she blocked out all the angry words that whirled around her.
Numb, she would stay numb; if only she could stay numb forever.
Why hadn't she died instead of him? Why had it happened the way it did? Tristan had been all his parents had. He had been all she wanted. No one could take his place. She should have died, not him!
The room was suddenly quiet, deathly quiet around her. Had she said that out loud? Gary was gone now. She couldn't hear anything but the scratching of a pencil. Will's hand moved quickly, with strokes strong and even more certain than before.
Ivy watched with numb fascination. Finally Will drew back his hand. She stared at the drawings.
Angels, angels, angels. One angel that looked like Tristan, his arms wrapped around her lovingly.
Fury rushed through her. 'How dare you!' she said.
His eyes met hers. There was confusion and panic in them. But she did not relent. She felt nothing but fury.
'Ivy, I don't know why… I didn't mean… I'd never want to, Ivy, I swear I never would-' She ripped the paper off the table.
He stared at it in disbelief. 'I'd never hurt you,' he said quietly.
It had been so easy. In less than a millisecond, it seemed, Tristan had slipped inside Will. There was no struggling to communicate: the angel pictures had come quickly, as if their minds were one. He had shared Will's amazement at the sight of the image his pencil had drawn; if only Will could make it real for them, his comforting Ivy.
'What do I do now, Lacey?' Tristan asked.
'How can I help Ivy, when all I do is keep hurting her?'
But Lacey wasn't around to give advice.
Tristan wandered the streets of the silent town long after Ivy and her companions had left. He needed to think things out. He was almost afraid to try again. Statues of angels, pictures of angels, just mentioning angels stirred up in Ivy nothing but pain and anger-but that's what he was now, her angel.
His new powers were useless, completely useless. And there was still the question of his mission, about which he was totally ignorant. It was so hard to think about that, when all he could think about was reaching Ivy.
'What do I do now, Lacey?' he asked again.
He wondered if Lacey was being overly dramatic when she had said that his mission could be to save somebody from disaster. But what if she was right? And what if he was so caught up in his and Ivy's pain that he failed someone?
Lacey had said to stay close to the people he knew, which was why, as soon as he awakened from the darkness, he'd sought out Gary and followed him to Celentano's that evening. She'd also told him that the clue to his mission might be in the past, some problem he saw but did not recognize as such. He needed to figure out how to travel back in time.
He imagined time as a whirling net that held thoughts and feelings and actions together, a net that had held him until he suddenly broke away. It seemed that the easiest point of entry would be his point of exit. Would it help to go to the place itself?
He quickly made his way along the dark, winding back roads. It was quite late now and no cars were on the road. An eerie kind of feeling, the sense that at any moment a deer might leap out in front of him, made him slow down, but only for a moment.
It was strange how easily he found the spot and how certain he was that it
Not the ones he had given her, but roses like them. They lay on the side of the road, completely wilted. When he picked them up, their petals fell off like charred flakes; only their purple satin ribbon had survived.
Tristan looked down the road as if he could look back into time. He tried to remember the last minute of being alive. The light. An incredible light and voice, or message-he wasn't sure if it was actually a voice and couldn't remember any words. But that had come after the explosion of light. He returned to the light again and focused his mind on it.
A pinpoint of light-yes, before the tunnel, before the dazzling light at the end, there had been a pinpoint of light, the light in the deer's eye.
Tristan shuddered. He braced himself. Then his whole self felt the impact. He felt as if he were collapsing in on himself. He fell back. The car was rushing backward, like an amusement park ride suddenly thrown in reverse. He was caught in a tape running backward, with words of gibberish and frantic motions. He tried to stop it, willed it to stop, every bit of his energy bent on stopping the backward-racing time.
Then he and Ivy sat side by side, absolutely still, as if frozen in a movie frame. They were in the car and eased slowly forward now.
'Last glimpse of the river,' he said as the road made a sharp turn away from it.
The June sun, dropping over the west ridge of the Connecticut countryside, shafted light on the very tops of the trees, flaking them with gold. The winding road slipped below, into a tunnel of maples, poplars, and oaks. It was like slipping under dark green waves. Tristan flicked on his headlights.
'You really don't have to hurry,' said Ivy. 'I'm not hungry anymore.'
'I ruined your appetite?'
She shook her head. 'I guess I'm all filled up with happiness,' she said softly.
The car sped along and took a curve sharply.
'I said, we don't have to hurry.'
'That's funny,' he murmured. 'I wonder what's-' He glanced down at his feet. 'This doesn't feel…'
'Slow down, okay? It doesn't matter if we're a little late- Oh!' Ivy pointed straight ahead.
'Tristan!'
Something had plunged through the bushes and into the roadway. He saw it, too, a flicker of motion among the deep shadows. Then the deer stopped. It turned its head, its eyes drawn to the car's bright headlights.
'Tristan!' she shouted.
He braked harder. They were rushing toward the shining eyes.
'Tristan, don't you see it?'
'Ivy, something's-' 'A deer!'
He braked again and again, the pedal pressed flat to the floor, but the car wouldn't slow down.
The animal's eyes blazed. Then light came from behind it, a burst of headlights-a car was coming from the opposite direction. Trees walled them in. There was no room to steer to the left or the right, and the brake pedal was flat against the floor.
'Stop!' she shouted.
'I'm-' 'Stop, why don't you stop?' she pleaded. 'Tristan,
He willed the car to stop, he willed himself back into the present, but he had no control, nothing would stop him from speeding into the whirling funnel of darkness. It swallowed him up.
When he opened his eyes, Lacey was peering down at him.
'Rough ride?'
Tristan looked around. He was still on the wooded road, but it was early morning now, gold light fragile as spiderwebs netting the trees. He tried to remember what had happened.
'You called me, hours ago, asked me what to do next,' she reminded him. 'Obviously you couldn't wait to find out.'
'I went back,' he said, and then in a rush he remembered. 'Lacey, it wasn't just the deer. If it hadn't been the deer, it would have been a wall. Or trees or the river or the bridge. It could have been another car.'
