Invisibility

by Andrea Cremer

  “Let’s not worry about me,” he answers. “I didn’t try to donate four gallons of blood to the pavement.”

  “What happened?” I ask Laurie, knowing he’ll understand that I mean, What does Mom think happened?

  It’s Mom who answers. “They just don’t know, honey. So many people were affected. And after what happened in the park, they think it’s some kind of neurotoxin.”

  I groan. Even dead, Maxwell Arbus leaves us a legacy of his curses: a paranoid city, hunting for a culprit they’ll never find, but always fear. It would be so much better if I could tell Homeland Security and the NYPD that they can stop their investigation right now. That this mess was made by a cursecaster run rampant, but he’s gone and we can all get on with our lives. But that won’t happen. I don’t want to be transferred to the psych ward.

  Stephen is still sitting. Mustering what sass I can, I smile in his direction. “You shy in front of the family or what?”

  Laurie coughs. “You know I’m never shy. Mom has been watching the news, so she knows more.”

  I cast an irritated glance at Laurie, still speaking to Stephen. “Glad you found the hospital.”

  Mom’s hand moves from my cheek to my forehead. “Are you feeling all right, Elizabeth?”

  “What do they have you on anyway?” Laurie pretends to fiddle with the IV bag, but his eyes shoot me a warning.

  I go silent. What else can I do? Stephen stares at me, remaining perfectly still. He is here. With me. And nothing has changed.

  I am the only person who can see him.

  Pain flares through my limbs as my body tenses, straining against all the questions I can’t ask with my mom here. What the hell happened? Why was I covered with blood and half-conscious if Stephen is still invisible? What does it mean that he’s invisible and his grandfather is dead?

  “Elizabeth?” Mom murmurs, but I hear the worry in her voice. “Should I call the nurse?”

  I am shaking my head, grateful, when her attention turns to a knock at the door.

  “May I come in?”

  I’m sure I’ve imagined the sound of Millie’s voice, but a moment later I see her papery white skin and familiar face marked by wrinkles that seem to have worn deeper since I last saw her. Millie is wearing a black dress and black gloves. My stomach knots up when I remember why.

  “How are you, dear?” Millie questions me before she’s introduced herself to my mother.

  I’m fumbling for an explanation of her arrival, but Mom speaks first.

  “I think the meds are making her a bit fuzzy,” she tells Millie. “But the doctors say no permanent harm was done.”

  “Thank goodness.” Millie offers my mother a reassuring smile.

  “Do you two know each other?” I am imagining some covert meeting that Millie arranged with my mother, all the better to regulate my activities.

  Laurie pipes up. “I called Millie. I thought she’d want to be here.”

  “And he was right.” Millie nods.

  “I’m glad Laurie had the sense to introduce us.” Mom gives me a pointed look. “The next time you get a job, I expect to be consulted about it.”

  “A job . . .” I glance at Laurie, who picks up where I left off.

  “At the comic book shop,” Laurie says. “I know it’s only part time, but you’ve talked so much about Millie. I figured I should let her know what happened.” He forces a laugh. “Didn’t want you to get fired for missing work.”

  “Laurie,” Mom chides.

  “Too soon for jokes?” Laurie mock-slaps the back of his hand.

  Mom sighs.

  Stephen is still in the chair. Silent.

  “Mom, could you get me some juice?” I ask.

  “There’s water.” Mom picks up a glass. “I don’t know if you can have anything else yet.”

  “Can you ask the nurse?”

  Mom hesitates, but then says, “Okay.”

  I wait until she’s out of the room.

  “Stephen.” My voice breaks.

  He is out of the chair and at my side, opposite Laurie and Millie.

  “Tell me the truth,” he says, stroking my hair. “Are you okay?”

  Tears are clogging my throat, but I manage to choke out, “Why can’t they see you?”

  Stephen doesn’t answer. I can still feel the touch of his fingers at my temple. Reaching up, I cover his hand with mine and look at Millie and my brother.

