A scream sears out of me. It’s now or never, and I need to give Ivy one last push to complete my plan. I spring up from the crouching position, on a collision course for her.
Ivy easily drops the hatchet and draws the gun in one fluid motion. She pulls the trigger.
The dart pierces the fabric of my hood and lodges itself in my neck.
“Do unto others, Renata,” Ivy says.
I reach up and wrap my fingers around the dart. I pull it out.
Ivy watches me with a patient smile, waiting for the frog poison to leach into my bloodstream, waiting for me to die.
Instead, I start to laugh.
Ivy’s smile liquefies. “What’s so—?” she starts to ask. The word “funny” dissolves into an unintelligible gurgle. Her jaw goes slack and her facial expression melts into something ugly.
“The poison wasn’t in the dart,” I tell her. I fling the empty syringe at her hand, which is still gripping the gun. “It was smeared on the trigger.”
The plastic gun spills from Ivy’s hand. She reaches for her throat as her windpipe closes up and she begins to choke. Her arms quickly go slack and she collapses onto the walkway.
I stride over to her convulsing body. “I knew you’d find out that I’d stolen those frogs. I knew you were strong and fast enough to disarm me if I pulled a gun on you. I knew you’d revel in the opportunity to execute me using my own weapon, with the poison I’d brought to kill you. It was as simple as getting the gun into your hands.” I shake my head. “And I thought sphinxes were supposed to be clever.”
As a last ditch-attempt to kill me, Ivy weakly reaches out with her poison-coated fingers, but I pin her shuddering hand to the floorboards with the heel of my boot.
I kneel down and bring my face right up to hers. Her back rises every few seconds as her lungs struggle for air. Even though her face has gone completely paralyzed, except for a single spasm at the corner of her mouth, her bloodshot eyes still roll up to look into mine. She’s just narrowly clinging to life.
I slip a single finger under her jaw and hold it in place while I deliver my final message. “You know, when we created the Amaranthine Society, we had the fable about the Amaranth and the Rose all wrong,” I say. “I’d rather be a rose. Because in the end, I’d rather live one, short life making the world a more beautiful place than to live 800 years feeding on the passions of others.”
As Osiris’s soul evaporates, I let my earthly form crackle and expand and blow away.
I picture an earlier time when all my classmates and friends and teachers can live again, when they’ll know nothing of the violence that transpired here.
With that day in mind, I return to Patchwork.
One last time.
Patchwork Falls
It’s pouring in Patchwork.
Not a light rain, or a thunderstorm, but a monsoon.
I’m no longer at the Hellhole or the Reverie Dam, but back in the orchard, lying on the boulder in the middle of the Crater. The rain cascades down the hillside, rapidly pooling around me. My hoodie is instantly drenched, so I rip it off and step into the shallows, which are already ankle-deep and rising.
When I reach the first apple tree, even with the rain streaming down my face, I can see that something is horrifying and different here.
There are souls drifting through orchard. The souls of people I know. My classmates, my teammates, my teachers. My friends. All the people the explosion killed back at Harvestfest. The people I’ll bring back if I can escape this orchard, and return to an early memory, where they’ll all be alive again, but where Ivy will hopefully still remain dead. Her poison-tainted body will just rematerialize, ready to be found by one of her parents.
Then a chilling revelation: she has no parents. Everything she’d confided in me about her mother and father neglecting her, having affairs all around the world, had been fabricated to get her closer to me, to tunnel into my life and appear like a normal, vulnerable teenager.
The rain falls straight through the souls in the orchard around me as though they aren’t really there at all. But still they shimmer, iridescent even in the rainy darkness.
All the while, the water continues to collect in the valley. When I tilt my face to the thunderstorm clouds above me, I discover that they’re not clouds at all.
It’s a pulsing darkness, a tar pit in the sky, defying gravity. It’s the blight that used to be Osiris’s soul, somehow leaked into my memories like an indelible stain that no amount of time or distance will ever fully erase. It looms over all of Patchwork and I can feel it soaking in, touching the memories I cherished most. All those good times with Ivy, Slade, and Troy, all those little moments where Ivy would pass me origami notes in class—visits to colleges, talk of first kisses, sharing spiked hot chocolate in the bleachers at fall football games.
All of it lies.
How could the girl I’d been so close with these past two years be something else completely? How could she have done such normal human things with me, all while plotting a series of demonic mass murders? How could she be responsible for this? I must be in denial, because even after realizing that Osiris was actually Ivy, I can’t help but think of Osiris as a he.
I need to escape this place.
I start up the hill, trying not to look at the ethereal projections of my friends dangling around me, their unseeing eyes cast to the ground. The water flowing down the hillside is an inch-thick now, and I keep slipping onto my knees. I’m coated in mud, and I only start to make progress when I get down and dirty and force my fingernails into the soil. I make handholds and footholds out of any root I can find. It’s almost as if the storm wants me to stay here, in the Crater, where I can’t resurrect my friends.
That will never happen.
