Chapter 34 #2
“Your home is beautiful,” she says to Teresa.
Teresa tastes the chili, smacks her lips, and adds a pinch of seasoning. “Thank you. We renovated a couple of years ago. It was horrifying before that.”
“Well, I love what you’ve done. It feels like home.”
Teresa puts a lid on the pot and braces herself on the island. “How’s New York? Getting James to tell us anything about his life requires a full-on interrogation.”
Nelle tries to hide her tears behind a grin. “It’s wonderful. He really, really loves it there.”
Teresa forces a smile, too. “I knew he would.”
“He loves you, too, though,” she says, sensing a wall of sadness. “He is so grateful for you.”
“Thank you for saying that.” Teresa absentmindedly wipes her hands on her pants, lets out a shaky exhalation, and cranes her neck into the hall. “Where did they disappear to?”
“I think upstairs,” Nelle says.
“Would you mind running up there and telling them that dinner’s ready?”
Nelle slides off her stool and starts up the creaky stairs.
On her way up, she studies the wall of family photographs.
Days on the beach, award ceremonies, costumes.
James and Midi standing beside each other, one tall and lanky, the other short and sassy.
Nelle wishes she had the chance to meet Midi before . . .
Her throat tightens. She steadies her breath and wipes her tears before climbing the rest of the stairs.
After dinner, James gives Nelle the tour of his childhood bedroom.
The desk with his typewriter, the window overlooking downtown Lincoln.
His shelf stacked with snow globes from all the cities he has visited.
He finds the crumpled letters he wrote for her last summer and smooths some of them out.
I think I’m falling in love with you. Is Quill trying to kill me?
Are you both plotting my murder? Is he hurting you somehow?
I’m kind of lonely, so if you want to be friends . . .
They laugh over his letters until they are kissing over them. James cups the back of Nelle’s neck and leans her down, cradling her. He kisses her soft, slow. Then he pulls away. One kiss to remember her by, ahead of whatever happens next. Tonight. In the morning. Whenever she chooses to go.
“When do you want to . . .” He trails off.
“At dawn,” she says. “We should sleep soon.”
James can’t breathe, and the muscles behind his eyes clench.
A feeling takes over his body, hot and blinding.
He scrubs his tears away as quickly as they come, angry with himself, with Nelle, with God.
Trembling, he pushes off the bed and paces the room.
He has never felt like this. With no forethought, only fury, he kicks the bedpost.
Immediate, splitting pain. The anger dissipates. Damn, it worked. And it hurts. He hobbles on his foot, clenching the bedpost.
Nelle shrieks, “What the hell was that, James?”
“I’m mad,” he says. “You’re leaving! I know you can’t help it. I know. But I’m still fucking upset about it.”
“Well, stop,” she says. “You knew not to come if you were going to have an issue with this. I have to do this, James, and you know why. You said you understood, so don’t go back on your word now. And don’t get in my way tomorrow.”
Her voice is cold, emotionless, but James sees through her wall. If she lets it crack, then she won’t be able to follow through.
He opens his mouth, but she is already leaving.
“Your mom said we have to sleep in separate rooms,” Nelle says. “I’m going to Midi’s. She’s at a friend’s house, so I hope she won’t mind.”
“She won’t.”
James watches Nelle go, hoping she will turn around one last time.
They drive through walls of morning mist. It blankets the town square and curls like gray snakes around the trees on either side of River Road.
The fog doesn’t clear until they reach Blackwood and James takes a left.
He hasn’t looked at Nelle since they got into the truck.
He can’t even remember what she is wearing.
He glances. A cream sweater and brown pants.
Delicate silver earrings—must be Midi’s—gleam in her lobes. When did she get her ears pierced?
James tries to drive slowly, but eventually the mailbox marked Quill rises from the trees. Now he regrets coming at all. It would have been easier to let Nelle disappear, not to witness her death. Tires grind on the gravel, stirring up dust, and he brakes halfway down the driveway.
Shit.
The house is gone. Blackened grass covered by a thousand square feet of ash. Shreds of warped tin gleam under the morning sun. Clumps of wood stand here and there, but nothing of the original structure remains upright. Nothing but the lone brick chimney watching over the destruction.
