“I knew you were all right. I knew you were going to be all right,” she said.
“It’s good to see you, too, Mom. Can I come in? I’m pretty tired,” Zoe said.
Her mother stepped aside so Zoe could enter the apartment. The living room looked as odd to her as the street outside had looked. Nothing had changed, except for the overflowing ashtrays on every flat surface and the smell of stale smoke. Zoe felt so different, so utterly and irrevocably changed, that it seemed to her that everything else should have changed, too. She shook off the feeling and turned to her mother.
“Hi,” she said feebly. “I’m glad I’m home.”
Her mother still stood by the front door, almost as if she was afraid to approach. Her hands were balled up in front of her mouth, and she regarded Zoe with wide, wet eyes.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“It’s all right,” said Zoe. “Really, it’s not as bad as it looks.” Then she added, “But it was a rough couple of days.”
“Couple of days? It’s been a week,” said her mother. “Tomorrow would have been eight days.” She dropped her hands to her sides, but she was still tense and didn’t seem able to move from the door.
Zoe sat down on the edge of the couch. “It didn’t seem that long. Just a day or two, at most.”
“Well, it was that long!” yelled her mother, breaking down into red-faced sobs. She tried to speak, but she had trouble breathing. “I thought you were dead.”
Zoe got up from the couch and went to her. Her mother took a step back.
She held out a hand and after a minute her mother took it, as if she wasn’t sure that what was happening was real. “I’m sorry,” Zoe whispered. “I’m so sorry.” Her mother’s sobbing let up a bit and she stroked Zoe’s head.
“You’re filthy,” said her mother. “You look like you’ve been dragged behind a truck.”
Zoe laughed a little. “Just about.”
“Where have you been for a week?”
“Far away,” said Zoe. “Farther away than I ever meant to go.”
“What does that mean?”
“Can we do this sitting down?” Zoe asked. “I’ve been running for days. I’ve hardly eaten anything.”
“Running? Are you in trouble? Did someone do this to you?”
“Do I look that bad?” Zoe asked. She turned and caught her reflection in the hall mirror. It took her a moment to recognize the young woman looking back at her. This young woman had wild, dirt-caked hair. Her face and arms were covered with cuts and bruises. She still wore Emmett’s baggy clothes over her own. They were torn and the front of her shirt and pants were splattered with blood and Hecate’s ashes.
“Let’s sit down,” Zoe said. She took her mother’s hand and they sat on the couch.
“I know you want to know where I’ve been, what happened to me, but I’m afraid to tell you.”
Her mother let out a short, harsh laugh and took her hand back. “Just say it. What kind of trouble are you in?”
“It’s not that kind of trouble. And all the blood is mine, so you don’t have to worry that I murdered anyone,” Zoe said. “I’m just afraid that if I tell you the truth, you won’t believe me. I haven’t been real good with the truth lately.”
“That’s for goddamn sure,” said her mother. She reached for a pack of cigarettes on the living room table, took one out, and lit it with a disposable plastic lighter.
“Please don’t do that. It’s not good for you,” said Zoe.
“You don’t get to tell me what’s good and not good for me,” her mother said. “Sitting around for a week thinking you were dead, that’s what’s not good for me!”
“I’m really sorry. Nothing quite went the way I thought it would,” Zoe said. She held on to the back of the couch. The fabric was cool and scratchy against her hand, but it felt a bit more real than it had when she first came in. The world felt like it was slowly shifting back into focus.
“Look,” said her mother, exhaustion and anger framing each word, “just fucking tell me what’s happened to you, where you’ve been.”
Zoe looked away, gathering her thoughts, not sure where to begin. She took something from her pocket. “Someone told me to give you this,” she said, handing the coin to her mother.
It took her mother a few seconds to register what she was holding. She turned the coin over and over in her hands. “This club’s been gone for something like fifteen years. Where did you get this?”
Zoe took a breath, held it, and said, “Dad.” They sat in silence for a minute.
