9. LUZ Y FER #4
The door buzzed. I slipped in, making sure to close it behind me.
I heard her door open somewhere up the apartment stairwell as I came in.
Climbing the stairs, I was back to wondering what to say to her.
When I reached her floor and saw her there, however, my mind went blank.
It was the first I’d seen her since that day, the first time I’d actually been able to confirm she really existed.
There she stood: the same wavy black hair, dimpled cheek, white pendant, and the smell of that perfume emanating from her that had turned my head that day at Javits. She was real.
She looked down at her phone, back up at me, studying my face.
“I looked you up while you were coming up. Just to be sure.”
“Totally reasonable. Would you want to talk inside?”
She gestured for me to come in. My heart pounded in my chest as I drew close to pass into her apartment.
“So, what is this project about?”
I crossed to her window and peered out the blinds before turning to face her. I took a deep breath. We didn’t have time to dance around my purpose in being there.
“I’m sorry to have lied, but I’m not really working on anything at the moment. I’m here because I was at the Javits Center that day.”
Fernanda took a step backward, immediately wary of me.
“How did you know I was there, too?”
“I saw you. At the coffee stand right before it happened. Then everything… You know. After it happened, I saw you again, running out. But it wasn’t you, was it? It was your twin. Do you know who I’m talking about?”
“No…” Fer took another step back. I needed to get to the point.
“Javits wasn’t the first time you’ve been close to a disaster like that, was it? You’ve seen a few, right? Maybe you didn’t see her, but she was at all of them as well.”
“Stop. Get out.”
“Please, just… Your necklace. You’ve had that your whole life, haven’t you? It wasn’t given to you by your adoptive mom.”
Her hand shot up to the pendant on her neck.
“I bet they always told you that your birth mom gave it to you. You always wear it. The other woman, Lucia, your twin, she had the same one, except it’s black.”
Fer had begun to open her mouth to tell me to stop again but froze.
“A black one…”
“Look, I can explain more. I can tell you what the symbol on that pendant means, too, but we have to leave as soon as possible.”
“Leave? Why?”
The intercom rang; we’d run out of time.
“Don’t answer that. Is there another way out of the building?”
She moved toward the intercom. I still hadn’t won her over.
I begged her, “Please. You have to trust me. Don’t answer it.”
“Why the hell should I listen to you?”
The sound of shattering glass from the stairwell answered the question for me.
“Because I asked to come in. They aren’t. We have to go. Now.”
Heavy knocking erupted at the door. Fer looked petrified. I held up a hand and checked the peephole, but it was covered.
WHAM! Someone shouldered the door, sending me stumbling back.
“What the fuck?” Fer yelled.
I turned to her.
“Do you have a fire escape?”
WHAM!
Fer flinched as someone threw their weight against the door again. “Fernanda, I can explain, but we need to leave.”
“Who the… Why… Why would I trust you?”
WHAM!
“Again, I’m not breaking down your door!”
Fer weighed her options.
“This way.”
She grabbed a coat and led me to her tiny bathroom, where she hoisted a rickety window beside the shower, slipping through onto the fire escape.
The storm, already odd for March, seemed to instantly worsen as we stepped out.
Just as I shut the window, I heard Fer’s door finally break open.
I barely caught a glimpse of one of the Birthing Room agents crashing into the bathroom before I followed Fer down the fire escape, each step shaking the old metal frame.
As we scrambled down the ladder to the ground, our pursuers had just managed to squeeze through the same window. One of them slipped on the wet iron steps of the escape as Fer broke left. I grabbed her shoulder and yanked her back when I saw three more round the corner ahead.
“No! This way! This way!” I shouted, pulling her toward a small gap between buildings.
My recent mezcal diet helped as we squeezed through into the courtyard of another apartment complex.
I stopped and peered back through the gap, seeing nothing but rain splattering from the gutters into the alley.
It seemed they were looking for another way around.
