There is no other word for it: I howled.
I knew there was nothing to say. No words that would fix this. But I couldn’t be silent. Couldn’t shut my mouth. I wept, and I wailed, and I screamed, and I howled. I dropped to my knees, because it was getting hard to breathe. Probably I was hyperventilating. Hopefully I was dying. It would be so much easier to never have to stand up again.
The universe was broken.
I howled until my eye twitched uncontrollably, until a headache wrapped all the way around my cranium.
“Ash,” Solomon said, high above me in the rain.
“Oh god, Solomon,” I said. “Oh god, I am so, so sorry.”
“Ash, no,” he said, and got down on his knees beside me. “It’s not your fault.”
I remembered everything. Lying on my back, on the ground. Moving in and out of consciousness. Seeing him in the doorway up above me, holding on to the tattered red blanket. Seeing Mr. Barrett behind him. His pants hastily, sloppily pulled up.
The hospital, after. My arm, broken. My skull cracked, around my eye.
More importantly, I remembered the not remembering. The days of darkness. The way nothing was clear. The dream I’d had, that city of rain and fire and monsters, giant squids and manta rays that swam through the skies, spiders as big as people who infested vacant buildings.
I lay back, into the mud. Solomon lay back too. I grabbed his hand. Our fingers interlaced.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I should have done something. Said something. But I didn’t remember. Not enough . . .” Since that day all that had remained was a suspicion. A fear. A knowledge that Solomon had been hurt in some irrevocable way. And that I couldn’t do anything about it. And sometimes there wasn’t even that.
“You blocked it out by accident,” he said. “I did it on purpose. I was so scared, all the time. I used to have nightmares. They started bleeding into when I was awake. I tried my hardest not to think about it. To lock it up tight. And eventually, I guess it worked. I knew I hated him—I knew I was afraid of him—but I never knew why. The other night, after the bonfire, things started to come back to me. But now . . .”
Thunder boomed twice in the time I spent waiting for Solomon to finish his sentence.
I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to calm the headache that originated there. The pressure helped only a very tiny bit.
I said, “We have to make him pay.”
“We can’t,” he said. “Football coach, All-American dad. Who do you think they’ll believe?”
“It won’t be your word against his,” I said. “I saw it. I remember it, now.”
“He’s buddies with lawyers,” Solomon said. “And they’ll say ‘How convenient that you remember everything, all these years later.’ Poor kid, she fell out of a treehouse, went weeks in the hospital. Her best friend is a fucking mental case and he’s in trouble. She’s desperate to help him. She’d say anything. She may even believe what she’s saying. Poor kid.”
He was right, of course. Apparently he watched the same shitty cop shows as my mom.
“Some other way,” I said. “We can make him pay. I don’t know how, but . . .”
“Like what?” Solomon said. “Cut his brake lines? That man already did enough damage to me, Ash. I refuse to let him hurt me anymore. Or you.”
A train whistle split the night.
“We should move,” I said. “We’re pretty close to the tracks.”
“We’ll be fine where we are,” he said. “I come here all the time.”
We could hear the metal rails whine. These weren’t the freight tracks, where the trains came through slow and solemn. These were the passenger lines, that stretched north to Montreal and south to New York City, and from there to every city in the country. Follow them long enough, and we could get anywhere.
I took my hands off my eyes. The world looked different, now. Brighter. Weirder. I couldn’t see the other side of the river anymore.
The ground shook, as the train came nearer. I propped myself up on my elbows, to see it better.
The headlight cut the night in two, swinging around the bend, catching us in its wide, bright sweep. The conductor, who must have seen us, blew his horn. Three short toots, a friendly sort of hello. Probably train conductors saw a lot of weird shit out their windows.
And then it was screeching past us, and the light from the windows turned us a deep shade of amber. Solomon wasn’t looking. His eyes were on the sky. The rain. The spot where the moon was showing a rip in the clouds, in the distance, to the west, where they were ragged and torn, like maybe this storm would finally be coming to an end.
I looked. I saw the people inside, asleep or reading or watching things on phones or tablets. Some were looking out the window, but they were all peering into the distance, the Catskill Mountains, the lights of the Rip Van Winkle Bridge up ahead. Dreaming of their destinations.
Only a little girl saw me. Just for a split second, but I saw her eyes widen. I wondered what she thought of the filthy wet woman in the mud, in the night, in the pouring-down rain. At first I hoped she wasn’t too scared, and then I decided it was okay if she was. The sooner you learned there were monsters in the world, the better.
I watched the train until it was long gone, leaving us alone with the river and the rails and the sky.
The sky, where something moved. Too solid to be a cloud. Moving too fast. Black as the night. Swimming through the air with broad slow strokes of a massive tail.
“Do you see that?” I asked, pointing.
“The sky whale? Of course.”
“Of course,” I said, and watched a massive sea creature as it descended from the sky and dove into the river.
Of course the world would never be the same again. We had passed through something, Solomon and I. Fighting it wouldn’t do me any good. Whatever weird shit came along, I would roll with it.
“I know what to do with you,” I said.
“Do with me,” he said, and laughed. “Is this the part where you take me out in the back, tell me about the rabbits, and shoot me in the head?”
“Shut up,” I said. “I never liked Of Mice and Men, anyway. I’ll sneak you into my basement; you can sleep there tonight.”
He sat up. “I’ll be fine out here. There’s an old duck hunter’s shed, in the swamp not far from here.”
I sighed. “It’s late October and you’ve been out in the rain and it’s going to get cold as hell tonight. You’re not sleeping alone in a dark shed in a goddamn swamp.”
“Well, when you put it like that,” he said. “It does sound kind of terrible.”
We went back to my car, and got inside. I turned the key, cranked up the heater, but didn’t put the car in drive right away. Instead, we sat there, listening to rain hitting the roof.