kin & keeper; part 6.
Cicero, Indiana
Present Day
December marched slowly, greyly in. It brought black slush with it, sleet-rain that slashed and hissed under the tires of Dean's truck, sparkling as if inwardly with the golden orbs of streetlights. The air was bitter. He drove.
The Braeden house was a restless, hulking thing, he found, in these new cold months. It had a tendency to blend into the low sky when he pulled up in the drive in the evening, a proclivity to sink into the clouds, to loom, as if any moment it would come crumbling down and rush him back away into the street. Lisa and Ben didn't seem to notice, and why would they? It was only their home. But Dean hesitated longer and longer in the white cab of the truck, looking hard at its shutters and windows, trying to decide whether or not he was really welcome here anymore.
In the week after Thanksgiving he realised he'd lost the ability to make blocks out of the days. Those careful sections of time didn't seem to matter anymore, or at very least seemed less imperative than they once had. There was no point in rationing minutes and hours when the things he'd wanted to avoid in June and July and August and September were making themselves comfortable in his mind whenever they pleased, now, uncurling and unfurling like morning glories opening to meet the sun when he least expected them. No point in fighting their spontaneity, especially now that he'd come to terms with their existence.
So he'd been adrift, really, since Thanksgiving, since winter had begun to bear down, since Lisa had made it clear she wasn't inclined to keep his grief in the guest room into another year. He didn't fault her for that, though he dwelled on it sometimes, held it briefly in his mind before letting it evaporate again-wondered exactly how bad it looked, on the outside. Probably worse than he'd thought. And he felt a pressure in the house that came not from the Braedens but from somewhere in himself, maybe, a grip around his ribs pushing him out into the cold, to stumble feebly away or towards or into something that he didn't have a name for yet. Tonight, he drove.
He'd told Lisa he was going for beer with Sid, after making sure Sid's own truck wasn't in his driveway, and pointed the white hood down the street and drove. The suburban streets were slick with half-liquid ice, and mostly empty for that very reason. His headlights caught on glimmers of snow, lonely flakes falling without purpose or point.
Dean wasn't sure where he was going, exactly, or if he had any destination in mind at all; but when he ended up on Caplin Street, parked by the corner, picking the blue of the Okoro house out against the night sky, he couldn't find it in himself to be surprised.
He killed the ignition, let the dark collapse on him, looked out idly.
There was a tremulous, curtained light in their downstairs front window, a fragile, flickering glow. Upstairs the house vanished into the black sky, closed-up windows and silhouetted rooftops. He sighed, relaxed into his seat.
Haunted. It was still hard to believe. But there had been that article in the newspaper a while ago, the family's shameful faces arrayed on the couch-and that old gut feeling never quite went away no matter how long he slept in Lisa's bed. Something was off about this place, even if he couldn't put his finger on it.
The cold was beginning to creep metallic into the truck; he pulled his arms close to his chest for warmth and blinked slowly.
What was he doing here? It wasn't like he was going to sit here all night, as if on reconnaissance. There was nothing to do reconnaissance on. He was a civilian now, or he was supposed to be, and civilians didn't park on the street and watch houses at night; that was what the police liked to call stalking. And even if this place was haunted-which he wasn't sure it was-it was highly unlikely anything would happen tonight.
Maybe if he stayed out here long enough a memory would come.
Dean turned his head a little, looking for himself in the side mirror where the streetlight hit its edge. He sighed.
Even in the nighttime he could see the bags under his own eyes, the gaunt pull of his skin around his sockets. It was hard to find rest in sleep when his sleep was so jumbled and toppled and brimming over with Sam, with that tall house in Willowick, the cedar chest at Pastor Jim's. That morning he'd even entertained the thought of using the bottle of Lisa's cover-up, sitting on the counter-top in the master bathroom, to hide the shadowed flesh beneath his eyes-two or three shades darker than his own skin, certainly, but he'd picked it up anyway, turned it over in his palm-put it back in the end.
