“I know what happened with Beringer,” I repeated, clenching my hand tighter as the blood soaked through the light fabric. “And I know that Jack's here. I just have to find him –”
The figure to my left shifted again to come nearer, and I turned inward so as not to see it. The edge of the bedside table dug into my forehead as I pressed myself closer to it and the phone cord twisted around my abdomen and up my arm.
“You won't, Enim! Jack's not out there – he's not waiting for you!”
“He is. I know that he is.”
I couldn't leave him out there all alone. The two of us were different in every visible way, but in reality we were the same. If I didn't find him, he would be just as lost as I was, and both of us would teeter without the other to even us out. And I didn't expect my father to get it, who was so capable of replacing anyone that malfunctioned from the prototype that they were supposed to be, or Fisker, who had mapped and charted the feelings that he was supposed to display so well that there was nothing left to feel, or Graves, who was so set on pretending to understand that he had never even scratched against my skin – because none of them knew what it was like to go without the only person who was capable of understanding him, and none of them were well aware of the way their absence hollowed out the world and made living nothing more than an echo of death. None of them knew what it was like to feel anything at all.
“You don't understand,” I told him, shaking my head.
“No, Enim: you don't understand. You don't understand that you won't find Jack – you can't.”
“But I was going to, I would have,” I told him, doing away with the secrets that I had harbored for so long. “I just needed more time – I would have found him with more time.”
“He's not out there, Enim – he's not waiting for you! He's not somewhere in Europe!”
“Somewhere,” I repeated vacantly. There was sunlight somewhere outside the room, but it had frozen over and the room held nothing but a chill. It cut through the skin and leached into the bones until I thought that they would break, and the shivers were so uncontrollable that it was difficult to clutch the phone. “Mom's somewhere. Jack's somewhere.”
“Somewhere where you can't find them, Enim.”
“No, I can. I can get to him.”
“No, you can't. You can't find him and you won't find him, so tell me where you are before this goes any further!”
“No.”
“Enim, I'm warning you: tell me where you are. This has gotten completely out of hand – Karl should have never let you leave –”
“Karl told me the trial was in absentia,” I said, ignoring his voice. “They haven't caught him. He's still out here.”
“Karl told you what?” His sharp voice cut through my ear and into my skull; I was certain that it would draw blood. I pressed my hand harder between my knees, sending another bout of blood surging out from the skin. The cuts didn't appear to be too deep; if anything, the warmth from the blood let me know that there was at least something besides for the emptiness inside. “He told you that there was a trial in absentia? Why in God's name did he do that?”
“Because. Because it's true.”
“Enim, listen to me,” my father said. “I don't know what possessed Karl to tell you something like that – to feed into your delusions – but it's not true.”
I pulled my hand away. The red glistened on my fingers and slid down my palm.
“What do you mean?”
“Karl lied. And if you tell me where you are and let me come get you, that we can talk about it. Properly.”
“Tell me now,” I said.
“No, Enim. I'll tell you when you're home.”
“Home?” I tried to laugh, but only a dry crackling of air escaped from my throat. “Where is home, Dad? At the treatment facility? With Karl? With you?”
“Enim ...”
The figure had grown so close to me that no amount of tucking my legs in could pull me away from it. I dug my eyes into the wood of the bedside table, trying to focus on the last bit of the conversation while I still could.
“What did Karl lie about? The – the trial? There wasn't one?”
“I ...” He paused again, this time letting the shaking of his voice come over the line. “No, there was.”
The tremors that had plagued my skin for the entirety of the conversation suddenly stilled and I was finally able to blink away the haziness in my vision. Sitting up a bit straighter, I righted the phone on my ear. The dress shoes were just inches beside my leg and I could feel the slightest of breaths descending on my neck.
“What do you mean?” I said. “You mean – you mean he was there? They caught him? He's – he still there?”
The idea that Jack was in New England was unprecedented: it seemed impossible that he could have been so close to me all that time without my knowing it, and that I had traveled ten times the amount that I had needed to in order to find him. Something welled up in my stomach as I pictured him staring blankly behind the glass of a prison visitors' room, waiting for me to come and pick up the phone and wondering why I never did.
“No, no … he's not there,” my father said. His voice was unreadable, though it was betraying more emotion than I had ever heard from his tone. My breathing had hastened in contrast to his slowed one, and I pulled my injured hand up to grasp the phone with both hands. “It was a trial in absentia.”
“But you just said –”
“Enim,” he said lowly, “I need you to listen to me very carefully: I need to know where you are. You need to come home.”
“Tell me where Jack is,” I countered, my voice rising as his dropped. “Tell me where he is, Dad! Was it a trial 'in absentia' or not?”
“It was, but – but that's not what in absentia really means, Enim.”
“Of course it is,” I said. “I took Latin: I know it means 'in the absence of –'”
“But that's not what it means, Enim!” he said, his irritation with me more apparent than it had ever been before. “You're not – you don't get it. In absentia doesn't refer to someone who's missing – it refers to someone who's dead!”
