I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “You think I’m holding things against you,” I said. “Me. You think I think you’re the one sick in the head. You just don’t get it, do you? Or do you think I was lying about what I—”
“Of course I don’t,” she said, sharp and sorrowful. “After all this? Don’t be stupid. Of course I don’t. And it’s on my own conscience forever, that woman’s death. Just as much as yours.”
But I didn’t have to do it, Mom. Your going away so we couldn’t try and survive together, it’s got nothing to do with what I chose to do to Ms. Acosta. But at least she was taking her own advice, refusing to go after someone sick in the head. She sighed.
“If I’d raised you with some sort of faith,” she said, “even just the outlines of one, maybe you’d feel like there was more hope. Like Tina does. I can tell she’s lived through all this by barreling through everything, shoveling through one pile of shit after another, she’s so convinced that if she keeps going long enough she’ll find a pony in her stable. Jesus in the manger. If I’d—”
“That’s got nothing to do with anything,” I said. Short and sharp.
“Amy—”
“I didn’t tell all that stuff to Lisa instead of you because you left. Okay?” Gnats, sand flies veered toward my face and I brushed them away hard and brusque, hand slashing at the air. “The stuff about feeling caught between things, like I don’t really belong in either of—I told her all that because it would’ve scared you. It did scare you, I could tell, you started thinking I wanted to kill myself or something—”
“Lisa thought so too. I could see it. Can you blame her?”
“Jesus, don’t you think if I wanted to kill myself, I’d just do it? That I wouldn’t have done it already? I’ve got good reason to, believe me. There’s plenty of folks who’d look at what I did and think I should be dead.” My eyes were hot and stinging and full like tears would well up any second but they stayed dry, I’d killed someone and soaked myself in their blood but my eyes stayed dry, good a proof as any of a hardened heart. You can’t get blood from a stone, or salt water either. “But I don’t want to die. I really don’t. It’s just—”
There were no good words, not to say this. But they were the ones I had. “It’s just I don’t feel like I’m really alive, either.”
Another gull strutted past us, all bobbing head and gulping throat and sharp, indignant bird-eyes, going about its business like it would long after we were gone. The wounds in my own neck, where Natalie had slashed it, where we’d picked out the sutures last night one by one after it all healed with an inhuman speed, the itching there surged up and as I tilted my chin to scratch it, I could feel the skin, darker pink scar tissue, straining itself to stretch. A shiny little canopy tugged dangerously taut. My mother put her hand on mine, pulled my fingers down.
“You’ll open it all up again,” she said.
Our fingers twined together, resting on Nick’s broad rough back. He gazed indifferently at the waters.
“Even when I’m here,” I said, “even when I’m right here, with the clouds, and the lake, and the birds, and all of it, I feel like I’m not. It’s like how my skin itches, where it’s grown back. You always said that when I was little and hurt myself: ‘Don’t scratch. Itching means healing.’ There’s sand in my shoes, a little gritty. My socks are flat on the bottom from sweat, they need to be washed. The breeze is almost cool enough, but not quite. I can smell the water in the air. I feel all those things, all at once, like anyone would, except part of me thinks I really don’t. I just remember those feelings, in the aggregate, I just know that in a situation like this I’m supposed to feel them. And both those things are true, all at once. I’m here, I really am, and I’m also really not.”
Her hand in mine, though—that was unambiguous, that was real. I could feel it and remember how it felt beforehand all at once, without having to decide if it were really happening or not. She thought my words over, lending them weight.
“Maybe you’ve just had enough,” she said. “Like everyone has. Detachment, dissociation, are perfectly normal human reactions to—I’m wrong, aren’t I? Completely wrong. Just like that psychiatrist I saw was wrong, because I could never tell her the actual truth of what had happened to me. About my actual life.” She laughed, and as she rocked back and forth where she sat, my hand in hers rocked too. “I’m wrong. Aren’t I wrong?”
“I don’t know,” I said. It sounded right, didn’t it? Detachment. Depression. Disassociation. All explained by: disaster. Perfectly nice and neat, all very textbook. Just what you’d expect. From someone who’d lived through this, done what I’d done.
She was looking straight at me.
