Chapter 14
We stopped for the night at a campground not far from the barbecue joint.
The place was crawling with other campers—retirees and families in rented RVs with murals of the Grand Canyon emblazoned across the sides, a handful of hikers in hammock tents strung between the trees.
There was barely room to accommodate our vehicles, but we managed to squeeze ourselves into a small plot in the middle of the campground, which the girls spruced up with their lawn chairs and string lights.
That night, we slept all together in the overcrowded RV.
Around midnight, when the air grew thick and stuffy, someone cracked the windows open, and breaths of wet wind swept through the RV, carrying the scent of rain.
I slept in one of the fold-down bunks across from the kitchen, Iona tucked beside me, pressed flush against the metal wall.
But when I squeezed my eyes shut, sleep wouldn’t come.
I’m not sure if it was my proximity to Iona—I was still getting accustomed to the, at times, suffocating closeness between the girls—or if it was the ghost of Jasmine, still alive in my mind’s eye, keeping sleep at bay.
But a few hours past midnight, I gave up, kicked off my blankets, and slid down and out of the bunk.
There were three girls—Riley, Skye, and Chloe—sleeping on the floor in a nest of quilts and downy pillows.
I picked my way past them on my tiptoes and stepped precariously into the narrow galley of the kitchen, where I made myself a warm cup of milk, my favorite remedy for sleepless nights.
It was there that I saw Naomi sitting on the stairs under the awning, the light of her vape winking in the dark.
She exhaled mouthfuls of smoke, which rose and floated in a pale halo around her head.
I took my mug of milk and sat down on the stair, beside her.
The rain came down hard, but the awning above the RV door kept us mostly dry.
Naomi listed to the right, bumping her shoulder with mine in wordless greeting.
We just sat there for a long time watching the rain come down.
I offered her my mug of milk. “My mom says it helps you sleep. Some chemical in it.”
Naomi smiled graciously, took an obligatory sip. “Adeline told me how your mom used to make it for you before bed, with sugar and vanilla.”
I was surprised that Adeline had said as much to her.
She was never one for nostalgia and always rolled her eyes when my mom recounted her favorite stories from our childhood, as if she was reminding Adeline of something she’d sooner forget.
I guess she’d had a change of heart, part of her strange metamorphosis that summer.
Naomi stood up, extended a hand. “Come kill with me.”
I didn’t take it. “What? Now? Shiloh gave you another name?”
She nodded, gazing off into the alleys that ran between parked RVs.
“She does that sometimes, especially with the older girls. Besides, you need to get back in the saddle. If you don’t, you’ll get scared of it.
It’s like what they tell you if you get attacked by a dog.
The very next day, you need to go to the shelter, play with one before you develop real fear. The kind that grows into a phobia.”
I knew she was right. I could already feel the cold fingers of terror seizing around me at the very thought of killing again. I got up, stiff and a little numb. Naomi put her hand in mine and guided me through the dark. She led me to an RV parked a good ways away from the others in the campground.
Naomi showed herself inside. It was a much nicer RV than ours.
It was roomy, and it had a flat-screen TV over an electric fireplace, the flames dancing behind slick glass.
On the kitchen countertop, an empty bottle of wine and a bottle of pills, also empty.
There was a name on its label: Elizabeth Paulson.
My heart sank. “Oh my god. They didn’t…Naomi, did they—”
“We’re not investigators,” she said, a soft whisper. “We’re not here to uncover how or why a person died or judge their decision. Enough people do that already.”
“But if they were young and healthy, shouldn’t we—”
She stepped past me, through the kitchen and into the back half of the RV. The bedroom. “It’s too late.”
Naomi opened the door, and I heard it: a horrible rattling, like loose change in a dryer.
It was the sound my grandmother had made before she died.
There were two people in the bed, under a red quilt that looked handmade.
A man and a woman—she was deathly thin, and her head was bald apart from a few stray wisps of hair at her temples.
They lay motionless, their breaths slow and labored, mouths wrenched ajar.
