Chapter 8
This chapter is a little weird, but I promise, that's not why I'm dedicating it to gemjam! ;) I was so stuck on this part, and panicking about getting my quota, and on that very day gemjam read "Spooks" and left wonderful feedback and the muse went, "Eureka!" and...well, you'll see. Thank you, hon, you were my angel and you didn't even know it!
Chapter 8
Somehow, Jack gets through another day. His mother’s visit that morning had started things off badly, and then a complicated case had presented itself at work, and by mid-afternoon Jack finds himself so bogged down with worry and stress that he knows he needs a break. He asks another surgeon to cover for him for the rest of the afternoon, and he makes his way to the hospital library to study up on his patient’s diagnosis. He sits at a long table in the middle of the book-lined room, rubbing his eyes in the glare of the overhead light. Compulsively, he keeps pulling his cell phone from his pocket and checking his messages, as if Sawyer would ever text message him to tell him that he’s ready to take him back. It’s impossible for Jack to concentrate, though, so he closes the textbook and leans back in his chair, and lets his eyes roam around the room.
It it’s a well-stocked library. Nothing like the elaborate set-up they’d had at St. Sebastian, but still very nice for an average-sized city hospital. Jack had considered a position at a smaller hospital in Maryville, a town closer to Sawyer’s home, and Sawyer had encouraged him to take it. But the relative lack of resources available there, compared to the far-more-adequate ones to be found in the city, had lured him here in spite of Sawyer’s protests. The only time he regretted the decision was late at night when he faced more than an hour’s drive to get home. He fights off a wave of homesickness as he stares blankly into space.
It finally registers that his eyes have fallen on a portrait of a woman on the wall, and that he’s staring because something about her caught his eye. He assumes that she is the woman for whom this room - the Brooke Wentworth Memorial Library - is named. She was an attractive woman, young-ish, with blond hair pulled back in a low ponytail and a casual, seventies-era pantsuit. He assumes she is no longer living, since this is a “memorial library,” and he wonders how she died. And then he asks himself why he cares, and why he can’t stop staring at the portrait. Finally, he realizes it’s because the woman reminds him of Sawyer.
He drops his forehead to his hand and rubs eyes, tired and blurry from too much work and too little sleep and too many unshed tears. He’s seeing Sawyer everywhere these days, in the faces of strangers on the street, in people he passes in the hospital’s corridors, and now he’s imagining that he sees him in portraits of hospital benefactors. He knows it’s ridiculous, it’s a sign of his loneliness and his longing for the man he loves, but still he reaches for his laptop and types in “Brooke Wentworth” and “Knoxville, Tennessee.”
Half an hour later he leaves the hospital, gets into his car, and begins to drive toward the mountains.
********
The spooks still call to him. Even now, in another time and another place, a place about as far from the foothills of the Smokies as you can get. Ocean instead of river, jungle instead of forest, and James isn’t even James anymore, he’s Sawyer. Yet the spooks still call.
He lies in his tent, listening to the whispers. The whispers beckon him, calling him into the jungle. But no one goes into the jungle anymore. They don’t go now, since the Others discovered their camp, because going into the jungle means certain death. And yet the whispers still call to him, and beneath their song he hears his papaw’s voice. “Spooks ain’t for hidin’ from, son. Spooks are for facin’ down, lookin’ straight in the eye.”
“Ain’t no spooks in these parts,” he tells himself. “It’s nothin’ but frogs.” And he lets the jungle lure him in.
The trees close around him as he makes his way deeper into the undergrowth. Bugs sting his skin and sharp blades of grass slice his bare feet, but still he forges ahead, following the hissing sound. “Nothin’ but frogs,” he tells himself, but the sound is magical, it’s irresistible. It lures him forward, on and on through the darkened jungle.
After what seems like hours he emerges from the trees and finds himself on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. The moon is high in the sky above. It sparkles on the water and casts its blue-white light over the clearing, making the tableau almost bright as day. Sawyer stands alone at the precipice, and still the whispers call to him.
“What do you want?” he asks the darkness. “What do you want from me?”
The night doesn’t answer, but from the jungle comes a swirl of darkness, blacker than the night, and the whispers grow louder. The inky mist rushes toward him and there’s nowhere to run; there’s nothing behind him but empty air. So Sawyer stands his ground, he stands tall and proud and he faces his fate as the mist envelops him.
