I nod.
Scratch raises his index finger, and I watch him write cursive in the air, the word illuminated by fire. Completed.
Jeb falls limp on his cable.
Completed.
Then Renata.
Completed.
Then Clarissa.
Completed.
Ellen.
Completed.
Mike.
Completed.
Gary.
Completed.
Jasmine.
Completed.
Dan.
I don’t know how it’s possible, but I feel it, the loss of their souls. Like there’s more negative space all of a sudden, more air than there should be. I hope they find some sort of relief, wherever they are now. But I doubt it.
I grip the knife handle tighter.
Alejandro raises his chin slightly, expectant. “I am ready, my dear.” Closes his eyes. A hint of a smile teases his mouth, and he’s about to speak again—
—when he’s cut off by the blast of a shot ringing out, the impact of the bullet causing the front of his skull to explode, spraying blood and bits of brain across my face, the camera, the floor. Alejandro’s body crumples, falls to the cold flagstone. For a moment, his right hand twitches, like he’s processing an electric current. Then it’s still.
The gray cast to his skin, his dark shadow, lightens and then gradually, slowly, disappears. For a moment, he looks at peace. Then his skin crumbles, five hundred years of decay happening in five seconds, leaving behind only a blanched, white skeleton, and a pile of gray ash.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
MY FIRST EMOTION is anger that someone has cheated me out of my revenge, followed closely by relief that someone has cheated me out of my revenge, which is quickly followed by shock. Because when I turn to see who has done this evil deed, I find Justin standing in the doorway of St. Patrick, both hands gripping a gun, smoke still drifting from the barrel.
Justin. Good God, Justin.
I turn to Scratch, but the devil is nowhere—gone, vanished.
Justin puts the gun in his coat pocket—Where the hell did he get a gun?—runs down the aisle—When’s the last time I saw him run?—clasps me in his arms. “Oh my God, oh my God, are you okay? Are you okay?”
Is this hell? Did I really die and go to hell? Because this isn’t right, nothing about this is right.
Justin pushes me away slightly, examining me for injury. “Are you really . . . what the hell are you wearing?”
I start to shiver. It’s uncontrollable and my teeth chatter.
He presses a hand against my cheek, like I might be running a fever. “Oh, Fiona,” he says, his voice breaking. “My Fiona.”
He takes off a dark navy peacoat, which I’d bought for him a year ago and has never been worn. Flings it out like a matador cape and wraps it around my shoulders.
“There,” he says, running a loving hand over my matted hair. There is still gum from where the duct tape bound his wrists.
He looks different. His shirt hangs off him. His tumor looks smaller. I feel the weight of the gun in his coat pocket, still warm.
“How did you know where I was?” I ask.
At that, he looks down for just a fraction of a second too long. “I turned on your Find a Friend app. When you were asleep. Opal suggested it. We were worried about you.”
We. When did they become we?
“But I don’t have my phone.”
This seems to surprise him. “Well . . . who does?”
Oh, the digital trail has been set, Scratch had said.
“Stolen,” I lie. “Probably one of . . .” I nod in the direction of the dead-soul web.
Justin wraps an arm around my shoulder, gathering me. “Well. Let’s get out of here before the police come.”
We are both lying to each other now; I know it. I look at Alejandro’s skeleton lying askew in the aisle, and envy him.
A QUIET RIDE HOME. Even with the priest’s smock and Justin’s wool peacoat, I’m cold. We drive slowly through the streets in Opal’s car, an old Volkswagen that is neat, vacuumed, well cared for. Smells like the strawberry air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. We’re cleared through a police checkpoint, and then onto the freeway. The sky is tinted pink, smoke and dust creating a glorious sunrise, and it makes me sad that Alejandro isn’t in this world anymore to capture it.
I wonder if Scratch will ever call my favor, if I’ll end up in prison, insane and alone like Saul. But I feel like there is some other plan in store for me. Something worse. Something to do with Justin.
