32
Warm breath brushed against my neck and then receded, over and over, gentle and even, like the tide withdrawing.
My mother. So many nights she’d come into my bed and curled around me to protect me, or sometimes to shield herself from some private nightmare that she’d never share in the morning. Now I turned enough to see Cate’s dark curls spread across the pillow, her skin waxy and brittle. I had an impulse to press against her forever.
But I was also restless, my whole body lit up. If I returned to that moment of standing on my garage roof as a child, I really could take off and fly. Anywhere I wanted. Anywhere at all.
I sat and looked around the motel room, careful not to wake Cate. The slant of sunlight that came through the crack in the floor-length drapes suggested late morning. The tacky striped coverlet was imprinted with splotches, pale pink to deepest black. Somewhere, a faucet tapped steadily. Across the room, Isabelle slept on the floor, her narrow white back to me, spattered with freckles like a trout’s markings. She had a pillow under her head, no blanket.
I didn’t see Tom. Rising, I pressed a hand to my abdomen. The gunshot: Had I imagined it? I felt good. Amazing. Like I’d slept for a very long time. I walked to the bathroom mirror and lifted the edge of my dress. Blood trailed across my hip bones. I pressed at the lightly pooched skin above my navel—soft and firm, giving at my touch with a light buoyancy. No pain.
I went higher, sure that at any second I’d accidentally slide my fingers inside a gaping wound or touch an exposed organ. Nothing. My skin felt wrinkled, soft and moist and too smooth, like that bluish skin that I’d find beneath a Band-Aid when I was a kid. I couldn’t detect that foreign sensation, the stuck feeling that had burned between my rib cage.
Behind me, the door opened and sunlight fell in a brilliant triangle inside the mirror. I turned. In the bed, Cate stirred slightly.
“Josie.” Tom wore a pair of dark sunglasses. His gaze drifted downward until he abruptly looked away, neck going pink. I remembered that I’d lifted my dress, exposing my hips and thighs. To me, my body had become a novelty, nothing to be embarrassed about. For his sake, I dropped the hem of my dress.
Tom nudged the door closed with one heel. His arms were loaded down with filmy plastic bags, peppered with the logo of some drugstore chain. He dropped the bags onto the bed. He started toward me, then stopped. His hair was damp and smelled like shampoo from across the room. Tom seemed to want to say everything at once: instead, he said nothing.
“Are you okay?” I asked at last.
“Am I okay?” he repeated. “Josie, you were—you were dead.”
I laughed. “I wasn’t dead.”
“For a few minutes, yeah. It felt like forever.” He was struggling to stay calm.
“Come on,” I said. “Dead? Truly dead. Heart stopped—no brain waves—”
“I know what death looks like.”
The way Tom was staying back from me, like I was a ghost, told me all I needed to know. Inside Cate’s half-open palm, a glimmer of something dull and metallic. Moving to the bed, I gently pried her fingers open. A bullet, varnished metal, tapering to a blunted tip, slightly misshapen. I touched the bullet with the pad of one finger; it was warmed from Cate’s body. This little thing felt so utilitarian, so unremarkable, like dozens of things I’d come across during my daily life: frying pans, door handles.
“I’m confused, Josie,” Tom said. I could tell he’d rehearsed this in his head. “I don’t understand what happened last night. I don’t understand how Cate saved you. You were dead, now you’re—” He took a deep breath. “And you. God. You did something to me. It was like I couldn’t—like I was in a dream, watching myself. I’ve never felt that before. It was you doing something to me, wasn’t it? Something weird.”
“It was me.” It was a relief to admit it.
“How?”
“How do you think?”
A long silence. “The rumors about Fiona aren’t just rumors,” Tom said. “It’s all of you, not just Fiona.”
“That would about sum it up.” I spoke casually, but my heart was beating too quickly. I was half worried about how he’d respond. He wasn’t one of us. I felt that so keenly right now. What would happen when more people knew? Not people who were actively trying to hurt us, but people like Tom. Observers. Recorders. How he responded, I realized, would show me how others would—maybe—at some point in the future.