Frail (31 page)

I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.

I curled up on my side, pressing against that coldness like a cat seeking warmth, and his legs kicked out so sudden and hard I shouted, leapt backward, sprawled on the floor. Watching.

His mouth twitched, lips drawing back in a spastic grimace. Closing up again. Going fly-catching slack, like before I’d closed his mouth.

Hope and dread have exactly the same taste, a grainy, piss-sour porridge too thick to swallow down.

His body thrashed again, harder this time, feet scrabbling and donkey-kicking so they left clean tortoiseshell trails on that dirt-caked linoleum floor. Arms jerking up, back, limbs pushing against an unseen tide, like a man drowned and at the bottom of a lake slowly, impossibly, swimming to the surface. My throat was closing and I choked on piss-sour porridge, fighting the sickness of gulping it back, as I watched him, watched myself wake up. He arched up from the lino, feet and shoulder blades the only parts touching, and his hands flew to his chest, clutched and clawed like he was frantic to dig something out; then his arms went limp but his gray-sneakered feet jerked out violently, relaxed, convulsed again. Steady, rhythmic, mirroring the newfound beating of his heart.

He was grinning again, grinning wide, and his mouth was square and taut like a man about to shout, scream, curse the whole world, but his first breath wasn’t a groan but a quiet sigh. Each one horribly audible at first, wheezing gasp iiiiiiiin, moaning expulsion oooouuuuuuut, then quieter again, so quiet, sound coalescing into movement as his chest began to rise. Fall. Rise. His feet lost their epileptic rhythm, resting still against the floor. His grayish-white skin changed color like the sky, going a faint, faded pink as the blood resumed its perpetual passe-partout through his body.

I had arms around him again, I’d been afraid he’d hurt himself thrashing like that but I couldn’t hold back, just hold on and wait. Come to the water’s surface. To the air. Please. I couldn’t say the words aloud because I was choking on the dread that I was wrong.

He stared at me like he didn’t know who I was and then, like his own heart kicking him in the chest, I saw the sudden, startled strike of recognition. Memory. His mouth opened and his tongue ran along his teeth just like I’d done, like he was reminding himself how to speak.

“I thought you were dead,” he said. “I thought—”

His voice croaked and creaked just like mine, as if he were still a boy and it were just starting to change. I pulled away to let him sit up and he winced, bent forward, every movement triggering a newfound cramp.

“Amy,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”

“I was,” I said. Each word gelatinously thick and difficult, oozing slowly from my lips. “I was dead, and you were dead. Now we’re—”

Now we’re what? I don’t know what. I don’t want to think about what. Stephen looked at me, and he looked at my neck, and he reached out but his hand dropped down before it could touch. I’d stopped crying. He looked like he might start at any moment.

“I was praying you were normal,” he said. “Ever since we first met.” Still staring at my stitched-up skin, my cutthroat just like his. “I prayed you were normal. That you weren’t like me.”

He looked full into my face. His eyes were distraught, his smile a stubbornly futile barrier against terrible things.

“But if you were?” he said. “Then how could you have ever stayed with me?”

TWENTY-ONE

“W
at’s happened to me,” I said.

He didn’t answer.

“What’s happened to me? And you?”

Stephen bit his lip. Sawed at a tender bruise-swollen corner piece, back and forth, until I could feel the rawness and abraded skin in my own mouth. “Sometimes it works,” he said. “The procedures. A lot of times it doesn’t. Sometimes it works, but then stops.” He laughed in a raw, bitten-up way that almost scared me. “Some of us, it keeps working over and over again.”

Stephen took my hand. He slid it down his chest, over the shirt front and right up against the skin, so that I felt something beneath the thin cloth, long and narrow and raised.

Can I turn the lights off?
he’d asked.

“Over and over,” I repeated.

He pulled his shirttails up. There was a line, a straight center parting, bisecting him up from the navel: a ropy, dirty-red surgical scar, thick with age and the accretions of reopening. Over and over. It parted in two when it reached his chest, one little wine-colored tributary coursing toward the left shoulder, one to the right. He pulled his shirt down and pushed back his hair. I couldn’t see it at first, hiding in the juncture between the ear and scalp, but another thinner set of lines traversed the flesh there, tracing the contours of his skull as if the skin were a mere curtain flap all comers could push aside. Autopsy. Vivisection.

