True: An Elixir Novel (10 page)

Maybe I will stay in bed forever. Or at least a week. Maybe when you hurt this much, your body stops needing to do things like pee.

Maybe not. The next time I open my eyes it’s
dark again outside, and I either have to move or wet myself. I waffle about it for a while, but since I can’t possibly stay bedridden on a wet mattress, I stagger out into the hall. Weird how one horrible day can turn around years of yoga. Not only am I no longer one with my body, it and I aren’t even speaking the same language. My limbs are glued in place, and my brain is detached and floating several feet away, trying to find any kind of path back to Nico.

Mom’s there when I get out of the bathroom. She’s dressed in her elasticized jeans and one of the mountainous button-down plaid cotton shirts she likes to wear over a scoop-necked tee when she works. She doesn’t say anything when she sees me, just wraps me in a huge hug that’s maybe a minute away from becoming Suffocation by Breast.

Dad must have called her cell to tell her I was awake. She smells like the stables. Like Nico. I start crying all over again.

“What happened, baby?” She coos the way she did when I was five and fell out of the climbing tree in our backyard. “Whatever it is, we’ll make it better, okay?”

“We can’t,” I croak.

“I can try,” she promises. “But you need to talk to me.”

I can’t say it. I cry until my body feels like it’s ripping apart, and I’m so grateful to Mom that she doesn’t try to coax it out of me anymore.

“Shhh, baby. Shhh. It’s okay. Everything is okay.”

She bends down and sweeps her arm under my knees, scooping me into a fireman’s carry like I’m a little girl again, and carries me to bed. I fall asleep while she’s rubbing my back, and when I wake up she’s there again, but her clothes have changed and the sun shines in my window, so I must have slept through the night.

There are tears in her eyes, and I bolt upright. “Mom?”

“Oh, baby, I’m so sorry.”

“Did Clea tell you?” I haven’t used my voice in a while. It’s raspy.

Mom shakes her head. “I don’t poke my head in when you girls fight. And she didn’t have to tell me. I went to his house.” She didn’t have to say his name. She knew I’d know who she meant. “He didn’t show up for work, so I went by his apartment. I thought something happened between the two of you, and I was all set to yell at
him for letting that get in the way of his job.” She gives a low, rueful laugh that turns into the littlest sob. “Some friends of his were there, packing his things to ship back to his mother.”

“Did they say what happened?” I whisper the question, not positive I want to know the details.

Mom shakes her head. “You know, Clea’s been calling a lot. Coming to the house, too. I told her to stop. I said you’d find her whenever you’re ready.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“Baby, I don’t know what went on between the two of you, but it seems to me like now’s a really good time to have your best friend by your side.”

She means well, but she doesn’t get it. She can’t get it, and there’s no good way for me to explain it, so I just stay silent.

“Whatever you need,” Mom says. She stays in the room until I fall asleep again.

The next few days are surreal. I don’t go to school, but Mom takes care of it. She tells my high school there are “extenuating circumstances” and makes it clear that she’ll kick their butts if they give her a hard time about me missing as much time as I need, so they don’t. They probably don’t care that much, since it’s April of my senior year
and the whole college application thing is a done deal. I already got acceptance letters from a couple of fallback schools, though I can’t imagine going anywhere beyond my bedroom and the bathroom, maybe ever. I wear the same yoga pants and soft baby tee until they practically jump off me and walk themselves to the laundry, at which point I put on the same outfit in another color. It doesn’t matter; I’m not leaving the house.

Clea calls a zillion times a day. And texts. And e-mails. I just ignore them. I ignore Ben, too. He calls a bunch and says it’s important, but I know it’s not. The only important thing is that Nico’s gone.

Mom got a call from Nico’s mother. I guess Nico really did ask his mom for his grandmother’s ring, because she had our information and apparently knows all about me. She called to tell my mom there’s going to be a funeral, back in Montana. I’m invited to the service, but I don’t want to go. I tell Mom I have no desire to see Nico’s body in a coffin.

