The Temptation Read online

“Do me a favor,” he said, hoisting himself up into his saddle once more.

  I waited to hear the rest.

  “Anyone asks, you don’t know who called nine-one-one, okay? Just say some dusty old cowboy with no teeth or something. Don’t use my name. Bad things could happen if you talk about me by name to the wrong people.”

  “What do you mean by the wrong people?”

  “Don’t matter. Just do me that favor. Can you do that?”

  I nodded, intrigued and annoyed.

  “Good, Shane. I gotta go now. Hope to see you again, though.” He gave me a beautiful smile, and winked. “Never met a girl like you before.”

  The helicopter came into view now, just over the mesa on the other side of the highway, and Travis turned his face away from it anxiously, as though he did not want to be seen. He looked briefly at me with a confusing expression on his face—part longing, part anger, part sadness—then discreetly touched the brim of his hat toward me in a gentlemanly way before directing his horse to turn. Then they took off, fast.

  “Travis!” I called out. “Wait!”

  My voice cracked with emotion. All the love, peace, and energy he’d given to me seemed to swell up in the air around me and follow him. I felt cold, and alone, and terribly sad. It felt as though I’d just lost something very important, vitally important in fact. I wanted to see him again, and it was an almost overpowering urge, like extreme hunger or thirst. I needed him. I didn’t want him to go.

  “Come back, Travis!” I cried.

  Travis didn’t even look back, though; instead, he bent himself low over his horse, and together they galloped gracefully off into the growing gloom of evening, disappearing as mysteriously as they had come. He left nothing behind but newly fallen snow, and an ache in my soul as big and empty as the desert itself.

  Chapter Four

  I knew one of the two paramedics who jumped out of the loudly roaring helicopter and rushed over to me and Buddy where we waited by the wrecked car. That sort of coincidence happens when your single mom is an ER doctor who doesn’t believe in nannies, and you’ve spent most of your after-school hours for the past ten years doing homework at the nurses’ station while your mother did things like remove bullets from drunk gang members. You know all the ambulance drivers, and the helicopter pilots.

  This one’s name was Jesse, a dead ringer for Ronald McDonald. He and the other paramedic—a tall, good-looking firefighter type I’d never seen before—were friendly, but all business. I faked a limp, probably because I felt guilty they’d come out here for nothing now, and I didn’t feel like telling them the unbelievable truth. They descended upon me, and strapped me to a stretcher and loaded me and Buddy into the helicopter with their heads ducked low. Before latching the door shut, Jesse jumped out of the chopper to pluck something out of the snow. He jumped back in a second later, holding my battered cell phone.

  “Must be yours,” he said.

  I thanked him, and took it. Astoundingly, the phone still worked, and still held a nearly full battery charge. Predictably, there were calls from the director of the Youth Symphony, probably wondering what had happened to me. I texted to tell him I’d be missing the concert due to an emergency, but not to worry because I was fine. It felt creepy to tap “I am fine” into the keypad, because I shouldn’t have been fine. I should have been dead. But here I was. Fine.

  Jesse looked at me with puzzlement as the chopper lifted up.

  “What happened out there, Shane?”

  I shrugged. I had no idea how to talk about it, so I just looked outside instead.

  “Seems to me you should be a lot more banged up than you are,” he said.

  “I guess.” I couldn’t look at him. I hate to lie.

  “I mean, I’m glad you’re not,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense, with the car like that.”

  I stared outside and hoped he’d drop it. A soft snow fell through the darkening sky, and I could have sworn I saw two red eyes watching me from a distance. I was hit with a sudden dread and fear, remembering what had happened and sensing from those eyes that it wasn’t over, not by a long shot.

  Shuddering, I pushed back the tears. As stupid as it sounds, I wanted to stay there in the middle of nowhere, because I wanted Travis with me. It was absurd, but I needed him, the way you need water after a long hike. Jesse busied himself checking my pulse, and with a shrug settled back for the very loud ride to the hospital. Buddy cuddled up against me, his eyes connecting with mine, and I had an eerie sense that he understood something I didn’t, that he knew. He looked scared. Then again, Buddy almost always looked scared. I tried not to read too much into it.

