What the #@&% Is That? Page 4

  She counts silently: sixty seconds later, the screen door creaks open and Evie steps out. “Nan? It’s eleven—I’m going to bed.”

  “I’ll be there in a second.” Her voice only trembles a little.

  Evie frowns, cocking her head. “Weren’t you wearing pants a minute ago?”

  Nan looks down at her bare legs. She was, before. The first time. The past overwritten. Her heart speeds again.

  “It’s hot,” she says, standing up. Her left calf twitches with an incipient cramp.

  Evie’s frown deepens. “Are you all right?”

  “My back.” It’s not entirely a lie. Nan takes Evie’s hand and pulls her close, kissing her neck and breathing in the clean smell of her skin: salt-and-honey soap and sweet citrus shampoo.

  Evie laughs as Nan’s lips brush her collarbone. “Maybe we should take this inside.” She pauses and leans in. “You smell like rain.”

  “A storm’s on its way.”

  That earns her a different frown. Not the crazy girlfriend who wanders around in her underwear frown, but the crazy girlfriend who predicts the future. Who thinks she can change the past.

  Nan kisses Evie again and leads her into the air-conditioned house.

  * * * *

  “Five hours,” Evie says later, stroking her fingers through Nan’s short hair. The storm hasn’t hit yet, but the wind picks up and thunder growls in the distance. The room smells of sweat and musk and hot wax. Candlelight dances across the walls, votives of St. Peter and Mary and all the others that crowd the little shelf Evie refuses to call an altar.

  Nan nods, her head pillowed on Evie’s stomach, her cheek sticking to the soft curve of the other woman’s belly. She concentrates on the murmur of Evie’s heart, the weight of her fingers. The now. This moment with no pain, no fear, no past, no monsters. The river of time waits to sweep her away, but she won’t let it.

  It can’t last, but she can pretend.

  “Hey,” Evie murmurs as comfort threatens to lull Nan to sleep again. “Love you.”

  “I love you. But do you believe me?”

  Evie sighs. “It would be easier if I didn’t, but I do.”

  “I am crazy.”

  “You surely are.” She strokes Nan’s hair. “But I dreamed about the black dog again last night.”

  Nan shivers. “I’m getting closer. I could only manage five minutes before.”

  “Five minutes is a long way from fourteen years.”

  “I can do it. I’m sure I can now.”

  “But are you sure you should? You see monsters, Nan. Don’t you think that means you ought to stop?”

  She flexes her left hand. Only a faint chill lingers in her bones. She’s told Evie about the monsters, the hounds, but not about how they feed. “I can’t.”

  Evie’s fingers still. You mean you won’t. Don’t lie to yourself. It’s not mind reading; she hears the words leave Evie’s lips. Precognition. Déjà vu. But Evie chooses a different path.

  “What’s that word you told me about the stars? The light we see that doesn’t exist anymore?”

  “Fossil light?”

  “Yes.” She sighs again, and Nan’s head rises and falls with her breath. “That’s you. You’re not really here. And I’m afraid by the time I find you, you’ll be gone.”

  * * * *

  The first time Nan rewrote the past, she was dying.

  A bottle of Xanax and a bottle of tequila, determined to stop it once and for all. The lost time, the panic attacks, the nightmares. The eerie precognition that left her stumbling away from people who hadn’t moved yet, dodging parked cars, answering unasked questions. Slipping grades, doctors’ warnings. Another lost job, another girlfriend walking out on her. Everyone tired of dealing with crazy, broken Nan.

  She was sick of living with it. Sick of living.

  She was sick of dying before long, huddled on the bathroom floor with the stench of vomit thick in the air. Her cheap phone smashed to pieces against the linoleum—no more calls for help. Maybe she should have hanged herself instead. All she wanted was sleep, but an empty place unfolded inside her, sucking her down. The empty place that never healed after Chelsea died.

  Chelsea always believed people would find each other again on the other side. If that was a lie, it was the sweetest Nan had ever heard.

  It should have been her all those years ago, her instead of Chelsea. Her with Chelsea. Why hadn’t she died too, if this was all she had to live for? To live through.

