by M. Anjelais
I tried to let myself get lost in the endless parades of superficial characters and humorous situations that wiggled their way across Leigh’s television screen, but my mind refused to tune out. No matter how many movies we watched, my brain wouldn’t stop thinking over everything, running through what-if scenarios in which Cadence and I had both been gravely injured by the glass, in which my mother had forced me to come home anyway, in which I didn’t actually accomplish anything by staying here, in which something broke further inside Cadence’s head and he did something horrible to me. And I was in pain. The cuts were prickling all over my body, the palm of my hand an almost constant throb.
Then slowly, as the days passed, I healed. The pain became less, I began using the hand that had been cut again, the stitches pulled out like loose threads, my skin having formed the necessary bonds again. Leigh’s new table arrived, a shiny, dark mahogany, and she and Vivienne set it up in the living room, refilling the void. My mother called every day, asking me how I was doing, if I was feeling healed enough to make the flight home. And in my heart, I knew that I was healed enough, that enough days and weeks had passed for my cuts to be considered closed … but I didn’t admit it. I dragged out the visit, dragged it out longer every time I got off the phone, dragged myself out of my chair to find the digital camera because I noticed another opportunity for filming Cadence. I refused to let the fall through the table take anything out of me; I was still on a mission, firm in my will to complete it. Nothing could make me leave Cadence.
He hadn’t healed as nicely as I had. Some of his cuts reopened, looking angry and red. His body was focused on the mess that the leukemia had created, and didn’t see fit to attend to the newer injuries. He was more tired than usual now, too; he slept even more than he had before, and sometimes when he woke up, he mentioned pain that had nothing to do with the cuts and the broken rib. New pain, new bruises spreading out, taking over. And I felt guilty, because it seemed as though he had taken a turn for the worse after I had fallen on him. It wasn’t my fault, of course, I kept reminding myself. He had been too rough with Wilbur, he had lashed out — I wasn’t responsible for any of that. And this was supposed to happen, this was expected, the way that he was getting more and more exhausted, closer and closer to giving out.
It seemed hard to believe that something as stupid as an illness could ever take him. Yes, he looked frail and delicate and drawn, all the color sucked away from his face and dark hollows under his eyes, but those eyes were still burning. And he was still reaching outward, doing this and that and shocking everyone he could, blazing like the fiery surface of the sun, trying to convince everyone that he was a god, that his sacred ground was real. When I thought of it that way, it seemed like idiocy to think that he was dying. How could he be dying? He was still burning so brightly.
I followed him outside and sat next to him on the swings before dinner one day. He had just woken up from a nap, and his hair was fluffed up at the back. The part where he had gotten stitches over his hair stuck out in odd little wisps and points. He held on to the ropes of the swing with a tight grip, making his knuckles pop out. It was cold outside, and I worried that maybe he shouldn’t be out there, that maybe it was bad for him. Fog hung in gray waves over the expanse of Leigh’s backyard and veiled the trees at the far end, making everything look ghostly and somehow older.
“It’s getting colder,” I remarked, and immediately felt that I should have said something more interesting. He evidently thought so too, because he didn’t bother to answer me. He pushed the ground with his feet and his swing began a slow journey back and forth.
“The fog looks spooky,” I said after a few minutes. “But kind of pretty, too.”
“It looks more pretty than it does spooky,” he said, his voice level. I looked at the fog again, letting my eyes take their time.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” I told him.
There was momentary silence. I could hear his breathing: That odd raggedness that had come over it on the day we fell through the table was still audible. He turned his head to the side and looked at me, his eyes half-lidded, pale irises almost glowing in the dim light.
“Sphinx, did you know that I missed you when we moved away?” he said softly. “I wanted to take you with me. They shouldn’t have made me leave you behind.” He paused, locking eyes with me. “But that doesn’t matter anymore. You’re here now, until the end.”
I nodded my head, unsure of how to respond. And then he smiled. Slowly, the corners of his mouth pulled up, transforming it. The angles rounded out. The brightness of his eyes lit up his face and chased away the signs of illness for a split second. I shivered.
“You should have known I wanted to take you with me, Sphinx,” he murmured. “Didn’t you miss me too?”
I didn’t know whether to lie or tell the truth. All I really knew was that I was in awe of the way he’d turned his voice into velvet and draped it over my shoulders. And my real answer to his question was complicated. No, I hadn’t missed him, and yet I had felt the loss of him. I’d been relieved to be safe, without his lies and his mind games and the threat of his presence looming over me anymore, but when he moved away, he took his shining light with him, leaving me alone to fill in the blanks and watch the line on my cheek go from burning red to vague white. And now? I looked away, tearing myself out of his gaze, and focused instead on the way the fog was hovering over Leigh’s yard in ripples.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him cock his head to the side slowly. Then one of his hands let go of the swing and reached toward me. I flinched away instinctively, but the hand didn’t ball into a fist or threaten to do anything harmful; instead, he held my hand, which had been sitting idly in my lap. I stared at him, frozen in anticipation, waiting for him to say something, but he didn’t look at me. He just stared straight ahead into the fog, his eyes glowing in the dim light, and squeezed my hand. It was gentle at first, almost as though he was trying to comfort me, but then his grip tightened. Harder and harder and harder, as though he’d never wanted to hold on to anything in this world as much as he wanted to hold on to me. I let out a soft whine. His fingernails were digging into my flesh.
