By the time Amma got up to put on the water for tea, Link was so restless he was banging out a tune on the place mat with his fork. He looked at me. “Remember the day they served that nasty chocolate pecan pie in the cafeteria, and Dee Dee Guinness told everyone that you were the one who gave Emily the Valentine’s Day card no one signed?”
“Yeah.” I picked at the dried glue on the table from when I was a kid. My pie sat untouched. “Wait, what?” I hadn’t been listening.
“Dee Dee Guinness was pretty cute.” Link was smiling to himself.
“Who?” I had no idea who he was talking about.
“Hello? You got so mad you stepped on a fork and crushed it? And they didn’t let you back in the cafeteria for a whole six months?” Link examined his fork.
“I remember the fork, I think. But I don’t remember anyone named Dee Dee.” It was a lie. I couldn’t even remember the fork. Come to think of it, I couldn’t remember the valentine either.
Link shook his head. “We’ve known her our whole lives, and she totally ratted you out in third grade. How could you forget her?” I didn’t answer, and he went back to tapping his fork.
Good question.
Amma brought her teacup to the table, and we sat in silence. It was like we were waiting for a tidal wave to crash down over us, and it was too late to pack or panic or run. When the phone rang, even Amma jumped.
“Who’d be calling this late?” I said late, but I meant early. It was almost six in the morning. We all were thinking the same thing: Whatever was happening, whatever Abraham had let loose on the world—this would be it.
Link shrugged, and Amma picked up the black rotary phone that had been on the wall since my dad was a kid. “Hello?”
I watched as she listened to the caller on the other end of the line. Link rapped on the table in front of me. “It’s a lady, but I can’t tell who it is. She’s talkin’ too fast.”
I heard Amma’s breath catch, and she hung up the phone. For a second, she stood there holding the receiver.
“Amma, what’s wrong?”
She turned around, her eyes watering. “Wesley Lincoln, do you have that car a yours?” My dad had taken the Volvo to the university.
Link nodded. “Yes, ma’am. It’s a little dirty, but—”
Amma was already halfway to the front door. “Hurry up. We’ve got to go.”
Link pulled away from the curb a little slower than usual, for Amma’s sake. I’m not sure she would’ve noticed or cared if he’d skidded down the street on two wheels. She sat in the front seat, staring straight ahead, clutching the handles of her pocketbook.
“Amma, what’s wrong? Where are we going?” I was leaning forward from the backseat, and she didn’t even yell at me about not wearing my seat belt. Something was definitely wrong.
When Link turned onto Blackwell Street, I saw just how wrong.
“What the he—” He looked at Amma and coughed. “Heck?”
There were trees all over the road, torn from the ground, roots and all. It looked like a scene from one of the natural disaster shows Link watched on the Discovery Channel. Man vs. Nature. But this wasn’t natural. It was the result of a supernatural disaster—Vexes.
I could feel them, the destruction they carried with them, bearing down on me. They had been here, on this street. They had done this, and they’d done it because of me.
Because of John Breed.
Amma wanted Link to turn down Cypress Grove, but the road was blocked, so he had to turn down Main. All the streetlights were out, and daylight was just beginning to cut through the darkness, turning the sky from black to shades of blue. For a minute, I thought Main Street might have made it through Abraham’s tornado of Vexes, until I saw the green. Because that’s all it was now—a green. Forget about the stolen tire swing across the street. Now the ancient oak itself was gone. And the statue of General Jubal A. Early wasn’t standing proudly in the center, sword drawn for battle.
The General had fallen, the hilt of his sword broken.
The black sheath of lubbers that had covered the statue for weeks was gone. Even they had abandoned him.
I couldn’t remember a time when the General wasn’t there, guarding his green and our town. He was more than a statue. He was part of Gatlin, woven into our untraditional traditions. On the Fourth of July, the General wore an American flag across his back. On Halloween, he wore a witch’s hat, and a plastic pumpkin full of candy hung from his arm. For the Reenactment of the Battle of Honey Hill, someone always put a real Confederate frock coat over his permanent bronze one. The General was one of us, watching over Gatlin from his post, generation after generation.
I had always hoped things would change in my town, until they started changing. Now I wanted Gatlin to go back to the boring town I’d known all my life. The way things were when I hated the way things were. Back when I could see things coming, and nothing ever came.
I didn’t want to see this.
I was still staring at the fallen General through the back window when Link slowed down. “Man, it looks like a bomb went off.”
The sidewalks in front of the stores that lined Main were covered with glass. The windows had blown out of every one of them, leaving the stores nameless and exposed. I could see the painted gold L and I from the Little Miss window, separated from the other letters. Dirty hot-pink and red dresses littered the sidewalk, thousands of tiny sequins reflecting the bits and pieces of our everyday lives.
