Missing, Presumed Dead

by Emma Berquist

  “That night,” she whispers. “The night I died. You touched me.”

  I swallow, and my throat is tight and painful. “Jane.”

  “Did you see it? Did you know?” Her voice is desperate, like she’s begging me to deny it.

  But I tell her. “Yes.”

  She drops my shoulders, and the cold air on my face snaps my eyes open. Jane steps away from me, her face slack and horrified.

  “That’s why you looked so scared.” Blood starts to well up from her neck and her shirt blooms red.

  “Jane,” Trevor says, getting up from the bed. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her, and it’s pitifully inadequate. “I’m so sorry.”

  “You knew,” she says again, and her mouth curls with disgust. “And you did nothing. You let me die.”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Then explain it to me.” She storms forward, and I can feel the rage barely contained under her skin. “Tell me why you didn’t stop it.”

  I try to move away, but she grabs my arms, yanking me close. Her eyes film over pure white, blood bubbling from her throat.

  “Jane, please.” I try to tug away, but she only digs her fingers farther into my wrists.

  “Did you see him cut me?” she growls. “Did you see me bleeding?”

  Her hands are hot on my skin, too hot, crossing over into pain. I don’t fight; I let her hurt me, let her anger roar past the spells in my skin.

  “Tell me,” she yells, shaking me. “Tell me!”

  My arms are burning under her hands and I grit my teeth to keep from crying out. My mind stops working, screaming at me to stop the agony by any means necessary. And there’s only one way left.

  “Jane, stop,” Trevor says, pulling at her hands, but they’re fastened around me like manacles.

  “Stay out of this,” Jane hisses at him.

  My skin starts to blister, the stink of burning hair filling my nose.

  “If you don’t stop, she’ll have to push you out,” Trevor yells. “Do you hear me? She’ll make you leave, Jane. Permanently. Is that what you want?”

  She knows that I won’t. I don’t even try. It feels like my skin is being charred to the bone, and still I don’t do the one thing that would stop the pain.

  “Don’t do this,” Trevor begs. “Please don’t make her hurt you.”

  My vision is starting to darken at the edges. I focus on Jane’s face, pale and bloody and twisted with hate. The pain starts to recede, and that’s a bad thing, but I’m grateful for the relief. Everything is moving very slowly, and Trevor’s voice comes to me muffled and muted. I can see his lips moving, but I can’t quite make out the words.

  There’s a loud crack, and then I’m falling backward, landing hard on the floor. I cry out when my arms hit the wood, the pain snapping me back into consciousness.

  I look up and see Trevor looming over Jane, his hand still clenched in a fist. He looks back at me, and I suck in a breath. His eyes are black holes, bruises and cuts mottling his angular face. Blood drips down his neck, his arms, pools in places beneath his shirt.

  “Go,” he says to me. “I’ve got this.”

  I stare at him, barely recognizing the boy in front of me. He turns his face away like he doesn’t want me to see it. Like he can hide the fact that he, too, died violently and painfully. That his anger might not match Jane’s, but it’s far older, a cold burn instead of a fire.

  Jane makes a horrible screeching sound and tries to run past him, but he catches her around the waist and pulls her back.

  “Go,” he yells at me, and I scramble to my feet, my arms screaming. I run to the door, my legs unsteady, and I throw it open.

  I take one last look back, and too late I wish I hadn’t. She’ll never forgive me; she’ll never want to see me again. This will be my last memory of Jane, this shrieking, clawing creature in Trevor’s grasp. I shut the door behind me, and I shut everything I wanted with it.

  I move in fits and starts, my body not responding properly to my commands. I head for my car, then realize I don’t have my keys. So I start walking, my feet stumbling along the sidewalk, somehow propelling me forward. I don’t know where I’m going until I’m pounding on the locked door and Nancy is frowning at me from the other side of the glass.

  “Lexi?” she asks, reaching down to unlock the bolt. “It’s the middle of the night.”

  “Deda,” I say, my voice echoing strangely in my ears.