“You do know,” she said.
Dread. There’s another word. But it wasn’t the thing itself that I dreaded, it was saying it aloud all wrong. How did I tell her? Why was I so sure she already knew what I’d say?
“Maybe,” I said, as the wind picked up and wrapped strands of hair around my face, “maybe it’s because it was mostly just you and me, growing up, but I always felt, before this, like, how can you even trust anyone you haven’t known all your life? How can you even start to tell them things, and—I guess that’s why I never really had any friends. I mean, any best friends.” I didn’t need people, I’d thought, I had my dreams of music instead, though how I was ever going to get a band together with that attitude, God only knew. Dissociation. Distrust. “So, I mean, that’s something I’ve found out, since all this happened. That you can realize you know somebody, really—hate them, or love them, or both at once, when you’ve barely even really met them. Like Lisa. Or how Lisa feels about Naomi. Or Stephen.”
Get to the point. Stop dancing around it and get to the point. “I know you don’t like her, okay, I know that, but I love Lisa. I mean, as a friend. A sister even. And I love Stephen.” His name faltered in my mouth, like the sound of it had cut my tongue. “No matter what happened. But if something happened to him, if he died in earnest or just didn’t want anything to do with me, with us, anymore, things would keep happening. They’d hurt, but I’d get used to it, and they’d keep happening.” That I learned firsthand, after you left. “But—the other one. Not the man in black, not Jessie’s Florian—”
“Natalie’s friend,” said my mother. Mockery, and sympathy—both for Natalie—all at once. “The other one.”
“The other one. I—” How I ran away from him. It, her, them. How I ran from Nick, when Nick only wanted to introduce us properly, to stop my being afraid. I was afraid now, but only of the effect of my own words. I pulled my hand free, reached down and put my arms around Nick once again; he let me hug him like he never let Naomi, shaking her off so politely but not caring if she cried. I drew strength from the feel of his fur and muscular barrel-chest and the cool, silent hollow where he should’ve had, where I knew he wouldn’t have, a living beating heart.
“I love Stephen,” I said. “But... the other one. Him. It. Even before Natalie, and the lab, before I ever killed anyone—I didn’t know before I saw him, it, face to face, that that’s what I was feeling, but what I think is that he’s what I’ve been waiting for, my entire life.”
I pressed my cheek to Nick’s back. His tail thumped against my leg. He was all good strong flesh shielding the curve of his backbone, without his ever needing to eat. Goddammit, I sounded like Natalie. I sounded like Natalie and that wasn’t what I’d meant at all, not romance, not Death as some fantasy boyfriend or daddy-figure or—at least I’d said it out loud.
I felt the touch of fingers against my hair, and when they persisted I finally looked up. My mother’s face, her eyes, I couldn’t read them for trying.
“So I guess now you think I really do want to kill myself,” I said. “Or that I don’t really care what happens to the world, or that I’m so guilty about what I did, I think I deserve—”
“No,” she said. An emphatic shake of her head. “That’s the thing, Amy, I know—I think—what you meant. Y
ou’re here, alive, but you’re not. You’re in his world, its world, but also in ours. Your outside self, it’s flesh and blood”—she glanced down at Nick, gave a brief quick touch to his nose—”but inside you, it feels all clean and empty, like a house that’s been cleared out. Space. And the reason it’s empty is because nothing actually needs to be there.”
Maybe I’d said it better than I’d thought, after all. I was embarrassed all over again that she’d seen inside me, that anyone but Stephen, one of my fellow hollow men, had—but she was one too, my mother. Not knowing which world she belonged in—that was really why she’d run away. I pressed my forehead to Nick’s side. Protect me. Help me, even as you condemn me, just like you were sent to me to do.
“Death,” I said. Out loud. “It’s what I’ve been waiting for, without knowing it, my whole life. Not to die. I don’t want to die. But—to meet Death, to see it, him, face to face. Because he’s in there, in the hollow spaces inside. He’s part of me. Before I ever... before everything I did, he was part of me. A house, where everyone’s moved out? That’s good. That’s what it’s like. And this is like, I’m in the cellar of that empty house, and the plaster of the walls is starting to crumble so you can see just how much hollow space there always was in there, all along, and I’m on the steps next to some old jam jars and canned things nobody took with them, all caked with dust, probably not fit to eat... and he’s in there. Living. He didn’t cause the emptiness, he isn’t filling it up—he’s just part of it, and always was. He’s just there. Telling me everything he knows, everything he keeps from everyone else until they die.”
