by Sarah Porter
At last he manages a nod, almost in tears. “Let me know when you are?”
I soften enough to give him a hug. He’s trying. I’ve hurt him and he really doesn’t understand why.
A few people overheard us; I couldn’t avoid it, not when we were right in the hallway. Soon the school is going to be humming, because we were supposed to be the ideal couple. I can’t control it, and I’m not sure how much I care; what matters for now, for today, is Josh’s voice still flowing in my head, telling me not to blame him. As far as I can tell, I’m all alone in knowing that there’s a chance, however slim, that Josh has somehow come back.
What matters is what I’ll see, or not see, at five o’clock by the gorge. I think, once or twice, of just not showing up, but how else can I test the truth of what’s been happening?
The seconds drift down, as slow and frail and murderous as chipped-glass snow.
I make myself go swim laps after school, to do something, to transform my anxiety into weariness, but I brush off my friends afterward and get a sandwich to go at the diner. I park near the gorge and eat in the car, watching the dashboard clock in its impossibly drowsy advance. Four thirty-seven, now. Josh used to be the late-running type, and I wouldn’t expect that his ghost or his double, or even the complete negation of his being, would be any more punctual.
I catch myself biting my nails, and I quit that a year ago.
At a quarter to I climb out of the car and wait for a moment at the side of the road. What am I doing? Listening? Trying to analyze the components of this particular quiet, with its ordinary warbling birds and the stroke of leaves on leaves? Then I turn in, walking through the pale unraveling birches, the maples’ chartreuse claws. Over moss and lichen-scabbed rocks, then to the clearing where we always used to go on warm nights. No one is there, so I sit down on a stone and watch the freckling light.
I try calling Josh, just one more time.
He doesn’t answer, but I don’t hear the robotic voice explaining that the number I have dialed is no longer in service either. Instead I hear a peal of bells, guttural and piercing and lovely all at once. A terrible sound.
I hang up as quickly as I can, but I can’t avoid the suspicion that I didn’t hang up quite fast enough. The impression made by the quiet woods has altered, as if something in those tones affected my brain waves somehow, dosed me with some slippery sonic drug.
I check the time. Five exactly. And all at once I think I’m not willing to wait any longer, not on the slim chance that the real, living Josh will show up.
When I stand to leave I see something moving through a scrim of trunks and sparse spring leaves. It’s not in our clearing, that is, but in the next one farther on, and the detail seems significant to me, though I can’t remember quite why.
There’s a yellowish fluttering that can only be bleach-frizzed hair. I start walking toward it, waiting—hoping, perhaps?—for it to disappear.
But he’s there, he’s really there, and the moment I part the branches he turns to see me, grinning at me as if not a single day has passed since we last met.
“Lexi!”
He jumps forward and catches me in a big, warm hug, and I don’t know if it’s habit or relief or genuine happiness that makes me hug him back just as hard. Or maybe it’s pity, since after all I have to tell him something that’s going to destroy him. Because as long as I wasn’t sure if he was real, I could refrain from anticipation of just how it will feel to break the news to him, about Ksenia.
“Josh, I am having some trouble believing this. But it’s really you.” Those round brown eyes, rimmed in charcoal and lilac glitter, that big soft-lipped smile. He hasn’t changed at all. “Where the hell did you disappear to?”
Maybe there’s one tiny possibility that I don’t have to blame him: if he was taken captive and somehow just escaped.
“I know it’s been a while,” Josh says, letting go of me. “It’s so completely awesome to see you again, Lexi.”
“You—couldn’t you have called, Josh? Emailed, done something? In nine months? What was stopping you?”
For a moment his eyes go wide, though I can’t imagine how that could come as surprising information. Then he grins. “You’ll think I’m a raging asshole, right, if I say I lost track of time?”
It shouldn’t be funny, but it nearly is—at least, it might be if it wasn’t for her.
“Josh, listen, there’s something I have to tell you. I’m really, really sorry. Right after you left, Ksenia died. It was ruled a suicide.”
