She turns to me slowly like she’s not sure she wants to do it and I start to tell her that she’ll be saving the rest of us if she does. But I can’t. I won’t give her the excuse.
Louisa, for all of her tough-girl exterior and homicidal urges, is a child. She is me and she is Ruthie Mae and I have to try and save her.
Her eyes focus on me and she relaxes her grip. Her dad lets out a loud gasp and sits up.
“Nuts,” she says.
Her dad stands up, moving through her body like she is a hologram. He’s saying “fuck” between coughs. He grabs a glass from a TV tray in the middle of the floor and gulps the liquid. He spits it out, sending a spray of liquid all over the room.
“Motherfucker!” He throws the glass down.
“He probably spit tobacco in that one and forgot about it. He does that all the time.” Her delivery is lazy, resigned.
“Let’s talk about this. Make an informed decision.” I hold out my hand and lead her behind the horrible tweed couch, littered with burn holes. We sit on the crumb-covered carpet, face-to-face. I have no idea how all of these crumbs got behind the couch. “Do you want this enough to forfeit your second chance? To cease to exist?”
Louisa crosses her arms, squeezing into herself. I’m getting used to seeing her black boy-short underwear and no longer feel the need to look away out of fear of staring.
“I think I do,” she says.
“Think is not a strong enough answer. This is too much of a decision for that.”
The cold envelops both of us at the same time. Louisa pushes into me like she can’t get close enough. She doesn’t know what’s happening, but her intuition is telling her to be terrified.
“What’s going on?” Her teeth chatter around the words.
“It’s the Shadow,” I whisper.
The Shadow approaches from behind her. It’s facing me, sizing me up. The air disappears and I don’t know if it’s my panic or the Shadow’s presence.
Louisa sees my expression and turns her head. I want to tell her not to, but I can’t find the words.
The dark cloud is forming into a shape, not human but maybe human-adjacent. It thrusts its head toward us and a face forms. It’s puffy and void of color, scarred and rutted. The face has black holes instead of eyes. It smiles at us, a creepy leer that reveals dripping fangs.
I wrap my arms around Louisa. She’s trembling and squeezes her eyes closed. She whispers “no, no, no, no” under her breath.
The face stops centimeters in front of mine and my terror transforms into something else. Anger? Confidence? I don’t know exactly what, I only know that I have to protect this girl.
“You can’t have her,” I say to the face.
The Shadow retreats a few inches and forms hands. A long, opaque haze of a finger strokes the left side of her face, the side furthest from me.
Louisa leans backward, away from its touch and releases a scream. The sound vibrates in my ears so loudly it’s almost like there’s no sound at all.
The Shadow pulls back and its face twists into an amused grin.
Louisa falls silent, her eyes wide and face perfectly still.
“Go away.” My bravado is an act but it’s all I have.
The form dissipates into smoke. And it’s gone.
“Are you okay?” I ask. Louisa is stone-still beside me, as if catatonic. Or at least what I’ve learned about catatonia from General Hospital.
Her eyes move up to my face, focusing slowly and deliberately. She opens her mouth to speak and the pull begins.
Chapter 20
I miss dreaming. Dreaming was one of my favorite things. I don’t know if it’s because of all the weed I smoked, but I had vivid, fun dreams. Laughing, screwing, dancing, beautiful dreams.
I wonder if Eben dreams like I did. In vivid color. His dream I managed to be a part of was in color. Wasn’t it?
I wish I didn’t know about Eben. He’s nothing but a void that didn’t exist before.
Maybe kids are like that even when you’re alive.
For some reason, this quasi love-triangle, if that’s what I can call it, makes me want to live more. Even though Naomi misled me, not necessarily lied, but manipulated me for her own use. In this case it was because she wanted me around for company. I was the only person she knew. And that was only because she hadn’t found Greg yet. And Greg was who she was here for the entire time.
Greg. He’s probably only here because of a minor chemical imbalance that could have been fixed with Prozac.
It’s easy to go to the simple narrative: she’s just a bitch and all that. But since we’re here, in this fucked up purgatory or whatever, that narrative doesn’t seem to fit.
But she isn’t willing to sacrifice herself for me, even after I offered to do it for her. I wouldn’t have held her to it. I’m sure she knows that. But she still couldn’t say it. Would she have said it if she had the ability to lie?
If we’re not going to remember our lives, our families, each other, then what’s the point?
But maybe that’s by design. We won’t carry the trauma with us that led us to offing ourselves in the first place.
I shouldn’t put too much energy into figuring it out. I’m either headed to Oblivion or to another body where I won’t remember this shit anyway.
Maybe there’s a loophole we just haven’t found yet. Naomi is intelligent and manipulative, and if she uses those forces to figure it out, I might get out of this alive.
“Are you always this mopey?” Nolan asks.
We’re in his son’s mobile home. I guess I came back to make sure he was getting the job done.
“Mostly.” But I had just started to do better, hadn’t I? What went wrong? I mean, I know what went wrong. It was finding out that I won’t remember my son or Naomi and that Naomi is here for someone else.
Fuck this.
I have to stop letting circumstances dictate my life. Or death. Whatever.
“Come on, Nolan. Let’s get this done. If you’re not going to volunteer to go to Oblivion, then you need to stay on track.”
Nolan nods and we turn to his son, who is currently turning on a porno and looking for a bottle of lotion.
Why don’t women in porn have pubes anymore?
“Maybe we should give him a few minutes,” Nolan says.
“Yeah.” I nod.
Naomi sits across from me. We’re back in the café. I can’t stop thinking about the porn I just saw. Round, perfect sphere breasts and no pubes. What is happening?
Louisa appears and clears her throat.
“Hey, pervert. We’ve just been through something traumatic so if you could not look at Naomi like a Playboy spread that would be fantastic.”
I wasn’t really staring at her. I was staring into space and thinking about the weirdly perfect boobs I just saw, but I don’t think that will sound good out loud.
“Sorry,” I say. “What happened?” My eyes are firmly on Louisa’s face now. I should also look at Naomi, so I kind of dart my eyes between the two and I’m pretty sure I look like a weirdo for it.
“The Shadow,” Naomi says.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
Nolan appears and sits at the table. “Who are you?” he says to Louisa.
“Louisa.”
“Nolan.” He holds out his hand and they shake.
“What happened?” Impatience crawls through my gut. I’ve always hated it when someone starts telling me something important or interesting and stops.
“It came for Louisa,” Naomi says. She opens her mouth to say more but stops.
“Why? She hasn’t been at this long. Has she?” Are the rules changing as we go?
“I was attempting,” Louisa pauses and looks up, “patricide.”