The air froze. Every bit of sound in the room had vanished as though it had been sucked through the plaster, and for a moment his voice didn't come through as though the line had been cut midway through the sentence to keep the admission from reaching my ears. The silence hummed as the echo from them reverberated around the room, and I was certain that I had not heard him right and that there was some other meaning behind the words, but then he spoke again and the firmness of his tone made it all too audible.
“Jack's dead, Enim. He's dead. And Karl couldn't tell you. After everything that happened, he just – we just couldn't tell you.”
My voice was lost somewhere outside of me, no longer mine to shelter or control. I shook my head in response regardless of the fact that he couldn't see, hoping that if I did so with enough adamance or force that I could keep the words from entering my memory and ruining my mind, because Jack wasn't dead – he couldn't be dead –
“Please, Enim,” my father said quietly, his voice breaking the motion and slowing the world back down until it was all too real. “Please – come home.”
“No.”
The hands holding the phone slid down my shoulder and torso, streaking the sweater with blood as they went, before fumbling it down to place upon the base. I wasn't aware of the sound of the dial tone as I shoved it away from me and it fell off the hook again, or of the pain in my throat as an unheard cry tore at my throat, but I could feel the rupture in my abdomen as my stomach was ripped open to spew out my insides, and I folded my arms over myself, digging the nails into my sides as I bent forward to try and wrap myself up tightly enough to prevent coming undone, but the cold was stinging and the water was rushing and my thoughts were nothing but violent stabs through the skull that would surely puncture holes through it where they could all spill out at last –
The figure on my left crouched
down beside me, tugging at his pant legs to do so and revealing the ruined shoes that had resulted from walking through the Bickerby forest in the storm to get to me. They were caked with mud and his dress socks were soaked and clogged with grains of dirt, and his hands and neck were raw and red from walking so long against the violent windchill to make his way up to the cliffs, and I didn't want to see him, but I didn't need to see him to know that he was there, just as he was always there skimming the surface of my thoughts, only this time I couldn't will him away.
And I wished that I could get out of my head for just a minute – to step back and peel back the skull to unveil the thoughts so that I could sort through them and rearrange them, and do away with all of the things that made me the way that I was now and revert back to who I had been. I wished that I could slice through the flesh covering my chest, squeezing my hands through the rib cage in order to get to my heart and pluck it out from within to toss away, willing to forgo every sensation there and every moment of pleasure or hope or bliss if only to just rid myself of the guilt and loathing boiling there once and for all.
And I wanted it to be over – to be properly over. I didn't want to sit in another treatment facility, to swallow any more pills that would supposedly make me into someone different, because I was different, and no amount of tweaking the dosages or adjusting the combinations would change it in any way.
He was dead. He was dead. But he couldn't be dead – not while there was still space between us, and not without me. We still had moments left uncompleted, and things left to say, and adventures and conspiracies to follow as blindly and childishly as we had at fourteen. We still had time left – time that I had been saving, bundled up and stowed away to save for when I was myself again. Time to make things right, and to make things different, and to be different and to not care. There were things that we still had to do – things we were supposed to do, but together, because I couldn't do them without him. Not him. Not the only person that I had left.
But he was gone: in absentia. The words rang out in my ears and hollered back at me, breaking the last bit of doubt that I had been holding onto, and finally became true. And that was all we would ever be – in absentia of one another, gone from one world and missing from the next, doomed to never meet up again in the dark expanse that took over the bones when the flesh was torn from them, locked beneath the ground and unfeeling, unknowing, and never again capable of touching or being touched but for the torment that would clutch at the heart and mind forever without the other there.
And the water and the cold all around me made sense now, because it had taken my mother away, and Beringer away, and now Jack away too. He must have never made it across to the mainland – must have been hit by a wave and capsized, ducking below the water and flailing for help that no one could give. I could see him struggling in the black, too weak and too cold to do more than claw at the overturned rowing boat, fingernails scratching at the wood as he tried to pull himself up while the water pulled him down. And he had drowned, but he shouldn't have drowned – I should have drowned. It should have been me. It always should have been me.
“That's not what happened,” I said, my hands clawing at my hair and down across my face as I tried to tear the images away. “That's not – that's not what was supposed to happen –”
Because it wasn't supposed to have been that way – it was never supposed to have been that way. Jack was never supposed to have gotten involved in Miss Mercier's death, because we were supposed to have left Bickerby months before it had ever happened; and my mother wasn't supposed to have been sick, and she wasn't supposed to have gone to the bridge, and so Beringer wasn't supposed to have come to the island at all, because I wasn't supposed to be tormented over what had happened to her, and he wasn't supposed to have followed me up to the cliffs that night. And I did know what happened – what had really happened, just as I had said: I had known from the moment that I had plunged down into the blackened ocean.
