I cried and I cried.
“The only one left to blame is you,” my mom pulled the phone from her ear for one stupid second to tell me. “You did this to yourself. Now go to your room.”
That was the first time in my life she pulled the phone from her ear. I’d almost forgotten what she sounded like.
No one listens to me.
Dad said I ruined a month of work and would have to be punished. But he never punished me, forgot about it the next day. Something about an early flight.
I ran away from home two months later but didn’t get very far. Cindy’s mom was so stupid and wouldn’t lie to mine, so I was forced home in the limo.
Somewhere in the backseat, I found a doll I’d once called Princess. The head wouldn’t twist back on right, still staring at me all cockeyed, confused.
Half its left arm was missing.
I ordered Eddy to drive by the creamery and get me a sundae. I wanted a sundae with hot fudge and a cherry.
I screamed when dad told me we were moving again.
“Hope you like the snow,” dad said stonily but it was in the middle of summer.
I was so angry, I broke my mom’s expensive plates, the ones she kept up in the cabinet. Each plate with their ornate symbols and paisleys, pulled apart like threads of a sock, like beads of a necklace, sentences in other languages reduced to mere syllables in the hallway.
I was so, so angry, I took the family photo album and ripped it page from page, grandmothers and great uncles and half-cousins and my little baby face twenty times, mom’s face a hundred times, dad’s face. I pitched every eye and smile and sweet memory into the fireplace.
My anger wasn’t yet satisfied.
For my final act, I took a shovel to mom’s garden. It took several kicks of my fur boots, but I enjoyed the snap of roots beneath my feet. I enjoyed with dark delight her beautiful garden decimated, her plumb tomatoes, her stalks and her greens. I smiled over them triumphantly.
Mom’s on the phone again.
“Grounded!” cried my dad, and it’s a terrible feeling when all your happiness and power and height rests completely on the stupid assumption that your friends would be waiting there for you. My friends were never there, because they were never friends.
“You did this to yourself,” said my mother coolly as I shut the door on her face and her phone.
I was halfway through my senior year when we moved about two thousand miles away to a three-story house in the north. It doesn’t matter what I do.
I called my friends on the phone but they were all busy and two thousand miles away and I didn’t have my big house with the beach and the beer anymore.
My mom fell down the stairs one evening in August and I spent that night in the hospital and I was so mad at her because I wanted to go to a party where Ricky and James and the girls I knew in class would be.
I made new friends and my mom’s fall got in the way.
“Darling,” she whispered to me in the hospital room. There was no phone at her ear anymore. “Claire, sweetie, can you get my glasses? They’re by the flowers.”
I dropped her glasses and stepped on them.
I elbowed the vase off the table, shattered on the tile. “Oops,” I said nastily on my way out of the room, trampling over the flowers.
Tulips.
When my dad told me she wouldn’t be able to walk again and that I couldn’t have a nineteenth birthday party because of something to do with family and money, I was so angry that I sat in my room and cried for two hours.
With every heaving breath, every perfectly placed sob, I was sure he’d hear me and change his mind, but no one heard me that day.
No one listened.
A boy named Gill asked me to prom and I said okay.
Still bound to the wheelchair, mom wouldn’t let me wear the red dress I wanted with the slit up the side.
“This is my prom and I’m going to wear what I want.”
The short red garment in her lap, she plunged a steak knife through it, tore a jagged hole in its chest. “Wear it now,” she said, flinging it to the floor.
Many angry words fired from my mouth, searing bullets of hate, something about her being a legless freak, and for the first time in my life, dad grounded me for two weeks. I wouldn’t be going to prom. He said tough luck for Gill, he’ll have to get himself another date.
I had to talk to him and he said, “Not now.”
He came home from work on a Thursday with a gash down his arm, kept telling mom it was nothing. He was always stubborn and hated going to the doctor.
“I’m not a worn-out car that needs constant upkeep,” he scowled over a cup of oolong tea, the wound in his arm growing uglier and uglier by the hour.
He slept in his bed that night.
He slept in a hospital bed the next.
The doctor described it as an infection caused by the deep laceration dad got from a rusted steel cabinet at the office. “But steel doesn’t rust,” said mom in her chair.
Yes, it does, and did.
It was the morning of prom, Saturday, I sat in the chair across from my dad’s hospital bed and explained to him how disgusting the cafeteria food was, and that I was still going to prom whether he liked it or not.
“There’s more than one kind of poison,” said dad, “other than arsenic and snakebites, or a sharp bit of steel. There’s a poison of the soul, Claire.”
“You’re saying my soul is poisoned?”
“No. The world is.” He smiled at me, tried to reach for my hand. “Stay pure and true, Claire. Don’t let it—”
The fire alarm went off. It turned out to be a false alarm, but it interrupted his sentence, and I’ll never know what he was going to say, and I never again asked.
That afternoon, dad still in the hospital, I was sulking in the kitchen over a bowl of something gross and I said I was going to my prom anyway. My mom rolling into the room, she told me I was the only one to blame.
“Need to take responsibility for your actions,” she said over the rim of her green, glinting glasses. “Nothing decent comes from a person who doesn’t make right by her wrongs.”
