“Departures” is a supernatural thriller and love story published as a serial novel with new episodes dropping every Tuesday morning. Anyone can read or listen for free. Paid subscribers gain early access to new episodes. Watch the trailer or visit the table of contents to browse all the published episodes.
Previously…
In the last episode, Wild was remembering June’s love for journals and how she had insisted he start keeping one as a kind of ledger, a way to record the deaths he predicted. He pulled his journals out after almost a decade of leaving them on the shelf and was looking at them when his niece, Millie dropped by, distraught about her mother’s approaching death. Millie discovered the journals and confronted Wild about what they meant.
“Okay, you’re scaring me now.”
Wild felt sick to his stomach seeing the way his niece looked at him. He had spent the last half hour trying to explain the unexplainable. Since she was just a little thing, he had enjoyed the privilege of her trusting gaze. He was her safe place, her favorite uncle. How could he possibly have thought she would respond differently than anyone else. It was fantastical that someone could predict a person’s death date. To believe such a thing was crazy. But if it was true, that was terrifying.
“That’s the last thing I want to do,” he said, defeated. “Just forget you saw the journals and chalk them up to the scribblings of your crazy uncle.”
“No, don’t do that. You can’t just walk it back. My dad said you were unwell but I never thought…”
“He’s not wrong. I am unwell, but that’s been the case your whole life. Have I ever made you afraid? Have you ever felt I would do anything to harm you or anyone else?”
Millie looked away from him. She sat back down into the chair where she had perched many times as a child. There was no way to take back what he had just shared in a moment of weakness. Why was it so damned important that he be understood? Why did he need to burden someone else with this horrible knowledge?
“Okay,” she said, looking back up to meet his gaze. “If this is real, then you’ve known for a long time when my mom was going to die.”
“Yes, I have.”
“Then why didn’t you do something to stop it? Why didn’t you at least tell me?”
“These are good questions, but you won’t like my answers. Don’t you think that in the past four decades I’ve had this curse that I’ve tried to prevent a death? I’ve tried, more times than I can count. Guess how many times I was able to change things? Zero. Always zero. So what good would it have done for me to tell you when you were six or nine or twelve that your mom was going to die on September 28, 2024?”
Wild could see in her expression that she was conceding this point. Her anger was ebbing away. She just looked like someone whose mom was about to die.
“I don’t think I can accept this,” she said after a moment. Then she rose to her feet. “It’s too much, too strange. I shouldn’t have come. I need to get back to work anyway.”
He didn’t try to stop her. He didn’t try to plead his case further. She picked up her purse, walked to the door and opened it. Before she could leave he said, “I’m sorry about you mom, Mills.”
She closed the door and was gone. Wild cursed bitterly and pushed his fingers through his unwashed hair. He had lost so many people close to him, and had shut so many others out. He couldn’t afford to lose Millie too. He was an old fool for thinking she could ever have believed him, but he was more of a fool for having left the damned ledgers out to begin with. He turned back to the table to retrieve them so he could return the books to their position on the shelf for another ten-year rest. What he realized immediately is that one was missing. He looked frantically around the room, under the chairs and the table before moving quickly to search the kitchen, the bathroom and even his bedroom. The first journal was gone. Millie had taken it.
Wild ran from the bedroom toward the front door with the intention of catching her, but in his haste, he tripped over the corner of the Persian rug and fell hard, breaking his fall with his right hand. His wrist wasn’t strong enough to take his weight and he felt something snap. He cried out and rolled onto his side, cradling the damaged hand. He took deep, shuddering breaths. He knew he had had worse. He would live, but first he had to call Millie and get her to bring back that damned journal. He should have burned them years ago.
It was a struggle to get to his feet without the use of his right hand but eventually he did. Of course his phone was nowhere to be found. By the time he did locate it ten minutes later and tried to call Millie, he was sent directly to voicemail. He shoved the phone back in his pocket, grabbed his wallet and keys, and headed out the door to walk down to the ER at Emory, already dreading the number of people he would have to come into contact with in a hospital.
Later that evening, well after midnight, he was just falling into a fitful sleep when his phone started ringing on the nightstand. After some groping with the hand that wasn’t bound in a brace, he found it and answered without bothering to look at who might be calling.
“Hello,” he sighed.
“Uncle Wild, I’m sorry to call so late. I know it was wrong of me to take the journal and it was unfair the way I left this morning.”
“It’s okay, I understand,” he said then tried to push himself into a sitting position which sent a shooting pain through his wrist. He bit back a cry of agony, downgrading it to a stifled grunt.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I uh… broke my wrist today and it still hurts.”
“Oh shit! How did that happen? Did you go to the hospital?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Just old man stuff. It doesn’t matter. Broken bones heal. It just takes old dogs longer. Look Mills, you have every right to be upset…”
“No, listen, I believe you. I looked up more than a dozen of the dates you recorded in the journal. Some of the people I knew and others I didn’t but in every case, what you wrote down was right. Can you tell me how the hell that’s possible?”