He let go just before I tried to pull my hand away from him, and then he gripped the swing rope again, still staring into the fog. I understood then what he had been trying to do when he had petted Wilbur so hard that he had almost killed him. He had looked at Leigh petting the bird, and he had seen something in her eyes — her affection for the bird, the pleasure that being with the bird gave to her. He had experimented with doing the same thing, but he hadn’t understood anything clearer, and so he had petted the bird harder and harder, trying and trying and pushing and pushing, but he had not achieved what he’d seen in his mother’s eyes. And just now, when he’d grabbed my hand, and squeezed harder and harder, he had been looking for the same thing, trying to find it in me.
I couldn’t help wondering if I could give him the answers he was looking for.
The canvas was three-quarters full, the blues reaching ever further toward the other side. I crept up into the attic and stood behind him, holding the digital camera, filming his sweeping strokes, which drew the waves of azure and cerulean toward the end of the empty white expanse. After a few minutes, I turned the camera off, just moments before he lifted the tip of his brush from the canvas. Slowly, he turned and walked over to the shelves where he kept his paint, one thin hand reaching out to select another shade of blue.
“Hey,” I said, not wanting him to be startled by seeing me out of the corner of his eye. “I came up here, and then I didn’t say anything because I started watching you paint —”
“I know,” he said, in a tired, steady voice. “I knew you were there, Sphinx.” His fingertips hovered over a tube of sky blue in a moment of indecision before selecting a darker shade instead. I waited for him to chastise me for filming him without asking, but he didn’t. He knew that I came up, I thought, but he didn’t know that I was filming.
/>
I watched him unscrew the top of the paint tube and squeeze a generous amount onto his palette. His fingers looked almost translucent now.
“That’s a pretty blue,” I said, not wanting to just stand there and watch him silently.
“It’s not just blue,” he said. “It’s called ultramarine.”
“Oh. Cool.” I had stepped forward toward him, but now I took a step backward. The giant canvas caught my eye again and I looked at it thoughtfully. “Do you want to be a famous artist someday and have shows in galleries?” As soon as the words left my mouth, I realized how stupid I was for saying them. There would be no someday. He had only months left.
“There isn’t time enough for that, Sphinx,” said Cadence, in a soft, melancholy voice. “And you know that just as well as I do.”
I felt a weight settle in my chest. I shouldn’t have said that, and it sounded like I’d made him sad. Was that possible? His head was bowed slightly, giving him a sorrowful air.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I … I wasn’t thinking …”
He walked back over to stand in front of the canvas again, and let out a sigh as he dipped his brush into the little puddle of ultramarine on his palette.
“Well,” he said, “most of the great artists weren’t famous until after their deaths.” He put the palette down, balanced on the edge of the sink. “Van Gogh, for example.” I had studied Van Gogh in school. He had been an amazing painter, but he’d gone mad and taken his own life. Suddenly, I was afraid that Cadence too might turn to suicide as an escape, as a quicker way out instead of waiting for the leukemia to take its course. Or maybe he would feel that he was above that, too sacred to take himself away before his time. He knew that he was sick, but he didn’t know that he didn’t feel, did he? I wasn’t sure how much he understood about what he was missing.
“But tell me, Sphinx,” he said, lifting his brush. “What do you want to do when you’re older?” He drew a thin streak of ultramarine across the canvas and began feathering it out, blending it into the other blues.
“Well,” I said slowly. “I’m not really sure yet.” It was a classic answer for my least favorite question in the world. Relatives, friends, teachers, even my own parents were all starting to ask me that question with increasing frequency, and it never failed to leave me wishing that I had a real answer for it. A lot of girls at school knew exactly what they wanted to devote their lives to, but I didn’t have any idea what college I wanted to go to or what job I wanted to have, and it made me feel immature and dull.
“You mean you can’t think of anything,” said Cadence, without taking his eyes off the canvas. I felt my entire body tense almost involuntarily, as though I was bracing myself for a physical blow. What did he want me to say? “You can’t think of anything to do with your life. And I knew that was going to be your answer, Sphinx. You’re the same as you were when we were little, and you always needed me to tell you what games we should play. It was pathetic then, and it still is now. And that is one of the few things that you do know for certain, isn’t it?”
I’d been researching sociopathy whenever I could get the chance, in the hopes that if I just kept drilling all the facts into my mind, they might act as a shield and stop me wanting to open myself up to him. Knowledge was power, right? He was beautiful, but he was damaged. It didn’t matter what he said as long as I kept remembering that. That was what I tried to tell myself, that was what I wanted to believe. Yet still his words stung me, and his eyes entranced me, and I was never really one step ahead of him — I was always trailing behind, strung along from moments of venom to soft touches of velvet and back again.