He has a jitter about him—he turns on the heat, turns it down, turns it up. I recognize that jitter—guilt.
“Where did you get the gun?” My first words. They sound stark.
“Just . . .” He takes a hand off the steering wheel, runs it over his head. I note the first blossoming of what looks like new hair sprouting. “I bought it online. Just in case I couldn’t . . . you know . . . take it.”
“You would shoot yourself? Why not just OD?”
His eyes cut sideways. “What the hell kind of question is that?”
But if he was a dead soul, there’d be a shadow. No one I can call now to compare notes with.
I fiddle with a button on his peacoat. “I’m just wondering if I know you.”
“That’s really funny,” he says. “That you’re wondering if you know me.”
We don’t say anything after that for a while. We get on the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, joining a long, thick vein of traffic. Everyone leaving the city in the same, small arteries. Stop and go. Stop and go. Makes me think of the beat of a heart, the pulse of blood through veins. Renata’s heart, exposed to the air.
The ocean below is still, dark, and pensive.
“I bought the gun,” he finally says. “I put it in my coat pocket. I decided I’d go to a park early one morning, before anyone got there. Take care of things.”
It causes me to wince, because I know it’s true. He has always been that considerate.
“I know it’d ruin the life insurance policy, but I didn’t want to be in the hospital. My mother was in the hospital. I hate the way they smell.”
His mother died when he was eight. He rarely, if ever, speaks of her.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I just feel weird. It’s not every day your boyfriend shoots a man you were about to kill. Who doesn’t ask any questions about, say, a church filled with flayed bodies.” I try to inflect it like a joke, but neither of us smile.
A van in front of us, the bumper adorned with a bumper sticker: COEXIST.
“Look, I woke up, or came to . . . Opal found me, untied me. The place was a mess, you were gone. I don’t even remember what happened; the last thing I knew we were talking. I tried calling the police, but they were busy, so Opal gave me her keys and since then . . . fuck, let’s just say I’m a little overwhelmed.”
The thought occurs to me that maybe I’m being paranoid. Maybe I don’t know how to be any other way. He reaches out for my hand, and I give it to him. Raise his hand to my lips, kiss the knuckles.
Only they smell like Opal’s perfume.
NOT A HARD TIME getting a parking space, not on a day when people are packing up and leaving the city. At least four spaces right in front of our apartment building.
“It was just an explosion,” I say, watching a mother pack her minivan across the street. She has two toddlers and four barely closed suitcases.
Justin slides the stick shift into park. “Rumor is that it’s a terrorist attack planned by an inmate in San Quentin. Someone leaked a highly classified document.”
“Right.” Someone like Scratch. I bet my name is in that document.
I find the handle of the door, open it, step out of the car onto the sidewalk. Blue sky now, a
small skittering of white clouds. I think about the card in my wallet, in my purse, in my apartment. Whether there are words written on it. I think about Justin’s fingers that smell like Opal’s perfume. My knees almost give out.
“Here,” says Justin. He grabs my elbow and props me up. His shirt seems to hang even looser now. His cheeks are fuller, healthier. Rosy almost.
“I don’t know if I can walk.”
“Then don’t,” he says, scooping me up and into his arms. He’s only done this once before, carrying me into the cabin at the foot of the Tetons. When he was stronger, when he was cancer-free.
He carries me over to the entry, gently sets me down and reaches into his pocket for his keys. The tumor is definitely smaller, and his jeans hang just below his hip. A click as he unlocks the door.
“Ready?” he asks brightly.
We are playing roles now. I offer a wan smile.
He knows.
He knows I was the one who trashed the apartment, made Jeb tie him up. How he knows, I’m not sure. I want to speak into the wall I’ve created, I want to argue my case—I didn’t mean for any of this to happen, the only reason it happened is because I love him so much, I was afraid I was going to lose him, so I did something stupid, even for me, and that everything I’ve done since then is for him, for us. All I wanted to do was fix the mess I made.