I sat up, still embracing Nick around the neck like he’d only tolerate from Naomi in short bursts. I hoped she never saw us like this, it’d make her sad. “And all the times before this,” I said, “when I would go down the cellar stairs, I’d sense something was down there with me but I didn’t want to see it, I was scared of it like a little kid, so I made sure only to look straight ahead, grab my jar of tomatoes or whatever, get back up the stairs fast as I could without turning back—but now, I look around. I wait. And then I see him, in the shadows. Living inside me. Just like that Florian said. Just like that. And he’s, it’s, they’ve been there all along. And—it fits. It’s right that he’s there. It’s all right. And he’s never going to leave, and that’s all right too. Wherever I go, he’ll be there and however long I live, and we’re part and parcel of each other, forever.”
Just like that Florian said. But it’d left him now, that’s what else Florian said, that eternal unspoken presence had left him and he had no idea where it had gone or why it had faded away. What did it mean? Did it mean anything? Was Death just growing sick of us all—us so-called special children, the despised orphans like Natalie, every last one of us—and cutting us loose, going so far away we’d never hear from him again? Maybe that’s what Stephen meant, when he talked about feeling blind: something that he’d grown so used to seeing from the corner of his eye he barely registered its presence anymore, suddenly really truly wasn’t there. But without Death—without that place beyond this one, Death’s own house—what was there waiting for any of us, if the living world was dying? If Florian’s world was collapsing, disappearing?
Nothing, that’s what. Nothing at all. And you couldn’t fight nothing, no matter how much something you had. The biggest number in the universe, times zero, equaled... zero.
But that couldn’t be true. The things I’d seen that I’d thought weren’t there, turned out to be real and true. The things Florian and Stephen thought they didn’t see—the things we all thought we didn’t see, like Florian’s old-man limbs suddenly not there anymore—they were surely hidden behind some ever-shifting blind spot to taunt us, remind us who was really in charge. That no matter what we did or where we went, he, it, was still in charge of what we saw of him. Of dead people, of the world of the dead. That wasn’t the same as nothingness. The presence of Death inside me—still, this very second—that was the opposite of nothingness. That was the whole point. Maybe everything we thought we thought we could see wasn’t there, was actually safe and sound and solid. Maybe that sensation we all felt and pretended we didn’t, growing stronger and stronger as the hours crawled by—that slow, creeping, unshakable premonition of disaster—was all just in our own heads. Maybe it wasn’t only Billy, but all of us who were delusional bugfuck crazy.
He wasn’t just leaving all of us behind, like he had Natalie in his anger. Was he?
Was I really just giving up too soon?
High, angry squawking sounds broke out nearby, the whooshing flutter-flap of wings, then suddenly silence once more. Some territorial fight over an insect, a shiny pull-tab, a bit of dead flesh from right after the plague when the lake shores were clogged with bodies. My mother, who understood everything and didn’t want to, laid her palm down flat in the sand and patted thoughtfully at the soft, crumbly little ridges until they collapsed. Patty cake.
“I think we need to leave,” she said. “We should leave here, as soon as we can. I’ll talk to Stephen myself if you don’t want to.”
I dug my own fingertips into the patted-down mound, rucking up ridges and furrows all over again. “This isn’t about Stephen, and you know it.”
“I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all, it—” She looked up at me with desperate eyes, the eyes of someone who needs an older, wiser, better person to confide everything because they’re so weary of being that person to someone else, but they only have themselves. It must’ve been fun as hell, sometimes, having children. “Something’s going to happen to you, I can feel it inside that if we stay here, something will happen to you. We have to leave.”
“We can’t leave now,” I said. “Not with what’s about to happen. What might be about to—do you think there’s anything we can do? Do you think everything he warned us about is true? That anything Stephen said he saw was true?”
