Chapter 16
“Forever and Ever, Amen” by Randy Travis
Funny how being a messed-up government science experiment doesn’t feel all that different from being a teenage girl.
Hell, it’s almost a relief. Messed-up government science experiments don’t have to stress about being alone in the back of an RV with the boy they like.
They don’t struggle to make small talk in the wreckage of their life crashing down around their ears.
They don’t worry about what to do with their hands, hyper-aware of every inch of their body as they slip under the comforter that still smells like the woman who is probably not their mother.
And when the boy they like kicks off his beat-up sneakers and flops down on top of the covers—well, that’s nothing to stress about either.
He’s just another messed-up government experiment too.
Brave in the darkness and the drone of the engine, I curl under Bas’s arm, my ear pressed to his chest, eyes closed in the slow roll of a distant ocean.
“What do you think it is?” I ask him. “Our matching un-heartbeats?”
Bas shrugs, jostling my head a little.
“I think it’s a piece of home.” His fingers drift through my hair, calluses tracing the shell of my ear where he tucked a flower only yesterday. “Haven’t you noticed? Hell is wherever we are.”
His words lodge somewhere deep inside my empty chest, caught like asphodel in a linen hem.
I fall asleep to their echo, carrying them through strange dreams with pieces missing.
Lost in my own head, I wander through a litany of familiar scents, sensations, the hazy outlines of places I should know like the back of my hand made strange and unfamiliar.
The terrain flakes away beneath my bare feet and bones, broken, a stained-glass panel with only the leading left behind.
I hold a waxen fruit in my hands.
I hold death in my hands.
I hold the sky in my hands. One by one, I eat the seeds—the stars—sharing them morsel by morsel with a stained and grinning mouth until the night sky winks out.
I wake to an unsteady sunbeam poking me in the eyelid, the RV rumbling slow across uneven terrain.
My neck aches. My mouth tastes like something might have died in it.
Bas’s eyes flutter open, and I roll away before he can catch a whiff of me.
Craning my head to work the kink out of my spine, I shove the curtains aside, squinting into the light.
We bump through a big grassy field turned into some kind of parking lot. Cars and old RVs sit in rows marked by unsteady spray paint as far as I can see out the little back window. Shoving myself upright, I wobble the bedroom door open, lurching as Cain reverses into a parking spot.
“Where are we?” I ask, frowning.
Bas sits up with a hiss, shaking out his arm. Trying to knead life back into the poor dead hand I slept on, he glances out the window.
“Flat.” He shrugs. “Probably Indiana.”
“Why Indiana?”
“Good visibility,” Cain answers, unfolding out of the driver’s seat with a groan and several cracking bones. “Good flea markets. No cameras, no ghosts, and no traceable transactions. Also, this diner is decent.”
He wings his wallet past my head. Even with one hand numb, eyes screwed shut and yawning as he emerges from the bedroom, Bas snatches it out of the air.
“Bring me back something.” Faster than my mother or I have ever managed, Cain bullies the table into its bench position, shoving cushions into place. “And clear out. I need to sleep.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bas laughs, heading for the door. “Pappy needs his nappy.”
It’s weird, watching the smile kite across Cain’s face. His lips twitch almost against his will and suddenly he’s a different person. Not the cold lighthouse on a broken shore but a… a father.
“You believe this shit?” he mutters, and I don’t know if he’s talking to me or himself, levering down onto the newly made couch.
“Such disrespect from my own kidnapped baby.” Flopping down, he tugs his baseball cap over his eyes, folds his arms across his chest. “You come back here with onions and I’m disowning you. ”
“Heartburn special, got it.” Bas grins, firing off a finger gun, then looks at me. “You coming, Jenny?”
How is it so easy for them?
“Yeah,” I croak. “Just let me brush my teeth first.”
Shoving myself into the tiny bathroom, I wedge the door shut on Bas’s baffled “Before you eat?” and pretend not to hear him.
I force myself to concentrate, to breathe slow and even, a normal teenage girl doing normal teenage things—and I don’t know why this, out of everything, is what gets to me.
I’m mired smack in the middle of several felonies, states away from home, the product of a messed-up government experiment, but watching the two of them together somehow hurts me the most.
I don’t know why Cain stole Bas, but I remember terror and rage and a cold metal table, and I can guess.
