Resurrected (Resurrected Series Book 1) (4 page)

I expected her to try to pull free, to take off running or at the very least, use her free hand to start slapping the shit out of me. What did I think I was doing anyway? When a person runs away from you, that’s usually a sign they don’t want you around. She wouldn’t look at me, but she didn’t fight me either. She followed me to the side of the building and stood lamely by me, waiting for me to say something. Shit. I had been entirely focused on just catching up to her. I hadn’t actually thought of what I would
say
to her when I did.

“Lottie, what … ?”
Brilliant, Dietrich.

She shifted her weight to her other foot, but still didn’t lift her gaze from the ground. A part of me had been hoping she was going to fill in all of the information I wanted but didn’t even know how to ask for, but that apparently wasn’t going to happen. I took a deep breath. Start basic. “What the hell is going on?” It came out sounding like an accusation. I hadn’t meant it to. I was tired from having woken up too early, stressed from two years of painful grieving that more often than not was really just me working too hard to try not to really grieve, and then the shock of … of what? What the hell
was
going on?

It didn’t matter. I regretted saying it as soon as the words were out, as those big, hazel eyes I loved so much started brimming with tears again, and she still wouldn’t look at me. I hadn’t meant to hurt her. Not even her … ghost. Should a ghost have a body, I wondered? I realized I was still holding onto her arm. Her very real arm. Very warm, very alive arm. I could feel the hard bone underneath the thin skin and muscle, see the blue-green veins underneath that porcelain complexion. I turned her arm over and softly traced my thumb over her wrist. Pulsing. Fast. Her heart was still beating fast.
Her heart was still beating.
She was alive.

When I looked back at her face, I realized she had been watching me. Those tears had spilled over her cheeks but she didn’t try to wipe them away. She just watched me. Concern, sorrow, love, regret. “No,” my voice was hoarse, just a whisper. I’m not sure it mattered. I must have lost my mind, right? None of this was real. “I buried you.”

Lottie never looked away. “I’m not her,” she whispered back.

I know she must have seen the confusion that was suddenly written all over me, but she didn’t offer anything else. She just stood there, watching me, not moving, not looking away, crying silently. So much emotion behind those eyes, and I understood them all, because they were
her
eyes,
her
emotions. Of course she was Lottie. I had lost my fucking mind but she was Lottie. Of the seven billion people on this planet, I would have known this face, this hair, this body, this smell, the feel of her skin against mine. I
had
known her in that coffeehouse, even when my brain kept echoing
this is impossible.

“Lottie,” I started, my voice finding itself again, and I reached up to wipe a tear from her cheek. She blinked in surprise but didn’t move away from me. “I would know you in a room of imposters; you know I could find you anywhere on this Earth.”

She finally looked away then out toward the busy street, shaking her head at me but as silent as before. Occasionally, people passing by us would stare, some would even slow down, but I wasn’t really paying attention to them. If Lottie even noticed them, she didn’t let on.

My hand had slipped down her wrist and was loosely holding her fingers, those delicate thin fingers. I was holding her left hand. Her ring finger no longer bore the tan line from her engagement ring, and I caressed it, wanting to ask but not wanting to know what had happened to her ring, to her promise to marry me, to become my wife. Even her ghost in this Hell of an afterlife would still wear that ring; I was more secure in that certainty, in the strength of our commitment to each other, than anything else in my life.
I’m not her.

“Lottie, your ring …” I started.

She stopped me. “It’s not mine.”

This was maddening. “Lottie,” I was exasperated. But something was clicking within me. Some spark of truth, an element of
this isn’t quite right.
Still holding her hand, I asked her, even though I felt ridiculous doing it, “Who are you then?”

She cast her gaze back toward the invisible phantom on the street.  “I’m so sorry, Dietrich. I swear I never wanted to hurt you. You never should have seen me. It was so incredibly stupid of me to even come here.”

What the fuck was that supposed to mean? I was about to ask her, but then remembered the hurt in her eyes, the pain I had caused her by speaking too quickly before. Tact wasn’t my strong suit. “Then why did you?”

She glanced up at me again and a half-smile played at her pale link lips. God, I missed those lips. She shrugged and looked away again. “Goddamn it, Lottie.” I never cursed at her like that. I really must have lost my mind. She flinched but didn’t reprimand me, didn’t curse back at me. Other than a second of recognition of knowing I had said something reprehensible, she didn’t even respond as if anything unusual had happened.

Christ, I hated myself sometimes.

“I’m sorry,” I said, and pulled her just a little closer to me. “Lottie, really, I’m so sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

She gave me a sad smile, an effort, “It’s ok. You have every right to be angry.”

“I’m not angry, I’m just confused. Frustrated. And you won’t talk to me.” She shook her head again to indicate she still didn’t plan on talking to me, so I kept talking. “And I’m tired. I got like three hours of sleep last night. I keep having these dreams about you. Last night, we were on the beach in Galveston, that time I took the picture of you that’s set as my phone’s background …”

She had started to smile at that phantom in the street as she recalled the memory. I wanted her to hold onto it. “What was that shell you found?” I asked. Lottie would have known I remembered of course. And she didn’t hesitate to call me on it now.

“Dietrich, you could recite the entire Wikipedia page.”

I just smiled back at her. “Hm, I think it was some kind of whelk.”

“Lightning whelk.”

“Right. Turns out it’s our state shell too. Who knew we had a state shell?” I probably shouldn’t have used those first person pronouns. It made her uncomfortable.

“I need to leave,” she told me, and tried to pull her hand away from mine, but I wouldn’t let her go.

“Lottie, please, can we go somewhere to talk? Please?”

