The Cost of All Things

by Maggie Lehrman

  When my mind wouldn’t stop racing and I couldn’t sleep I’d turn my head and watch her breathing, shifting slightly in her chair, red hairs curling at the back of her neck. I was lucky.

  I couldn’t tell how long passed before Brian, Dev, and my mom showed up. Brian was out of uniform but he had on his full Cop Face, hardened and watchful. Dev wore pajamas and watched Brian and Mom with a lost expression. Mom—I couldn’t look at her. She had rivers of tears running down her cheeks and agony filled her face. Diana took one look at all of us and slipped out of the room, closing the door carefully behind her.

  “Oh my god, Markos,” my mom said, crying more when she took in the bandages, the hospital bed, the IV running to my right hand. “I told you not to talk about the spell. I begged you. Why didn’t you listen?”

  “Me?” It hurt when I breathed in; the doctors had failed to catalog a couple broken ribs, probably from when Echo got me out of there. “Cal set the fire.”

  “Only because you told him—”

  “I mean the one nine years ago. The one that killed people.”

  “Accidentally.” Her face twisted, as if she could hear how that sounded. “He was a boy. A good boy. He was acting out, and he made a mistake. Set off some fireworks—I don’t know why it was the Madrigals, and it was terrible—a terrible accident—but it didn’t have to be his whole life. They would’ve taken him away from us, Markos. He would’ve grown up in juvenile detention. That would’ve changed him. Ruined him. But instead I helped him—he started over.”

  She clutched the end of my bed, arms shaking. “All that money . . . all your dad’s insurance money and more, for all those years. It was for nothing now. He remembers. He told the EMTs on the way here—he’s telling the nurses, he’s telling everyone. Everything I did for him . . . for all of you . . . was for nothing.”

  “Look at me, Mom.” I raised my broken hand and tried to gesture at my burns. “He did this to me.”

  She closed her eyes rather than look at me. “I would’ve saved you, too, you know. I would’ve done the same for any of you.”

  I swallowed with difficulty. “You would’ve spelled me—without my knowledge—for the rest of my adult life?”

  “I gave him a life. I gave it to all of you.” She kept crying, snot mixing with the tears and dripping onto her shirt. “Why did you have to ruin it?”

  She seemed to totter, and both Dev and Brian—and me, reflexively, from lying down—moved to help her stand. She was crying too hard to talk anymore and so she allowed herself to be led out of the room by Dev, leaving me alone with Brian.

  Brian watched them go.

  “They’re going to prosecute her for obstruction of justice,” he said, as if to himself. “I resigned.”

  My stomach sank. “She’s going to jail?”

  “They want to do something. Statute of limitations is up on the Madrigals’ fire, so this is all they have.”

  “I didn’t think . . .”

  “Of course you didn’t.” When he turned to me, his face had lost some of the cop stiffness. “Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”

  “You didn’t want to know.”

  “That’s not—”

  “Sure, you want to know now—now that something’s happened.” I took as deep a breath as I could and tried to speak quickly before he could interrupt. “But back before—when you thought I was pissed and sad about Win—you wanted me to shut up and be cool.”

  His eye twitched. “I wanted you to be happy. That’s what everyone wants for their family.”

  “Yeah. Exactly.”

  He looked out the window into the just-rising sun. “You’ve always been so angry with us. I never understood why. You didn’t have a bad life, you know.”

  I wanted to tell him that the life he and my brothers had given me wasn’t ever truly mine. But even though he was trying his hardest to listen, I didn’t think he’d understand.

  He exhaled. “We could’ve fixed it together, if we’d known. But not now.” My eyes drifted closed; it didn’t block out his voice, which stayed eerily calm. “You really have no idea what you’ve done, Markos. We had each other’s backs, but do you think anyone’s going to have your back again, after this? After what you did to me and Dev and Mom and Cal?”

