DECEMBER 19, 1999
“You should go away,” Jane says, and the words are a curse.
Elijah waves a weak hand in the direction of the ocean outside. “Yes. Let’s go somewhere else. Thailand. We wanted to go there, once. Didn’t we? We wanted to go everywhere, just you and me. Cambodia. Let’s find a place where you can love me again.”
I do love you, she tries to say. I will always love you. Don’t go. Instead, she says, “No, not us. Just you. You need to disappear.”
He takes a swig of whatever he’s drinking. It’s dark red, like blood, smells sickeningly sweet. “You and me, Jane.” His voice is pleading.
I love you, I’ll do anything, please stay, I don’t really want you to go. But the words that come out of her lips are, “The only way out is for you to just leave.”
His face turns to bone, then dust. Jane screams herself awake.
In the silence that follows, she thinks she hears footsteps on her front porch.
She gets out of bed and goes to the window, but there’s nothing out there except the mist rising up from the valley, the Soviet-era watchtower coming into view through the morning fog. Jane pulls a sweater over the black T-shirt she slept in, one of Elijah’s that doesn’t smell like him anymore, no matter how much she wishes it did, and goes downstairs barefoot. When she opens the front door, she half expects the assault of a camera’s flash, paparazzi lying in wait. But there is only a little wooden box sitting in the center of her front porch mat.
Jane picks up the box and examines it. It’s hand-carved, softened by some kind of wood conditioner, looks innocent enough. When she shakes it, something flutters inside. She opens the box and finds a crumpled sheet of lined paper covered in pencil strokes.
When she unfurls the paper and sees what’s on it, shock vibrates through her body like the gong of a bell.
The Secret Adventures of Adam & the Rib.
How can this be?
“Hello?” she calls into the fog. “Who’s there? Who left this?”
She looks down at it again and knows which one it is with just a glance. The only drawing she doesn’t have—and there’s good reason for that. She threw it away. She didn’t want it.
Her eyes skitter back down to the page. The first square of the drawing features a computer with a list of bands in block letters. It’s the list of favorites she sent Elijah during their first conversation in the chat room she created when she was seventeen. How could this ever have come into anyone’s possession?
She reads the story she already knows. The letters, the phone calls—then Jane in a car, driving to Seattle. His arms around her, his lips on hers. Their beginning. Even after everything, she still feels the force that drew her toward him—the way when she arrived at his door, ended up in his arms, she felt like she had dropped an anchor for the first time in her life. She was home.
“Who’s out there?” she shouts. “Who left this?”
A calico cat hops down from a window of the crumbling barn at the edge of Jane’s property, startling her. As she watches, he lands on an overhang, scoots down the slanted wall, and disappears into the trees.
“Hello?” she shouts. She walks down the porch steps and spins in a circle, the grass beneath her feet stiff with frost, the soles of her feet stinging from the cold.
“Elijah?” She hasn’t said his name in so long that tears spring to her eyes when she does. “Are you there?”
But it’s the girl from the day before, the one who yelled at her, who creeps out of the cedars.
Not Elijah.
Elijah is dead.
And Jane wants to die too. Even a moment of hoping, then having it yanked away, is enough to undo her.
“Where did you get this?” Jane says in a shaking voice, crumpling the paper into her fist.
The girl steps closer. Today she has an oversized coat on. “I was at the concert in Berlin. Your last one. I saw you and Elijah fighting. I saw him give you that piece of paper, and I saw you toss it away.” There is judgment in her expression, and Jane wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her, tell her she knows nothing, nothing. But that would be admitting there’s anything else to know. “I took it out of the garbage. I’ve had it ever since.”
“Oh.”
“And now you’re here, and that has to mean someth—”
Jane interrupts her. “Did you show this to anyone?”
“I have no one to show.” A flicker of loneliness in the girl’s eyes; Jane recognizes it but pushes away the empathy she suddenly feels.
“Could you write down your phone number and leave it on my front porch, please? My team will be in touch.”
“In touch about what? You want me to just go away?”
“Do you know what an NDA is? There’s money involved—”
“I don’t want money. I want to talk to you. Just five minutes. It will cost you nothing. Please, just let me explain.”
Jane’s bare feet are stinging in earnest now. She wants this to be over but knows it won’t be that easy. “Fine. Come inside. We’ll talk in the house. Five minutes.”
In the kitchen, the girl looks around hungrily and Jane feels grateful that the house is so impersonal.
“What I tell you,” the girl begins. “You have to believe me.”
“I don’t have to do anything,” Jane replies.
“Okay. So, I’m just going to…” She trails off, and Jane feels a strange sense of familiarity in the halting way she speaks—but whatever the memory is, it slips from her grasp.
Abruptly, the girl reaches into her jacket pocket and Jane wonders where the knife drawer is. But what she pulls out is just a photograph, not a weapon. She keeps it turned away from Jane at first. “When I found the clue, I knew what it was because of that.” She nods toward Jane’s clenched fist, where she still holds the Adam & the Rib drawing.
“What are you talking about?”
The girl draws a shaky breath. “There’s a German word… Shicksal. It means… like, fate? Destiny. Also, it means doom, and adventure, and fortune, and… Just, why else would you have moved in next door if this wasn’t all meant to be? Don’t you believe in destiny? You of all people?”