  “Why can’t you see him?” I ask accusingly, as if Stephen’s invisibility is somehow the result of their collusion.

  “Dear Elizabeth,” Millie says quietly, “of course it’s the curse. Just as it’s always been.”

  I shake my head. “But I drew the curse from him. I felt it inside me.”

  When I say it, I can’t stop the shudder. My limbs convulse at the memory. Blood poisoning. That’s the only way I can think to describe it. I once saw a movie set sometime in the past when medicine sucked and a character died of blood poisoning after his wound became infected. I remember the gruesome close-up of the fatal gash. Black veins spidered out from the wound, evidence of the way his body had turned against itself.

  That’s how Stephen’s curse felt when I drew it out of his body and into mine. Dark squiggles of resentment and malice that wormed through my veins, sickening and painful.

  “I had to stop it,” Stephen finally says. “It was killing you.”

  My voice is flat. “I’m not dead.”

  “You would have been,” Stephen insists. He turns pleading eyes on Millie.

  “It’s the strongest curse I’ve ever seen,” Millie tells me. “You wouldn’t have survived it.”

  Anger is pummeling my chest, making me ache all the more. “You don’t know that.”

  Her silence tells me that she doesn’t.

  “Josie.” Laurie takes my hand. “How could he risk it?”

  “I couldn’t.” Stephen leans down and presses his forehead to mine.

  “You couldn’t,” I whisper, closing my eyes so I can just feel the warmth of his skin. I try to tell myself that this is somehow okay. That what I can feel, what I can see, is enough.

  “Juice!” Mom announces from the doorway. At the sound of her voice, Stephen backs away. I open my eyes.

  Mom presents a cup of apple juice to me with a flourish.

  “Who’s the superhero now?” She grins and winks at Millie as if she’s just established some sort of comic-book-shop solidarity.

  I try to smile, but I feel my lips wobbling. Laurie and Millie look at me with sympathy that verges on pity. I want to throw the apple juice across the room.

  Chapter 33

  I KEEP VIGIL. The doctors and nurses parade in and out. Elizabeth’s mother visits with Laurie. Elizabeth sleeps and wakes. The whole time, I stand in the corner, waiting for the moments when she and I are alone together, when I can keep her company. Even when she sleeps, I try to hold her hand. When she is well enough, she asks me to climb into the bed with her, to hold her there. We lie like that for hours, nothing but bodies and breath, wondering what will happen next.

  * * *

  As I keep vigil, the police remove my grandfather’s shattered, bloody body from the pavement in front of my building. He is the day’s only fatality, and the story goes that he was a man so severely affected by whatever struck those few blocks in Manhattan that he stabbed himself and jumped from the roof. His body will lie in the morgue for weeks, unclaimed. Finally, he will be given a mournerless funeral, a pauper’s grave, an anonymous death.

  I do not need to read the coroner’s report to know: The knife may have surprised him, but he died from the fall.

  I feel that remorse should bloom into its own kind of curse within me. But it hasn’t done so yet.

  * * *

  My father leaves messages.

  I don’t know this until I stop off at home, three days after Elizabeth is taken to the hospital. Even though I am invisible, I need a shower and a change of clothes.

  It is strange to h
ear my father’s voice, because he has no idea what’s happened. It is like the past is calling me, and doesn’t realize I am already in the future. He attempts a casual tone, as if he’s calling me up at college, wondering how my classes are going. He even asks me about Elizabeth, and tells me that he liked her, for the brief time they were in the same room. The sincerity of this makes me unsteady; the weight of all the things he doesn’t know fills me. I sit down on the floor, close my eyes, regain myself. I listen to his other messages—each one growing more urgent with my lack of response.

  When I call him back, there is actual relief in his voice. He asks me where I’ve been, and I tell him that Maxwell Arbus is dead. This, I’ve decided, is all he needs to know.

  Immediately—eagerly—he asks me if the curse has been broken.