She had started to shake her head again, but I interrupted her. I had expected her to say no. “Lottie, you can’t just show up here, not dead, tell me you aren’t you, it was a mistake, and then not even tell me why. Do you have any idea how badly this is going to fuck with my head?”

I wondered if she had any idea how badly this was already fucking with my head. She was staring at that invisible spot in the street even more intently now, biting her lower lip in that nervous way of hers as she stalled for time. I waited. I would have waited on the street corner all day if I had to.

I needed some argument, some better reason than, “Don’t completely fuck me over,” for when she said no again, but I couldn’t really think of any compelling reason. After all, she didn’t owe me any explanation. At least, I didn’t think she did. I was half-convinced I was still just losing my mind anyway and this was all a delusion. And I was more than half-convinced delusions don’t owe us anything.

Finally, she looked away from the ghost on the street and met my eyes again, and quietly told me, “Something went wrong, Dietrich. I don’t know what to tell you when I don’t even understand everything myself.”

“You can tell me what you do know. That’s a hell of a lot more than I know.” She looked like she was going to protest again, so I kept talking, even though that didn’t usually work well for me. “Lottie, my car is eight blocks from here. We can go back to our … my apartment,” she had started shaking her head again, “ok, wherever you want to go. Or we can just sit in my car. I don’t care. At this point, is it really going to hurt anything to tell me whatever it is you don’t want to tell me? Because I’ve already seen you. You’ve already told me you’re not … you. Is there some cosmic mystery I’m not supposed to know here? Is this about the rosary at your funeral? That was Eric’s idea, I didn’t even know what the fuck the rosary was for, that was
not
my fault.”

I was rambling now. I had waited for something revelatory to happen during that ritual, after all; maybe if souls did exist, hers was really pissed off about it not being done properly. Or being done at all. It had taken a while. I guess if I were dead – I mean, really dead - and waiting to move on, I would be pretty pissed off about having to wait around while a bunch of people sat chanting around my corpse.

Her laughter had cut me off. Like little bells, it was infectious and I couldn’t help smiling, even though I had no idea why she was laughing. She smiled at me, and it was a genuine smile, Lottie’s smile. That sarcastic, witty, personality of hers always hidden just below the surface of that smile. “Dietrich, the rosary was fine. It was nice. It meant a lot to Cathy. Although you didn’t have to look quite so derisive.” Her smile faded.

Derisive? That wasn’t a word I had ever heard Lottie use.

“You were there?” That was going down in my top five list of stupidest questions ever asked.

Lottie pressed her lips together. I knew why. She was trying not to laugh at me. I had seen her do that so many times before, especially when we first met. We were 17, and I had only been in this country for three years. I spoke English well, but it was the English of a non-native speaker – the textbook English I had learned in school. I had finished the gymnasium at 14 and moved to Baton Rouge to go to LSU and was finishing my degrees when I met her; even after three years in this country, I found American idioms, especially south Louisiana idioms, baffling. Granted, my anti-social personality didn’t exactly put me in a lot of situations to learn conversational English. Lottie found my confusion over common expressions endearing and funny. I just found it frustrating. Ten years later, I was still trying to figure out why I should “get down” from the car instead of getting out.

“Yes, Dietrich, I was.”

Well, of course she had been there. But her insistence that she wasn’t Lottie was baffling me. There were few things I could be certain of in this world, and Lottie was one of them. But there was something so right and yet so wrong about her. “And who is that?” I asked cautiously.

She took a deep breath then started chewing on her lower lip again, this nervous habit of hers that never changed whether she was concentrating on studying for finals or picking out flower arrangements for the tables at our reception. “Ok. We can go sit in your car. It’s starting to get hot out here anyway.”

It didn’t take long in June along the Gulf Coast for the weather to become stifling, oppressive even. She let me lead her back down the sidewalk, not trying to free her hand from mine again, even though I wasn’t holding onto her tightly or assertively, just enough to know that she was still with me. And she kept pace with me, not really seeming to need me to lead her back to the parking garage by my building. Of course, Lottie would have known where I was going. But she was and wasn’t Lottie. She had said so herself. Sort of. And for every movement, every detail of her body, every mannerism, and speech pattern and smile that made me
know
this was Lottie … there was still this tickling in the back of my brain, something that kept whispering, “
This isn’t right. Something’s not quite right. Something is different.
She
is different.”

We walked in silence, moving with the crowd this time, so it was easier to walk back, passing by the coffeehouse where we had only been … I wondered how much time had passed. It had seemed like hours, but I knew that couldn’t be true. The line was to the door now. No rest for the weary baristas. Lottie glanced forlornly at the door but didn’t stop walking. I could guess what she was thinking. She was, and wasn’t, Lottie after all. She had never had a chance to drink her coffee. “I can get you another one,” I offered.

Lottie paused but then picked up her pace again. “No,” she sighed, “with that line? Besides, I have to go back … home today.”

“Where is that?”

Silence. Of course. “Ok, mother ship?” I joked. At least I think it sounded like a joke. I couldn’t always tell.

But Lottie just looked at me, puzzled, inquisitive. “No, no mother ship,” she answered.

We were only two blocks from the parking garage now. Knowing she planned to leave Houston today, I wanted to walk slower, drag these moments with her out longer, even if trying to talk to her was frustratingly difficult and increasingly confusing. She was close enough to Lottie, I thought. Close enough, that if she would just stay here, if she could just… pretend … perhaps, one day, I would find myself resurrected. I knew it was terribly unfair to even think that. But I had never claimed to be selfless. She started slowing down before me as we neared the parking garage and finally let her hand drop from my fingers. She crossed her arms defensively over her chest, that pained expression returning. She didn’t want to have this conversation with me, and there was nothing more in the world I wanted to do right now than hear everything she had to say. One of us was going to be incredibly disappointed.