But he was fooling himself, he thought, if he pretended he didn't enjoy that exhaustion in the morning just a little bit.
He'd busted a thumb open with his hammer at work the other day. Broken the nail right off, smashed the top of the bone. It was wrapped up, set to heal, but it had been a careless mistake. He'd been thinking of the time Sam had brushed a loose tooth right out of his mouth, five years old or so, and the bloody foam around the drain of the yellow motel sink. He hadn't been paying attention.
The tremulous light in the Okoro house went out, quietly. Stillness fell.
There was nothing here for him.
He sat there for a long time, until he thought he could almost feel the heartbeat of the hands moving inside his watch, and when he finally bothered to look it was nearing ten o'clock.
Dean drove past the house before he turned around in the cul-de-sac, idled behind its mailbox for a moment, looking up at it. It was strong-faced and silent, as if staring him down. Dissatisfied, though with what, he didn't know, he drove home.
Hamilton County Public Library did not have many books on the occult in its small, back-corner reference section, and had no books at all on how to retrieve a soul from the Cage of Hell. Not that Dean had expected to find one. But he looked anyway.
He was too restless to go home, too bothered by the looming of the house. Work had been cut short-the first driving winds of a snowstorm were coming in, making construction on the outside of the site impossible-but he wasn't ready to park the truck in the driveway and consign himself to the pale hallways and warm bed upstairs just yet. By all accounts the weather was preparing to get fierce, and would continue ferociously all week. He was going to be stuck inside until next Thursday at least.
He was here at the library for that reason, trying to find something, anything, to tide him over those long arcing silences that would inevitably fill the Braeden house once the snow descended. He didn't mean to wander into the reference books, into the aisle marked O - Occult P - Paranormal R - Religion.
But once he was there, he couldn't help trailing his fingers over the Dewey Decimal stickers, the rough, hard-bound spines-light, amateur stuff, for the most part; nothing nearly as heavy-duty as he was used to. Hobby-witchcraft. Ghosts of the Northwest. Devils & Demons: A Guide. He slipped that one out of its shelf, paged through it. The chapter titles were in a gooey, cheesy Halloween-style font. It was nothing of substance.
The shelves ran out almost before they began, but he touched the spine of every book-trying to tell himself loudly at the front of his head that he was only looking out of morbid curiosity, black humour, seeing what passed for civilian knowledge these days. But it was hard to ignore the distinctive rise and fall of his heart every time an emblazoned title looked vaguely promising, or seemed to say, there's an answer in here, to get your brother back.
Once, a long time ago, he and Sam had had a pact. If one was gone, the other was forbidden to look. It was a stupid pact, one neither of them had ever upheld; but even years ago, on that horrible wet night when Sam had knelt in the mud of Cold Oak and breathed his last into Dean's shoulder, even then Dean remembered the sound of the pact knocking around in his head, chasing him down the asphalt to the crossroads whispering no! you promised! But he'd broken it then; Sam had broken it in turn; it could scream and cajole all it liked but ultimately it was never listened to. Eventually.
But here it was again-his finger was crooked against the spine of a book titled A History of Necromancy, a long-shot even by his standards, to be sure; and a small voice murmuring below his ear, don't do it, don't even try. You'll only disappoint yourself. You swore. You promised him.
Dean sighed, let his finger slip away.
He leaned for a moment against the opposite shelf, books pushing into his back, and looked up at the rectangle of fluorescent light in the ceiling. A fly was trapped inside, a dead black smudge in the corner.
But if he didn't try, if he didn't at least make the cursory effort, what kind of person was he? Did Sam-was he really expected to live life knowing that the person who'd sent him on this course was, at this moment, pinned like an insect, like a dead fly, down there, suffering pain so unimaginable-
He pulled his eyes away from the light, pried himself away from the reference section, grabbed the first Stephen King novel he could find, checked out at the front with his head ducked and his mouth tight. The burning in his eyes, he decided, was from staring at the light for too long. Absolutely.
