The Everafter (11 page)

age 2

“Mommy, play. Now!”

“It’s time to go to sleep now, Madison. Lie down. I’ll cover you up. See the Pooh Bear blanket? He’s waiting to cover you up.”

“I standing up!”

“I know you’re standing up. Lie down now and go to sleep.”

“Play. I play now.”

“No, it’s sleepy time now. We’ll play tomorrow. There’s a good girl. Lie down now. See how nice it is when Pooh
Bear covers you up? I love you, sweetie. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Need Baby Sarah. Give me Baby.”

“She’s right there at the foot of the bed.”

“Give Baby Sarah. I want Baby. Please give Baby me.”

“Here you go. Here’s Baby Sarah.”

“Baby Sarah bad. She not eat all dinner.”

“She didn’t? You didn’t eat all your dinner, either, did you? Maybe Baby will be good tonight, though, and go right to sleep.”

“Baby no sleep. Baby play. Maddy playing, too.”

“Night-night, Maddy.”

“All gone Mommy. Baby, Mommy all gone. We play now. I stand up, Baby. When we eat dinner…when we…Baby Sarah cry. Say I don’t want dinner. I don’t like carrots. Daddy say eat. Daddy say carrots good and make Maddy grow. Like milk. Milk make my grow, too, Baby. But me and Baby said no.

“I laying down Baby. We sleep. Bad Baby. Time to go sleep now. But play instead. Time out, Baby Sarah. Time out. Sit there, Baby. Still playing, Baby. But time out. Bad Baby go under bed. Time out.

“Now, Baby, be good baby. Sleep. Baby sleep…’cause me a good girl…”

“…Today I go to babysitter house…Mommy take me. But I not cry. Mommy come back…”

“How’s my sweetie this morning? Time to get up and go. We’ll have a good breakfast this morning. How about some pancakes?”

“Pancakes yes. Maddy love pancakes. Baby. Where Baby Sarah? Baby breakfast too.”

“I don’t know where your baby is, Maddy. She was in bed with you last night. I don’t see her. Let’s look under the covers…No. She’s not there. Behind your pillow? Not there, either. We can find her later, sweetie. We have to get ready to leave now or Mommy will be late for work. Come on…. Oh, you’re getting heavy to carry.”

“Want Baby now…want Baby now. Baby can’t find—”

Not so freaky as going all the way back to being a baby.

But still.

Definitely freaky enough. I mean, it’s like I know what’s happening but also like I
don’t
know what’s happening. Worth a second try…

…And a third try…

I’m not sure what fascinates me about being two again. The feel of that wet diaper in the morning? So
not
that. It’s almost enough to keep me from going back there. But not quite.

It must be the way it feels to have Mom pick me up and carry me away from my bed. Or the feel of falling, falling, falling asleep.

Traveling back to two is way less disconcerting than going back to infancy. I can at least name things while I’m two. I think that’s why the baby experience disturbed me so much. No language there.

This realization helps me understand how being dead now is different than, well, the last time I wasn’t alive. There had to be such a time, right? I mean, there was a time before I was born, and my body wasn’t alive then, but I must have had a soul, an energy, a
something
in existence. I couldn’t have come from, well,
nowhere,
could I? According to physics, energy is never created or destroyed. I’m a form of energy, so I must have existed in some form before life.

Only, back then I don’t think I knew that I existed. Because I didn’t have language. I guess the reward for having gone through a whole lifetime is gaining language. Here in
Is
I still get to use words. Silently only, maybe. But I still have them.

I guess I’m an
old
soul now.

Or maybe just not a new one.

Makes me realize how powerful words are. They have some kind of miraculous ability to make me who I am.

Or
was.

No,
am.
Because I still have them.

age 17

The scrapbook and folder of pictures is slipping around in my arms. Too much stuff. I’m bound to drop it and lose half my pictures in this ridiculous wind. I should have accepted Gabe’s help carrying all this into the house.

Too late now. He’s pulling out of the driveway.

What’s that on the front porch? It’s right in my way. I’m not sure I can manage to step over it while juggling all this—

“Ohmygod!” I scream, dropping everything. I don’t care what happens to it.

