We Sing It Anyway #4
“Anyway,” said Rose. She let go of my arms, picking her way through the mess remaining on the floor to perch on the absolute edge of the bed, eyeing my sheets with distaste.
“Mary brought me because she couldn’t figure out how to explain the situation.
She’s never been a psychopomp. She knows when members of her family are alive or dead, but she’s not really equipped to escort you into the afterlife.
Makes her weirdly less comfortable with the idea of death than I’d expect, from a ghost. But then, she’s always been a weirdo. ”
“What does this have to do with my brother?” I asked.
“You have to understand, what happened to Artie … it wasn’t exactly death,” she said. “He was erased, not killed, and that isn’t the same thing.”
“Okay, and?”
“And when the Johrlac snatched Arthur, they took him to a place where things could be recovered after they’d been erased.” Rose looked at me earnestly. “Elsie, they brought him home.”
“What?” Numbness spread through my entire body like wine soaking into a white tablecloth, filling every inch of me.
Artie was gone. I’d already mourned him.
There’d been nothing for us to bury, but he was gone, and we had Arthur now.
If Artie was somehow back, then Arthur … “No. I can’t mourn another brother.”
“Honey, you don’t have to. They brought them both home. Arthur looks a little different now, and he’s not the same species anymore—the body they had on hand to transplant him into was pure Kairos—but he’s here. Artie and Arthur are both here.”
“Because that’s not going to be confusing or anything,” I said, still numb. My knees felt like they were about to buckle. I sat down on the bed, next to Rose, our knees almost brushing. “You’re not fucking with me right now? My brother’s coming home?”
“He is,” she said gravely. “Soon.”
“How soon?”
“Tonight,” said Mary, reappearing with my empty laundry hamper in her hands. “Sarah just wanted me to tell you before she showed up and scared you half to death.”
“Sarah.” Try as I might—and I was trying, I truly was; she was bringing my brother back to me, with a bonus, and I should really be able to forgive her if she was willing to go that far for his sake—I couldn’t keep the disdain out of my tone.
Mary heard it, I knew she did. Her expression cooled, skin around her eyes tightening with displeasure.
Still, my feelings were valid, and I looked away from both ghosts as I continued: “She’s coming here? ”
“She’s bringing your brothers,” said Mary. “We don’t have another way of getting them here that quickly, and Arthur doesn’t currently have any sort of ID. He doesn’t even legally exist.”
“I guess not, if he’s in somebody else’s body.” A thought occurred to me, sharp and stabbing and unkind. I looked back to Mary. “Is this another situation like the last one, where he’s going to come to pieces and then someday they’re going to get the original owner back again?”
“Not according to Antimony,” said Mary. “The leadership of the Johrlac apparently keep bodies whose original owners have passed on some form of life support for situations like this one, so that they can both restore people who’ve been unmade and preserve the new people who replaced them.
It’s something to do with their legal system.
Can’t get testimony from somebody you’ve deleted. ”
“Wait—legal system?”
“Yes,” said Mary, patiently. “The Johrlac initially snatched Arthur because they wanted him to testify against Sarah in their courts.”
“What were they trying to charge her with?”
“Being a cuckoo queen. That’s apparently illegal in their culture.”
I just stared at her for a moment. Becoming a queen hadn’t been Sarah’s choice—no matter how mad at her I was, I couldn’t ignore the fact that she’d been victimized by her biology as much as Artie and I had sometimes been abused by our own.
She’d become a queen because other cuckoos had gone out of their way to hurt her, and trying to make that out to be something she needed to be punished for wasn’t just cruel, it was utterly ridiculous.
I took a deep breath. “I’m not going to say they can’t do that, since they obviously did, but are you seriously telling me that I’ve spent the last six months waiting to hear that my brother was dead because some extradimensional assholes decided to get overambitious with their law enforcement?”
“Pretty much,” said Rose. “Now, if your room’s this bad, the rest of the house has to be something out of a nightmare. You want to go down and tackle the living room before your cousin and your brothers get here?”
The plural was still jarring, and probably always would be. I shook off my momentary surprise and nodded. “That sounds like a good idea, if the two of you are willing to help.”
“That’s why we’re here,” said Mary. “Let’s go.”
