“I’ll be your flap monkey anytime,” she said. “The owner can’t wait for Afterworlds. She asked for an advanced copy, signed to her personally. I should write her name down, I guess.”
“Anton will make it happen.” Standerson saluted Anton, who laughed. “Indispensable media escort is indispensable.”
As she smiled at this, Darcy tried to recall her first rattling moments in Anton’s car the afternoon before. That flutter of anxiety over a trifling thing like death seemed so long ago now, before her first school visit, her first stint as a flap monkey, her first glimmer of YA heaven.
CHAPTER 30
OVER THE NEXT DAYS, I waited for the old man in the patched coat to come to me again. I hated not knowing where Mindy was, and I kept imagining her being unraveled into flailing threads of memory for the old man’s amusement. The only thing that kept me sane was Yama, his presence in my room at night, his touch, and his certainty that she was okay.
Being able to sleep again helped a lot. School was much easier, no longer teeming with the phantoms of leftover crushes and humiliations. The echoes of the past were still there in the hallways, of course, but they were quieter now. My last semester in high school drifted toward normal life, almost boring after everything that had happened since Dallas.
But the best thing about sleep was that it washed me clear. Some mornings, I was awake for five minutes before the memories flooded back in.
* * *
“Any news on the secret agent front?” Jamie asked at lunch one day. “I haven’t seen him lurking lately.”
“He’s been busy,” I said, which was probably true. Agent Reyes had drugs to interdict, death cultists to surveil. I was thankful that the FBI had bigger worries than keeping watch over me.
“But you guys keep in touch, right?”
“Yeah, we talk most nights.” This was also true, because I had decided that Jamie was asking about my actual boyfriend now, and not the secret agent from her last question. It was amazing how I never lied to my best friend, as long as I interpreted her questions flexibly.
“Most nights? That sounds serious.”
I smiled at her, because it was serious. Not just the time spent in my room, but our conversations on his windswept atoll, and our long hikes in another of his places, a mountaintop that I guess was in Iran. (Yama called it Persia, because he was old-school like that.) And we’d made plans to travel farther, even to Bombay, once I was ready to face its excessive ghost population. And, of course, one day in the distant future he would take me to his home in the underworld.
“You still haven’t told your mom about him, have you?” Jamie asked.
I shook my head. “I’ve thought about it, but she’s always too tired for big news. She’s had enough to deal with.”
“Can’t disagree with that.” A pair of non-seniors hovered at the other end of our table for a moment, wondering if they could sit there, but Jamie sent them away with a glance. “You can’t keep her in the dark forever, though. That’s just being mean.”
“Of course not.” I’d already been wondering about how that was going to work. When do you explain to your mother that you’re dating a millennia-old psychopomp? Do you spell out the rules of life after death? Or have him over for dinner with a cover story all prepared? “I was thinking of waiting until after graduation. Like, maybe when I’m away at . . .”
My voice faded, because college was up in the air as well. I’d finished my applications last semester, but did newbie valkyrie even go to college? What was the appropriate major?
“Are you okay?” Jamie asked.
“Yeah.” I gathered myself, needing a moment of honesty between us. “It’s just been hard to think about planning my life lately.”
She didn’t answer at first, her eyes glistening a little in the cafeteria fluorescents. Lunch was almost over, and the clatter of dishes rushed in to fill the silence between us. “You mean, you feel like something horrible might happen again. So what’s the point in making plans?”
I nodded, though my problem wasn’t that death could strike at any moment, but that death was all around me. In the walls, in the air. Leaking like black oil from the ground. I couldn’t hear the afterworld’s voices all the time, not yet. But I could feel its eyes out there, watching me.
“That’s really common,” Jamie was saying. “A lot of people who’ve had near-death experiences can’t make plans.”
I only smiled. The words “near death” seemed like an understatement. I was traveling on the River Vaitarna, waiting to rescue a kidnapped ghost, sleeping beside a lord of the dead.
I wasn’t near death, I was swimming in it.
“Or maybe it’s survivor’s guilt,” Jamie said. “Feeling bad that you made it and all those other passengers didn’t.”
I rolled my eyes. “Did you buy a psych textbook or something?”
“No, that’s from Les Misérables.” She leaned closer and sang a haunting line, barely audible above the buzz of the cafeteria.
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe it’s about that too.”
“At least you don’t have to worry about those Resurrection guys anymore.”
It took me a moment. “The Movement for the Resurrection?”
“Um, yes. The guys who almost killed you. Did they slip your mind?”
Oh. I remembered what Agent Reyes had said on our phone call. “There’s a big standoff at their headquarters, right?”
She stared at me. “You mean, the one that every FBI agent in the country is headed to? I assumed you knew about it, Lizzie! Don’t you have a boyfriend who might be shipped there sometime soon?”
“He doesn’t do that kind of thing,” I said.
“Crap.” Jamie frowned. “I keep imagining him in a bulletproof vest. Is that wrong of me? It wasn’t in a lustful way, much.”
