Eight years ago, Jesse died for the first time.
It was a barn fire and her step-father died with her. I didn’t know about Jesse’s NRD and had no idea she survived. Her mother never told me and for years—years—I thought she was really dead. I thought I’d lost my best friend and first love in a pyre of ash. I can’t describe the emptiness of those years. Countless months of moving as if I were programmed. There wasn’t a day I didn’t think about her. I suffered the kind of grief that someone can’t possibly understand unless they’ve lost someone they love. The way the mind keeps remembering and grieving again and again. It isn’t a brush with death, painful panic that can be relieved with a phone call or an embrace. It was the kind of grief that stayed with me, day and night. The kind that has no remedy, coloring everything. Consuming, everything.
Then I found out she was alive. She was alive. It took me almost a year to find her, but when I did, oh my God— when I walked into her office and saw her alive and smiling—
It took everything I had not to kiss her. Not to slap her. Shake her. To cry like a mad person or squeeze her to death again and again.
Now that I know the truth of her condition, I’m supposed to be able to let go of this fear—that she will never wake up. The fear that she died at seventeen and everything that has happened since has just been a mad illusion of my grieving mind.
But I can’t. God help me, I can’t. Every death replacement, every threat, tastes like the grief I carried around for four long years.
“I’ll be right there.” I tell him, and he hangs up without saying goodbye.
I press my warm hand to Jesse’s cold forehead. I kiss her cheek and tell her I’ll be back before she wakes up. Because she will wake up. She will.
The nurse at the station takes down my message for Dr. York: I have to run an errand. If I’m not back call me when she wakes up.
I am still deep in thought as I cross to the elevator and punch the up button. I step off onto the sixth floor, into the bustle of the cafeteria. And thankfully, it smells like food and not the antiseptic mixture usually clogging the hospitals.
I scan the cafeteria for him, but he isn’t here yet. The lighting is lower, a soft orange sunset. It’s comforting compared to the antiseptic brilliance of the rest of the hospital. This little nook is also several degrees warmer than the bleached hallways. Few people are here in the post-lunch hours. A couple of doctors and nurses have come to eat on their break. An older man reading a book sits alone at a table, his plate showing signs of a meal long since devoured, little brown napkins crumpled on top. At another table, two women talk solemnly over steaming cups. A row of televisions on the far wall play a collection of news, talk shows, and a soap opera.
I go to the build-it-yourself taco bar. I haven’t eaten all day and the smell of food is unbearable. I don’t go easy on the hot sauce or the water. I choose a booth that is highly visible from the elevator. I’m on my third taco when he arrives.
“May I join you?”
Because my mouth is full, I can only gesture. He slides into the booth opposite of me. He’s wearing dark clothes again today—the only thing I’ve ever seen him wear—dark sweaters with a dark dress shirt collar protruding, dark dress pants. If I look under the table, I’m sure I’ll see the same dark shoes.
“You look tired,” he says. “Are you on duty?”
“That’s a terrible thing to say to a woman.” I swallow. “You look tired.”
He doesn’t smile. “I apologize if I’ve offended you.”
His coolness unnerves me, those unwavering eyes behind silver-rimmed glasses, the meticulously trimmed beard covering his jaw and the skin above his lip. He is too polished, too together. It isn’t normal.
“Jeremiah,” I ask. I want to get this over with. “Why are you here? In the hospital?”
“I brought Nikki to get a few stitches. She’s fine.”
He watches my face but I think I do a pretty good job of remaining unreadable. Not that I have anything to hide or be ashamed of. Only that I’m a little embarrassed by my attraction to Nikki. And it isn’t exactly something that I want her boss to know—that I’m attracted to her.
“What did you want to talk about?” I ask.
“What did Jesse say?” he asks without missing a beat.
“I haven’t asked her.”
“I don’t understand your reluctance to include her.”
“She doesn’t want to fight,” I say. I don’t want her to fight. “She gets enough danger in her day job, don’t you think?”
Jeremiah’s eyes flick up to the row of televisions above our heads and I follow his gaze.