Inside the mist rages a firestorm. Lightning flashes in the smoky swirl, and in the flashes of light he sees faces, images from his past that still haunt him in his dreams. He sees his father’s face, bloodied as it had been the last time he’d seen him, and his mother’s face, unmarred and still. He sees the face of the man he’d killed, and in the whispers he hears the man’s dying words, “It’ll come back around.” And then the images fade and another one takes their place, the image of a little boy with tears on his face. “What do you want from me?” he asks him softly and the whispers grow louder still and there’s nowhere to run. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nothing to do but to step backward into the void.
Sawyer feels himself falling, and still the black mist surrounds him, still the boy’s face shines before his eyes. And as Sawyer flies out of this world and toward the next, the child reaches out from the darkness and takes his hand.
Sawyer awakens in the clearing on the cliff’s edge, his body prone on the ground. The mist is gone, and so are the whispers. And something else is gone, too. Gone from his heart is the weight of responsibility that he’s carried for so many years. Gone is his lifelong blame for the boy under the bed, because the boy reached out. The boy saved him. Sawyer feels renewed. He’s alive.
Tomorrow he will leave on the raft and sail away into the unknown. He doesn’t know if he’ll live or if he’ll die, but whatever his fate may be, it will be enough. He’s been given a chance, and what he makes of it is up to him. Sawyer begins his journey toward home.
********
The sky above the mountaintops is beginning to fade to a deeper gray, and the wind in the trees is getting chillier, and still Sawyer hasn’t found his way. He thinks about the lost Boy Scout, and he wonders what he did at night when he was cold and helpless and alone. Did he look for shelter and try to sleep? Or did he continue to wander, clinging to hope that just around the next bend he’d find rescue? Sawyer knows there’s no hope, no rescue on his horizon, but still he walks on.
One thing that Sawyer does know is that spirits roam these mountains at night. He’d heard them as a child, and he heard them after he came back. They’ve been quiet since Jack’s been here, but he has no doubt that they’ll return tonight.
Sure enough, as the light starts to fade the sounds begin, haunting whispers in the cold mountain air. Sawyer tries to make out words but the sounds are elusive, floating and twirling on the wind. White wisps of vapor twine like ghosts through the branches of the trees that surround him. And then they begin to converge. As the cacophony of whispers grows ever louder, the clouds drift together to form one great glowing mass, and Sawyer stops and stares, mesmerized.
The great billowing cloud descends and surrounds him. He’s been here before, he thinks, but there are no faces in this cloud, no flashing lights. All he sees is white; all he feels is a sense of peace and calmness. Though the vapor has no substance, it seems to pull at him, urging him forward. Almost without his conscious will, his feet begin to move.
He doesn’t know how far he travels, blinded and mysteriously led, before the mist evaporates just as mysteriously as it formed. The sky has deepened from watery gray to purple dusk, and he finds himself alone in a clearing. Suddenly he realizes where he is. He’s on the edge of the churchyard where his grandparents had brought him every Sunday, where he’d learned all about fire and brimstone and the pits of hell. Sawyer knows now that the preacher had it wrong; hell isn’t fiery but cold, cold and empty and black as night. The people in these parts had drifted away over the years; living in these times is too scary in its own right to add in terror about what happens after death. Sometime after James left Tennessee in shame and before he returned in glory, the little church had become just as dark and cold and empty as the hell James knew existed, no matter what they’d tried to tell him inside those dirty white walls.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees movement, and he looks toward the cemetery. Someone is standing there, in the corner of the graveyard that holds his family plot. No, he thinks, it can’t be. He begins to walk forward slowly, part of him wanting to run to Jack, part of him wanting to run away. But Jack looks up from the headstone he’s staring at and his eyes meet Sawyer’s, and Sawyer can’t look away.
“Hey, Sawyer,” Jack says in a voice that doesn’t sound like Jack’s at all, so soft and tentative are the words. “Planning on shooting someone?”
Sawyer looks down at the shotgun in his hand. “Bear,” he says. “It’s a long story.”
“Oh.” Jack sounds relieved. “I thought maybe, after the way you acted the other day, that was meant for me.”
