THIS IS LIKE THE PERFECT

storm of bad decisions,” Jamie said as the three of us approached a bed-and-breakfast in Key Largo. It was dark out. We’d ditched the truck about seven miles before; minutes later, it had begun to rain. Not enough to wash the blood out of my T-shirt or off my skin, but more than enough to make the miserable seven-mile walk even more miserable. Stella scratched at a thousand mosquito bites, and Jamie muttered about Lembas the whole way.

“Fine. Let’s get this shit show on the road,” he said as we stood in front of a well-lit, charming old green Victorian with yellow plantation shutters and scalloped trim. The shingles were weather-beaten and worn, and creepers snaked up the siding from the ground to the windows. “Mara, you should probably stay outside while I—”

“What?” I looked up. I’d been picking at a flake of dried blood between my thumb and forefinger, not paying attention.

“You’re not exactly inconspicuous,” he said. “And I’ve never tried to Jedi mind-fuck anyone like this before.” His voice wavered a little.

I arched an eyebrow. “Don’t you mean ‘mind-trick’?”

“Not when I do it,” he said.

“You’ll be fine,” I said. “Just ask for three rooms.”

But I’d never seen him so nervous. He ended up taking my hand and walking in with me, filthy and bloody though I was. Our clothes dripped water on the maroon runner that led up to the front desk. The wood had been painted a dark hunter green, and the desk itself looked like it was covered in a giant doily. A fan lazily spun above our heads, and the breeze made me shiver.

No one was actually at the desk, of course. There was a little silver bell, like an actual bell, with a card that said Ring for Service in calligraphy.

“Well?” Stella looked at Jamie.

Jamie fidgeted. “I’m not sure I can—”

“You can,” I said gently.

“No, but if I can’t, though . . . I mean, if I screw up, what if she calls the police?”

“Then you’d better not screw up.” I smiled.

“Don’t be such a dick,” Jamie said, but he was smiling too. Then he rang the bell. He looked ready to bolt at any second.

“Just a moment!” The three of us heard shuffling, and then a pair of doors swung open. A bespectacled elderly woman appeared, beaming at us. Well, not all of us.

“Oh my,” she said as she got a good look at me. “Oh, sweetheart, are you all right?”

I mustered up my most winning smile. It did not have the desired effect.

“Um, we’d like to book a room,” Jamie said quickly as the woman held her hand to her chest. Stella nudged him. “Two rooms. Three rooms,” he amended.

“Dear, what happened to you?” she asked me. “Do you need a doctor?”

“Um, no—We were just—Jamie,” I said through gritted teeth, still smiling awkwardly. “Do something.”

I could see the woman’s confusion turn to nervousness and then to fear as she looked from me to the others. “Three rooms, you say?” Her voice wobbled slightly. “You know, I think I have just the ones for you. I’ll just run and do a quick check and make sure they’re ready. It’s been a while since we’ve had anyone up in the suites. Won’t be but a minute.”

“There’s no need to check,” Jamie said suddenly. His voice wasn’t loud, but it still felt like it was the only sound in the room. “The suites will be perfect. What floor are they on?”

“Third,” the woman said, blinking at him. “Third floor, rooms 311, 312 and 313.”

“Those will be perfect.”

The woman nodded, looking a bit dazed. “Yes. Perfect. I’ll just need your names?” She took out a guest book and a pen, and looked at Jamie expectantly.

Something came over Jamie then. He lifted his chin as he said, “Barney.” I cocked my head to the side. “Rubble.”

Stella put her head in her hands.

“And this,” he said, a smile spreading across his lips as he sidled up to Stella, “is Betty.” He put his hand on her shoulder. She smiled weakly. “And this is our daughter.” Jamie placed a hand on my head. “Bamm-Bamm.” I stepped on his foot.

“Ow,” he said through a clenched smile.

The woman clapped her hands together, clearly pleased. “What a lovely family you have, Mr. Rubble.” Her green eyes twinkled as she wrote our names in the guest book. “I’ll just need a credit card and one form of ID?” she asked Jamie.

“We already gave it to you,” Jamie replied.