Josh just looks at me. It comes into my mind with a breath of horror that I’ll have to hammer and hammer at him, beat him with words, to break through his denial. He might be genuinely incapable of believing in a world without her. I think he could accept any story at all, any wild science-fiction planet I could invent for the occasion, as long as I told him Ksenia was living there, and that she missed him.
“Lexi? I wish you’d never had to think that—any of it. But Kezzer is totally fine.”
I stare. It might be even worse than I thought. “She’s dead, Josh. She’s been dead for a long time. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to believe it. I wish I didn’t have to believe it, either. But—Ksenia took poison, and she died right in front of me. I was holding her.”
Josh’s mouth rounds for a moment, then shuts again. “That must have been so horrible for you, Lexi. I’m so incredibly sorry you went through that.”
That’s all he has to say?
“It’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.” Before, I wanted to be gentle with him and spare him the pain of it as much as I could, but his blank, smug, imperturbable face is getting under my skin. How can he possibly care so little? “But it was infinitely worse for her. She was suspected of your murder, Josh. Of course, and you really should have known she would be. She couldn’t face it, I guess, all the blame, everyone whispering about her, coming right on top of losing you. You know Ksenia—as tough as she pretended to be, none of it was real. You broke her heart.”
I wait for a reaction; wild sobs, crumpling features. The kind of sorrow that will spare me from having to despise him. But he smiles instead of crying.
“Oh, Lexi. You, um, you might have to suspend disbelief for a while, okay? But it’s really not that bad. Kezzer is living with me, and she’s fine. We’re basically married now.” He delivers that last sentence with a defiant lilt, because we both know what I think about that—though what I think can’t possibly matter anymore.
“I saw her die, Josh. I thought I just explained that?”
“And I just saw her drinking coffee, and she just kissed me! So maybe what you saw doesn’t matter as much as you think it does.”
Dots of sun sway across his face with the wind, and he’s still wearing that maddening smile, but now to go with it there are tears in his eyes. Either he’s certifiably insane, or else there’s some extraordinary explanation here.
“Are you saying Ksenia faked her own death? So the two of you could run away together?” For half a breath it seems almost possible that she and Josh could have come up with a scheme that wild, if it meant they wouldn’t be separated. What wouldn’t those two have done, if it would let them take control of their own fate at long last? But that’s just the effect of those terrible bells still ringing in my mind, and after a little more thought I understand how absurd the idea is. The dress she wore in her casket didn’t hide the incisions, or not completely. “Josh, they did an autopsy. Ksenia was cut to pieces. They took out her heart. Nobody could live through that!”
“Lexi,” Josh says, with ostentatious patience. “Why don’t you just come see her?”
For a slow moment all the functions of my body, breath and pulse and brain waves, suspend together: a velvety, minuscule death, there in the woods, before my life resumes.
“Go see Ksenia?” Only two weeks ago I left daffodils on her grave, but I suppose she could have been exhumed since then. I imagine her greenish white, clay-cold, and dap
pled with decay: a walking corpse, leaning in to hug me.
“Oh,” Josh says, and grins. “Then you’ll believe me! When you see Kezzer walking around totally happy, and totally, completely free of all the crap everybody put her through. And anyway, I know she really misses you. You know how you used to complain that Kezz would never open up to you, and everything intense that you knew about her came from me? But I think she actually misses you more than anybody. She really might—be different now.”
“Go see her,” I say again. “Josh, if this is a joke, it’s unspeakably evil.”
“Of course I wouldn’t do that, Lexi! You—it’s awful you were hurt so much already, because of us. But maybe seeing Kezz again will help make up for that, and then you’ll forgive me?”
He has to be insane.
But at the same time, I have to see for myself.
“You mean right now?” I ask.
Josh bounces a little and squeezes me again, quickly. “Sure, now. I knew you’d come!”
“Where is she?” I guess, if this were real, they’d be hiding out together in some cheap motel twenty miles up the interstate.