Sawyer takes a few more steps forward, until he’s standing beside Jack, beside his parents’ grave. “Because that’s what I do, right? I shoot people.”
“I was thinking maybe it was because you hate me.”
Sawyer’s eyes travel over the granite marker rising from the ground. He notices that it’s chipped, and weeds have grown up thick around its foundation. He hasn’t been here since he was nineteen.
“What are you doin’ here, Jack?”
Jack looks back down at the grave. “I know now,” he says. “I know why you didn’t want me to take the job in the city. I found this place a few days ago when I was jogging, and today I was in the hospital library and I saw her picture. She looks like you, you know. I remembered the name on the headstone, and I did some research, and I put it all together. All except for one thing.”
There’s a heavy feeling in Sawyer’s gut, and the urge to run away is almost overwhelming. Of all the secrets that have come out in the last few days, this is one he never wanted to face, never wanted Jack to know. “What’s that?” he asks, dreading Jack’s words.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why keep it a secret, Sawyer? I don’t understand.”
Sawyer stares at the grave, at the carved letters of her name and his daddy’s…his own. At the larger, bolder name carved above them, “Ford.” They hadn’t put her maiden name on the stone, “Wentworth.” They hadn’t acknowledged who she’d been at all.
Sawyer’s mother had confessed. She’d confessed out of shame, out of some misguided sense of love. She’d told her parents that she’d allowed a man named Sawyer to con her out of the money her grandmother had left her. She told his daddy that she’d cheated on him. And what had it gotten her? It had gotten her disowned by her family and kicked out of her home by her husband, left penniless and alone save for a son, a child who was suddenly a burden, just another mouth to feed. And in the end, it had gotten her killed.
“Secrets keep you safe, Jack.”
They stand silently in the gathering dusk, each lost in his own thoughts. Finally Sawyer says, “Why haven’t they come for me yet?”
“Who?” Jack answers in a voice that tells Sawyer that he already knows.
“I know you turned me in. If you ain’t done it yet, you will.”
“I didn’t turn you in. And I’m not going to.” Jack reaches for his shoulder and grabs him roughly. He pulls him in and wraps his arm tight around Sawyer’s waist, and he takes Sawyer’s mouth in a hard, fierce kiss. When he pulls away, his voice is as fierce as his lips. “Secrets keep you safe.”
link to Chapter 9
Chapter 8
Somehow, Jack gets through another day. His mother’s visit that morning had started things off badly, and then a complicated case had presented itself at work, and by mid-afternoon Jack finds himself so bogged down with worry and stress that he knows he needs a break. He asks another surgeon to cover for him for the rest of the afternoon, and he makes his way to the hospital library to study up on his patient’s diagnosis. He sits at a long table in the middle of the book-lined room, rubbing his eyes in the glare of the overhead light. Compulsively, he keeps pulling his cell phone from his pocket and checking his messages, as if Sawyer would ever text message him to tell him that he’s ready to take him back. It’s impossible for Jack to concentrate, though, so he closes the textbook and leans back in his chair, and lets his eyes roam around the room.
It it’s a well-stocked library. Nothing like the elaborate set-up they’d had at St. Sebastian, but still very nice for an average-sized city hospital. Jack had considered a position at a smaller hospital in Maryville, a town closer to Sawyer’s home, and Sawyer had encouraged him to take it. But the relative lack of resources available there, compared to the far-more-adequate ones to be found in the city, had lured him here in spite of Sawyer’s protests. The only time he regretted the decision was late at night when he faced more than an hour’s drive to get home. He fights off a wave of homesickness as he stares blankly into space.
It finally registers that his eyes have fallen on a portrait of a woman on the wall, and that he’s staring because something about her caught his eye. He assumes that she is the woman for whom this room - the Brooke Wentworth Memorial Library - is named. She was an attractive woman, young-ish, with blond hair pulled back in a low ponytail and a casual, seventies-era pantsuit. He assumes she is no longer living, since this is a “memorial library,” and he wonders how she died. And then he asks himself why he cares, and why he can’t stop staring at the portrait. Finally, he realizes it’s because the woman reminds him of Sawyer.
