THIRTEEN
“Well, one of the Taylor sisters takes her responsibilities seriously and, in a shocking turn of events, it’s not my stepdaughter. It’s the Taylor girl I gave birth to.”
Just like that, I wanted to shut my eyes again. And maybe gouge them out. Followed by the completely sane decision to ram knitting needles into my ears. “Proof, like I needed it, that this was such a bad idea,” I muttered, glaring at Mrs. Antonia Taylor, she of the pineapple hair (in height and color) and complete lack of maternal instinct. “Shouldn’t you be screaming in agony in a lake of fire somewhere?”
“It’s Monday,” she replied, like that was an answer.
I was uneasy, no surprise, given where I was and who I was talking to, but putting that aside, I’d forgotten the worst thing about being in Hell: my telepathic link with Sinclair didn’t work here. It had been so upsetting last time, I’d shoved the unpleasantness right out of my head. If denial and repression were Olympic sports, I’d clank at every step what with all the medals.
And here it was again, here I was again, remembering the worst reason why Hell was Hell.
It was amazing how fast I’d gotten used to the impossible. I had gone three decades without Sinclair but these days he was the air I no longer breathed. Not being able to feel him inside me4 was like losing a tooth. One of the important ones, an incisor or something. When I was younger I used to dread the inevitable loose teeth and subsequent losses, mostly because my mom was a fan of the “tie one end of a string around the loose tooth, the other around a door handle, then slam the door” school of thought. (Don’t judge; it was surprisingly painless. Didn’t make the whole ordeal any less stressful, though.) Once the slackass tooth was gone, I’d constantly tongue the hole where it used to be, unable to stop prodding the spot even though it felt weird. Now I kept reaching for that mental link, knowing it was gone but unable to leave it alone. Sinclair was like a tooth in my brain, only now he had been yanked like a cavity. Wait, cavities aren’t yanked. And it isn’t one of my better metaphors, either, so insult to injury.
“See, Antonia?” Laura had met her biological mother around the time she met me, and wasn’t comfortable calling her Mom. She’d also rejected my many helpful suggestions (Jerkass, Homewrecker, Bilbo Bag, Knockoff, Fake Tan, Fake Boobs) and finally settled on Antonia, spoken politely with a dash of warmth. “We’re already making progress.”
“We are?”
Laura had appeared out of the ether (more on that in a minute) and walked up to slide an arm around the Ant’s waist. The Ant looked startled, then almost-but-not-quite relaxed. See above, no maternal instinct. Also, I wasn’t sure the Ant understood unfeigned affection. “I knew you were wrong when you said Betsy was a sociopath with tacky highlights and no sense of social responsibility.”
“Tacky?” I yelped. Then: “Oh, are you actually lecturing me on social responsibility, you odious bitch? You told me you were glad you were dead when I told you about Obama!” Ugh, that reminded me of how Jessica’s awful dead parents had reacted, shades of “I can’t believe we’re dead and missing this!” I had no right, ever, to the moral high ground, which was another reason Hell was awful. I was the best of a bad lot around here.
Except for Laura, of course, who worked at being good, frequently failed, and always came right back to dig in again. Even though it seemed to me that these days she valued good mostly as a terrific way to spite Satan, she still worked at it. I admired the tenacity, while owning the fact that I wasn’t up to it.
“Let’s not fight,” Laura interjected, which was ironic because she wasn’t fighting at all. Now that she’d gotten what she wanted (she’d never learned to be careful what you wish for, a tiresome lecture for another time), namely, my presence in the pit, she had perked up. Way up; I hadn’t seen her looking so carefree in more than a year, and I ignored the stab of guilt that brought. “Let’s just get to work.”
“How?” That wasn’t my usual dumbassery. I genuinely had no idea how we would make anything happen. We were standing in a big bunch of nothing. Not fog, not darkness, just . . . void. I couldn’t feel anything under my feet, but I was standing. I was taller than the Ant in Hell, as I had been in life, but again, we weren’t standing on anything. To add to the illogic, the Ant didn’t even have a body anymore! She was here spiritually, but Laura and I were here in soul and body. We were in the middle of a blank slate and I was in no mood for metaphors, even though the metaphoric slate was also a literal slate. (And when had I become so obsessed with metaphors?) What were the rules?
