“You know I love you.”
She didn’t mean it. Even though it was true, she didn’t mean it, it was just something she said. But it still warmed a deep, cold, starving part of me, and I hated it. “I love you, too.”
She tipped her head up and kissed me, and I couldn’t hold back, kissing her as if I might never see her again. As if maybe I could do it perfectly, just once, and break whatever spell she’d cast on herself, as if my hands on her skin could erase the memory of everyone else who had touched her, draw out the hundred poisons…
“Claire?” called a voice from the living room.
She pulled back with a gasp. “Doug’s here,” she whispered, grimacing something like an apology. “Go get some groceries. When you come back, it can be just you and me for a while.”
I kissed her again, hoping she’d forget the man in the living room, hoping to make him go away.
“Claire?” Doug called again. “You here? I scored some premium stuff for us, baby.”
“I’m coming,” Claire called, getting to her feet. She turned back to me, lowering her voice. “Look, Ro, I know you don’t like Doug. But he really cares about me. What am I supposed to do, never date anyone in my whole life? We talked about this. You want me to be happy, right?”
“Yeah,” I said dully.
She trailed a hand across my cheek. “You know I’ll always come back to you.”
Sometimes I really wish you wouldn’t.
I didn’t say it, but perhaps she saw it in my face. She scowled in one of her sudden tempers and kicked my outstretched leg.
“Jealous boys don’t get to play with the toys,” she spat, and left the room.
I drew my knees up to my chest and listened through the wall as she and Doug took the pills and ate microwave pasta with the wine he’d brought. Their conversation grew less linear, more slurred. Then it ceased altogether, replaced by other sounds that I tried not to hear.
“Ow! Stop that!”
My attention abruptly focused again.
Doug laughed, the sound muted through the wall. “What, have we left your comfort zone?”
“That hurt. I said stop it!”
“Oh, come on, baby, try something new—”
“Cut it out!”
I heard her slap him, then an ominous silence.
“Oh, that’s how you want to play the game,” Doug said, and there was another smacking sound, heavier, and the thud of a body hitting the floor.
I was on my feet, fists clenched. Easy. Easy. She told you to stay away. If that’s the end of it, she’s not going to want you—
“Looks like somebody,” smack, “needs a little tutorial,” smack, “in the rules of the game!” Smack.
“I’m sorry, Doug, I’m sorry, please stop, just stop—”
“I’ll stop when I’m ready, you stupid little crackwhore!”
I shaded, not bothering with doors, and came out directly in front of them. I had a split second to savor the shock on Doug’s unshaven face before my fist sank into it.
He bounced off the opposite wall, came up with his fists before him, weaving unsteadily.
“I dunno where you came from, moron, but you’re gonna pay,” he said around a busted lip.
“Really,” I said, and hit him again. And again. And again. It felt good to hit him. “You can’t treat her like this,” I said, and hit him again. “You can’t treat people like toys. Like they have no value outside of what you want from them!” I hit him again.
“Stop, Romeo, leave him alone!” Claire pulled at my arm.
“Psycho!” Doug scrambled away from me and spat blood. “Psycho freak, you can have her!” Bent over and limping, he dashed out the door and slammed it behind him.
“Why did you do that?” Claire screamed. “He’s going to be so, so mad — Why did you do that? He’ll never talk to me again!”
I tried to shield my face as she began pounding me with her fists.
“He was hitting you,” I said.
“He would have stopped! I started it — I hit him first! I told you to stay away! Now you’ve ruined everything!”
I had retreated as far as I could, my back against the wall, turning my face toward it as her blows grew more vicious. She snatched up a lamp, broke it against my shoulder, then the empty wine bottle, then the other lamp. I fell to one knee, arms over my head, taking most of the damage with my back. She pounded it with her fists, like a child beating a pillow in a tantrum.
You can’t treat people like toys.
I swear I heard something snap.