I actually put a hand to my own breast, behind my ear, feeling for it, but he shook his head. Unmarked. Yet.

“Did she do that?” I asked. “Did Natalie open you up, and—” She couldn’t have, those were healed-over scars. The sun through the windows was high and strong, telling me I’d been lying here dead for hours, but she still wouldn’t have had time. Still no time. “How did she?
Why
did she?”

“Amy. I’m sorry.”

He grabbed me and was rocking me back and forth like I really had started crying but I was dry-eyed, vertiginous with confusion. Sitting curled against his sliced-up, sewn-up, scarredup chest, feeling the faint steady pulsations of a heart stopped in tracks an entire night, it felt like the most natural thing I’d ever done in my life. And that made me scared.

“I could almost smell it on you,” he said. A wretchedness all in him, like Lisa right after the tornado staring at our shopping cart in the trees. “Almost
see
it. But you’d never known me, and I’d never known you, and whenever Phoebe or whoever else would babble about this place you didn’t seem to know—maybe you just didn’t remember. I thought, maybe you really were here, all along, on another wing or another floor, and you just didn’t remember it.” He splayed a palm against my shoulder blades, each fingertip a tree root trying to take hold in hospitable ground. “It’s so hard to remember anything.”

I had my forehead pressed to the hollow of his neck, I’d rubbed it back and forth like a cat scent-marking someone’s shin, and now I pulled back because I had to see his face, I had to see up-front what he was when that plaster wall inside him got kicked and blown down. He’d known what had happened here, all along, and barely said a word. “That night,” I said. “When you stayed. That’s why you wanted the lights off, so I wouldn’t see your marks—”

“No,” he said, and he laughed loud and flat like he’d done something terrible, so much more terrible than being afraid to show his whole truth. “You don’t understand. It was so I wouldn’t see any marks on you.”

His washed-out, plain-John face, the mismatched nose and cheekbones and chin, every muscle in it was tense and tight waiting for me to—to what? Scream, run away? He saw my throat. He saw. “But you would’ve wanted to see,” I said. “You would’ve
wanted
to. Because it’d mean that we were—the same.” The same what, the same
what
. A word crawled drunkenly through the back of my head and I didn’t want it there, trespassing unbidden over all my thoughts and all my life, get out,
get out
.

“I was dead,” I said. “You were dead. Dead for hours. I wasn’t breathing. My heart stopped. My body was cold, stiff. And now—I’m alive.”

I gulped like someone catching their breath from mirth but I wasn’t laughing, I wasn’t. I was thinking of bottle-green hazard lights flashing all over Seventy-Third, of a redheaded woman fattened up in ash-gray protective gear and training flame at something noxious, sickening, not supposed to have mind or memory but it
knew
her, it knew—

“Zombies are extinct,” I said. “The plague converted or killed them all. Every one of them. Except—we’re not extinct.” I gripped his shoulders in my hands. “Are we.”

Stephen’s eyes closed for a moment. He shook his head. “I don’t know if that’s what we are.”

“We were
dead
, Stephen. Now we’re alive. What the hell else do you call something that—”

“You don’t get it, Amy, the experiments they did, they’ve fucked up my whole memory, remade all the—I didn’t even remember Natalie. I must’ve known her, I had to know her, and I saw her every day in Paradise and I didn’t remember.” He was laughing again, hard enough I knew it hurt. “And she was counting on that, she must’ve been—counting on it.”

I put a hand to his face, running fingers along the cheekbone, and he wheezed, coughed, tried very hard to stop laughing.

Zombies don’t—didn’t—breathe. They had no heartbeats. The fronts of both our shirts were stiff scarlet-claret-pink but zombies didn’t have proper blood, they didn’t bleed red. Those were basic, middle-school biological facts. So this can’t be true. None of this can be true. I’m seeing what’s not there all over again—but it was there, all the time, all that was intangible congealed into earth. My dog. That Angel of Death, leaving as many corpses as he chose in his wake.

“I killed someone,” I said. “I killed someone, back home. I—I beat them to death. Not a baby, like, not a mercy killing, but a grown person, who wasn’t sick. I’m a murderer. I killed someone. Is this our punishment?” I brushed ragged, unevenly chopped-off hair from his eyes. “Did you kill someone too?”