The living room was in some ways worse than my bedroom, and in other ways, better. There was more clutter—unbroken boxes, bags of recycling, stacks of mail that had been ignored until it began to cascade onto the floor—but there weren’t nearly as many dishes, and there was basically no food waste.
One nice thing about living with the Aeslin mice: they’re incredibly effective disposal services.
Any food that had been left out had been cleared away long before it could mold, and any bugs that had been attracted to the mess had been hunted for the additional protein they could provide.
The mice weren’t picky about their diet, and even enjoyed the opportunity to hunt.
Normal mice, rats, and various reptiles were all nice additions to their tables.
A few cockroaches or houseflies were no big deal for them.
They weren’t as reliable about dealing with wrappers, which was part of why my bedroom floor was such a disaster.
The living room had no such issues. Mary and Rose gathered up armloads of towels, vanishing into the ether before coming back to help me sort mail or break down boxes.
I felt a little awkward about sending all the laundry to Michigan for Grandma to deal with, but only a little awkward.
She’d been gone for six months, along with everyone else, and if she was willing to do the washing, I was equally willing to let her.
About halfway through the first pass on the room, Mary took my hamper and came back with clean, folded clothes, carrying them up to my room. She paused on the stairs, giving me a frank look.
“I told them we’re almost ready,” she said. “You’ve got about an hour. You may want to go and grab a shower before it’s too late.”
“Even if you don’t want to, I think you have to,” said Rose. “Again, you smell like a literal corpse, and that’s not going to make your brother feel good about coming home to you.”
“He’s really coming home?” I asked. “This isn’t all some nasty joke to convince me that I need to clean the house?”
“He’s really coming home,” she said. “Come on. I’ll stand outside the bathroom if you need me to.”
“I’m not a child.”
“You’re sort of acting like one, and I’d understand if you didn’t want to be alone right now.”
Mary continued up the stairs with my laundry, and I watched her go before sighing and turning back to Rose.
“Okay,” I said. “I think I’d like that.”
“Good girl.”
The bathroom was as nasty as the rest of the house, but the tub was damningly dusty and dry.
I shut the door—Rose staying outside as promised, although I knew she could drop the illusion of flesh and walk through the wood on a moment’s notice if she felt the need—and stripped, dropping my clothes onto the old, stiff towels on the floor.
I was definitely going to be shouting for a clean towel when I got out.
The pipes grumbled when I turned the water on, air escaping like a rattle of bones. I stepped into the tub, pressing the button to activate the shower, and stood under the water, letting it cascade down over me, washing some of my confusion away.
Unfortunately, what came in after it was grief, and fury.
Grief, because my brother was coming home—both my brothers, apparently, which was an impossible gift that I would never have expected or asked for, not in a million years—and fury, because my mother had died not knowing that Artie would ever come home.
She’d grieved him, and she wasn’t going to get this reunion. She deserved this, and she wasn’t here.
That realization was like ripping a scab off the infected wound that was her absence. I slumped against the shower wall, water streaming over me, and sobbed until I felt like I’d been wrung dry.
“Elsie?”
Mary’s voice came from directly behind me. I turned, and there she was, standing in the shower. The water was falling straight through her, leaving her as dry as ever, but when she reached out to put her hand on my shoulder, her fingers were solid. I sniffled.
“That’s a neat trick,” I said. “How are you managing it?”
“I have no idea, and if I think about it too hard, I’m going to get drenched,” she said. “It’s ghost stuff. Are you okay?”
“I haven’t been okay for a long time,” I said, closing my eyes and leaning against the shower wall.
The water cascading over my back was a soothing, steady pressure.
“I’m trying to be okay now. For Artie.” And for Arthur, and for my dad, who was going to have to find out sooner or later that all this was happening.
I knew I should go and tell him, but I couldn’t face the thought of opening his office door and finding him staring off into space, unblinking, barely present in any sense of the word.
I wasn’t sure he’d even have been eating if not for the mice harassing him to stay alive.
It’s hard to say no to an entire colony of wildly shrieking rodents.
Believe me, I’ve tried.
“He’ll be here soon, sweetheart.”
“I know.” I opened my eyes, straightening. “If you want to hop on out, I’ll finish getting myself presentable. Give me ten minutes, okay?”