Chapter 46 Amelia
FORTY-SIX
AMELIA
Fearlessness didn’t exist in a girl like Amelia. Her mother told her so when she was five and got stuck in the white oak in their backyard. Brian had climbed it with courage burning so brightly that Amelia stood at the bottom in blind awe of her little friend.
On her turn, Amelia had made it only six feet off the ground. She wrapped herself around a branch, closed her eyes, and wailed for help. Her mother got her down and, after the ordeal, consoled Amelia with homemade cookies and a worried smile.
“You’re fearless in other ways,” she’d said, but it stuck like a thorn in Amelia’s side as she waited for her brand of fearlessness to show up.
It did tonight.
When she wasn’t looking, it blindsided her. Perhaps it should’ve made her proud or relieved, but Amelia’s body was wooden and aching and her mind snowy with static as Mirabelle followed her into Emory’s bathroom.
“You were so brave,” Mirabelle said with misplaced effusion that echoed amongst the glazed tiles.
It reminded Amelia of the recommendation letter her English professor had sent to Harvard. It’d been stuffed to the gills with thoughtful hyperboles. A fictional Amelia existed more exacting and assertive and braver than she had any right to be.
Amelia shook her head and started the shower. “I wasn’t brave. I was lucky.”
Mirabelle stared at Amelia as if it never occurred to her that bravado made no guarantees, that luck was dumb and heroes often failed.
She opened her mouth for the million-dollar question—did Ivan do to her what he did to those other girls?
—but Amelia bluntly grounded that conversation before it took flight.
“I’d like to clean up now,” she said. “I’d also like something other than a t-shirt and underwear to sleep in. Maybe one of Emory’s flannels.”
Mirabelle nodded but sniffled with misty eyes.
She needed comfort Amelia couldn’t give and didn’t have to begin with.
That well ran dry and might not function the same again, so Amelia turned her back on a crying friend, a moment she’d surely torment herself with later.
With nothing else to say, Mirabelle left.
After her shower, Amelia toweled off and wrung out her hair but didn’t take inventory of her injuries.
She felt them just fine; every bruise, scrape, and cut accounted for.
Then there was the bite mark still screaming with pain too loud to ignore.
Mirabelle had dug out a red flannel shirt and left it on Emory’s bed with a pair of leggings.
No one wore flannel in Nevada, but in some outpost of Emory’s closet, his sweaters and fleeces hung like a homesick wish.
Amelia dressed with the desire to burrow beneath bolts of fabric, layers and layers as thick as armor, until she disappeared. Even that wasn’t enough, though, so she sought comfort in her and Emory’s sanctuary on the third floor.
The room enchanted with its strange trinkets and paintings of lunar-drenched seas and boats seeking harbor. She’d almost forgotten about the black phone there and couldn’t remember why it’d once fascinated her. It just looked ordinary, its sheen dull beneath a layer of dust.
Cross-legged on the floor, Amelia flipped through a book of short stories.
She skimmed the words but mostly admired the intricate gold-leaf illustrations.
Emory found her there and sat beside her with blood still on his cheek and dirt staining his jeans.
He brought an ice pack and medical supplies that laid in a heap next to him.
“That was my grandmother’s,” he told her and gestured to the book in her lap.
“She kept a bunch of old toys and books in her basement from when my dad was a kid. Whenever we’d visit, she’d send us down there to play.
I didn’t care about the toys. I only ever wanted to look at this book.
I liked the pictures and some of the stories. ”
Old books had memories; the parts where the spine was worn and glue cracked from revisiting the same page.
After a while, they opened there of their own accord, committing to heart the most well-loved parts.
That book was no different. It flopped open to an illustration of a raven carrying the moon.
“This was your favorite,” Amelia said, and it felt as though she was reaching into Emory’s distant past. So little of it existed at Liam’s. Perhaps just that book.
“Is it that obvious?” he chuckled, and Amelia skimmed the story.
In it, a raven and a dove made an odd couple.
Every evening at dusk, the dove mourned the loss of day.
Distraught by the dove’s grief, the raven fetched his most cherished stone—pockmarked but brilliantly silver—and hauled it to the night sky to resemble the sun.
And so it was said that the raven hung the moon for his dove.
“Why this one?” she asked.
Emory shrugged and studied the page as if unearthing the memories there. “It has the happiest ending, the kind I wanted for myself.”