Worse, I had a good idea about why the place was blank, why it was just a big old bunch of nothin’, which was making me uneasy as shit.
“Yes, well.” The Ant let loose with a pointed cough. “Good point, Laura. Enough time has been wasted.” This with a typically unsubtle glare at me. I shrugged it off as I’d been doing since the Ant first tsunami’d into my life when I was a teenager. “So. Where do you want to start?”
I stared at them, then at the nothing, and managed not to scream, “How the fuck should I know?” into their expectant faces.
“I—I don’t—what? I don’t know. Maybe . . . maybe with the ones who are leaving? Or the ones who haven’t left? Or—where is everyone? Aren’t there supposed to be a whole bunch of souls down here? Wait, not ‘down here’ since we’re not underground, it’s not Dante’s Inferno or anything. I—” I cut myself off before I could finish with “I got nothin’,” cringing at how idiotic I sounded.
“They’re all here,” the Ant replied, answering one of my questions at random, “all the time. Hell has layers. Just because you can’t see everyone doesn’t mean they aren’t here.”
Layers made sense. It was a concept I could grasp pretty easily and I was pretty sure Hell was designed with that exact thing in mind. On one of my trips (“one of”—argh, cue drawn-out groan) to Hell I’d seen all kinds of souls being punished.
An aside, not to come off as a creepy voyeur (like there was any other kind), but getting a glimpse of Anne Boleyn cutting off Henry VIII’s head while he begged her forgiveness for knocking her up with Queen Elizabeth I was just too good. I wanted to linger and say, “Oh, so we’ve learned a little more about biology in the last five hundred years, you fat fuck? That’s right, it’s the sperm that dictates a prince or a princess, and the sperm comes from the guy! Meaning you! I know you don’t know who I am! Your hair is stupid! Hey, Anne, how about you pull another Red Queen and off with his head again?” Luckily I had been a model of restraint and just walked on without commenting.
My point, I just now remembered, was that on that particular trip, Hell was like a hive. The biggest, most complex, and fucked-up hive I’d ever seen. Each little cell contained someone’s personal Hell and they stacked up so high and so wide and the events in the cells just went on and on . . . boggling, the whole thing. Just trying to ponder everything going on was enough to make anyone’s head pound. Glimpses were all I got, and all I wanted. On that particular trip, anyway.
On another trip, Hell was a waiting room with ready-to-burn-out blinking fluorescent lighting, and the only thing to read was years-out-of-date magazines. Unpleasant, sure, but again—a concept I could grasp, context I was familiar with.
So maybe that was the key. Maybe the trick was to set it up however we want, in the best way we can think of, using relatable symbolism to help our (okay, my) tiny minds grasp ungraspable concepts.
Okay. Well. I’d never tried to run Hell, but I’d been fired more than once, and I’d had to take over more than once from someone who’d been fired. And the first thing I always did in a new job was . . .
“How did Satan do it?”
. . . figure out what my predecessor did, then refine. “I don’t suppose she left us lists. Or suggestions for organization. You know, like how when you’re in a new job, the person you replaced left contact info and lots of memos explaining day-to-day ops. Anything like that around?”
“At last, intelligent observations,” the Ant muttered, as if I didn’t have super vamp hearing and wasn’t standing four feet away. “I knew if I waited through enough years you were bound to—”
“Oh, shut up. Look, you were the old boss’s secretary or whatever—”
“Yes, or whatever,” came the dry reply.
“—so you can take us through her routines and kind of go over the day-to-day running of Hell, right? That’s why you got right up in my face the second I showed up.”