“That’s the strange thing,” Mom says. It’s late, long after her phone call with Nico’s mother, and she’s wrapped in her robe. She and I both sit on the bed and stare at the TV. I like to keep
it on, as long as it’s nothing too dramatic. Even my standby reality TV has had too much emotion lately, so I’ve been watching game shows. The old episodes of
Match Game
and
$25,000 Pyramid
are my favorites; lots of sixties and seventies fashions to check out. If I were ever leaving the house, I’d want a pair of Brett Somers’s sunglasses.

Mom likes to join me here in the evenings. Dad visits too—he brings my dinner up on a tray. He never says much, just pats me on my arm before he leaves the room to go downstairs and eats with Mom, then Mom comes up for dessert. Tonight we’re sharing a plate of brownies and staring at an episode of
Family Feud
from sometime in the eighties, where Richard Dawson is making out with every woman on the show.

“What’s the strange thing?” I ask. I assume it’s some weird kind of custom you do when your family’s part of a bizarro cult and people die a lot.

“I asked if the funeral would be open casket. I thought you’d want to know if you were going. She said no . . . because they don’t have his body.”

Something prickles over my skin, and I sit up straighter. “Why not?”

“She said it wasn’t found.”

“I don’t understand. How do they know he’s dead?”

“Believe me, I asked. She said they spoke to enough people who were there when it happened—whatever exactly happened—and they know.” Mom reaches over and strokes my hair back from my forehead. “So what I’m saying, baby, is that if you do want to go, you won’t have to see anything you don’t want to see.”

“That’s okay,” I say. “I still don’t want to go.”

I’m speaking, but my nerves are on fire and my mind is a million miles away.

There is no body.

Does that mean Nico could be alive?

His family doesn’t think so, but with everyone dying so young, his family must be all kinds of messed up, right? Nico expected to die by the time he was thirty; they must have thought so too. They were probably
waiting
for a call that he was dead. Hell, Nico probably could have called
himself
and said he’d died and they would have believed him.

He might still be alive. He might.

“Rayna? Did you hear me?”

Oops. Mom said something.

“Sorry. Zoned out for a second.”

“Rayna.” Mom looks deep into my eyes, as if trying to read my thoughts. She does a pretty great job of it too. “His mother
did
talk to people who were there. She didn’t go into detail, but she made it very clear that he’s really gone.”

“I understand,” I say, by which I mean that I understand his mother
thinks
he’s really gone, but she’s almost 100 percent certainly wrong. I try to keep my thoughts a secret, but I suck at that kind of thing, and it doesn’t help that I suddenly can’t sit still. I jounce my knees up and down and drum my fingers on the mattress. Mom looks sad, and I know she doesn’t want to see me get my hopes up for nothing, but she doesn’t know the whole story, and there’s no way I can explain it.

I jump out of bed and get into Mountain Pose, then do some Breath of Fire to let out the energy swirling through my body. Thirty seconds of superfast, super-deep inhalations, in through the nose and out through the mouth, fully inflating and deflating my abdomen each time. From there I take a long, deep cleansing breath to get me centered and focused.

It works. I know exactly what I have to do. I sniff at my T-shirt and decide it’s decent enough, then go to my closet and pull on a hoodie.

“I have to go see Clea,” I tell Mom, and I’m halfway out the door when she stops me.

“Wait, baby,” she says. “There’s one more thing.”

“Now?” I whine like an impatient child and bounce on my toes.

“I found something today. In the stables. You know the little desk we have in there? It was tucked in the back of the drawer. I imagine he wanted to surprise you there.”

I immediately stop bouncing. “Surprise me with what?”

“I almost didn’t show you,” Mom admits. “I don’t want anything to make it worse. But it’s for you, so it’s your right to have it.”

She reaches into her robe pocket and pulls out a small box wrapped in plain white paper. Scrawled on top of the box in Nico’s handwriting is my name and a message.
To Rayna
, it says,
One Day . . .
Looking at his loopy print makes my heart hurt with anticipation. He’s alive. I’ll see him again. I’m sure of it, and whatever’s in this box is just something to tide me over until it happens. I tear off the wrapper to find a completely nondescript cardboard box, the kind you’d buy at Office Depot.

I take off the top, and my heart stops.

A ring. Is it his grandmother’s wedding ring? But before he left he said he didn’t have it yet, that his mom was going to send it.

