After Obsession Part 31

The house is so silent, except for the sound of regret and of mourning and of pain and loss, and that's the way it is supposed to be. Alan leans toward us and wraps his arms around both of us. For a second I imagine my mom smiling at me. Alan and I did what she couldn't do. We protected us.

"It's okay," I whisper into Court's hair. "It's all okay now. It's okay."

After a minute Court lifts her head. She sniffs and rubs at her nose. "What happened with that stupid Cheeto? Did they sell it yet?"

I wipe the tears off her cheeks. "The bidding's up to $1,200."

"You're not serious," Alan says.

"Man." Court flops back against the armrest. "This world is so freaking weird."

* 26 *

ALAN.

"You really have changed." Mom reaches over and touches my hair when she says it. This is unusual for Mom; she's not much of a toucher, really. But since she came home that day and found the three of us sitting on Aunt Lisa's couch, things have been a little strange. Not that they weren't strange before.

The hair Mom touches is gray. I am a seventeen-year-old half-Navajo boy with streaks of gray hair at both temples. I guess that comes from traveling in the Spirit World. From dying and coming back.

"We all change, Mom," I tell her. "It's part of life."

"Says the boy who fought so hard to stay in Oklahoma," she teases as her hand drops to her side. Her hands slide around and she hooks her thumbs in her back pockets; a strange look comes over her face. "I'm sorry I dragged you away from home."

"Like Metallica says, 'Anywhere I roam, where I lay my head is home.' " I grin, and she shakes her head. "There's also that other saying, you know." I look through the open front door to where Aimee and Benji are cleaning paintbrushes in the yard.

"What saying is that?" Mom asks.

"Home is where the heart is."

She laughs at me then. "We only had to travel halfway across the country to find a girl good enough for my boy."

"I think there were other reasons," I say. "But Aimee is a definite perk."

"Talking in riddles again?"

I smile at her, but I know it's kind of a sad smile. "It's the new me."

It's Sunday afternoon, more than two weeks after the battle with the River Man. A lot has changed. I went to my first New England funeral, for Chris Paquette, and I'd be happy never to go to another one again.

Blake was picked up on U.S. Highway 1 about ten miles north of town the day after the battle with the River Man. An older couple on their way to the coast saw him stumble out of the woods and collapse beside the highway. They brought him into town and left him at the hospital, where he was treated for hypothermia and questioned by the police. Blake didn't know anything about Chris's death. The news was pretty hard on him. After our fight, he'd gone home, he said. That's the last thing he remembers until he woke up facedown in the woods beside the river.

"It was like a shadow had been sucked out of my head," he'd said in a newspaper article printed a couple of days after he was found.

Today, the house is full of the smell of fresh paint. The upstairs hallway has new Sheetrock, put in yesterday, and today it is painted, all with the help of Aimee and her menfolk. Courtney has new furniture, though most of it came from a secondhand store in Bangor. She calls it retro-chic, and I honestly don't know if she's trying to make the best of sleeping on a used bed or if she really thinks it's cool.

Gramps and Mr. Avery come down the steps. Gramps is grinning at me. "Women love a gray-haired man," he jokes, running a hand over his own head.

I laugh. "Thanks again for all your help," I say.

"I don't mind," Gramps says. "But you know Benji's price."

"I know." I grin and look back out the door. Benji and Courtney are using the brushes to throw water at each other now. The sky is overcast and the TV weatherman says it'll snow tonight. "Dinner and a movie with me and Aimee. And a new football."

"He'll expect some kissing on the date," Gramps says. "That way he can tell on her. And you have to teach him how to throw the football like Tom Brady."

"Well, if I must," I agree. "I suppose that's a pretty good trade for the $1,567.43 you guys got for a Cheeto with b.o.o.bs."

Yes, that's how much they got for the Marilyn Monroe Cheeto. It was Benji's idea to give the money to Aunt Lisa to help pay for fixing her house.

Benji may be the only one besides me, Aimee, and Courtney who truly believed our story about what happened in Aunt Lisa's house that day. Maybe Gramps does; he's hard to read. But n.o.body really argued with us, either, so maybe I'm just not giving them enough credit. Maybe they sense a change in the house. In the town. Maybe they're just glad the dreams are gone and Courtney is back to normal.

Gramps and Mr. Avery move away, going outside. Aunt Lisa walks out of Courtney's room upstairs and smiles at me as she comes down. A stair above me, she's my height. She stops there and puts her arms around my shoulders.

"Thank you," she whispers into my ear. Maybe she does believe. She leaves me and goes outside with the others.

