Chapter 29 #2
I couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d leaned over and slapped me. “Tha-that’s not true, and if you’d just come to me and told me that you were thinking that, I could’ve…helped you. Or something. We could’ve talked. Made things right.”
“I was too ashamed,” said Adeline. “I felt pathetic, and I hated myself for resenting the person I love more than anyone else. I didn’t know how to face you, so I just stopped trying. I got sicker and sicker and angrier and angrier until you hated me too.”
“I never hated you, I—”
“Don’t lie to me, Roslyn. Not now.”
I clamped my mouth shut. She was right, and we both knew it. Sometimes I’d even wondered if it was impossible for me to love her so fiercely, to know her as well as I did without that hatred. As if it was a price I had to pay for the proximity. “Adeline, I’m so sorry.”
“Will you stop fucking apologizing?” It was more a plea than a demand, no anger in it, only desperation.
“But I have to, because I don’t want you to—” I couldn’t bear to say the word die.
“I don’t want to leave here without being sure that you know the truth.
You say you didn’t measure up to me, but that’s not true.
I have only ever existed in your shadow, and I don’t know who or what I am without you.
All I’ve done is fill the spaces you’ve left behind, but I’m no substitute. ”
Adeline shook her head. “You’re wrong, Roslyn—”
“I’m not. I’ve taken everything from you because I wanted so badly to be who you are. To have what you have. You’re so full of fire and life, and everyone knows it. I’m nothing in comparison.”
Adeline was quiet for a long time. Not looking at me. “What I have is artificial. Put on. It has to be, because I’m so weak beneath it all. But you’re not like that. You’re stronger than you seem. You always have been. That’s why you’ll walk away from this. You’re going to have a good, long life—”
“Stop—”
“You’re going to find someone who really cares about you. Someone who really deserves you—”
“Adeline, shut up—”
“And I’ll watch on, from my place in forever. And I’ll be happy for you. Really happy this time. There’s nothing I’ll want to take from you or be jealous of. No way for us to hurt each other anymore. Just the good things left.”
I was crying too hard to speak. I crawled across the playhouse, tucked myself into her the way I used to when we were kids.
She’d hated it when I’d done that. Adeline was never a touchy person, always squirming her way out of hugs, the first to pull away.
But when I leaned against her then, she tipped her head to mine, her cheek pressing into the top of my skull.
“I know what you’re here to do,” said Adeline, and her voice was weaker now. “I’m ready for it. I’ve known for some time that it was coming, and I’m tired of fighting it. I’m tired of just about everything.”
“Even me?”
I felt her shake her head. “No. Not you. You’re the hardest part of all of this, but…you’ve got to let me go.”
“Why?”
“I was never yours to keep,” she said, a fact so simple I couldn’t challenge it.
Because a part of me had always known that it would come down to this.
I had spent my whole life preparing to lose her, fearing the day she’d cast me off or just disappear.
I knew I couldn’t hold on to her any more than I could grasp a fistful of fog.
But despite all the years I’d had to prepare for her inevitable loss—I still wasn’t ready to let her go.
“Promise me you’ll stay with me?” I whispered. “In whatever way you can?”
“I will,” she said, and nodded to herself. “That’s a goal of mine.”
I laughed aloud at the stubborn absurdity of it. Only Adeline would have a list of goals to accomplish in death. But I believed she’d be able to do it.
“You’re not scared?” I asked her, still stalling, trying to prepare for the moment. My hand, the one cursed with the touch of Death, gave a dull throb. A warning. It was almost time.
“Of course I’m scared. I’ve been scared my whole life.” Her expression suddenly changed, her mouth pulling taut at the edges. Her heart fluttered up to her sternum and trembled there, like a leaf in the wind.
I grabbed her, harder than I intended, my fingers clenching around her wrist like I was free-falling and she was the last thing I had to hold on to. “No. I’m not ready.”
“You never will be,” said Adeline, and when she took me by the hand, I felt a flash of white pain, sharp and momentarily blinding. My vision seemed to reverse for a split moment so that, instead of looking into her face, I was staring at my own.
I looked broken.
I blinked, returning to myself. Adeline guided my hand to her sternum, and I could feel her heart.
“There’s no hospital that can save me now,” she whispered, smiling as she said it.