When my other half came after me, when he died and got up again and again in whatever body would hold him, I bet eventually he ran low on options, got trapped in a child like I did.
And somewhere along the way, twenty bullets deep, Cain must have realized killing him wouldn’t work, so he just… stole the whole baby.
He fathered him.
My chest aches, remembering a plate in the microwave, the anxious pinch between my mother’s eyes, futilely refreshing a subpar ghost-tracking weather app over and over. I wish…
I don’t know what I wish. Can I wish it had gone differently when it shouldn’t have happened at all?
Can I wish we’d learned to talk with more than actions?
More than offering warm leftovers and road trips and silent apologies forever left unanswered?
Knowing how she broke the world to build me, how much suffering my existence here caused, am I allowed to wish for anything at all?
I rinse the sour taste from my mouth with Listerine, slap cold water on my cheeks.
Held together with minty fresh determination, I get my shit together.
Outside, I take a quick picture to remember our parking spot—section C, spot 82.
No risk of Mom seeing it with my internet off and no SIM card in my phone.
Carpetbag in one hand and Bas in the other, we trudge across the muddy field, slogging through wet grass and kicking gravel.
Dew glitters on my boots, soaks the toes of Bas’s sneakers.
His socks must be sopping, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
We cut through the last row of cars, spilling into the flea-market proper, and Bas’s eyes light up.
Darting sideways, he drags me after him, to a vendor plonking down big Tupperwares of costume jewelry onto a beat-up folding table.
“We don’t have a lot of money,” I protest, but Bas flashes me a grin. He plunges a hand into the box and emerges with a velvet choker, its wispy agate cameo dangling from a short silver chain.
“You need a green ribbon, Jenny,” he says. “Keep your head on straight.”
I can’t breathe. I watch him haggle for it with my eyes stinging, head spinning, my un-heart so tight and swollen it clogs my throat and I can’t tear my eyes away.
The early-morning sun burns cords of copper into his gray hair, thaws his glittering black eyes into fresh-turned earth.
When he turns, smiling at me, my brain stalls out.
I can’t think of anything but harvest gods—of Hel, the only creature alive and dead, tricking the world to keep one; of the Morrigan and her cunning magics, stealing King Arthur away; of Persephone and what she saw in Hades—
Was it this? His mischief, his shy joy, his work-marred hands cupping her tender throat so gently, fastening the clasp?
Lunging forward, I grab the front of Bas’s hoodie and press my lips to his.
(We stand ankle-deep in the star-spattered river, moonlight in the bowls of our bronze scales draping a silvery beacon across the water. Ghosts journey, arms laden with death goods they won’t need beyond a single coin, an offering, the price of measuring hearts against feathers…
One of us weighs, one of us waits, arms open and torch held high on the opposite bank.
Which of us is Harvest? Which of us is Death?
We’ve swapped so many times I can’t remember where we began.)
My head spins. My rib cage feels like a dress that doesn’t fit, zipper straining, about to split.
Bas presses his forehead to mine. His hand spanning my cheek grounds me in my skin.
My cold fingers steal the blazing heat from his.
Breathless and giggling, we lean into each other like chilly drunks, both a little wobbly by the time we make it across the flea market to the tin-twinkie diner at its far edge.
Already decorated for Christmas to ward off spooky Halloween, frosty condensation hazes windows strung in plastic pine garlands.
A bell announces our arrival, the heat inside hitting us like a wall in sharp contrast to the frozen morning, syrup-sweet and promising sausages.
The hostess glances up from behind a long bar counter, her arms laden with plates.
“Sit anywhere, hon,” she tells us, so we do, sliding into a red vinyl booth opposite the little TV on the back wall, blaring out the morning news for all the old regulars hunkered over their coffee mugs. Bas hands me a slightly sticky menu from its rack against the window, but I can’t concentrate.
We’re probably the only people here under forty and everybody seems to know each other, conversation bandying back and forth across the bar, skipping across the booths.
An old man sitting at the bar cracks open an honest to God metal lunch box, hands over his thermos.
The waitress takes it like a habit, empties in a whole pot of coffee without a hiccup in the story about her kid’s last football game, hands it back with a plastic-wrapped sandwich she had ready and waiting.