Chapter 34
Don’t look, Els,” Dee cries, pushing Ella’s face down.
They’re an odd pair: the tall woman—is she Swedish?
Danish? I don’t know enough to tell one Scandinavian accent from another—her pale hair fanning on the dark ground, her graceful wrists exposed above the tailored edges of her coat sleeves, and the squat, strange little man with his small, crowded face.
His eyes are open and his expression is bemused, caught off guard.
Death is only silence, he said. Her eyes are closed.
Mom is crying. “What happened? What happened to them?”
Dee speeds past with Ella. I take a few steps toward the bodies in the battlefield. I think of British and colonial soldiers lying side by side beneath this ground, companions in death. There is something so intimate about being enemies.
And just as I think this, the ground seems to shift, to rearrange. The transition is sleepy and fluid, as though the grass is a stream, trickling over the two shadowed forms. And then, with only a swish, a soft breath like a glad sigh, the earth subsumes them.
“Oh no, Al,” whispers Mom.
Something glints by my feet and I lean over—it’s my phone, face up in the grass. I pick it up and then Joel staggers, and I am at his side, but I can’t let myself touch him.
“Who was that?” he asks thickly.
“That was Al,” I say. “He was supposed to kill you. My father sent him. A demon.”
“Oh,” he says, hardly above a whisper.
“He was actually really nice.”
“Very painful, though.”
“Yes,” I agree. “That was the whole idea.” I add, “I wouldn’t let him. Kill you, I mean.”
“Thanks,” he says.
“Thanks for—all that,” I say, gesturing faintly back at the monument.
“I shouldn’t have sent— ” he starts, and I shush him.
We make our way across the field to the road. I hear Ella as Dee opens the car door and the light turns on. “Is that . . . blood on me?”
* * *
Dee and I sit together on the porch bench in the bright chill of noon, the usual leaf blowers roar-whining their way around the block. The sun pours itself through the last red leaves on our sidewalk maple, igniting each one.
I tell her everything. Again, starting from the beginning. And then the rest of it, the parts I concealed from her, starting from when I learned the truth about Joel.
This time, for the first time, she believes me. Although I can see it’s hard, even now.
“Dick Face is . . . sort of a demigod? Like in a Greek myth?”
I think of Grub. “Basically,” I say. “I mean, at least that’s the best name we have for it?”
“And all his children are cursed.”
“Right.”
“Cursed,” she repeats, shivering a little under the fleecy throw she’s brought from the living room.
I nod.
The elderly man from a few houses down walks briskly past, pausing to lift a hand to us, plaid scarf bundled above the high neck of his coat.
“Hi, Curtis!” Dee calls. I wave.
“Good morning, Miss Dee and Miss T!” We sound like some kind of nursery rhyme.
She waits until Curtis is out of earshot to whisper, “And Joel is the one who— ” But she can’t say it.
“He killed Grub.” My voice quavers on the words. My fingers tighten.
“T,” she says, and then she just looks at me.
And then we’re both crying.
“Oh my God,” she says into my hair, holding me snugly against her on the bench. “What you’ve been through. And I was right here. But you were alone.” She has wrapped me with her in the blanket.
I nod haltingly.
“I’m so sorry, T. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I whisper.
“You’re never going to be alone again,” she says.
“Why would she be alone?” says Mom from the doorway. I hear the slosh of her vodka tonic, the clink of ice. “My girls aren’t alone! That’s what I’m here for!”
Dee and I both laugh the same tiny, smothered laugh. It is absolutely not what she’s here for. But at the same time, she is here. We straighten away from one another and I wipe my nose.
Mom sets her drink on the ledge. She bursts into tears.
Dee and I look at each other.
“Oh, Tempest!” Mom brushes her face with well-manicured fingers. “I understand how you feel.”
I stand up and she throws her arms around me, snuffling into my shoulder. I rub her back.
“I understand, finally,” she says. “To be unable to have what you know you should have. The wrongness of it. Like looking through a window and there’s your life, spread out in front of you, but you can’t touch it!”
“Um,” I manage, not completely following.
“He was my soulmate!” she cries, drawing back.
“Al?” says Dee, a little startled.
“Yes, of course! And now he’s gone!”
“Oh,” I say. “Yes.” And I sigh, very quietly, to myself, but I hug her. And Dee hugs me. And we are a tower of hugging, holding each other up, holding each other together.