I’m fairly confident in my cooking abilities and the food smells and tastes fine to me, so I don’t think it’s that. I think he’s sick.
“You told me you ate.”
“I did,” he says, affronted. Then looks away. “At Ms. Josephine’s.”
I sit facing him on the couch. “Grady, you have to eat. You’re going to make yourself ill, and you don’t look that healthy to begin with.”
He nods. He knows.
“I’m going to make you some chicken noodle soup.” Everyone likes chicken noodle soup, and it was the only thing he ever wanted when he was sick. It wasn’t high on calories, but at least it would get something in him.
“Okay,” he nods.
After twenty minutes, I’ve got a bowl of fragrant, steaming chicken noodle soup on the table. It smells so good that I make myself a small bowl too.
But unlike him, I eat it. He takes two bites and struggles to take another. He actually gags. On soup. His paleness has taken on a greener tinge, and now I’m really worried.
I put my spoon down. “You can’t eat it, can you?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what it is about it, but it tastes rancid and makes my stomach cramp. But I’m still starving.”
“Tell me what you want,” I say, feeling desperate. “What sounds good? I will go to the store and buy anything that sounds appealing to you.”
He carefully puts his folded napkin down, avoiding my eyes. “I’m afraid to tell you what sounds good.”
At this point I will buy him nothing but beer and chips if it gets him to eat. With my hand on his, I say, “You have to eat. If you don’t, I’m taking you to the doctor, even if I have to call an ambulance.” He looks at me, questioning, but I keep my jaw tight, because I’m serious. “Tell me. Whatever it is, I’ll get it for you. You have to eat.”
He meets my eyes. “Meat.”
“You mean like chicken? Steaks? Or like hamburger patties?”
“Yes, but...plain.” He’s looking away again.
“Okay.” I pat his hand. “I’ll go to the store right now.”
I’m up and gone and back with two packages of raw hamburger before I allow myself to think.
He takes it out of my hands and sits at the table. He rips the cellophane open and pinches a chunk out with his fingers before I can even offer to cook it for him. I blink, because that’s not at all what I expected. I don’t think it could be what anyone would expect, but I said I would get him anything to get him to eat, and I meant it. I just... When he said “plain”, I thought he meant without anything else. I didn’t think he meant raw.
His eyes close as he chews, and I’m still standing by the door with the empty grocery bag, trying not to think. It’s not working. My stomach rolls.
“Grady?”
He doesn’t seem to hear me at all, or even remember that I’m here.
Maybe he is severely low on iron, since he’s so pale, and that’s why he craved raw meat. Or maybe it is somehow easier for him to digest with whatever this illness is that he has. Maybe he’d been poisoned while he was gone, or experimented on, and this is all he can eat.
Most of the package is gone now, and his bites have slowed down. But he’s starting to look queasy again, and after watching him devour a whole pound of raw meat, I’m feeling the same way.
Balling up the bag in my hand, I sit across from him at the table. “What’s wrong?” Perhaps he ate too fast. Or perhaps he just freaking ate a pound of ground beef, raw.
He makes a face without looking at me. “I can eat it, but it tastes old. It’s like kale. I can eat it because I’m starving, but it’s not great, and I don’t know how long I can stomach it.”
I can feel that something else is coming.
“I need...” He glances back at me for a split-second, and there’s an otherworldly redness to his irises that he never had before. “...fresher,” he says, almost growling.
Suddenly I know perfectly well what he means. Him missing six weeks, showing up wearing his burial clothes. The paleness and coldness of his skin. The bloody sets of clothes. The pain and blackness he remembered. What he said about Ms. Josephine, and dying, and Voodoo.
It all makes sense now. He was telling me the truth.
My stomach rolls again, and I run to the bathroom and get rid of the soup I ate a little bit ago, my dinner from earlier, and possibly even the lining of my stomach.
I’m limp against the wall when he comes in and gets me a wet cloth and a cup of water. He squats down in front of me and holds them out. I take them, because I’m so wrung out from puking, I couldn’t even run away if I wanted to.
