“Jane—”
“Shh.” Fingers pressed against my lips.
Every muscle in my body contracted and pulled against the ropes. I opened my lips again, ready to shout for help but the fingers pressed harder, mashing my lips onto my teeth. My mouth tasted the finger. Salty and rough. My eyes focused enough to see an outline. The bulk of someone hovered over me. The person leaned close and I smelled rotted food and something akin to a school locker room. Suddenly, cold water washed over my hand.
“Cheyanne, you're sick,” Christopher said. “It’s for your own good. Please don't fight me. It's your only chance. Cheyanne, you have to trust me.”
Pain sliced through my hand. I cried out.
He sniffed at my ear and nuzzled the space between my neck and shoulder with his nose. I tried to separate that part of me from him. He was touching some other person’s neck. He was not touching me, he was not touching me.
“This will protect you.”
Something warm pressed against the pain.
I heard sniffling. “Maibe?”
“He bit me,” Maibe said. I strained to see where she lay but only made out a dark lump against a darker wall.
The meaning of his actions sunk in. He was mixing our blood, infecting us with whatever he had. With a mutated form of rabies and some awful bacteria. I struggled to take my hand away but he only pressed his palm more firmly against mine. I watched a light flare. His lighter. It revealed Christopher—the lines on his face, the flush in his cheeks, the glaze on his eyes. I saw the rope around my wrists was shoelace pulled from my own sneakers.
“Jane?” No answer. “Jane?”
A headache pounded in my temples. My limbs were dead weights and my chest hurt.
Christopher scratched his eyes with the hand not infusing blood into mine.
I tried to think, could I break through the shoelace?
“There.” Christopher removed his hand from mine. “I’m sorry, Cheyanne—”
“That's not my name!”
His eyes cleared and he seemed to see me. “What's happened?” He looked down at my palm, the knife, the blood. “Oh God, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I had a memory-rush. It happens…” His eyes lost focus again. “I love you, baby. You'll be safe now. I promise. You and the kids.”
“You’re a bastard,” I said.
Maibe moaned. “I’m so hot. I don’t feel good.”
“It’s probably going to be painful. It was for me. But don't tell the kids.” He stood up and sorted through our meager pile of supplies. He returned with a bottle of water and supported my head. I was thirsty, but my throat felt swollen and my tongue thick. I sealed my lips and turned my face away from the water.
“It causes hydrophobia at first, but you’ve got to drink something, while you still can. Come on, baby.” He forced my lips open with the bottle and tipped a small sip of water into my mouth. I almost spit it back in his face, but thirst overruled me. He laid my head down and stood back. The relief at his distance was immediate. I was still tied up, bleeding, infected, but at least he wasn't touching me.
Waves of heat rolled across my body, I broke into a sweat, I swore my hand wasn't clotting and I was going to bleed out on the floor. The muscles in my shoulder and around my knee spasmed. My eyes felt so heavy.
I fell into the memory-rush and the fevers, and everything disappeared.
***
December
***
***
—until the knocking started. That sick man came and pressed his dirt-smudged faces against our glass patio door. Doesn’t matter what everyone else believes. They’re not zombies. Zombie is just a made-up word to scare people into horrible—I can’t talk about all that yet.
Please.
I need more time.
Dylan and I wanted to start over. We were putting ourselves back together when everything else fell apart. Like Humpty Dumpty, except that with the two of us, I just knew the broken pieces could be glued back together and made stronger and more beautiful because of it. The glue lines would create a mosaic. A fingerprint of our love; unique to the two of us. It would never look perfect or new or unused, but what’s the point of having something if you don’t use it, enjoy it, break it in like a new pair of shoes? Our love was like an old t-shirt, the more beloved the more we used it. Our love was like an iron filing ready to fly through the air and latch onto its magnet. Our love was like the olive oil vessels filled to overflowing, spilling over the ceramic and into the dirt and becoming a part of the earth, and making feet dirty as people walked through the oil slick puddles and took our love out to the rest of the world…
…did a van come for you too? I will try to make you understand how it was. How it is now. Don’t you see that you all are like me and Dylan?
Chapter 7
Father always waited in the front yard for me to come home from the fifth grade, the grade I remember the most for all the wrong reasons. He usually kept his hands behind him, holding back some kind of present—almost always an orange, his favorite afternoon snack. The unspoken rules of our game: first my father would ask, “How was school?” and then I shared a good story before winning whatever he hid.
One day I didn’t want to play. I didn’t want to talk about fighting the girl who’d called me ‘foreigner’ and said she wished my mother died from her cancer. I brushed off his question and headed for our front door, books heavy in my arms.
“What happened?” He’d asked.
I’d stopped and stared at the grass and then shook my head, my braid whipping across my back. I yearned for a hug, but fifth grade was the year I decided to stop acting like a baby.
I felt a tug on my braid. “Here.”
I turned and saw my father offering me one of his hands. “Make a wish,” he said, and held out a wishflower even though I hadn’t followed any of our rules.
I imagined how my breath might release the feather-like pods to gallop into the air and travel a chaotic path away. But I felt too old to fall for these tricks anymore. I forced the spines of my textbooks to dig bruises into my arms. “This is stupid.”
