Grave (50 page)

“I’ll be there soon enough,” I said. “We’ll all follow.”

“You sure?” I saw his face and I could tell he was thinking of Billy, of Sam, of all the ones left behind. Of me, right after Joe. “You sure—we’ll all—”

“Follow. I am.” I patted his cheek.
Calm down, my love, calm the fuck down. You’re only dying. We know this song and dance full well.
“All of us. Every one.”

He saw I wasn’t lying; no false words, no slop-sugar as the final thread of consciousness spooled out, frayed at the ends, unraveled into death. Saw I wasn’t lying, tried to smile. The facility was deserting him.

“Soon,” he said. And died.

Soon.

Lisa or someone above us gasped, and there was the stifled sound of sobs. For God’s sake. As if we needed any more life. What we’d already had was plenty enough, more than enough—

Renee. Were you there, still? Renee?

“I’m here,” she said. Murmuring, eyes closed, not lifting her head from my lap. Held my hand, strong, thumb pressed to the soft bit next to my palm, holding it the way you held the hand of someone you loved. Of course we loved each other all along too, of course we did. All three of us. Whatever kind of love you wanted to call it. I held back just as hard.

“I’m here,” she repeated. And then, like that, she wasn’t.

Murmuring sounds, all around me, susurration of the waves and high-low hum of talking and congested rainstorm dampness of crying. Stop that, Lisa. Stop. Lucy, Amy’s mother, I heard her saying something I couldn’t make out but surely it was something calm and sensible, she and Amy both had that way about them, and I let the sounds rush and wash over me like lake water. I didn’t think Renee would go before I did—but then, she only had me left to tell goodbye. Only me.

Only me left. When did I get to go? When did I have to? Soon. I could tell. Soon.

Someone was squatting down beside me, so close I could feel her hair brush my face. Amy. She laid a hand to my cheek, weirdly grownup gesture from the kiddie, though she was already so much not what she once was and I didn’t know whether to feel sad for her, glad for her, both and neither at once. She made her choice, open-eyed, and she seemed glad of it. Hell, she leapt at it. I’d never understand why she took it so hard, just because she killed a person or two, but then it must be different when you’re human. I hadn’t been human in such a long time—

Or maybe all of this was human: death, life, death-in-life. All of it together. Maybe we always were one. Maybe it’s like I always suspected, dying did a fucking sentimental number on your brain.

“Are you okay?” Amy whispered. No dignified remove. She sounded young as she was, and scared. “Are you in pain?”

I shook my head. It was hard to do it, it took all my effort and it almost hurt but other than that, no, there wasn’t any pain. “This is what I’m used to,” I told her. Every word taking all my effort. “This is what I’ve missed.”

Lisa was losing it again, kneeling over me choking and sobbing.
Jesus Christ, Lisa, seriously, get a grip. You’ve got a kid to take care of.
Tears and snot streamed down her face, threatening to drip right on me like scum-water from a rusty tap. We’d all see each other again, sooner than she’d ever think. I was sure of it.

“Fly right,” I told her, looking her straight in the eye. I grabbed her hand, putting all the strength I had left in a hard painful grip. “Fly right.”

She shuddered with the effort to pull herself together. A winter-scaled hand scrubbed and scoured at her flushed cheeks, at her eyes pink and swollen with grief. “Jessie—”

“See you soon.”

I dropped my head, my hand, back to the sand. It was rushing over me in earnest this time, over and through my nostrils and mouth and lungs, but it wasn’t like drowning—it was water to a fish, a fish who never knew it was a fish and spent all its time gasping and dying on the shore but now, gratefully, amazedly, opens up its gills and slides into the sea. Breath, true breathing, at long last. Deep and quiet. In through the mouth, or maybe the nose. Out through the pretty slits fanning on either side of my throat.