  She remembered Chelsea’s hand in hers. Cold and damp and clutching tight, before her best friend’s fingers went limp and slipped away.

  The precise instant was lost. When she realized there was nothing she could do, that her parents weren’t coming back and there was no one to help them, she’d shut her eyes and tried to get through, pushing as hard as she could against that awful moment. Trying to fast-forward through the pain as if it were a song she didn’t like.

  The emptiness opened, welcoming her inside.

  But as she fell, Nan snapped awake to find herself back in the drowning car. Muddy water rising all around her, her back throbbing where she’d slammed against the door when the station wagon slid off the flooded bridge into the rushing, rain-swollen creek. The flood roared past, pulling at the car, pinning the doors. Debris scraped like claws against metal.

  And Chelsea. Chelsea trapped in the back seat, seatbelt locked tight. Brown eyes wide and shot with panic as the water rose higher around her head, closing over her black braids and purple plastic barrettes.

  Best friends since second grade, blood sisters by needle-pricked thumbs since the age of twelve, an awkward sugar-sticky first kiss on Nan’s thirteenth birthday. A world of possibilities stretching out before them with only the certainty that they would be together. And now Nan watched those possibilities wither and fall away one by one with every millimeter of rising water.

  The other Nan, the poisoned, dying Nan, clawed her way up from the dark. This wasn’t a dream: she was back. The body that ached so fiercely wasn’t a child’s. She could change it, change anything, and maybe she could save them both.

  Chelsea’s dimming eyes flashed open, blazing like cut glass. Thirsty.

  It was the first time Nan remembered hearing the monsters, their words like scalpels, but the sound was as familiar as childhood lullabies. Teeth pierced her flesh, sharp as the doctors’ needles that took the pain away. She screamed in panic and recoiled.

  With a sickening wrench, she fell back through the dark, back into the now.

  She opened her eyes to warped linoleum tiles, the bathtub slick and steady against her back and her spine throbbing like the injury was fresh. The amber bottles sat on the floor in front of her, full of liquor and little blue pills, but she still felt sick and poisoned. White-knuckled fingers clamped tight around her phone.

  This time, she called for help.

  * * * *

  Four in the morning again, the long way round this time. The power is still out, so Nan takes a cold shower by candlelight. Modafinil keeps sleep at bay, but maybe she’ll walk to the corner store and get some lousy coffee and be back in time to wake Evie at five.

  Even candlelight can’t flatter her reflection. The face in the mirror is worn and whittled thin. Only twenty-seven, but she looks ten years older. Hollow cheeks, indelible bruises around her eyes, threads of gray in her spiky brown hair. Lack of sleep, maybe, or drinking—though she drinks less when she’s on her meds. Or maybe all the time slips take their toll, all those moments lived twice. She’s moving faster than the rest of the world, rushing toward the end.

  She won’t go without a fight.

  She leans against the doorway, watching Evie curled in tangled sheets. Guttering candles kiss her chestnut skin, limning her with gold. Midnight curls splay across the pillow.

  The suicide-that-wasn’t and all the possibilities it opened were enough to keep Nan going. To scale back the booze and pills, to keep track of the slips and lost time, the nightmares
and flashes of precognition, and especially the monsters. It kept her alive long enough to meet Evie, and she can never regret that, no matter how bad things have been since or will yet be.

  Evie, who spends all day with the sick and broken and dying and comes home to light candles to powers she refuses to name. Who invests her time and training and student loans in medicine but carries magic close and silent in her heart. Her brushes with the weird aren’t the same as Nan’s, but they’re enough to let her listen. To accept if not understand.

  Chelsea is a shadow between them. Nan’s therapists tell her to let go, to move on, to make peace, but how can she when every careless moment tugs her back? She lost three years to a haze of drugs and doctors and quiet rooms, but even that couldn’t keep the past away forever.

  Evie deserves more than Nan can offer. But to fix herself may mean losing everything she has now.

  She turns back to the medicine cabinet and reaches for her fluoxetine. As she counts out forty milligrams in green-and-white pills, eyes flash in the angled mirror. The bottle slips from cold fingers, bounces off the counter, and sprays pills across the floor with a machine-gun rattle.