I straightened, and one fist swept out, knocking her away from me. I felt her jaw break. She hit the back door, a solid sheet of glass, and for an instant was outlined by hundreds of spreading cracks. Then the cracks, and the glass, and Claire, all disappeared into the grass.
Pain hit with the weight of an ocean. I thought I would rip myself open with screaming.
For a fever-dream second, I saw myself leaping through the remains of the glass door, biting my wrist open, pressing it to her mouth. There might still be a chance, the slimmest glittering needle of a chance, to put everything back as it was. By giving her everything. All of myself.
I didn’t move.
None of what I remembered for a long time after that was very clear. But that moment before it was unquestionably too late, that half-second of not moving, stuck out from the pain-distorted mayhem like a diamond. That and a single image of Claire lying in the grass, shattered glass sparkling all around her, with moonlight leaching the red from her hair, and turning to black the shard of glass sticking up from her throat.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Opiate of the Masses
NAOMI
“Hey, she’s awake.”
‘Awake’ was a relative term. I’d been awake, more or less, for some time, too busy sorting out competing sets of memories to do anything more complicated than breathe.
It was profoundly strange, seeing myself through Damon’s eyes. Remembering the same events from such different, sometimes contradictory, angles was enough to set my head spinning. Also, I knew for a fact that I wasn’t that pretty.
I remembered childhood as Gabriel. I was right, he’d been an adorable kid. I remembered Westley’s death, only hours ago — minutes ago, from where the memories left off — and gasped at the raw, searing pain of it.
I remembered Claire.
Everything was tumbled about, out of order, but there was no doubt which memories were mine and which Damon’s. I could sooner mistake ice cream for anchovies. I took a moment to thank God that I didn’t have a concussion.
And, oh yeah, I’m alive. Thanks for that, also.
“Naomi? Can you hear me?”
The voice wasn’t Damon’s. Wasn’t Jonathan’s or my father’s. A male voice, familiar but not…
I opened my eyes, watched a hospital room come into focus. Well, a bed between curtains, anyway. I’ve come down in the world. I turned my head toward the man sitting beside me.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
He was beautiful. Not just handsome, but beautiful, tall and slender with thick dark curls, big dark eyes with killer lashes, a hint of stubble. Orlando Bloom, eat your heart out. And I’d never seen him before in my life.
“Hello?” I managed, my voice faint and rough.
He grinned. “You don’t recognize me, do you? Try again.” He put his hands up in a sort of frame that blocked his forehead and nose, showing only his eyes.
My mouth fell open. “Paris?”
“All growed up.” If he got any more smug, I was sure he’d dissolve into a puddle of self-satisfaction.
“But… how…”
“She’s awake?” Carmen swept around the curtain. “It’s about time! Girl, you have got to stop this love affair with hospitals.”
I gaped as Paris stood, face lighting, and twined his arms around Carmen’s waist. Carmen, looking positively gooey, leaned in for a lingering kiss. I raised an eyebrow at her, rememberi
ng the testosterone-oozing thugs on her posters; she looked sheepish, but did not move away from Paris.
“What did you call love? ‘The opiate of the masses’?” I said.
She shrugged, giggled. “What can I say? I’m stoned.”
“And how are you taking… all this?”
Her delirious look took on a dazed note. “Paris and Damon have been… explaining. It’s all sort of… enormous.”
“That’s for sure.” I thought my grin would split my face. “Now, I know I’m one to talk, but isn’t re-covanting supposed to be impossible?”
“I hear the Formyndari metaphysicists are already waist-deep in theories,” Paris said. “Is it something in the water? Something about the Orphanage, something about your apartment? A lot of people are wondering if it will prove to be a natural consequence of orphans settling down, staying sane and healthy. That’s been rare enough, in the past. They could call Damon an aberration, a freak event, but now…”
“Where is Damon, anyway?”
“In the NICU, giving Charlie his bottle.”