  Thirty minutes later, Jesse and the other guy wheeled me into my mom’s emergency room at the university hospital. Buddy was hidden in a custodial closet by some nice nurses, because you can’t bring a dog into the ER. It was probably for the best, because Buddy, even though he is small and cute, tends to attack people who aren’t me. The only stranger I’ve ever seen him not attack, come to think of it, was Travis, at whom he only snapped.

  Weird.

  Getting wheeled around at high speed like some kind of invalid felt ridiculous and dramatic, needlessly showy considering that I wasn’t actually sick or in any pain anymore. In fact, I felt healthier than I had felt earlier that day—and maybe even ever. I felt incredibly alive, energized, ready to take on challenges. Still, I was also heartsick. Who was that boy? What had he done? How, exactly, had he done it? How would I ever find him again to thank him? I realized I hadn’t even said thank you. That was bad. Very. I am usually super polite. Hopefully he realized I was just distracted. I mean, I was sure he did. He seemed very understanding, anyway.

  Jesse had radioed my mother ahead of time, to warn her that I was coming in, and sure enough, there she was, worried and angry in equal measure.

  “Oh, Shaney,” she sighed. “Thank God you’re in one piece. We get more accidents on that stretch than we should. They’re usually bad. They need to put signs up there, or flashing lights. Something.”

  “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m fine.”

  “I don’t know how she did it, Dr. Romero,” Jesse told my mom. “That car was totaled. I’ve never seen anyone walk away from a crash like that alive, much less without a scrape. Guess it happens, though.”

  “I have scrapes,” I insisted.

  “I didn’t see any,” he said.

  My mother paced alongside the stretcher as they wheeled me around a few corners, into a room with a pink-and-green-patterned curtain separating my bed from a bed on the other side. I couldn’t see who was sharing my room, but I could hear the person coughing up their lungs, cursing, groaning, and begging God to help them—the usual miserable ER monologue.

  “I don’t need to be here,” I told my mom in a whisper. I pointed toward the curtain. “That person? They need to be here. Not me. I’m okay. Really. I want to go home.”

  My mom smoothed the hair back off my forehead, and said, “We’re just going to run a few tests to make sure you’re okay. Sometimes, after an accident, you can feel okay but you’re really not. It’s the endorphins masking the pain.”

  Yeah, I thought. I know all about that now.

  Jesse patted me on the shoulder, the shoulder that, an hour ago, had felt like it was torn from the socket and mashed through a meat grinder. He left with the other guy. My mom started to do all the things nurses do, brushing off the actual nurses by telling them I was her kid. She took my temperature by sticking an annoying thing in my ear, and got my blood pressure reading with the tight arm cuff. She listened to my lungs with a stethoscope. She checked my reflexes by whacking me on the knee with something that looked like a triangular rock on a metal stick. Everything was normal—except my mother, who was somber and not her usual wisecracking self.

  “You seem fine,” she said, hugging me.

  “It wasn’t that bad,” I lied. I wanted to tell her the truth, but Travis had told me to tell
no one. I was a little bit afraid of what might happen if I disobeyed an order from a guy who healed people with electricity from his bare hands.

  “Did you tell Dad about the crash?” I asked her.

  She nodded.

  “Did he ask about the car first thing?”

  Mom looked at me with the pained expression she got when she tried to protect me from ugly truths. “Of course he’s worried about you. He’s your dad.”

  “Whatever. He did, right? He asked about the car first.”

  Mom sighed wearily, her mouth a bitter white line. “Yeah, well. You know how he is.” Mom and I shared a look of unspoken disgust for my father, who left us six years ago to marry a woman twenty years younger than my mom and start a whole new family with her in Santa Fe.