“I don’t know.” He had a hand on my back again, running it up and down like he could somehow soothe away all my crimes. “I might have. Maybe that’s why they brought me here. It’s like I told you, Amy, I don’t remember—”

The door was rattling. Clicking. Someone turning a key in a lock.

We were on our feet fast enough I swayed for a second, dizzy, and Stephen grabbed my arms, holding me steady. Trying to push me back behind him. I shook free and grabbed his hand in both of mine.

“Two guesses who that is,” I said.

He shook his head. “I’d never even trust myself to try.”

A decisive, clicking thud. A deadbolt, being opened. I heard a murmur of voices behind the door. More than one voice. My fingers went tighter.

“I wish I’d had a chance to hear some of your songs,” Stephen said. Eyes steady on the door.

“I’ll sing them,” I said. I will. I’ll sing them. I wish I’d sung them for Lisa too. They can’t stop me. They. Except, maybe they can.

Zombies don’t breathe air, they don’t have the breath to sing. So what’s true, can’t be true. Except.

Her face was still wan and drained from all that crying but when Natalie slipped through the half-opened door she looked happy: sealskin-shiny hair, dark pink mouth, big brown eyes lit up soft and beatific. Running up to me like we were best friends, parted for months.

“You’re alive,” she said, and her voice was still a little shy, tentative, after everything she’d done. “You’re both alive. I’m so happy. Isn’t it wonderful?” She smiled at us, a real smile, like something beyond us all had granted sunshine and prayer. “Happy birthday.”

She was happy for me, truly happy. No triumph, no gloating. Zombies couldn’t talk.
Ooooooooosss, ooooooossssss.
I could. That meant it couldn’t be true.

“What have you done to us,” I said, and my voice cracked and I despised it. “Explain.”

“I have a surprise,” Natalie said. “A wonderful surprise.” She turned toward the door. “It’s all right,” she called, “you can come in!”

Nothing. Natalie’s face distorted, sudden anger like a mousetrap snapping shut. “Come
on
!”

The door opened a little wider. Natalie relaxed and smiled again, and Stephen tensed up, ready to spring. Waiting. The woman who walked in came slowly toward us, hesitant shaky steps like she was being pushed off a plank, and then she stopped in her tracks and swallowed with an audibly dry, breathless sound, brought a hand to her mouth.

Stephen, beside me, made a sound as well. A wordless exclamation of surprise.

That woman’s mouth was my mouth, the same shape and same thin lips and set above the very same small, squarish chin. Same hands, narrow like mine, with short thick-knuckled fingers. Same eyes. Same hair, still the same shade of red, except that gray was taking root and taking over like mint in a flower garden, like yellow grass-spots in a summer drought crowding out the green. Taller than me. I’d given up on that even back when I was twelve, I just knew I’d never get that extra half-foot of height. And I didn’t.

“Oh, my God,” she said. A sharp-edged sob. “My God. My God.”

Did they destroy your memory too?
My God.
We don’t believe in all that, you and I. You know we don’t, Mom.

TWENTY-TWO

S
he ran toward me then like this really was a movie and I shoved her aside, I sent her skidding. She almost fell.

“You
left
,” I said, with a venom even Ms. Acosta never heard. “You left me, you—”

“I’m sorry.” My mother, Lucy Holliday, this half-gray stranger claiming her name, she was wiping her eyes before tears could reach her cheeks and I remembered from when I was small, after my father’s funeral, her huddled in an armchair doing that when we were finally alone. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I won’t forgive myself, you can’t forgive it, I don’t—”

“You left me and you went off to die!” There was no one else in that room now but her and me, Stephen a shadow standing there with no idea what to do, Natalie a forgotten smudge on the wall. “You went to kill yourself and you left me there with
nothing
and now I’m the dead one! You see?” I jabbed at my own throat so hard it hurt, so hard I could’ve gone crying to my mother to make it better. “I’m dead! I’m dead and all you ever did was hang up the fucking phone, I was looking for you and you weren’t there and I did something awful and you just hung up—it—”

“I thought you died. I wasn’t thinking straight, Amy, I thought—the sickness, you don’t know what it was like out here when it came through and we heard all about Lepingville, Morewood, I was sure you were dead—”