  I kept my eyes closed. It was easier not to see him. To think of him only as a voice. “I think you should go.”

  “I’m your brother.”

  “Just go away, Brian.”

  I kept my eyes closed until I heard footsteps and the door close. I couldn’t be sure if that was it—if it was over, if I was no longer a Waters, if we were done. I’d asked him to leave and he’d left. It seemed too easy.

  But not easy at all. Because now I was alone.

  When I opened my eyes, Diana was standing in Brian’s place at the head of the bed, looking at me.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Everyone I love is either dead or hates me.”

  She smiled for a second and then her face crumpled like she was going to cry.

  “Diana—what’s wrong?”

  Her eyes flitted over my face—my burns, underneath the bandages. Probably full of pus and blood, stinking of rot. I was hideous, obviously. But it shouldn’t have made her that weepy.

  “Where are your parents? What did they say?”

  She shook her head. “They checked in on me while you were asleep. They’re worried, but it’s okay. They understand.”

  “Understand what?” I’d been pumped full of drugs so that nothing hurt physically, but it still tore me up to look at her and see her upset. “Please. Tell me.”

  She took a shuddering breath and came around the side of the bed, where she sat carefully, without touching any of my damaged skin, and then curled up on her side next to me and rested her head on my pillow next to my bandaged face. “I’m scared, because”—she swallowed—“because I’m going to trust you again and that’s totally terrifying.”

  I held my breath and managed to raise my arm so that she could lean her head onto an unburned part of my chest. She could probably hear my heart beating all over the place, but for the first time in hours I smelled something other than lighter fluid and flesh and gauze and hospital. I smelled her hair.

  The only thing that could make her leave was me. It had always been that way since the night of the bonfire, when I could’ve crushed her spirit or made her night, and I chose to do neither. The fate of this—us—was in my hands. I could make it work or fuck it up again.

  The difference now was that it wasn’t only her fate at stake anymore. It was also mine.

  “I’m scared, too,” I said.

  She must’ve understood all that because her breath lost that hesitant catch and she settled in to my chest more comfortably.

  And I was happy. So happy.

  At that moment, I would’ve spent the rest of my life in the hospital wrapped in bandages if it meant I could have her head next to mine forever.

  But all the same, I felt my chest caving in, because I missed Win.

  It hurt that I could not tell him about this. That he wasn’t here to see it. It killed that I couldn’t talk to him anymore.

  I had loved him so much. I never imagined that I would have to grow up without him.

  Was I a coward for admitting it? I don’t know. It felt brave, actually, no longer keeping up appearances.

  I cried all over Diana’s red hair, heart breaking with the bigness of Win gone, and she didn’t move away. She stayed with me all night.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  I could tell you about the aftermath. How we went to the hospital—the big, familiar hospital—and they patched us up. I could tell you how Cal became infamous and his mother pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and filed for bankruptcy. I could tell you about the weeks and weeks it took for my ribs t
o knit back together. All that did happen, and I was there, but no one looked at me.

  I could tell you more about my spell. No one listens to me anymore, which is how it used to feel in the hospital with Mina. I would ask something of a doctor or nurse and it was as if no one had spoken; Mina used to have to repeat my questions. Yes, I could use the bathroom. Yes, food was coming soon. Yes, that’s what “carcinogen” meant. It makes you feel like a speck on the wall, an irritating stain, something to frown at and sigh heavily and hope no one else notices. With my side effects, I feel all of those things a hundred times over.

  I could tell you how Echo’s mom faded fast once Echo died. She could no longer spell, she was in a great deal of pain, and then she stopped eating. She died before the last of the tourists left in September.

  I could tell you that Diana and Ari were so grateful that I saved their lives that we went back to exactly the way things were before—no, better—but that would be a lie.

  I am not alone, though. I have Mina. Mina loves me so she can see me despite the spell. She stayed home from school for a semester and took care of me. “What’s another year?” She laughed, and for the first time, I saw what she meant. Some things are more important than schedules and plans. Some things you have to do now.

