Locked (29 page)

IA:
please come home now

IA:
my mom touched your things

IA:
you’ll be angry

IA:
that’s okay

IA:
i need to see you now

I touch it. I pick it up. I unwrap it.

A DVD and two pieces of paper fall on the bed.
Learning to Contra-Dance in Under an Hour.
Two tickets to a dance at the church, on evening of my birthday. Sheet music. Hand-written. A note at the bottom.
You’re the only person for whom I’d play my violin like an idiot. Happy birthday, Irene.

I’m crying. Tears are pouring down my face. I’m crying so hard I can barely breathe, my lungs hitching, my nose blocked up. I’m sobbing. I can hear myself sobbing. I don’t want to hear those noises. Don’t want you to hear them when you come home.

Tell him soon. Nobody lives forever.

Not even the invincible Sherlock Holmes.

Suddenly I’m screaming. I’m screaming so loud I’m terrified of it. The ceiling above me is the same color as the sky in my dreams, the almost-dark blue that comes before a sunset or a sunrise and I never knew which one. There’s a sun inside me now. They told me in elementary school that eventually the sun will die and as that happens, it will get bigger, engulfing all the planets around it in fire. The sun inside me is dying, and I’m being engulfed.

You died, Sherlock, and now you’re burning down my world.

I grab your dresser and throw it against the ground, violently. It crashes. Splinters. I scream at the pieces.

I’m very hard to hurt.

I swing your lamp against the wall. It shatters, glass flying everywhere. A shard cuts my cheek.

I won’t let anyone kill me, Irene Adler.

I lift your bedside table and smash it to the ground. The legs crack apart. I seize your books, tear their pages out. Your favorite books. I upend your drawers on the floor, ripping your clothes apart, your sleek dark expensive clothes. I punch a hole in the wall we painted together.

You look…nice. It’s…distracting.

You looked at me just before Ethan fired. Your expression, gentle. Understanding. Like you didn’t want me to be scared.

Irene. There’s something I want to tell you.

I’ll never know what you wanted to tell me.

I sink to the ground amidst the wreckage, the tears still pumping out of me, steadily, endlessly, like the way I bled in your arms.

Like the way you must have bled in no one’s arms.

The bullet took the cleanest path it could straight through you, and out the other side.

You’ll have a minimum of one use as a human shield.

|||

“But I thought I heard you talking to me,” I say dazedly.

You smile under the almost-dark blue sky. “You may have hallucinated it. Occasional side effect of going into shock and nearly dying.”

“But I could have sworn,” I say. “I could have sworn.”

“I probably was talking to you, in fact. The bullet that passed through you entered my upper arm. Arms are always getting chopped off in movies and no one blinks. Nobody thinks there’s arteries there. You were shot in the upper chest or lower shoulder, depending on how you define it. Either way, it certainly looked bad. I would have been more concerned about you. There may have been a minute or two that I didn’t notice it had severed my brachial artery, and by then it was too late. Didn’t you wonder how it was possible that all the blood was just coming from you?”

“But,” I whisper. “I lost blood too. Immediate blood transfusion, they said. Saved my life.”

“Blood type. You’re type AB negative. Universal receiver. I’m type O negative. Universal donor, but I can only receive type O negative blood. Which there’s a shortage of right now, I’m afraid. They had enough of the right kind for you in the ambulance. Even when it comes to blood, people want nothing to do with me.”

“But I saved you,” I say stupidly. “I jumped in front of you.”

“Like in the movies, yes. Very brave. Unlike in the movies, people use types of guns that can shoot through more than one body even in the event of a dramatic rescue by someone breaking their promise not to do anything dangerous to save my life.”

“I made a promise to someone else first,” I say. “I promised Mycroft I’d protect you if he let you stay in Aspen.”

“Then that’s two promises you’ve broken.” You take a step back. And then another. The water is up to your knees.

“Where are you going?” I ask.

“I told you not to trust me, Irene. I warned you many times.”

“That wasn’t the real you.” Tears slip down my face.

“The real me bled to death while you were unconscious.” You step back again and then you’re gone, but your voice isn’t. “I’m all you have now.”

I’m alone in the sea, Sherlock.

Alone, without you.

|||

I tore three stiches.

They keep me in the hospital another two nights.

I don’t talk. I’m asleep, even when I’m awake. I stare at the ceiling.

People want to interview me. I don’t want to be interviewed.

Mom wants to talk to me. Wants me to talk. She’s worried. I don’t want to be talked to. Or worried about.

I want to stay curled up quietly on my own little piece of nothingness.

On the second night, the person behind the curtain—James—leaves. He walks past my bed and I look at him, unfocused, registering nothing but hooded eyes. He leaves a card on my bedside table. I spend the next two hours gathering enough strength to pick it up.

James Moriarty. 876-987-245

I don’t know what it means. I don’t care. I’m dead and nobody else has noticed.

Only stupid people die.

I guess you were as stupid as the rest of us.

A few people from school come visit me to apologize. To say they were wrong about you. As if that’s news. As if you ever cared what they thought. As if I could save them from their guilt.

You saved my life, Irene.

(no, Sherlock. I didn’t.)

Anna, the nurse, comes by one time with something in a little plastic bag.

“I thought you might want this. Some people do, after they’re shot. My grandfather got shot in Vietnam and he always kept the bullet. Said it helped him.”

It’s a tiny bronze-colored piece of metal. It looks like an earplug. Or an eraser. A little thing that looks like an eraser killed you, Sherlock.

Sorry. No.

I killed you.

“Thanks.” It’s the first word I’ve said aloud since I whispered to you that being rational was boring, when I was running, before I got to your room.

I say my next three words to Mom, when she asks what I need:

“A chain and some wire.”

