“The Driver is dead?” Regine asks.
“If it was even alive to begin with,” Seth says.
She shoots him an angry look that causes her to wince again. “I swear to God, if you say one more philosophical thing to me –”
“It saved my life.”
This stops her. “It what?”
“It killed him first,” Tomasz says, his voice still edged with worry.
“It did this to me with its leg,” Seth says, pulling up his shirt to show her the bruised, purple scar. “But then it took it out of me and did . . . something. Something that sealed up the wound.”
“I did not see that,” Tomasz says. “I was crawling into the car. I only saw it throw the thing through Seth and thought . . .” His face crinkles up. “I thought it had killed you. And I did not see Regine. And I thought . . .”
“I know,” Seth says, putting an arm around Tomasz and letting him cry.
Regine shakes her head, before stopping at the pain it obviously causes. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No,” Seth says. “No, it doesn’t.”
Regine puts a hand up to her cheek. “Jesus, my face hurts.”
“And my whole body,” Seth says.
“And my hair,” Tomasz says, putting unhappy fingers on his new bald spot.
Seth’s arm is still around Tomasz, who’s resting part of his weight against Regine, who in turn nudges Seth with her outstretched leg. They just sit for a moment, together, injured, confused.
But alive.
82
Slowly, slowly, slowly, they gather themselves up, helping one another to their feet with a tenderness they don’t need to discuss. Seth shows them the other scars the Driver left on him, still wondering at their very existence.
“How does it look?” Seth asks when Regine checks out his back.
“Like the one on your front,” Regine says. “Except.” She picks something off his skin and shows it to him. It’s a piece of cloth, soaked with blood, the exact same shape as the tear on the front of his shirt.
“Looks like it cleaned out the wound, too,” Regine says. “I don’t get it. Why did it save you?”
“If it’s a caretaker,” Seth says, “maybe it’s supposed to keep us alive.”
“And throwing a metal javelin through you accomplishes this how?” Tomasz asks. “You could have died immediately.”
“And it seemed pretty happy to try and kill me and Tommy,” Regine says.
“I don’t know,” Seth says, but he says it quietly, still thinking about what happened, about why the Driver did what it did, about whether he did in fact die just now, right here on the pavement –
But what would that mean?
“Life does not have to go how you think it will,” Tomasz says. “Not even when you are very sure what is going to happen.”
Seth can tell he’s thinking of his mother. Life definitely hadn’t gone how they’d expected it to. Regine either, he thinks, as they start trudging toward Seth’s house, each of them avoiding bits of the Driver, still burning in little puddles.
No, life didn’t always go how you thought it might.
Sometimes it didn’t make any sense at all.
You’ve just got to find a way to live there anyway, Seth thinks.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got any painkillers in there,” Regine asks as they walk up his front path.
“We can try the supermarket if there isn’t,” Seth says. “Rustle up some expired aspirin.”
“Or expired morphine,” Regine moans, holding her eye again.
“I could try to fix this,” Tomasz says, holding up the baton. “Zap you with it. Might work.”
Regine bops him on the back of the head.
“You are not feeling that bad then,” Tomasz says.
They go inside. Nothing has changed. The front window is still broken, the kitchen and sitting room still piled with the furniture they hurled in the Driver’s way.
“I can’t believe it’s gone,” Regine says as Seth climbs over the fallen-down fridge to get them some water. “How did it come back anyway? We saw it burn. Not even a machine should have survived that.”
“And what will happen now?” Tomasz asks, flopping down on the settee. “Who will take care of all the sleepers?”
Seth doesn’t answer because he doesn’t know. He climbs back over the fridge with a bottle of water and three cups, and they all sit around the coffee table, drinking and resting.
They sit there for a good long time.
“You knew, though,” Regine says, after a while, as if mid-conversation and snapping Seth out of an almost-doze he didn’t even know he was having.
“Knew what?” he asks.
“You said the Driver was going to be there for one last attack, and it was.”
Seth frowns. “I didn’t think I was going to be right,” he says, and it’s mostly true.
Regine looks down into her cup. “Your idea of this all being a story in your head. Or that we’re your –”
“Guardian angels,” Tomasz says. “She is correct. Does this mean we are angels? Because I would be very cross that I was such a short one.”
“It was there, wasn’t it?” Seth says, feeling the scar on his ribs again. “Just like I said.”
“Just like you said,” Regine repeats.
They look at him as if he can provide some explanation they haven’t thought of. He doesn’t have one, though. The Driver, who had previously shown no mercy, showed mercy. The Driver, who had killed him, also healed him. No single explanation – if everything was real, if everything was just in his head – covered everything.
Then again, maybe the point was that there was no point. Well, not no point, because looking at Regine and Tomasz, he can easily see two points without even trying.
So if this is all a story in my head, he thinks, then maybe –
“Oh, forget it,” he says with feeling. “Nobody knows anything.”
He looks up at the painting above the hearth, the terrified, screaming horse that has spent its life freaking him out, showing the pain he thought lay underneath the whole world.
But it’s just a painting, isn’t it?
He looks back at Regine and Tomasz.
“Shall we do what we came here for?” he says.
“Are you sure?” Regine asks him for the hundredth time since they came up to the attic.
“No,” Seth says again, “but I’m going to try anyway.”