By the time I crest the hill, I’m as waterlogged as a sponge in the kitchen sink, so I take cover beneath an apple tree. I collapse in exhaustion on a nest of roots and watch the scene below. The rain has transformed the Crater into a lake. As it swells and rises up the hill, it swallows the boulder and the trees and the souls along with it.
In the center of the new lake, a few bubbles breach the surface.
Followed by two red hands.
Two red arms.
And a red face.
Thanatos emerges like a red-hued Lady of the Lake, and I prepare to run or fight or whatever she has planned for me this time. She wears nothing, as far as I can tell, and her crimson spikes are plastered wet against her head.
She makes no move to attack me, or even approach. Instead, she treads water until, with her eyes locked in my direction, she nods once. Then she dives back beneath the surface, and I don’t see so much as a bubble after that.
Fear is something no man or woman can ever kill entirely. But for the time being, with Osiris gone, I’ve subdued my inner Thanatos.
Gradually the rain fades to a light shower before the supernatural plumbing in the sky is wrenched off completely. The hiss of the rain dies, but it doesn’t leave me in complete silence. Somewhere, not far from where I sit, I hear a different sound. A familiar sound. A sound that has always comforted me.
The ocean.
I follow the siren call of the tide through the apple trees until the orchard terrain abruptly transitions to sand.
I’m standing on my favorite Nantucket beach. I strip off my soggy boots and socks and let the sand stick to my feet. Up in the sky, the Osiris cloud stops at the edge of the seam and gives way to Patchwork’s cloudless, star-cluttered night. Osiris might have tainted some of my memories, but this one belongs to me. This is my little corner of the world. This is my summer place, my island where the ocean cleanses everything, makes everything better. Where the sounds of the sea can numb even the death of your father, and even though you may still cry, at least the good memories will start to resurface while you’re here. And through that you start to realize that it’s not all pain. There’s a legacy of joy, too, not just in the memories of him, but woven in every new memory you ma
ke.
I step over the sea-tumbled log that I’ve always thought of as my beachside sofa. No matter how many summers and storms it weathers, the log has somehow never moved, never changed.
Am I confident this beach is the memory I should return to? To September, when my friends will be alive, but my father will still be gone? I’ve never traveled back more than a month before, but surely there’s some way I can get back to early spring, to before I lost Dad …
But it was illness and age that took my father, not Osiris. I’ve performed miracles these last few days over the boundaries of life and death, bent the rules of time and changed so many things for the better.
If I’ve learned anything from deconstructing my junior year in reverse, it’s this: while it’s important to see where we can change the world for the better, it’s equally important to accept the things beyond our control.
As if I need a reminder to let go, a familiar bird swoops over the beach, a brown one with a yellow tail and red-tipped wings. It’s a cedar waxwing, one of my father’s favorites.
When it reaches my spot on the beach, it veers out into the ocean, soaring off toward the dark Patchwork horizon.
I wade out into the water, until the cold tide laps around my ankles. It’s funny: I’ve focused so much on my friends’ survival these last few days, that for the first time, I finally process how much my life is about to change. I’m the only phoenix in almost a thousand years to outlive Osiris … which means I may also be the first to live long enough to harness my powers for a greater good. To better the lives of others, the way that Ignatius so desperately wanted to. It may no longer be the Crusades, but there are still plenty of catastrophes—natural and manmade—that might be prevented with the phoenix’s foresight. The world is still far from a perfect place.
It’s a responsibility that I’m not sure I’m ready for.
Deep breaths and baby steps, I remind myself, and I can’t help but think with a smile: I guess this means I better start watching the evening news.
With my toes digging into the wet sand, I close my eyes and will myself back to September.
Back to Labor Day weekend, to when my classmates and friends were still alive and carefree.
Back to when summer was ending and so many beautiful things were just beginning.
Walter Lake’s Eulogy, Part III
by Renata Lake
Lastly, my father taught me about love.
My dad and I were graced with a surprise visitor one day this past November: a baby bird. It was a beautiful cedar waxwing, barely old enough to be free of the nest, and Dad had discovered it in our backyard. There were bite marks on its wings, maybe from one of the coyotes that lurk in the woods. On its own, it would never survive the approaching winter, and it certainly wouldn’t heal in time to fly south. Ornithologist that he was, Dad decided we should do the cliché father-daughter thing and look after the bird with the broken wing. It’s really hard to say “no” to an adorable hatchling, so I agreed to play nurse.
Over the course of the next four months, we kept him in an old canary cage and fed him juniper berries, or blueberries when I felt like pampering him. We named him Sugarloaf, after one of the nearby mountains, because he had a sweet tooth. Finally, last month we took him up to the summit of the same mountain for a releasing ceremony. Dad attached this tiny tracking tag to one of its legs, with my name and address etched into the aluminum, and he painted it neon purple, because the other cedar waxwings in its flock would “think it looked bitchin’.”
Dad always had a habit of using words that were thirty years out of style.