“Okay. Try this.” He brought out his other hand.
Air caught in my throat. He held the largest bouquet of wishflowers I’d ever seen, inches from my face. Dozens of globes hung together by the barest of connections and blotted out the rest of the world. Each stalk contained potential, hundreds of seeds ready to tornado into the sky and then blanket the yard, maybe land on Mrs. Harrit’s grass and anger her when they sprouted in a week.
I took a deep breath.
Before I exhaled, my father used all his strength to blow.
A rushing wall of pods plunged into the air around me. Feathery tails twirled across my cheeks, eyebrows, into my open mouth. I smelled the oranges my father loved.
He blew again, hard enough to snuff out fifty birthday candles, his cheeks puffed into a pair of red balloons and I couldn’t prevent my smile or the giggle that materialized deep in my throat, because yes, he’d gotten me, was getting me, and, oh, what a good trick!
I dropped my books and searched the grass. Broken stalks poked from the yard like bent drinking straws. I laughed while brushing seeds out of my mouth. “Did you pick them all?”
He waved his hands at the pods still floating in the air. “Just about.”
The seeds settled into a white carpet on the grass and did not pay attention to property lines. I couldn’t wait for the look of horror on Mrs. Harrit’s face once hundreds of wishflowers grew up in her perfect lawn. Then I saw it—a scraggly stalk with half the seeds already blown off the flower head, hiding in the crack where the house met grass—it was enough. “Mrs. Harrit is going to be mad,” I said.
He looked toward Mrs. Harrit’s front door. “Promise you won’t tell on me?”
“Okay.” I picked the flower and hid it behind my back. “But only if you get my books.”
“Done.”
I crept closer and readied my attack stance. I blew at the wi
shflower as he turned, but he blew at the same time. The seeds twirled as if caught in a hurricane, some going this way, some going that way.
My father laughed. I giggled as a couple of seeds caught in his eyebrows and disappeared into his gray-streaked hair.
“I think your father wins this round.”
We froze at the sound of my mother’s voice. It came out of nowhere, reminding me we were still three, though no one knew how much longer that might last.
She leaned against the door post. I noticed she wore sweats, not a bathrobe. One of her good days.
“You both look like you’re wearing very silly white hats,” she said.
I ran fingers through my hair, pulled out a handful of white tufts and stuffed the seeds into my pockets for my collection.
My father stepped onto the porch and kissed my mother’s cheek. “Did I tell you how,” he said, turning back to where I stood in the grass, “when we first moved here, your mother returned to her old neighborhood to pick some wishflowers? She couldn’t find a single one growing on the whole block here. To your mother, this was a travesty.” He lowered his voice and glanced toward Mrs. Harrit’s house. “So your mother walked the neighborhood, under the cover of night, and blew an entire flower’s head of seeds into each front yard, for five houses down, in both directions and both sides of the street.”
“But I didn’t plant anything!” My mother laughed. “I was like a strong breeze, nothing more.”
“I don’t think the neighbors would agree.” He winked at me.
She replied, “Well, too bad.”
Rain beat against the roof of the store, startling my memory-rush—there was nothing else to call it except what Christopher had named it. Memories that wisped in and then away like weed-flowers turned into wishes.
“Yes, momma. I know you love me.” My throat spasmed and I wished for her to get better. I thought maybe if I made the wish over and over again, one wish for every wishflower pod that my father and I had ever blown at each other, that it would come true.
I woke enough to remember my mother had died six weeks after that day. All my wishing for nothing. It couldn’t stop my father from dying of pneumonia and grief two months after I turned thirteen. I went through several foster homes. I ended up at a group home that asked me to find a new place to live after I’d gotten into a bad fight at school. I moved in with Jane's parents. Got a job at the garden. Met Dylan.
Dylan.
The infection grew, swirling together old and older memories. I came out enough to drink a little water, and then I sweat it out, and then I fell back into it, but not before seeing Maibe lying next to me, and then the fever of memories settled on my brain like a humid blanket.
I lived my father dying. I lived my high school fights. I lived endless pasta dinners and tuna sandwiches, the calls to Jane that held me together, the classes and papers and bills. There was nothing particularly poignant about grief and poverty and loneliness. I’d folded those memories into a black hole of time, but they came back.
My father had died, but he’d done so slowly and his will asked he be cremated and shipped back to his family in the old country. There was no proper funeral for him, just an ache and emptiness. I lived much of my memory-rush time with him, and felt some gratitude to the virus for this.
I wondered if all of the memory-rushes would be so kind, and then I understood how people might get so lost in the fevers they never came back out.
Hours or days or weeks later, there was no way to know, the gnawing pain in my stomach cleared my head. Like the knife-edge feeling after a migraine has left. This sense of openness, yet fear, because the migraine might be waiting around the corner.
I lay flat on the floor. I tested my muscles. I stretched and felt the tingle of increased blood flow. The shoelaces no longer bound my limbs. I sat up and looked around.
“Jane?” No answer. I raised my voice. “Jane? Maibe?”
