Afterworlds (49 page)

But he had no desire to collect anything so foul, and in the end we cast all those carefully cut pieces into the Vaitarna. That’s all the river was—endless millennia of human memories boiled down to black sludge. I wondered how it could smell so sweet.

“Thank you,” I told Mr. Hamlyn when we were done.

“There’s no thanks better than being right.”

I looked at him. “Right about what?”

“That you would call me.” He smiled. “Though I admit, it was sooner than expected.”

I started to say that there was no way I’d ever be calling him again. But how could I be sure? My future was up in the air, both as a valkyrie and as a human being.

Everything changes when you take a life.

*  *  *

It would have been easy to let the river carry me home, but my real body was here in Palo Alto. I couldn’t leave it behind, or my shiny new car, for that matter.

When I turned on my phone for directions back to the highway,
it woke up sputtering: six messages from my mother and fourteen from Jamie.

Maybe if they’d left only one or two, I would have listened to them. But the thought of all those voice mails growing steadily more anxious made me switch the phone back off. But first I texted them both:

I’m okay. Will be home this morning.

The highway was easy to find, and there were plenty of signs pointing to Los Angeles. But my timing was terrible once again. After four hours of driving I found myself approaching LA smack-dab in the middle of morning rush hour.

It was also breakfast time, and I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. Maybe I didn’t need sleep anymore, but here in the overworld food was not optional.

I stopped at a place called the Star Diner in North Hollywood, choosing it for the parking spot right in front. A mercifully efficient waitress brought me scrambled eggs and toast, which I devoured in about three minutes. Eating simple, ordinary food edged me back toward reality.

Morning sunlight slanted in through the diner’s picture windows, as if the afterworld didn’t exist. The tables were trimmed in cheery, glittering chrome. Sitting there drinking coffee, I didn’t feel like someone who’d cut apart a ghost last night. I wasn’t sure how I felt, exactly. Not angry anymore, because the bad man was gone, but not triumphant either. I should’ve been exhausted from driving all night, but even that was missing. It was as though I’d excised some part of myself along with the bad man’s memories. Only the cold place remained.

Then I reached into my wallet to pay, and a business card slipped out. It had a blue seal in the upper left corner, and the name Special Agent Elian Reyes in the center. I remembered what he’d said to me on the phone:

You should always report murders, of course.

And that’s what I’d just done: committed murder. What else would you call breaking into an old man’s house in the middle of the night, waking him up, and leaning on his chest until he has a heart attack?

It hadn’t been an accident.

The business card was frayed and soft from being in my wallet. I’d memorized the information ages ago, figuring that if you have your own personal special agent, you should know his number. Learning the digits by heart had seemed funny at the time.

It didn’t seem funny now.

You should always report murders, of course.

What would happen next back in Palo Alto? Someone would find the bad man’s body, sooner or later. The police would be called, and couldn’t fail to notice the smashed bedside table and the pills scattered across the floor. They would ask the neighbors if anyone had seen something strange, like a car pulling up at three in the morning. Maybe a wild girl digging up his lawn with her hands.

As I sat there staring at the dirt under my fingernails, the eggs in my stomach began to squirm. I’d turned on my phone in front of the bad man’s house, and sent two texts, and made that collect call from near my house. In a phone company databank somewhere were numbers connecting me to his mysterious death.

The kicker, of course, was my fingerprints on the handle of
his shovel, which I’d slid back into its spot beneath the bed before leaving.

A dry little laugh forced its way out of me. I wasn’t a particularly clever murderer, was I? Nor was my defense going to be the sanest thing ever heard in a California courtroom: “I did it to free five little dead girls, and so my ghost friend doesn’t have to worry about the bad man ever again.”

I took a slow breath, letting the fear of being caught flow through me. It was better than feeling nothing. Better than letting the cold place grow until it swallowed up the rest.

There were so many things I couldn’t change: what had happened to those people in the airport, whatever was wrong with my mother. Last night, at least, I’d done something rather than nothing.