  “He’s sleeping, what’s going—” She stops, halfway through opening the door, staring down. “Lexi, what on earth happened?”

  I look down and catch sight of my arms. The skin around my wrists is bright red and blistered, peeling away in places to show pink, wet spots underneath.

  “Come in,” Nancy says urgently. “The on-call nurse can look at you.”

  She opens the door wide and I pause in place. I’m tired; I’m so, so tired.

  “Lexi,” Nancy says sharply, reaching a hand out. Then her tone gentles, goes coaxing. “I’ll wake up your grandfather. He can sit with you.”

  I stare at her hand like a threat, think of the nurse’s fingers on my wrists. I can’t take it, not tonight. What am I even doing here? Deda warned me, and he was right. This was my mistake, and I won’t lay it on his doorstep.

  “No,” I say, taking a step back, and then another.

  “Lexi, you need medical attention,” Nancy says warningly.

  I shake my head. “Tell him—tell him I called. I’m taking a break, but I’ll come see him soon.”

  “Lexi—”

  “Don’t tell him I was here,” I say, still backing away. “Don’t tell him any of this.”

  Nancy yells after me, but I’m already running. My legs don’t carry me far. I barely make it two blocks before my knees lock up and I have to stop. It’s okay; I know where I’m headed now. I wait at the bus stop, and no one else is there to stare at my arms or ask any questions. I don’t know what time it is; the buses start running at four a.m. and it has to be close to that. I left my phone at home, along with everything else I thought I cared about.

  My arms are throbbing and I focus on the pain, anything to keep me from thinking about what just happened. I don’t know how deep the burns go, how many layers of skin I’ve lost, only that it feels like I’ve been seared to the bone.

  I sink into the pain, let it fill me up, until my body becomes one large ache. I can feel my pulse in the raw skin of my arms, the blood rushing beneath the wounds. Each beat sings to me that this pain is earned, and I welcome it. If this is my punishment, I’ll take it. I deserve worse.

  The stink of exhaust hits me before the groan of the bus. In the darkness, the driver barely glances in my direction as I get onboard and pick a seat in the shadows. I close my eyes and lean my head against the grimy window; I’m in too much pain to fall asleep, but I let the lurch and tug of the wheels lull me into kind of stupor.

  My stop isn’t far, but it takes every ounce of energy I have to get back on my feet. When I climb off the bus and stumble outside, I’m running on nothing but delirium and the certainty that this is where I belong.

  The doors of the clinic’s psychiatric ward slide open and I stagger inside, almost weeping when I see the familiar green tile and the nurses’ station.

  “Can I help you?” asks the orderly behind the glass, but I barely hear him.

  “Lexi?” Someone takes my elbow gently. “Are you all right?”

  I look at the white-haired man hovering over me with concern.

  “Hi, Dr. Ted,” I say, his face swimming in and out of focus. “I need some rest again.”

  “Who are you talking to?” the orderly asks.

  I blink, and it takes forever for my eyelids to open up again.

  “No one,” I say. “It’s no one.”

  And then my bones can no longer hold up my body.

  16

  THE NURSE THINKS I BURNED MYSELF. I DON’T correct her; it’s easier than the truth.
She doesn’t ask me how I did it, or why, but she makes small, disapproving sounds as she dabs ointment on my blisters. I flinch each time, for once more from pain than what lives in my head. Not that I can unsee it. Ironic, really, for a woman who works in a psych ward to kill herself. Physician, heal thyself.

  I hiss as she starts to bandage me, the gauze scraping across raw skin. I wish I was still unconscious, but I only collapsed for a few minutes. The Vicodin should be kicking in soon, but right now it’s only making me nauseous.

  “Don’t pop the blisters yourself,” the nurse says, fixing the gauze in place. “Keep applying the antibiotic and keep it clean.”

  I only nod and her mouth purses.

  “The new skin will be sensitive to the sun, so take precautions. There will be some scarring.”

  I pull my arms away and fold my tattooed fingers together. Do I look like the kind of person who cares about scarring? I’m only worried whether the lines of ink on my wrists will need to be retouched, if Theo’s magic has been broken. I guess I’ll find out if I catch a cold.

