.
I came across a gigantic fallen log and clamored up over it. I jumped off the other side to save time, but landed badly on my ankle. I forced myself to stand again and started limping as fast as I could. The boulder seemed to be even bigger than it was before. I didn't understand why it was taking so long to reach Gray. I could hear him crying for me, could hear it like he was right beside me, but no matter how fast I moved, I couldn't seem to make it around the curve of the boulder to where his broken body lay.
Tears streamed from my eyes; tears of pain and tears of guilt because this was all my fault, because I hadn't listened to Mama, and I'd gone up to the edge, and Gray had wanted to be just like his big sister and had gone up and done the same thing and now he was hurt really bad.
I came around the curve and there he was, lying motionless on his back among the leaves and pine needles. I fell to my knees and crawled to him, grabbing his wrist.
"Gray," I cried, "Gray, wake up. Wake up!" He wouldn't move. His arm was icy cold beneath my fingers. I screamed at him and shook his shoulders until he opened his eyes. I sobbed in relief—but there was no life in his eyes. They were dark, like marbles. He turned his head stiffly, like a machine, and said, "It's your fault, Ellie."
"No!" I said. "Gray, no, you're still alive, you're okay!"
"You killed me," he said sadly. He reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a blob of putty with a timer attached. He pressed a button on the timer, and it began to beep. In his other hand, he was suddenly holding a pistol. "So now, I'm going to kill you."
"No," I whispered. I stood on shaky legs and backed away, but he had risen to his feet, still moving all mechanically, and he matched every step I took. "Gray, please!" I cried. "It wasn't my fault!"
He didn't respond, but he kept coming at me, so I did the only logical thing: I screamed for Mama and turned and ran as fast as I could, tearing down that leaf-strewn hillside. When I got to the brook at the bottom, I tried jumping over it, but my foot caught on a rock and I went face-down into the icy water. My clothes were covered in mud and my knees stung like fire and my ankle had just about had it, but I made myself get up and staggered through the water to the other side and clamored onto solid ground. I limped as fast as I possibly could through the trees. I could hear Gray's footsteps behind me, the rapid crunch-crunch as he ran through the leaves while the timer on the bomb went beep-beep, beep-beep, getting ever louder as he neared. I dared to look over my shoulder for just an instant to see how close he was, but then I tripped on something hard and the ground went out from underneath me, and now it was my turn to flail and scream and fall down, down, down into a pitch black void—
I sat up so fast, I nearly clocked Dr. Tillman in the forehead.
"Woah," she said, leaning back. "Hey, you awake now?"
I gasped and choked down air. I swayed; it felt like I was still falling. I grabbed Dr. Tillman's arm tightly to balance myself. The image of Gray holding a bomb hovered, like a ghost, before my eyes, and no matter how much I blinked, it wouldn't go away.
"I—I—oh god—" I chocked.
"You're safe," Dr. Tillman said quietly. She put her free hand on my shoulder. I could feel her warmth through the hospital gown. "Safe and sound. I'm gonna guess you were having a nightmare."
"R-really?" I stuttered. "G-gee, how could you t-tell?"
"Your heart rate was really high," Dr. Tillman said. "I saw it on my workstation monitor." She hesitated, then added quickly, "You were yelling in your sleep. I don't need a degree for that diagnosis." She looked down at my hands, which were still clamped tight around her arm.
"Sorry," I whimpered, releasing her.
"It's okay."
I shivered. The afterimages from the dream were finally fading, but Gray's voice still echoed in my ears—or was that my ears still ringing from the explosion? My mouth was dry, very dry.
"Can I have some water?" I mumbled. "Please?"
"Sure," Dr. Tillman said. Squeezing my shoulder once, she bustled off, ducking into the bathroom. I heard water running. Trembling, I laid back down in the hospital bed and focused very hard on taking deep breaths and not crying.
"Here," said Dr. Tillman. She handed me a paper cup. I drank most of its contents in seconds, swallowed wrong, and coughed a third of it back into the cup. My throat burned, but the pain helped to ground me, to distract me from the disjoint memories of the dream that were still flashing before my eyes.