I can’t meet his eyes though. I sip the water, a certain word I don’t want to say pinging around my brain.
Zombie.
“Please don’t freak out until we know more,” he begs. “You’re not in any danger from me.” He ducks down to meet my eyes. “I would never hurt you, no matter what. I love you.”
Realistically, I know that, or even with the puking, I wouldn’t still be here. I’d have run out of the house spewing and driven straight to the police station with a trail of barf behind me. He’s still my husband, still Grady. He’s just...still dead. Sort of. Mostly. “You’re a zombie.”
Saying the word is weird. It feels foreign in my mouth, sounds peculiar in the air.
Grady flops from kneeling to sitting against the other wall, head in his hands. “Yeah,” he says after a few seconds, muffled.
“Are you going to start the apocalypse?” I blurt out. I look up at him, my head against the wall, still too weak to do anything if my husband changes his mind and decides to start chomping on me.
“No,” he huffs. “At least, I don’t think so. Ms. Josephine made it sound like it was a soul-thing, not a virus thing.” He throws his hands up, shakes his head, and then covers his face. “I don’t really know anything. I don’t know how this could happen, or why I’m back, or what any of this means.”
I don’t know either, but he’s still my husband, and he wouldn’t hurt me. I have to trust that.
He looks so broken. I put the cup of water down and crawl over to him. I pull him close, and he lets me, burying his face against my chest.
At least if he decides to bite my boob, it wouldn’t be the first time. I laugh.
“What?” he asks, voice thick.
“I was just thinking that if you decided to bite my boob, it wouldn’t be the first time.”
He chuckles, and I chuckle.
And then I start crying, because son of a bitch, my husband is still dead. A dead man walking. I don’t know if that makes things better or worse.
But just knowing that he really died, that I really buried him, and all my previous feelings about it were real, brought them all back in a rush.
We switch positions and my face is pressed against his chest, tears choking out of me and soaking his T-shirt. And I thought I was done crying done mourning him, because he was back. Silly me.
His arms tighten around me, and it takes me a minute to notice, but he feels different than the last time we hugged. I sniffle, pull back, and put my palm on the side of his neck to make sure.
“You feel warm.”
Indeed, he’s even got a little pink in his skin, his eyes are clear, the dark circles under his eyes almost gone. I meet his gaze.
“It’s because I ate,” he says, eyes dark, apologetic.
“Oh,” I say, recalling the other times I’d noticed him looking a little better. “So you have been...eating. Just not my food. Raw meat.” I don’t think I want to know the details.
He winces, nods.
There’s no avoiding the truth now, but I almost don’t care. It’s a bright light through the darkness that makes me hope we can have some semblance of a normal life. A way that we can be together. He’s more ‘alive’ now. So long as he eats raw meat, he looks, acts, and feels like my husband.
And suddenly I don’t care if he’s undead, I on
ly care that he’s here with me, and that he stays that way.
I put my hand on his cheek and press myself upwards until my lips can meet his. They feel warm. Familiar. They’re the lips of the man I love.
I bring up my other hand to hold his face while I kiss him more, tears leaking out of my closed eyes. “I told you at our wedding that I’d love you forever,” I say between kisses. “No matter what. And I meant it.” I pull back to meet his eyes, and they’re a little damp, and he closes them as he pushes his fingers into my hair and presses his forehead against mine. And I’m now 100% certain that it’s my soul-mate in that body...even if the body is a little different than it used to be.
Somehow, whether by choice or chance, he conquered death and came back to me.
And I’d known he would if he could, didn’t I? I’d wanted him to, begged God for it to happen. And I would never reject an answered prayer, no matter what form he took.
“But if you’re undead...” I say, sniffling and swiping my eyes, “then that also means that someone, or some thing, made you dead in the first place.” And there were still so many unanswered questions around that. He nods again, but doesn’t reply. “Does Ms. Josephine know what happened to you? Before she did her spell?” He shakes his head, eyes damp, apparently struggling for words. “And you still don’t remember?”