His face was dry by the time he got home, through the ice and the driving wind. That was something, at least.
1989
At the end of May the Willowick house was far behind and near-forgotten. They drove into the heat of the summer creeping up over the country, stealing into the northern states like a gale forcing long grass down, showing its shivering silvery underside to the sky.
In Oklahoma Dad fought a poltergeist and they lived for a week and a half in a room with a big window and a big window-ledge, and Sammy sat in its corner every day, scribbling in his one and only colouring book with his green crayon, or watching cars pull in and out of the parking lot, watching the lady down the way who wore short jean-skirts sit on the parking buffers all afternoon, waiting for men in cars. They only stayed long enough for Dad to get a nasty cut across the brow that he stitched up in the mirror over the sink that didn't work.
As they made their way west into New Mexico a tornado touched down, far away, so distantly back down the highway that Dad thought it safe to pull over, and they clambered out, all three, to lean on the hood of the car and watch it come down-first a slim finger of dark cloud, stark against the sick green sky, and then a grinding column of wind and wood and scrap metal, monstrous-but so distant that its roar was dim and Dean could only hear the gale in his own ears rushing east, could only watch as the twister ploughed its way across the plains away from them, furrowing into the Earth, plundering its path. He watched it devour a windmill, watched sparks of electricity pop and light and die within it, and when he looked down at Sammy, his brother's eyes were as wide as silver dollars and glinting just as brightly, fixated on the monster with just as much awe as terrible fear.
A corner cut through New Mexico and they sped into Colorado, through tall green mountains, perilous winding roads, sheer cliff to one side and steep climb to the other. Dean pushed Sammy across the back-seat towards the mountain-side of the road. If they plunged off the road he would be on the safer side of the car.
Two weeks of homelessness in the heights of the Rockies; they slept in the car at night under a blanket Dad kept in the trunk, and in the daytime, while Dad plied locals and spotty small-town records for information on the vicious hillside deity that was stealing children away, they wandered foolishly and carelessly into the steeps, through the dark sun-pierced crowded woods on the mountainsides, through the smell of pine and the hum and rattle of birds and bugs. Dean carried his BB gun under his arm, just in case, though the god on Dad's kill-list never attacked in sunlight, and he followed Sammy through animal tracks that it seemed only his brother could see, up thin ravines to staggered rocky outcroppings from which they could see for miles and miles, through the endless mutilated spines of the Earth pushing through; whether they were looking east or west, Dean never knew. Invariably, they ended up lost, but somehow-whether by good luck or good intuition-they always found their way back to the car by nightfall.
They saw a deer once, up there, in the mountains. She was creeping through the underbrush as if fearing to wake the world. They stood there-Dean with his gun, Sammy's eyes glimmering like chips of green mica-watching her, and for a moment she stopped and watched them, her own big eyes the colour of chocolate or dark mud, her soft ears pricked. Then she darted away, and they listened to the sound of her bounding through the forest, breathless, until it was gone.
It was cold at night, but Sammy curled up between the seat-back and Dean's body and was always warm enough.
From the town where the car was parked, where Dad was hunting, when Dean looked up at the peaks and the clouds settling on them like white hats and sometimes the blue storms rolling down them like marbles rolled down anthills, sometimes he imagined that if he ran hard and fast enough he could climb to their very tops in only minutes. He felt strong enough, brave enough, to do that.
It was east, then, east down through the Texas panhandle and then back up into different mountains, into Kentucky, and by now it was early July, and as soon as Sammy learned to read the long word on the brown government signs he said it constantly as if he liked the taste of it in his mouth: Appalachia. A family who lived behind a chicken-wire fence and pried coal from the highway-sides with pickaxes let them stay in the trailer behind their house for a few days while Dad tracked down a pair of ghouls haunting the hills. The trailer was dark and smelled like piss and the family in the house burned tires in the grass, huddled round the sick black smoking things to talk with voices so thick and accented that Dean couldn't understand them. Dad was loathe to leave them in that place when he was gone, so he took them up the twisting wet highway to a low flat white building in a hollow with a black cross on its door.