  I tell him that it hasn’t. Silently, I hope he will find a way to love me anyway.

  * * *

  I cannot return right away to Elizabeth. This is not the time for her to see my vulnerable need, my naked want.

  I call Laurie and find that he’s up in Sean’s apartment. I tell him I’m sorry to interrupt, but he assures me I’m not interrupting. He asks me if everything’s all right with Elizabeth. I explain to him that I’ve come home for a short time. He says he’ll be right down, and I don’t try to persuade him to stay with Sean. I want to talk, even if I’m not sure what I want to say.

  We don’t go to the roof. We may never go to the roof again. Instead he lies down on the floor of my living room, face to the ceiling. I position myself next to him, also staring up. I make noise as I do, so he knows precisely where I am.

  “I like Sean,” he says. “But it feels a little different now. The possibility that he’ll know me—that he’ll know me completely—is gone. I was working up to telling him what happened in Minnesota. But this? We’re the only ones who are ever really going to know about it, aren’t we?”

  “We are,” I tell him. “For better or worse, it’s ours.”

  He turns to me and says, “Promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “Promise me that we’re not going to stop knowing each other. The last thing I went through, I went through alone. I don’t ever want to do that again.”

  I look right into his eyes. “We will never stop knowing each other,” I promise.

  Even though he can’t see me, he looks like he does. He looks like he sees me perfectly.

  “Good,” he says.

  * * *

  The doctors don’t know what’s wrong with Elizabeth, but Millie does. Even though it horrifies her, she can see Arbus’s presence within her, the last tendrils of dark cursework that have gripped her in spaces that are neither blood nor tissue, muscle nor bone.

  “Will it go away?” I ask. Elizabeth is safely sleeping. Millie does not have to pretend that everything is all right.

  “Over time, I believe so,” she tells me. But I can see she’s not sure. “It is a miracle that she survived. But just as you remain invisible, the power that she absorbed from him doesn’t go away when he dies. We’re basically relying on a magical immune system to break down what she’s taken in—the hope is she’s built up enough resistance to fight it off. Especially since she’s young and innately powerful. More so than most.”

  “But there’s no precedent?” I ask. “Nothing like this has ever happened to you, or to any other spellseeker?”

  Millie shakes her head. “None that I know about. None who lived.”

  “And there’s nothing you can do?”

  “I can see it. That’s all.”

  “So she’ll live with it inside of her?”

  “Yes. Her body will recover from the shock of it. But it will be there, until it isn’t. But when that will be—I don’t know.”

  The doctors think it’s a speedy recovery. But Millie and I know better. And I suspect that Elizabeth knows better too.

  * * *

  I watch her asleep in her hospital bed. She is bruised. Her hair is greasy, dank. There are dark patches under her eyes and blotches on her neck. Her breathing sometimes comes in clots. A line of drool creeps from her mouth.

  I have never loved her more.

  * * *

  She becomes well enough to leave the hospital.

  I accompany Laurie and their mother as they wheel her home. This is her request—that if she’s going to have to go back in a wheelchair (the doctors are worried she’s still too weak, too drained) that they will not be taking a cab or an ambulance. She wants to be in the air again. She wants to see the city that we saved. She wants me there beside her, an invisible participant in the homecoming parade.

  It is a beautiful summer day. Even though the city still hovers under the fears that Arbus’s attack unleashed, the weather eases people’s minds somewhat, because we all treasure the innate illusion that nothing bad can happen on a beautiful summer day.

  Elizabeth smiles under the sun.

  * * *

  It is hard to get Elizabeth’s mother to leave her side, but a few hours after the grand return, Laurie manages to convince her to go grocery shopping with him, leaving me and Elizabeth alone together.

  “How are you doing?” I ask her. “Do you need anything?”

  She’s sitting on the couch. She pats the space next to her.

  “Come here,” she says.

  I make my shoulder solid so she can lean on it.

  “I still don’t remember most of it,” she tells me. “I wonder if that will come back to me, or if it’s lost.”