“And what kind is that?”
“Finding someone worth hanging the moon for,” he said sweetly and smiled at her nestled in a cocoon of his flannel. Pain sullied that smile as he opened his arms. “Come here. I need you.”
Amelia eagerly crawled into his lap. With her body against his—heart to heart, cheek to cheek—she felt the uneven, shuddering quality of his breath.
The more it labored, the tighter he held on.
She clung to him, the only comfort she needed, but when she closed her eyes, that cinder block wall and stained mattress filled her vision.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” she whispered with her throat aching.
“I know. I was crawling the walls without you.”
Emory placed his hand over her heart as if counting each beat. The meaning transferred in his touch. He needed a sign of life to know it wasn’t a dream.
“I’m okay,” Amelia assured him.
Twice, she’d told him that because if she said it enough, then it might be true.
Did she believe it? Only time would tell.
In their sanctuary, neither had to pretend, though, so they came apart where no one else could see.
The others wouldn’t know how they trembled against one another or the tears that wet both their cheeks.
“What happened down there?” Amelia asked and motioned to the foyer far below.
Emory ran a hand over his face and exhaled a heavy breath. His eyes darted to the shadowed edges of the room that seemed to stretch further across the floor.
“A few street soldiers were murdered tonight. I guess one declaration of war wasn’t enough.”
He snickered at the last bit and shook his head.
Amelia searched his face for artifacts of how he’d come apart, the hurt he shared right there in the dark.
Ever the master of restraint, Emory had brought to heel whatever overtook him in the foyer.
She’d already seen it, though, and was bound to again.
“I meant you,” Amelia said and gently walked a line that seemed to be shifting beneath her. “You were ready to leave here and run away.”
“I still am,” Emory said with a joyless laugh. It rung hollow in the space between them. “You were right, though. This shit has to end, and I can’t run from Ivan forever.”
Resolute as ever, he lifted his chin and put up his defenses with stoic reserve. A pit grew in Amelia’s stomach. The fire still burned in Emory, no matter how often he tried to ice it out. Sooner or later, he’d lose the ability to contain the blaze.
“It’s okay to come apart,” she told him and rested her palms against his chest that rose with sharp breaths.
“For now, I need to keep it together,” Emory said. He combed his fingers through her hair, but his jaw clenched and brow hardened. “You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want, but did Ivan…”
When he couldn’t manage the question, he abandoned it altogether. Amelia shook her head but spared the details, including Ivan’s assault on Richard.
“He would have but didn’t. You came just in time. I did recognize him, though.”
Emory’s eyes snapped to her with dread that surfaced as swift and fierce as the storm-battered seas in Francisca’s paintings.
“What do you mean? How?”
“I saw him at Rich’s party. He came after me and Brian. I thought you knew.”
“Fuck. No, I didn’t.” Emory bit his bottom lip but must’ve forgotten the cut there. He winced but only clamped down harder until his bite drew blood. “I should’ve known, should’ve seen this coming.”
Of course, he’d blame himself, but it wasn’t a lapse in observation. Amelia remembered well how Emory had scoured the outskirts of Rich’s party and noticed danger long before anyone else. If Ivan had wanted to reveal himself, he would have.
Emory slipped the flannel off Amelia’s shoulder and scrutinized Ivan’s bite. She declined to look at it. She’d derived bitter satisfaction at how it stung with soap and hot water in the shower but resolved herself to ignore it forever.
Troubled, Emory looked for a distraction. Amelia admired that quality in him, how in trying times he couldn’t withstand idle hands. He fetched a tube of ointment and warmed a glob between his thumb and finger. When he dabbed it on the wound, Amelia held her breath against the sting.
“I didn’t kill him,” Emory confessed in the small shelter of space between them. “I had the chance, a few actually. I could have, but I didn’t.”
He glanced at her haltingly as if afraid of what he might find in her eyes or perhaps to hide the shame in his. It struck Amelia then, though not for the first time, how viciously his time in the Moriartys warped his reality. She cupped his cheeks to force his gaze.
“Emory, taking a life is no small thing. You hesitated because it’s not easy for you nor should it be, even with someone as deserving of death as Ivan.”
“I know. I let him get under my skin. It’s just…” Emory shook his head. “It’s more than that, though.”
“Tell me.”