He shakes his head again and sits back. “I don’t know, Maisie. I see shadows, shapes, partial faces, impressions...but it’s all a blur. I couldn’t move or breathe and I couldn’t see—” His eyes close tight and his voice cracks the tiniest bit, and I can’t help but press myself against him. Even if he doesn’t need it, I do. “—and all I wanted was to get home to you.” He opens his eyes and looks down at me, brown gaze soft as he strokes his fingers down my cheek. “I wanted to see you again so badly, I couldn’t let go.”
And as weird as our current situation is, as absolutely freaking crazy as it is... “I’m glad.” And I am, because it hurt too bad to say goodbye to him, and I would rather love my husband in person, zombie or not, than over the uncrossable distance of death. I lean up and kiss his mouth again, partially to hide the tears trying to fall.
To think about what he’s been through, it horrifies me. I know he is leaving out all the pain, the terror. I saw his face when he remembered in the car. To know that he’d been hurt like that by someone made me angry.
Whether or not he was in front of me right now, whether or not he was alive or dead or somewhere in between...
Someone had murdered my husband.
Chapter Twelve
Grady
I hang on to Maisie for dear life, eyes burning, trying not to break into sobs like a baby. I’d been so scared about what would happen if she found out. I thought she’d freak out and run away again, maybe permanently. Or call the police, the government, or a priest for God’s sake. But she’s taking it so well. I don’t think many people who have handled the news as well as she did. I didn’t give her enough credit. I’m not sure I’m handling it as well as she is, and I’ve had a bit longer to adjust.
Maisie figured it out. She knows my secret. And if I am being honest, showing her had felt easier than telling her. I’d tried to tell her before, and she couldn’t believe it, couldn’t accept it. But she believed me now.
And still loved me.
As crazy as things had been, still are, and as much as we still had to figure out, I feel relief so profound I’m almost giddy. Giddy too, at the depth of her love for me. It’s infinite.
Probably. Hopefully. She didn’t know about the deer, or our neighbor’s dog, or about that scary dark place I go to when I eat, unaware and out of control.
I’d tried to stay present, to not go to that dark place while I was eating, and it had worked. Maybe it was because I’d just eaten at Ms. Josephine’s recently, but I’d been able to keep my head. Barely.
We were still sitting on the bathroom floor, my arm around her as she leaned against me, talking. She has questions.
A lot of them I’d just had answered by Ms. Josephine, but a lot of them I don’t have answers to yet.
Like who murdered me. Who the lab was that was responsible. Biff’s role in everything.
“We have to try talking to your boss again,” she says, as if she heard my thoughts.
We pull apart and look at each other. “You think Biff did this.”
“I’m not sure, but I think he at least knows more than he’s letting on. He has to. He was at the site when you left. You remembered his voice. He’s the one who called in the accident. He identified you to the police.” She counts the facts off on her fingers. “And all that doesn’t mean he was the one who—” She pauses there, and I can tell she’s struggling to say it out loud.
“Who killed me,” I finish for her.
She nods, swallowing. “Right. But he must be hiding something. He must know more about what happened.”
I know I died, but I don’t know why, and I don’t who did it. Someone hurt me, buried me in the ground, suffocated me. But who? Was it really Biff? Or could it have been Travis, whose mutinous expression is stuck in my brain? Or maybe it was the two faceless shadows, or the skeleton man. Either way, my former co-workers have to know more than they let on.
“We do need to talk to Biff. But I feel like we can’t confront him until I have my memory back or we have some kind of proof, or some kind of affirmation from someone else.” But Ms. Josephine doesn’t know anything about it, and there isn’t anyone else to ask.
“What about asking Travis?”
I tense, and she looks up at me.
“What is it?”
“He was there. That night. I don’t know how or why, but I remember his face.”