  “You don’t need to remember it.”

  “But I want to. I don’t like having this gap in my past.”

  “You were brave.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking.”

  “You were astonishing.”

  “Stop it.”

  “You were strong.”

  “But not strong enough.”

  “Definitely strong enough. Because he’s not here anymore, is he? You did what you had to do.”

  She closes her eyes, tired.

  “It’s over,” I tell her. “Now we go back to normal.”

  She lets out a breath that’s part laugh, part sigh. “You have a very strange conception of normal.”

  “You know what I mean. In a few weeks, you and Laurie will go to school. I will stay at home and wait for you to come back. It’s not a normal life for anyone else, but it will be a normal life for us. That’s what matters. Not that it’s normal to anyone else. But that it’s normal to us.”

  Her hand finds my hand. She squeezes.

  “You’re right,” she says. “That’s how it will be. Only, it’s not over. I still have many, many things to learn.”

  “We all do. And we’ll learn them.”

  She nods, and I can see I need to let her rest.

  I kiss her a temporary goodbye.

  “We’re safe,” I tell her. “That’s what matters.”

  “Yes,” she says. “We’re safe.”

  Then she drifts off into dreams.

  * * *

  I return to my apartment. All the familiar, quiet sounds. All the familiar furniture, all the familiar history.

  For a moment, I feel alone again. Entirely alone. I can believe in a life that exists only in this apartment, only on its own. My old life. The life I thought I would always have.

  Then I imagine Laurie and his mother returning to the apartment. I imagine Elizabeth on her couch. I even imagine Millie alone in her hexatorium and hope that she, in turn, is imagining us.

  This is more than I ever could have wanted. This is more than I ever thought I’d have.

  Chapter 34

  IN THE AFTERMATH OF it all, when I am sick and broken and so very, very tired, I finally understand that I am not a superhero. I’ve discovered my fragility, my humanity.

  In meeting Stephen—in seeing Stephen—I stumbled upon an extra set of senses. Millie claimed me as part of her magical heritage, which I’ve barely begun to understand. She named me a spellseeker.
<
br />   What little seeking can accomplish.

  I see curses. Identify them. But when it’s life and death at stake, I fold.

  I thought I could help Stephen, that I could embrace this new, magical me and change the world. But nothing has changed for Stephen since I first discovered he was invisible. I am still the only one who can see him. His passing through the world draws less notice than a flicker of shadow.

  It is not fair.

  But life is not fair.

  How quickly we forget that lesson only to learn it again.

  Sometime soon I will go back to Millie’s basement, which smells of tea and musty books. Under the guise of working part time as a purveyor of the comic books I adore, I will train with her. I will be the earnest pupil she deserves. I will try to fill the void that Saul has left. I will get stronger, better . . . deadlier.

  But not yet.

  I have enough self-awareness to know that I can’t just bounce back from what happened on the roof of this building. None of us can. It’s more than a vague notion of the events that occurred between my attempt to draw Stephen’s curse and opening my eyes to find myself looking up at the sky. Only it wasn’t the sky, but the vivid blue of Stephen’s gaze.

  I don’t know how Maxwell Arbus died. Of course I know hitting the pavement after a nine-story fall took his life. But I have no memory of how Arbus took Laurie’s place on the ledge. Or what made him fall.

  The way that Stephen and my brother steer me sharply away from the subject anytime I get near it makes me think I probably don’t want to know. Maybe it’s better this way—that we keep our darknesses close, hidden in our minds, protected by our hearts.

  * * *

  We’re each coping in our own ways.

  Laurie is hinting that he’s going to bring Sean to dinner so he can meet Mom. This will be new territory for Laurie. For all of us. We are looking forward to our pioneer days.

  Stephen is slowly rebuilding ties with his father. They speak often and Stephen relays the conversations to me. This is his frontier. I can see the sparks of hope in his easy smiles, in the gradual melting of the cold edge that his voice carries whenever he mentions his father.