by Kat Zhang
My head spun.
“Can you do it again?” Ryan said.
I’d spoken. I’d formed words and moved our lips and tongue and spoken.
They’d heard my voice.
From far within the abyss, a pulse.
Again the pulse. Then came a feeling like the drawing of a breath. A tendril of something as light and insubstantial as dawn haze floated from the chasm.
Then she was back, bleary-eyed and weak and confused, but back, back, back, filling that terrible hole inside us. Making us whole again. Making us how we were meant to be.
She believed me. She kept our eyes closed, and she relaxed little by little.
Seven
Addie was still woozy five minutes after she awoke, swaying when she tried to sit up. She moved as though through syrup, each limb thick and unwieldy.
she said. We could see Lissa and Ryan now, and they were crouched by the sofa. They kept talking, their words washing over us but barely sinking in. Addie wasn’t listening at all. I heard enough to know the drug would take a little longer to wear off completely.
I didn’t think she was ready to know.
Addie strengthened, her presence growing less tenuous beside mine. She kept blinking, like someone trying to clear away a dream.
“Addie?” Lissa said. She reached toward us, then pulled her hand away again at the last moment. “Are you okay now?”
Addie started, as if noticing her for the first time. “You—you drugged me.” Her words were slurred.
The siblings looked at each other.
“We had to,” Lissa said. “It’s so much easier with the drug—”
“What’s easier?” Addie said.
Another glance between Ryan and Lissa. The sofa was solid against our back. Our fingers dug into the rigid fabric.
“Didn’t Eva tell you?” Ryan said.
Addie’s frown deepened. “How would Eva know?”
“Well . . .” Lissa tugged on a curl of her hair, wrapping it around her finger. “Eva was awake, right?”
“Of course not,” Addie said. “That’s not pos—”
I said.
The rest of Addie’s sentence lodged in our throat. It hurt to breathe around.
I hesitated. Lissa and Ryan watched us, studying our face. But I knew Addie wasn’t paying them any attention.
I said.
Stunned silence. Her astonishment swirled bright and wild around me.
I said, unable to stand it any longer. The very knowledge pushed at our bones.
“Addie?” Lissa said. Her fingers hovered above our arm.
Addie looked up. Our lips parted. Then the sound came, hoarse and crackly. “Eva talked?”
Lissa smiled. “She did.”
Addie stared. She didn’t speak, not even to me. I matched her silence. I didn’t know what to say. And then, suddenly, she tried to stand. Our legs felt too frail to support our weight. “I’m . . . I’m going to go home.”
Lissa grabbed our arm as we wobbled. “No, Addie, stay. Please stay.”
“Wait a little longer. I’ll walk you back,” Ryan said. Addie looked at him. She didn’t even know he was Ryan, I realized. She thought he was still Devon.
“I’m okay,” she said. She tugged out of Lissa’s grasp and sleepwalked toward the kitchen. They hurried after us, their feet slapping against the hardwood floor.
“I’m coming with you,” Lissa called. “Just wait a second, Addie. I’m—”
Addie seemed not to hear.
She slipped into our shoes without tying the laces. But when she reached for our book bag, Ryan was already holding it. He nodded for us to go through the door first.
“I’ll go, Ryan,” Lissa said. “I can go—”
I didn’t know how the argument ended. I couldn’t hear because Addie had already stepped over the threshold, our shoelaces clacking as we walked. I heard the door close behind us. Then a voice by our ear: “You should tie your shoes or you’ll trip on them.”
Addie bent down and did the knots. Our fingers fumbled with the laces. When we stood again, Ryan was watching us.
“Well, come on,” he said, not unkindly. “I don’t know where you live, so you’re going to have to lead the way.”
They walked the first two blocks in silence, the mosquitoes out in full force. The humidity made it feel like we were slogging through sheets of suspended rain. The sky was straight out of a picture book, so perfect summer-spring blue it hurt to look at.
I couldn’t tell what Addie was thinking. Her mind was blank, her emotions boxed. The few cars on the road rushed by us as if we didn’t exist. They didn’t know who we were. What we’d done.
What I’d done. Spoken.
I’d spoken.
“What did she say?”
“Sorry?” Ryan said, turning to face us.
It took Addie a moment to repeat herself. “What did she say?”
“Who, Eva?” he asked.
She nodded.
Ryan frowned. “What do you mean?”
It didn’t make sense to him why Addie would ask him instead of me. I didn’t know, either. I didn’t think Addie knew.
“I want to know what Eva said while I was asleep,” Addie said. Our voice was low, almost raspy.
He was quiet for a second before answering. “She said: ‘I can’t.’” He inflected the last two words to show they were mine.
“Can’t what?”
“Why don’t you ask her?” he said.
