True: An Elixir Novel (3 page)

“Oh, Ben . . .”

“You should see the driver’s side,” he says, then shakes his head. “Actually, you shouldn’t. Trust me.”

“I’m sorry.”

Ben shrugs. “Badge of honor, right? Besides, you’re always telling me it’s time to get something new.” He opens the back door, and the Offensive Tackle Orderly puts the brakes on Sage’s wheelchair and comes around front to lift him out with a bear hug, but Sage stops him with a perfectly arched eyebrow.

“Uh-uh,” he says. “I’m fine.”

He climbs into Ben’s car and I follow, tossing the orderly a “thank you” on the way.

“So where to now?” Sage asks once Ben’s inside and driving.

“I already have orders from Clea,” Ben responds. “The nearest motel’s just ten minutes away.”

“Motel?” Sage asks.

“You should rest,” I say, though it sounds disingenuous. Whatever haunted his dreams before, Sage seems fine now. Almost back to himself.
Maybe I’m just making excuses to put off facing Rayna.

Maybe . . . but I
am
tired, and Ben must be exhausted. As for Sage, he’s trying not to show it, but I can tell his playful burst of energy is fading. His head lolls against the back of his seat, and he struggles to keep his eyes open. It’s not surprising; he’s on hard-core antibiotics—the kind of thing he’s never experienced before. At least, his soul hasn’t. Maybe his body has?

Whatever—we all need to rest.

Ben pulls off the highway into a patch of barren blacktop, nestled onto which is a Denny’s, a Chevron, and the generic box of a Red Roof Inn. It’s perfect. He pulls up to the office and turns around in his seat. Sage’s eyes have closed, and Ben keeps his voice low. “I’ll go in if you want to stay with him.”

“Great, thanks.”

But Ben doesn’t leave the car. He furrows his brow and sucks air through his teeth.

“What?” I ask.

“It’s just . . . I’m thinking . . . one room, right? Two beds and we bring in a cot?”

“You want to chaperone?”

“No,” Ben says, blushing. “I just . . . we’ve all
been through a lot . . . especially, you know . . . and . . .”

“Two rooms,” Sage says without moving or opening his eyes. “Adjoining. Ben bunks with me.”

“I’m on it,” Ben says, and slips out of the car before I can object. When he’s gone, I unbuckle my seat belt and move closer to Sage.

“Open your eyes,” I whisper.

He does, and everything else blurs as I focus in on only those brown orbs. “It’s true. The eyes really are the windows to the soul. That’s why yours stayed the same.”

“Did they?”

“You haven’t looked at yourself in the mirror,” I realize.

“I’ve caught glances, that’s all.”

Unbelievable. To me the change in Sage is so glaring and obvious, it didn’t even occur to me that he hadn’t fully seen it.

“When we get to the room,” I say, “you’ll get a good look.”

“Like it or not.”

That’s when it hits me. He’s afraid. I’ve seen Sage face death without fear. It didn’t even occur to me that he’d be afraid to see his own reflection.
I slip my hand into his. It’s clammy, but this time it’s not from the gash in his wrist.

“If it helps, I know exactly how you feel. I’ve seen myself in another body.”

Something shifts in Sage’s eyes, and I feel like he’s looking for more.

“I know how strange it is,” I tell him, “when you see yourself, but it isn’t you. I remember the first time I dreamed of us, before I’d even seen you outside my pictures. I was Delia, singing at a club where you played piano. You watched me when I performed. . . .”

I can see it in my head, and it takes my breath away. At the time I thought it was the most vivid dream I’d ever had: me as a singer in the 1920s, tied to a mob boss named Eddie but sneaking off to meet Sage, the secret love of my life. It was wild and romantic and dangerous . . . and completely real, though I didn’t know that right away. It was a memory of a past life Sage and I had shared. Yet when I look at him now . . . he isn’t sharing it at all. There’s nothing in his eyes except wistful sadness.

“You don’t remember any of that, do you?”

Sage shakes his head. “I remember seeing it—bits of it—through Magda. But it’s not like I lived
it. I
did
, I understand I did. But it doesn’t feel that way. I’ve lost the memories.”

“Just for now,” I assure him, though there’s no way I can know. “Maybe they’ll come back to you in dreams. The way they did for me.”