I worried that the tag might be uncomfortable for Sugarloaf, or make him veer to the right when he flew, but Dad convinced me that it was a gift to both the bird and to me as well. For Sugarloaf, he’d get to carry a keepsake, a reminder of the girl who nursed him back to health—like he was some injured soldier and I was the nurse who’d tended to his bedside. As for me, Dad said it would give me another reason to remember to look up, to search the skies every spring in hopes that Sugarloaf would return home.
When I pointed out that with the number of birds that flocked to Reverie every year, the odds of reuniting with Sugarloaf were infinitesimally small, Dad smiled and replied, “Maybe you’re right. Isn’t love the same way, though? We spend half our lives looking for that one person in six billion who can make us truly and completely happy. The odds of finding your soulmate sound pretty slim, but tell me: will that ever stop you from looking?”
Shoreline
September
These are the things I love about this beach.
The chill of the crisp New England water around my ankles, that cold the summer sun can never fully penetrate.
The sprawling moonlit view of the Atlantic, the uninterrupted panorama between here and the horizon. The way I can look out over the vast ocean and know that, for thousands of miles in front of me, there’s only water.
The smell of brine, and how it will stick to my clothes whether I’m out here for five hours or five minutes, so I always take the sea home with me.
The tufts of grass that stubbornly cling to the sand.
The way the beach looks flat and smooth, until you walk on it, lay on it, and touch the subtle dimples etched by the latest tide. Knowing that tomorrow’s tide will bring new designs.
The little driftwood log and how it never changes.
The towering Sconset bluff behind me, and how it always changes. The way it looms over the beach, a tidal wave of sand and stone ready to come crashing down. How erosion constantly transforms it into something else, recording the history of every storm.
The way the bluff shelters the beach from the eyes of the four-century-old fishing town behind it.
The first kisses that can happen within that privacy.
I’m so overjoyed to be here that I dash forward and dive headfirst into the frigid Atlantic. Even though I know I’ll pay for it with hypothermia later, I float in the night waters and let go. The intense cold flushes the cocktail of sedatives and epinephrine left in my system. Even though I could probably sleep for a full day at this point, I feel surprisingly awake.
More than anything, I feel alive.
I’m too lost listening to the delicate lullaby of the surf to hear Troy until he’s almost behind me.
“Renata?”
I lift my head out of the water. Troy has one hand wrapped around a beach blanket and another stuffed in the pocket of his seersucker shorts. His white linen shirt is buttoned halfway down his broad chest, the sight of which makes me giddy in the stupid, flailing, helpless schoolgirl crush sort of way that made me kiss him in the first place.
A first kiss that’s supposed to happen about five minutes from now.
He’s squinting at me, and at first I think it’s because of my impromptu night swim. But then he points to the hair matted against my face. “What’s the matter, did you get sick of being a blonde?”
I’d forgotten that my new dark hair travelled back with me. “Felt like the appropriate time to make a change.” I pause, then add, “You know, with school starting next week.”
He spreads open the blanket. “Well, last time I checked, you’re not a seal or a dolphin, and those booty shorts aren’t properly insulated for cold waters—so why don’t you come out of there and dry off.”
I don’t argue. The moment the air comes into contact with my wet skin, my internal temperature plummets. Fortunately, Troy rushes forward to meet me before I have to waddle all the way over to him. He wraps the absorbent towel around me and immediately begins to rub my body dry, from my neck down to my toes. I shiver uncontrollably, but by the time he makes the return voyage up to my shoulders, I don’t feel quite as numb.
“There,” he says. He massages the big blanket in the space behind my ears, then ruffles it playfully through my damp hair. “Black is a good look on you,” he says. “But only when it’s your hair, and not when it’s frostbite.”
“It wasn’t
that cold,” I protest, but my teeth chatter as I say it.
Eventually, he runs out of wet spots to dry, and his hands come to rest where my shoulders meet my neck. I can tell that he doesn’t want to let go. “If you want to slow dance, it’s cool,” I joke. “But that’s usually where the girl’s hands go.”
Even in the dim moonlight, I can tell that Troy’s cartoonish blush reflex has kicked in. His hands fall from my shoulders, but he doesn’t step away.
I know that I’m supposed to take him over to the log and sit down beside him. That we’ll gradually inch closer to each other. That I’ll want him to put his arm around my back so badly, so incredibly badly … but he never will. I’ll sense that I want it, and he wants it, and we both want it, so in the middle of him making predictions about the new school year, I’ll lean in and kiss him. Kiss him because it’s the only way to feed a hunger that’s been building for so long.
That was last time, though.
Things are different now.
It’s not that I don’t love him anymore, or love only parts of him. I love all of him. I love the way that he’s supposed to be this confident, carefree athlete, but now, in front of his best friend, he’s been reduced to a fidgeting, awkward mess, shifting his weight from one foot to the other.
Since that discussion with Troy in his truck, I’ve been putting off even thinking about the question of whether I could do this—us—all over again.
And now that I’m faced with this choice, this crossroads, I don’t think that I can.
Troy’s own words echo in my memory. You’ll anticipate things that were surprises before. You’ll yawn your way through things that once excited you. A life with no surprises is really just a half life.
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