It was a Methodist church, and there were old women who sounded like birds in there every day, and they were more than happy to look after him and Sammy. They gave them bright yellow lemonade that stung with sugar and stale old cookies and while they ate the old women converged around an ancient player piano and a few black music stands and sang, warbling, practising tunes that sounded older than the mountains themselves. Sammy wandered around the church for hours, peering up at the warped picture of Jesus in a frame by the door, or listening to the women practise their harmonies, or pretending to read the hymnal books placed under every blue plastic chair in the sanctuary. Dean didn't like the church much; he sat outside on the stoop more often than not, listening for cars coming up the road, counting the number of pickup trucks he saw, watching ants meander across the concrete into cracks where they made their homes.
North, far north, to New Hampshire, and then to Vermont, and then to Maine-well into August they bounced around New England, a new motel every week or so. Hunts pouring into Dad's lap. Sometimes Dean saw him scribbling furiously in his journal, crouched over it on the kitchenette table by the light over the counterpane. Dean learned how to do laundry in those places, and he and Sammy hung their wet things over the rail of the shower curtain or the rack above the sink, to save the quarters the laundromat dryer would have required. Their clothes came out wrinkled and smelling like damp, but they were clean.
There was danger. Dad caught a shapeshifter in Massachusetts as it was on its way to the hotel where Dean was asleep next to Sammy, and Dean only learned of it the next morning, as Dad was washing the blood and skin off his silver knife in the sink. His heart rose into his throat and didn't come down until Massachusetts was far in their rear-view mirror. Sometimes he forgot how vulnerable they were.
He began to latch and double-lock the doors at night and sprinkle salt on the threshold, in those flimsy-walled rooms, to keep his BB gun next to him in bed, safety on, resting at his back like a third child, his body a wall between it and Sammy's sleeping.
August blurred into September blurred into Florida, Georgia, a long trip into the Carolinas chasing an elusive water spirit, and Sammy began to ask more questions, ask them more in earnest, with greater frequency. Where did Dad go? Why do we have to leave? He liked his second-grade teacher in North Carolina a great deal and when Dad dragged them both away again after only three weeks in the new school he pestered Dean for ages: why can't I go to school with Miss Adley? Why? Why?
It was frustrating, and Dean began to lose patience, angry both at Sammy for poking and prodding at the things he just couldn't know and at Dad for insisting on this stupid secret. Why, he wanted to ask his father, why can't Sammy know even just a little bit of the truth? But Dad was tired and had a short fuse and Dean kept his complaints to himself.
His answers to Sammy became short and snide and he hated himself for the expressions of annoyance they called up on his brother's face, but they at least tempered the stream of questions. Sammy gave up asking a lot of things.
Dean gave him haircuts, sitting on the edge of the bowl of the sink, once every few months. Kept his hair long and dark and soft but cleaner, neater. For himself he used Dad's electric razor to buzz-cut the sides of his head, to keep cool in the blistering southern heat.
Summer closed up and they trekked for days across the Midwest up into Montana to a quiet, dust-blown town with a demon problem, and it was the first Dean had heard of demons in a long, long time. Perhaps that was why they stayed three months there, why Sammy got to finish a whole semester of second grade at the miniscule elementary school, why Dean got to bring home two report cards before they left again. Maybe Dad was on to something there, something about the Monster, the capital-M thing that had killed Mommy-God, a fire and a fear that now, to Dean, felt ancient, like something he'd read about in a history textbook. He could still feel the heat and the fright on his face if he dwelled too long upon it but he could no longer remember the smell. But Dad, he knew, still felt the empty hole where their mother had been as acutely as if it were a bullet hole in his own breast and he lingered in Noxon until it was freezing blue Christmas and his pen wore straight through the pages of his journal.