But I know in my heart it’s not true. None of it is. I’m a good liar, but not that good. The truth is I was paranoid, and jealous, and never really trusted him. I always kept a psychic bag packed. Until I sold my soul, nothing terrified me so much as real intimacy, the kind where you risk your heart, actual feelings. The truth is that the most important thing to me is me. I wanted a double deal so I wouldn’t end up in hell. The truth is that to whatever extent he’s now corrupted, it’s because I introduced the contagion.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
I remember my father looming in the doorway—Christ, his skin, I remember his skin now, that strange, gray cast. You think you’re a good person, but you’re not. I always thought it was the drugs that made him look that way. I was wrong.
He was a dead soul too.
Justin holds open the door for me while an invisible shock wave ripples through my body. I almost want to laugh, although there’s nothing funny, not really.
“Ladies first.”
THE ELEVATOR CREAKS, and groans, and I can’t help but think of the metal cables spinning around the pulleys that carry our weight, like the web stringing up the dead souls in St. Patrick. Justin holds me up around the waist, and I lean my head on his shoulder, savoring these last moments.
The truth, it hurts. But for the first time in my life, I’d rather see and feel it in every excruciating detail.
The elevator reaches the fifth floor, jolts to a halt. He unclasps the metal gate, pushes it aside like a fan. Opens the door. Gallantly offers his hand, and I take it. We step into the hallway—he slips his arm around me again, warm, protective, an illusion. That woman—Lydia, Gloria, something—pokes her head out the door of her apartment.
“Oh my goodness gracious,” she says. “Are you two okay?”
I offer another wan smile. “Looks worse than it is.”
She seems doubtful. “You should see a doctor, honey.”
“Hospitals are packed,” says Justin. “But my hospice nurse is here—she can fix her up.”
Of course she’s still here. Everything I touched, I corrupted, Saul had said. It bleeds that way. I feel ribs under Justin’s shirt. It’s the first time I’ve felt them in months; they were covered by the tumor.
“I’ll be fine,” I say. “Everything is going to be fine.”
I’m sure she’ll be more than happy to tell her story to the news media, once I’m officially pegged as a suspect. There was that time when I found her clothes in a heap on the stoop. She never was friendly. Kept to herself.
“Thank you,” says Justin, in a tone that implies now go away.
She hesitates, uncertain, but then closes her door, leaving me with the man I don’t love as much as I do myself. One who has some nefarious plan for me.
Gently he guides me down the hallway to our apartment door, and I lean on him more than I need to. I can almost feel his cancer melting away under my fingers. Strange and miraculous. We get to the door, and pause for a moment.
I think about all the things I’d wished I said to him, long ago, I think about all the time I wasted pursuing work, cultivating fear, being invisible, here but not here. I think I might even have been happy. Isn’t that a strange thing to consider, that I was happy but didn’t know it? Another thing I lost that I didn’t know I had.
I take a deep breath. He smells like old Justin—clean, healthy, just a touch of sweat. I look at his face, and his eyes hold a wall between us. We regard ourselves as these new creatures, capable of unspeakable acts, of treachery.
“I really loved you,” I say. “Even when it didn’t look like it, I loved you.”
“I know,” he says. “I’ve always known.”
He opens the door. A waft of Opal’s perfume escapes.
“But it is what it is.”
I could run; I could try to ghost one last time. But I’m tired of running, and tired of being a living ghost. I can’t imagine how Alejandro endured living in this shadow world all that time.
I step into my apartment. He follows.
And shuts the door behind him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
OPAL IS STANDING in the kitchen area, cooking something on the stove. Not hiding how at home she is. Something meaty in the oven, a roast maybe. Justin hasn’t been able to digest that kind of protein in months.
There’s been a shift too in the arrangement of furniture. The couch now faces the window, not the TV, which does create a nice buffer between the door and living space, and draws the eyes to the fire escape and a peek of the lake view. I wish I’d thought of it.