It’s Caldwell, North American Leader of the Unified Church, on TV. Plastic surgery or not, he still looks like Jesse to me. Jeremiah doesn’t know he’s her father. Almost no one does. Because the volume is turned down, I must read the black and white closed captioning.
Announcer: As leader of the Unified Church, what is your position regarding North Carolina’s latest amendment?
Caldwell: I respect every State’s right to amend their constitutions as they see fit, to best serve its resident citizens.
Announcer: You do?
Caldwell: Yes, oh yes. I understand why they might favor this bill.
Announcer: If you have NRD and you die, you are not allowed to reclaim any property, voting or marriage rights.
Caldwell: Yes the loss of rights is unfortunate. However, I can understand their attempts to make everyone equal.
“It’s on the ballot for November,” Jeremiah says. His ears have turned red and his mouth has tightened. “They may pass the same laws in Tennessee. Then what will you do?”
“Then we will sell Jesse’s house and move,” I say. “I hear Portland is nice and they love NRD.”
I give up on the third taco.
“We would be so much stronger with her help,” Jeremiah urges. “I’m sure she would want to fight, if she knew it was by your side.”
That is what I’m most afraid of. I will give anything to keep Jesse out of danger. Anything to know I will never feel that empty sense of loss again.
“I’ll ask her if I feel like the time is right,” I say, knowing I never will.
“I’ve been respectful of your relationship.” Jeremiah meets my eyes through those silver-rimmed glasses, waiting. “But if you do not bring her into the fold soon, I will.”
Jesse
I wake up in the typical zombie fashion: stiff and starved. The first thing I see is a super tall, black man with his back to me. Kirk, my mortician, wears a nice dark green suit with a white shirt and red tie. He’s busy packing the little cosmetic bottles and jars back into the small carrying case.
The second thing I notice is the white walls and gray comforter of my spare bedroom. A bland room, I admit, because I never have guests stay in my second, let alone third bedroom and because I am pretty unmotivated when it comes to décor. I’ve never even hung curtains. The rest of my house looks livable and inviting purely by Ally’s design.
“Why are we here?” I ask. Kirk owns Mt. Olivet’s, a funeral home and cemetery here in Nashville. Usually after Dr. York makes sure I’m healing okay, Kirk takes me there and fixes me up. Not in the cemetery of course. He has a little room for me in the back of the funeral home. I’ve gotten so used to waking up in the softly lit, rose-colored room that finding myself anywhere else always means something is wrong. “Oh my God, did she die?”
“Nothing like that,” he says. His voice has the faint drawl of New Orleans, where he lived before a hurricane laid waste to the levees, and the city was lost. He turns toward me, palms out in surrender. “It’s only that we are doing renovations at Mt. Olivet. I thought you’d be more comfortable here at home.”
I watch him make a big show of arranging his little black case, his zombie-care case as I like to call it. He’s more used to working with stiff bodies than living ones, so I can trust him to fix me up at any stage of decomposition, no matter the damage my bod
y took in a replacement. It is Dr. York’s job to put everything back in place—like my bones and stuff. It’s up to Kirk to do the cosmetic stuff. And I have no objection to letting him put a little makeup on my unconscious body because even though I have a really fast metabolism and some regeneration-healing skills, pretty isn’t in my post-replacement vocabulary.
“So Julia is okay?” I ask again because he still hasn’t answered me.
Kirk snaps the lid on the case closed but doesn’t turn around. “She’s fine, just fine. I heard she didn’t have a scratch on her. You were hit by a tree.”
“A tree? That’s a first. They usually don’t move much.”
Kirk laughs and the robust sound of it relaxes me. But again I notice his tight shoulders, and turned back, Kirk with his bag poised and ready to flee the bedroom.
I want to ask what’s wrong because something is wrong, but stop. I don’t want to be that girl. Are you mad at me? Is everything okay? Is it something I did? Said? I tell myself not everything has to do with me. Maybe Kirk has something else going on. Something that is probably none of my business.
“Thank you,” I say. “For destiffing my corpse.”