  “I just want to go home,” I said. “I really don’t need to be here, and Buddy’s in the janitor’s closet. He might poop in there or something.”

  “What?” My mom perked up for the first time that evening. “Why is Buddy in the closet?”

  “The nurses hid him there.”

  “You took Buddy to Farmington with you?” She was annoyed.

  “I didn’t make it that far, but yes, I took him.”

  “I told you not to.” She scowled at me, and I felt grateful to be alive to experience this, even if it wasn’t fun.

  “He wanted to go,” I said.

  My mother rolled her eyes and, after a moment, sighed and patted me on the knee. “Well, kid, we should still run some X-rays and an MRI, just to make sure we didn’t miss anything. You never know.”

  This was exactly what Travis had said, and so I agreed to the tests.

  Two excruciatingly boring hours later, with Buddy now locked away in my mother’s office, all the tests came back normal. I was starving, and trying to solve that particular problem with stale vending machine Doritos and a Sprite. I wondered just how long Doritos had to sit in a vending machine before getting stale. A century?

  My mother hurried off to ask her supervisor if she could take the rest of the night off, to be with me after my accident. She said accidents can leave you shaken up and in need of rest, and all I could do was think to myself that she really had no idea just how right she was.

  I lay there on the uncomfortable stretcher bed, waiting for my mom to come back and trying to ignore the violent coughing on the other side of the curtain. When the vile hacking and spitting finally stopped, I heard muttering, an old woman’s voice. I was surprised by this, having imagined the disgusting, gruff cough belonged to a man. The lady was mumbling what sounded like biblical stuff, the usual crazy talk you hear in the ER. My mom liked to say that there were no atheists in the emergency room, meaning that in times of physical distress, everyone turns to God for help. There was no more religious place on earth than the ER. I tried to ignore the babbling, but one of the lines came through loud and clear, and spooked me to the bone.

  “‘Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people,’” said the mystery woman. “That’s Matthew four, twenty-three. That’s what the girl told me just now, the one with those horrible hands crawling around up there on the ceiling. She says someone here met one of them today and missed the crossing.”

  Gooseflesh dotted my arms. However crazy or drugged, she meant me! I knew she did.

  She kept talking. “Then he called his twelve disciples together and gave them power and authority over all demons, and to cure diseases. He sent them to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.”

  My phone rang in my pocket just then, and I dug for it. I looked at the caller ID and saw nothing but a long line of zeros across the screen. This terrified me. I’d never seen anything like that on my phone before. Frightened by the old lady and everything else that had happened, I considered not answering it, but curiosity got the better of me.

  “Hello?” I said, tentatively.

  “Hi, Shane. It’s me, Travis.” He spoke as though it was the most normal thing in the world for him to be calling me, even though there was no way he could have had my phone number.

  My blood ran icy cold for a moment at the unexpected sound of his voice. Then my heart began to race with excitement and fear. I felt a little dizzy.

  “How did you get this number?” I whispered.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, able to project that sense of calm and peace to me now just through the phone. “I hope it’s okay that I called you. Sometimes I forget how things work out there.”

  “Out where?” Goose bumps.

  “In your world.”

  “What do you mean, in my world?” I whispered urgently, afraid of what he might say next. I freaked out now, as I tried not to imagine what his statement might have meant. What was he trying to say? I knew I had not given him my phone number. It was all very scary to me.

  He said nothing, which was worse, in a way, than if he’d said something.

  “How did you get my number?” I repeated.

  “Same way I knew your name. It’s all right. You don’t have to be afraid. I just wanted to hear your voice again—make sure you were okay.”

  We sat there for a long moment, in silence. My heart pounded, and I was overcome with a fearful longing to see him again.

  Thankfully, my mother returned at that moment, snapping me out of my trance, the keys to her Lexus SUV jangling with great practicality in her hand.

  “You ready?” she asked. Noticing I was on the phone, she made a motion for me to hurry it up.