1990
Whether or not he learned anything there, Dean never knew. But on New Year's Eve he packed them up and they drove through the night to Washington, to a sweet, kind-faced motel overlooking the sea, and Dad disappeared into the woods hunting a Black Dog and that was where Dean met Hettie.
She was only twelve-two years older-but she lived down in Room 608 with her mother and every day Dean saw her sitting out on the parking buffer smoking cigarettes.
It was Sammy, really, who approached her first. He and Dean were tossing an old tennis ball they'd found back and forth, their breath frosting in the cold, too cabin-feverish to sit inside the warm room for too long at a time, when Sammy stopped, holding the ball in his mittened hands-the mittens with the holes in them-and he ran over to her where she sat, in her bobble-hat and braided pigtails, sucking on a light like every middle-aged chain-smoker Dean had ever seen, and proffered the ball to her.
She stamped out her cigarette with the bottom of her boot and joined them quietly, tossing the ball back and forth in a loose triangle, having been neither greeted nor truly invited; it wasn't strange; things just happened that way. When they grew tired of it Sammy wandered back to her buffer with her and Dean followed, and he watched her sit back down, smack snow off her coat, and light another cigarette with an old blue plastic lighter.
“Pretty sure you're too young to smoke,” was the first thing Dean ever said to her, and she looked up at him with eyes the colour of ice.
“Nobody gonna care,” she said. She had a gap in her teeth and her rough-chiseled accent belied how far away she was from wherever she came from. “Ain't nobody out here 'cept y'all, y'all ain't gonna tell.” The end of her cigarette flared and she breathed the smoke out through her nose.
“I'm Dean,” Dean said, stuffing the tennis ball into his coat pocket. “That's Sammy. He's my brother.”
“I'm Hettie.” She coughed her name. “Hettie Blue Jones.”
“Blue Jones,” Sammy repeated.
“'At's my middle name,” she said. Smoke left her nose like the huff of a dragon. “Blue. Like the colour.”
Every day when they came back from the school-a dark, mean place, flat grey brick and bars on the windows and teachers with yellowed teeth-Hettie Blue Jones was sitting on her parking buffer, the door to her room closed. She didn't seem to go to school; she didn't seem to do much of anything. She just smoked cigarettes, and Dean didn't even know where she got them, or why her mother never seemed to come out of that room to rebuke her or call her inside.
“Why are you living here?” he asked her, once, crouched on the buffer with her, tasting the smell of her smoke on his tongue. Sammy was making snow angels in the dead lawn a ways away. “Don't you got a house?”
“My daddy's the guy who puts Bibles in motel rooms,” Hettie said, picking something off her tongue and flicking it into the snow. “He ain't never home. We're from Alabama.”
“I've been to Alabama. Sammy too.”
“You ever seen a alligator?”
“No.”
“I seen a alligator,” she said, “once.”
She was quiet for a long time, looking down past the rumbling town to the grey beach and the grey waves and the grey sky. Dean had never been so close to the ocean before.
“My mama's real sick,” she said, finally, “like, she got the cancer. She ain't never seen the ocean and it's, like, her dying wish, or whatever. So we come up here. We're waitin' on my daddy. He gonna come meet us. He's leavin' Bibles in California.” California on her cold tongue had five syllables. Ca-li-for-nee-uh.
“I'm sorry about your mom,” Dean said, unsure what else to say.
Hettie shrugged, directed her eyes at the ground between her boots.
“My mom died,” Dean said quietly, after another moment. It hurt to say, like a pinch in his mouth. He swallowed.
“Sorry 'bout that,” she replied, flat.