  So thirsty. She feels its attention shift, past her to the bedroom. Sweet.

  “No!” Her hands clench on the edge of the counter. If feeding the monsters is the price she pays for what she does, so be it. But not Evie. “Don’t you fucking touch her,” she hisses.

  Teeth like shards of ice blaze in a grin. You touch her.

  Nan slams the mirror shut, rattling glass and bottles. Behind her, the doorway is empty except for a soft chuffing laughter fading in her head.

  * * * *

  Tension builds that week, simmering, implacable. Evie is scared, hurt, and Nan doesn’t know what to say to make it better. Knows, but isn’t willing to lie. She hears the things Evie almost says but holds back. Unlike so many others, Evie considers her options before she acts, doesn’t always take the easiest, obvious path. It was a balm when they first met: someone Nan couldn’t always predict, a journey whose end she didn’t know from the start. But now it leaves her off-center and shaky, fighting not to react to things unsaid.

  She could make it easier. Lock herself into the now and turn her eyes away from the probabilities and possibilities constantly unfurling. After so many years, she’s learned to turn the volume down. Instead, she stretches herself wide, searching, riffling through cracks whenever she sees them. The night of the storm left her with a sense of momentum, a cold weight of anticipation in her stomach. She doesn’t dare lose herself to complacency again.

  * * * *

  She sees the next storm coming on a dead television. A roiling mass of green sweeping across the state. Flooding, devastation, death. Reports of destruction that hasn’t yet occurred scroll past her, and she knows bone-deep that one of those deaths could be hers.

  This is her chance.

  She comes back to herself in Evie’s cramped living room. The lamplight is wrong, crystalline and fractured as if she were tripping. The monsters, her monsters, wait in the corners. Sharp lines, cutting angles, nothing of softness.

  Impatient. Yearning. So thirsty for destruction. A lean shape slinks around her, flickering in and out of her vision. Come with us, Ananda Walker. We’ll show you.

  Jaws close on her right wrist. Needles of ice pass through meat and bone. A rough, sparking tongue laps at the wound. Nan feels some part of her draining away, but she can’t name it. Behind her eyes, the void begins to unfold, the threshold to uncounted worlds.

  “Nan?”

  Glass shatters.

  “Nan? Are you—” Evie lets out a strangled shriek. Nan spins to see a glass slip from Evie’s long brown hand. It falls so slowly. So easy to move between heartbeats and catch it. Gravity resists for an instant as she moves it from its downward path, then it’s safe on the counter.

  Evie stands frozen, hazel eyes wide. Tall and rawboned, the proud arch of her nose slightly off-center, an asymmetry that leaves her more arresting than simple prettiness could. Nan is often struck by her beauty, her strength, but now she marvels at the life in her. The blood jumping beneath her skin, the dampness of her parted lips, the film of moisture shining on her dark-flecked irises. So sweet.

  She looks for her reflection in Evie’s eyes and sees only a dark, angular shadow.

  The light softens. Cut-glass shadows melt back to normal. Evie recoils, catching her hip against a little table. A vase teeters and falls to the floor.

  Glass shatters.

  “What the hell was that?” Evie’s eyes flash white as she looks from Nan to the empty corners and back again. She shakes her head sharply, curls rasping against her scrubs. “Those things—You were—”

  The room stifles with potential, none of it pleasant. Some inevitabilities can be dodged only so long.

  “How long have you been feeding them?” Evie demands.

  “Since the beginning, I think. I didn’t realize it at first.” Nan lifts her hands in a useless shrug; the right is still numb. “I didn’t want to scare you.”

  “I’ve dreamed of the black dogs ever since I met you. I thought I could protect you from them. But all this time, you’ve invited them in. And you don’t want to scare me.”

  “Evie—”

  “Look at yourself!” She catches Nan’s wrist, presses palm to palm. Her touch burns. Nan’s skin, always paler, is spectral now in comparison. Bone and tendon and veins stand stark, any softness she’s ever had melted away. “They’re stealing your life.”

  Nan draws breath to answer, but there’s no answer to give.

  “I’m living with a ghost,” Evie whispers. “Because you won’t stop living with yours.”

