I was not sure I ever really believed that Noah was dead, but I wasn’t sure I really believed he was alive either. I still couldn’t quite adjust to the reality of him. There were shadows beneath his eyes, and his cheeks were rough with stubble. The fading afternoon light from the window behind the bed shone through his hair, turning the strands gold. I never wanted to stop looking at him. I wished I wouldn’t have to.
Maybe I don’t have to yet, I thought. There was so much to say, but maybe I didn’t have to say it now. Noah was alive. Here. Neither of us was in mortal danger. We were sitting next to each other in a bed. I wanted to reach out to him, but my hands stayed knotted in the sheets.
“I let you die,” Noah said casually. “In case you were wondering.”
I wasn’t wondering. “Because I begged you to.”
Noah hesitated before he asked, “Do you want to die?”
“No.” It was the truth. I would have, for my brothers, but I didn’t want that for myself. “Do you want to die?”
I knew the answer, but I asked the question anyway, because he’d asked me. Maybe he wanted to talk about it. Maybe we needed to.
“Yes,” he said.
“Tell me why.”
“I don’t have the words.” His voice was smooth, his expression unreadable, but I knew it masked how worthless he felt, how screwed up and damaged and wrong he thought he was. How he felt responsible for everyone, for me, and how it broke him that he hadn’t saved me.
I didn’t know what to say to him, so I asked, “Are you thinking about your father?”
His jaw tightened; it was the only sign that he’d heard me. After what seemed like forever, he said, “I’m never going back there.”
“To Miami?”
“Wherever he is, I won’t be. He’s dead to me.”
I wondered if that were really true. I hoped, selfishly, that it was.
I remembered the way his father had spoken to him. David Shaw was guilty of many crimes, and the way he’d treated Noah was one of them. I would make sure he suffered for all of them someday. He would be punished, somehow, the way he deserved, before he could hurt anyone else.
But one look at Noah told me this was not the time to mention it. “What about your sister?” I asked. “And Ruth?”
He stared blankly at the opposite wall. “I’ll figure something out, I suppose.”
“What will you do? If you don’t go home?”
He didn’t say anything, just shrugged. I had a bad feeling about where this conversation was going, and changed the subject in fear.
“What do you think about the letter?” I asked him, but he didn’t respond except to say, “I’m tired.”
He had shut down. I couldn’t blame him—he’d had less time to process things than the rest of us, and in a way he had even more to process.
We used to process things together. Before yesterday. Before Horizons.
It was like the life we’d lived before was in some alternate time line. There was something missing in both of us, and when we first met there, we found it in each other. But now, after, everything was different. We’d slipped out of that time line, and that life was lost to us. We were strangers to each other now. We weren’t even a foot apart, but it felt like a thousand miles.
Noah stood up, pulled back the covers and held them until I crawled under. I expected to feel him slide back into the bed behind me, to feel his arms wrap around my chest, my waist, to feel his legs tangle with mine. But he didn’t. He just gently tucked me in.
“Stay,” I said. He hesitated for a moment, but then stretched out next to me.
“I dreamed about you, while you were gone,” I said.
That smile appeared again on his lips, just for a moment.
“Was it good?”
“Yes,” I lied. “Yes, it was good.”
He closed his eyes, but I didn’t close mine.
“Noah?”
“Mara?” he asked, without opening them.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“Anything?”
“There’s nothing I wouldn’t tell you. No secrets,” he said. His eyes opened, and he looked at me, finally. “I hope you know that.”
I hadn’t known that. I had never before asked what I was about to, because I’d never felt like I needed to hear his answer. But I needed to hear it now. “Do you love me?”
There was a pause before Noah spoke. He shifted in the bed and rested his hand on my cheek.
“Madly,” he said, and I felt the truth of it in the pressure of his hand.
But when he took it away, the feeling went with it.
“Do you love me?” he asked.
Hopelessly, I thought. “Madly,” I said.
He leaned over me, his long lashes casting shadows on his cheeks, and kissed my forehead. The words “I need you” left my mouth as soon as his lips touched my skin.
I had never said those words to anyone before, and I’d never imagined I would say them now, even—or especially—to him. But it was the truth, and I wanted him to know it, no matter what happened next. No one else would or could do what Noah had done for me. What he did for me even now.
“You have me,” he said back.
But then why did he feel so far away?
71
NOAH
THERE IS SOMETHING DIVINE ABOUT seeing my mother’s faded words incarnated in the girl beside me. Even while sleeping, she looks like a deadly goddess, an iron queen. Mara is anything but peaceful—even in repose she is a silky gray cloud, bright with the promise of lightning. I will not find peace with her. But there will be no greater passion.
She sleeps with her cheek on my chest as my fingers trace the blades of her shoulders below the sheets. I imagine wings cutting through her skin and unfolding around us, blanketing me in velvet darkness before I close my eyes.
But I startle in my sleep, as if I’d dreamed I was falling over and over and over again. I wake up remembering fragments of dreams; Mara bending to smell a flower, watching it die under her breath. Her stepping barefoot into the snow and watching it bleed red beneath her feet.
Her sleep seems untroubled, her breathing deep and even. Peaceful. How could everyone be so wrong about us? It is impossible that she could make me weak. Next to her, I feel invincible.
I don’t know what day it is, or what time; I left the hospital feeling like I could sleep forever, but now I’m restless, so I leave Mara in bed. I descend the stairs. Jamie and Daniel are nowhere to be found. The view beyond the windows is dark, though the sky is edged with gray. They must still be asleep.
I wander the house and end up in what appears to be an apartment converted to a music room. There’s a drum set, a keyboard, and a few guitars lying about, as well as a piano at the opposite end of the room, by the garden doors. I head for the piano and sit at the bench. I want to play, but I can’t think of any music.
“Is there anything you don’t play?”
Mara’s standing at the foot of the stairs. Blocking my exit, I notice.
“The triangle,” I respond.
She manages a smile. “We have to talk.”
“Do we,” I say. I’m caught, I think.
She holds something in her hand. I think it’s my letter, the one from my mother, and I tense, until I realize its hers.
“I don’t care about that,” I say, and mean it.
She shoves it into my face anyway. “Read it,” she says. “Please.”
I know the second I begin what it will say, and what will happen when I finish, and with every word my body slackens and I dissociate. We’re going to have the same fight again, but this time, for the first time, I feel like I deserve to lose.
I look up when I finish. “What do you want me to say?”
“You heard what your father said about us.”
“I’m not deaf.”
“And you read what the professor said.”
I narrow my eyes. “The professor?”
She blinks and gives an almost dreamy shake of that dark, curly head. “Lukumi, I mean.”