“I hope so. I don’t want to lose any time with you, Clea. Not even time in the past. It’s just . . .”

His eyes are filled with the same look I remember from my dreams. The one that promises he’s mine, now and forever. But there’s something else in there too. There’s pain and . . . doubt?

“What is it?”

“I might know why I can’t remember. I made a choice, while we were apart. I saw you and . . .” His eyes drift to the driver’s seat. “I don’t even know if it was real, but I . . .”

He clenches his jaw, and my stomach hurts because I know what he’s seeing. In a fit of jealousy over Sage and another woman, I’d tried to seduce Ben. Even though Sage was miles away, he saw it—the incriminating part, before Ben rejected me.
That’s
why he broke our soul connection.

“Sage . . . look at me . . . please.”

He doesn’t want to, but he does. The mix of anger, hurt, and guilt I see there is almost unbearable, but I won’t let myself look away. I take his
hand and squeeze it. “I know what you did,” I say, “and I know why. And if that’s the reason you can’t remember . . . if that past is gone for us . . . that’s okay.”

“How can it be okay? Clea, while we were apart . . .”

I know he’s about to tell me about Lila, but I can’t hear him say it out loud. The only saving grace of Sage’s new body is that it’s not the one I see tangled together with Lila’s every time I blink.

“I already know,” I say. “Just like you know what I did. What I
tried
to do. It didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . . I was jealous. What you saw . . . that’s all that happened.”

It’s my penance that I have to watch this sink in. Sage slips his hand out of mine and stares at me like he’s seeing me for the first time. He did what he did with Lila because he was held captive. Playing along with her was his only way to maybe get back to me, and he only gave in completely when he thought I didn’t want him anymore. What I did with Ben had been on purpose, designed to wound. A million questions fight in Sage’s eyes, and he leans back into his seat with a heavy sigh.

“So the past is gone forever,” he says. “All we have is now.”

“Isn’t that all anyone has?”

Before Sage can answer, the door opens and Ben flops into the driver’s seat. He leans back and hands two key cards each to Sage and me before starting up the car. If he notices the tension in the air, or Sage’s glare, he doesn’t show it.

“I shall now drive you both to our very own parking spot,” he says. “It’s quite luxe.”

Silence.

“What?” Ben asks. “What’d I miss?”

“Nothing,” Sage says. “We’re speechless over the luxe accommodations. Let’s check them out.”

Ben cocks his head, clearly debating whether to ask any more questions, but he decides against it, and we drive all of ten feet before we park. As we get out of the car, Ben heads to the trunk and grabs three plastic Walgreens bags, all filled to bursting.

“What are those?” I ask.

“It’s not just the accommodations that are luxe. While you were in the ER, I got us all brand-new outfits. Very chichi.”

The minute he says it, I realize how harsh and heavy my dirty and bloodstained jeans and T-shirt
feel against my skin. I don’t care what kind of clothes Ben managed to find at a drugstore in the middle of the night; they sound like heaven.

“Two rooms, two showers,” I say. “I call first round.”

“Wrestle you for the other one?” Ben asks Sage as we climb the stairs to the second floor. “I’ve been working out. I might be able to take you.”

Sage gives Ben a half smile, but it doesn’t reach his eyes, and his fists are balled at his thighs. “You go first. You don’t want to wrestle me.”

“Two-ten and two-eleven,” Ben says. He gestures for me to open one of the doors while he gets the other.

Sage follows behind me like a shadow as we walk into room 211. It’s a simple box, decorated in browns and creams, and the light streaming in the open curtains at the far end gives us a perfect view of what we’re waiting to see.

The mirror.

It’s on the door of the closet, just a few feet in. We approach it wordlessly, and I take Sage’s hand as he turns to face it head-on.

He stares, but his eyes are unreadable. He lets go of me and touches his own face, watching his fingers as they trace its new contours.
He reaches up to finger a thatch of blond hair, so much shorter than the dark mane he wore all his life. He clenches his fists; sinews stand out in his forearms. He gazes down at his thick biceps, watching them grow as he flexes.

It’s weird, but watching him discover Nico’s body, I’m blown away by how completely
Sage
he is. Nico was always languid and relaxed; the man who stares into the mirror is tightly coiled. He leans forward slightly, ready to spring into action, his jaw tensed and gaze steeled.