“Oh yes!” she said, shaking her head. “You already gave it to me. Of course you did. Forgive me. The old brain’s not what it used to be. And how long is it that you’ll be staying?”

Jamie looked at me. I shrugged.

“Indefinitely,” he said, flashing a dazzling smile at her.

The woman handed him three keys. He handed one to Stella, one to me, and pocketed the last for himself.

“One last thing, Mrs.—”

“Beaufain,” the woman answered.

“Mrs. Beaufain, are there any security cameras on the premises?”

“I’m afraid not,” she said. “We had some once, right by the entrance, but they broke, and my son’s not out here often enough to help me fix them, so I just let it go already. Life’s too short.”

“Truer words were never spoken,” Jamie said, and thanked her.

Stella and I began to head up the stairs. “I’ll catch up with you in a minute,” Jamie said, looking shaky and gray.

“You okay?”

“I’m—I don’t know. Mrs. Beaufain, is there a bathroom down—downstairs?”

She shook her head. “Just in the rooms, Mr. Rubble.” It was a testament to Jamie’s amazingness that she said it with a straight face.

Jamie nodded and turned on his heel. We watched him push open the glass door and heave into a hedge out front.

“Ugh,” Stella said. “You think he’s okay?”

“Should we wait for him?” I asked. As the words left my mouth, I felt a prickle of awareness, like I was being watched. I glanced at Stella.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing.” I peered behind us. My skin was still crawling; it felt tight, stretched over my bones. Even when Jamie appeared, looking normal and healthy under the circumstances, I couldn’t shake the sense that something was deeply wrong.

“You look weird,” Jamie said, as we headed up the stairs. “You okay?”

I shook my head but said nothing. I didn’t know what to say.

We unlocked the doors to our rooms, but congregated in one for a powwow about what just happened. Jamie and Stella did most of the talking. My tongue felt thick in my head even as my thoughts raced. I couldn’t focus on what had happened—I was thinking about what would have to happen next.

I crossed the room and looked at Noah’s bag. My fingers unzipped it before I realized what they were doing. And then my hands settled on something familiar. The textured cover, the spiral binding—I pulled out my sketchbook. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen it.

I heard Jamie say my name, but I ignored him as I opened it. My heart turned over when I saw the pictures of Noah that I’d drawn at Croyden. In every stroke of the pencil, every smudge of charcoal, there was a sense of cautious happiness, of restrained excitement. It felt like someone else had drawn those pictures. It felt like another life.

I moved through them quickly without knowing why, but then, when I turned the next page, I stopped.

I was staring at a picture drawn in negative space. The entire page was black, except for the figure at the center of it. It was unmistakably Noah, etched out in white; his messy hair, his sleeping face. His eyelids were closed, and I thought I’d drawn him sleeping until I looked at his chest.

His ribs were cracked and open. They pierced his skin and exposed his heart.

Time stretched and flowed around me. The world rushed by me, but I stayed still. I didn’t know if I was awake or dreaming until Noah appeared and took my hand.

He led me out of the room, out of the bed-and-breakfast. When he opened the door for me and I stepped through, we were in New York. We walked hand in hand down a crowded street in the middle of the day. I was in no rush—I could walk with him forever—but Noah was. He pulled me alongside him, strong and determined and not smiling. Not today.

We wove among the people, somehow not touching a single one. The trees were green, but a few still blossomed. It was spring, almost summer. A strong wind shook a few of the steadfast flowers off the branches and into our path. We ignored them.

Noah led me into Central Park, which teemed with human life. Brightly colored picnic blankets burst across the lawn, with the pale, outstretched forms of people wriggling over them like worms in fruit. We crossed the reservoir, the gleaming sun reflecting off its surface, which was dotted with boats, and then Noah reached into his bag. He pulled out the little cloth doll, my grandmother’s. The one we’d burned. He offered it to me.

I took it.

“I’m sorry,” he said, as my fingers closed around it. And then he slit my throat.

I woke up gasping. And wet. Hot water splashed around me. My clothes were on and soaked, and the water was tinged a dark, deep pink. My fingers grasped the cool cast-iron lip of the antique tub, and I felt hands tighten around my wrist.

