Ashes, Ashes

8 - Revelations

"You know. At work." 

I stumbled over a story about the hospital. My job in the pharmacy keeps me out of the path of the death and devastation for the most part, but everybody who works in a hospital has seen somebody die, from the bright-eyed interns to the dead-inside veteran nurses to the night shift receptionist. 

So the story wasn't a lie, but it wasn't what I was thinking about. Not really. 

"Logan." Abby's voice was kind, but laced through with gravity; when we played this game, we played for keeps. "Drink the rest of your beer." 

My heart leapt into my throat, and I almost choked on it. I felt my skin go cold, blood drawing from the surface as it retreated from my limbs. My hand shook. 

"You were there, right? Everybody knows." 

"You don't have to tell the story," Richard broke in, and he looked stricken, almost as pale as I was, tan skin going ashy gray and bloodless. You could almost hear him adding, Please don't. 

"I was there," I agreed, because I needed to say it, I needed to let at least some of this awful poison of guilt leak out, like releasing a pressure valve. "I called the ambulance. I was...it was too late." 

I tipped the rest of my beer back, drinking it in long, bitter gulps; the air in the bottle made it come out in sputtering bursts. 

Laurel Williams did not die alone. Everyone knew that. She had a friend there with her, an old friend who was worried about her and came over to the house but didn't quite get there in time. A friend who held her close and called for an ambulance and felt the life slipping away from her before the paramedics got there. 

A friend who made the arrangements for the funeral, who stepped into the role of next-of-kin, whose love and guilt and horror mingled all together into something powerful and new, some cosmic magnetism strong enough to draw together a group of friends who had long ago scattered into the wind. 

Everyone knew that. 

(Does it hurt to die Logan I'm scared Logan) 

"I've got to pee." The beer hit my stomach and sizzled like water in a hot pan, and it all rushed to my head as soon as I stood, an unsettled lightness filling up the inside of my skull. "Keep playing without me." 

They looked at me with something like pity, and I ignored them, turning and shrugging back into my jacket and grabbing the flashlight by the door and heading outside into the dark and the cold. 

The snow was still falling, and a spiderweb of frost was forming on the ground, the topsoil frozen. It was quiet, hushed in the way it only gets when it snows. That unearthly quiet that's like life put on pause, like everything else has been muted and put away and only the snow continues to fall. 

I shoved my hands in my pockets and made the trudge across the campground to the bathroom, shivering from something more than just the cold. 

They say that suicide is a spontaneous act, but Laurel planned hers down to the last detail. What she was wearing, the music playing. She'd taken the time to do her makeup just right, the way she liked it -- the way she was done up in her author photo, the extra-long lashes and the dark painted lips, skin as pale as a ghost. She'd planned it all, every step of it, what pills to take, the dose, the timing, when to call me and when I should call 911 and how to be sure, absolutely sure, that it would end the way she wanted it to. 

But had she planned on being so frightened? 

When she made me promise not to interfere, did she know what she was doing? 

The bathroom door creaked, a metallic squeal that shattered the snowy silence, and I grimaced and pushed through. The overhead light wouldn't turn on. The beam of my flashlight streaked across the darkness, bouncing off the uneven tile floor and catching the edge of the shower. In the dark, the shadows grew long and twisted. I could see the long, black bodies of people hidden behind partly closed doors, their silhouettes made up of tattered shrouds -- but they vanished when light passed over them, a trick of vision and darkness. 

A violent shudder rolled through me, from ass to spine, and for a minute I thought I would double over with the force of it. 

But I didn't. I didn't puke, either, although I was a little afraid that I would. 

I finished up and crept toward the sinks on the opposite wall, the flashlight tucked up into my armpit. 

Wind rattled the tin roof, lifting it from its eaves and howling beneath the corrugated metal. Outside, something moved, a light scuff on stony earth.

The door screamed on its hinges, and I whirled around, the flashlight beam dancing over the damp, sweating bathroom walls. It landed on the opening door and the figure that stood beyond it, a black looming skeleton that filled the widening gap.