Where I End and You Begin (7 page)

I
n the Tarot deck, the Death card doesn’t portray
death
so much as change. Something will happen. You will die to one life and be reborn into another. The old ways will be washed away and you will step into a new place.

There’s no card for
changing,
though, and there should be, because there is a place between when you die and when you come back. Doorways. Thresholds. The
in between.
The place where ghosts live.

In Tibet, there is a word for that place. It’s called the
bardo.
The place where you teeter between one state and the other. The dangerous place where you are stripped of your defenses, where reality brushes against you.

Those places happen in life, too. Sometimes soft transitions, between dreams and waking, sometimes harsh, swift, brutal. An accident, perhaps. Going a hundred miles an hour down the highway you lose control of the car and your life spirals out of your hands. You smash into a barrier. You aren’t wearing your seat belt. You fly through the windshield.

Suspended in the air, a thousand glittering fragments twinkle around you. Old life left behind. New life not yet begun.

That’s what changing is.

W
hen I wake up the next day I am so hung over that I think I’ve legitimately made myself sick. My throat scratches and burns, but after I roll out of Tanya’s bed and take a hot shower I start to feel less like death warmed over and more like toasty terminal illness. The only problem is that I have the terrible feeling that I’m forgetting something. Something important.

All through classes I sit and try to recall the night before. I remember almost all of it, which is pretty good for me, but there’s something nagging at me. I keep checking my phone, knowing that Daniel has said he’s going to take me out to dinner, but while it is fresh in my memory I keep thinking that I dreamed it. But he texts me at three as I’m getting out of my Vichy France class and says he’ll pick me up at five thirty.

It still doesn’t seem real. It’s a trap. I’m being set up.

Shaking my head I cross the campus back to the house. When I open the door and step into the foyer, the first thing that happens is someone hits me in the head with a Nerf dart. The second thing that happens is that I remember I’ve told Alice and Jibril that I’d drive them out to go poke around in Nompton, the small town just up the highway with about ten decaying structures perfect for exploring.

“Shit,” I say out loud.

“Sorry.” It’s Lana. She sniped me through the railing of the staircase from the second floor.

I shake my head at her. “Not you, don’t worry.”

“Okay!” she says. “Mind tossing that back up here?”

I bend down and pick up the dart and lob it up to her. She reloads and ducks behind the half-wall at the head of the stairs.

I turn toward the living room—except I turn the wrong way, toward the kitchen. The living room was to the right in my
old
house, not in this new one. I shake my head and turn left, stepping into the living room to wait out the game. They usually only last about twenty minutes before someone wins. I plop down on the couch and start worrying.

Here’s the thing: Daniel is a very nice guy, very cute, very sweet, but I am not a nice girl. I don’t think he wants to sleep with me, and I certainly don’t think he’s been taken by my charm. And while I desperately want a good meal, even more desperately I don’t want to be some nice guy’s charity case. Besides, I have a perfectly legitimate excuse: I have a prior engagement.

I should call and cancel.

I dig in my backpack and grab my phone. From behind the loveseat Andy pops up and shoots a dart over my head, pinning Carson in the doorway. Carson screams and falls over. The hazards of playing Nerf assassin with a drama major.

“Hey,” I say. “I’m trying to make a call here.”

“Sorry,” Carson says from the floor.

I scroll through my list of numbers and find Daniel’s. My finger hovers over his name.

I hesitate.

Sucking my lower lip between my teeth I begin to chew, my eyebrows drawing down fiercely. The thing is... I don’t really want to cancel. Even if I am a charity case... wouldn’t it be nice to talk to someone who doesn’t know me at all? Like a chance to start over.

On the other hand, I can’t leave Alice and Jibril in the lurch. I chew harder on my lip.

I’ve finally reached a decision when the game comes to an end. Lana was the victor. She does a victory lap around the living room, her hands held over her head, singing, “I’m number one! I’m number one!” Then the players crowd into the living room for postgame discussion. To my complete and utter unsurprise, Alice and Jibril are among them. I stand up and sidle over to Alice.

“Hey,” I say, leaning over the back of the couch where she’s sitting. She looks up at me, her face a huge grin.

“Hey!” she says. “What’s up?”

I open my mouth, hesitate, then decide to just go for it. “Would it be okay if I brought someone with me tonight?”

Her eyebrows rise. “You want to actually come with us?”

I’m not sure. I grew up getting yelled at and whooped for going places that I wasn’t supposed to, so I’ve always been hesitant to join them, but the alternative is to either sit in the car or walk aimlessly with an almost complete stranger. Yeah, I’m not doing that.