If I called 911 now, I wondered if it would be enough to save them.
I wondered, too, how long it would take for Death to right my wrong.
The woman was gaunt, her skin taut and yellow with jaundice.
The man at her side looked barely better.
He was painfully skinny just like her, but his hands were red and swollen.
Both of them appeared older than Stewart Gavin by a good decade or more.
With some relief, I wondered if they were already marked for death no matter what I did.
“She’s sick. Cancer, probably, from the looks of it,” I said, as if trying to absolve myself of guilt—for not calling for help, for not trying to save them.
“Maybe she was tired of suffering and he didn’t want to live without her, so he took the pills too.
Or maybe he’s sick himself in a way that we can’t see. ”
“The good thing about the work we do is that we don’t have to rationalize like that,” said Naomi, and I could tell she was trying to be gentle with me. “It’s not our job to assess the morality of when and how someone dies or whether or not they chose to. They’re not our lives or our deaths.”
As she said this, Naomi came around the edge of the bed, standing on the man’s side. She nodded for me to do the same with the wife. My feet felt leaden and numb beneath me as I stepped up to the bed. I didn’t want to look at the woman I was about to kill, but I did it anyway.
Her face was smooth and expressionless, no tension pulling at the corners of her mouth, which probably meant she wasn’t in any pain despite how sick she looked. If it wasn’t for that horrible rattle every time she breathed, I might’ve thought she was just asleep.
“You want to know a secret?” Naomi asked, peering down at the husband, a fondness in her eyes that reminded me of the expression mothers wore when they stared down at their newborn babies for the first time. “I love this part.”
I froze. I had always assumed that of all the girls, Naomi would be the most averse to what we did.
She was warm and gentle. The mother who cared for everyone.
And here, by the sides of this couple we were going to dispatch, her manner was no different, but the context was all wrong.
I was filled with dread, on the verge of tears, and Naomi was beaming.
“These moments are so precious,” she said. “It’s an honor to get to see them. To watch a person transition between here and gone. To have some role in that journey.”
Naomi put a hand on the man’s forehead, and his chest filled with air and just…
stopped in an eternal inhale. I thought it would be a long time before Naomi moved—the experience of the life montages felt like it stretched on forever for me as I fell through the memories of the dying—but Naomi barely missed a beat.
She blinked a few times, as if to clear dust from her eyes.
Then she bent down, her long hair sweeping over her shoulder, and pressed a kiss to his brow.
When she straightened, her gaze fell to me, expectant.
“Go on, then. Don’t make him wait for her. ”
I looked down at the woman. The breaks between each of her rattling breaths grew longer and longer. Her expression bore no signs of pain, but I could tell her body was…fighting a futile battle.
“It’s necessary,” said Naomi, watching me, not the woman.
“Merciful, even, when you think about it. In death, there’s so much grief and carnage.
Even the expected ones are filled with their share of tragedy.
But unlike most, she won’t have to suffer for even a moment.
She went to bed beside the man she loved, and somewhere between night and morning, she’ll just have…
gone. If only we could all be that lucky. ”
She made it seem like I was wrong for not doing it.
And maybe she was right. I was prolonging the suffering of a worn-out body, poisoned and ailing, all because I was too weak to usher in the inevitable.
To give her the mercy of a quiet ending.
What if she woke up and saw her husband dead beside her?
Her last moments would be filled with horror instead of the peaceful passing I could’ve given her if I’d just worked up the nerve.
I met Naomi’s eyes across the bed. “You can do it,” she said. “For her. For Adeline.”
So I pressed my hand to the woman’s side.
She was so thin I could feel the ribbing of her bones beneath her nightgown.
I shifted my hand to her arm, and the moment we made contact, skin to skin, I felt the sickening sensation of falling back through time and memory, and I saw her life in a series of bright flashes.
Grass blurring beneath pumping legs. A baby’s cry.
A fish reeled from the water, snapping wildly on the line.
