Yakob
Every step feels like it’s taking one-hundred percent more energy than it should.
I know we’re nearby when the trees thin out and the sun is high enough to cast light over what used to be a garden.
Now it’s overgrown. The owners of the small farm are long gone.
They were good people. But still, every step is a bargain with something outside of myself.
I should take my hand back.
It’s not like I haven’t been touched in the last twenty years.
Doctors who didn't ask my name. Men who wanted me dead and got close enough to try. Handlers who shook my hand because the contract required the gesture. Iris’s mother.
Every one of those touches had a purpose I could name and a price I could calculate.
This has no purpose. She gains nothing from it. It's just her hand around mine because she wants it there.
I don't have a category for that and I'm too tired to figure one out.
I leave my hand where it is.
"Is it much further?" She catches the change in my breathing without turning her head. She reads people the way I read situations. "You went somewhere for a while. I didn't love it."
"I'm fine."
"So you keep saying." She looks at me now, and there's a smudge of my blood dried along her jaw that she doesn't know about. Her eyes are her mother's eyes, green enough to be unsettling in the pale morning light. "I've decided it means something different in whatever language you learned first."
I turn my hand over with the intention of sliding it free. Reasonable. Practical. She needs both hands for whatever comes next, and I don't need to be held like something that might float away.
"You don't have to do this," I tell her. "Save your strength. If anyone comes, you run. You don't wait for me. You don't come back for me."
She listens to the whole thing with the expression of a woman waiting for a kettle to finish boiling.
"No," she says.
"Iris."
"You've been shot. You've lost more blood than I want to think about.
You've kept yourself upright through a vineyard, a boat, and my driving on nothing but grit, and now you're trying to give me instructions about abandoning you, which I'm choosing to find funny instead of insulting.
" Her grip tightens, briefly, a pulse of pressure. "Look."
I follow her gaze and find what I knew was there, even when every step felt like I was somehow getting further away.
The small house stands in front of us like it’s too stubborn to collapse. Stone, half swallowed by an overgrown olive terrace, shutters bleached to the color of driftwood. No neighbors. One track in. A cistern, a generator, a month of supplies, and a med kit that's about to earn its keep.
It’s almost ironic.
There’s a note written in Italian nailed to the front door.
To the Ghost. Until next time. S.
“What does it say?” she asks, looking over the top of the note like it might make more sense upside down. I tell her.
"The Ghost. That's you?"
"That's me."
She huffs something that's almost a laugh. "I didn’t think ghosts would be able to be shot."
Now it’s my turn to laugh, only it breaks through the surface as a breathless smile. "It happens more than you’d imagine."
"Is this place yours?"
"It’s nobody's anymore," I say. "That's the point." I don’t tell her about the couple who used to live here. The couple who almost lost everything. The couple who got to live out their last years in peace with a beautiful view, where no one would ever think to look for them.
That story is better left in the past.
"You have bolt holes the way other people have regrets." She's nudging open the door. "Come on, Ghost. Ten more steps and you can fall down with my full blessing."
The ten steps feel like forty, but I make it into the small dusty backroom and collapse onto an old camping cot.
"There," she says, triumphant, following me into the bedroom. "Solid ground, walls, a door that locks. I'd like it noted that I delivered everything I promised."
"Noted," I manage.
"Good." Her voice softens into something more gentle than anything has sounded to me in twenty years. "You can put it down now, Yakob. Whatever you've been carrying to get us here. I've got you."
My name again, in her mouth, easy as breathing. She hands it to me like it's mine. Like I'm someone, and she's simply reminding me.
The gray closes in from the edges, and the last thing I hold onto, the very last fixed point in a world gone to water, is the certainty that she will still be there when, if, I wake.