Words cannot express the explosion of emotion erupting from me. It escapes in hysterical screams. I hear them. They’re
loud
but not loud enough to release this surge of emotion. That’s all I can do: release it. So I throw every bit of my being into screaming louder, screaming from somewhere deep inside me that I didn’t even know existed.

Gabriel’s tires screech on the cement as he pulls back into the drive. From somewhere far away, I process that he’s coming, running toward me, so I stop screaming and start crying as he reaches for me and wraps me in his arms. “It’s okay, it’s okay,” he’s saying as he presses my face to his shoulder and strokes my hair, but then he’s swearing—gently, softly. An obscene lullaby takes shape as he alternates between reassuring me and expressing his shock in four-letter words.

My horror converts to anger, and I push away from him, saying, “It’s not okay. It’s not. She’s dead. Cozy’s dead.”

And the worst is that “dead” doesn’t even begin to describe what she is.

Mutilated…

Broken…

Crushed…

Blood around her head has matted her hair in clumps. Her legs, broken, are arranged in an unnatural shape. Her tail, that once-proud flag proclaiming her cathood, is limp and bent. The saddest thing I notice is the dried blood that
trickled from her mouth at the end. That same mouth with the scratchy sandpaper tongue she used so many times to lick ice cream off my fingers.

“Who’d do this?” I choke out around sobs, pulling away from Gabe.

“No one,” Gabe says. “At least not on purpose. It was an accident. She must’ve gotten hit by a car.”

I can’t tell if he’s trying to protect me or if he’s actually this stupid. Either way, I’m not putting up with it.

I turn my back to Cozy. I can’t stand to see her as I confront the universe with this cruelty. “She’s not in the road, Gabe. If she’d been hit by a car, she’d be in the road.”

“Maybe a neighbor—”

“She’s
arranged,
Gabe. Posed. Someone wanted us to see her this way.” I discover that I’m whispering, trying to protect Cozy, for God’s sake, as if I don’t want her to hear the truth about what’s happened to her. As if she doesn’t already know. She was there.

But still I whisper. “A neighbor wouldn’t stick her on the porch for us to…to stumble over.”

“Maddy, I’m sorry. I know you loved her.”

“I’ve loved her for ten years. Why? Who hates us enough to kill our cat?”

“I don’t know what happened here, Madison. But I just can’t believe that someone…someone…y’know—”

“Killed her, Gabe. Someone killed her.”

“No, Maddy, I don’t think so. It’s bizarre, you’re right, finding her here like this, but it has to be that someone was stupid enough not to realize this isn’t how you bring someone’s cat back after it’s been hit by a car. Some kid, maybe, who doesn’t know any better. C’mon.”

What he’s saying makes a whole lot more sense than what I’m thinking. I let him pull me back into his arms. I want to believe him.

But I just can’t.

The air around me seems to mold itself into an ominous shape. It presses against me so hard that I can barely breathe. I’ve become prey to a new feeling I’ve never experienced before. Something out there is tracking me down. I can feel it. Something has caught the scent of my blood. And I don’t know how to escape it, because I don’t have any idea which direction the threat is coming from.

Gabe kisses my forehead.

“I never figured out what her third name was,” I whisper, holding him even tighter.

“What?”

I can tell he thinks I’m losing it. Maybe I am. “Never mind,” I say. I wish he understood what I meant, but I don’t have the energy to explain Mom and T. S. Eliot’s theory about cat names—or that I’ve caught Cozy over the years contemplating this secret she’s managed to keep from me.

Gabe whispers, “Go in the house. Call your mom and
dad. I’ll pick up all those photos and come in to sit with you.”

I do what he tells me.

Because I can’t look at Cozy again.

Because even though I don’t care about my scrapbook right now, I know I will someday.

But mostly I do because I’m afraid that whatever is stalking me will return, and I’m scared to stay out here any longer. I step through the front door, expecting my house’s crisp scent of eucalyptus to offer some comfort. But it doesn’t. I sense that the house is grieving the loss of Cozy, too.

Is
feels emptier than it ever has when I return this time, but at least I’m feeling some hope. Maybe Cozy never did actually know what happened to her in those final moments. After all, I don’t know what happened in my final moments.