Addie didn’t reply. Ryan looked away again, but he said, “Does that make you happy? That she spoke?”
“Happy?” said Addie.
Ryan stopped walking. Our eyes dropped to the ground.
“Happy,” Addie said again, softer. The lukewarm, waterlogged air swallowed our voice.
“It’s okay,” Ryan said. “It’s okay if you aren’t.”
Slowly, Addie looked up and met his gaze.
“I think she understands if you aren’t,” he said.
They started walking again, taking their time in the heat even though the mosquitoes attacked with a vengeance. It wasn’t a day built for things like walking quickly.
Little by little, our house came into view. Squat, off-white, with a black-shingled roof and a row of straggly rosebushes, it had been one of the few we could afford when our parents decided to move. Our room was smaller than the one we’d had before, and Mom didn’t like the kitchen layout, but complaints had been kept to a minimum as we’d walked the halls for the first time. We might have been young, but not nearly so young we didn’t understand that doctors were expensive and government stipends only helped so much.
Soon, we stood in our front yard. The soft kitchen lights shone through the strawberry-patterned curtains.
“Here you go,” Ryan said, holding out our book bag. Addie looked at it
as if she’d forgotten it was ours, then nodded and took it before turning and heading toward the house. “I’ll see you later, then, Addie,” he said.
He’d stopped at the edge of our yard, letting Addie walk the short distance to the door alone. There might have been a question buried in his words. Or it might just have been a reflex, a meaningless good-bye people passed around. I wasn’t sure.
Addie nodded. She didn’t look at him. “Yeah. Later.”
She was wiping our shoes on the welcome mat when he added, “Bye, Eva.”
Addie stilled. The air smelled of dying roses.
Our hand froze on the doorknob. Slowly, Addie turned around.
“She says bye,” she said.
Ryan smiled before walking slowly away.
After that day, Addie and Hally walked together to her house every afternoon after school. Addie no longer drank the tea; it was too hot for that. Instead, Hally dissolved the fine white powder into sugar water, which masked the bitter taste.
Addie and I didn’t talk about these sessions. I told myself I didn’t bring it up because I didn’t want to push my luck. Addie was risking everything by agreeing to go. What more could I ask for? But to be honest, I was scared. Scared of hearing what she might have to say, what she really felt.
Hally and Addie didn’t speak much, either, though it wasn’t for lack of trying on Hally’s part. Addie fielded all her attempts at conversation with an averted gaze and one-word replies. But as long as we didn’t have a babysitting job that afternoon, Addie never missed a day, either. Her friends invited her out shopping or to the theater, but she suggested skipping our trip to the Mullan house only once.
“I’ve got to go to someone’s house today,” Hally had said as she stuffed things into her bag that particular afternoon. “We’ve got a project due—”
Addie hesitated. “Tomorrow, then.”
“No, wait,” Hally said. She smiled. “I won’t be long. Half an hour at most, okay?”
I said nothing. Addie didn’t look Hally in the eye. She stared at the half-erased chalk marks on the blackboard, the graffiti on the tops of the worn desks, the bent plastic chairs.
“Devon will walk you—” Hally started to say, but Addie cut her off.
“I remember how to get to your house.”
“Oh,” Hally said and laughed, which should have eased the tension but only made the silence that followed more pronounced. She slung her book bag over her shoulder, her smile unfaltering but her eyes blinking a little more rapidly than usual. “Half an hour at most,” she repeated. “Devon knows where the medicine is. And he’ll make sure nothing happens to Eva while you’re asleep.”
Addie ended up walking home with Devon anyway, since we ran into him by the school doors. It was possibly the most uncomfortable ten minutes I could have imagined. He didn’t speak to Addie. Addie didn’t look at him. The heat made them both sweat, made an uneasy situation worse, and it was an even bigger relief than usual to reach the cool, airy Mullan house, to swallow the drugged water and lie down and wait for Addie to fall asleep.
It still made me sick to feel her ripped away from me, but I was getting better at keeping calm. She would come back. It was easier knowing that she would come back, that the drug’s effects lasted only an hour at most, and sometimes only twenty minutes or so.
Devon had been sitting at the table when Addie went to lie down, but about ten minutes after she disappeared, my name came floating through the blackness.
“Eva?”
He said my name like a secret. Like a password, a code whispered through locked doors.
I felt the warmth of his palm as he laid it softly on the back of our hand, the pressure of his fingers, the brush of his thumb against our pulse.
“It’s Ryan,” he said. “I figured you—that you’d like to know there was someone here.”
I tried to speak. I focused on our lips, on our tongue, on our throat. I tried to form thank you with a mouth that belonged to me yet didn’t want to obey. But it seemed I wasn’t going to be able to speak this particular day.