  Ari tries, too. She calls me; we talk. We’re honest with each other. It’s real. She gives me what she can afford to give, and I don’t expect or demand any more.

  It’s okay. All I ever wanted was two good friends.

  The good thing about my side effects is that it’s not just the bad emotions that are amplified. When I’m happy—which is not infrequently—I can feel it clearer and sharper than ever before. When good things happen I can squeeze every last drop from them. And good things happen all the time. Even to me.

  Still, some nights I dream I’m stuck in the hardware store, but instead of a locked-up Diana and knocked-out Markos, there’s everyone I’ve ever loved, even a little bit, behind a chain-link fence in the woodshop. Mom and Dad and Mina and Echo and Markos and Ari and Diana. I’m the only one there to save them, and I keep running into traps that break my legs and sting my lungs and turn me around in circles. I never see any sign of Cal, only the traps. I get more and more frantic until I’m ripping the chain-link with my bare hands, and my loved ones stare at me, horrified, speechless, desperate, and I realize I am Cal—I am the bad guy—and they are scared and imprisoned because of me. The horror chokes me as bad as the smoke filling the room—and there’s no hekamist there to save us—and then I wake up, gasping.

  Glad to be invisible.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  A week after Waters Hardware burned down, I went to Echo’s funeral with Echo’s mom, Diana, Markos, Kay, Mina, and Jess. None of us knew what a hekamist funeral should be and Echo’s mom couldn’t tell us, so Kay’s parents paid for something simple at the local Unitarian church.

  As I sat there in silence—except for Echo’s mom’s weeping—I thought about how blind and bewildered I’d been at Win’s funeral, stuck on my own pain. Rows and rows of people behind me, grieving Win, staring at me as I tried to make up some words to say. And I thought of my parents’ funeral. Jess had been a stranger, I hadn’t yet befriended Diana, and I’d taken a spell that had plucked out a terrible memory and made my wrist sore. Like at Win’s funeral, people filled the church. I may have felt alone, but my parents hadn’t been lonely in their lives.

  But we were the only ones there for Echo, and most of us had met her in the past few months, if we’d known her at all. She’d spent her whole life in hiding.

  I found myself wishing Win was there. Not for myself, obviously, but for Echo. Someone who she’d cared about, someone who’d probably cared about her, paying his respects. Someone who’d made her life less alone.

  Diana held my hand and a bandaged-up Markos held her other one. Diana had cut her burned hair into an asymmetrical bob, and it was redder than ever. Markos’s scars made him look even more like a handsome villain. Markos had moved in to Diana’s basement after leaving the hospital. Diana told me things were strained with his brothers, and his mother might have to go to jail. Jess had found out that I could sue Cal in civil court for damages, but the Waterses had no money; it had all gone to Echo and her mom over the past nine years. And I didn’t want to sue. I believed it was an accident back then and that the shock of remembering it all at once and suddenly pushed Cal into what he did at the hardware store. He seemed to be suffering enough, living with his messed-up mind. After the hospital, he’d moved to the psych ward, where he was likely to spend many years. I didn’t forgive him—not yet—but I wanted to, one day.

  Word was that the Waterses would move as soon as they could, but that Markos wanted to stay. Markos and I weren’t talking too much—again, not yet—and the only thing he said to me at Echo’s funeral was out of the corner of his mouth, while Diana was in the bathroom.

  “I get it,” he said, and then looked away, as if there was anyone there who cared whether or not he spoke to me.

  At first I thought he meant he got why I took the spell to erase Win, but we’d already covered that—my general weakness, not caring enough about Win to remember. When I thought about it more I figured he was talking about Diana, trying to say he got why she was my best friend. And then I started thinking maybe it went even deeper than that. Maybe he understood me and Win, why Win wanted to be with me, why we belonged together. I would’ve liked to know that myself, but I knew I couldn’t ask. It was a secret I’d never know.