Sammy liked Hettie, more than he'd ever liked a stranger before in Dean's memory. He didn't talk to her much, but he gravitated towards her in the parking lot whenever they were outside, sitting at her feet, writing out his ABCs in the snow. One day when Sammy was inside dutifully doing his homework and Dean was alone with her in the cold air she asked him, abruptly, “You been saved?”
“What?”
She coughed, cleared her throat, let her cigarette dangle between her thin, ungloved fingers. “You been saved? You got Jesus?” She peered at him, her eyes narrow slits. “You and your brother, you been saved?”
Dean shrugged. “I don't think so.”
Hettie grunted. “Y'all oughta get saved.”
Dean shifted uncomfortably, searching out the distant ocean from beneath the heavy cotton weight of the January clouds. His eleventh birthday was coming up, soon. In a week or two, now.
“See,” Hettie said, gesturing to the parking lot and the street and the buildings across the street with her cigarette, “my daddy reckons, world's gonna end soon, you know? Like, New Millennium?” Another word she punctuated, mill-en-ee-um. “Figure, y'all oughta get saved, else y'all gonna end up, you know.” She stuck her light back in her mouth and fumbled her shaking hands into her pockets. “H-E-L-L,” she said, around the stub between her teeth.
Dean frowned. “Why?”
“'Cause y'all sinners.”
“We're not sinners.”
“Everybody's sinners,” she said, shrugging. “Just gotta get saved, get Jesus. I been saved. If y'all are still here when my daddy gets here he might could baptise y'all. He can do that. He got Jesus.”
“I don't think I believe in Jesus,” Dean said, feeling sour. Mommy had believed in Jesus, he remembered, Jesus and angels, and it didn't seem they'd done her much good.
Hettie scoffed. “You dumb, boy.”
“I'm not dumb!”
“What about your little guy? He believe in Jesus?”
Dean looked back towards their room, at the closed red door with the 618 on it in black placard letters.
“I dunno,” he said, low, annoyed. “He's only six.”
“Well, if y'all are still here, y'all should let my daddy baptise him. Ain't no use some little baby goin' to the Fire.” She got up, dusted ash and snow off her jacket, turned to go inside her own room.
Dean scowled at her back as she fumbled with the key. Who was she to act like she knew anything about him, about Sammy? He didn't even think he believed in Hell, or God, or the Devil, or anything like that. He certainly wasn't going to let some hokey motel-Bible-dumper come and pour water on his brother's head and act like it meant anything. He didn't like the way she talked, as if she knew everything there was to know.
“Sammy's not a baby,” he said, as defiantly as he could. “He's six.”
Hettie went into her room and closed the door.
Dean sat, annoyed, on the buffer, looking at the patterns her cigarette ash had made in the snow. His face was getting cold.
Sammy was probably getting antsy in the room by himself; he didn't like it, recently, when he was away from Dean for too long. He seemed to go through waves, inclined to wander by himself one month, practically attached to Dean's hip the next. Not that Dean minded. Just another reminder that Sammy was growing in strange crooked ways into someone different, someone new.
The sound of a latch; Dean turned his head. Hettie Blue Jones came back out, closed the door carefully, walked slowly to the buffer and sat down next to him and pulled another cigarette out of her pack.
Dean looked hard at the dollar store across the street, hoping she could feel how irritated he was with her. He decided that if she said another word about Jesus he was going to get up and go inside and not speak to her again until she could talk about something other than that.
Out of the corner of his eye he watched the glowing stub of her cigarette dwindle halfway until it was almost to the filter, and then she pulled it out of her mouth and breathed out her smoke.
“My mama's dead in there,” she said, matter-of-factly, and coughed a little.
Dean went inside when the ambulance came, and the gurney with the black bag came out of Hettie Blue Jones' room. He closed the blinds and the curtains before Sammy could look out and then sat down next to him on the bed where he was wrapped up in a blanket watching cartoons.
Sammy didn't greet him, but leaned sideways to push his head against Dean's arm, and Dean put it around him tight.