And now I realize something important: Maybe I shouldn’t want to know so badly what happened to me. I remember that trickle of blood matted along Cozy’s jaw, and then I recall the oppressive feeling of being stalked that hit me just before I went into the house. I’m afraid that whatever was stalking me…found me.

What if…

What if my predator caught Gabriel in its net, too?

It’s an appalling thought.

God, if you’re out here somewhere amid all this clutter from my life, please tell me that whatever happened to Gabriel, it wasn’t
that.

age 17

“You’re paranoid,” Gabe says.

“I am
not!
” This whole home-alone-with-Gabe thing isn’t going the way I thought it would. Here I am, with my boyfriend, in my own room where we could be comfortably horizontal on the bed together, no parents barging in (they’re with Kristen, helping her paint the baby’s room), and what are we doing? Fighting.

“You are, too,” Gabe says. “This is just silly.”

Okay, being told I’m silly and paranoid? This takes me to an all-new level of anger. It isn’t helping any that I’m still
shaking from the car accident—even if it was three hours ago. I was so upset right after it happened that my parents weren’t going to leave me alone to go do the painting at Kristen’s. I convinced them to go, thinking time alone with Gabe would help me more than hanging out with my parents would, but now he’s not even concerned about the way his ex-girlfriend almost killed me.

More than that…he’s defending her.

“You weren’t there, Gabe. I’m not being silly and paranoid. I’m telling you, she hit me on purpose. We were both stopped at a stop sign. I had the right of way. She looked
directly
at me and then drove that Mercedes straight into the driver’s side of my car. She
wanted
to hurt me.”

“That doesn’t even make sense. Why would she mess up her parents’ car?”

“Uh, hello? Because she wants to hurt me? Because she still wants you back?”

“Jesus, Maddy. You and I have been together for a year and a half now. It’s not like she would think I’m going to go running back to her anytime soon. And hitting you with a car wouldn’t do anything to get her back with me anyway, unless she killed you or something. She’s not a murderer. You’re the one who’s jeal—”

He’s just admitted that he’d go back to her if I were dead, and he thinks he can accuse me of being silly? “See?! You just admitted you’d get back with her if I were dead!”

“I did
not!
How crazy can you get, Maddy? You know that’s not at all what I meant! Your jealousy is driving me insane. You’ve never been able to let go of thinking that I still have a thing for her. No matter what I do, I can’t get you to let go of that.”

“Well, gee, Gabe, it might help if you’d stop defending her. Maybe then I’d believe that you cared about me more than you do her.”

“I do! But I’m not going to believe that Dana hit you on purpose with her parents’ Mercedes. Sometimes she’s awful. I admit it. But she’s not that crazy. And she isn’t trying to kill you.”

Okay, I start crying. I can’t explain to him how…insecure I’ve felt since we found Cozy dead on the front porch a few weeks ago. That strange sense of being hunted hasn’t gone away. It’s just intensified. And today, as Dana was pulling that car straight into me, it was like my predator finally caught me. Time seemed to slow, to laugh at the way I’d been captured.

“This isn’t just me being paranoid or jealous, Gabe. I mean it. She wants me dead. I think she even killed Cozy.”

The strangest look crosses his face. It’s terrifying to me because I can tell he thinks I’ve gone off the deep end on this one. I feel more alone than I’ve ever been in my life. And all those feelings roil inside me with anger. How dare he not believe me? I thought he loved me.

I grab a small ring off my vanity (I’d use something bigger if it were in reach) and whip it at him where he’s standing in the doorway.

The I-don’t-know-this-girl look that crosses his face is too much. I’m humiliated. He’s right—I
am
psycho right now. I owe him an apology, and yet, even though I know this, and even though humiliation has just been added to the emotional stew I’ve been cooking, I feel like I hate Gabe right now.

And I hate him even more when he turns on his heel and simply walks away from me. His feet pound quickly down the stairs, and then I hear the front door slamming.

Still crying, I wander over to the doorway and get down on my hands and knees to start searching for the missing ring. It isn’t valuable or anything. It’s just a ring that my grandma gave me for my twelfth birthday. But it seems incredibly important that I find it right now. I’ve lost so much else—my cat, my boyfriend, my sanity. I can’t bear to lose this ring, too. It feels as if finding it might help me find all the other things I’ve lost.

Something metal brushes against—