Finally her mother sighed and shook her head. “Zoe, what are you—”
“Do you want to hear where I’ve been or not?”
“I don’t want to hear a load of shit that’s supposed to make me feel guilty about your father being dead.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel guilty, I swear.”
“Don’t play games with me. Not after what I’ve been through. You could have found this coin on eBay.”
“But I didn’t. Dad gave it to me to give to you because it’s from the club where you first met. You even had the words on the back, ‘Fuck You Very Much,’ on the jacket you were wearing that night.”
Her mother stared at her. “How do you know all that?”
“I know about it because I was there. I told you, I went somewhere very far away, and when I was there I saw a lot of strange and horrible, and even some kind of wonderful things.” She put her hand on the low table where her mother’s cigarette butts spilled over the sides of a saucer. The sight of the ashes swept her mind back to Iphigene for a moment and she pictured Hecate burning, reaching for her. “One of the things I saw was my brother, Valentine.”
“What?”
“Why didn’t you or Dad ever tell me about him?”
Her mother stared at the cigarette smoke curling in the air between them. When she turned back to Zoe, her eyes were red and unfocused. “It hurt too much,” she said. “We didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant, at first. We were going to have a big party and tell people there, but then I had the miscarriage.”
“I’m sorry,” Zoe said, suddenly seeing the young girl from the club lying in a hospital gown, scared and heartbroken, knowing that her baby had died.
“When the doctor told us how far along I was, your dad and I counted the weeks and realized he’d be born about Valentine’s Day. So that’s what we called him.” She reached for the ashtray and stubbed out the cigarette. “No one knew but us and the doctor. How did you find out?”
“Remember the boy in my dreams I used to talk about? My imaginary friend? That was Valentine. He came to me in dreams in this world, and then I met him for real in the other world.”
“What other world?”
Zoe took a deep breath. “Iphigene,” she said. “You see, there was this record shop and a man named Emmett. Well, really Ammut, but I’ll get to that part later.” She talked for hours, and told her mother everything.
When she was done, she could barely keep her eyes open. She was too tired to even take a shower, so her mother helped her to bed. After she had slipped under the covers, her mother sat beside her. “Do you believe me?” Zoe asked.
Her mother stroked Zoe’s hair and nodded. “I used to believe in things, once,” she said. “God. Ghosts. Guardian angels. I used to believe the world was a crazy, bad, beautiful game we were supposed to play forever.” She shrugged. “So, yeah, I guess I believe you, because it’s the best thing I’ve heard to believe in a long time.” She got up from Zoe’s bed, went to the door, and flicked off the light. “Besides,” she said, “you’ve had a week to come up with a better lie than that. So, how can I not believe you?”
“Love you, Mom,” said Zoe.
“You, too,” said her mother, and pulled the door closed.
Even though she was still covered in grime and dried blood, it felt wonderful to lie in her bed between the cool, clean sheets. Zoe was in her body again, in this world, and she had to admit that
she was happy to be back.
As sleep swept over her, she heard a strange sound, like something scratching at her bedroom window.
When she awoke the next morning, the covers were pulled tight and wrapped around her like a cocoon. In the night, her dreams had shifted randomly from Iphigene to this world, until she wasn’t sure which was which or where she was, and Valentine wasn’t there to help her figure it out. It was a relief to wake up in one place and have it stay that way.
Zoe was wearing her underwear and an old “X” T-shirt she must have found on the floor the night before. She didn’t even remember changing. The clothes she’d worn in Iphigene lay in a pile at the foot of her bed. She laughed when she saw them. Her mother had been right. It really did look like she’d been dragged behind a truck. She kicked them over by her closet. The hoodie and T-shirt she’d wash later. The jeans might even be salvageable, but the sneakers were so caked with sewer filth that they were probably a total loss. She hated the idea of giving up a good pair of Chuck Taylors while she and her mother were broke, but she told herself they could probably find a used pair down at Goodwill.