They left Washington before Hettie's father could come, before he could baptise anybody. Dean turned eleven before they reached the blackening desert warmth of Arizona.
Cicero, Indiana
Present Day
From the top of the roof Dean could see for what felt like miles-all the way to the main road, past that to the rows and rows of pointed blackened roofs that made up the development facing theirs, like a range of neat, symmetrical mountains fading, eventually, into the white sky; the wind was harsh, his fingers bare. The ladder he'd used to climb up was rattling where it rested against the gutter.
He was done hanging Christmas lights, but the bitter gale, the solitude up here on the incline of the shingles, was strangely comfortable, and no one would miss him for another fifteen minutes.
He was discovering, for the first time, the inward inclinations of human beings in times of cold. His life up until this point had been so restless and so harried that neither he nor anyone he was ever with seemed to adhere to the instinct to stay indoors. For him there had always been new roads, new work, and though he loved a good hot radiator as much as anyone else, it never seemed a necessity, or a tradition. Now, Ben Braeden was less and less out-of-doors, more often holed up in his room playing video games than kicking a soccer ball against the fence; Lisa pulled her morning jog into the study downstairs where the treadmill stood in the corner. Dean went to work in the close, warm hallways of well-to-do families who wanted new wainscoting before the in-laws came for Christmas. The familiar heat and sweat of house sites and exterior renovations was shelved, gone, hidden away while the snow drove in, and he was beginning to feel himself falling prey to a kind of claustrophobia in the rooms below where he sat now, with his hammer in his red-tipped fingers.
A little ways down past his feet the newly-hung strands of icicle lights bumped and swung against the gutters in the wind.
Christmas was soon. Just one more mile marker on the road that began at the end of Sam.
Slowly, carefully, Dean stood up from his crouch, took a few cautious steps down the incline of the roof, until the toes of his boots were nudging the edge of the shingles. Down below, far below, was frost-prickled grass, bleak and grey and dead-the corner of the porch roof-the street, past the shrubs and trees.
He wondered, only briefly, what would happen, if he stepped off this roof now. It probably wouldn't kill him. It wouldn't achieve anything; would only add to Lisa's list of worries about him, her list of grievances. He wished so much that he knew, still, how to act, how to make these kinds of decisions, how to think about consequences; but it seemed all he was able to do-as he stepped back from the edge, sat down again, pulling at his red nose with his fingers, looking off at the mountain ranges of the houses-was sit and wait to dream, and try desperately to cull meaning from those dreams.
He thought absently for a moment of Hettie Blue Jones, whom he'd almost forgotten until the ghost in his head had mentioned her name. How she'd sat, much in the same attitude as him, in the cold, smoking cigarettes.
Whatever became of her and her father? And for that matter, whatever became of Ms Chancey and her beautiful farmhouse, or Liza and her withered veins? Were they as nebulous and abstracted now as they seemed to him-dead, turned to dust, blown away? Sealed up in unmarked graves or chilly mausoleums, weathering the winter with empty skulls? Or if they were alive-against all odds in this ever-darkening world-did they ever stop to spare a backwards glance towards the children they had known once, hosted in their homes, held in their arms?
Did any of them remember Sam in the way that he did?
Dean touched two fingers to his lips, absently, imagining the roll of a cigarette between them, exhaling to watch his breath freeze and cloud and vanish. He wondered if Hettie Blue Jones was out there somewhere, in a motel, looking at the Bible in her nightstand, knowing her father once had placed it there-if maybe she was paging through it remembering, if only for a moment, the two young boys she'd met in that parking lot in Washington; if maybe she, too, could recall as well as Dean could the glimmer of December light in Sam's eyes; if she understood who and what had called her into their game of catch that day. She'd spoken about Jesus.
He thought of holes in the Earth, and outstretched arms.
Fitting his boots into the rungs of the ladder, he climbed down from the roof.