I tried to pull my hand away, but Adeline held it fast, even as her strength began to fail her. Her eyes went out of focus, threatening to roll back into her head as she fought to stay conscious.
It couldn’t have been easy, what with her heart barely beating in her chest.
“Come on,” she said again. “I can’t do this without you. It has to be a choice, and I want it to be yours, not his. It’s the last thing I’ll ever ask. Don’t say no.”
I felt the pressure of tears in my throat, like a stone that I couldn’t choke down.
I had more that I wanted to say to her. More that I wanted to ask—about what I should do in the future without her, the kind of person I should be, how best to mourn her, where she wanted me to spread her ashes, when and with whom. But the time for questions was over.
“Goodbye,” she said, and her chest gave beneath my hand.
I fell through her, into free fall, through memories—hers or mine, I didn’t know.
I saw our house in Michigan, in the middle of summer.
I ran toward it, the asphalt so hot I had to pick my feet up quick, run faster, throwing myself forward with abandon to keep them from burning.
I grew older, slower. My feet turned heavy, like stones I could barely lift.
The sadness came down like a smothering blanket, settled around my shoulders, until I could barely think beyond it.
I lay in bed with my sister, our bodies fitted together, and I told her that I was going to get better someday and that, when I did, we’d go to the sea.
It was a promise I couldn’t keep. One of many.
My sadness festered, turned to anger. Then the anger turned to rage. The sessions with the therapists stopped helping. Pills were offered that I couldn’t bring myself to take.
That same summer, I went north with my aunt, to a little cabin in the woods near the lake.
At night, when I was supposed to be sleeping, the water called to me.
And when the rage hooked its claws between my ribs, when the blanket of my sadness grew so heavy I felt like I’d die beneath it, I answered.
I left the house in the middle of the night, barefoot, in a T-shirt, and walked two miles through the trees, sliding down the dunes to the lake’s edge.
It was cold, and the wind tossed the water into whitecaps that wrecked themselves on the shore.
I stepped into the dark water. It was so cold I could barely breathe, but I managed to get three words out, a pinched whisper: “Here I am.”
I waded deeper, until the water came up to my chest, until I couldn’t feel the bottom anymore. Then I went farther still, let the currents take me. The black waves broke over my head, and then I was falling, weightless, sucked down into the deep.
When I woke, the morning sun was pulling clear of the dunes and there were six girls standing over me. Shiloh and Naomi, Iona and Chloe, Riley and Skye. Though I didn’t know their names yet. Behind them was the dark cut of a man, Death.
A bargain was made. A deal struck.
Roslyn.
The memories fractured. I saw Shiloh with her back to the stars.
I saw a playhouse in the middle of the woods.
I saw myself—no, my sister. Her dark eyes filled with tears.
She was screaming at me, pleading, almost. I wanted to tell her that everything would be okay, because I would make it that way.
Because I loved her. Because she was the best of me, and I’d always known it.
Even then, at the end, I knew. I wanted to tell her, but the words were gone. I was losing her.
Stay with us.
New memories surfaced. The forest in the dead of night. A city of lights, music pulsing through me. Then, all at once, I was in the back of a pickup truck, Shiloh’s, wind ripping at my hair.
I fell, through time and memories, reeling through a thousand stolen moments, shrinking into the distance, into the pinpricks of stars, the whorls of the galaxies cycling around me. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, the spinning had stopped, and she was there with me, at the end.
Roslyn.
I took her by the hand. Pressed it to my chest. And in that moment, she was everything.
Come back to me.
—
I opened my eyes, found myself back in my own body, staring up at a black sky spangled with stars. The girls encircled me, their faces backlit by moonlight. “She’s alive. She made it.”
I sat up, and they parted so that I had a clear view down the shore to the black figure of Death, wrapped in a storm of sand.
There was a sound coming off him, the voices of the dead forming a kind of windswept chorus.
I don’t know if I imagined it, but I thought I heard Adeline and Skye, their voices on the wind.
I didn’t know what they were saying, but it felt like goodbye.
“He’s setting us free,” said Shiloh, tears streaming down her cheeks. And it wasn’t just her. All of them were crying as we watched him slip away.
All at once, I was on my feet. I ran—fast as I ever have—but Death, walking slowly, kept pulling ahead, leaving me behind. He shrank into the distance, so small I could barely see him. Wind rolled down the beach, throwing sand between us. When it settled, he was gone.