The rest of the world was hungry to know everything about the dead, but I wasn’t even ready to hear their names yet.
No one seemed to know much about the terrorists. They had ties to a cult somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, but the cult’s leaders were denying any knowledge or responsibility. The gunmen themselves had all been killed in the battle—no notes left behind, no manifestos, no clues.
Wasn’t the point of terrorism to send a message of some kind?
It was as if they’d simply been in love with death.
* * *
We drove all afternoon, eating in the car, stopping only to use gas pumps and restrooms. We passed Abilene, Midland, and Odessa, and then the cities faded into a scrubby wilderness dyed brown by winter. Oil derricks pulsed on the horizon, and dust devils swirled across our path, carrying road trash with them. The highway sliced through outcrops of gray rock that had been dy***ited open. The clear blue sky grew huge above our heads.
Mostly we were silent, and I thought about Yamaraj—his eyes, the way he moved, his voice telling me that I was safe. Those details were fast in my memory, while the rest of what had happened at the airport was an awful blur. The only part of that night that had seemed real was the part that no one would ever believe.
When Mom and I did talk, our conversation matched the landscape—brittle and withered. She asked about Dad’s new apartment, what I thought of Rachel, and the fancy restaurants where we’d eaten. She asked me what classes I would be starting soon, and even delivered a little speech about keeping up the grades in my final semester of high school.
I could see that Mom was trying to be kind, talking about trivia instead of terrorism. But as the hours passed, her avoidance of reality started driving me crazy. Like she was gaslighting me, trying to make me think I’d imagined the whole attack. Every time her eyes drifted up to the stitches on my forehead, or the little tear gas scar on my cheek, an expression of confusion crossed her face.
But nothing that night had been imaginary. I’d gone to another world. Yamaraj was real. I could still taste his kiss, and when I touched my lips, his heat still lingered there.
Plus, he’d practically dared me to believe in him, which is a pretty good way to get me to do anything.
Mom just kept talking about nothing, driving us farther away from Dallas, her hands tight on the wheel. The closest she got to mentioning the attack was to say that my luggage would arrive in San Diego soon after we did.
“They said a few days.”
No mention of who “they” were. The FBI? The airline? She spoke as if my bag were simply lost, not sitting in a pile of evidence for the biggest Homeland Security investigation in a decade. No big deal.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’ve got plenty of clothes at home.”
“Yeah. It’s much better to lose your luggage on your way home than going away!”
As if that was the big takeaway from surviving a terrorist attack.
“All I need is a new phone,” I said.
“Well . . . maybe we can stop somewhere and get you one.” She hunched forward, scanning a cluster of passing signs, as if one might lead her to an Apple store out here in the West Texas desert.
Didn’t she understand that I needed things to make sense right now? I needed my mother here in reality with me, not off in make-believe land.
We kept driving. Long pauses were easy in this terrain, and it was a while before I spoke up again. “I feel weird without it. That phone saved my life, kind of.”
Her grip on the steering wheel grew tighter, and her foot must have tensed on the gas pedal, because the car shuddered beneath us.
“What do you mean, Lizzie?”
I took a slow breath, drawing calm from the cold place inside me.
“I was running away, we all were, and I called 911. The woman on the phone said . . .” My voice gave out, not with any emotion that I could feel, but like a ballpoint pen running dry. I’d already told this story, I realized—to Yamaraj.
My mother waited, staring at the road ahead, the muscles in her shoulders tight, and I heard that calm voice from my phone: Can you get to a safe location?
“She told me to play dead,” I finally said. “That’s why they didn’t kill me. They thought I was dead.”
My mother’s voice was tight. “The doctors told me about that paramedic, the one who thought you . . .”
“He was really sorry about that.” I shrugged against my seat belt. “Guess I fooled him, too. But it wasn’t even my idea. The woman at 911 told me what to do.”
Well, not quite. She hadn’t told me to think my way to the afterworld, meet a boy, and then come back. And she hadn’t mentioned anything about seeing ghosts, either.
Tom hadn’t reappeared once they’d given me my own room, so it was possible I’d imagined him. Or maybe he only haunted the ER.
Mom made a soft sound. She was trying to say something, but couldn’t. The hairbreadth narrowness of my escape was more reality than she could take.
That was when I realized the weird truth: my mother was more freaked out than I was. And the fact that I was so cool and calm, not sobbing and shuddering, only made it worse for her.
She didn’t know about my dark place inside, where I could escape anytime. She didn’t know that I’d walked the afterworld.
I was going to have to take care of her. But at that moment the best I could manage was, “It’s weird not having a phone.”
“We’ll get you another one,” she said firmly. “Exactly like the old one, so everything feels normal.”
“I’ll get Dad to pay for it.”
Her knuckles went white again, and I waited through another long pause, staring out the passenger window at the pulsing highway lines.
At last she said, “Your father really wanted to come, he told me to tell you.”
