To Rebecca, leaning against the dining room table with one hand on the back of a cracked wooden chair and the other in her hair, it felt horribly like waking up. As though the last five years—the whales and cormorants, the Stockade and Jess’s windmill shed, Sock Puppet and the sea mist on the sweetly rolling Strait—had been not just sleep, but self-protective coma. Now everyone’s eyes had come open at once, and here was the world just as they’d left it the day the Whistler came to Halfmoon House.
She couldn’t make herself join in, yet. Partly, she couldn’t quite believe what was happening. That is, she couldn’t believe the efficiency of it all. Jess had dumped all the knives out of the woodblock onto the counter, then ducked into the garage just long enough to grab a set of long-handled garden implements Rebecca had never seen before and drop them on the kitchen floor. Next, from under the pans in the back of the cabinet under the sink, Jess withdrew a stack of already cut two-by-fours. She took those straight to the nearest window with a hammer in her fist and nails in her mouth.
Meanwhile, Joel—who hadn’t fled, after all, or who’d fled and come back trailing a stumbling, gaunt-faced Latina with a motionless mouth and screaming black eyes that suggested she knew exactly what all this was about—sat at the far end of the table, away from the glass sliding door to the backyard, cleaning and loading his revolver. On his face was some sort of approximation of his old smile, the first Rebecca had seen in years, like fire reflected in metal.
Kaylene, insanely, had donned the Whistler’s hat and produced an aluminum bat from somewhere, and now was taking practice swings hard enough to behead the couch in the middle of the living room. Jess had glanced her way long enough to note the hat and nod approval.
Benny was at the stove monitoring the oil he’d set bubbling in all three saucepans.
For a collective last meal? Pre-apocalypse stir-fry? Last-ditch Peace Summit banquet? Had all of them forgotten just what it was that was coming?
Had there been meetings she’d somehow missed? Of the Go Down Swinging (and Also Raking and Hoeing) Club, Far Northwest Chapter?
Finally, Rebecca couldn’t take standing still anymore, so she moved to the kettle to bring the Latina some tea. Benny leaned away from her as she approached. Now that she thought of it, since the second Joel had burst through the front door with the Latina and his news—which had happened scant minutes after Rebecca had reeled away from her encounter with the woman who’d knocked at that same front door and shown her the Whistler’s photograph—everyone in the Stockade had been haloing around her, surrounding but not demanding anything from or even including her. Keeping their distance.
Because I’m the only one who has actually killed somebody, she thought, and even as she thought it, she remembered it wasn’t true. Jess had killed her own daughter, for God’s sake.
Which might or might not have been necessary. Or right. In the same way—and with even more devastating consequences—that Rebecca’s murder of Sophie might or might not have been necessary or right. At least that murder probably qualified as collateral damage. To anyone who was keeping a ledger.
Wincing at the spatters of oil leaping from the saucepans to her arm, Rebecca dropped a spoonful of jasmine pearls into Jess’s Frank Robinson Day Orioles mug, added steaming water from the kettle, and took a second to watch the pearls unfold into the heat like blossoms into light. Then—avoiding Kaylene, who’d swept past to get a bread knife she seemed to think might work as some kind of bat-bayonet—she brought the mug to the table. The new woman didn’t look up until Rebecca sat down.
She was younger than Rebecca had first supposed. Not even thirty, most likely. Possibly no older than Rebecca and Kaylene. Her skin stretched threadbare across her cheekbones, almost transparent despite its duskiness. Her lips looked drained not just of color but texture, worn completely smooth like runoff grooves at the edge of a record. And then there were her eyes. Those silent, screaming black eyes …
Understanding broke over Rebecca the way it always had, in a single burst. She hadn’t experienced a flash like this in years—God, she really had been asleep—and now she only prayed this one had come in time to save them all.
In one motion, as the woman reached mechanically for the mug of tea, Rebecca seized her wrist, shoved the black sleeve of her sweater up past her elbow, and yanked her whole, bare forearm into the sunlight still spilling through the unboarded half of the sliding door.