“There’s no place I would rather be less than right up in your face,” she sniffed, “and you know perfectly well why I was the first one to show.” Ugh, so true. Last time I was here, everyone I thought of eventually showed up, called to me by the force of my bitching. “I’ve got very little interest in helping you,” she added, all disdainful and pissy, but the fidgeting gave her away. In Hell, as in life, she was inappropriately dressed a good decade younger than her age: too-tight navy blue miniskirt, polyester blouse in an eye-watering floral print (yellow roses against an orangey-red background or, as I like to call it, ow, my brain), black wedge pumps (blech, wedges, they’re ugly and they always remind me of the terrible disco era which never should have been allowed to happen), de rigueur black stockings. Bright blond hair piled high, too much green eyeliner and shadow, lipstick just a little too orange and bright to be flattering. If it had been anyone else, I would have assumed she was forced to dress like that as penance for her many sins in her wicked life, but it wasn’t anyone else and I knew she thought she looked perfect.
But she still couldn’t keep her hands still. When she got nervous or edgy, she’d run her hands all over her clothes and hair, sort of patting with fluttering fingers to make sure everything was in place. Which would be understandable if she did it once or twice. But those hands were constantly moving. It was dizzying.
“What’s got you so—” I began, deeply suspicious, when my phone buzzed against my hip.
Wait, what?
I plucked it out and stared. A text from the vampire king: I trust all is well. Return at once if you require assistance. Classic Sink Lair. I ran it through my translator and got, I’m sure you’re seconds away from an epic screwup so I’m ready to haul your delectable ass out of the fire and won’t tease you about it later except I probably will for a little while and I lurrrrrv you sooo much!
Awww. What a sweetie.
The implications took a few seconds to hit, but when they did: “Whoa.” I had been slow to embrace texting. Not to go on an old-lady rant or anything (if you’re over thirty, thirty is the new twenty; if you’re under, thirty is the new ninety), but texting was pretty much destroying civilization. As with Jessica’s bed, I’d been gradually sucked in (I only started hauling a cell phone around in the last three years) and even now, I sent maybe five texts a month, and those along the lines of How can we be out of ice AGAIN? What is wrong with all of us?
But my telepathic link with Sinclair didn’t work in Hell. Which he knew, and had handled with his usual pragmatism.
“Whoa,” I said again, not at my creative best. “I can get texts in Hell? AT&T, I have once again underestimated your vast scope and reach.”
“Yes, the antitrust laws were put in place for a reason,” the Ant replied. “Monopolies aren’t good. Unless you’re running Hell,” she added quickly in response to my dumbfounded expression. “Then they’re fine.”
“No, I just—I had no idea you knew what antitrust laws were.” I myself was a little vague on the subject. Something about making companies play fair, right? Hell didn’t need antitrust anything. Hell didn’t have to compete with any other entity.
“I had an existence outside of this,” she snapped back, gesturing vaguely at all the nothing.
“Yeah, I know the words to that song,” I muttered in reply. “I pretty much wrote that song.” But back to more important things: what to text back. A smiley face? A winking smiley face? Emoticons were a bit lacking when you factored Hell into the equation. I settled for All’s well so far. I would not abbreviate. I would not OMG or LOL, no matter how TSTL I was. You was never u. Are was never r. Nevernevernever. “Okaaaaay. That’s done. Also, how the hell was that even possible?”
Identical shrugs. Great. The so-called experts didn’t know, either. Was it how Hell interpreted my bond with Sinclair? Was it like the shoes that didn’t exist—it was a tool that helped me figure out the un-figure-out-able? Or did it simply mean that Hell had AT&T towers? Oh, my, yes, we were the perfect bunch to move in and take over. Nothing could go wrong. It made me think of a lost friend, Cathie, who’d had that same thought shortly before being murdered in her driveway and, the minute she figured out what had happened to her, haunted me until I found her killer.
“Never mind,” I said, trying for comforting and managing to be just dismissive. “We’ll figure it out later. Or we never will.”
Laura was nodding. “Yes. I agree. It’s probably that one.”
“Um. Which one?”
“I’m not saying,” she replied with a stubborn shake of her head. “You’ll get even more irritated.”
The Ant made a rude noise and, much as it pained me, she was corrected in her snorting. “I’d love to take offense and debate that, but when you’re right you’re right.” I sighed. “So. Now what?”
“Now you give me a hug, you silly bitch,” said the dead woman behind me. I turned, surprised, and saw a ghost I’d thought was gone forever. Unlike every other surprise in Hell, this one was welcome.