She’s so happy I’m speaking that she brings them to me, although I overhear her telling the nurse to make sure I don’t hurt myself with them. There was a time I would have done anything to prevent her from thinking I’d hurt myself. Now I don’t care.

I wrap the wire around the end of the bullet, attach it to the chain, and put it around my neck. We’re the two things that killed you. We should be together.

Then I go to sleep.

I see you when I sleep. Your face. Your cheekbones, your lips. Your lightning eyes. Your dark hair that I had cut. It’s you without a heart, and you speak to me.

You say, “If you’d let me move, I’d be alive.”

You say, “If you hadn’t told Ethan where you were, I’d be alive.”

You say, “If I hadn’t met you, I’d be alive.”

You’re honest.

I am honest, and in this society that happens to be constituted as mean.

I have to sleep during the day, because at night, all I can do is cry.

|||

They commit me for a week.

Because I won’t talk. Because I’ve struggled with depression in the past. Because I’m reacting abnormally. Because, because, because.

The therapist tells me to write my feelings down. I don’t. He tells me to take the bullet off from around my neck. I don’t. He tells me to remember the good times. I don’t. I don’t deserve the good times.

You are a complete mystery to me, Irene Adler.

You like—my lips?

You don’t want me to get lung cancer.

You really were trying to murder me, by getting me to do this.

Besides, the good times hurt.

Eventually I care about the first thing I’ve cared about since you, which is that my bed at home is more comfortable and easier to sleep in than the bed in the mental hospital. So I tell the therapist all the things he wants to hear, and they send me back.

Mom has turned your room into an office. The room that isn’t alive anymore.

I’m alive, aren’t I? Here. A pulse and everything.

IA:
you

IA:
were

IA:
wrong

All of your things, the ones I didn’t destroy, the ones that were outside your door and didn’t burn in the fire, are in the attic. I go through them one day when I feel like punishing myself. I find little notes, the ones you were always writing to yourself, the ones you never threw away because you never threw anything away.

You were writing about me.

Have significant problem, though: I like Irene.

Kissed her (strange. Had some effect on me.)

      
I’ll do something to ruin it. I always do something.

Must seek further confirmation of third hypothesis before I
hope

IA:
i’m sorry for not being a jellyfish.

You were trying to figure me out.

You didn’t understand. It hurts.

I should have told you. I should have told you every day.

I don’t deserve your writing. I take the notes with me to your grave. The same graveyard where Carol is buried.

The gravestone just says your name. Your date of birth and death. Not
Hated by all who knew him. Except Irene Adler.

The stone has nothing of you in it. I press my forehead to it and it’s cold.

Stronger than she thinks.

(no, I’m not.)

I pile the notes, the napkins and receipts and torn-off bits of pizza box, at the base of your headstone. I burn them with your lighter. The flame licks them up the way it licked your house up. They turn to ash fast. Nothing left behind to prove what they were. The fire flickers out, and then there’s no evidence of what ate them up except the ruined pieces it left behind.

“I was going to tell you something.” My voice is hoarse from not speaking.

I’ll tell her when the sun comes up.

What were you going to tell me?

“But there’s no point in me saying it now. You’re not here. You’re nowhere near here. I could say it and say it, and the whole world could hear it, and you still wouldn’t.”

There are flowers by the base of the gravestone. Guilt flowers. No one liked you enough to leave you flowers out of love. I should have brought flowers. Instead I brought fire.

IA:
what if you came back right now

IA:
that would be like you

IA:
just to show up with a smirk on your face

IA:
i want to see your face

IA:
i want to see your everything

IA:
i want to touch you

I’ll never touch you again, will I?

I’ll never pause by your door again, telling you we’ll be late, telling you to come down for breakfast. Never spill tea on your floor again and mop it up with my sweatshirt because you’re too excited to tell me you have paper towels. Never climb into bed with you again. I only did that once. Why had I only done that once? I’d wanted to, every night.

Had you wanted to?

I lie down. You’re six feet below me. The closest I’ll ever get to climbing into bed with you again. I shut my eyes. I’ll sleep here. Close to you.

Except I’m not close to you.

You’re not here.

Where are you?

I sit up so fast it makes me dizzy. Of course you’re not here. You died before you ever set foot here. But maybe, somewhere else—

I run back to Mom’s car and drive so quickly that someone nearly crashes into me. Maybe it’s the same car you saved me from, back when we first met. Wouldn’t that be funny. They’ll never know that they owe you an escape from a manslaughter charge.

I drive to the ocean.

It’s bleak here. Cold. The sky is slate-gray. It’s going to rain. The sea will swallow it all up. I get out of the car, the wind grabbing my hair at once and flinging it everywhere. There’s nobody on the beach. It’s too cold for that. Nobody could survive out here for long.

There are certain things someone like me needs to survive. A good mystery is one of them.

Was I your mystery, Sherlock? Did you solve me before you died?

I walk to the end of the dock. The wind is trying to pull me forward. Pull me into the water. Is that you? Are you the wind now?

“Mycroft told me the only thing worth valuing about you was that you were a genius.” The wind takes my words and whips them away, hungrily. “He was wrong. He was wrong about a lot of things, but that especially. There were so many things about you that were good and important.”

The clouds are darker in the distance. There’s a storm coming.

“I waited too long,” I whisper. “I lost our chance.”

I take off my shoes, setting them neatly together where both of our shoes had been before. I remember the cold. Remember how I broke into a thousand pieces. Maybe it was the same for you. Maybe there are still some pieces of you down there.

“It doesn’t matter because I don’t love—” My voice cracks in half.

I jump in.

It’s not like before. It doesn’t shatter me. Doesn’t freeze me to my core. It feels like I’m stepping into my own skin. I’ve been in freezing water ever since you died, Sherlock.

I break through the surface, gasping, my clothes billowing around me. My skin is ice.