“At the house,” Josh says, as if that should be obvious. “Um, Mitch and Emma aren’t there right now.”
I gape at him, trying to absorb that; but of course, when Joshua ran off, there was no reason why he wouldn’t have taken his keys with him. “You’re staying in their house while they still believe you’re dead? Josh, that has to be the most perverse thing I’ve ever heard in my life. You know how much they loved you.”
Josh scowls. “If they’d really loved me, then they would have loved Kezzer too, and not acted like she was some creepy wild animal. Kezzer and me—anybody who loves us has got to love both of us. And if they don’t, then it doesn’t count.”
It’s just a few miles away, their old house on Whistler Drive. “We can take my car.”
“We can’t,” Josh says. “We have to walk. But I know a shortcut.”
He holds out his hand, and it’s warm and firm when I take it. “Josh,” I say. Walking through the woods I feel almost ill, and there’s still a hint of those bells lingering in my ears like tinnitus, only more terrible and more exquisite at the same time. I feel like there are infinite questions, infinite ramifications to explore. Where has he been all these months? “When you disappeared, and then—there was this strange time where we all thought that Ksenia found you—”
“Yeah,” Josh says. “Lexi, God, did you know that Xand tried to make your awesome brownies? And they were totally not as good as yours, but I had to pretend. I don’t know how he got them so leathery.”
“Then that was real,” I say. “Ksenia didn’t lie about finding you. You were really in the hospital.”
“Of course I was. I mean, until Kezzer took me home.”
Nothing makes sense, but as we walk deeper into the woods, in what I think must be the opposite direction from the Delbos’ house, I start to adjust to behaving as if it made sense, to taking the impossibilities almost for granted, as if they were light, trivial, ignorable things. One thing that must be true: Ksenia didn’t take him home, not if home means Whistler Drive.
“Lexi? You haven’t told me anything about you. Like, how’ve you been? What’s been going on?” He’s not looking at me; instead he’s peering ahead at the trees, as if the path were almost too subtle to make out.
“Oh,” I say. For a moment it feels hard to remember. “Well, I got into Brown, and my parents are totally over the moon about it, naturally. And—don’t say anything about this, okay? But I think I just broke up with Xand.” Josh’s eyebrows shoot up and he glances at me, but he’s tactful enough to keep quiet. Alexander and Alexandra, how could we not be meant for each other? “Oh—and there’s been this bizarre epidemic that none of the doctors can figure out; I mean, they haven’t been able to identify a pathogen or anything. Seven kids have died so far and all the parents are panicking. We’re sending Marissa to stay with Grandma Claire this summer, just to make sure she’s safe.”
Josh stops walking and turns to me. “I hate to think of that. How sad everybody must be. But Lexi, the important thing to remember is that those kids are in a better world now. No one can ever hurt them again.”
The look in his eyes is wounded and serious, even urgent; it’s an astonishing statement, coming from him, but he obviously means it. “I didn’t think you were religious.”
“I don’t have to be religious to know that this is the worst world ever. Anytime anyone is happy, or in love, or amazing here—people will try to crush it, Lexi. And mostly they succeed! Every time I see Kezzer, I remember what people did to her. Just because she was beautiful and, and vivid in a way they could never be, so they had to try and destroy her. And she can get better, kind of, but never completely.”
He’s close to tears, so it would be insensitive to point out that for me the world has been mostly pretty great—and also that he’s just contradicted what he said before, about how happy and free she is now.
“It’s the only world we have going on, Josh. So our only option is to work as hard as we can to make it better for everybody. Help build each other up, make each other stronger.” I hesitate. “Love each other.”
He smiles and touches my cheek. “But you’re one of the really special ones, Lexi. For every person who thinks like you do there are at least three of the bad kind. And maybe ten of the kind who just don’t care or feel anything.”
I’d like to tell him that’s not true, but he wouldn’t believe me. He turns and starts walking north again, along a path that must run roughly parallel to the gorge, and I follow.