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m gonna bring someone so we can, like, buddy up or whatever.”

“Good thinking,” she says. “Four o’clock, before it gets too dark.”

I nod and retreat to the foyer and dial Daniel’s number. This time it comes easily to me.

I try not to dance from foot to foot like a high schooler calling her crush as the dial tone rings in my ear.

“Hey Bianca,” Daniel says when he picks up.

I don’t want to bother with niceties. “Have you ever been urban exploring?” I blurt out.

“What?”

“It’s this thing where you go and poke around old condemned buildings and take pictures and whatnot. It’s kind of dumb and dangerous, but it’s a good way to burn an afternoon...”

There’s a silence at the other end of the line. “No, I know what it is, but I can’t say I ever have,” he says, “unless Roman ruins count.”

I feel my brows raise in surprise. I’d never thought of it like that. “I don’t think it quite counts,” I say, “but it’s like that. Because, see, the thing is I already promised a couple of my friends that I would drive them up to Nompton to go explore the old hospital there, and they’ll be shit out of luck if I don’t take them, and I was thinking, if you don’t mind, that you could... I dunno... come with us?” God, it sounds stupid when I say it. “I mean... if you want to?”

“I’d love to,” he says immediately. “I studied photography in college. I’d love to snap some photos.”

My mouth twists in surprise. “You did?” I say. “I thought you had a background in counseling?”

“I do,” he says. “I can do more than one thing at once.” I hear him smiling.

Of course. Well. “So you’ll come?” I say.

“Sure. When are you guys leaving?”

I suck air between my teeth. “In about thirty minutes?” I say. God, I hope he doesn’t have something else he should be doing, because if I don’t see him today then I’ll never screw up the courage to look him in the face again. I’ll just avoid his calls, slip between the cracks, and I’ll just be that girl he helped once, and he’ll be the last person who ever threw me a lifeline.

Which is a dumb thing to think. But...

“I can do that,” he says. “I’ll drive over there. What should I wear?”

“Heavy clothes, thick-soled shoes,” I say. “In case there’s something rusty.”

“Gotcha. See you then, Bianca.” He hangs up.

I stare at the phone in my hand, then take a deep breath to calm my thundering heart.

I’m afraid to hope for anything. I’m afraid to hope that he can help me. I’m afraid to hope that I can pull myself out of this death spiral. Midterms start next week, and I’m terrified. I should stay home and study tonight, but I have the strange suspicion that this little adventure might help me more than studying. Give me a new perspective. Something to do other than drown in anxiety.

I climb the stairs and go change.

Thirty minutes later Daniel knocks on the door of the house, and I allow myself a small smile. He must have seen the code last night, but of course he wouldn’t use it. I was right to trust him. For once.

I open the door and he’s standing there in a hooded sweatshirt and a pair of thick jeans. He still looks pretty amazing. He’s wearing his glasses again, and he has a camera slung around his neck. “Good afternoon,” he says formally, as if he’s a butler or something.

“Hey,” I say. “Come in. Alice and Jibril should be ready in about two seconds.”

He does, and I immediately regret it. What are we going to talk about? We can’t do any of that deep soul-searching stuff right now—not that I’m going to do that, of course—but I’m also shit at small talk. To my infinite relief my assessment of two seconds was actually accurate for a change and Alice and Jibril troop into the foyer dressed for exploring the great depths of ruin.

“Hey!” Alice says. “Who’s this?” The good thing about Alice is she’s always direct. You always know where you stand with her.

“This is Daniel,” I say. “Daniel, this is Alice, and that guy is Jibril.”

They smile and shake hands all around, and then we file through the lower floor, the boy’s floor, and out the back door to the tiny postage-stamp parking lot behind Marchand. We pile into my car—a piece of shit Chrysler, but a functional piece of shit that I’d give daily blood sacrifices to if it meant it would keep running—and we head off.

The whole way there Alice peppers Daniel with questions, because she’s that sort of person, and I’m glad because it allows me to get to know him a little better without actually having to interact with him. If only I had a beer, that would make things so much easier...

Daniel answers all her questions with good humor, and I find out he’s twenty four, from Boston, and he’s taking a break from school right now, which surprises me but I don’t pry. If I could take a sabbatical from school, I would. I’d get myself together. Go to the hospital. Get healed. Then pick up and continue.