I can’t know what Sage sees when he looks at his new self, but I see the final proof that the man I love is alive and well.

He moves closer to his reflection. “Nico didn’t have brown eyes?”

“Blue. Strikingly blue. I remember them. Rayna said they reminded her of a place we went on the Italian Riviera, where the water’s so clear you can see down to forever.” I smile, remembering how Rayna sighed over the cliché like she was the first one who ever said anything like it. Then my throat clenches. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell her.”

Sage puts an arm around me. I know he’s trying to comfort me, but I see our reflection through
Rayna’s eyes: Nico, the man she thought was the love of her life, cuddling with me, her best friend. Even if she realizes the eyes are a different color, even if she sees that the way he stands, the way he acts, the way he does
everything
is different from what she knew, she’ll still see Nico. I know because I’d do the same thing if it were me. I’d want to see the man I love so badly that I
would
see him, even if he wasn’t really there.

Am
I doing that? Am I seeing Sage inside Nico’s body because I want to?

No. That’s crazy. Every word that comes out of Sage’s mouth proves that it’s him. And even though it’ll be hard for her, eventually Rayna will understand that, too.

I hope.

There’s a knock on the door connecting our two rooms, and I open it for Ben.

“Clothing delivery,” he says, holding out one of the plastic bags. “I thought you’d want it before you got in the shower. Yours are on the bed in there,” he adds to Sage. Then he frowns. “Clea? Is everything okay?”

“Rayna,” I reply.

Ben’s whole body deflates. “I know. Are you going to call her?”

“I can’t do it over the phone. When I see her.”

Ben nods. He opens his mouth like he’s going to say something comforting, like maybe that it’ll all be okay, but I think he knows better. He offers a halfhearted smile, then walks back into the other room. I turn back to Sage, who’s still gazing at his reflection.

“You don’t have to wait for Ben to finish,” I offer. “You can use the shower in here.”

“That’s okay, you go ahead.”

I watch him stare at his own face for another moment and try to imagine what he’s feeling. It was bizarre enough for me to see visions of Olivia, Catherine, Anneline, and Delia and know my soul was inside them, but if I actually looked in the mirror right now and saw one of them staring back at me . . . I’m not sure how I’d handle it.

I grab my bag of clothes, lock myself in the tiny bathroom, and turn the shower as hot as it can go. The whole room is steamy before I strip down, pull open the shower door, and test the water with my palm. It’s just this side of scalding. Perfect. I step under the powerful stream and shiver as it pelts my skin. I wash my hair three times, using the entire bottle of motel shampoo, and take huge satisfaction in the swirls of filthy water that flow
down the drain. When I’ve soaped and washed every bit of the last twenty-four hours of grime off me, I lean my back against the wall and slide down until I’m sitting in the stall, my ears filled only with the patter of water, steam filling my lungs. I’d stay like this all day, but too soon the water loses its biting heat, and I turn it off before it gets too cold.

I dry off and pull out Ben’s purchases: a purple pullover sweatshirt two sizes too big for me, and a green pair of sweatpants with elastic just below the knee. The material’s thin but soft and cozy; to me they feel like the finest silk. I throw my wet towel over the clothes I took off and kick the pile into a corner. I don’t ever want to see them again.

When I come out of the bathroom, the room smells like coffee, and Ben’s sitting on the king-size bed sipping a mug of it as he laughs at a rerun of
The Daily Show
. His sweatshirt is orange, even bigger on him than mine is on me, and he wears it with a pair of red sweatpants.

“I should have you shop for all my clothes,” I say as I head toward the door to the other room. “You’re a genius with color. I can’t wait to see how you dressed Sage.”

“He’s asleep,” Ben says, and when I ease open
the door, I see he’s right. This room has two double beds, and Sage is sprawled out on one of them, completely unconscious. His sweats match and fit him perfectly, though they’re an eye-popping shade of electric blue. I ease the door closed again and stack the pillows so I can lean my back against them when I sit on the bed next to Ben.

He takes a sip of his coffee and winces. “For once I’m jealous that you don’t need this stuff. The coffeemaker in here is awful.”

At another time, small talk over bad coffee and Jon Stewart would be fun, but not right now. “Tell me about the soul transfer,” I say. “Why do you think Sage was so sick?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s because Nico’s stomach was cut open. Or maybe it’s just something that can happen, like the bends.”