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Smiling at Charlotte while Kodiak signed the stack of forms she brought in, the young nurse seemed uncomfortable. Acknowledgment by health care proxy. Do not resuscitate order. Consent to withhold treatment. No wonder she wouldn’t look at him.
“Would you like to see your dad now? He’s been asking for you.”
Turning to Linnea, he nodded. Her hand clasped in his, holding the baby to his chest with the other, they followed the nurse down the hall. Thinner than the last time he saw him, cheeks sunken, his skin sallow, Jarrid lay semi-reclined on the bed. Oxygen tubing up his nostrils, intravenous fluids dripping into his veins, he wasn’t nearly as formidable as Kodiak remembered him being either.
“Pastor Black, your son is here.” Gently rubbing his shoulder, the nurse attempted to rouse him. “Jarrid.”
Opening his eyes, he squinted at the fluorescent lights. He turned his head on the pillow and looking past him, a tear slipped from the corner of his glassy, green eyes. He fixed his gaze on Linnea and smiled.
“Grace.”
She was quiet in the car. Staring out the window, Linnea hadn’t spoken a word since they left the hospital.
Exiting off the highway, Kodiak turned onto the road that led into Crossfield. The silence deafening, he couldn’t take it anymore. “Say something.”
“He thinks I’m my mother.”
“Today.” Tomorrow he could think you’re the Queen of England. “You heard the nurse. They’re giving him a ton of meds, and his clarity comes and goes. He’s not in his right mind, Linnea.”
“Was he ever?”
Blowing out a breath, he shrugged. Debatable.
“I’m sorry, Seth, but the way he was staring creeped me out.” Adjusting the seatbelt, Linnea turned toward him. “They say people who are dying can see things we don’t—the spirits of those who died before them, coming to help them cross over.”
Glancing at his sister, Kodiak snickered. “Who’s they? John Edwards? Tyler Henry? The Long Island Medium?”
You shouldn’t be watching that shit, little one. It’s fucking with your head.
“No, smart-ass,” she said, smacking him on the thigh. “It’s a well-known phenomenon. There’s documentaries about it. Dying people pointing to something no one else can see, talking to folks long since gone. Anyway, I got chills. Because what if my mother was right there behind me?”
As long as Catherine doesn’t stop by, we’re good.
Raising his brow, he shot her a look.
“Do I resemble her all that much?”
It hurt his heart to think Linnea didn’t know what her own mother looked like. He remembered her as ethereal. An angel here on Earth. A beautiful life wasted, rotting beneath the ground for twenty-five years now. Just another sin of their father’s.
“Grace’s hair was the palest blonde.” Linnea’s the color of rich buttered toffee. “But otherwise, yeah, you do.”
Three wooden crosses, twenty feet high, appeared along the side of the two-lane road. Staring straight ahead, his sister reached for his hand. “God, I loathe this place.”
Welcome back to Hell.
Old clapboard houses sporadically came into view. The rusted gates of the cemetery where Jonathan and her mother lay.
“God doesn’t live here, little sister.”
“It’s more depressing now than it was seven years ago.” Midwestern Gothic at its finest, she slowly shook her head. “I didn’t think that was even possible.”
In all that time, Linnea had never been back. But then he hadn’t either. The last time he was here, he took the portrait of Grace off his father’s wall.
Stopped at the lone red light in the center of town, it all looked the same to him. Crumbling brick. Paint, peeling, cracked, and faded. “Lunch?”
“Yeah, I’m hungry.”
He parked along the curb, in front of the sad-looking, little diner. “I’ll order some groceries when we get to the house.”