“That’s good, then, right? I could go talk to him, see if he knows anything that would help us with Biff. He was pretty torn-up at your funeral. More so than Biff.” She frowns. “I had barely noted in my grief-numbed mind. But...that’s kind of odd, right? Maybe he knows something.”
“And what if he’s the one responsible? You might be in danger.” I brush her hair back from her face. “And the last thing I want to do is put you at risk.”
She’s quiet a minute.
“I don’t really want to either. But if Travis is the one responsible, don’t you think we should try to find out before we go accusing Biff? And you can’t exactly be the one to go talk to him.”
“Good point.” I frown into the distance. We can’t confront Biff yet.
“I should go talk to Travis. Try to catch him in a lie or get him to give up something on Biff. Or maybe we’ve got everything wrong, and he’ll give us a new lead.”
“I don’t like it,” I grumble. Yet what other choice do we have? “But okay. We’ll try this weekend. He should be off.”
“Okay. Before then, I need you to tell me everything you remember, so I know if Travis lies. It might help to look at it now that we know your...condition.”
Condition. Sounds like we’re describing a medical problem, not an undead problem. “Yeah. Okay.”
I tell her every snippet of memory I have about that day, in as much detail as I can. Everything I told Ms. Josephine. The snow, Ms. Josephine, the lights. Travis, the barrels, the faces, the pain. And once again, I’m forced to relive a memory that no one should have to: the awful moment of my death.
It’s better for me this time, with her by my side, to smell her and have her here to anchor me.
But it’s hard on her. She’s crying again, hand over her mouth, blue eyes dark with sympathetic pain.
“I’m so sorry,” she sobs and dives into my arms. “I was so worried that you had suffered, and you did!”
I squeeze her tight and stroke a hand down her head. “It’s okay now. I’m here.” For now. I still haven’t told her all of it yet. That even my undeath could end soon. And as hard as she’s taking all of this, I don’t think I can right now.
With her in my arms, I rise up and readjust her so her legs are over my other arm. I finall
y get to use my increased strength for something good.
She nestles against my shoulder and I carry her to the bedroom.
I’ve stayed on the couch every night since I came back. Will she let me join her in our bed again? Should I?
I lay her down gently, and as our arms slide apart, her hand grasps mine.
She doesn’t let me go, and instead slides over, and I almost crumble to the floor on weak knees from gratitude.
I join her on the bed, facing her, hands clasped between us.
“What is it like?” she asks, staring at me.
My forehead wrinkles as I try to formulate an answer. “I don’t really feel that much different. Except that I can’t really sleep much, especially after eating. And yet if I wait too long, I’m tired and slow, and I can’t think straight. And I get cranky.”
“Ohhhh,” she says, awareness in her eyes.
“Yeah, I know you’ve gotten the brunt of it a few times. I’m sorry. I didn’t know why at first, then when I figured it out...” I toss a hand into the air, and she nods.
She reaches out and puts her hand on my chest, over my heart, feeling it beat. Occasionally. “It’s so slow,” she murmurs.
I nod. “But it’s beating. Ms. Josephine said I’m not an animated corpse. I’m...something else. Straddling the world of the dead and the world of the living.”
“So nothing is going to rot and fall off?”
I grin, because though she doesn’t say it, I’ve known her long enough to know what she’s thinking of. “No, nothing is going to fall off. I was lucky enough to be buried in whatever chemicals were leaking from the barrels I remember.” My smile fades, because I’m still not sure if I’m lucky, or cursed. “They regenerated my body, and I still heal normally as long as I eat.”
“Do you ever feel like eating... me?” Her voice is small.
“No! Never,” I say, immediately. Normally I’d make a joke at the timing of her question, but this isn’t the time. “Only animals. Never humans.” But I don’t want to scare her, especially when she seems to be coping so well. So I don’t tell her about the black-outs, the things I do in them, the worry about what else might happen. I’ll just stay on top of my eating, and make sure I never go to that place in her presence, ever.
A Cursed All Hallows' Eve Page 24