  “So, yeah, you know, I’m fine,” I told Travis, affecting a fake carefree tone. “Um, thanks for asking. My mom’s right here, she’s about to take me home.”

  “Okay, good,” he said, and genuinely sounded relieved. “Get some rest.”

  “Okay.”

  Another awkward pause, this one shorter than the last, and then Travis said, urgently, “I have to see you again.”

  “Um, yeah, sure,” I said nervously, scared and thrilled, aware that I was limited by my mother’s presence from saying too much to him. My heart pounded and my cheeks felt red. I knew I should have said no, because of Logan, but it felt right to agree to see Travis again—as right as breathing.

  “I’ll find you,” he said.

  “How?” I asked.

  “Same way I got your phone number,” he told me mysteriously, and I could almost see his teasing grin. “Bye, Shane.”

  “Bye.”

  I gulped, and ended the call. My mother, distracted by her own smartphone, asked me who I’d been talking to. I lied, and told her it was Logan, whose parents were friendly with her and socialized in the same symphony-and-gallery crowd. Saying Logan’s name left a bad feeling in my chest; I recognized it as guilt.

  “Oh,” she said distractedly, texting someone. “He seems like a sweet boy.”

  “Yeah,” I said unenthusiastically as I gathered my things to go. “He’s great.” But it was Travis’s handsome face on my mind, not Logan’s. “He’s really sort of . . . magical.”

  “Praise and glory be,” croaked the old lady. My mom stopped in the doorway, seeming not to have even heard the woman. Hang around enough deranged, injured people, you learn to tune them out. “‘O my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion.’”

  I shuddered at the words. It was too creepy. It wasn’t a coincidence, it couldn’t be. My mom was still oblivious to the old lady. She ended her text, smiled as she waited for me to catch up, teasing, “Logan’s magical, huh? Shane Clark, I have never heard you talk about a boy that way. You sure you didn’t hit your head in that crash?”

  “No,” I answered truthfully, as she put her arm around me and we walked toward the exit. “I actually have no clue what happened out there.”

  Chapter Five

  It took the usual half hour for my mother to drive us from the uni
versity hospital where she worked to our four-bedroom adobe-style house set on its own acre of land in a gated part of the High Desert neighborhood. I was still processing the entire afternoon. It almost felt like I was watching my life unfold now from a great distance away, like things were in slow motion and I wasn’t entirely inside my own body. It was all I could do to put one foot in front of the other and pretend to be normal because, let’s face it, I wasn’t normal anymore, and I probably never would be again.

  My mother parked in the three-car garage, and in we went. After I’d showered—marveling all the while that there was not a single scratch on my whole, healthy body—and changed into my coziest pink flannel pajamas, my mother settled me in on the sofa in the family room, with a snack of cut veggies and ranch dip on a TV tray, and more pillows and blankets stuffed around me than I needed. I kept thinking I saw shadows moving in the corners, the kind of silly imagined stuff that happens after you listen to ghost stories at a slumber party or something. Every little thing made me jump.

  Mom either did not notice my tense state, or she pretended not to notice. She got into her own pajamas, ordered my favorite comedy show on demand, and settled in to watch it with me on the sofa. Mom’s pager was blowing up, but she ignored it and finally just turned it off, saying I was more important to her than anything else right then. It was nice to hear that. Truth be told, it had been a while since I felt like I came first before her job. I was glad to have her home with me, but wished terribly that I could tell her everything that had happened.

  “If you want to talk about it,” she said, staring at the TV screen, meaning that she was there to listen and that she had, in fact, noticed my uneasiness.

  “I’m okay,” I said, turning my attention from the TV to Buddy, who was very much alive and well, and happily lapping up the water in his bowl next to the refrigerator with characteristic tiny-dog abandon. I smiled, but was suddenly spooked by the sound of something bumping around outside, near the trash cans.

  “What was that?” I asked my mom, sitting up straighter.