The woman shrieked, as Rebecca had feared and expected. She tried just once to yank her arm free, stopped, and stared down at her own skin. It wasn’t steaming or even reddening except where Rebecca clutched it. Not even around the puncture marks dotting the crook of the elbow, which Rebecca had not expected. They gaped, crusty and unscabbed, weirdly wet. Less like track marks than open mouths.
Silently, softly, the woman started to weep.
“I’m sorry,” Rebecca murmured, still holding the woman’s arm but gently, now. She’d been all geared up for an unmasking, a confrontation. Now she felt like she was stroking a dying cat, which was an absurd and incoherent association on all counts. Nothing about this woman was catlike, in either the cuddly or menacing sense. She wasn’t dying. And she clearly wasn’t burning in discomfort where the sun kissed her, either.
Not much, anyway. Not the way the monsters seemed to.
More than anything, the woman seemed embarrassed or ashamed. She also looked less afraid than Rebecca would have been under the same circumstances. Whatever those were. What circumstances are we all imagining we’ve got, here? Assuming Joel and I are even right about that woman … how had she even found this place? And why would she have bothered?
“I really am sorry,” she said again. “We’re all just … What’s your name?” She released the woman’s arm.
Instantly, the newcomer’s hand leapt to the sleeve of her shirt, but she didn’t tug it down. She’d slid forward in her chair, staring down at—or into—the holes in her elbow. Softly, then with increasing force, she pressed her fingers into the blue veins around the holes until little bubbles of blood surfaced in those open mouths.
The sight was as mesmerizing and also just plain wrong as anything Rebecca had ever seen. She felt as though she were watching film of a mother bird feeding chicks, except backward. So that the mother was extracting.
“Stop,” Rebecca snapped, grabbing for the woman’s wrist again to make her.
“Emilia,” the woman whispered. She was no longer crying. She pressed down harder, squeezing more blood out of herself. “My name is Emilia.” She sounded like she was reminding herself.
All Rebecca knew for certain was that she wanted to yank Emilia out of her chair and fold her into an embrace. Simultaneously, she wanted to recoil as far from her as she could get. She waited for her vaunted intuition to tell her what to do, and in its absence settled for a pathetic half-measure and echoed the woman’s name. Reinforced it.
“Emilia,” she said, and felt more than saw Jess start to move behind her. Rebecca stood up in her path.
Jess barely even hitched her step, just altered course to flow around Rebecca again. Rebecca blocked her. The question no one seemed to be asking leapt to Rebecca’s lips. She almost didn’t voice it, precisely because no one else had. The possibilities it suggested seemed too terrible even for this appalling morning. But someone had to say it.
“Jess. Where’s Trudi?”
At least Jess stopped moving. But she wouldn’t meet Rebecca’s eyes, and all she offered was a shake of her head.
“You don’t know? Are you kidding? You’re just leaving her and Eddie out—”
“She’s fine. He’s fine.”
“What? When did—”
“We … got a note.”
“What? From her?”
“Also, I texted. She practically texted back before I hit Send.” Finally, Jess glanced up. To Rebecca’s astonishment, she was almost smiling.
Reflexively, Rebecca smiled back. Almost. “Of course she did. That’s how Trudi rolls. She’s got Eddie? She found him?”
“She found him. I didn’t ask how. I didn’t ask where. I didn’t even know she’d left her room.”
“Well, I’m asking where. How the hell did—”
“No idea. But I told her to stay away. To keep Eddie hidden and away until we say it’s okay to come back.”
“What did she say to that?”
“A lot of ds.”
Jess’s smile had long since drained away. No longer meeting Rebecca’s eyes, she started again toward the tackle box full of screws and nails at the edge of the counter.
“Ds,” Rebecca murmured.
“Fuck if I know.”
Harder than she meant to—and she meant to do it hard—Rebecca grabbed Jess by the shoulders and spun her around. For a second, the two of them swayed in place and clutched each other, as though clinging to the sides of a collapsing rope bridge. It really did seem as if the whole Stockade were swinging beneath them, giving way as everyone here scrambled or leapt for their lives. Except Emilia. She was still staring down at the holes in her arm as though into the abyss.