It's just me and Mom, alone in the house, watching everyone else outside. Mom comes over, pulling a folded paper out of her back pocket. Even before she hands it over to me I see the University of Oklahoma logo on it. "This came for you yesterday," she says. "You were busy, and ..." She sighs. "It's from the athletic director's office."

"Oh." I unfold the cream-colored sealed envelope. There's a stamp from where it was forwarded from our old Oklahoma City address. I look at the red OU logo in the return address corner. I don't open it. I just look at it.

"Alan?"

"Yeah, Mom?" Her eyes are watering a little. "What's wrong?"

"You look just like your father," she says.

I put my arm around her and hug her so tight her back pops. I release her just a little as I say, "I know, Mom. Sometimes Fate puts us right where we need to be, and we don't realize it until later."

She hugs me back, then steps away. Now the tears are running down her cheeks, but she's smiling.

She says it again. "You really have changed."

* 27 *

AIMEE.

Things slowly become a new kind of normal. The footsteps in our house go away, but occasionally I still smell vanilla. My dad doesn't get cranky when Benji or I mention it. Instead he smiles, and sometimes he'll even say, "It's nice to know she's still around."

And it is.

My mom may not have succeeded in stopping the River Man, but she lost her life trying to keep her family safe. We think the painted rock and the ruined painting were done by her, not him; she was trying to warn us, to keep us safe still.

I used to be embarra.s.sed by my mom, but now I know what she is-she's a hero. I can only hope that I'll use my gifts half as bravely as she did. I only hope that I can figure out exactly what my gifts can do. I will. I'm sure.

Sometimes I write her little notes and drop them into the river, which is sort of silly, I know. They say things like "I love you" or "Thank you" or "Look for Court's dad." They are small pieces of paper, and the tide takes them, wetting them and heavying them before they finally sink below the water. It might be silly, but I think she reads them.

The most recent one I sent was just this morning. Benji was off at swim practice with Gramps, and I walked down to the river with my dad. The water was smooth and beautiful. You couldn't tell that people died in it. You couldn't tell that something wicked lurked inside it. We took out the kayaks and when we were just about a quarter mile toward the bay, he said, "You seem stronger now, Aimee."

"I think I'm liking who I am," I said, and stopped paddling for a second, just letting the tide slowly take me. "It sounds cheesy and maybe egotistical, but I like the parts of me that are Mom, the weird healing-dreaming parts."

"I like those parts, too," he said.

And I know he wasn't lying.

I put the big yellow paddle back into the water and we pushed toward Eagle Point. That's where I dropped the last note. The river took it. Water pulled it away and under until it became just a speck of white paper, and then just a memory. Once it was gone, a seal head popped up and it reminded me of her-those huge eyes.

"What did it say?" my dad asked.

I swallowed. "It said, 'Thank you for being my mom. I am so proud to be your daughter.' "

"She would be proud of you," he said. His voice broke, and he obviously tried to save himself from being all emotional by splashing me with water. It tasted of ocean salt.

I splashed him back for a second, and then I couldn't help it. I asked, "Are you? Are you proud of me?"

"I am, but it doesn't matter."

"It doesn't?"

"No. What matters is that you're proud of yourself."

* Acknowledgments *

Carrie and Steve would like to thank Jeaniene Frost and Melissa Marr for introducing them, as well as Edward Necarsulmer IV at MacIntosh & Otis Literary Agency and Mich.e.l.le Nagler and Margaret Miller at Bloomsbury for believing in this project.

From Carrie:.

Thanks to Jackie Shriver, Karin Raymond, Chris LaSalle, Dave Lafleur, Dave Stoker, and Joe Tullgern for helping me make it through all the scary that happened before college. Thanks to my favorite knight, Edward Necarsulmer, Lori Bartlett, Marie Overlock, Alice Dow, Kelly R., Laura Hamor, Amilie Bacon, Jennifer Osborn, Jim Willis, Emily Ciciotte, Betty Morse, Lew Barnard, Melodye Sh.o.r.e, Deb Shapiro, Fans of Awesomeness, and Shaun Farrar for helping me make it through all the scariness of now.

From Steve:.

Thanks to Gayleen Rabakukk and Paul White for keeping me going when writing was more frustration than fun. Thanks to Edward Necarsulmer for taking on Carrie's friend. Thanks to Ms. Dragoun for not having me arrested when I wrote my first horror story in tenth grade, and to Dr. Gladys Lewis for showing me that literature is more than individual books. Thanks, also, to the students, staff, and my fellow faculty members at Western Heights High School. And in memory of Wilda Walker, who introduced me to creative writing and became a friend.

ALSO BY CARRIE JONES.

Need.

Captivate.

Entice.

After obsession / by Carrie Jones and Steven E. Wedel. - 1st U.S. ed.