I stood there silently, jamming the camera into the back pocket of my jeans and trying not to pay too much attention to what he was saying. He’ll get bored of talking about this in two seconds and become the shining Cadence again, I was thinking determinedly, trying to reassure myself. And it doesn’t even matter anyway.
He trailed off, as I had predicted. I expected him to shoo me out of the attic once he’d finished. Instead, he turned around to face me, tapping the handle of his brush thoughtfully against his lips.
“If you found something meaningful to do with your life, would you do it?” His voice was worlds away from the harsh, snippy one he’d been using only moments ago. The edges of his tone had been rounded, vowels drawn out and consonants blurred slightly.
I opened my mouth, and shut it again just as quickly. Was this question another trap? Was he trying to lure me in? If I knew that it could be, then I couldn’t really be caught, could I? I decided to answer honestly. After all, there was nothing stopping me from simply leaving the attic or screaming for Leigh if things became too much to handle.
“Yes, I would,” I said.
In an instant, Cadence came toward me, stopping barely a foot away. He looked at me, his lips slightly parted, his eyes glimmering with a hint of moisture. Then he tilted his head back slightly, gazing up at the ceiling light, and without meaning to, I noticed a hundred little things about his face. The arch of his eyebrows. The outline of his cheekbones. The way his hair fell across his forehead. The sharp line of his jaw. The precise shade of faint pink that his lips were. The fact that his eyelashes were as blond as his hair. How had I never seen that before? I was captivated. Sometimes, I thought he could do anything to me and I wouldn’t care, if it would only make him feel something.
“Sphinxie,” he said, and I blinked. He looked away from the ceiling, back into my eyes, and I remembered that I’d never noticed his eyelashes because I wasn’t supposed to be looking at him that way, especially not now that I knew his secret. You were supposed to get married, said my mother’s broken voice in my head, the memory of her crying on my shoulder in our kitchen swimming, unwanted, to the forefront of my mind.
“Sphinxie,” Cadence said again, and I blinked again, trying to clear my head.
“Yes?” I said, forcing my voice to be steady.
“Come with me when I go,” he said, in a soft whisper.
“Come with you?” I repeated, confused. “Come with you where? I don’t know what you —” I stopped short. His eyes were burning underneath the lowered lids, a forest fire beginning beneath a covering of leaves. And suddenly, I understood. My mouth went dry. “You mean you … you want me to die too?”
My voice came out higher than usual and cracked slightly. I started shaking my head vaguely, my chest feeling as though it were filling rapidly with ice water. So this was it. This was why he had wanted me, this was why I was here.
“No,” I said, shaking my head, trying to make my voice sound firm and strong. “No, I’m not dying with you. I can’t do that.”
“It would make sense, Sphinx,” he said, in that same whisper. “We both know what’s going to happen to our mothers’ plan. It’s only going to break further. It’ll break them, Sphinx, when I’m gone and you’re still here. You’ll be a reminder to both of them of just how wrong everything went. It would be best if you took yourself away, and came with me. Both of us gone, quietly, gently. Our mothers moving on and remembering us how they want to, instead of the way we really are. It’s meant to be that way. We were planned for each other, Sphinx, you know that. We were made for each other, meant for each other. And now we have to go together, can’t you see that?”
“No,” I said, and I heard my voice growing smaller, higher, weaker. “No, that’s not —”
“And we’d be dying together,” he went on, ignoring my feeble protests and moving still closer to me, only inches away now. “Just think of how we’d look, Sphinx. Imagine us. Lying on my bed, slipping away, as though we were falling asleep. We’d be perfect. It would be art.” He reached out with the hand that wasn’t still holding the paintbrush and took my hand slowly, gently. “We could even hold hands,” he murmured.
My hand was stiff in his, frozen along with the rest of me. But I could imagine us. I could imagine how pale and still we’d be, like statues carved from white marble. Our eyes woul
d be closed and my head would be resting on his shoulder and our hair would be spread out underneath our heads and, yes, we’d be holding hands. My hand started trembling in his grasp, my fingers folding over his, like an invisible force was pushing them down, even though I was fighting it at the same time. My fingertips grazed his flesh and I pulled them back as though they’d been burned, making my hand stiff again. But I could see how we would look, I could see exactly how we would look, a twisted facsimile of Romeo and Juliet.
My heartbeat sped up, feeling as though it were pounding against my rib cage, begging to be saved from the icy ocean in my chest. I felt sick because Cadence was standing so close to me, because of what he’d suggested — because I could see how it was true. The plan was only going to break apart further, wasn’t it? Our mothers would be tormented by my presence after Cadence’s death. If we were both dead, they would be able to remember us soft and perfect if they wanted to. And I wouldn’t be left behind, haunted by the imprint of Cadence and his terrible shining light, like a camera flash that had gone off and stung my eyes and blinded me forever.
We were planned for each other, we were meant for each other, and now we have to go together.
I knew that his words were obviously wrong. They should have been easy to dismiss, they should have sounded crazy, but they weren’t. They were starting to make sense, the idea was taking hold inside of my head. I tried to swallow and couldn’t. The inside of my throat felt like it was thickening.