forty-seven
“Isaiah, I’ve lost her.” It’s Faith.
My fingers curl around the phone. “What? What happened?” I am already grabbing my car keys. Faith is panicking—I can hear her breath coming short. “Faith, talk to me.”
I’m behind the wheel in seconds, not bothering to notify my security. If Eden has run away, I have a pretty good idea of where to look first. I start driving as Faith tries to stop herself from hiccupping with panic. Finally, she tells me that Eden has vanished, leaving her phone behind, and she doesn’t know anything more than that. I drive like a madman.
This is not like last time when she almost died , I keep repeating to myself . It’s not then. This is now. And now you are both stronger. You will get to her in time.
After spending a few magical, freezing hours yesterday in the woods, we spent the rest of the day together. We were only separated for an hour or two, because she needed to rest, but she texted me to come get her. And I did. It cost me everything to leave her last night, but I sent her to her hotel, safe in Faith’s company, and I went to mine.
But between last night and this morning, something happened to her. Something that made her run away. The memories are grabbing me by the throat. My brain thinks I will find her in the middle of the highway again.
This is not like last time .
I manage to stay calm enough to not crash.
I’m stronger now. I will fight. I will not let fear consume me.
That’s when it dawns on me: I’m not afraid of her breaking my heart any longer: I’m afraid of her breaking her own.
And then, I see a tall, slim figure in the middle of the empty street, and my car screeches to a halt.
“I got her,” I tell Faith. “Don’t worry any more, she’s with me.” I disconnect the call: I need to focus all my attention on Eden.
She’s standing in front of her old house—the house where she grew up. The house where she was kept a prisoner. She is standing there, absolutely still, as I approach her slowly. If she hears my footsteps, she doesn’t react. Nothing moves except her fiery hair in the wind.
“Eden, are you ok, baby? Are you cold?”
She doesn’t appear to have heard me.
I would stay here with her all day if she wanted me to, but I don’t think these memories are what she needs right now. Or ever. Her eyes have a glassy, faraway look, like a ghost’s .
“Eden?” I hesitate to touch her, bringing my hands around her shoulders, but not quite lowering her them yet.
“I can see her—it’s me,” she whispers, her eyes glued to the window on the second floor. “Can you see her?”
“See who, baby?” For a second, I panic that she is seeing things. “Who do you see, Eden?”
“Myself,” she replies, still staring at that window. “That used to be my room. This house is haunted, don’t you see? It’s filled with ghosts. I can see myself pacing around my room in different ages, I can see a little girl crying in the corner. It’s me.”
She sounds detached, not an ounce of emotion in her voice, but I know better: I know her heart is overflowing with anguish, and it will spill out sooner or later. And I will be here to catch her when the tide pulls her under.
In the meantime, I just let her talk. My hands come down on her arms, and she doesn’t shake me off, so I just hold her.
“I am haunting my own house,” she says and for the first time her voice trembles. “I can see him , looking at the little girl. He mostly ignores her, of course, but once or twice, he looks at her. He looks at me.” She stops to take a deep breath. “I hate how he looks at me.”
“How does he look at you?”
“Like I’m a piece of air.”
And that’s when she breaks. I barely have time to drop to my knees and catch her around the waist as she suddenly collapses to the ground like a rag doll and just shatters into sobs. I hold her as tightly as I can, as if I can put her back together by sheer force of will.
“It’s ok, baby, cry it out.” I let her soak my shirt with her tears, and when she starts shaking so badly she can’t hold her head up any longer, I pick her up in my arms and carry her to my car.
“That haunted house,” she murmurs with her head on my chest, gasping between breaths, “it will never let me go.”
“Listen to me.” I wipe tear strained strands of hair away from her flushed, wet cheeks. “This is not your house, ok? It’s not. Even when you were kept here, your real house was in the woods with me.” I take her hand and place it over my chest. My heart is beating so fast it’s about to jump out of my ribcage, but it seems to calm her a little to feel its soft rhythm. “This is your home. This, my heart, this is your home. And your sisters, your Dad. They are your real home too. ”
She nods. She’s listening to me, but her head is filled with images of that damn house and her life in it. Of course it is. It truly is a haunted house, in that sense. But I won’t let it have any power over her.