James climbs out and circles the vehicle to open Nelle’s door, but she is already out.
She stalks down the driveway, cutting through the yard to what was once a porch, and stops where the front door stood.
She steps gingerly over the ashes, and James traces her footsteps to the center of the house, where the chimney stands.
Nelle closes her eyes. Wind sweeps through, clearing the mist, picking up swirls of ash, playing with her golden tendrils.
Strangely, James’s nervousness is gone. In its place, he feels both crushing sadness and an eerie calm.
“We should’ve picked up coffee,” Nelle says.
James laughs. “Yeah, we should’ve.”
Nothing, absolutely nothing about this feels right.
“I don’t want to go.” She curls a finger around his. “Ask me to stay.”
This is what you want! screams his gut. Tell her to stay. But his brain knows better.
There is a reason she bleeds ink. A reason she can’t be harmed.
A reason she can’t die a mortal death. She is not a human.
Her dying is impossible because she was never meant to exist in the first place.
Some might call her a mistake, but James calls her a miracle.
He doesn’t tell her to stay, but he can’t tell her to leave, so he lets his silent tears speak for themselves.
Nelle nods in understanding, her face crumpling.
James wraps her in his arms, lifting her off the ground as she breaks down. Her arms loop around his neck, and they kiss in the ashes of 23 Blackwood Road.
As they part, salt on their lips, James eases Nelle back to her feet.
She breaks into a teary-eyed grin. “Thanks for busting me out of this place.”
He can barely see her through his bleary vision, so he reaches down and takes her hands.
“All I want to say,” he says, lip trembling, “is that I love you. We got out of there together. I was miserable before, and no one saw that but you—you, Nelle, are the only reason I’m happy now. I just . . .”
Say it. Just say it.
“I want you to stay.”
Nelle’s forehead hits his chest.
He is running out of time to talk her out of it. To list the thousands of places she has yet to see, the experiences she has yet to have. Scuba diving and charcuterie boards and bad movies and stale chips and birthday parties and—
“Goodbye, James,” Nelle whispers, her voice vibrating through his chest.
The words cleave him. He will never be whole again.
“I can’t watch,” he says. “I can’t. It’ll kill me.”
Nelle’s hands tighten. “Go sit in the truck and count to thirty.”
She steps back, and his hand feels incomplete without hers.
“Go, James.”
He soaks her in, ash flaked on her sweater, in her hair, on her nose. She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a journal. Fighting tears and every instinct to slap that journal out of her hand, James turns his back on her.
Cursing himself, he climbs into his truck.
Count to thirty. Watching the trees, he starts. One. Two. Three . . .
Nelle pulls the journal from her back pocket, but something else tumbles out with it.
A golden locket, engraved with a rose. She excavates it from the ashes, cracks it open, and stares at the two empty ovals, like a pair of black eyes, watching her.
Waiting. Are you going to do it? they seem to ask.
Well? The same taunt that almost drove her to write with her own ink on a street in New York.
The truck door slams shut.
Count to thirty, she said. By then, she will be gone. Flakes of dust on the wind.
Nelle runs her thumb over the locket. Then the journal hits the ground, fountain pen beside it, glass barrel black with her ink. Wind brushes the hair from her face, giving its blessing.
Go on, be free.
Thirty.
James opens the truck door, breathlessly hoping to find Nelle where he left her, already envisioning how he will sprint up to her, how good she will feel in his arms, knowing that she chose to stay. But when he steps out, she is gone.
No use fighting tears now. He braces against the chimney, hollow. The sun climbs, the sky brightens to robin’s-egg blue, and then James notices it.
He kneels in the ash beside the journal, pages splayed open and—
Blank.
The pen is cast aside, ink glistening.
She didn’t write it.
James looks up, left and right, spins around, but Nelle is gone.
He snatches up the journal and pen. Knowing that she is alive, that she might one day master her thoughts, that she might come back . . .
That is her parting gift.
Or maybe, he thinks as he drives away, it’s her parting curse.