“That’s no bomb, Wesley Lincoln.”
“Ma’am?”
Amma was staring out at what was left of Main. “Bombs drop from the heavens. This came from hell.” She didn’t say another word as she pointed toward the end of the street. Keep driving. That’s what she was saying.
Link did, and neither one of us asked where we were going. If Amma hadn’t told me by now, she wasn’t planning to. Maybe we weren’t going anywhere specific. Maybe Amma just wanted to see which parts of our town had been spared and which had been forsaken.
Then I saw the red and white flashing lights at the end of the street. Huge pillows of black smoke poured into the air. Something was on fire. Not just something in town, but the heart and soul of our town, at least for me.
A place where I thought I would always be safe.
The Gatlin County Library—everything that meant anything to Marian, and all that was left of my mother—was engulfed in flames. A telephone pole was wedged in the middle of its crushed roof, orange flames eating away at the wood on both sides. Water was pouring from the fire hoses, but as soon as they put out the fire in one place, another ignited. Pastor Reed, who lived down the street, was throwing buckets of water around the perimeter, his face coated in ash. At least fifteen members of his congregation had gathered to help, which was ironic, considering most of them had signed one of Mrs. Lincoln’s petitions to have books banned from the library they were trying to save. “Book banners are no better than book burners.” That’s what my mom used to say. I never thought there would come a day when I’d actually see books burning.
Link slowed down, weaving between the parked cars and fire engines. “The library! Marian’s gonna freak. You think those things did this?”
“You think they didn’t?” My voice sounded far away, like it wasn’t mine. “Let me out. My mom’s books are in there.”
Link started to pull over, but Amma put her hand on the wheel. “Keep drivin’.”
“What?” I figured she was bringing us here because the volunteer firemen needed help pouring water on the rest of the roof so it didn’t catch fire. “We can’t leave. They might need our help. It’s Marian’s library.”
It’s my mom’s library.
Amma wouldn’t look away from the window. “I said keep driving, unless you want to pull over and let me drive. Marian’s not in there, and she’s not the only one needin’ our help tonight.”
“How do you know?” Amma tensed. We both knew I was questioning her abilities as a Seer, the gift that was as much a part of her as the library was a part of my mom.
Amma stared straight ahead, her knuckles turning white as she clutched the handles of her pocketbook. “They’re only books.”
For a second, I didn’t know what to say. It was like she’d slapped me in the face. But like a slap, after the initial sting, everything was clearer. “Would you say that to Marian—or Mom if she was here? They’re a piece of our family—”
“Take a look before you lecture me about your family, Ethan Wate.”
When I followed her eyes past the library, I knew Amma hadn’t been taking stock. She already knew what we’d lost. I was the last one to figure it out. Almost.
My heart was hammering and my fists were clenched by the time Link pointed down the street. “Oh, man. Isn’t that your aunts’ place?”
I nodded, but I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t find the words.
“It was.” Amma sniffed. “Keep drivin’.”
I could already see the red glare of the ambulance and fire engine parked on the lawn of the Sisters’ house—or what used to be their house. Yesterday, it had been a proud, white, two-story Federal, with a wraparound porch and a makeshift ramp for Aunt Mercy’s wheelchair. Today, it was half a house, cut down the center like a child’s dollhouse. But instead of perfect arrangements of furniture in every room, everything in the Sisters’ house was upturned and torn apart. The blue crushed-velvet sofa was lying on its back, end tables and rocking chairs pushed up against it, as if the contents of the house had slid to one side. Frames were piled on top of beds, where they had fallen off the walls. And the eerie cutout faced a mountain of rubble: wooden boards, sheets of plaster, unidentifiable pieces of furniture, a porcelain claw-foot tub—the half of the house that hadn’t survived.
I stuck my head out the car window, staring up at the house. I felt like the Beater was rolling in slow motion. In my head, I counted what had been rooms. Thelma’s was downstairs, in the back, closest to the screen door. Her room was still there. Aunt Grace and Aunt Mercy shared the darkest room, behind the stairs. And I could still see the stairs. That was something. I ticked them off in my head.
Aunt Grace and Aunt Mercy and Thelma.
Aunt Prue.
I couldn’t find her room. I couldn’t find her pink flowered bedspread with all the little tiny balls on it, whatever they were called. I couldn’t find her mothball-smelling closet and her mothball-smelling dresser and her mothball-smelling rag rug.
It was all gone, as if some giant fist had come down from the sky and pulverized it into dust and debris.
The same giant fist had spared the rest of the street. The other houses on Old Oak Road were untouched, without so much as a fallen tree or broken roof shingle in their yards. It looked like the result of a real tornado, the way it touched down randomly, destroying one house while leaving the one next door perfectly intact. But this wasn’t the random result of a natural disaster. I knew whose giant fist it was.