“Jess,” Rebecca said, and at long last, there it was again. A flicker of her old calm and clarity. Where have you been, Rebecca-I-used-to-be? I need you now. Come home …
“Rebecca, let go. They could be here any second. We’ve got to—”
“What? We’ve got to what, Jess?” She didn’t release her grip but loosened it. Turned it into an awkward caress. “What, exactly, do you think you need to do? Or can do?”
With a ferocious shiver, Jess shook off Rebecca’s hands. She’d come back to herself, too, Rebecca noted. Or at least part of her had. Her gaze was her steely one, the fighting mask so familiar, now, one could almost have mistaken it for her face.
Unless one knew her better, the way Rebecca did.
“What do you think I’m doing? Jesus Christ, Rebecca. Why aren’t you helping? Get a knife. Get a wrench. Get a fucking bobby pin and do something.”
“I am. I’m holding up a mirror.”
Just like that, Jess went still, clamped her mouth around the words she’d been about to spit and stared. It was possible, Rebecca thought, that Jess was going to punch her.
Instead, she said, “Okay.”
“What do you see?”
The sound that burst out of Jess’s mouth could have been a sob, a laugh, or a strangled shriek. Whatever it was, there was only one of it. For that instant, only, Rebecca thought Jess might implode, crumble to dust. But all she said was, “I see a woman born for this.”
“For killing? Jess, you are so not—”
“For grieving. For missing. Rebecca, I miss her so much. Every second I am alive, whether I’m asleep or awake, it makes no difference. I am an organ for missing.”
“With a hammer in your hand.”
“I’m not the idiot who invited them in,” Jess snarled. At Natalie, Rebecca knew. Through grief so all-encompassing, it could only express itself as fury. “But they’re not staying this time. And they’re not taking one thing more from anyone else I love. Ever.”
“We don’t even know it’s a they, Jess. And we have no idea what they want.”
“I’m pretty sure I know what they want,” Jess snapped, so hard that her mask slipped, allowing a glimpse of the face underneath. The same one Rebecca had first seen hunched over her daughter’s photograph in the perpetual gloom of the burned-out house in East Dunham, or stirring spaghetti at the stove to take up to her broken lover. Or turning in doorways to reach out, abruptly, and stroke Rebecca’s cheek. Gather one more lost girl to her because she just couldn’t help it.
Stamping her foot, Jess shook her head again. “What do you think they want?”
You trust me, too, Rebecca thought, through no tears. They both wore their masks so well now.
“I have no idea,” she said softly.
“Right. There you go.”
“How would I? Or you, either. But Jess, there’s one thing I do know: we can’t fight them.”
“We did last time.”
“We had help,” Rebecca murmured, and then she blinked, couldn’t help it, and there Sophie was, as always, right on the undersides of her eyelids, her mouth bloody and blooming and her eyes not quite wild enough, staring up at Rebecca as Rebecca slammed the shovel down.
Jess was neither smiling nor glaring, now. Just standing there saying nothing, because there was nothing to say.
Except I love you. So Rebecca said that.
Jess nodded, grabbed a fistful of nails and another two-by-four, and returned to the sliding glass door. At the table, Emilia looked away from her own arm long enough to watch. Even Kaylene glanced up from the work she was doing on her bat. Sick and sad, helpless and small, Rebecca turned away toward the hall. So she was the only one who saw Sophie dance out of the shadows near Joel’s bedroom door, throw her arms wide, and grin.
That grin.
“So, I was in the neighborhood,” Sophie started.
Never in her life had Rebecca moved so fast, and even as she snatched out her hand and grabbed the nearest saucepan, she knew it shouldn’t have been fast enough. That she was a hypocrite and a knee-jerk fighter just like Jess, after all. Also a scared little girl.
But not an orphan, anymore.
Then the oil was flying and Sophie was screaming and crumpling, her hands clawing at her face as the residents of the Stockade whirled and swarmed her.