  The nurse sighs and peels off her gloves, tossing them into a bin.

  “You’re done,” she says, her voice heavy with resignation. “I’ll check the bandages tomorrow.”

  Maybe it’s not so ironic. Maybe what she sees every day would be enough to break anyone.

  “Thank you,” I say, sliding off the table.

  I could tell her to get help. I could tell her to talk to someone, that I know what it’s like to feel the darkness closing over your head. But of course I don’t. Instead I cross my thickly wrapped arms and leave the room. I’ll always have this reminder of how I didn’t save Jane. Scars tell a story, and mine is a cautionary tale. Get too close and get burned.

  The Vicodin is almost better than the sleeping pills. It hits me like a hammer wrapped in cotton, and it takes me long minutes to undo my shoes and climb into bed, my fingers clumsy from the burns and the drugs.

  I curl up on my side, half convinced the bed is rocking on waves, and let the movement ease me to sleep. I try not to think about her, but I can’t seem to stop. I shouldn’t have let her kiss me. I shouldn’t have kissed her back. Maybe she could have forgiven me, at one point. But I let her die and then I let her kiss me. There’s no forgiving that kind of betrayal. I never should have left this hospital bed.

  I sleep, and sleep, waking only when the nurses come to do their checks, and sometimes not even then. The light is low when I finally open my eyes and keep them open, late afternoon at least. The drugs have worn off and my arms are stinging, but I still don’t get out of bed. The stiff hospital sheets smell like bleach and powder as I burrow my face into the pillow. They’ll make me get up to eat something eventually, or I would stay in this bed for the entire seventy-two hours.

  “Are you ready to tell me what happened?”

  I open one bleary eye to stare at Dr. Ted. He’s in his therapist pose, legs crossed, thoughtful expression.

  “No,” I say, and turn my face back to the pillow.

  “I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me.”

  “You can’t help me at all,” I say, my voice muffled. “You’re dead.”

  Dr. Ted sniffs. “I don’t see what difference that makes.”

  I sigh and roll onto my back. “You can’t fix what’s wrong with me, doc. There’s no point in trying.”

  “I don’t ‘fix’ people, Lexi. But why don’t you tell me what you think is wrong with you?”

  “God, do you have to be such a . . . a shrink?”

  Dr. Ted laughs a little. “Why else would you come here?”

  I frown. “I come here to rest, that’s all. It’s quiet here.”

  “There are lots of quiet places, Lexi. Libraries. Hotels.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  Dr. Ted leans back and presses his hands together. “What I understand is that for the past two years, you’ve come here more and more often. Out of all the places you could go, you choose a clinic full of doctors whose job it is to help people who need help. Now maybe the living doctors haven’t figured it out, but I don’t have other patients to distract me. So I’ll ask again: Why do you come here?”

  I press my head back into the pillow, staring up at the ceiling and the water stain spreading at the corner. It was smaller the last time I stayed in this room, barely more than a handprint. Now it’s like a beach ball with strange tentacles growing out of it. Has it really been so long? Have many hours have I spent staring at these ceilings, sleeping in these scratchy sheets? And for what?

  Twenty-six thousand light years from us, at the very center of our galaxy, is a supermassive black hole. It is the heaviest object in the Milky Way, the mass of millions of suns condensed into a single point. The closer you get to it, the stronger the gravitational pull. Get close enough, and nothing can escape. Not even light.

  “There’s this . . . scream inside of me,” I say finally. “I can feel it here.” I press a fist to my chest, just where my rib cage ends. “Sometimes it’s weightless. And sometimes it feels like it’s packed with cement, like it’s a cinder block pressing down on me.”

  “How long have you felt it?” Ted asks.

  “All my life,” I say. “Ever since I knew what I was.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I think it’s where things were supposed to go,” I say. “Normal things. Like having your mom hug you when you scrape your knee. Or having a secret with your best friend. Or holding hands with someone when the lights go off at a movie. I think those things were meant to be there, but I never got them. Instead I got . . .”