Opal looks up, sees the state of me, and takes the spoon out of a pot—Beans? He hates beans—and places it on a spoon rest I didn’t know we had.
“Oh my God,” she says.
“I found her like this,” says Justin. He doesn’t mention shooting anyone. “I thought it was better to bring her back here until the hospitals clear up.”
It feels practiced, what they’re saying. Scripted. And her skin—I’d recognize that dark shadow anywhere. She must see mine too. But Justin doesn’t have one. There’s some small comfort in that.
My teeth chatter. My body is actually going into shock.
Opal walks toward me with an affectation of concern. “We need to get her into the bathtub. Clean her wounds.”
Here they are, talking about me in third person. I’m the child now.
“That’s what I thought.”
“I’ll get the kit.”
What kit, I don’t know; we never had a kit. Still, I let Justin lead me to the bedroom, which has been restored to order, except for the mangled bedside lamp, which sticks out of my modern trash can, looking like it’s trying to eat it. Subtle changes here too. My papers, for instance, are missing. Trashed too or simply stored in the closet?
Justin turns the light on in the bathroom, goes in. I hear him turn on the faucet, the rush of water into the tub. I take off his peacoat jacket, drop it on the bed—the coverlet with the bloodstains is gone, replaced by a simple white sheet over the feather comforter. I think for a moment. Yes. Just in case.
I reach into the peacoat, pull out the gun, slide it under the mattress where I kept my scissors. My fingertips leave a slight smudge of dust on the white sheet.
“Do you think you can take it hot?” Justin calls out.
“No, medium warm.”
Creak as he turns on the other faucet. I reach down for my purse, placed on the floor next to my bedside table. Grab my wallet, and p
ull out my card. It doesn’t even concern me in some strange way; I feel beyond worry or care at this point. It’s more a distant sense of curiosity.
FAVOR: blank.
No, Scratch has some other plan for me in mind for sure. I slip the card back in my wallet, the wallet back into my purse. I want to sit on the bed, but my bloody, dusty self would cause more work for Opal for sure. I almost feel like a guest here. Not in my own room.
“I think we’re set,” says Justin. He comes out of the bathroom to retrieve me. My heart aches for the concern in his eyes to be real.
He smiles gently, pushes the priest’s smock off my shoulders—loose anyway it simply falls away into a heap on the floor. I see I’m cut and scraped and bruised in more places. A really nasty gash just below my rib cage that I hadn’t even noticed.
“Jesus. Maybe I should’ve taken you to the hospital.” An unscripted thought, which seems to create a wavering confusion.
“Oh, we’ll fix her right up,” says Opal brightly.
She stands in the doorway with a crowbar in her hand. He sees it, and for just a few seconds I think he’s going to charge her, take her down, but then he just takes a step away instead.
“I’m sorry,” he says, not looking at me—he can’t. Reaches down for the coat on the bed, then into the pocket where the gun was supposed to be.
Opal smiles. Something glitters on her hand, and then I see it—the engagement ring Justin had kept in his sock drawer.
I thought I’d known the worst pain, experienced the worst horrors.
Once again, I was wrong.
EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS next happens fast, but in slow motion too—I am inside myself, my consciousness, but outside it as well, an observer. There is the surprise in Justin’s face when he finds the pocket empty, followed by his shock when I disappear, not entirely from view because my form covered in dust is still visible.
I see Opal lift the crowbar over her head, start running for me—her face is contorted, her dark shadow radiating out like a poisonous gas cloud—but I’m too fast, I slip my hand under the mattress, pull out the gun—Justin is still trying to process what’s happening, trying to understand—when I shoot Opal in her right shoulder. Blood spatters and she doubles over with pain, dropping the crowbar. It falls to the floor with a clatter. Justin takes a step back, runs his hand through his hair, now a few centimeters thick.
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