Rags & Bones: New Twists on Timeless Tales (15 page)

See, I remember it word for word. I remember everything.

“I think there are mysteries everywhere,” I told you. “If you’re looking for them.”

You snorted, but you didn’t look displeased. “Like what?”

“I’ll show you,” I promised. “Tomorrow.”

“It better not be one of those mysteries like ‘why do people sneeze when they’re exposed to a burst of sunlight?’ ”

“Is that true?”
I asked, fascinated, my bragging forgotten.

Your father ordered in Thai food and we ate it at the raw-edged Nakashima dining table next to the wall of windows. I never have much appetite, so I pushed my pad thai around and listened to you and your father talk. He was quiet, but unexpectedly funny in the way only quiet people can be and too polite to ask me all the questions I could see swimming
in his eyes. But you asked me about what pets I had, whether there were horses at my private school, what Broadway shows Mother and I had seen, what books I loved, what television shows I watched and whether there were different shows in Europe that were better than American television. I talked and talked and talked. When I looked out at the city, sparkling in the early evening, my heart swelled
with giddy joy.

Then I cleared the table and washed the dishes, over your protests, slumping to the floor just as I was about to put down the drying cloth. It was a really good performance. You let me lie down in your bed and rested next to me, taking my temperature by pressing your wrist to my brow, like some grown-up must have once done for you. Then you read to me, softly, from a book of fairy
tales that you said were silly, but good for the sick. I didn’t
tell you that I didn’t think they were silly at all. Later that night, my mother called and charmed your father with her distress.

The next day, I said I had to go out to get a few things, but really I went to a storage unit in Midtown and brought back my own clothes in Bergdorf shopping bags.

And from then, everything was perfect.
Lying in front of the big flat-screen, watching cartoons in the mornings; giggling over adding powdered cocoa to the milk in our cereal; passing gum back and forth by blowing huge bubbles and pressing them together until they stuck and one of us took the whole thing, tasting each other’s spit in our mouths. Walking through the park with iced coffees, pressing the cups against one another’s bare
skin to surprise one of us into a shriek; trying on counterfeit McQueen scarves and short plastic skirts on Canal Street; and meeting up with your friends to see movies in deliciously cold theaters where we shared slushies that stained our mouths ruby red.

And then your cousin Bertha got sick and died within a week of her first symptom. I bet you’re thinking about that, thinking about how I’d
go down to her apartment on the eleventh floor on Wednesdays to watch that show about aliens that you thought was stupid. I bet you’re thinking about how it was a Thursday morning when she collapsed.

I know what you’re thinking, but let me explain.

Have you ever felt that when you were around a particular someone you were smarter and funnier and more beautiful? That all your charm and her charm
ricocheted back and forth until it amplified itself to almost impossible heights? That’s what it’s like. Both of you are radiant, glowing with it. Her cheeks are rosy and her eyes are bright as flames. No one could resist her and I can’t either. The thought of being without her is painful, impossible.

At the sound of her voice, you come alive. You feel it like the cresting of some dark wave out
at sea. Her heart leaps and yours leaps with it. Then she’s gone.

They die so fast sometimes. An afternoon of giggling. A weekend of sleepovers and secrets. A night of whispered confessions.

But could you really give up feeling that way? Could you give up the giddy joy of being so in tune with another that you can finish one another’s thoughts? Could you give up being understood and being surprised
and being made into a wholly finer version of yourself?

And you don’t understand that when they’re fading, when they’re sick, I don’t feel smug or pleased, I feel panicked. I feel like I am being left behind by the one person in the world I would most hate to lose.

And in that moment, they see me for what I am and despise me.

After Bertha died, things were different. Your aunt spent hours crying
to your father, pacing the room, raving about how she had brought this on herself. How your uncle’s work was dangerous and that it had always been only a matter of time before they struck at him. He was flying in from Chicago for the funeral, although your aunt told him that his daughter’s memory would be best served if he stayed away.

I asked you what she meant once, but you said you didn’t
know.