And you can’t put a valkyrie in jail. We can walk through walls.

If there was a punishment for what I’d done, it wasn’t going to come from the world of phone records and fingerprints, of laws and prisons. It would come in the transformations taking place inside me. As Yama had tried to warn me on that lonely island: whether ghosts were real or not didn’t matter, what mattered was what we decided to make ourselves.

I slipped Agent Reyes’s card back into my wallet, and left the waitress a big tip.

*  *  *

My mother was waiting on the front steps when I got home.

“Nice car,” she said when I got out. I think she meant it.

“I know, right?”

We took a moment together, amazed that my father had spent real money on me. I sat next to Mom on the steps, still uncertain
how to feel.
In trouble
seemed wrong, like something for little kids, not murderers. I couldn’t tell whether she was angry, or sad, or exhausted. Or maybe just sick.

“Did Jamie tell you about Dad’s note?” I asked.

“Of course.”

“Then what is it? Your diagnosis?”

“Not yet, Lizzie.” She held up a trembling hand. “You disappeared for twenty-one hours. You don’t get to set the terms of this conversation.”

Angry, then. I didn’t answer, just nodded.

“Where the hell did you go?”

“Driving.”

“For
twenty-one hours
?”

“Yeah, I know.” I still wasn’t tired. I wondered if I would ever sleep again. Probably not without Yama’s lips to help me, and would he ever touch me again after what I’d done? “Driving helps me think. It’s a pretty comfortable car.”

Mom took a deep breath. I could
hear
her biting back harsh words.

“Jamie told me you have a boyfriend.”

“She did? Seriously?”

A grim smile crossed my mother’s face. “She didn’t say anything until this morning, when you still weren’t home.”

I sighed. Fucking LA traffic. “Yes, I have a boyfriend. But this had nothing to do with him. I just needed to get away.”

She gave me a long, appraising stare. But she turned away with a sigh, as if I were something unknowable.

Fair enough. I didn’t even know myself.

“Are you going to die?” I asked.

“Not any time soon. But we’ll get back to that, and to your boyfriend.”

Not any time soon.
If that counted as good news, then the world sucked.

Mom stood up and went over to the car, opened the driver’s door, and leaned in. “Jesus. A thousand miles, Lizzie?”

“Like I said, it helps me think.”

She shut the car door and came back to the porch. She stood over me, a parent over a child. “Where did you
go
?”

Only the truth would do. “Palo Alto.”

“Is that where your boyfriend lives?”

“No. I went to your old neighborhood.”

She stood there staring at me, her anger blunted for a moment. This telling-the-truth business was oddly effective.

“You know that old photo in your room?” I asked. “I needed to see the house where you grew up.”

She shook her head. “Why?”

“Because you never told me about Mindy. She was haunting you and you didn’t tell me. But she was
there
, Mom.” I could feel the cold place retreating as I spoke, so I kept going. “Every time I played outside when I was little, she was there. And even now when I’m traveling, or when we drive anywhere, she’s there in the way you worry. Every day of my life, her ghost is with us. Every day!”

Mom didn’t answer, but I didn’t have any more words, so we were silent for a while. I wondered if Mindy was standing on the other side of the front door, listening.

Finally my mother said, “You don’t know what it’s like, when your best friend disappears.”

“Maybe that’s because you
never
told me about her
.”

“I’m not going to apologize for that. Not today. And it wasn’t something I could just tell my child about. They found her in her own backyard, Lizzie. You have no idea.”

I nodded, even though I knew better than she did how horrible it had all been. I’d seen every detail played back in the bad man’s memories. The only thing I didn’t understand was why my own mother had hidden it from me.

“Look, I get that it was awful. But—”

“If you get it, then why would you disappear for
twenty-one hours
? Why would you drive away and turn your phone off? You vanished, just like she did!” Something shuddered in my mother’s chest. “At three this morning I got up and checked the backyard, Lizzie, in case you were buried there!”

Her voice broke at the end, and the sound of it was awful, like every fear she’d ever had was tangled in her lungs.

