Kitty
I can’t say it’s the first time I’ve thought of finding a dead person for myself. I can’t say it’s the first time I’ve tried by myself. There are so many people I want to find, yet all I can do is find them for others.
I stand in front of the mirror in my bedroom. Sam’s at school. He went by himself this morning, and I let him. It didn’t feel like quite such a big deal, letting him walk in. I don’t think anything will feel like such a big deal anymore. He tiptoed around me this morning as I lay in bed wishing everything would just end. Wishing I could not be.
Wishing it had been me instead.
My eyes are puffy and red-rimmed, my nose swollen with tears, and I slap the glass with both hands, leaning in and glaring at my own face. I must have drawn the symbols twenty times. I can’t seem to pull myself into the grey place.
I just want to see him. I want to see Mum and Nan, even my stepdad. But I can’t call myself in. I need someone else.
* * *
The world feels devoid of colour. I thought I could handle death through losing my parents, through my magic. But this…how does it get harder?
Sam and I are practically living at Peter’s. Anytime we’re not at work or school, we’re slipping into his house—his and Matt’s, let it be his and Matt’s again, give him back—and putting things into the dishwasher or cooking for Peter.
Peter fluctuates between blank immobility and frantic motion, manic smiles and rushing around like a blue-arsed fly, cleaning and telling us all about the family members who’re coming over from Poland or up from Southampton for the funeral.
I feel like I’m walking through treacle. Every movement feels impossible. My arms weigh a tonne.
“Did you know?” Peter asks me one morning. I’ve come straight from a night shift. He’s already up. Has he even gone to bed?
“Did I know?” I frown, foggy with grief and sleep deprivation.
“That he was gay,” Peter says. He puts his mug on the counter and presses one hand over his mouth, staring down at the white knuckles of the other.
I nod.
He swallows hard enough for me to hear. Tears well up in his eyes and somewhere, distantly, some instinct is telling me that’s good. He’s processing his emotions. “Did he think I wouldn’t accept him?” he asks, his voice plaintive. “Is that why he lied? He felt like he had to?”
I shake my head. “He didn’t want to disappoint you,” I whisper. My voice can’t come through the band clamped around my chest.
Peter almost howls in pain, bending over the counter and sobbing. My face feels cold, and I raise one hand to touch my cheek. It’s wet. “I didn’t tell him enough.” He gasps. “I didn’t tell him how much he meant. I didn’t let him know…he could have done anything. There is nothing he could have done that would have disappointed me, nothing. He was my everything. I loved him so much, Kitty, I loved him.”
I pull him into a hug and stare at the colourless world over his shoulder.
* * *
My eyes are still swollen and puffy when I get home and go through the motions of dinner and bedtime with Sam. He hugs me extra tight that night, and I cling back to him, feeling his little body shudder with grief through his fluffy pyjamas. “You okay?” I ask, my voice barely strong enough to raise above a whisper.
He nods. “I miss Matt.” His chin wobbles, and more tears trickle down his cheeks. He’s still so little.
I sit up a bit longer after he’s gone to bed, staring out over town with a cup of decaf and a blanket draped over me as I lean on the windowsill. And that’s when the call comes, the pull under my ribs.
I let my head drop against the window and grit my teeth to hold back a scream. This isn’t fair at all. Why should anyone else get relief from their pain when I can’t even help myself with my own?
In the end, it’s more the thought of seeing Mum that drives me to my feet and over to the mirror. Not the pull that has becoming almost unbearable. What’s one more unbearable thing, after all?
I sigh and watch my own face in the mirror disappear, leaving an older woman’s face to take its place. She gasps as she steps back, but I can barely raise the energy to be sympathetic. “Hi, I’m Kitty,” I say, my affect flat. “I’ve got the power to swap lives, who are you wanting to bring back?”
She’s doomed to disappointment. I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember anything about her; the moment she tells me anything, it’s gone from my memory. The person she’s looking for has gone, passed on to whatever comes after this. I do remember her disappointment. The emptiness in her eyes that’s a reflection of my own.
When she’s gone and Mum appears, I start crying and fall into her arms. She knows. Of course she knows, she’s here. We fall to the floor, the mist-rolled ground that’s somehow solid and not there all at the same time. I bury my face in her shoulder and cry like a little girl who’s lost nearly everyone important in the world. For a moment, even the important things that I do still have, even Sam and Peter and all my friends in town, they don’t matter as much as everything that’s gone from me.
At last, I’ve cried myself dry. I always think, this time, I’ve cried all the tears I can possibly cry; there can’t be any tears in my future. I’m always wrong. There are always more tears in there somewhere. I sit back and wipe my face.
“I’m sorry, darling,” she says, brushing the hair back from my face. I smile a little. Her hand on my cheek reminds me of my own hand on Sam’s cheek, and my life seems a bit less empty.
“Is he here?” I ask. I don’t know if I hope he is or not. I want him to be at peace and move on, but selfishly, I also want to see him again.
She shakes her head. “Honestly, I thought I’d managed to send him back out,” she says and laughs.
I frown. “What do you mean? I didn’t think you could do that from here.”
She bites her lip and glances at me, a little shifty. “Yeah, I guess I can’t.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “What did you try?”
“You know that girl you brought back, the hit-and-run girl?”
“Yeah, Talia.”
She blinks and looks taken aback. “Oh. Well, Matt turned up here that same night.”
“Yeah,” I say, drawing it out. I’ve got a rising sense of foreboding, and I don’t want to listen to it.
“Well, Matt died in a car accident too, so I thought it might work if I swapped them right as you were sending that girl back.”
“Mum!”
“I’m sorry, love, I thought it had worked. I had to act quickly, he turned up, and then you took Talia away. I should have prepared for this in advance, but—”
“You were going to swap his life for some other girl, not get permission from either of them?” The horror and disgust hurts right down to my core. “You can’t do that, Mum.”
She frowns a little. “But it still keeps the balance, one life for another. They’re a similar age. The universe would be fine with it.”
“Well, I’m not bloody fine with it!” I cry. “I can’t believe you think that’s okay. They have to be willing, to know what they’re getting into.”
“Now, Kitty—”
“How could you even think of this?”
“I was trying to fix things for you, Kitty, because I know Matt’s your best friend.”
“That doesn’t matter, I…” I can’t get the words right in my mouth, I can’t breathe with how wrong it feels down in the magic of me. For the first time in my life, I don’t want to be with my mum.
And just like that, I’m not. I’m sitting on my bum on the cold floor of my bathroom, with nothing but a bad taste in my mouth and that bottomless well of tears full again, ready to get back to work.