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I smiled a little. “How?”
“Like you’re the ocean and he’s desperate to drown.”
His words wiped the smile off my face. Noah had drowned. With my help.
I shook my head as if to clear it. Jamie must’ve thought I was disagreeing with him because he went on.
“You don’t get what you do for him. You’re like his manic pixie dream girl or something.” Jamie thought for a second. “Actually, more like his psychotic demon nightmare thing, but whatever. You get my point.”
I refused to acknowledge it.
“Speaking of demon nightmare things,” he segued gracefully, “you dying and coming back to life? That was a neat trick. How’d you manage that?”
“Jude said it’s because I manifested finally, or something. That I healed myself.”
“Huh. And Noah?”
I stayed quiet.
“He looked pretty dead when you were sitting there rocking back and forth, holding his seemingly lifeless body, I have to say.”
“Do you? Have to say?”
“Why do I get the feeling you’re not being entirely truthful, Mara?”
“You’re imagining things. You’re under a lot of stress.”
He looked like he was about to hit me, when someone knocked on the door. Rochelle peeked inside and motioned for us to follow her out into the hallway.
“You owe me, Cousin,” she said to Jamie as we passed Detective Howard and some nurses.
“You love me and you know it.”
“You’re lucky I do.”
We passed Noah’s closed door on our way to the elevator. The cops were still there, still guarding him. I recognized one of them; he’d been at the factory. The one distracted by Jamie shouting from the computer.
Jamie stopped walking. “You okay?” Jamie asked the officer. I stopped to listen.
“Yeah,” the cop said slowly. “Why?”
Jamie motioned to his own nose. “You have . . . something.”
The cop’s eyebrows drew together and he sniffed, then rubbed his nose. His fingers came away red. They left a bloody smear above his lip.
He nodded at Jamie. “Thanks.”
We resumed our exit. When we neared the elevator, though, something caught my eye.
A scalpel rested on a little cart outside a patient room. I glanced around to see if anyone was watching me.
No one was.
I slipped it into my back pocket and followed Jamie and Rochelle into the elevator. The officer was dabbing a bloody tissue to his nose when the doors closed.
68
NOAH
MARA IS WAITING FOR US when Jamie springs Daniel and me that night. She stands beneath a streetlight on an empty sidewalk, looking very gorgeous in a very bad way.
“Subway?” Jamie suggests.
Daniel sticks his hand up in the air. “Cab. Definitely.”
A minute later one pulls up to the curb. The cabbie turns around once we’re in. “Where are we going?”
Mara grins at me. “Wherever we want.”
Almost as soon as Jamie unlocks the front door to his aunt’s house, he ducks into the bathroom, and Daniel passes out on the couch in the parlor.
I look around. “Nice place,” I say as Mara leads me farther in.
“Upstairs or downstairs?” she asks.
“Bed,” I answer. Her smile widens as she leads me up the steps. I follow her into a bedroom and we collapse together in each other’s arms.
I wake up the next afternoon. Mara is beside me, dead, her limbs tangled in the sheets.
No. Not dead. Sleeping.
But the panic stays with me. I extract my arm from beneath her as guilt rises in my throat. It’s so thick I could choke.
There’s a bathroom in here, thank God, and I escape into it and bolt the door behind me. I look at my reflection in the medicine cabinet mirror, at my empty eyes, my blank face. Then they disappear and I see other things. The pale blue veins in Mara’s arm before I stuck the needle in it. Her closed eyelids, u
I want to cut myself into pieces no one can reassemble. Instead I take off my shirt, knowing, fearing what I’ll see.
There are stitches in my chest, as expected, and the wound is almost completely healed, as I’d feared.
I steal scissors from the medicine cabinet and cut the stitches out, wondering without much curiosity at all if I’ll have a scar. Hope so.
“Knock, knock.” Daniel’s voice, muffled, accompanied by tapping on the door. I step out of the bathroom as he says, “Everyone decent?”
Mara opens her eyes blearily, looking up at me from the bed. Her hair is a wild, tangled mess. I want to fill my hands with it.
“Who is it?” she asks.
“Your brother,” I say.
She’s up in an instant and launches herself out of bed, stubbing her toe in the process, swearing creatively as a result. She flings the door open and attacks him with a hug. Daniel staggers back, but his arms wrap around her just as tightly.
“I’m so sorry,” she says, her voice muffled. “So sorry.”
He backs up and holds her shoulders. “It’s not your fault.”
She’ll never believe you, I almost say. But this is not my moment.
Daniel looks at me anyway, as if he knows what I’m thinking. “Noah. Thank you.”
The words make me sick.
“For saving me and my sister.”
Except I didn’t save him, or his sister. If it weren’t for me, Daniel would never have been in danger. His father never would have moved their family to Florida. Mara never would have been at the asylum. Jude never would have hurt her—she’d never have met him. Everything that happened to them was because my father made it happen. I think about the times I promised to keep her and her family safe, when all the while she was in danger because of me. Just thinking about it makes me want to swallow a bullet.
I can’t say any of this to Daniel, obviously, for fear of sounding like a little bitch.
“So this is where the party is,” Jamie says as he sweeps into the room. “Guess what?”
Mara raises an eyebrow.
“We’ve got mail.”
He tosses something at me, and I catch it, wincing slightly. My full name is on the cream-colored envelope, otherwise unmarked. Jamie hands one to Mara, too.
“From?” she asks.
“Lukumi. Lenaurd. Whoever that dude is. There’s one for Stella, too, but . . .” He holds up his hands as if to say, What can you do?
“How do you know they’re from him?” Daniel asks.
Jamie holds up a larger manila envelope in his other hand. “It was addressed to ‘The Temporary Residents of 313 West End Avenue.’ That’s us,” he adds superfluously.
Mara pouts. “You opened it without me?”
“I thought you might be having sex.”
“You would have heard it.”
Their banter is intimate in a way. I’m not jealous, exactly, but I feel like a stranger, watching them play together. Left out. Cue violins.
“Who knows, you could’ve been at it for hours,” Jamie continues. “I wasn’t going to wait.”
All right, enough. “Please refrain from being a tool,” I say. “What’s in them?”
“I du
Daniel frowns. “I feel so left out.”
“Count your blessings,” Mara says to him, with unusual seriousness.
“You can have mine, if you like,” I offer. Mara looks at me queerly. “What? I don’t care what it says.”
Her eyes narrow. “Can I read it, then?”
I hand it over. She opens it carefully and begins to read, but stops almost immediately. I can’t tell if she’s afraid or angry or upset; her expression is flat. Blank.
Christ. She looks like me.
She holds the letter out. “It’s for you.”
“Yes, I’m aware. I’m trying, vainly it seems, to communicate that I don’t want it.”
“Take it,” she says softly. “Please.”