  I could see why Diana loved him, though. Around her, he showed all the good parts I remembered about being friends with him: he was funny and loyal and quick to defend his friends. All that—plus he listened to her and took her seriously, believed in her completely. It made me think I’d underestimated them both.

  After the funeral, he went to Diana’s to rest and she and I sat in my room, like we had so often before. Diana was making me laugh about something Markos had said to her when I stopped and blurted out, “I don’t think I’m ever going to dance again.”

  Diana tilted her head, doubtful. “You could get another spell, like the one Echo made for you.”

  “Knee surgery, too.”

  “Sure. But a spell and knee surgery aren’t that big a deal. You’ve been training for years. And the Manhattan Ballet . . .”

  “If Win hadn’t died, I don’t think I would’ve gone to New York. I would’ve stayed here to be with him.”

  Diana shook her head. “You’ve always wanted to dance.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’ll never want anything else.”

  She hugged her arms over her chest. “Echo wanted you to dance.”

  “Echo wanted to get out of here.” That sounded cruel, so I shook my head. “She wanted to save her mother. And I think she wanted . . . people. Other people. She helped us. She gave me what I told her would make me happy. I think . . .” I thought she was in love with Win, actually. But she kept Win’s secrets, so I kept hers. “I think she felt guilty about Cal, too.”

  “You shouldn’t feel guilty. If you took another spell, everyone would understand.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  I pressed my aching wrist to my heart.

  I didn’t need more spells. It was enough work getting used to the ones I had. The blank of my parents’ last moments on earth. The year I’d lost being in love with Win. The different kind of pain I had instead.

  “Are you going to be okay?” she asked.

  I fought the urge to nod and laugh and say “of course,” and instead thought carefully about what I really felt. “I feel like everything’s changing and it’s totally out of my control,” I said.

  She nodded. “And you can’t dance.”

  “I can’t dance,” I said, and ignored the lump that rose in my throat. “But Jess and I are going to New York anyway.” />
  Diana froze, waiting for the joke. “But—why?”

  “People who don’t dance move to New York all the time.”

  “You’ll leave me here?”

  “You won’t be alone.”

  “Don’t throw Markos in my face. I never did that to you when you were with Win.”

  “Not just Markos,” I said, and that damn lump kept rising. I tried breathing through my nose. “You have—your parents. You remember the kids at school, the teachers. My memories are fuzzy.”

  “You remember me,” she said fiercely. “You want to forget me, too?”

  The nose-breathing didn’t work. I was crying, and so was Diana. Ugly, gulping crying. I thought, You don’t deserve to cry, which only made me cry harder. “I was always going to go. I should’ve been gone already. What’s the difference if it’s for the Manhattan Ballet or not?”

  She opened and closed her mouth, then wiped her eyes and put her hands on her hips. “Give me some time to think of a reason.”

  I hugged her. It was a kind of lurchy hug because my calves froze up halfway across the room, but it worked—I latched on and wouldn’t let go. I was not a hug person, so I didn’t know the secret of hugs until that moment: They’re not only one person’s effort. You hold each other up.

  Maybe it was stupid to leave Diana now that I was finally being honest with her. Part of me thought that would be enough, to lean on Diana and let her get me through this. But a bigger part of me knew that what I needed more than anything was a blank slate—and not from hekame this time.

  “I’m afraid,” I said.

  Diana let go and took half a step back. “Of Cal?”

  “No. I mean in the future—when I lose someone else, like I lost Win. I’m worried it’ll be more than I can handle.”

  She nodded but didn’t say anything.

  What else was there to say?

  I didn’t think I’d choose to forget someone again. Not now, knowing what I did about the costs: to the hekamist to make the spell, with her food, blood, and will; to everyone else, who had to carry their pain alone; and to me—not only the loss of dance but losing the connection between what I was and what I will be.