"Thanks," I gasped. She took the cup from me and set it on the bedside table. Then she sat down in one of the chairs and scooted it a little closer to the bed.
"Is there anything I can do to help?" she asked.
"Can you get me that time machine for real?" I asked.
"Sadly, no."
"I don't think there's much you can do then," I whispered. "Thanks though."
Dr. Tillman looked like she wanted to say something, but couldn't decide just what. The silence between us quickly turned awkward. I looked away, staring down at my feet beneath the sheets. I wiggled my toes and moved my ankle, just to make sure I hadn't really jumped off a log. There was no pain, only a dull ache. Beside me, I heard Dr. Tillman shuffle in her seat, as though she wanted to stand up, but she hesitated. A moment later, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her lean forward, balancing her elbows on her knees and clasping her hands in front of her.
"I don't mean to pry," Dr. Tillman said quietly. "But, when I came in, you were saying something over and over. Is 'Gray' somebody's name?"
"Yeah," I said. "He was my brother."
"Ah," Dr. Tillman said. She caught on to the was right away. "I'm sorry."
"Thanks," I said.
Now the silence was even more awkward.
"I might know a little about how you feel," Dr. Tillman said. "I lost a sibling too."
"You did?" I asked, looking over at her.
"Yeah," she said. "My sister, Gabrielle." She got this far-away look in her eyes, and her voice softened. "Little Gabbie..."
"I'm so sorry," I whispered.
Her mouth quirked in a sad little smile for an instant. "Sounds like we both are," she said.
"Yeah," I said. I couldn't look her in the eyes. Instead, I focused on fondling the edge of my sheets, noting idly that they were even softer than the ones on my bed. My splinted hand fumbled, moving stiffly. "How long ago?" I asked.
"Eleventh anniversary, coming up."
My lip trembled. "Do you think about her still?"
"Almost every day," Dr. Tillman said. "You?"
"Not as much as I used to," I said. "But I really miss Gray." Despite my best efforts, my voice began to crack. "I never get to have good dreams with him. Only nightmares."
"Do you have the nightmares often?" Dr. Tillman asked softly.
"I used to have them only every once in awhile," I said, shrugging. "Maybe...once a month, if that. Then they started getting worse, after—after I—" I hesitated, not sure how to explain the whole John-saving-my-life thing. I wasn't sure how much Dr. Tillman actually knew about what he did. "After I almost died," I said, deciding to keep it simple. "And since then, I've...seen a bunch of things I didn't really want to see."
"C-beams glittering in the dark near Tannhauser Gate?"
"Pretty much." I couldn't help but make a tired grin. "You must watch a lot of sci-fi."
A shrug. "For months after Gabbie died, I was too depressed to do much more than stay on the couch all day. Movies were a good distraction. I had nightmares, so I stayed up most nights until I dozed. I think I watched Blade Runner through my eyelids the first time around." She chuckled, but it was a weak sound.
"I do that too," I said. "Stay up late, I mean. I program when I can't sleep. Sometimes I program straight through 'til morning."
"It's really not healthy. But sometimes it's what you have to do."
"Yeah."
"Did they go away?" I asked.
"The nightmares?"
"Yeah."
Another shrug. "I keep them under control pretty well these days. My shrink had me try a few things that helped. You ever heard of lucid dreaming?"
"Yeah. I tried that. But I never can figure out when I'm actually dreaming."
"It takes practice. Keeping a journal helped too, if only because it kept me from bottling everything up inside."
Maybe I should try keeping a journal again, I thought. But I haven't had the patience since I was...thirteen? Fourteen?
"How long did it take?" I asked.
She seemed to get what I was saying right away. "Years," she said. Her mouth twitched and she cast her eyes downward. Her shoulders slumped and she suddenly looked much older. "It's a little better now. I had...closure." Her voice began to waver ever so slightly. "But some nights, I open my eyes, and I still see her face, and it hurts just like the day I found out she died."
The room became very quiet.
"Makes you wish Doc Brown would hurry the hell up, huh?" I whispered.
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, it does." And for the next few minutes, neither of us said anything.
There wasn't anything more to say.
#####