“Lexi? Do me a favor? When you see Kezz, don’t mention that thing about it being nine months since we saw you? It’s just—she’s been having some memory problems, since everything, and it might confuse her.”
I’ve accepted that we’re walking in the wrong direction, and I’ve accepted that he’s back, but the casual, lazy way he talks about seeing Ksenia: that still gets to me.
“Since everything?” I ask. “You mean, since she died?”
“You’ll see,” Josh says. “We’re getting close now.” He points at a thicket of what I think are blackberry bushes, just starting to form moist new leaves. “We go through there.”
“Through the thorns? We’ll get completely scratched up!”
“Yeah,” he says. “Sorry.”
I look to both sides; it would take us a minute out of our way to skirt the brambles, up through some rough areas off the trail, but nothing too bad. “So why don’t we just go around?”
But Josh is already down on his hands and knees, practically burrowing into the blackberry bushes as if he were some kind of rabbit. And it crosses my mind that it’ll be easier to get through if I’m close behind him, while his body pushes the canes apart.
So I drop down and follow him, straight into the thicket, trying not to think about what the thorns will do to my lace shirt. Josh squirms and thrashes just ahead of me, and I keep my face turned so it won’t be as close to his backside. A thorn scores a wicked streak along my neck, and my shirt snags at the shoulders.
And then we’re through. “Lexi Holden,” Josh informs the air. “Alexandra. She’s like the sweetest person ever, and really cool. I bet you’ll love her.”
He’s already up and he reaches down a hand to lift me to my feet. “You were introducing me to the tree trunks, Josh?”
“You know how I hate to be rude!” Josh grins. “Lexi, come on! I don’t like leaving Kezzer alone for this long.”
I glance back, and I still don’t see any reason why we couldn’t have circled the thicket instead of scrambling through it. We’ve come back to the edge of the woods without my noticing, and to my left the trees are thin enough to let through a view of houses and parked cars.
We walk out through dreamily deserted streets, and turn a few more corners, and then I’m looking at Whistler Drive. It bears repeating that it isn’t supposed to be anywhere near her
e, or maybe I’ve just gotten that disoriented. And while most of it looks just the same as I remember, there are a few details that seem definitely out of the ordinary, like for instance a charred recliner sitting in the middle of the street with its steel framework poking through blackened clouds of stuffing. It’s right in front of a house that looks just like the Delbos’, the same yellow siding and the same magnolia tree, except that theirs was just a single story, with a half-level down on the left, following the uneven ground. This house has a second floor above its entire main section, with two open windows framing perfect darkness.
But that’s the house Josh heads toward, his steps picking up speed. “Josh? Is that a new addition? The upstairs floor, I mean.”
He fires an irritable glance at the upper story. “Yeah. That’s new.”
“It seems weird that the Delbos added all that extra space, after you and Ksenia were gone. Wouldn’t most people decide to downsize, then?”
Josh doesn’t answer, and I lose all interest in the question, because I’ve just noticed something in the window, where the curtain is pushed aside.
There’s a head with short, spiky blond hair just visible over the back of the sofa. I can make out a curve of cheek, a hand, the top of a book. I’m still telling myself that it can’t be Ksenia, but if it’s not then Josh has found a remarkably convincing impersonator.
Josh is already at the door, and I run to catch up with him.
“Kezzer? I brought somebody to see you,” Josh singsongs, and I have to restrain myself to keep from just shouldering him out of my way. And then I’m in, and she’s scrambling up off the couch and gaping at me, with her dirty gray eyes saucer-wide and her jaw hanging; obviously, she’s every bit as shocked to see me as I am to see her.
“Ksenia?” I whisper.
She comes stumbling toward me, all her movements jerking and unhinged and so zombielike that I almost shy away. She’s wearing black cutoffs, a flowing black T-shirt, just like she was the day we met.
And then Ksenia—brittle, guarded, withholding Ksenia, who never seemed to care about me half as much as I cared about her—collapses in a pile at my feet. “Oh, Jesus, Lexi,” she moans. “Lexi, this can’t—you can’t be—”