He drops his forehead to his hand and rubs eyes, tired and blurry from too much work and too little sleep and too many unshed tears. He’s seeing Sawyer everywhere these days, in the faces of strangers on the street, in people he passes in the hospital’s corridors, and now he’s imagining that he sees him in portraits of hospital benefactors. He knows it’s ridiculous, it’s a sign of his loneliness and his longing for the man he loves, but still he reaches for his laptop and types in “Brooke Wentworth” and “Knoxville, Tennessee.”
Half an hour later he leaves the hospital, gets into his car, and begins to drive toward the mountains.
********
The spooks still call to him. Even now, in another time and another place, a place about as far from the foothills of the Smokies as you can get. Ocean instead of river, jungle instead of forest, and James isn’t even James anymore, he’s Sawyer. Yet the spooks still call.
He lies in his tent, listening to the whispers. The whispers beckon him, calling him into the jungle. But no one goes into the jungle anymore. They don’t go now, since the Others discovered their camp, because going into the jungle means certain death. And yet the whispers still call to him, and beneath their song he hears his papaw’s voice. “Spooks ain’t for hidin’ from, son. Spooks are for facin’ down, lookin’ straight in the eye.”
“Ain’t no spooks in these parts,” he tells himself. “It’s nothin’ but frogs.” And he lets the jungle lure him in.
The trees close around him as he makes his way deeper into the undergrowth. Bugs sting his skin and sharp blades of grass slice his bare feet, but still he forges ahead, following the hissing sound. “Nothin’ but frogs,” he tells himself, but the sound is magical, it’s irresistible. It lures him forward, on and on through the darkened jungle.
After what seems like hours he emerges from the trees and finds himself on the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. The moon is high in the sky above. It sparkles on the water and casts its blue-white light over the clearing, making the tableau almost bright as day. Sawyer stands alone at the precipice, and still the whispers call to him.
“What do you want?” he asks the darkness. “What do you want from me?”
The night doesn’t answer, but from the jungle comes a swirl of darkness, blacker than the night, and the whispers grow louder. The inky mist rushes toward him and there’s nowhere to run; there’s nothing behind him but empty air. So Sawyer stands his ground, he stands tall and proud and he faces his fate as the mist envelops him.
Inside the mist rages a firestorm. Lightning flashes in the smoky swirl, and in the flashes of light he sees faces, images from his past that still haunt him in his dreams. He sees his father’s face, bloodied as it had been the last time he’d seen him, and his mother’s face, unmarred and still. He sees the face of the man he’d killed, and in the whispers he hears the man’s dying words, “It’ll come back around.” And then the images fade and another one takes their place, the image of a little boy with tears on his face. “What do you want from me?” he asks him softly and the whispers grow louder still and there’s nowhere to run. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, nothing to do but to step backward into the void.
Sawyer feels himself falling, and still the black mist surrounds him, still the boy’s face shines before his eyes. And as Sawyer flies out of this world and toward the next, the child reaches out from the darkness and takes his hand.
Sawyer awakens in the clearing on the cliff’s edge, his body prone on the ground. The mist is gone, and so are the whispers. And something else is gone, too. Gone from his heart is the weight of responsibility that he’s carried for so many years. Gone is his lifelong blame for the boy under the bed, because the boy reached out. The boy saved him. Sawyer feels renewed. He’s alive.
Tomorrow he will leave on the raft and sail away into the unknown. He doesn’t know if he’ll live or if he’ll die, but whatever his fate may be, it will be enough. He’s been given a chance, and what he makes of it is up to him. Sawyer begins his journey toward home.
********
The sky above the mountaintops is beginning to fade to a deeper gray, and the wind in the trees is getting chillier, and still Sawyer hasn’t found his way. He thinks about the lost Boy Scout, and he wonders what he did at night when he was cold and helpless and alone. Did he look for shelter and try to sleep? Or did he continue to wander, clinging to hope that just around the next bend he’d find rescue? Sawyer knows there’s no hope, no rescue on his horizon, but still he walks on.
One thing that Sawyer does know is that spirits roam these mountains at night. He’d heard them as a child, and he heard them after he came back. They’ve been quiet since Jack’s been here, but he has no doubt that they’ll return tonight.
Sure enough, as the light starts to fade the sounds begin, haunting whispers in the cold mountain air. Sawyer tries to make out words but the sounds are elusive, floating and twirling on the wind. White wisps of vapor twine like ghosts through the branches of the trees that surround him. And then they begin to converge. As the cacophony of whispers grows ever louder, the clouds drift together to form one great glowing mass, and Sawyer stops and stares, mesmerized.