Turning, Fernanda was staring at me wide-eyed, shivering in the rain. I had to get her out of here.
I grabbed her by the shoulders and tried to sound calm. “Do you know anywhere safe nearby?”
Fer nodded, then took us ten blocks north to the Fordham University campus, swiping her student ID to get us into Walsh Library, past the metal detectors and a security guard.
We caught our breath in a small study room on the opposite side of the top floor, past dozens of bookstacks, where I finally laid it all out.
The Javits Center. The message board. Jay Wilding.
Lucifer’s sigil. Her sister. Tanita. The books helped a little, having something to point to at least, to show her I wasn’t making everything up off the top of my head.
Fer grasped her necklace as she listened. When I was done, she sat silent for a while.
“That’s a lot of shit to take in all at once,” she muttered. “Even if I believed it all… I mean, what am I supposed to do with this?”
Her look of vulnerability and trust revealed how little I’d thought this through. So much had escalated so quickly. I’d been so dubious about even being able to get to Fernanda first, let alone get her to listen to me, that I didn’t have a plan for what to do after.
“I don’t really know. Do you believe me?”
Fer held up her pendant and studied it, running her thumb across the symbol.
“When you said it belonged to my birth mom, it really…” She trailed off, running her thumb over the sigil.
“I can’t explain it. No one ever sat me down and said, ‘This necklace belonged to your birth mother…’ But I just always knew.
I didn’t talk about it, but I knew. I don’t think even I thought much about it, it was just always part of me.
I’ve had it since I was a kid, and I just assumed…
But who knows? I don’t know if anything I believed is true.
I could’ve written off all this crazy shit.
But when you mentioned the black necklace…
” She trailed off again, lost in her thoughts. “That’s when I knew it had to be true.”
“How?”
“Because in the same way I always had this deep connection to my mother’s white necklace… I also had these dreams, nightmares, visions of a black one. Sometimes they’re just clouds of sensations and feelings, and other times they’re not even really nightmares, they’re like memories.
“Years ago, my mom got sober long enough to land this finance bro who took us on vacation to Sumatra. Then the tsunami hit, and my mom and I got away, but her boyfriend didn’t.
The whole thing was traumatic. My mom started drinking again.
When I told her about the nightmares, it wasn’t just that they were terrifying flashbacks.
I remember saying, ‘I don’t remember these memories.
’ We couldn’t afford any actual help, but every social worker and doctor said, ‘Oh, that’s just your brain protecting you, remembering some stuff and not others,’ but nobody understood what this was.
“I have my own memories of what we went through, places we ran, who we saw, what happened, no—those experiences belonged to someone else.
This someone looked exactly like me, but went through other things, ran other places, saw different people, and did all of it with the same black necklace I have in white.
“The visions continued for a couple years, then got more infrequent. I’d wake up screaming and crying from a breakup with some guy when I hadn’t dated anyone, and I’m not even into guys.
Every now and then I’d get this flash of an experience that wasn’t mine.
Sometimes, when I was a kid, I’d even have a dream about getting hurt and wake up with a new scar, as though just by seeing it made it real for me.
But they were becoming more and more rare…
until the Javits Center. Just like before, I have all my memories and emotions, but then I fall asleep and it’s as if they belong to someone else.
Like, when I remember that day, I remember everything I did, but if I really think about it, there’s more.
Almost like another camera angle on the place.
” Fer closed her eyes, recalling. “I’m wearing black, some long formal dress, my hair’s short, there’s dust in the air, everything’s destroyed, but rather than help people I’m heading for the door, and then…
” Fer opened her eyes, looking into mine. “I see you.”
“So, you had seen me before, in a way.” I was stunned.
“Maybe it’s why I managed to trust you.” Fernanda reached across the library table, grabbing my hand.
“I still don’t really know what’s real here, but I know that I don’t want to meet whoever was chasing us.
I can tell you risked something to find me, and I know you want to find your friend, but I just don’t know what I can do to help. Where do we even go from here?”