I’ve been gone for more than a day, I discover next. The whole town has been searching for me, and the police brought Xand in for questioning; it’s all so dreadfully familiar. How perfect it is, how flawless, this script that we all keep acting out, without ever guessing that that’s what we’re doing. The police with their suspicions, the doctors with their useless tests, the parents weeping by their children’s graves, and now me as well: we say the words those creatures have slipped into our mouths.
“I have no idea,” I say. “The last thing I remember, I went for a walk by the gorge, and—I must have lost consciousness somehow. I came to lying by a blackberry bush.” I say it, knowing that there are no other possible lines for me, and knowing that they—whoever and whatever they are—have put me in this position, where for the very first time in my life I can’t just tell the truth.
I assume they’re perfectly aware of that. I assume that they’ve quite knowingly manipulated me, by leaving me in possession of a truth that anyone would mistake for insanity.
I spend a day and a night in the hospital, being tested for everything the doctors can come up with: epilepsy, date-rape drugs, brain tumors. The teeth marks on my calf excite concern, and I’m informed that I’ll have to receive a series of shots for rabies, just in case. The first injection is horribly painful, but I find I don’t care in the slightest.
I care that those creatures—who really can’t be precisely human, considering what they can do—have effectively bullied me into lying to my own family, simply because of how distraught and frightened my parents would be if I told them what actually happened. As I float on my back in the clanging tube of the MRI, that’s what I’m thinking: that those creatures have compelled me to behave in ways I despise. I have a low tolerance for anyone trying to control me, much less succeeding.
I’m thinking of something Josh told me: that Ksenia was raped repeatedly, when she was only eleven years old, by the biological son of the couple who fostered her just before the Delbos. That those earlier parents gave up their plan to adopt her and sent her away again, hoping to keep what had happened a secret, hoping to protect their boy from facing any consequences. She never even told her social worker, Josh said; she’d never told anyone but him, because she hadn’t actually said no, not out loud, and because she hated herself for choking on her own silence. Now, again, her right to make her own choices has been ripped away from her, I’m sure of it. I saw the despair on her face, and I know she can’t just leave that awful nowhere.
I’m thinking of her, and myself, and Olivia, and my anger hums along with the machinery. I’m also thinking that if those creatures could have stopped me from leaving with physical force, they probably would have done so; instead they relied on psychology, on blasting me with guilt and grief and horror to trick me into staying. I gave way to fear, but possibly, if I’d just fought back, I might have caused some real trouble for them. By the time I leave the hospital, a single thought blots out the whole of my mind.
I will not let this vileness stand.
Quite uncharacteristically, my parents want to keep me home for a few days; all my efforts to shelter them clearly aren’t helping, because they watch me with mournful anxiety. I have to insist on going back to school, but when I get there I find I don’t have much to say to anyone, and after a few halting efforts at conversation most of my friends seem to be avoiding me as well. I suppose I seem changed; I suppose, even if I look just the same as ever, people can barely recognize me.
Everyone but Xand, when he finds me alone on a bench. He stands there, too nervous to try to sit, light wobbling on the tears that fill his eyes. “I know I’m not supposed to talk to you yet, Lexi. But can I just say I’m worried? I’m really worried. Did—if somebody hurt you, you know you can tell me, right? I—no pressure. I heard you before, really. Just let me know if I can help?”
Once again he’s the only one making any effort at all, and there’s a shattered sweetness to his voice. If I weren’t so changed by what I’ve been through, I might melt completely. As things are, though, I get up and hold him, and tell him I appreciate it, really. And yet the whole time I feel infinitely far away, and Ksenia’s kiss is closer to me than Xand’s arms.
I have to give him credit, though: he still recognizes me, if imperfectly, even now that I’m on the other side of the veil.
When I’m at home I feel a compulsion to check my reflection over and over again, just making sure that I can still recognize the girl in the mirror. All of five-foot-two, curvy and compact, with glowing brown skin, and natural hair worn in long twists, and uptilted, jet-black almond eyes; she’s pretty and sweet-looking, with a dangerous intelligence in her gaze, but I feel a certain detachment from her that I’ve never experienced before.
Once you’ve been to nowhere, I discover, a trace of it clings to you, and it fundamentally alters who you are. At night, in the silence, I can still hear the shimmer of those bells.
On the third day I get in my car after school, and drive through our bland, placid streets, under our cresting trees, up Grand and as far as the intersection where I watched Josh cross in front of me. Rounding that corner is almost beyond my capabilities, and my hands shake on the wheel; they try to jerk back against my will when I start to turn. But I’m not going to be bullied again, not by the creatures who stole my friends, and not by my own fear, either.
I think I know what I’ll find, but I have to know for certain; I have to take it in, accept its reality with my own eyes.