“You are not a little girl any more, ok?” I tell her. My thumb is on her chin, keeping her eyes on me. “You are not that little girl. And she is not trapped in that house. No one is haunting it. You are here, alive, and no one can hurt you anymore, least of all, him.”
“He is,” she says, tears streaming silently down her cheeks, spilling across her lips. “He is haunting me, still.”
“No, I won’t let him.” I pull her to me and push my mouth on her forehead. “Ghost or no ghost, I am not letting him anywhere near your head ever again.”
She is just sobbing, but she is getting quiet in my arms, so I know that this time, it’s different. This time, it’s sinking in that she’s safe. That she is not that little girl’s ghost anymore. She is her own person. And she is also mine.
“If there are any ghosts,” I tell her, “I will scare them away. And if they refuse to leave, I’ll kiss you while they watch.”
She tips her head up to me, and I seal my lips with hers.
Heat immediately grabs me by the throat, need suffocating me. Hunger. For her. I let it devour us as I kiss her, opening her mouth wider with my tongue, teasing her lips, turning her head to the side with a hand at the back of her neck, stroking her back, her waist, her hips. I hook a leg around her thigh, filling the air with our hot, desperate breaths of just pure need .
We need to fill the air with them. This dead, haunted air, should be filled with hot gasps of want, of desire, of love, of life . Nothing else should exist but this new thing between us, this thing that we’re now starting—and I’ll probably die if we don’t finish it once we’re back in the hotel.
But for now, I kiss her. I’m kissing her in front of the place that took everything from her. That’s how we will fight what’s left of the monster inside her head. That’s how we will win.
“You are never coming back here,” I murmur in her ear. “Never, do you hear me?” I’m crying too at this point, but I don’t care. She nods slightly. “It’s not happening again, do you understand? I’m here this time. I am not going anywhere.”
“You were here before,” Eden says.
“Not like this. Now I’m here and I know. I’m here here.”
“I’m so sorry,” she cries, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry. ”
The words nearly split me open. I close my eyes, frantically searching for the right words. The therapists told all of us that she will feel guilty about Solomon’s death. It’s why he did it in such a dramatic way, in front of her. So that it will haunt her forever. He wanted power over her even after he’d be dead and gone. One last, final triumph.
But he hadn’t met me.
There will be no one haunting my girl. No one will haunt her apart from me. And I am never leaving her again.
“Don’t apologize,” I murmur, and it sounds small. Stupid. “No, I said that all wrong. I shouldn’t have told you not to apologize. What I mean to say, and what I should have said, is this: Thank you for telling me your thoughts. It’s amazing that you did.”
“I was taught not to be a burden,” she says and I smile. This , I can handle.
“Baby,” I laugh, “a burden? You are wings . You are Saint Hope.”
“That’s just a song.”
“A song I wrote. For you. Actually, we started it together, in this place. Sometimes I think we wrote it for each other.”
“Yeah.” She’s stopped shaking. Stopped crying. She’s just looking at me with those eyes that melt my soul, every single time.
“You are my wings, Eden. You are my paradise. If there is anything going on in your heart, anything hurting you, I need to be the first one to know, baby. It is my privilege, and I’m… well, I’m straight up jealous if anyone knows you’re hurting before me. Is that… is that too much?”
“I don’t know what too much is.” Her voice is hers again. She sounds tired and sad, but she’s been tired and sad before. She can handle it, and so can I. “I know what too little is.”
I rub my hands up and down her arms to warm her. I have put her in the driver’s seat, and I’m crouching on the street, by her knees. I blast on the heat, even though it’s little use to us with the door hanging open. But we’re not driving away until she is ok.
“Well, I’d love to say that from now on you will only ever have too much,” I smirk, “but that’s not right either, is it? You will have just what you need. That’s what I can promise you. You will have what you need, when you need it, as long as I am alive. Your every need met, even if I have to move heaven and earth.”
“Oh, jeez, you’re trying to be one of your Greek poets again, aren’t you?” I laugh out loud. That’s her. She’s come back to me.
“I’m what? ”
“You’re being dramatic. Too dramatic.” She’s trying to smile.
“Yeah, I know. I seem to remember a girl telling me so. Repeatedly.”
A tiny laugh escapes her. “Well, she was right. You are. And yet, I still love you.”
“You do?” I bury my head against her legs.