“You’re all right,” Stella said, kneeling by the bathtub. She was also clothed, and also soaked. I had no idea what she or I was doing there.

I whipped around, or tried to. “What’s—what’s happening?”

“You were—” She measured her words. “A mess.” She looked down at my shirt, the one we’d gotten from the tourist shop. That much I remembered. “The blood—it seemed to be upsetting you, but you couldn’t—you couldn’t get to the shower.”

“What are you talking about?”

Her hair was curling from the steam and the heat, and her skin was pale. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

I closed my eyes. “We checked in. I remember that. We came up here to the room—and I found my sketchbook in Noah’s bag.”

Whatever happened next had slipped out of my mental grasp; the harder I thought about it, the hazier it became.

Stella inhaled slowly. “One second you were fine. Then you just—went limp.”

“I passed out?”

Stella shook her head. “No. Not at first. Your eyes were open but staring at nothing. And you kept trying to take off your clothes.”

That, more than anything else she’d said, scared me.

“I tried to talk to you. You were aware, that’s the thing. Your eyes followed me when I spoke. When Jamie spoke. It was like, like you were listening but you didn’t respond. We coaxed you in here, and I thought maybe, if I could get the blood off, you’d come back. So we put you into the bathtub, but then you passed out.”

“That’s . . .” I didn’t even know what to say, except, “Fucked up.”

“It’s okay,” Stella said, squeezing my hand.

No, it wasn’t. I looked down at myself. I was a mess, outside and in. “Thank you,” I said to Stella. “For everything.”

Her brows drew together. “Thank you. I know I freaked out in the truck after . . . after. But I heard what he was thinking. He would’ve murdered us. If you hadn’t . . . ”

Killed him. Butchered him.

“I wouldn’t be here right now.”

I wanted to tell her she didn’t have to thank me, but the words tangled on my tongue.

“Can I—can I have a second?” I asked hoarsely. “I can’t stand these clothes anymore.”

She braced herself against the tub and quickly stood. “Of course. Do you want me to stay outside? If you need me?”

If I needed her. If I needed her to help me bathe. We barely knew each other, but without her help, who knows how long I would’ve been out?

“I think I’m all right. But thank you. Really.” I heard the door close behind her.

I stared blankly at the beadboard wall, huddled in the bathtub. The water had started to cool. I pulled the plug with my toe and drained it, stripped off my clothes and took a real bath. Without help.

When I was done, I looked up at myself in the mirror shakily, wondering who would be staring back. But it was just me. My eyes looked wide and round in my pale face, and my collarbones were sharper than I’d remembered them. The heat and steam brought some color to my cheeks and lips, and I looked better than I had at Horizons, but still. I didn’t really look like myself. I didn’t really feel like myself. It hit me then that this was the first time I’d really been alone since Horizons.

Wrapped in a white towel, I stepped out of the tiled bathroom and into my room, the old wooden floorboards creaking under my feet. Noah’s bag, still open, sat on the lace-covered four-poster bed. My sketchbook was next to it. Closed.

I approached his bag cautiously, staring at it like it might lash out and bite. I sat down on the bed and ran my fingers over the black nylon fabric. I needed to look inside. There might be something that could help us figure out where Noah was, why he wasn’t with us, whether he was really—

I closed my eyes and bit my lip to stop myself from thinking it. I didn’t open my eyes; I just let my hands wander over his things, feeling his clothes, his laptop . . .

He would’ve taken that with him if he could have, wouldn’t he? Which meant he couldn’t have, which meant maybe he—

Stop it. Stop it. I let go of the laptop, but my fingers caught on something else as I withdrew them. It was his T-shirt, the white one with the holes in it. I filled my hands with the fabric and brought it up to my face.

I caught the barest, faintest scent of him, soap and sandalwood and smoke, and in that moment I felt not loss but need. Noah had been there for me when I’d had no one else. He’d believed me when no one else had. He could not be gone, I thought, but my throat began to hurt and my chest began to tighten, and I curled up in bed, knees to chest, head to knees, waiting for tears that never came, and sleep that did.

BEFORE

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 595