I frowned, because it hadn’t even crossed my mind that Dad would fly down to Dallas. I was used to him bailing when things got crazy. Once when I was twelve, one of our cooking pots had exploded, a grease fire flowering across the kitchen ceiling, and he’d beat the flames down with a towel like a total hero. He probably saved the whole house from going up. But the moment the fire was under control, he’d driven away to spend two nights in a hotel, leaving me and Mom to call the fire department, clean up, and air out the house.
That was just Dad being normal.
“I’m glad he didn’t come,” I said.
My mother let out a half-stifled laugh. “Really?”
“He’s tough to handle when he’s freaked out. And you’ve taken care of him enough for one lifetime.”
She turned her head and stared at me. I’d never said anything like that to her before, even though it was totally true.
When her eyes started to glisten, I pointed ahead. “Um, Mom? Road?”
Her attention went back to the highway. “He called this morning. But I was kind of bitchy and wouldn’t let him talk to you, since he wasn’t flying down. Sorry.”
“That’s okay.” I smiled. “He can call me when he buys me a new phone.”
I don’t know how late we drove that night. I fell asleep just as the sun was setting, the sky turning red and swollen overhead.
We were at a motel when the car stopped next, and I woke up just enough to stumble to our room. I remember that the bed smelled wrong—not bad, but wrong, because it wasn’t mine and I wanted to be home. And then I was asleep again.
* * *
It was still dark when my brain switched back on, all at once.
There was an energy running through my body. Not the panic I’d felt at every sudden noise for the last two days, but something dark and warm. My fingers went to my lips, which were buzzing.
I sat up and looked around the room, taking a moment to remember where I was. Light from the ice machine outside was creeping around the blackout shades, revealing my mother asleep on the other bed. The darkness felt close, like something physical pushing in on me.
I’d fallen into bed in dirty clothes, but on the dresser were the T-shirts and underwear we’d bought at the hospital gift shop. I took a shower, which didn’t wake Mom up, and dressed quietly. The hospital shop hadn’t sold socks, so I slipped my sneakers over bare feet, grabbed my hoodie, and went outside.
The sky was streaked with shredded clouds, slowly turning burnt orange as dawn approached. A few spots of broken glass in the motel parking lot glittered like frost in the still, cold air. I pulled on my hoodie and crossed my arms against the chill.
A neon sign read WHITE SANDS MOTEL, and across the highway loomed the silhouettes of sand dunes. We’d made it all the way to New Mexico.
My father had taken me to White Sands for a camping trip when I was ten or so. I wondered if Mom even remembered that I’d been here before.
With no cars in sight, I strolled across the empty highway, brazenly stopping in the middle to close my eyes and listen. The warm energy that had awakened me was still playing on my lips. In the silence I could almost hear it crackle.
When I opened my eyes again the desert looked as blank as fresh paper. White Sands is a desert like little kids draw, the dunes featureless humps receding into the distance. The scrubby deserts of California had looked wrong to me ever since that camping trip with Dad.
The dunes were low by the highway, but after half an hour of walking they’d grown high enough that I was climbing with hands and feet, shedding little avalanches with every step.
From the dune tops, the desert lay spread out before me, ripples in a vast white sheet. The sky had lightened, erasing all but a few stars, and the eastern horizon was blossoming with dawn. Down among the dunes were metal picnic tables bolted to blocks of concrete. Forty-foot poles shot up from them, little plastic flags at their tips.
I remembered those flagpoles from our camping trip. They were to help picnickers find their way back to the tables. The sands were so featureless that you could get lost a hundred yards from your picnic and wander straight out into the desert, thinking that your table was just over the next dune, or maybe the next. . . .
I wondered if there were any ghosts out there, tourists who’d gotten lost in the desert.
That’s when I felt it strengthen, the energy that had awakened me, a tingle on my lips and a heat in my veins. And I recalled something that Yamaraj had said . . . Believing is dangerous.
But I didn’t have a choice in what I believed. I wasn’t going to forget what had happened in Dallas. I’d seen firsthand what philosophers had been arguing about forever, that there was something after death. Whether it was good or bad, I didn’t know, but at that moment the metaphysical issues didn’t seem as important as one simple question:
Could I do it again?
Not only because it was something amazing, going to the land of the dead. But because Yamaraj had thrown me a challenge, saying that if I called him, he’d be there.
Did I believe in him enough to see him again? Did I believe in the afterworld at all?
I climbed the highest dune in sight and stood there, letting my breathing slow. I closed my eyes, focusing on the cold place that lived inside me now, my souvenir from the other side.
Was there some spell that could take me across? The first thing to try was obvious. . . .
“I’m dead.” A shiver went through me as I spoke the words, but when I opened my eyes nothing had changed out in the desert. Of course, I wasn’t lying in a pool of my own blood, with bullets whizzing overhead and panic in my veins. Plus, I was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of a stuffed bear holding a box of chocolates. (That’s hospital gift shops for you.)
I closed my eyes again, letting myself remember the details I’d spent the last two days shutting out—the cold terror of running for my life, the squeak of tennis shoes on tile. And then, out of nowhere, gun smoke stung my nostrils, and a shudder went through my body. My heart beat harder, but I kept my breathing slow.