Nompton is twenty or thirty minutes away, and I have to say it’s sad that my car is the only one that can be trusted to schlep us there. If we broke down on the highway it’d be a long-ass trek back to the city from the middle of nowhere. When we reach it I have to park the car on one of the rinky-dink residential streets because we’d probably be arrested for trespassing if we made it obvious we were going to break into the old hospital. Rural Indiana is pretty depressing, to tell the truth. The houses are all dilapidated, their paint peeling and their yards overgrown and weedy. It reminds me a lot of the houses I lived in when growing up, and I have to physically shake myself to knock the cobwebs of old feelings from my brain.

We walk down cracked concrete sidewalks and cut across a small street. The sound of cars from the highway comes and goes, and we try not to look suspicious as we cut through a small parking lot and finally arrive at the wire fence surrounding the hospital.

It’s pretty much child’s play to get in. No one really cares what anyone does to a hospital that was last open in the fifties, and if we fall through the floor and die it’ll be our own fault. Smart people don’t go tromping around old buildings that look like they’re held together by the vines growing over their bricks.

Which is exactly what the old hospital looks like. The general hospital. Back when it was built, I’m sure it was state of the art, but now it’s just a big brick box with broken and boarded up windows. We slip through a gap in the fence—probably left by previous explorers—and we’re in.

Alice and Jibril take the lead, trying the back door, but it’s locked. We spread out, and when Alice hisses she’s found a way in we practically run toward her. None of us feel like getting arrested today.

The way in is through one of the basement windows. The glass is broken out, completely gone, and there’s no board blocking it. Alice gets down on her hands and knees and shines her flashlight inside. From my vantage point over her shoulder, I see dark shadows, gleaming white figures, destruction, dust.

A shiver skitters up my spine on icy paws.

“Looks good,” Alice says. “There’s a box below the window. Someone’s been here before.”

“Hope they left everything intact,” Jibril says. “It sucks when a place is cleaned out.”

“What do you mean?” I say. I’m already about to jump out of my skin, but I’m keeping it under wraps pretty well. It’s not that I’m scared, per se... I’m just getting the creeps, that’s all.

“Old hospital beds, wheelchairs, operating tables, shit like that,” Alice says. She gets on her stomach and backs into the window. She has plenty of clearance and she smiles when her feet hit the box below the window. “I’m in.” And she ducks into the darkness.

Jibril follows her, and then it’s just me and Daniel standing in the tall, dead grass, staring at the dark hole. The wind rustles in the weeds, muttering to itself.

“Do you want to go back?”

I jump about a foot in the air and let out a squeak. “Jesus, man,” I say, immediately defensive. “Keep your voice down.” I glare at him, daring him to make fun of me.

He doesn’t even laugh, just looks chagrined. “Sorry,” he says. His eyes flicker to the window. “We can go back if you want,” he says.

“No way,” I tell him. “Let’s go.”

I get on my belly. Dry stalks of grass reach out to caress my face, and I close my eyes and slip backwards.

I land on the box and let out a huge gust of breath. “I’m in,” I say, and I duck down and climb down from the box.

Now that I’m inside, it’s a lot brighter in here than it seemed outside. The windows that are still intact or half broken let the light in from the gray, cloudy day outside, and it’s easy to see what’s around us.

It’s not immediately apparent where we are, but I see dusty desks and old bookshelves, some dilapidated cabinets, and an old operating table in the middle of the room. There is dust and debris everywhere, leaves that have blown in from outside, chips of paint that have fallen from the walls and ceilings, old papers, anything and everything. I reach into my backpack and pull out my flashlight as Daniel slips through the window and lowers himself behind me. I feel his presence like a warm, living weight in this cold and lifeless world.

“Wow,” he breathes.

I can only nod. The abandoned room gives me a strange feeling in my stomach, as though I’m falling. Carefully, we begin to pick our way through the detritus on the floor as Alice and Jibril go ahead of us, more used to this sort of treacherous territory.

“Oh shit,” Jibril says from the other end of the room.

My heart speeds up and my fingers are white on the flashlight, even though I don’t really need it. “What is it?” I say. My voice is small.

“Come over here,” he says.

My blood rushing in my head, I look to Daniel, and he gives me a reassuring smile. Before I realize what he’s doing, he reaches out between us and takes my hand and forges ahead, leading me. “Step in my footsteps,” he tells me, and I feel something bend inside me.

Holding hands,
I think. I don’t think I’ve ever held hands with a boy—or a man, for that matter. The last time I held hands with any guy, it was my dad, and I was younger, much younger, and things were different then.