“He’s taking a bottle now?” Worry for Charlie was an ever-present, near-subliminal weight, by now. I felt it lift, just a little.
Before Paris could answer, Damon stepped into view around the sea-green curtain.
“I felt you wake up,” he said. And just stood there. He looked uncertain, almost shy.
Paris cleared his throat. “Yes, well. We’ll just… go get something to eat, then.” He tugged Carmen out through the curtain.
For a moment, I just looked at Damon, drinking in the sight of him, alive and here and unhurt. Unhurt? Ah, yes. There were teethmarks on my wrist. We weren’t quite even, of course, but as close as we were likely to get.
I opened my mouth, but he spoke first.
“By the time we got you here, you were healed,” he said. “They treated you for shock and dehydration. I don’t think they’ll keep you long.”
I pushed myself upright, or closer to it, and felt cautiously across my chest. It wasn’t even sore. I could breathe as easily as ever. I looked at my hands; no cuts, no burns. Only the bite on one wrist.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I felt you… tear loose…”
He nodded, face drawn. “Not quite a breach. It would have been, in another half-second or so. Your heart stopped.”
Though I had sort of figured that, I still had to take a couple of deep breaths before I could speak again. “But you… your blood. It started my heart again. Healed my lungs, my ribs. Fixed it all.”
Now it was his turn to take breaths before speaking. “I hesitated,” he said at last, hoarse and hollow-eyed. “Again I hesitated.”
“But you did it. I’m here.”
“And then it was too late,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “I thought it was too late.” He seemed to drift at the foot of the bed, not touching me — but wanting to, I knew, at least as much as I wanted to touch him. I held out my hands to him.
That quickly he was halfway into the bed with me, kissing everything he could reach.
“I thought I’d lost you, please, please tell me I haven’t lost you.”
“I’m right here, aren’t I?”
“But I…” He pulled back, with visible effort, and swallowed. “I killed Claire.”
“You didn’t mean to.”
“I could have saved her. I could have tried.”
I shook my head. “You could only save one of you.”
“Then it should have been her. I was her Shadow, the one person in the world she should have been able to count on absolutely, and I… I can’t even tell her I’m sorry.”
I could tell him that he had the right to fight back. That he was only human, or close enough, and couldn’t be damned on the basis of a single mistake. That he’d hesitated only a moment, that if he’d had another half-second, everything might have been different. But I knew these were things he’d told himself already. It hadn’t helped. Not enough.
I put a hand to his face, forced him to meet my eyes.
“She forgives you.”
“You can’t know—”
“Yes, I can. Because, for all her carelessness and cruelty and general total screwed-up-ness, she loved you. Like I do.” I pulled him closer, resting our foreheads together. “And I would have forgiven you. If you had waited too long, I would have forgiven you.”
He drew in a long breath, trying to keep it even. It came out as a sob. I put my arms around him and held him until we had both cried ourselves to sleep.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Goodbye and Hello
DAMON
I was beginning to feel like a connoisseur of cemeteries. Emily’s was a nice one, a flat carpet of well-trimmed grass, with leafy oaks and a brick wall shielding it from the world of the living, though you could hear cars pulling in and out of the library across the street. The markers here ranged from gleaming new granite at one end, to stones at the other that were soft-cornered with time, dark-streaked from decade after decade of rain.
Emily’s resting place was marked by a marble angel the size of a child, wings spread, hands clasped, gazing upward with enviable serenity. The inscription was a quote from — what else? — The Princess Bride.
“Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”
Naomi’s hand was warm on my left arm, the right one weighted by the makeshift urn I had filled at the abandoned Detroit bank. This time yesterday it had held self-rising flour. Now it held all that we could gather of my dead brother.
“They’re her ashes, too,” Galatea had pointed out viciously. “You’re giving her a funeral, too.”
“I’m putting as much of Westley as I can back where he belongs,” I’d said. “With Emily. If it means bringing some of Jewel along, so be it.”