I told you we’d all be together again, didn’t I? There they all were, gathered around me and over me, Florian and Joe and Sam and Annie and Billy and Mags and Teresa the bitch and fucking Rommel and Renee and Linc and my mother and everyone, everyone everywhere, countless thousands and millions I couldn’t even start to name. Everyone was here, everyone was one. The music hadn’t stopped playing in my head, the music of the old days, the dances, the wild carnival melody that still kept on flying and spiraling even with the calliope crash-landed on the ground. Nobody ever decides when it’s time for a dance, you just know. Everyone knows it, all together, electricity singing flesh and traveling from each to each all around the circle until all our bones, blood, brains, melt together to become one and only. The merry-go-round was coming to a stop. The music never would. The music was all of us.

I wish I had understood that, earlier. Years ago. Lifetimes ago.

It’s been a good life, though. All of it. Even the terrible parts had their core, their sliver of goodness. My last act of defiance to the universe, I couldn’t speak it anymore, but I was thinking it, I was thinking it out loud:
I wouldn’t change one fucking thing. Not this, not anything else.

“Jessie—” Lisa’s voice. Hand reaching to me. Eyes full of understanding and fear and grief.

The sea was claiming me. I closed my eyes, and the tide carried me away.

THIRTY-FOUR

LISA

“J
essie?”

She was gone.

I glanced up at Lucy, at the others; they’d pulled back, sad, worried, wanting to give me room but not certain, beyond the obvious physical space, just how to do that. Gone. They were all gone now. It was like she just—slipped under, quietly, like someone already oblivious being carried away by the incoming tide. Drowning. Or not drowning, but drifting. Floating. I still had her hand in mine, every finger a tiny, paper-dry, almost apologetic collection of bones. So thin, so fragile, so old even while her face had stayed unnaturally young. I leaned forward and kissed her forehead, savoring the last fleeting feel of her hair brushing against my temple, the faint scent of her skin—

—and though I had felt flesh and bone and hair just seconds before, now my lips touched nothing. Naomi and the others cried out behind me, so I knew I didn’t hallucinate it: She was truly gone, she and Linc and Renee, their bodies vanished before I even sensed their dissolving. Of course. They were so old, truly, all of them, they had been dead for so long, they would all long since have crumbled into dust. Even Renee, the youngest of them. Dust and atoms like the very air, the dead all around us. Maybe I had breathed part of them in, just then, without even realizing it.

I felt numb.

I stumbled to my feet, Lucy and Stephen both running forward to help me, Amy facing me with such sorrow and kindness in her face I didn’t think I could stand it.
Did you do that, just now
? I wanted to ask her, the words refusing to come out of me, but I didn’t even have to bite them back because she read my thoughts, right there on my face. She shook her head.

“They went their own way,” she told me, too quietly for anyone else to hear. “It wasn’t me. But they didn’t need my help... or his. I don’t think they really needed anyone’s help. It was long past time.”

His
help. The man who wasn’t really a man, any more than Amy was any longer a girl, stood halfway across the beach watching, waiting, and even though he and she were not the slightest bit alike, when I looked at them—really looked at them, beneath that faint surface illusion of difference—I saw twins. I saw more than twins. I saw one person, one entity, that only seemed for that faint, fleeting moment, a fraction of a heartbeat in their own extra-human time, to be divided into two. But that was nothing but a trick, a reassuring mirage, for they were the same now. They were one. Oh, Amy. My Amy, my daughter, why did you do it? Why did it have to be you? Why did you let it, why did you
want
it to be you?

Naomi hovered behind Amy now, uncertain, head turned away from the waiting stranger, hugging Nick because Nick was the only truly calm one among us just then. This couldn’t be happening. And of course, it was. Of course all of it was. I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it.

