Chapter 28
We made the most of our last day. As soon as we’d decided on a plan, we wrote a brief note to say goodbye to Monica and hit the road, taking just the RV and truck, leaving the station wagon behind in the driveway.
There was some debate about what beach to go to, but ultimately, we decided to push west toward Newport Beach, one of the closest to Palm Springs.
We’d only made it halfway there when one of the tires on the RV blew out.
I was inside when it happened. We were on the highway, and there was a horrible sound—the painful scream of metal on metal—and then a sharp jolt that threw us out of our seats.
Riley cried out, struggling to regain control of the RV. “Holy shit!”
There was a steep drop-off on the side of the highway, a wide gully between us and a large construction site.
The yellow dirt blurred past the windows as the RV drifted right, careening toward the guardrail, and for a sick moment, I was certain we’d plunge straight through it.
There was a spray of sparks, and Riley wrenched the emergency brake, and we all snapped forward.
I crashed into the kitchen cabinets, cups and bowls raining down around me.
Chloe lurched forward, slamming her head on the countertop as the RV ground to a wheezing stop.
I thought we would die, thought the guardrail would give and we’d wreck in the gully. I thought that Death would appear a split moment before the RV imploded into a ball of raging flames and we would all burn, like Corbin, in a gruesome tragedy of his design.
The door of the RV burst open. I froze in terror, but it was just Shiloh.
She went to me first and then the others, checking to make sure everyone was okay.
By some miracle, Chloe was the only one injured.
There was an ugly bruise forming on her forehead where she’d struck the countertop, and we debated among ourselves whether or not we should take her to the hospital.
Her pupils were the same size, and she knew what month it was, so it didn’t seem like she was concussed.
But we were all on edge, with Death’s threat hanging over our heads.
What if he planned to pluck us off one by one?
What if Chloe was bleeding out from the brain right now—a deadly hemorrhage?
“You’re paranoid,” she said, holding a pack of frozen spinach to her swelling temple. “I’m fine. We don’t have time for a hospital detour. We need to get to that beach. Let’s go.”
We took her word for it. But when Riley attempted to fit a new tire on the RV, we realized that the damage was more extensive than we’d thought.
A bit of metal had twisted itself around the axel when we’d run over it, gashing the underside of the RV, making it undriveable even if we changed the back tire.
“She’s done for,” said Riley, wiping sweat from her brow. It was brutally hot, even with the wind from the cars streaking past us on the highway.
So we piled into the pickup and set off. Abandoning the RV on the side of the road felt a lot like leaving one of our own behind, and I turned to watch as it shrank into the distance and disappeared.
Shiloh rerouted us off the highway and onto a small exit off the road.
We were still about forty minutes away from the beach and decided to get off the highway to avoid the traffic.
I sat shotgun in the pickup truck, Shiloh behind the wheel; despite our protests, she’d been determined to drive.
The space between us felt charged and narrow, and even after everything, a part of me wanted to lean into her, forget the rest. But I refused to let my own body betray me.
We pulled around a tight turn, and there it was.
The ocean, dark and glistening, white-capped waves almost as tall as I was breaking against the shoreline with a roar.
I’d seen big water before, spent my share of spring breaks on the coast of Lake Michigan, but the ocean was different.
Hungrier and more frightening. The sight of it—the vastness and power—stole the breath from my lungs.
Before the truck pulled to a full stop, we got out and ran for the water, kicking off our shoes and stripping out of our clothes as we ran down the beach.
The bravest girls—Chloe and Iona—plunged into the surf headfirst in nothing but their underwear.
I ran with them but stopped just short of the waves to take it all in.
The view was sweeping, and I felt pulled by it, as if I were sliding down the shore as the waves rushed and swirled at my ankles.
Shiloh came to stand beside me, sliding her hands into the pockets of her jeans. She looked out over the ocean, eyes narrowed against the sun. “So? Is it everything you thought it would be?”
“It’s all right. As good a place to die as any.”
“You know, we had a beach day when Adeline was traveling with us. We went south, toward Florida, to the prettiest beach you’ve ever seen. Better even than this one. The waters were clear blue; you could see straight down to the bottom. It was stunning.”
I smiled, imagining Adeline in the water with Iona and Chloe, the rolling waves lifting her off her feet. How she would’ve laughed, even in the wake of the biggest ones that charged the shore with a roar. “I bet she loved it.”
“She would’ve if she’d come with us. But Adeline wouldn’t go, wouldn’t even get near it. She told us to drop her off at a mall in town, and she stayed there all day until we came back for her.”
“What? Why? She always wanted to see the ocean.”
“She was waiting for you.” Shiloh kept her eyes on the water when she said it. “She said she didn’t want to experience it for the first time with anyone but you.”
I felt the tears coming then, a pressure in my throat that I tried and failed to choke back.
Adeline was never one to deny herself any pleasure, certainly not on my behalf.
It didn’t matter what she wanted or if I stood in the way of it.
She’d always gotten what she wanted. Or at least, that’s what I’d thought. “Did she really say that?”
Shiloh nodded. “She was adamant. We tried to get her to come with us, but she refused. She always had this space for you that she held close. There was no future she imagined for herself that didn’t have you in it, and I think she wanted you to know that, even if she couldn’t say it, if she didn’t know exactly how. ”
I was crying now in a way I hadn’t for some time, the tears hot and angry, streaking my cheeks, dripping off my chin and into the ocean.
Shiloh turned to me then, a hand raised to my face. But she faltered, thought better of it. “Are you okay?”