I think you lied about that, but I don’t blame you. You probably didn’t want to scare me. You probably thought that your aunt was being silly and that I was superstitious enough to believe it.

I should have seen the danger, but I was too busy being tangled up in your world, listening to your sorrows and making your joys my own.

Remember that museum exhibit about vampires? It was at the
very beginning of my stay, when we were still tentative with one another. How it made us laugh! They had the original cape that Bela Lugosi wore on the set of
Dracula
and the flowing gray nightgown dresses of his brides. There was a picture of his house in the Hollywood Hills with bright pink bougainvillea spilling down one side and his chihuahuas, which he called the Children of the Night. Then
there was the picture of the dashing Lord Byron and the tale of how, after he broke his friend Polidori’s heart, Polidori modeled the villainous Lord Ruthven in his book,
The Vampyre,
after the poet.

“Do you think they did it?” you asked.

“
Did it?
You mean Lord Byron and Polidori?” I asked. Lord Byron was handsome enough, but whatever magnetism had caused lover after lover to drown in his eyes
was missing in the stillness of the portrait. His lip could not rise ever so slightly, tempting you to believe that you could cause him to truly smile if only you worked hard enough at it. “Maybe. Or maybe Polidori just pined away, loving Byron from afar.”

“Have
you
ever been in love?” you asked me. Do you remember that?

“Yes,” I told you. And I was. Of course I was. I still am.

“Did you tell
the person?” You were watching me, as though my answer mattered.

“I’m shy,” I said.

“You should leave a note,” you advised me. “Can you imagine if Polidori left a note for Byron: I LIIIIIIIKE YOU. IF YOU
LIKE ME, CHECK THE BOX AND PASS NOTE TO SHELLEY.”

I felt light-headed. You dragged me on.

Then we saw a series of photos with cards explaining how certain chemicals found in certain soils
preserve a corpse and can even give it the appearance of life, how hair and nails grew after death, and how, at one time, people who suffered from something called catalepsy were accidentally buried alive. They’d seem dead, but they could still see and hear everything. Sometimes they’d start moving in their coffins, trying to scrabble their way out before the tons of dirt above crashed down and suffocated
them. It was awful, awful, awful. We walked past the drawings illustrating the bloody and broken nails of those bodies. Then more drawings, these of how some dead were buried upside down, so the newly animated corpse would dig itself deeper into the earth instead of climbing out of its grave.

Thinking about a vampire tunneling deeper and deeper, I felt as though I could no longer breathe. It
was too easy to think of dirt surrounding me on all sides, pressing down on my chest, cold and heavy. I sank to the floor of the exhibit and you had to sit there beside me while I explained in my own tangled way.

Then you took me to the bathroom and made me sit on the sink and press damp paper towels against my neck until I felt better.

You promised me that when I died, you would make sure my
parents cremated me. You would insist that I should have what I wanted, you said fiercely, as passionate as I have ever heard you. I would never wake up alone and afraid, choking on grave dirt—not if you had anything to do with it.

I didn’t have the heart to tell you that it was not fear that had made me weak and mewling, but memory.

On the way out, we stopped at the gift shop. You pointed and
laughed at the fake widow’s peaks, the contact lenses that turned eyes red, and the glitter body gel. We picked out twin amulets with tiny crystals forming the shape of eyes. They were supposed to protect us from evil. I loved to see it sparkling at the hollow of your throat. I wanted to believe in it, to believe it could really protect you from me, but three days after Bertha died and two days
before her funeral, you fell ill.

“There is a sharp pain here,” you told the doctor, touching just above the small swell of your breast. “I had a dream where a great catlike creature crouched over me, so I must be feverish. I feel so cold that my teeth are chattering. But I’m not nearly as sick as Millcara.”

I lay beside you on the bed, sick with fear, sick with dread and with remorse, playing
sick as I always did and hating myself for it. I blinked up at the doctor. “I’ll be fine. Just please help Laura.”

The doctor laughed at our devotion to one another. I decided that I hated him.