The great billowing cloud descends and surrounds him. He’s been here before, he thinks, but there are no faces in this cloud, no flashing lights. All he sees is white; all he feels is a sense of peace and calmness. Though the vapor has no substance, it seems to pull at him, urging him forward. Almost without his conscious will, his feet begin to move.
He doesn’t know how far he travels, blinded and mysteriously led, before the mist evaporates just as mysteriously as it formed. The sky has deepened from watery gray to purple dusk, and he finds himself alone in a clearing. Suddenly he realizes where he is. He’s on the edge of the churchyard where his grandparents had brought him every Sunday, where he’d learned all about fire and brimstone and the pits of hell. Sawyer knows now that the preacher had it wrong; hell isn’t fiery but cold, cold and empty and black as night. The people in these parts had drifted away over the years; living in these times is too scary in its own right to add in terror about what happens after death. Sometime after James left Tennessee in shame and before he returned in glory, the little church had become just as dark and cold and empty as the hell James knew existed, no matter what they’d tried to tell him inside those dirty white walls.
Out of the corner of his eye he sees movement, and he looks toward the cemetery. Someone is standing there, in the corner of the graveyard that holds his family plot. No, he thinks, it can’t be. He begins to walk forward slowly, part of him wanting to run to Jack, part of him wanting to run away. But Jack looks up from the headstone he’s staring at and his eyes meet Sawyer’s, and Sawyer can’t look away.
“Hey, Sawyer,” Jack says in a voice that doesn’t sound like Jack’s at all, so soft and tentative are the words. “Planning on shooting someone?”
Sawyer looks down at the shotgun in his hand. “Bear,” he says. “It’s a long story.”
“Oh.” Jack sounds relieved. “I thought maybe, after the way you acted the other day, that was meant for me.”
Sawyer takes a few more steps forward, until he’s standing beside Jack, beside his parents’ grave. “Because that’s what I do, right? I shoot people.”
“I was thinking maybe it was because you hate me.”
Sawyer’s eyes travel over the granite marker rising from the ground. He notices that it’s chipped, and weeds have grown up thick around its foundation. He hasn’t been here since he was nineteen.
“What are you doin’ here, Jack?”
Jack looks back down at the grave. “I know now,” he says. “I know why you didn’t want me to take the job in the city. I found this place a few days ago when I was jogging, and today I was in the hospital library and I saw her picture. She looks like you, you know. I remembered the name on the headstone, and I did some research, and I put it all together. All except for one thing.”
There’s a heavy feeling in Sawyer’s gut, and the urge to run away is almost overwhelming. Of all the secrets that have come out in the last few days, this is one he never wanted to face, never wanted Jack to know. “What’s that?” he asks, dreading Jack’s words.
“Why didn’t you tell me? Why keep it a secret, Sawyer? I don’t understand.”
Sawyer stares at the grave, at the carved letters of her name and his daddy’s…his own. At the larger, bolder name carved above them, “Ford.” They hadn’t put her maiden name on the stone, “Wentworth.” They hadn’t acknowledged who she’d been at all.
Sawyer’s mother had confessed. She’d confessed out of shame, out of some misguided sense of love. She’d told her parents that she’d allowed a man named Sawyer to con her out of the money her grandmother had left her. She told his daddy that she’d cheated on him. And what had it gotten her? It had gotten her disowned by her family and kicked out of her home by her husband, left penniless and alone save for a son, a child who was suddenly a burden, just another mouth to feed. And in the end, it had gotten her killed.
“Secrets keep you safe, Jack.”
They stand silently in the gathering dusk, each lost in his own thoughts. Finally Sawyer says, “Why haven’t they come for me yet?”
“Who?” Jack answers in a voice that tells Sawyer that he already knows.
“I know you turned me in. If you ain’t done it yet, you will.”
“I didn’t turn you in. And I’m not going to.” Jack reaches for his shoulder and grabs him roughly. He pulls him in and wraps his arm tight around Sawyer’s waist, and he takes Sawyer’s mouth in a hard, fierce kiss. When he pulls away, his voice is as fierce as his lips. “Secrets keep you safe.”
link to Chapter 9