“Oh, right,” was all I could manage.

She was staring at me, waiting for more, and I wanted to say how thoughtless I’d been, how I would never disappear again. I wanted to break down and cry.

But I kept seeing what
I’d
been doing at three that morning.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last. “Really sorry.”

She nodded at that. “Good.”

“But I’m not Mindy. Okay?”

My mother thought about this, as if it were something that could be debated. But finally she nodded again. Then an odd look crossed her face.

“I never told you her name.”

“Really? Maybe I looked it up online.”

Mom shook her head. “But that was her nickname. In the newspapers they called her Melinda.”

“Then you must have told me.”

I could see her weighing this, and not quite believing it. But it was the only possible explanation.

“Mom, will you just tell me about your diagnosis now?
Please?
”

“Okay.” She nodded and closed her eyes. “You know how I’ve been tired all the time? My doctor thought it was anemia, not a big deal. That’s why I’ve been taking iron tablets.”

“You have?” My voice was weak. Now that she was finally telling me, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear this.

“But iron didn’t help, and my blood counts kept getting worse. A lot of conditions can cause this, so there were a lot of tests—lupus, hepatitis, HIV.” She opened her eyes. “It wasn’t any of those. It didn’t make sense to tell you until I knew something for sure.”

“But you told Dad.”

She nodded. “With my blood counts, it might’ve been something that could cause heart failure. Maybe out of the blue. So yeah, your father had to know.”

“Heart failure?” I shook my head. “You said you weren’t going to die any time soon.”

Mom nodded. “My heart’s fine. The diagnosis went in another direction. What I have is called melody . . . crap.” She cleared her throat and tried again. “Myelodysplastic syndrome, it’s called. Everyone just says MDS.”

I took my mother’s hand. “What does that mean?”

“It means my blood’s all messed up, right at the source. They
finally got around to testing my bone marrow. There are stem cells in there that make your blood cells. Mine are broken.”

“Broken? How the hell does that happen?”

“They don’t know. When I was a couple of years younger than you, I worked as a house painter. We used benzene to strip the paint back then. We should’ve worn masks, I guess.”

“And
that’s
what did this to you? Some chemical you inhaled, like, thirty years ago?”

“We don’t know.” She took both my hands in hers. “But the important thing is that it’s not genetic. You don’t have to worry about this happening to you.”

“But I
do
have to worry about it.” The reaper was in me, sweeping across my life, across the lives of everyone around me. It was in the marrow of my mother’s bones. “So what happens next?”

“Well, nothing wonderful. Blood transfusions, maybe a stem-cell transplant. We’re talking about years of dealing with this, and we don’t know how it’ll work out. But I’m younger than most of the people who get this disease, which is lucky.”

Lucky, like surviving a terrorist attack.

“Real luck is taking another flight,” I said softly.

My mother didn’t hear me, or she didn’t understand. “I’ve got decent health insurance, so we probably won’t lose the house. And this is not going to make me an invalid, so you don’t have to be chained to your mother. You’ll be off at college for most of it.” She looked at me. “Are you following all this, kiddo?”

I shook my head. “I got lost somewhere between blood transfusions and losing our house.”

“Right.” She took a slow breath. “I guess you didn’t sleep last night.”

“Not at all.”

“Maybe we should go into details later. Along with that boyfriend conversation we’re going to have.”

“I’d like to go to bed.”

My mother hesitated, just to show that she was within her rights to make me sit here apologizing for the rest of the day, but had decided to be merciful. “Okay. But you know I have to meet him, right?”

I nodded. “He’s really nice and I think you’ll like him.”

“I hope so.” She hugged me then, hard and long, and when we finally pulled apart, she was smiling. “I’m glad you got home in one piece.”

I felt forgiven, at least a little, even if my mother only knew a tiny slice of what I’d done the night before. Her absolution fell on something darker than she knew.

She held out a hand. “Keys.”

So I gave her the keys to my shiny new car, as if that made up for everything, and told her I was going to bed.