My mother laughed, threw a hand skyward. “Ask Nick, maybe? You’ve been seeing these kinds of things all along, haven’t you?”
“But it doesn’t make any sense. It still doesn’t make any sense.”
I thought of when I’d finally run away from Paradise, away from Billy and his pals and smack into the path of those men, those boys who had their fists and an armory of guns and one poor, piteous woman they were holding captive. Who they shot in front of me when she tried to run away—who needs her anyway, now we’ve got a new one—but before anything could happen, something that looked like that woman’s ghost, but wasn’t any paltry ghost, came back and killed them all. And spared me. Collapsing like a teetering tower of building blocks there where they stood in the street, chain reaction of instantaneous death, while he, she, it stood there and smiled and worked its will on all their bodies—I could feel a heaviness inside me as we spoke, a weight of waiting like the thick ponderousness of air right before rain. If he, it really wanted to destroy everything, why wait? Why hadn’t he done it already, all at once? What was the point of being so elusive and scattershot, keeping everyone torturously on their toes? Either do it, or don’t. Or maybe it was like I was starting to fear: we were all just collectively crazy.
I wasn’t afraid of him. Apprehensive, yes. Confused. Impatient. But not afraid. Dying did that to you, maybe. I bet Jessie knew all about it.
“I don’t know what’s the truth,” I said. I shoved my fingers hard into the sand, past the first knuckle, wincing as the wet grains drove themselves past the quick of my nails. “I don’t know what to do, or what to think.”
“Then I guess we’re all in the same boat,” Jessie said behind us.
SEVENTEEN
LUCY
As Jessie spoke, I caught the faint smell of ash from the morning’s breakfast fires. We turned without rising and saw her standing with her hands shoved in her pockets—God knew how long she’d been there, listening, and it felt weirdly familiar—her snarl of auburn hair tangling itself into new shapes with the wind and her mouth set in a tight, tense line.
“There’s lunch,” she said. She wasn’t the least bit conciliatory, just announcing what was so. “If you want it.”
We shook our heads. She came up beside us, tilting her head so she was squinting straight into the veiled afternoon sunlight. “Breakfast, lunch, dinner,” she said. “Like living little squares on the calendar you mark off to know you’re through another day. And another, and another, and another. Except it never quits, does it? You never don’t need to eat—well, we can’t really starve ourselves, our kind, but hunger’d still drive us up a wall if we didn’t eat. I had a calendar, Linc brought me one a while ago. But we couldn’t figure out just where we were on it—Renee didn’t know the date and Linc and I had good as forgotten how to use one, and all those empty squares on that empty paper going on and on and on, it depressed me. It was depressing as hell. So we used it for kindling. Like we could just tear out and burn up all these days that keep going and keep going and never, ever end.”
She laughed, shaking her head. “It never felt like this, back when we were all properly dead. Even when we spent ninety percent of our time eating or hunting to eat. It never felt like this at all.”
Her voice unspooled evenly and steadily, like the tape machine on some old cop show where the killer finally gives her confession. I had the strange, distinct feeling we were being offered some sort of apology.
“Time does drag, sometimes,” I finally said. “That’s the truth.”
Nick pulled away from Amy, padding over to sniff at Jessie’s feet. She petted him, smiling—her soft spot for animals was obvious, deer kill or no deer kill—and he planted his front paws on her calf, wagging his tail hard as her nails raked his head.
“Florian,” she said, still giving Nick an energetic scratch. “He—I kept seeing him, dreaming about him, all through the plague, that’s how I know I was delirious. He helped get me where I was going, but—” She laughed again, the sound verging on a snort. “You don’t want to take much of what he says literally. I mean, he’s never lied, I don’t think he could lie to anyone if he wanted to—except Teresa, maybe, but Teresa was the most bone-stripped bitch who ever walked the planet so that hardly counts—but he gets to the truth in pretty roundabout ways. So all that talk of his, about... it doesn’t necessarily mean what it sounded like he said.” She patted Nick, who obligingly set his paws back on solid sand. “It could mean a thousand and one things you won’t figure out and he won’t tell you until you’re really in the shit, feeling like you’ve got nothing to go on, and then suddenly the light will go on.”
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