“Here,” Maibe said.
I saw a lump. Both of us had retreated to corners of the room, as if we’d turned into wild animals licking our wounds in privacy.
“Do you hurt still?” I thought about trying to stand, and tested putting weight on my feet. They held up okay.
“I guess. I feel kind of empty,” Maibe said.
I tried not to think about what might or might not be going on inside my body. My spine creaked as I forced myself to stand. My muscles felt weak, my bones fragile. I tried to take a step. “What the hell?”
“What’s wrong?” Maibe said.
I couldn’t tell her how everything was wrong. But it was, everything felt wrong. My skin felt tight, my joints ached, my entire body felt as if it was pulling my toes and my head into my middle. I tried to straighten my hunched back, pain seared up my spine.
“Corrina?”
“I’m okay,” I gasped. My body felt old and rickety. I feared taking a step. I feared I wouldn’t be able to take a step.
Pain lanced through my feet. I shifted my weight without moving an inch. Once I felt steady, I took another tentative step. More aches, but not as intense. I hoped the grinding feeling would disappear altogether once I moved around enough. I hoped all of it was caused by bad circulation and not something else.
“Maibe,” I said. “I want you to go very slowly. We’ve been sick and are both very weak. Be careful, but I want you to try standing up now and describe for me how you feel.”
I heard the scrape and shuffle of her shoes and then a small cry of pain.
“Maibe?”
“I’m okay,” she said in a small voice.
I stumbled over to her in the semi-darkness, pushing away the stinging in my joints, ignoring the way my body seemed incapable of standing straight. When I reached her corner she stumbled. I tried to catch her.
Both of us went down. My elbow hit the cement, shooting pain up my arm. Maibe sprawled across my stomach. I laid my head back on the ground and stared up at the ceiling. What was wrong with us?
“I’m scared,” Maibe said.
I shivered and wrapped my arms across my chest. “Me too.”
Maibe snuggled into the hollow of my armpit. I moved to embrace her and we lay still, together on that cold cement floor. I felt the warmth of her small body against my arm. The weight of her constricted my lungs, but I didn’t say anything. I just held her tighter and tried to find some comfort. Tried to tell myself to be happy that our hearts were still beating.
“Did it mean anything?”
Dylan paused for just a little too long. “No.”
“No? Then why did that take so long to say?”
“Why was it so easy for you to tell me?”
I didn’t know what to fire back with. I didn’t know how things had gotten so bad so fast. His knuckles turned white on the back of the chair. I feared he would break it and there wasn't any money left to buy another, but I didn’t dare say something and have him accuse me of nagging him.
After a long moment of looking at each other, tears pooled in my eyes and in the space of that pause, next to my anger, I felt what really lay underneath.
Loneliness.
I missed him. I missed him and I didn’t want any of this to end, but I didn’t know how to stop it either.
“Corrina.”
I held up my hand to give me time to fight the lump that had closed up my throat. “Just…let me cook the dinner. Just leave it for now. Please.”
He stood there as if about to argue with me and I steeled myself for the next round and told myself I would not cry in front him.
I waited for it, whatever was too much for him to keep in, whatever was going to hurt really bad and crush this moment of truce, this possible new beginning, and then the moment passed.
His dark eyebrows softened and a different light came into his eyes and it was his move and he kissed me. It was long and deep and tentative, like he feared guttering a candle. His five o’clock shadow scratched my cheek. He smelled like the almond-scented soap we both used. We made lov
e as an offering to each other and we made love to banish the lingering ghosts. We made love as if we feared it wouldn’t be enough.
Chapter 8
I pushed myself up from the concrete and crawled to the door. There was a stillness to the air I didn’t understand.
I checked to make sure the door was locked. It was, but from the outside, as if someone had left and barricaded it behind them to keep us from leaving.
My tongue felt thick with dust, like I’d been dreaming with my mouth open. The air was chilly and stale, yet humid from our sweat. Maibe shivered on the floor, moaning, tossing around. In the haze of gray cloudiness in my brain I went over and shifted the blanket to cover her.
I tried not to think about how much time I’d lost, how I was going to find Dylan. Thinking about him sent a new hurt through me.
I steadied my hand against the door.
Where was Christopher? Where was Jane?
Before I could search for them, I lost myself again.
The Pathfinder started with only a slight cough and rumble. I tied my hair into a ponytail and rolled down the window since I couldn’t afford the gas to run the air conditioner, even if it had worked. The radio spouted a song from the 50s and I cranked up the volume to compete with the rushing air.
I’d upped my time at the community garden to three days a week. The garden had helped put my life back together. I loved working in the dirt, planning out a new section of plants, discussing which species to cultivate next.
I made good time to Ms. Roche’s little blue cottage. She’d painted her stone porch a bright yellow the neighbors hated. I loved her courage.
“Hello, dear,” Ms. Roche said as she opened her front door. She wore a large dream-catcher pendant with plastic, pink beads that clinked together in the canyon between her breasts. “Come around back and let’s quickly get the starters in your car. Did Leiko tell you the water’s been off on my block for two days?”
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