“Then practice what you preach and make right,” I snapped back, tears in my eyes, furious and hateful.
“Come here and let me hug you.”
I went upstairs to my room and locked the door.
After an hour and a half of suffocating myself in two quilted feather pillows to drown out my sobs, I marched to my walk-in closet and found my red dress.
The hole was mended. Mom must’ve mended it at some point, sitting in her stupid wheelchair.
I clutched the dress, squeezing my eyes shut.
The next two hours were spent in the bathroom with curling irons, pins, razors and lotion. My hair, it was perfect like the magazine. My makeup, rich and burning eyes, high cheekbones and my mom’s dazzling green emerald earrings that made me feel invincible.
When the sun was down, in my little red dress and fur coat, I climbed out the window and stood on the edge of the roof, the cold winter wind biting my face.
From the roof’s threshold, only mist below.
I carefully climbed down and met my friends, just like I told them I would. Gill was there, and he didn’t even say how pretty I looked in my dress, and I already loved how angry my mom would be when she found out I’d gone. I couldn’t wait to see the furious look on her face. And my dad, still in the hospital like a broken-down vehicle.
They’ll be so, so angry.
When we danced that night, my slender arms over his shoulders, I kept looking at the other boys. I wondered if I’d look better dancing with Georgi, or Torin, or Darryn. Or the guy all the girls talked about, Sascha.
“What do you wanna do later?” Gill asked me, but I was studying Sascha across the room, wondering how I’d look in his arms instead of that ugly Tina.
In the limo, I was telling my friends how much better my old limo was by the ocean, how much cleaner and longer it was. They all
wanted to go to the lake house, and I was thrilled because I didn’t want this night to end.
My parents are gonna be so, so, so angry.
On the creaky porch, Gill tried to kiss me. I could see my reflection in a nearby window, illuminated by bright, blinding moonlight, and I studied how my face looked as he kissed me. I made sure my hair was never out of place.
“Let’s go to the lake,” he whispered in my ear.
I was so, so cold, but I swallowed myself up in the warmth of his thick jacket and I said, “Alright.”
We didn’t make it to the lake. In a little clearing of woods, we laid down in the snow and I felt his weight on top of me, holding me, opening me.
My fur coat opening, I breathed hard.
My dress opening, I breathed harder and harder.
Our breath like a fire in the icy air, he pressed his lips into me like the pillow I’d pressed to my face hours ago, drowning out the sound of my breath, of my life.
Something about my dad’s words, about a poison of the soul, and I put two hands to Gill’s chest.
Something about a puppy I never loved, how it was hit by a car right in front of my something-year-old eyes and I barely flinched, something about a poison and I’m pushing Gill off me, though he barely moves.
Opening me, opening me up.
Something about the way mom looked at me.
You did this to yourself, Claire.
He tears my red dress, tears it again, opening me up.
Something about my lying, something about where I am right now, something about no one knowing where I am and how everything I am is an ugly, ugly thing.
Something about my hair … and my dress …
About my emerald earrings that aren’t mine, and …
About my only friend Bethany I threw away, and …
I pushed and I pushed Gill and I pushed until I could finally say, “I don’t want this, get off me, stop.”
What am I doing?
“Stop it,” I said, and Gill was off me, and Gill looked at me, he looked down at me and he was confused.
I told him he was poisoning me.
He called me something and I told him to go away. He fulfilled my wish and left me all alone in the woods.
Something about the last thing my mom said to me.
Something about making things right.
“I changed my mind,” I tell her, but she’s nowhere.
I start walking faster, picking up pace. I watch my breath billowing out before me as I break into a sprint, the fog of my own breaths wrapping around me like a prison.
“I changed my mind,” I call out, because I want her to hear me, but she’s not there.
I’m running now, breaking free from the woods, my voice shaking as I squeeze out the words, “Mom, I’m so sorry, I changed my mind.” I’m running and my fur coat is nowhere to be found, and my dress is hanging off me and I’m so, so, so cold.
I’m so cold I don’t realize where I am.
Snap.
What I’m walking over right now.
Crack.
Something about her wanting to hug me.
I’m so, so cold.
“Mom,” I whisper.
Then fall through the ice.
C H A P T E R – T W E N T Y
J U D G M E N T
The first thing you need to do is, no matter who you were, let go.
The Deathless King slides off the end of my steel weapon like a wisp of hair, dropping away from sight.
I stare ahead. I am unfeeling. I am a series of bones and joints and two frozen eyes.
A blade.
What you must do now, no matter what you’ve done already, is forgive.
The corpse of my mother still dropping, twirling in the writhing, snaky air, her robes fluttering about her like the wings of the angel of death. A silent thunderstorm descending into the shattering mists.
What you must see, no matter what you actually see, is not who you were or who you are.
It’s who you aren’t.
I’m not sure I expected this to be my reaction to my Waking Dream. Perhaps I didn’t with all my amble thought once consider that it was all, every moment of this Second Life, linked so impenitently to my First one. Mad Malory, my mother, her mind aflame by the memory of her own First Life—her memory of me. Her inability to cope. Her descent into madness, into despair.