I nodded, wiped my tears on my arm, but it was no use. They kept coming. “We just took so much from each other, and we were so jealous and so resentful, especially at the end. Sometimes I think I hated her as much as I loved her, and I loved her a lot.”
“You did the best you could.”
“I want that to be true. I really do. But I could’ve given more.
That night before she left, we had a fight.
Our worst one. Ever. I don’t even know how it started, really.
It was stupid at first, or it seemed that way until we were screaming at each other.
Saying the sort of things you can’t take back. ”
“Like what?”
I considered ignoring that question. I had never been able to bring myself to say or even think the things I had spit at Adeline that night in the midst of my anger and hurt.
“I told her that I was tired of her being so sick. I said that there was no one, not even me, who could love her out of the misery of being who and what she was and that I was tired of trying. That wasn’t even the worst of it. ”
With her eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun, Shiloh looked almost pained. “What was?”
I let myself remember for the first time since Adeline disappeared, the words coming back to me so clearly, like a past version of me was speaking them aloud: Why do you take so much from me?
Every single day, you drain everyone in this house of their time and their concern and their energy.
And then you just sit here, useless, watching all of us live and suffer in your stead because you’re too weak, or maybe just too fucking selfish, to take accountability for your own misery.
And then Adeline’s sobs, broken little sounds, small and animal.
I couldn’t bear to listen then, had left her alone on the floor of her bedroom coming undone. But I heard her now, made myself listen, until the memories faded into the rush and pull of the waves.
I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I opened them again, I turned back to Shiloh.
“I made sure she knew all the ways she’d failed me.
I think, as screwed up as it was, I wanted to punish her in that moment.
I wanted to hurt her, and I did. I wish I’d known then that those were the last words I’d ever say to her. I’d give anything to take them back.”
The wind blew my hair in front of my eyes. This time, Shiloh let herself touch me, pulling my curls out of my face, tucking them carefully behind the shell of my ear. She held me for a moment, a hand at my cheek so that I couldn’t turn away. “You need to forgive yourself.”
“I can’t,” I said, frustrated that she didn’t, couldn’t understand.
“I can’t, because the guilt and grief are all tied up together.
I can’t untangle the two, and even if I could, I don’t want to, because that’s all I have left of her now, and if I let that go, then she’s gone.
Really gone, and there’s nothing I can do to get her back.
So I’d rather keep it. Even if it hurts. Even if it kills me.”
Shiloh dropped her hand. She was quiet for a long time, watching the waves roll.
“If you want to punish yourself, that’s your choice.
But don’t delude yourself into believing that you’re doing it for her.
I might not have known Adeline as well as you did, but I know that she wanted you happy.
She wanted it so badly that, even when she was staring down her own death, she begged me to make sure you were okay.
It was her dying wish. Are you really going to deny her, Roslyn? ”
In the distance, the sun hung above the water like a charm. In its light, the other girls seemed to glow. It was so easy to imagine Adeline among them, where she belonged. But she wasn’t here today.
I was.
So I made a choice. Not for myself, but for Adeline. I decided to make the most of the time I had left.
For a few hours, everything felt good and right and perfect.
We swam and made pitiful sandcastles. We told jokes and recounted the best stories from our travels thus far.
There was a diner just down the coast, less than a mile away, and Riley returned with milkshakes so thick we couldn’t suck them through our straws and greasy paper bags full of fried seafood—scallops and fish, clam strips and shrimp, skinny little smelt fried whole—which we ate while the ocean licked at our toes.
The sun carved its path across the sky, sinking low to the water, disappearing, and just like that, our last day was over. In the darkness that followed, we waited for Death.
And Death came. We saw him walking down the beach, a black figure wrapped in a storm of sand.
He stopped just short of us. The sand went still. His expression was placid, the corners of his lips slightly upturned into a smile that seemed cruel in the moment, but there was no real venom in it.
The girls all scrambled to their feet, but I shouldered my way to the front, standing beside Shiloh.
I reached out to give her hand a small squeeze, but it felt cold and dead in my grasp.
When I looked at her, I saw her expression, blank with grief…
and hopelessness. And I realized that she thought this was the end, my last day—maybe hers too.
Taking that first step toward Death was one of the bravest things I’d ever done. I took a second one and felt a sharp tug—Shiloh’s fingers grasping onto mine, attempting to drag me back. I turned to her. “Let me do this. It’s the only thing I want.”
I meant it.
The way I saw it then, the distance between me and Death was the distance between me and my sister.
He might as well have been wearing her face.
He could’ve been her in the flesh, for all it mattered to me in that moment.
I knew that I had to go, that whatever was on the other side of this would be closer to her, and that was enough for me.
I needed to put this to rest. Even if the cost was my life.
I tore free of Shiloh’s grasp, and Death cocked his head, perplexed.
I stepped forward. “The first time you touched me, you sent me back to the night my sister died. I want you to take me back so I can take her life and fulfill your request that we kill one of our own.”
There was a long beat as Death considered my sacrifice. I didn’t breathe as I waited, watching, staring into the swirling black of his irises, that pinprick of light in the center of them.
I braced myself for the worst. Waited to die. And when I was certain it would happen, when I said my silent goodbyes, Death’s mouth curved into a smile. I knew then that I had him, that I’d baited him with a scenario too intriguing, too twisted to refuse.
“Very well,” he said.
I didn’t see him step forward, but my fingers seared with pain as his hand locked around mine. And then it was as though we were ripped backward down the beach and through time itself, the ocean blurring, the sand shifting beneath our feet, kicking up into burning sheets and torrents, blinding me.
I heard the distant shouts of my friends, Shiloh screaming my name, as I left my body behind.