I shrugged. Men with guns seemed so ordinary now.
“Okay,” Jamie said. “I’m starting to think it’s not near-death syndrome or survivor’s guilt. You’re showing classic signs of being in denial.”
“I deny that completely,” I said, which actually got a smile from her.
The bell rang then, and as I got up to leave, Jamie reached across the table and took my hand. “It doesn’t matter what you call it, Lizzie. Just as long as you know I’m still here. What happened last month doesn’t go away just because it’s not on TV anymore.”
I squeezed her hand, trying to smile. She didn’t know that what had happened to me would never, ever go away.
* * *
That night my mother announced that we were making ravioli.
It’s not as tricky as it sounds. You have to roll the dough out really thin, but we had a machine with little rollers for that, and we used a cookie cutter to make the pieces all the same size. For the filling my mother had decided on ricotta cheese.
“If I’d gotten home earlier, I could have made some,” she said as we got started, giving the tub of store-bought ricotta a suspect look. Even before my father left us, she thought that buying things was sinfully lazy if you knew how to make them yourself.
“We’ll survive,” I said.
Soon the dough was made, and I was sending the first wad through, turning the machine’s little crank to spin the rollers. My mother took the end that came stretching out, as thin as a coin and marked with the flecks of black pepper we’d ground into the dough.
We worked in silence for a while. This was the first time we’d cooked together since the old man had taken Mindy from me. I missed her ghostly presence in the corner, the way she watched us, intent but dutifully silent.
My mother started with her usual conversational gambit: “How’s school?”
“Better,” I said.
She looked up from the bowl of ricotta, which she was crumbling with a fork. “Better?”
“My friends have stopped tiptoeing around me.”
“That’s great. What about everybody else? I mean, the kids who aren’t your friends.”
“Jamie keeps them in line.”
My mother smiled. “How is she?”
It took a moment to realize that I didn’t have a good answer. “We mostly talk about me. I’ve been a pretty crappy friend lately.”
Mom reached up with a dishtowel and dusted flour from my chin. “I’m sure Jamie doesn’t think you’re a bad friend. She probably doesn’t want to talk about herself. She wants to be there for you.”
“Yeah, she’s pretty good at making me spill my guts,” I said, silently promising myself that the next time I saw Jamie, I’d listen to her problems too.
“So what have you been spilling your guts about with her?”
I gave Mom a look. She wasn’t even trying to be subtle. “Whatever I’ve been thinking about that day.”
She gave me a look back. “Such as?”
Apparently Mom wasn’t letting me off the hook. But I could hardly tell her that we’d been discussing my secret boyfriend, and survivor’s guilt, and how near-death experiences leave you unable to face the future. And I couldn’t tell her that my other best friend, the ghost of Mindy, had been stolen from me.
But I had to say something. “Some mornings when I wake up, it takes a long time to remember who I am. Like, it takes a while for everything that’s happened in the last month to download into my brain. It’s nice, not knowing. Even if it’s just for five minutes.”
She didn’t answer, probably because the expression on my face didn’t match my words. I was thinking about how Yama’s lips made sleep possible at all.
We started building the ravioli. We cut out round pieces of rolled-out pasta dough, plopped a spoonful of filling into each, folded them over, and sealed them with our fingers. Mom ruffled the sealed edges with the tines of a fork, so that the ravioli looked like miniature calzones.
It was slow going, and at some point in the process I always wondered if it was worth all the effort. It took about half a minute to make each piece, and only a few seconds to eat it. But there was something tiny and precious about them, like furniture in a dollhouse.
“Have you talked to your father lately?”
I looked up at Mom. She never brought up Dad if she could possibly avoid it. “Not since I texted him a thank-you for my phone.”
“I don’t mean texting him. I mean really talking.”
This was definitely weird. “Mom, I haven’t talked to Dad since I was in New York.”
“He still hasn’t called you?” Anger curled her lips. Directed at him, not me, but I still felt like I’d done something wrong. “You two have to stay in better touch.”
“Where’s this coming from?”
“He’s your father. You’ll need him one day.”
I had stopped working by now, and was openly staring at my mother. Her hands trembled as she worked the edges of the ravioli, showing what it had cost her even to mention Dad.
“For heaven’s sake,” she said a moment later. “We haven’t even started the water boiling!”
She turned away to wash the flour from her hands, and I watched her add a long pour of salt to our biggest pot, then fill it up with water. The stovetop’s lighter popped a few times, followed by the huff of flame erupting.
Mom stared down at the water, her expression hidden from me.
“Can you finish up here?” she said brightly, then headed toward her end of the house. “I just need a minute!”
“Sure. I won’t let the water burn,” I said, repeating an old and stupid joke from my childhood. For a moment, I wondered if she’d been crying. But over what?
One of her friends had probably told her that I needed family right now, and to get over herself when it came to my dad. But did Mom really think I needed his help dealing with all this?