Abandon - Meg Cabot [79]
“I saw him do it!” I exclaimed. “I had to keep him from doing anything worse! And now you’re saying I’ve got to talk to him? How can I talk to him? Every time I talk to him, something horrible happens. I came here with my mom to try to make a new start, to be normal. Even though the word normal isn’t therapeutically beneficial. But how can I be normal when you tell me I have to talk to someone who’s in charge of some Underworld, and who, by the way, gave me a necklace that Hades gave Persephone, and P.S., killed a thousand people?” I shook the diamond at him. “This whole thing is crazy.”
“No,” Mr. Smith said, closing his briefcase with a determined snap and turning towards me with a face that had suddenly gone as grimly gray as the stone I held in my hands. “It isn’t. It all makes perfect sense to me now. When I first started working here, John was a challenge, it is true. But I was able to get through to him, probably because like you, I’ve seen death.…There’s very little that scares me anymore. But exactly a year and a half ago, something happened that turned John into the, er, nightmare you describe. I never knew what it was until tonight because he wouldn’t talk about it. But now I do. It was you.”
I lowered my arm in surprise. The rain had started to slacken off.
But the tension in the sexton’s voice didn’t.
“Miss Oliviera, I just bury the dead. John sorts out where their souls go after they’re departed. I don’t know what role you play in all this…but I do know that you need to figure it out, and you need to do it quickly. Because it took me months after you came along the first time to get John settled down. And everything was fine until last night, when you got him all riled up again. Next thing I know, my gate is smashed, there’s a dead queen’s necklace lying in my cemetery, and now a hurricane has sprung out of nowhere and is apparently headed directly our way. So if I might make a suggestion for all our sakes, why don’t you try” — his brown eyes were pleading — “just being a little sweeter to that boy?”
I opened my mouth. There were a lot of things I wanted to say to Richard Smith. One was that no matter how sweet I was to John, it wasn’t going to make a difference. John was a wild thing and, like any wild thing, was going to do whatever he wanted, and no one could stop him.
And two, it didn’t matter how sweet I was to John Hayden. He could go anywhere and do anything he wanted to with just a blink of his eye.
But then I realized saying all those things would be the wrong thing to do. It would be like dashing Richard Smith’s romantic notions of the Underworld, with its five rivers of sorrow and lament and whatnot. Pointing out the hideous truth — about the tattooed guards and the boats and the lines and the freezing beach — to this old man wasn’t going to make anything better. What good would it do? It would just crush him, learning those things he loved didn’t really exist.
The same way it would crush Mr. Smith to know that John had not, whatever he might think, fallen in love with me, for all he’d said he knew my nature because of what he’d seen in my eyes and the fact that I’d cared more for the poor people down there than I had for myself.
If he was so in love with me, as Mr. Smith seemed to be implying, why hadn’t he been a little sweeter? All those months when I’d been suffering in my own coffin, instead of popping up and trying to kill people in front of me, why hadn’t he just told me he loved me, if that was true?
Of course, there was always the possibility he’d grown so wild — being tortured night and day by Furies for letting me get away — he’d forgotten how important it is to people to hear the words I love you. Maybe he didn’t know how to say the words I love you. He certainly seemed to have a problem with the words I’m sorry.
Oh, God, what was I doing? I couldn’t believe I was even entertaining the idea of taking Mr. Smith’s suggestion seriously. He was an Isla Huesos kook — no different, really, in his own way, than my grandmother. Who owns a knitting store in a place where the median