He finally faces me and places a hand on the top of my head, a very grandfatherly gesture. Then he opens his mouth as if to say something. But then his mouth closes, jaw flexes, and he is gone.
I listen to his heavy steps on the stairs outside my darkening bedroom. My eyes are on the desk in the corner beneath the windows, but I’m not really seeing it. I’m listening to Kirk leave. His soft voice calls out to someone who makes some reply, followed by footsteps on the stairs.
Winston, my fawn colored ball of fluff with a cute black face, looks up at me from the end of the bed and snorts. I sit up and scratch his velvety ears. He is adorable with his smushed face and perked ears as he tries to bite my wiggling toes through the comforter. A crisp breeze from the open window has a sharp, sobering effect on me. I pull the blanket and the dog tighter just before the bedroom door opens again.
Lane comes to the side of the bed and kneels, a lovely wave of intoxicating cologne coming with him. “Hi, beautiful.”
His chilly hands slip under the covers looking for mine. I reach out for him.
“Hey,” I reply and my shoulder blades soften against the pillows. I try not to look sad. For a moment I expected it to be Ally, but I don’t know why. She used to be the first face I saw whenever I woke up, but Ally has been distant for the last few months. As Lane and I grow closer, she seems to slip further into the shadows of my life.
Lane leans in to kiss me, a soft brush of the lips. He smells musky, a sweet but boyish cologne making me think of the smell oozing from certain clothing stores in the mall. His dark hair, tousled, falls forward into his Mediterranean blue eyes.
Our mouths make a soft wet sound as he pulls back. “How do you feel?”
“Sore,” I say, truthfully. “But I’ll live. For a few more days anyway.”
Last year Lane found out about his own NRD and is now privy to the pain of a replacement. The benefit of this is now he’s much more considerate of my post-replacement needs. He’s always been considerate, but nothing like experiencing rigor mortis firsthand to promote post-death sensitivity.
“Are you hungry?” he asks, kissing the back of my hand. “I want you to see something. But if you need to rest, I can show you another day.”
“Are the seeing something and the eating something connected? Or are you just being random?”
“Connected.” He’s being cautious, but his eyes are all excitement.
“Well then.” I let him pull me from the warm bed and help me into my clothes.
Our first stop is Lane’s place. I don’t go up to his apartment, the top half of an old house he shares with his tenants below. The house belonged to Lane’s dad but when he died, he inherited the house and the commercial building where he has his comic book store. Lane doesn’t want the whole house to himself, so he’s sectioned it and rents the lower half out. Because it is close enough to Vanderbilt University, it’s usually empty in the summer and taken during the fall and spring semesters.
A couple of cute college girls who love to give me dirty looks are his current tenants. And I admit, I am a little concerned about big-boobed Vandy girls parading around in their panties in the communal kitchen, but I can’t say anything without sounding crazy. I try very hard not to let anyone know I’m crazy—which of course makes me think of Gabriel.
It isn’t uncommon for death-replacement agents to lose their minds and hallucinate. All that dying deprives the brain of oxygen and it has its consequences. I had full blown, weeks on end Gabriel hallucinations last year, but I assumed it was the stress. And here I was now, hoping the brief glimpse of Gabriel just before Julia’s replacement was a harmless flashback and nothing more.
Lane goes upstairs for the keys to his black Kawasaki Ninja and knowing this brief reprieve from rain is one of our last chances to ride this year, I agree to take a ride with him. And being the sweetheart he is, he brought me down some black knit gloves and a hat for my ears.
It’s a good time to go riding. The sun is melting into the horizon, dissolving into an iridescent puddle of melted gold. After Lane backs the bike out of the gravel driveway, I climb on. I keep my eyes open for Gabriel or anything weird, but I see nothing long enough that the worrisome knot in my stomach starts to relax.
The Nashville skyline is fifteen minutes behind us when he pulls off the interstate and leans the bike onto back roads crowded with imposing trees turning bright with hits of candy apple red and pumpkin orange. The tires against the pavement make a slick-rubber sound as we cut deeper and deeper into the country side, the engine whining with each acceleration. It’s getting dark and the air whizzes past my iced cheeks almost to the point of real pain. But it feels good. I feel alive.
