I had enough sense to hide Ksenia’s sweater in the trunk of my car right after that phone call with my mom, and to smuggle it up to my room later; now I put it on, feeling the infinite softness of the cashmere spilling past my fingertips. The fabric is still covered in bits of bark and dried leaves, but I don’t pick them off, just like I’ll never try to mend that rip in the sleeve. The dirt, the tear: all those things are parts of the truth, and all of them recall Ksenia’s voice in my ear. How she warned me to run, how she told me to consider her dead and never return.
It’s difficult for me to think about my own part in this disaster, and about that conversation over nine months ago that might have been its origin; that is, I know what happened, and what was said, but I prefer to let my thoughts glance off the memory, to avoid dwelling on the specifics. But since everyone but me believes Ksenia is dead, since I’ve been to a nowhere that should not exist at all, shying away from that conversation feels too cowardly. I let the memory rise up, let it take over my mind.
Tonight I’m sitting cross-legged on my bed; at the time, I was sitting on Josh’s. Xand sometimes got jealous of how close Josh and I were, but we had an understanding: that even if Josh fooled around with some of his other friends, he was absolutely not allowed to lay a finger on me. I told Xand that his only two choices were to trust me, or leave, and after some complaining he had the sense to go with the first option.
Even if I’d been single, I never would have kissed a guy who loved someone else, and it was no secret who filled Josh’s heart. Sometimes it seemed as if half of our friendship was me listening to Josh obsessing over his foster sister: the usual When she said X, do you think she meant Y? routine that people perform when they aren’t getting what they want from someone. Because even if Ksenia gave more of herself to Josh than she did to anyone else, she still held a lot in reserve, and he would worry over every nuance of her speech, hoping for some sign that she was finally coming around.
It got old.
I suppose I started to feel impatient with the whole thing, and why shouldn’t I? But what I should have said, of course, was Talk to her. If you don’t know how she feels then ask her, and just make sure you’re really listening when she answers. And that wasn’t what I did.
“Josh,” I said that night, “think about it. Ksenia always refers to you as her brother, and I don’t think I’ve heard you call her your sister once.”
“Because she’s not my sister, Lexi! To me she’s just Kezzer. She could never be—just one thing in my life, like a sister or a friend. What we have is way bigger than that.” He was leaning sideways against his bedroom wall, a chaos of unfolded laundry all around him, and his hair was platinum layered over deep brown, with garnet-red bangs. Because this conversation occurred just two weeks before he disappeared, because it was the damage done, the unbearable revelation from which Josh decided to escape.
“So why don’t you say something to her? The next time she calls you her brother, why don’t you let her know that you don’t see it that way?” I pulled my legs in and sat with my arms around my knees; it was a warm June night, that much I remember, with the windows open and a subtle stir of wind getting into everything. We had just finished finals.
“Lexi! I could never do that to her. I’m the only family she has in the whole world. Her real mom hasn’t even remembered her birthday in, like, three years.” His eyes were wide with outrage.
“Well, I don’t think you can be both,” I said. “I mean, her brother and her lover. I think that when she keeps calling you her brother, she’s giving you a message, and you’re just not hearing it.” I paused; I knew my opinions were going to upset him, but I didn’t yet grasp how seriously. “If you’re her only family, then it seems pretty harsh to expect her to put that at risk. What if the two of you get together, and then it doesn’t work out? She’d be losing way too much.”
“Kezzer can’t lose me,” Josh said. He was sitting straight now, his knuckles paper white. “That is not a possible thing that could happen. We need to stay together forever. Everything else in the world keeps falling apart, and this is the one thing we can both count on!”
After his parents died, I knew, he’d gone through five homes in four years before the Delbos took him in. Even his own grandparents gave him up after a few months, saying that they were too sick to cope with a child. So I could see a bit of where he was coming from, but I have to admit, now, that I didn’t see it clearly enough.
“She’s going to have to move across the state,” I pointed out. “She’ll probably start college, at least part-time. What if she falls in love with someone else, like somebody she meets in school? Can you promise that she wouldn’t lose you then?”
The shocking whiteness had spread from his knuckles to his face, and he was biting his lip. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Kezzer can’t fall in love with anyone else! It’s always been about me and her, ever since we were kids! I’m the only person in the universe she could ever love that way.”
I guessed even then that he wouldn’t be delivering those words with so much vehemence if he truly believed them. While I’d seen Ksenia kiss both boys and girls at parties, there was something kind of going-through-the-motions about it. I wasn’t sure whom she actually felt attracted to, if anyone, and I wondered if that had crossed Josh’s mind as well.
“I’m not sure that’s true. Josh, think about it: Ksenia can’t afford to be honest with you—maybe not even with herself—because she knows how you feel and she’s terrified of losing you if she doesn’t give you what you want. Why don’t you try backing off, and let her come to you, if that’s what she decides? Because maybe you don’t mean it that way, but right now you’re basically taking advantage of how vulnerable she is.”