Damp and mewling kittens in a cardboard box soaked with rain.
A sheet cake stuck through with twenty candles, the wicks black and smoking.
A man with kind eyes and broad shoulders, my hand in his.
The memories reeled on, like a roll of film unspooling, until they gave way to a darkness so complete I was lost to it, free-falling through oblivion.
And then, from the nothingness, someone stepped forward. A little girl.
I saw something in the distant dark, a small sun, a living light reaching its fingers through the murk. The little girl started to run toward it, throwing herself forward with a fearlessness that most of us lose somewhere between our first and final breaths.
And then she was gone into the light.
I opened my eyes, and I was back in my own body with Naomi and the two corpses lying on the bed between us.
Naomi smiled at me. “Not so bad, right?”
The room reeled a little when I nodded, but I managed to ground myself. “It was shorter this time. The vision, I mean. All her memories.”
“That’s good. It means you’re not getting dragged too deep. You’re adapting, getting good at this.”
I followed Naomi out of the RV and into the rain.
But instead of heading back to our RV, she settled herself beneath the awning just outside the door.
I sat down beside her, and we watched the drizzling rain come down in silence for a little while, as if the deaths hadn’t happened.
As if we’d been sitting out there the whole time.
I thought about what Naomi said, about my becoming good at this. About whether or not I wanted to be. “Was she any good at this? Adeline, I mean.”
“Not at first,” said Naomi. “She wasn’t particularly squeamish, but I think the closeness bothered her. The memories, being pulled into the mind and life of a stranger. She hated it.”
That tracked. Adeline didn’t like to involve herself with anyone too deeply.
“But when she found her footing, she took to this like a natural. Killed even quicker than anyone except maybe Riley. It seemed like it came easy to her. And I think, well…”
“You think what?”
“I think she liked it. Loved it, maybe even.”
Naomi didn’t seem like she was lying, but I didn’t quite believe her either.
Mostly because, that first night with the girls, when I’d overheard Chloe and Riley talking in the bathroom, they made it sound like Adeline had just…
folded. But Naomi was saying something entirely different.
So who was telling the truth? “The first night I was here, I overheard Chloe and Riley talking in the bathroom late at night.”
Naomi maintained a flat affect. Suspiciously expressionless. “Those two love to gossip. What did they say this time?”
“They made it seem like Adeline struggled. Couldn’t hack it. And they mentioned that she’d lost some kind of game. Do you know anything about that?”
Naomi, for her part, appeared genuinely perplexed.
But then…she was smart enough to be a good liar.
All of them were. “I can’t say that I do.
But I wouldn’t think too much of it, to be honest.” She got up, stretched with a stifled yawn.
“We all try to be good to each other, as good as we can. But as with all groups, there’s…
competition. Maybe that’s what they were talking about? ”
I stood up. “What do you compete for?”
“The same things everyone does, I suppose. Recognition, affection…credit for our contributions. I mean, doesn’t everyone want to be validated in the end?
That’s half the work we do on behalf of Death.
In those last moments of people’s lives, we come to tell them that they mean something, and they’re seen, if only by us.
You get it. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?
To find that kind of understanding in Adeline, in her death.
You want something from her, something she took with her when she crossed over to the other side. ”
I froze as Naomi put a hand to my cheek, the same one she’d killed the man with just moments before.
She rubbed small circles into my cheek with her thumb, her eyes narrowed, and she seemed to search for something within me that she couldn’t find.
“I know that you came to look for some piece of her that she might’ve stashed here, with us, that will lead you to something that feels like the truth.
But I’m telling you what the others won’t: We don’t have it.
Whatever it is you’re looking for, whatever you hope to find, it’s not here with us. ”
“Then where is it?” I demanded, in tears now, my voice thick with them. “How do I heal from this if I don’t even know the truth?”
Naomi’s mouth softened with sympathy. “Maybe this is something you’re not meant to heal from. Maybe the pain, the grief, is that piece of her that you’ve been searching for.”