And maybe you’d have to die as much as I do, to appreciate this rare feeling.
I hug him tighter, soaking up the heat of him and letting the vibration of his bike make the muscles in my legs tremble and tense. I use his back as a windbreaker and I get comfortable there, warming one cheek before turning my face to warm the other against the soft fabric of his jacket.
Then I feel the bike slow and light hits the back of my closed eyelids. I look up to find we’ve broken free of the trees’ shadows into a cliff-side clearing. The sunset is beautiful and casts us both in bronze shades as he pulls over to one side of the road. He lets me climb from the bike first before parking it. I pull off my helmet and set it beside his on a low stone wall.
“Is this what you wanted to show me?” I ask. I gesture wide to the sight of the sunset stretching over pale-gray water as far as I can see, distant stretches of land encroaching on the little waves.
“Yes,” he says.
“It’s beau-tee-ful. Did you make it yourself?” I move to kiss his cheek, but he turns to claim my mouth, pulling my jacket collar so I have to come up on my toes or be choked. The gesture might be possessive, but his lips are soft and after a handful of heartbeats, he releases me.
“I sure did,” he says. “Took me awhile to get it just right.”
As he pulls back I see how beautiful he is in this late afternoon light. I can even see sunlight collecting on his lashes as I come in for another kiss.
“Who knew you were so talented?”
He frowns and clamps his hands on my shoulders. “You’re shaking.”
I’m about to say it’s from the kiss, when he pulls off his green canvas jacket and offers it to me. He bounces it impatiently until I slip one gloved hand through the sleeve and then the other. He reaches under and pulls my hair free. Then he makes me a place to sit on the stone wall beside him.
The towel he used to wipe water from our seats becomes my seat cushion, draped over the deteriorating rock face. Then he surprises me.
Lane opens his backpack that I’d been wearing on the drive up, and pulls out our dinner: General Tso chicken for him, fried rice and
egg rolls for me.
“I thought I smelled Chinese!” I say. I open one of the boxes. “I thought maybe one of my brain nerves got smushed and I was just going to smell rangoons for the rest of my life—which actually wasn’t a bad prospect.”
“I picked it up just before I picked you up,” he says.
“Sneaky,” I say. “You knew I’d come with you.”
“Or we’d have eaten it in your bed.”
“But then we’d miss your magical landscape,” I say and I snuggle as close as our elbows allow. “How long did it take you to make this again?”
“It took me six days to pull it all together,” he replies, with a wink.
We sit on the wall, watching the day die and eating Chinese food. Me warm in his coat, wrapped in the smell of him. Him sitting close, thigh-to-thigh, smiling at me as much as the sunset.
And this is why I love Lane.
Because loving Lane feels—safe.
His world is safe. Little girls don’t die here. People aren’t trying to hunt and kill me. No one leaves hateful messages in soap marker or eggs my house. No one calls me the Devil’s whore or soulless. I don’t spend my days in hospitals, or funeral homes, or in several pieces for that matter. With Lane, I am just a girl who likes Chinese food, who has the cutest dog ever, who likes to watch bad TV and read sleazy tabloids and eats too much ice cream and doesn’t give a shit about the condition of her nails and yet—
Lane looks at me like I am this sunset. Beautiful. He makes me feel beautiful.
It’s why I chose Lane when I could have chosen Ally.
It isn’t that I don’t love her. It isn’t that I am not attracted to her—I am. But with her, it’s duty and responsibility. With Ally, it is fear, concern, and worry. It’s all about them and what we need to do to stop them. Little girls die in Ally’s world. Hell, Ally died. If I hadn’t been there to replace her—
God, I can’t imagine it.
So when I reach out to hold Lane’s hand in the fading sunlight, I tell myself that this is the world I live in. I can have my life any way I want it, and I want this. Chinese food and silly boyfriends.
Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2) Page 3