In retrospect, what I said sounds rough and blunt, but at the time I was proud of my restraint: because I didn’t say, You know Ksenia was raped, and now the absolute last thing she needs is to have some guy pressuring her again. Especially you.
“You’re saying she’s never going to be in love with me.” It was the closest I’d ever seen Josh come to snarling; his face was seething, its white abruptly flooded with scarlet, and there was something in his look that made me pull back. “Did Kezzer say something to you?”
“Not really,” I admitted. “You know Ksenia doesn’t exactly go around baring her soul to me. I’m just—reading between the lines.”
“Then you’re just wrong! And it’s a good thing you’re wrong, Lexi, because if I believed anything you’ve been saying—I’d disappear forever. I’d jump right off the edge of the planet!”
Even in the moment, I was pretty upset; I’d never seen such rage, such menace in Josh’s face before. I didn’t entirely dismiss what he was saying, but I mostly put it down as dramatics, as an outburst of passion that would subside once he thought about it.
I was able to go on telling myself that Josh would calm down; that is, until he vanished, and then I understood how big my mistake had been: that I’d been treating Ksenia like a child by speaking on her behalf, without ever asking if she wanted me to do that. The fact that I felt protective of her was no excuse. Ksenia was old enough to find her own truth, and to voice it. I thought that Josh had made good his threat by running off with the strangers from the gorge, and that, if I’d only kept my mouth shut, he wouldn’t have been so reckless.
I thought maybe the strangers had murdered him, and I was the one who’d set it in motion. When I saw Ksenia during the search, shame weighed down my eyes; I couldn’t bring myself to tell her what I’d done.
And when she died, or when that very convincing illusion of Ksenia died, it seemed clear enough that I had killed her.
The story is different now; that’s how it goes. You think you have a good hold on the thread, you think you can follow it, but then it twists and winds and knots in your hands and suddenly you’re on a path you never even knew existed. But there’s one thing that’s still the same: by saying what I said to Josh, I had a lot to do with everything that’s happened.
Josh jumped off the edge of the planet, just as he warned me he would. And he pulled Ksenia along with him, and some other people too, and maybe he thought it was only fair to make me share their fate, since I’d been there in his room that night, and I’d forced him to hear a truth he couldn’t tolerate.
I was the one who said the magic words, and now we’re all living under a spell.
All this time I’ve been sitting in the darkness; I’m in no mood for light tonight. Only shadows are tender enough that I can bear their touch against my skin, against my raw and throbbing heart. My calf still aches where that dead animal raked me with its teeth, even though the wound has been salved with antibiotics and painkillers and wrapped in soft bandages. I’ve been so lost in my memories that I almost forgot the pain, but now I’m returning to myself, to the glowing mist cast by distant streetlamps and the sweep of passing headlights on my sky-blue walls.
I’m returning to a sound, and I can’t say how long it’s been going on before I noticed it. A kind of crisp rustling, maybe like the whisper of a taffeta ball gown, maybe like an autumn leaf learning how to speak. What is it? It’s a bit of a cool night and I closed the windows hours ago; that noise can’t be the result of wind.
I reach to switch on my bedside lamp—and catch a blur of motion. Something darts to hide behind my nightstand before light blossoms in the room, but I saw enough to know that it’s perhaps two feet tall, pale and spindly and strangely flat.
Something, I’m sure at once, from there. My heart is in my mouth as I stare at the spot where I saw it brush past. The apricot-gold glow of the lamp hovers in a cloudy sphere, dreamy and serene, and I clench my fists and breathe as deeply as I can.
Once you’ve been to nowhere, who can say what might follow you home?
“I saw you,” I say softly. “You might as well come out. Do you have something you’d like to say to me?”
A tiny pale hand—human in shape, but so small, so frail—folds around the edge of the nightstand. And then a delicate, pitiful, broken-looking thing edges out into the light; even with my heart racing and my breath stilled, I can feel its shyness, and see the mixture of dread and quivering hope in its single, dirty gray eye. A miniature, fractured Ksenia; it would be completely naked, apart from its tiny black shoes, if it hadn’t swathed itself in a washcloth. It has ruby blood trickling down its knees and not a trace of my friend’s attitude.
“Sennie,” it pipes at me, in a thin, shrill, barely audible voice that sends shivers creeping across my eardrums. “You know Sennie?”
“I do,” I say, as well as I can with no breath. And after a moment’s silence: “I think I know her really well, in fact.”
The poor little thing nods gravely, with its head that sometimes seems as flat as a paper doll, and sometimes more complex, more dimensional. “You—maybe you help Sennie?”
Longing sends its voice even higher, into a squeak that I feel more than hear, but I know what it said.
“Yes,” I tell it. “Help Sennie. That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
I think Marissa has some old doll clothes she was going to throw out. I’ll find this little Ksenia-beast an outfit in the morning. In the meantime, I reach down my hand, palm-up so it won’t feel threatened.
“Your knees are hurt,” I tell it. “Come sit on the bed, and we’ll get you cleaned and bandaged, okay?”