The sound of the television, the smell of coffee, and the noises her mother made in the kitchen seemed as out of place and exotic as a circus in the living room. Give it time, she thought. Iphigene sort of made sense by the end. This will, again, too. She went into the kitchen, where her mother was in a terry-cloth robe, putting milk into her coffee. Zoe hugged her briefly from behind.
“Morning,” she said sleepily.
“Morning. Sleep okay?” her mother asked.
Zoe nodded, still trying to shake away the last few cobwebs.
“Want some coffee?”
“In a little while. I think I need a shower.”
“Thank God,” said her mother. “I’m going to have to burn your sheets. I didn’t want to have to boil the rest of the house, too.” They both cracked up a little at that.
In the bathroom, Zoe thought about how weird it was to laugh with her mother. Their relationship had become based so much on tension, that the absence of tension, even for a while, felt odd. Maybe not a bad odd either. It was kind of nice not to have her stomach tied in knots as she waited for the next explosion.
The hot water in the shower stung her cuts and scrapes, but still felt great. As she washed, she felt between her breasts and found a small, round patch of raised skin—a scar from where the arrow had gone in. Zoe smiled. When she turned eighteen, maybe she would have something tattooed around it. What? A snake, maybe. An ouroboros. She stayed under the hot water until it ran out and turned cold.
Her mother suggested that since it was already Thursday, Zoe take the next couple of days to rest before going back to school on Monday. It would also give them time to work out some kind of family emergency to use as an excuse for Zoe’s absence. At around noon, her mother dressed and headed out for another interview at the design company where she’d applied for a job before Zoe had left.
“Good luck,” Zoe called as her mother left.
“Thanks. There’s food in the fridge, if you get hungry.”
“Thanks.”
Her mother started to close the door, then came back in the living room. “Look,” she said, “I’m not going to lock you up or anything, but for the next few days, do me a favor and don’t go too far, okay?” She smiled at Zoe a little sadly. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours and I’d really like it if you were here when I got back.”
Zoe smiled and picked up a cup of coffee she’d brought in from the kitchen. “Don’t worry, Mom,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“Thanks. Is my hair okay?”
“Perfect.”
After her mother left, Zoe watched cartoons and then part of an old black-and-white Fred Astaire movie. After that, The Wizard of Oz came on. She fell asleep just as the flying monkeys were taking off to attack Dorothy and the others.
When she woke up a couple of hours later, her mother still wasn’t back. She hoped that was a good sign. Maybe the guy at the design company had put her to work right away, she thought.
While she’d been asleep, the flying monkeys had invaded her dreams. They’d circled overhead, just above the clouds, waiting for their chance to take her away. It didn’t feel exactly like a regular dream, more like something she was trying to remember. That night, she lay in bed, willing herself to stay awake. And then she heard it—a scratching at the window. When she went to look, there was nothing there, but the window frame was torn and splintered, as if by claws.
Her mother was already dressed when she got up. She moved around the kitchen in an anxious rush, gulping coffee and wolfing down mouthfuls of buttered toast.
“Choking to death is not a good way to start a new job,” said Zoe, pouring herself some coffee.
“I’m so nervous,” said her mother through a full mouth. “I know I can do the work, but I haven’t worked in an office in so long, and everyone else there looks like they’re twelve years old and have been doing design since they were a fetus.”
“You’ll do great,” said Zoe, stealing a half slice of toast from her mother’s plate.
“Hey!” her mother said. “Now I’m going to starve to death!”
“Don’t worry. It’s your first day. They’ll take you to lunch,” said Zoe cheerfully.
“You think so? That would be nice,” her mother said, her voice dropping into a low, thoughtful tone. “If they don’t and I faint at my desk, I’ll tell them it’s my daughter’s fault.”
“Say, do we still have that old Polaroid around?”