Galatea almost hadn’t come, I knew. Her bags were already packed, whether to go join one of our satellite groups or seek out her long-lost family, she hadn’t yet said. She stood now with sunlight burning on her yellow dress — Westley’s favorite, she wouldn’t hear of any other — and on the tears that trailed down her stony face.
I passed the canister to Jonathan, on Naomi’s other side, then stepped forward to take one of the gardening shovels Adonis carried. Paris took the other, looking startled to find himself taller than the handle, and fiddled with it while Adonis knelt to cut the sod, folding it back like a rug. Hopefully, when we were finished, it would cover our unauthorized addition to the ground here.
The dig took a minute, perhaps two; the hole only had to be large enough for a flour-can of dust. No one tried to stop us; there was no one in sight. But for the scrape of our shovels, the only sound was wind in the leaves and through the headstones.
He’s gone. He’ll still be gone tomorrow. A year from now, ten years, fifty, he will still be gone. The fact seemed to thunk into my chest like an arrow, knocking me back a step, a sudden piercing pain that stole my breath. The others paused, looked at each other, back at me. I motioned them back; the hole was deep enough now. In fact, it looked more and more like an abyss.
Naomi slipped her hand into mine, and I clung to it, hard enough for my arm to tremble.
Audrey spoke first, her voice faint and bewildered. “They were trying to help me. Jewel, she… she always did her best to take care of me.” She faltered a moment, and Adonis eased an arm around her shoulders. “They meant well,” she said at last, through a layer of tears. “In their own twisted way, they meant well.”
I supposed it made sense that Audrey would miss Jewel. I wouldn’t, I thought, and yet — she had been part of my family, good or bad, and my mind kept picking at it, showing me good moments between us, rare as they had been, times when we had been friends. Had I the right to remember anything good about her, after what she had done? Had I the right to reject her entirely, after accepting her into my family?
Galatea was discreetly digging into her wrist with a jagged fingernail, drawing drops of blood in multiples of
seven.
“He deserve better,” Dove said softly. She rubbed her eyes. “Westley so sad. So lonely. Maybe Jewel too. Easy for us to say, forgive them. We not the ones killed. But they dead, now, too. How much else someone could want?”
Silence stretched. I wondered if Jonathan would speak, but he only stood staring at the grave, tears standing in his eyes, brow creased with an inward-looking confusion. For a moment I thought Galatea would step away from him; neither of us quite knew how to respond to Jonathan now. Sometimes he absently referenced jokes and events that he wasn’t present for, or dropped into a British accent. Sometimes his expression would be, for a moment, pure Westley, like a punch in the gut. I wouldn’t blame her for moving away. But she stopped mid-motion, and twined their hands instead; I watched a drop of her blood glide off Jonathan’s fingertip.
I guess it’s my turn. I gathered breath, took the worn Bible out of my jacket pocket. “Westley read from this every day. When I picked it up this morning, it fell open, here.” I let the book fall open in my hands; there was no ribbon or bookmark in that spot, but it wasn’t needed. “Psalm six, verse two. There’s a line here that he drew a box around. ‘Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am weak.’ He outlined it over and over. Looks like the pen finally went right through the paper on one side.” I swallowed, tracing a fingertip across the words. “But he wasn’t weak, at the end. He killed Jewel rather than let her hurt anyone else. I don’t know if that’s good enough for God. But it’s good enough for me.”
No one else seemed inclined to speak. I took the flour can Jonathan held out. The ashes, finer and more silvery than anything from a fireplace, flowed with a silken rustle out of the can and into the bed of dark, damp earth. Smaller particles drifted up and away, catching on my clothes and skin. We all waited for it to settle. Then I reached into my jacket pocket, pulled out the rosary we had found on the bank floor, and laid it atop the ashes.
Paris and Adonis stepped forward with shovels. Thirty seconds later, everything — hole, ashes, rosary — had disappeared under the sod.
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