  And now the dam cracks, and the things she holds back come rushing out. Evie points at the desk, at the carved wooden box where Nan keeps her old photos, yellowing reminders of the days when she had a family, a life, when she had Chelsea. “Do you think I can’t see? Those could be my baby pictures. I look just like her. How the hell is that supposed to make me feel?”

  Not quite, Nan almost says. Her eyes were darker. She didn’t have that little mole. She wouldn’t be so tall. She smothers each thought in turn—she’s not that crazy.

  “Am I just a placeholder?” Evie goes on. “The next best thing until you”—finally kill yourself—“bring Chelsea back?”

  “No.” Nan’s chest aches around the word. Her own anger rises in turn, even though she knows it’s just defensive hurt. “What about me? You want to protect me? To rescue me? Am I just another project to you? Another broken bird to nurse? Don’t you get enough of that at work?”

  Evie laughs harshly. “Maybe neither of us knows how to have a healthy relationship.”

  “I know I love you. But that’s not enough to fix me.”

  “Nothing will ever be enough if you don’t let go of this!”

  “Do you think I haven’t tried? I can’t let go. I’ll never be enough for anyone. For myself. Something is wrong with me, Evie.” It’s her turn to laugh now, just as rough and ugly. “A lot of things. But something is broken, and I have to try to fix it.”

  “Bad things happen. Terrible things. They break us in a hundred ways. We can repair ourselves, but we can’t change the past.”

  I can.

  She catches Evie in her arms. “Hey,” she whispers. After a second’s stiff resistance, Evie hugs her back.

  “Hey. Love you.”

  They hold each other in the dark. It’s not enough.

  * * * *

  “Pardon my language, lady, but you’re fucking crazy.” The cabbie glances at her in the rearview mirror. He takes one big-knuckled hand off the wheel to gesture at the rain sheeting down the windshield, the furious squick-ick squick-ick of the wipers. “Which makes me equally crazy, too. We’re going to fucking drown.”

  “No,” Nan murmurs as images flicker and scroll through her vision. “You won’t.”

  Texas is drowning, though, or it will be soon. Every path that bran
ches from this now ends in destruction somewhere, unavoidable. Whether it will be hers Nan doesn’t know, but she won’t get another chance like this.

  She left Evie sleeping, walked out on everything, and called a cab to the bus station.

  “I love you,” she whispered. “I love you, but I have to do this.”

  The driver glares at her. She leans her head against the window and doesn’t meet his eyes. Every drop of water glistens with potential, a million worlds falling all around her, but she doesn’t look. The gutters surge, trees and buildings and the few other cars on the road swallowed alike by gray. Her stomach is sour from too much coffee, cup after cup every chance she had on top of the Modafinil to make sure she didn’t fall asleep on the Greyhound. Her eyelids feel like sandpaper, and a muscle has been jumping in her left cheek for the past hour. No idea what time it is, but that hardly matters anymore.

  “Crazy,” the cabbie mutters again. A gold saint’s medallion sways from the rearview mirror, flashing in the gray light. It reminds her of Evie’s candles, and she looks away. She’s too tired to cry, too dry.

  “That’s what all the doctors tell me.” An old joke, but her mouth can’t force a smile, and the words fall flat and humorless. The din of rain and windshield wipers replaces conversation, and she’s grateful.

  They leave offices and shopping centers behind. Hills rise through the blinding rain ahead. She hasn’t been back to Austin in years, but she remembers. Karst topography, limestone and granite cloaked in thin soil, green with live oak and cedar scrub. Hot and dry most of the year, perfect for flash flooding. Which everyone knows, but every time the rains roll in, someone is stupid or unlucky enough to drown. People like Nan’s parents. And Chelsea.

  Nan should have died too. How had she lived without Chelsea? Best friend, sister, first love, even if she hadn’t realized that at the time. Every plan they had ever made had included both of them. Chelsea, always the precocious one, had taken all the steps she could think of to keep the connection. Blood mingled on pricked fingertips; brown hair and black braided together in friendship bracelets; their names written together with Chelsea’s mom’s fancy fountain pen, smudged and sloppy cursive script offered to a candleflame. Maybe it worked too well.