“If you were lying,” I said to Amy. “If you were lying, when you promised that I will die someday, that I’ll see Karen and—” I couldn’t even say her name, right then. “—my sister again—”

Of course she wasn’t lying. How could I say that? How could I talk to my own child like that? Amy’s arms were around my neck now, hugging me hard, and I felt such remorse for my suspicion as I hugged her back. She was my child, still, one of my three daughters, even if I had to share her with Lucy. Even if both of them were going away. I couldn’t believe it. They couldn’t
all
be going away. They couldn’t leave me like this. This wasn’t happening. But it was. We hung on and on to each other for what felt like hours and I breathed in the scent of Amy’s skin, her hair, just like I did Jessie’s, knowing this was the last I would ever have of it again. But for now, for now—

The stranger on the sand, Amy’s hidden twin, said something I was too far away to hear. Silence. If nobody acknowledged he had spoken, Amy and I might keep this moment forever, in blessed silence. But the others heard him. They heard.

“It’s time,” Lucy said. So quietly, so hesitantly, I could almost pretend I hadn’t heard her either.

“I think it’s time,” said Stephen. Only the smallest bit louder. He sounded scared. As scared as I felt.

Amy made a little sound against my shoulder: fear, or sadness, or just plain nerves, all at once. Then she pulled away, tucking a lock of hair behind my ear.

“You have to be okay,” she said. It was half command, half fearful plea. “I can’t do this unless I know you’ll really be—”

“I have to be,” I told her. It was true. I had a little girl to take care of. I couldn’t fail Naomi. I had to be all right. I didn’t know how anything, anywhere, could ever be all right again, but
I
had to be all right.

“You have to be okay.”

“I’m going to be.” I swallowed. “I have to be. I’m going to—”

“I’m scared,” Amy said, and started to cry.

I stepped back and let Lucy approach instead, let Lucy and Stephen hold and comfort her, because they were her family and they were going with her and I had to practice not being able to. I had to practice it now, get used to sliding down the long, endless tunnel of loss for the rest of my life. Naomi ran up to me with tears in her own eyes and I knelt in the sand, hugging her, pretending not to notice as Nick detached himself from her side and went over to sit patiently, waiting, at Amy’s feet. It was time. It was past time. This couldn’t be happening.

Naomi wiped her face dry, breathed in hard, and Amy and her family, her other family, came up to us and we gathered together in a desperately tight knot. Thoughts clattered disjointedly, chaotically through my head with the uncontrollable velocity of panic, but what kept pushing to the maelstrom’s surface was the memory of me and Jessie fleeing north on foot during the worst of the plague, both of us so torn up inside by its wild unreasoning hunger we’d have killed anything, anyone, for food. An old man—still human, one of the unlucky immune—crossed our path like a rabbit leaping into a snare and when I looked at him I saw nothing but meat, but Jessie let him go. She let him hurry off in stupefied terror on his rusty, breaking-down bicycle, and I screamed at her for it because we were starving, we were both starving, but we could have taken him down together. Linc, too, we might have killed for his flesh when we found him, already up in Prairie Beach helping bury the dead, except Jessie recognized him for who he was. She was a better person just then than I was, a better person so much of the time than she’d ever thought she was; for her sake, as much as for Amy’s or Naomi’s, I had to try to be a good person too.
Fly right.
Maybe. I’d do what I could.

“Could you leave?” I asked Amy, trying not to plead. To beg. “Could you change your mind, walk away—”

“I don’t know.” Amy snuffled, curling the arm she’d wrapped around her mother’s shoulders into a fierce hug. They were so much alike, the two of them, a portrait of the same woman older and younger when you saw them cheek by jowl. I didn’t need Naomi to look like me but still, that feeling when you looked at yourself in your own child, it was one I still missed. “Maybe I could,” Amy said. “Maybe I could walk away right now. But I don’t want to. Even if I’m scared. I won’t.” Her eyes, as she gazed at me, had a warning lurking inside them. “I won’t.”

I nodded. I’d known the answer before I’d ever asked.

There wasn’t any putting it off anymore. The sun was high in the sky, the clouds dispersing—it was still so amazing, after what we’d been through, to see actual real earthly sunlight, smell lake water and greenery once more. Amy and I were embracing again, we couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t hold on long enough, it would never be long enough, so I had to let her go. She slipped her hands into her jacket pockets, that too-big ripped-up jacket she’d been wearing since I first met her back in Leyton, and she laughed once more, easy, suddenly unafraid.