  I pause, and Dr. Ted nods at me. “Go on.”

  “Guilt,” I say. “Every time I didn’t save someone. Loneliness, when I had to push everyone away. Because it hurts to have them near. Anger, because it isn’t fair. And when my mom died . . .” I swallow past the lump in my throat. “I knew if I let it out, I would never stop screaming. So I buried it. I let it rot and calcify and I chained it beneath my rib cage.”

  “And you never let it out?”

  I don’t want to think about Jane. Not here, not yet.

  “I tried,” I say. “Just a little. I thought it was safe. I was wrong.”

  Dr. Ted leans forward. “Why do you say that?”

  “Look what happened.” I hold up my bandaged arms. “I thought I could control it, but I can’t. I think I’m supposed to be like this. Not just the ghosts, not just the death. I’m meant to be . . . trapped.”

  I look over at Dr. Ted and he gazes back at me a little sadly. “I don’t have an easy answer for you, Lexi. I doubt you’d trust one, anyway. You and I both know there’s no such thing. But I will ask you consider this: the scream you say is inside you? Maybe it’s not about learning to live without it. Maybe it’s about learning to live despite it.”

  I curl up on my side, exhausted again though I haven’t left my bed. I don’t know if he’s right, if there’s a way to live like this. But if there’s no fixing what’s wrong with me, then what choice do I have?

  “You know, you don’t have to wait until you’re ready to break before you come here,” he says. “You could come see me every week, have someone to talk things through with. There’s a cafeteria on the bottom level that’s usually empty.”

  I blink at him, unsure.

  “Just think about it,” Dr. Ted says, standing up. “It’s not like I have a busy schedule.”

  “Yeah,” I say, pulling the covers up to my chin. “Maybe.”

  “Get some rest,” he says, patting my foot.

  “Hey, doc,” I say before he turns around. “How did you die?”

  He smiles down at me. “Old age,” he says. “Went to sleep at my desk and never woke up.”

  I nod, wearily. “I think I would have liked you in life. It wouldn’t have hurt much to know you.”

  Maybe he says, “I would have liked that, too,” but I can’t remember if I’m awake or if I’m dreaming.

  I get u
p for dinner. For Dr. Ted’s sake. I don’t think he can help me, not really, but he’s trying, and so I will, too. I put my boots on, rinse my face, pull myself into something resembling a human being.

  They sit us around a Formica table to eat and we avoid making eye contact with one another. It reminds me of high school; I hated eating there, too. At least in this place, I don’t have to pretend to fit in. We’re all outcasts here.

  The food isn’t bad, considering, not any worse than the stuff they serve at Deda’s. The spaghetti is too soft and the sauce is too sweet and they don’t let us have knives, but the meatballs are decent and I’m hungry enough to not care about the rest.

  I glance around the table while I drink from the small carton of milk. There’s a woman in a pink sweatshirt, a young man with a patchy beard. Everyone is quiet, focused on their food, focused on their minds. No one looks like they belong here. They look just like me—tired. Like they’ve been fighting something for a long time, something no one else can see. I told myself I was different, I was just coming here to rest; it turns out that’s all anyone here wants. A place where you don’t have to hide how hard it is. How much it takes out of you to just be every day.

  “There you are.”

  I look up and the fork slips from my fingers. It hits the edge of my tray, bounces off the table, and clatters to the ground. In the silence, the noise is deafening, and every face turns toward me, but all I can see is her standing in front of me.

  Her eyes are still white, her shirt soaked through with blood.

  “Jane,” I whisper through numb lips.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” she says.

  My eyes flick down to my arms resting on the table, and she blanches.

  “Again,” she says, swallowing. “I’m not here to hurt you again.”

  All I can do is stare, so sure that if I blink I’ll find she’s not real.

  “Can we talk?” she asks, glancing around the table. “Maybe somewhere else?”

  I stand up too fast, knocking my tray to one side. Suddenly the food is sitting wrong in my stomach and I wish I hadn’t eaten so fast. I head for my room, ignoring the orderly who shadows me for the few seconds it takes to get back.