“Of course I do, you buffoon.”
“I called you my paradise, and you are calling me a buffoon,” I laugh. “Sounds about right.”
She turns serious. “You have been one since the day you bound up my knee,” she says quietly. “I have known it since then.”
“Yes,” I reply. “Yes, you have. And you love me.”
Everything goes quiet as the truth of it sinks in. Peace spreads out around us like the calm waters of a lake.
“Let’s go,” Eden says.
I climb to my feet and take her hand. I get behind the wheel, Eden’s body curled around me, and as I close the door and put my foot on the pedal, I murmur to myself:
“You are never coming back. You are never coming back here as long as I’m alive. And afterwards.”
“Oh, now you’ve gone and done it with the ‘afterwards’,” Eden sniffles, her head nestled in the crook of my neck.
“You heard me?” I ask and feel her nod against me.
I press my lips to her temple as we drive away. We don’t look back.
…
I take her back to the hotel room she’s sharing with Faith. I call my assistant to tell her to delay my flight for another day. There is one more thing we need to do here. Eden is sinking fast into an exhausted sleep, but as drifts off, she says:
“I’m sorry I broke your heart, Isaiah.”
“Feel free to break it again any time you like, heartbreaker,” I tell her softly, my lips a breath from hers. “It’s yours.”
But she’s already asleep.
Faith is pretending not to watch us from the bathroom door, so I motion for her to get inside. She smiles at me, and then she comes over and kneels beside the bed. She closes her eyes. I know what she’s doing—but it takes me a minute to decide if I will join her or not .
And, in the end, that is how I find out the answer to my question: ‘Is it too late to believe in God?’ Apparently not, because here I am. Praying.
…
When Eden wakes up, Faith leaves the room to give us privacy. As if I know what to do. I barely stop myself from calling Faith back, but instead, I turn to Eden:
“What do you need?” That’s the simplest, most straight-forward way I know to solve this. By asking her.
“To write,” Eden says.
“Should I go?”
“Please stay.”
I watch her as she writes, and I see how the peace descends on her as she gets the thoughts out of her head and onto her laptop. I watch her fight the demons in her head. I wish I could fight them for her, but just as she can’t fight mine for me, I can’t fight hers. These ghosts have to be chased off by her own light.
Of course, as I watch her, the inevitable happens: The music descends on me. It comes to me so fast I’m afraid my head will explode with it if I don’t begin playing it in the next few seconds. Normally, that’s what I would do.
But this isn’t normally.
I don’t have any instruments with me—a rarity, but I left in a hurry—and also, an army couldn’t drag me out of this room, not after Eden asked me to stay.
I open the pentagram app on my phone and start writing the music there. I can transcribe it easily from what I hear in my head, it’s a skill I learned when I was really young.
I call Faith to tell her to come back, and she arrives ten minutes later, dragging heavy bags full of takeout food.
We stay in for the next few hours: Eden sits in front of the open window with her sister, me on the floor by her bed, both of us writing. Faith is reading. Not one word is exchanged between us—we don’t need to talk. We’re surrounded but nothing but the stillness of the hotel room, the tap-tapping of Eden’s fingers on the keyboard, and the chirping of the evening birds.
This , I think suddenly. Unexpectedly. This is what I prayed for.
…
We take a break when night falls.
“This is me,” Eden tells me. She’s done writing for the day. “Anger, rage, questions. Outbursts out of nowhere. Running away. This is what it’s going to look like for a long time. Maybe forever. I don’t know if…”
“Are you going to ask me if I can handle it?” I raise an eyebrow.
She shrugs. “How can I ask you that? Sometimes even I can’t handle it.”
“I can,” I reply with confidence.
“How do you know that?’
“I have handled much harder, that’s how. I have been to rehab, I have been through grief. I have been through losing you, I have been through an explosion of fame.” I’m holding her fingers firmly in mine, warming the backs of her hands with my thumbs. “I’ve been through it too, Eden. And I’m still here. As are you. This is nothing for us. We got this.”
“Isaiah, this is serious. What you just saw is...”
“…worth staying for,” I finish her sentence for her. “That’s what I saw. And I saw all of it, I was there, so now you can tell that voice in your head to shut up. ‘He saw, and he is staying’. Tell the voice that.”