Two miles farther and I’m looking at 32 Whistler Drive.
It has the same creamy yellow siding as ever, the same magnolia tree, a few blooming azaleas in an almost exaggerated shade of pink; those shrubs weren’t in bloom, not in Josh’s better world. And, just as I almost knew would be the case, the house’s main section is only a single story high, with its split-level wing stepping downward on the left. In other words, that whole addition that I saw, that whole second story, was—what? An artifact of nowhere. Not of this world, in any case.
I pull up just in front and stare at the house, absorbing it as it is now, and remembering it as it was when Joshua led me to its door. That upper floor, those stairs Josh and Ksenia couldn’t climb—they must have some kind of significance that I can’t quite put my finger on.
Emma Delbo comes around the corner of the house, a pair of pruning shears poised wide open in both hands as if she were contemplating using them to commit a murder. I haven’t seen her—since everything, as Josh would say, since the funeral for that Ksenia I’m now convinced was as fake as a string of glass pearls—and I’m shocked at how aged Emma is, how her face is crumpled with bitterness and her body slumps forward. Of course the Delbos got in trouble—they weren’t really supposed to go off and leave their foster kids unsupervised, not even if Ksenia was just a breath shy of eighteen at the time. And coming home to find one of their kids dead, the other gone: that came as a crushing shock to them, since another feature of the oddness then was that not one person had thought to tell them what was going on.
Now that I think of it, I’d bet those creatures arranged it that way; I’d bet they somehow reached into our thoughts, bent and tweaked them out of shape, and hid the ones that said, Mitch and Emma need to know about this.
Emma’s curls are still light brown, but even from here I can see that her roots are three inches of pure gray. The bags under her eyes are slate blue and so puffed that she seems to peer over them with difficulty, and with suspicion.
She looks at me and doesn’t smile, though we once saw each other fairly often.
I almost drive off, but it feels too callous. She’s a husk, an emptied thing, and even if I can’t come out and say what I know, maybe I can still find some way to comfort her.
I turn off the engine and climb out, then walk across the wavering lawn, its grass the electric green of new spring growth. “Hi, Mrs. Delbo. How are you?”
The look she gives me is utterly hostile, in a slow, oozing kind of way. “Alexandra. You must have some reason for coming around again? You wouldn’t have bothered just to see how I’m doing, now that my son is dead.”
I nearly snap at her that she’s hardly the only one who’s grieved over Josh and Ksenia, but she’s too pitiable for that. “I—had a dream, Mrs. Delbo. It might sound strange, but I’m nearly certain that Josh is still alive. I thought I should let you know.”
“I dream about Joshua every night.” She practically snarls it, and I make a note to stay well out of range of those garden shears. “Has that brought him back?”
I’m sorry for her, but anger is also rising inside me, and not on my own behalf. Because there’s one terrible fact of the case: if the Delbos had decided to adopt Ksenia as well as Josh, then the two of them never would have been so desperate, never would have feared the separation that was coming. Josh and I never would have said the things we said to each other, and maybe Josh wouldn’t have gotten into whatever bizarre kind of trouble he’s in right now. If the Delbos had only been able to open their hearts, just a bit more, to my brittle, frost-flower friend, then maybe all this suffering could have been avoided.
All right, it’s only a maybe. But the possibility is with us, along with those shaking azaleas, that single-story yellow house.
“I didn’t say I could bring him back,” I tell her. “But I thought—maybe you’d be glad to know that not everyone has given up hope.”
“If anyone’s dreams were going to bring Josh back, mine would,” she pursues resentfully. Emma Delbo was never my favorite person, but I really can’t remember her behaving like this, with such self-absorption, such a tainted heart. “That girl killed him out of envy, because of how dearly we loved him.”
I’ve heard more than I can stand, no matter how soul sick she is. “What Josh said in my dream was that you didn’t love him. He said if anyone couldn’t love Ksenia too, then it didn’t count.”
She gapes at me with her tired green eyes and her shears veer up to point straight at me. I take a step backward, toward my car.
“No one could have loved that girl,” she says. “It wasn’t possible. What Josh thought he felt for her—that just showed how badly he needed our help. Imagining he was in love with that cold, ruthless, cunning little—”
“I loved her,” I interrupt. “I’d say that proves it could be done. And she never hurt anyone, especially not him. Mrs. Delbo, Ksenia was a beautiful, caring person; if you couldn’t see it, then that’s on you, not her.”
And I turn to go home, because no matter how disturbing, how dangerous Josh and Ksenia’s new nowhere is, I’d actually rather be there than here, talking to this woman who can’t seem to muster the smallest compassion for a girl she once called her daughter.
I notice the strangest sensation as I slide back into the car—as if something silky, crisp, and barely there were clinging to my leg.