I heard him whispering to your father that it might be psychoemotional distress of some sort, but since the two of them had the same symptoms he was going to order an EKG, just to be sure there was no
infection of the lining of the heart. And later, I heard your father on the phone with Mother, asking her about insurance cards and telling her that he was so sorry not to have taken better care of me.

And we missed the funeral, of course, lying in your bed, watching
Wizards of Waverly Place
on television. You had come to the part of your illness where you were constantly thirsty. You drank gallons
of orange juice, big bottles of Pellegrino, one after
the other, mugs of tea, and glasses and glasses of water right from the unfiltered tap. You said you could taste the metal of the pipes in it and the minerals and the darting of the little killifishes in the river it came from.

“Wouldn’t that be amazing if it was true, Millcara?” you wanted to know. “If I could really taste the past? If I
could taste the dust on the moon and know everything there was to know about it—or if I could really take a bite from the sun and lick the rings of Saturn? Did you know that black holes sing? They do. So if it’s possible to hear the universe then maybe it’s possible to taste it too.” Your eyes shone with fever.

That was when I made my decision. There would never be anyone like you again. You
must not die.

I waited until after midnight, when you were asleep, and snuck out, a jacket over my pajamas and flip-flops on my feet. I loitered around an apartment lobby across town, until a girl came down to get her mail. I asked her if she was bored. She said she was. I told her I knew a game. She followed me to the stairway, where I eventually left her.

When I got back to your apartment,
I tried to creep in, but your father was awake, sitting at the kitchen table with your uncle. His leather duffel was on the floor and they had a bottle of some amber liquor on the table along with empty glasses in front of them.

“Millcara, where were you?” your father asked, sounding cold and mean and not at all normal.

Your uncle turned around. And I saw in his suddenly narrowed eyes that he
knew me—knew what I was as no one but my victims has ever done. I backed up involuntarily. He half-stood before he remembered himself and sank back into his chair.

But a moment after it happened, I thought I must have imagined
it. It must be guilt, I told myself, my own body slow with satiation, guilty at being caught creeping home from a prowl.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure what happened.
I woke in the bodega on the corner, but I couldn’t remember why I’d gone there. I think I was sleepwalking. I had the milk case open and was just staring at the bottles.”

Your father stood up and led me back to your room. “Please, you and Laura have to rest. I know that Bertha’s death rattled you both. The doctor thinks that your both getting ill like you did might be a reaction to stress—but
I can’t have you going out in the middle of the night, do you understand? Your parents aren’t here and I have to trust you to be responsible.”

“I hate funerals,” I said with utter sincerity. “I hate them.”

He put both his hands on my shoulders and regarded me with a kind of fond exasperation. “Go to bed and we’ll see how you’re feeling in the morning.” He smelled like booze and his eyes were
red-rimmed, swollen with crying.

I crept into your room, your uncle’s eyes on me. Once I was inside, I turned the lock and slid under your covers, reaching for your hand and twining your fingers in mine. Your breath was hot on my cheek and I was so happy for the steady rise and fall of your chest. I settled against you, closing my eyes and letting your languid warmth enter my limbs.

A few moments
later, you whispered against my neck, “Most of the universe is made of dark matter, but no one can see it. Can you see it?”

I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what you meant, but it might just have been more fever talk.

“Will it hurt?” you asked, your mouth moving against my skin, making me shiver.

“Will
what
hurt?” My heart was pounding now, sleep very far away.

“Dying,” you said.

I wanted to
tell you it wouldn’t hurt at all, your heartbeats slowing, counting down to the thudding moment of final forever stopping, the gulp of one last breath. I wanted to tell you that, but I didn’t want to lie. And that was all over anyway, I’d promised myself. I was never going to—not ever again.

The next morning, you were much better. You put on clothes and ate breakfast with your father. I slept
late, huddled under the covers, the scent of you in my nose. My stomach hurt from feeding too much and too quickly the night before in the stairwell.

Then you came in, jumping on the bed. “Look,” you said. “Wake up and look at this.”