“The camera? Yeah, it’s in one of those boxes behind the couch. The one marked ‘Random Household,’ I think. You going to take some pictures?”
“Yeah. I thought maybe I’d shoot some stuff around here for Julie and Laura.”
“Great idea,” said her mother distractedly. She set her coffee cup and plate in the sink. “Is my hair okay?”
“Great.”
“See you tonight.”
After her mother left, Zoe thought about what she could to do to get ready. She should have known Ammut wasn’t going to let her get away. She’d killed his mother, even if she hadn’t meant to. And Valentine had warned her that the snakes wouldn’t finish him off. He’d marked her window for two nights running. She was certain that he’d come for her tonight. He liked threes.
Gathering the clothes she wore in Iphigene, she left them in a pile by the window. In the bathroom, she checked the cabinets for rubbing alcohol, but didn’t find any. She dug through the boxes in her closet and found an old diary with a few dollars hidden in the spine. She got dressed and walked to the corner.
The liquor store sold cigarettes individually, for a dollar each, and on the counter were little glass tubes that were labeled as cigarette holders but which everyone with two brain cells knew were actually crack pipes. On the shelves were brightly colored candles set in tall glass holders with pictures of Jesus and saints she’d never heard of. There were dusty boxes of ancient laundry soap and pet food, but she couldn’t find any rubbing alcohol. But she noticed that the store seemed to have every kind of liquor known to man. She went to the counter, where the bored clerk was watching a talk show on a small television propped up on a milk crate, and pointed to a pint bottle of vodka on a lower shelf, a cheap off-brand with a white plastic screw-on cap.
“How much?” she asked.
“You got ID?” asked the clerk.
Zoe leaned around the man and saw a hand-lettered sticker reading “$3.99” by the vodka. She put five dollars on the counter, took another five from her pocket and set it on top. It was all the money she had. The clerk looked her over for a moment. Zoe looked right back at him, hoping her scratches and bruises made her look older. The clerk took a small bag from under the counter, slipped the bottle inside, and twisted the top closed. As he handed it to her, he swept the ten dollars off the counter and into the pocket of his baggy chinos.
“There’s no drinking in fron
t of the store,” he said.
Zoe took the bottle back to her room and hid it under the mattress. In the living room, she found her mother’s cigarettes and the disposable plastic lighter. She threw the cigarettes in the trash and took the lighter to her room, slipping it under the mattress with the vodka. She went into the kitchen and found a small box of laundry detergent and put it in the pocket of her heaviest winter coat.
She napped as much as she could during the afternoon so that she could stay awake later. She tried to will herself not to dream, but it didn’t work. When the dreams came, they were confusing, a murky combination of Iphigene’s worst sights—the dying dead, the flying snakes descending on her father—and the tree fort where she and Valentine had played. The fort and tree were burning and the snakes she’d seen there once before had overrun the field.
When she got into bed that night, Zoe wore her old, scuffed combat boots, along with her winter coat, her jeans, and Ammut’s oversize pants that she’d stolen in Iphigene. She was hot and uncomfortable fully dressed under the covers, but if what Mr. Danvers had told the class about snakes was right, it could work. She lay down and closed her eyes, but she didn’t fall sleep.
After all her preparations, she still didn’t know if she was ready. Not “ready as in having no plan.” She had a plan for once, as ridiculous as it was. No, she wasn’t sure she was ready mentally to act, to do what needed to be done. It had been easier in Iphigene, threatening a kidnapper, taunting Emmett in the café, fighting the dying dead with her bare hands. None of it was completely real, and the parts that were real worked within a whole different set of rules from this world. She wasn’t the same person here. She felt smaller and more vulnerable. The thought of going back to school the following week made her queasy. Would anyone have even noticed her absence? Absynthe, probably. Maybe Mr. Danvers, still the most interesting adult she knew. If everything worked out tonight, she’d see if she could find him a tooth to pay him back for the one she’d stolen.
Dead Set: A Novel Page 21