Me, of all people. Jane shakes her head. “No. I can’t explain why you took this drawing that day and then I ended up next door to you—but sometimes things are just a coincidence. When you’re older, you’ll get that. Okay? Life is weird, there is no plan. You picked this out of a garbage can, and actually, it belongs to me. I’ll pay you for it, you will tell no one, and that will be the end.”
“I think he’s still alive! And using street art to send messages to you! I found one, in Berlin! I think it’s for you!”
“Who are you working for? Is it Kim Beard?”
“Where would I have met Kim Beard?”
So many people hate her, so many people want to hurt her. And this is the precise way to do so.
“Enough,” Jane says. “I won’t listen to another conspiracy theory about Elijah not really being dead. Just get out.”
Elijah used to love their fans, and he once asked Jane why she could never bring herself to feel anything for them. Why she always wanted to keep them so firmly at a distance. They just like our music, he said. They’re like us, when we were teenagers. You remember how it was. How we felt about the artists we revered.
But to Jane, this was the problem. Yes, she had once been a teenage fan who lived and breathed the music she listened to—but she had never perceived the artists she worshipped as real people. Then she became one of those half humans, and it scared her. She knew she might be offered adoration by the masses, but never compassion. There was a difference. Adulation, but never empathy. They’d eat you alive if they could, then say you asked for it by stepping into the spotlight in the first place. This girl would hurt her, and Jane knew it.
“Look. Please.” The girl turns the photograph she holds toward Jane. It’s just an alley wall covered in paintings. “Do you see it? Take it. Look closely.”
The image features a kaleidoscope of artwork. It blurs together at first, and then Jane begins to make out individual images: a wolf walking out of the wall. A rainbow moon. A Day of the Dead mask. Foreign words, crude tags, and then—
The Secret Adventures of Adam & the Rib.
“What did you do?” Jane’s voice rises with anger. “You painted this on a wall somewhere. Admit it. You took this”—she waves her fist, the drawing still clutched there—“and you copied it onto a wall.”
“It wasn’t me! I can’t even draw!”
Jane holds the image closer, takes every detail in. There are splashes of color across the bottom of the painting, words in the bubble above Adam’s head that are too small to decipher.
“You need to come to Berlin and see it for yourself. Then I think you’ll understand.”
Jane looks up. “That’s where this is, in Berlin? Give me the exact address of where it is.”
“Can I go with you? Can I show you myself?”
“I’m calling the police.”
Jane crosses the room and picks up the kitchen phone, but the unfamiliar dial tone only serves as a reminder that she doesn’t know which number to call to reach the police here in Woolf. Meanwhile, Elijah’s ghost voice is now telling her to calm down. She looks frightened, Jane. Be gentler with her. And what if she’s right? What if I’m out there somewhere, waiting for you to find me? What if she’s the only person who can show you where my message is?
If she’s right, I wouldn’t be talking to a ghost.
“Are you okay?” the girl asks.
“I’m fine,” Jane says. “I really just want you to leave.” But the girl doesn’t move. So Jane shouts, “Get out! Now!”
It works. The girl startles and runs like a terrified animal, and Jane feels like the monster everyone thinks she is. But she’s also relieved. That was far too intense. She locks the door. But in the silence she hears a whisper she knows is not real: Jane. Look closer.
There’s an office in the house, and she searches through the desk drawers. It has been stocked with pens, paper, various letter writing materials—as if Jane is ever going to write anyone letters. She finds a set with a letter opener and a magnifying glass, holds the glass to the image. Words come into focus.
2,400 miles was a long way to go for guitar lessons.
Her eyes blur with tears. No one else could possibly know those words. No one.
Unless someone stole them.
She runs to her bedroom, pulls the little safe from under the bed, and opens it. But the letters he wrote her and the drawings he made for her are all there, every single one.
Also… I could teach you to play bass. Except after I wrote that down I looked it up in an atlas, and Stouffville, Ontario, is about 2,400 miles away from the Seattle ’burb where I live. Kind of far to go for guitar lessons. Sadly.
The words are right there on the page. She sinks down onto the unmade bed and reads them again.
Of course she has wished for Elijah to still be alive. Every day. But he isn’t. He can’t be. She saw the smashed rowboat for herself, held his empty, waterlogged jacket in her hands, stood in front of the freezing, raging sea in Iceland and listened as officials told her he was gone, that there was no other possible outcome.
And, of course, she had seen what shape he was in before he disappeared into the water. He couldn’t have managed to swim the length of a backyard swimming pool, let alone battle his way back to shore through the North Atlantic on a cold night.
And yet—
This cannot be real, she tells herself. All she has ever wanted is proof, but the close reality of it introduces an element she has avoided. Believing in this is dangerous. If she truly allows herself to think he’s out there, and then finds out he’s not, that it’s nothing but yet another cruel twist of a knife from one of her many enemies, she knows she will be finished, finally and truly.
But what has her life been without him? Who is she, now that the life they had together is gone? She has tried and failed too many times to rise above the tragedy that has defined her life. Maybe it’s time to stop fighting so hard.
More voices in her head now, louder than whispers, traveling to her over the anguish of time.
You will never lose me. There is nothing in the world that could ever tear us apart.
Do you promise, Jane?
I swear. No matter what happens, I’ll always find you, I’ll always save you.