Sunday. It had to be Sunday. Liv would tell herself later that, given her slumberous fog, she could be forgiven for mistaking the day as one from the past two years: the knocking sounds (Doug rapping at the window), rustling sounds (Doug collecting John’s feces in a bag), and thumping sounds (Doug raiding the kitchen for Pop-Tarts). Liv threw an arm over her eyes, prepared her usual reply of Can’t you be late for once?
What was different now was that Doug was inside her room. He was touching her. She must have slept too deeply, and he’d decided to jostle her awake. She swatted at him, then a complete recollection of A landed all at once. The precise space the skinner took on the mattress, its weight in her arms, the reedy sound of its breathing. She knew all of this despite A’s absence. She heard Doug’s grunt of effort, too quiet to be trusted.
The show. The crowd. The rage. It was Saturday, not Sunday. She squinted. Doug was stepping away from the bed. What was happening? He balanced A upright while he wound the tarp around it. He lifted its wrapped body into both arms, and it seemed by accident that he caught Liv’s eye as he turned to leave.
She blinked up at him, confused, dimly alarmed, and feeling a great ache in her empty arms. Doug, in reply, did the least expected thing. He didn’t snarl in disgust of how she’d slept alongside it. He didn’t whip Maquahuitl from behind his back. What he did was smile, a smile as gentle as the hands he’d used to remove A.
“A’s light.” He chuckled softly. “Light as a ghost.”
Liv wiped a clump of tangled hair from what felt like a puffy face. She hoisted herself to an elbow. She looked around. The September dawn produced a paltry, sea-green silt that made her room look as if it had been transplanted to the woods out back. Her survey ended on the murky, conjoined form of Doug and A. She’d hoped a night of meditation would calm Doug, and it seemed to have done that.
She scanned the floor and found Mist swaddled in a sweater. The weapon was too far to reach—and what would she do with it if she had it? Perhaps it was some enzyme that had seeped from A’s flesh, but she was so, so, so tired. Last night, all she’d wanted was to turn over A to the authorities. This morning, though, she felt in her exhaustion a relinquishing of those ideals, all so burdensome.
“You said it wasn’t justice,” she whispered. “To…”
“To kill it,” he finished.
“But maybe…” She swallowed, her throat tight and feverish, and those prophetic words of her father wheezed out one last time: “You know what to do.”
“Don’t worry,” Doug whispered. “I’ll take care of it.”
Liv’s body doubled in weight: guilt, grief, acceptance. Last night Doug had confessed that A was the only thing of value he had left, but now he seemed willing to let that thing go. And in doing so, he would save Liv’s life—her potential, her future, everything for which her mom had worked so hard for so long. All Liv had to do to accept this gift was to give in to the weariness, just this once. Not move. Not dispute. Not do anything.
Doug picked his way across the messy floor. Liv opened her mouth but didn’t make a sound. Her mother would hear. Or Liv herself would hear, and the sound would coerce her into making a second sound, then a third, and wasn’t all of it, here at the end, pointless self-destruction? There was a great, unanticipated relief in seeing A slip from her responsibility, a relief she’d felt once before, when her father jumped an electric fence. Letting things go hurt. Keeping them around could hurt even more.
Doug paused at the door and glanced over the top of A’s head.
“I’ll see you soon,” he whispered. “I promise.”
Liv was nodding. She knew it by the taste of salt; her nodding had shaken free tears, hopefully the last she’d taste for a while. Doug disintegrated into the hallway without Liv having said a single word to A, not even the simple shushes she’d made hours earlier: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
She lay down and pressed a pillow over her face, still ripe with A’s odor, and told herself, over and over, that this was the only way all of this could ever realistically end. Anything else—rescuing her father’s name, discovering the significance of Carbajal—had been a fantasy of heroism that she, no hero, had no hope of pulling off. If she couldn’t be the steadfast soldier her father had trained her to be, then it was a lucky thing that Doug could.