I am the seedling of Deathless. My mother, its King.
Already I’ve removed myself from the cliff, but this time with no help from a pale-faced prince of death. With one foot and then the other foot, I walk through decayed plain and wood, returning home once more. But for the first time, I approach it knowing everything.
Knowledge is not power. Knowledge is a prison. And with it now, I envy every ignorant soul in this city.
It was just a split second, the King’s impaled body hanging on my sword. Just one split second for her, but an entire lifetime invaded my consciousness.
In one short and soundless instant.
I pass through the gates with the Judge’s great blade still in my hand, and I see the faces of these innocents, but I can’t distinguish which ones are living and which ones are not. With my Life inside me now, I guess they all look Human. I don’t need to ask anyone what’s happened, it’s written on their faces.
We won.
There’s no telling how I get there, but I’m in front of the tavern suddenly and there’s Ann telling me she’s glad the Deathless are gone. “Wasn’t even a proper death we gave them,” she points out with a smirk. “Just so happens the convenience of having a weakness to something as silly as steel made them drop to their knees. If it weren’t for their little puppeteer. What’s with the glum face?”
“I’m not glum,” I tell her. “Just …”
“I know,” she agrees with a sigh. “Back to same old. It was almost more exciting when we had the Deathless threatening our very existence. Now instead of imminent doom, all I have to look forward to is another thrilling year at the high school.”
“Yes,” I agree numbly. “And I have to look forward to the …” And I can’t think of anything.
“Oh!” Ann’s eyes go wide. “You don’t even know!”
“Know what?”
She takes my hand and pulls me down the street, around a corner, and into the squatty pink building I know so unfortunately well. A dark-haired woman is seated on the worktable with her slender back facing me. A very eager Marigold works on her, reattaching the neck from what it looks like.
I’m a second from saying hello when the dark-haired woman turns her face to look at me, and I’m silenced.
“Hello,” she says.
I’ve choked on my own tongue. I can’t even make a word.
“Surprised?” She smiles. Such a difference a smile makes compared to the scowl I’m so used to seeing on her sharp, pointy face. “Guess I’m just … lucky.”
“Helena,” I finally manage to say.
She gets up from the table despite Marigold’s half-hearted protests, and gracelessly staggers toward me, then stops, bracing herself against the wall. “Same head, new body,” she explains, annoyed. “I don’t like these legs.”
“They’re the best we have,” says Marigold. “I so wish you would’ve let me build you some from scratch!”
“Could you imagine, if I let her?” Helena whispers secretly to me, and I have to stifle a laugh. “I’d look like a human tarantula. Winter.” She takes me by the shoulders, looks deeply into my eyes. “I want you to know, I don’t blame you for what happened at the Black Tower. You did what you had to do, and you were braver, you were stronger, you were smarter than I’d ever dream a Raise of mine could be. You are a true wonder.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I say, looking away. I can almost fool myself into thinking I’m blushing.
“And I knew it,” she goes on, dismissing my remark, “at that moment in the tower, I knew you were the answer. You were, and are, the only one who could’ve broug
ht freedom to us all. I never knew the power you possessed, and I may never in all my existence understand it, but I, like every other soul in this town, owe you my life.” She pulls me in, embracing me in the tightest hug.
“We don’t have lives,” I say coyly.
“We do now, Winter.”
Her uttering of my name starts an unwelcome battle in my mind, a war in my heart, a clash of galactic masses in my core that have everything to do with a New Life that I’ve been made aware of. Winter, she calls me. I swear never to tell a soul about my Old Life, never to recall it again for the rest of my Undead days. Except …
“It’s Claire,” I whisper into her ear.
She doesn’t react for a moment, staring off over my shoulder. Then her eyes find mine, and she knows. And I know she knows. The world connects, and she sees the weight in my eyes. Her alone, she understands that I left this city lighter than I returned. Purged of the King, only to return with something so much worse.
“Thank you … Winter.” And her eyes smile, and for all the pain that’s snaking through my being, for all the inner battle that might never for all of time end, I feel a wave of gratitude at her words.
After reassuring Marigold that I’d be back to get a left arm, I leave to make my way through the streets of victorious faces, my long steel sword dragging on the ground behind me. So pleased everyone is to return to their peaceful lives, to the strict and submissive Trenton way. So much happiness around me, so why can’t I feel it?
“Winter of the Second,” calls a proud voice as I enter the Square, and suddenly everyone is looking in my direction, their faces lighting up. I spot the Mayor standing on the Square stage, his happy face welcoming me toward it. “Winter of the Second, come forth!”
I pass through the crowd of happy faces, everyone parting to allow me this simple path to the stage. I wish I could feel proud of it all, but I’m just a walking corpse today and not much else.
“Up to the stage and embrace your victory!”
The town hero, I suppose I am, I ascend the little steps, again. I’m about to face the crowd, again-again, when I notice that we are not alone on this platform.
Bound to the stake is the slender, slackened form of Grimsky, his body hanging from the tight ropes binding him in place. His eyeless face stares forth at the nothingness, the nightmare, the infinity.
The Beautiful Dead Page 26