“I'm sorry,” I said, clutching at the sides of my head and unable to look at him, though I knew that the image was waiting for me behind my closed eyes. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry –”
And all the blood had left me, because there was nothing left beneath the skin except for bone and shriveled organs that would never function again. There was no soul that could be redeemed, and no hope of coming to life again, and nothing that I could ever think or do or say to make it better again, but I said it anyway, because I was sorry, so sorry, for all that I had done.
“I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry –”
Beringer's hands were folded in front of him, his arms resting upon bended knees. He was so calm, so unbroken, that I could see the warmth beneath his skin and light flickering in his eyes even through the tears wrecking my own and cracking my face.
“I'm sorry,” I said, my hands clawing at every part of me as I tried to pull myself down far enough to descend through the floor and ceiling and basement and earth. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry–”
It was so hard to speak, and not because of the cold that had stiffened my jaw or the scorching in my throat from crying out in agony. It was hard because saying it aloud would be admitting that it was true, and I didn't want it to be true: I wanted to be right, even though I knew that I was wrong, because it was the worst of what I had done and the worst of who I would ever be, and it was better to be confused and conflicted and unstable than it was to be myself.
I shut my eyes as his image blurred before the tears, and all of the reasons and doubts that I had been desperately holding onto edged away to make room for what I knew, and what I had always known: he had come to the island after Jack and I had burned the opossum on my birthday. It was late March; the first two girls had been killed before he had ever stepped foot on the island.
He had followed me up to the cliffs that night to stop me from putting it all to an end – the thoughts, the music, the tragedies – he had tried to stop what shouldn't have been stopped, and I had had the break from reality that had twisted my thoughts into something that I wanted to believe. Because I had wanted it to be him, and I still wanted it to be him, because it was too unbelievable that anyone could care, least of all about me, and I had wanted to prove it before the truth could seep in and make itself real.
And if I could go back and replay it, I would change it all over again so that he had never wasted a moment on me, and had never come out to the island to see me, and had never allowed me to feel better for even just a moment, and had left me alone with my thoughts and guilt and self-hatred forever if only it would mean that I hadn't pulled him down upon the rocks.
“I'm sorry,” I whispered. “I'm – I'm sorry.”
His eyes blinked very slowly, the expression more familiar than anyone else's in my mind, and he leaned his chin upon the arms resting on his knees as he surveyed me with such careful consideration one last time.
“I know, Enim,” he said. “I know.”
And it wasn't real, and it would never be real, but if I could have been certain – truly certain – about anything or anyone at all, it was that he would have forgiven me, and my mother would have forgiven me, and Jack would have forgiven me, but that I would never forgive myself. I squeezed my arms tighter around myself until the image of him broke along with the horrible shivers, and I collapsed sideways into the bedside table and shook upon the floor, convulsing as the mind beneath my skull finally shattered from the weight that had compressed it there for so long, and the world faded into a blur as my eyes rolled back into my head and grew darker and darker until it all went away.
Ch. 16
Something blinked before me, shining in blue light behind my eyelids, and I peeled them open and broke from the darkness that had been all around. I was lying on the bed again and the cellphone was on the table beside me, the bright light dotting in and out of sight; but it couldn't have been, I thought, blinking to regain focus in my vision. She had taken it.
“He kept calling.”
I slowly moved my eyes towards the voice. Even the slight movement made my head throb like a dead weight that had settled in my skull. Ilona was hovering just off to my side, her arms crossed over one another and a blanket draped over her arms in lieu of her cardigan, standing just far enough away to be out of my reach.
I looked across at her blankly, not knowing what to make of seeing her there. She was supposed to have gone, just like the rest of the world, and left me to retreat into nothingness. And maybe a part of me should have been happy that she had returned, but the large part of me wished that she had not. She wasn't the first person to be kind to me, though perhaps she would be the last, but she was the type that would only be so in passing, becoming just a memory before flitting through my life and on her way – and it wasn't the type of kindness that I needed. I needed the type that stemmed from something stable and someone reliable and that would stay with me through it all when the world wasn't kind in the least, and she wasn't that person. They had all gone.
“Why ...” Saliva had solidified in my throat, rendering me incapable of proper speech. I gave a haggard cough as I tried to clear it. “... are … you … here?”
She stepped forward cautiously, seemingly not hearing what I had said.
“You nearly aspirate,” she said. “I turn you over just in time. You almost die.”
My head was pounding horrifically. I turned onto my back as I tried to stop the aches that had come to every one of my muscles, but only caused another bout of pain to shoot through my spine.
“You … left ...”
“You try to strangle me,” she said, clicking her tongue in irritation. “But I come back, yes? You are ill.”
I wanted to shake my head but knew better than to do so. She continued to stare off to my side, her eyes lingering on the cell phone.
Song to the Moon (Damnatio Memoriae Book 2) Page 23