“No, I wish to God I could.”
“So the journals were June’s idea. She knew?”
“Yeah, she was the only person who ever did until now.”
“You must miss her. I can’t imagine how lonely I’d be if I were you.”
“It’s okay, I’ve found ways to manage.”
There was silence, and he wondered if they had been disconnected. Then they both tried to speak at the same time. She was trying to apologize again but his question took precedence.
“How’s your mom? Any better this evening?”
“Yeah, she seems to have passed through some gate this afternoon and is more peaceful. I can’t believe we have to go on like this for another three days.”
“I know. It’s a process that follows no one’s schedule anymore than being born does. You know your mama went into false labor twice and then spent nearly twenty-four hours trying to get you to come out once the actual labor started?”
“Why didn’t she just induce or do a c-section?”
“Your mom wouldn’t have it. No drugs for her baby. She was determined to bring you into the world the natural way.”
“I’m not sure it made much of a difference. I can’t imagine how much she suffered needlessly.”
“Of all the suffering in this world, I don’t think that’s the bad kind. She got you at the end of it. At the end of this bout, she doesn’t get that kind of reward.”
It was a horrible and senseless thing to say to his niece and if he hadn’t been exhausted and drugged up on the painkillers, he never would have. He knew Millie wasn’t religious. She’d walked away from the faith when she turned sixteen and understood two things. One, she liked girls and two, the Baptist church would never think that was okay.
“Is it that grim?”
“I’m sorry, darlin’, that came out wrong. I don’t know a goddamned thing about what comes after. But if there is a heaven, they’ll let your mama in.”
“It all makes sense now,” Millie said. “All the dead things on your bookshelf, the way you avoid touching anyone. I can’t imagine…”
“Nor should you have to. This burden is mine and mine alone. You hear me?”
Wild had not intended this to be a rhetorical question. In the silence, he could hear the faint steady beep of the heart monitor and imagined his niece curled up on the chaise lounge in her mother’s upstairs bedroom where Abby lay in a hospital bed, just the bare, skeletal scaffolding of the woman she used to be. Wild hadn’t worked up the courage to visit her in over a month and felt enormously guilty.
“Can I ask you a question?” Millie said, her voice small like the little girl she used to be.
“Sure.”
“Is it all bad? I mean, the knowing?”
“No, not exactly. It’s been a comfort in many cases. Like with your mom. When she first got sick, way back, I wasn’t worried. I mean, I was upset that it was likely the beginning of the end, but I knew exactly how much time she had left. Nobody else who loves her got that gift. That’s something June helped me to appreciate.”
“That’s why you planned that trip to Paris for us five years ago, wasn’t it? You knew she had never been and always wanted to go.”
“Yes, that and the birthday celebration up at that cabin in Hiawassee last year. I’ve had the good fortune to nudge these things forward that no one else could for fear that they might put too much of a strain on her. I knew she had time to soak up the last few good things.”
Wild could hear Millie crying softly.
“I’m so sorry, Mills. It’s gonna be okay. Listen, you think I could come and be with you and your mom sometime before…”
“Yes, yes of course. I’d like that.”
“Okay then, I’m going to go back to bed now. And Millie?”
“Yes?”
“Keep that journal safe please. It means a lot to me.”
“Of course. Goodnight, Uncle Wild.”
“Goodnight, sweetheart.”
Wild set the phone back on the nightstand, took a sip of water, and gingerly laid back down. He knew it would be a while before he could sneak up on sleep and wrestle it to the mat, but he felt an easing in his chest that had been in a knot since Millie left in anger that morning.
How strange it was to not be alone with his secret after all these years. Having just one person really see you and not think you were crazy was about as good a minimum definition of love as you could get. In June’s absence, Wild had kept her alive by talking with her on nights like this when he had trouble sleeping, which was many nights. He didn’t believe in God or an afterlife. He knew she only existed in the unknowable reaches of his own mind and in the minds of those who had known and loved her, but it gave him comfort to talk to her and imagine her voice in the darkness next to him. They spent many nights here on his bed staring up through the circular frame of night sky that hovered above them in the darkness like a portal to another world.
“I know it was stupid to leave the journals out. Yeah, maybe some part of me wanted her to find them. I know it’s dangerous, but I’m old now, June. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.”
June turned on her side to face him and she placed her hand on his chest. He could feel the phantom weight of it there, an illusion manifested by the aching need of every muscular cell in his heart that strained to reach for the comfort of that particular hand.
“How can I still miss you this much?”
She faded, the illusion of her destroyed by the desperate rasp of this old man’s voice that he didn’t recognize, alone in a dark room above a dark theater with 4,665 empty seats. Before he drifted off, Wild wondered how many of those seats could be filled by all the souls past, present, and future whose final day on earth would be known only to him.
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