I spill the ring into my palm. This is no wedding ring, and it did
not
belong to a woman. It’s huge—a thick gold band with a raised engraving of three swirls, each growing out of the same central spot. The swirls are surrounded by a thick outer circle in gold.

One Day
, the box said. It sounds like a message for a promise ring—exactly the kind of thing he wanted to give me. I try to slip the ring onto my thumb, but even that’s too thin by half to fit the wide circle. Did he maybe think this was the ring he wanted, and only later realize it would be enormous on me? It
is
the sort of ridiculously cute thing he’d do, but come on, did he honestly think my fingers were anywhere near this thick?

Mom’s apparently thinking the same thing.

“Maybe he meant it to be a necklace,” she says. “Or a paperweight.”

Paperweight probably not so much, but I head to my wall, where a series of hooks poke out from among the collage of random keepsakes, each one dripping with a tangle of necklaces and bracelets.
I detach an empty gold chain from one of the hooks and string it through the ring, which drops like a lead weight.

My new necklace might be heavy, but I’ve never felt lighter. I bounce to the side of the bed, hand the chain to Mom, and spin around, lifting my hair so she can clasp it around my neck.

“You sure you don’t want to use it as a paperweight?” she asks as the ring thumps against my chest. “You’ll get backaches wearing this around. It’s enormous.”

I drop the ring under my T-shirt so I can feel it against my heart. Or maybe not—I think your heart is on the left side, and the ring falls pretty squarely in upper-cleavage land, but it’s way more romantic to imagine it against my heart, so I’m going with that. It
is
heavy, but I’m only wearing it until Nico and I are back together again. Then he can wear it, and I’ll wear his grandmother’s ring when his mom sends it. Hopefully she won’t do anything crazy like get rid of that ring now that she thinks he’s gone, or bury it in his honor or something. No worries—if she does, we’ll get another made instead. One just like the behemoth around my neck, but small and delicate.

I spin back around to face Mom. “Thank you,”
I say, and kiss her on the cheek. “I’ll be back. I’m going to go see Clea.”

I run downstairs and stop by the selection of keys hanging on small hooks by the front door. Mom is the key master—she has copies of keys to everything on the property, from the stables, to the cars, to the ancient wood box full of tennis equipment. She used to keep them all in a lockbox . . . until she lost the key to it. Now they’re out in the open, but there are so many, and they’re labeled in such a random way, that even if a thief did manage to get past the outer gates and alarm system and into our house, he’d never know what to do with them.

I don’t have that issue; I know most of the keys by sight. I grab the one to Clea’s place, then sprint across to her front door. As I use the key to let myself in and climb the steps to Clea’s room, I think about how Clea told me the news about Nico. She never said she saw a body. What did she see to make her believe Nico was dead? She must believe it—there’s no way she’d tell me Nico was gone if she didn’t think it was true. No matter how mad at her I’ve been, I know she wouldn’t do that to me. I need to know everything
she saw. Then we can figure out what really happened, where Nico is right now, and why he hasn’t come back for me, which he would unless he was hurt . . . or had amnesia.

I’m going with amnesia. It’s so romance novel. He has amnesia, and he’s wandering the streets somewhere . . . or maybe he’s hurt
and
has amnesia, and he’s in a hospital somewhere thinking he’s someone else entirely, but I’ll find him, and my mere presence will bring back his memories little by little. . . .

Yes. That’s how it’s going to happen. I’ll find him. Clea will help me. I was awful to her, but I was so hurt. She’ll understand, and we’ll work together to track down Nico. Sage can help too. And Ben. Hell, we can even bring Suzanne, so Ben has someone. It’ll be an adventure, and it’ll end like a romantic comedy, with all of us paired off with the perfect person for each of us.

Clea’s bedroom door is wide open, so I run inside . . . but I can’t make sense of what I see. Even when it comes together, it doesn’t click. I only know there’s molten lava filling my stomach and I want to be sick.

It’s Clea, and she’s wrapped in someone’s arms,
and they’re kissing like they can’t get enough of each other. . . .

But the man she’s kissing isn’t Sage.

“NICO?”

The two of them spring apart and turn to face me. They’re bookends of shock.