So instead, I focused on Ryan’s hand, which was easier. He’d slid his palm down over our knuckles, his fingers tucked beneath our hand. I curled our fingers around his and squeezed as hard as I could, which was barely anything at all.
I figured that was as articulate as I was going to get.
But the thought of one day being able to respond to him, to sit and laugh and talk with him as anyone else might have done, was added to my ever-growing list of reasons to keep on coming to the Mullan house. To keep fighting, no matter the cost.
Eight
The days passed. Then a week. Then another and another. I used to count my life in weekends or theater visits or Lyle’s dialysis sessions. I marked the days with school assignments or babysitting jobs. Now I tallied my life by the improvements I made lying on a couch with Ryan or Devon, Hally or Lissa, by my side. The number of words I managed to speak. The fingers I managed to move.
And for the first time, my mind filled with memories that were mine and mine alone. My first smile while Hally whispered to me all the stupid, crazy things she’d dragged her brother into when they were little. My first laugh, which startled Lissa so much that she’d jerked away before laughing, too. And even on the days when all my progress seemed to backslide and I lay mute and paralyzed on the couch, trapped in the darkness behind our eyelids, I had someone beside me, talking to me, telling me stories.
I learned how the Mullan family had moved to Lupside a year before Addie and I did, when their mother had changed jobs. How Ryan missed their old house because he’d spent twelve years there, had known the position of every book in the library, the creak of every step in the curved stairwell. How Hally didn’t miss it because they’d hardly had any neighbors, and the ones they did have had been hateful. How they both had fond memories, though, of the fields behind the house and childhoods spent running through them, pretending to be anywhere but where they actually were.
I remember with perfect clarity the first time I opened our eyes.
Hally had screamed, then scrambled to fetch Devon. “Look!” she’d cried. “Look!”
“Eva?” Devon had said. But it hadn’t been Devon.
That was the first time I caught them shifting, caught Ryan pushing through and looking out at me. I couldn’t even move our gaze or smile or laugh, could only stare up at his face. He was so close that I could pick out his individual eyelashes, long and dark and curved like Hally’s.
I remember that snapshot of him, smiling with only one side of his mouth, hair damp and curlier than normal from that afternoon’s rain. It was my first glimpse of him, really, because we hardly ever saw him at school, and even when we did, Devon always seemed to be in control. He rolled his eyes slightly as Hally nudged him aside so I was looking at her instead.
“Soon,” Hally said, grinning, “you’ll be doing cartwheels.”
At times like that, I believed her. Other times, I wasn’t so sure.
“Don’t worry about it,” Ryan said one afternoon. Hally and Lissa were gone again that day. They seemed to be leaving us with Ryan more and more now, and Addie had stopped asking where they went. I didn’t mind. I liked this boy who pulled up a chair next to the couch, who talked to me about wiring and voltage and then laughed and said I was probably bored out of my mind, that this was all incentive for me to get control of my legs so I could escape.
Ryan pulled his chair closer
. “Devon and I never really settled. There were a few months when we were five or six when I kept losing strength. Everyone was sure I’d be gone by our seventh birthday.” His lips twitched into a smile. “But I came back. I don’t know how, exactly. I remember fighting it, Devon fighting it . . . and I don’t know. Our parents never told anyone. You remember our mom works at the hospital?”
I did. That was where the medicine came from—stolen one day when Hally had gone with her mother to work. Addie had barely kept from shuddering when she’d learned.
“She knows a bit about this kind of stuff. She thought maybe we were just late bloomers or something. Or she hoped, anyway. So she never reported it, and she made sure we hid it—she hid us. Donvale—that’s where we lived before—is this tiny, rural place, so it was easier to keep to ourselves. Our dad homeschooled us through first and second grade so we wouldn’t be in public so much during that time, when everyone’s newly settled. Our parents were afraid, you know?”
It took all my strength—all my strength and all my concentration—but I managed to force our lips, our tongue, to form one word: “Yes.” And in that one word, I tried to convey everything.
Ryan smiled, like he always did when I spoke, even when it was just a few syllables. But then his smile faded. “The officials wouldn’t have been lenient about the deadline—not with us.”
I was torn between horror and envy. If you knew your child was sick, wasn’t developing naturally, how could you not take him to the doctor? How could you not worry?
“But eventually, not going to regular school was attracting more attention than it was worth. Our mom thought Devon showed signs of being dominant, so when she finally registered us, she put only his name. Just pretend, she told us. We’d already learned how important it was that we did.”
I stared up at him, wishing I had the words and the strength to tell him I knew exactly what he meant. About the open curiosity and growing fear Addie and I had faced on the playground.
But Ryan knew that, just like he knew how his features reminded everyone who saw him of the pictures in our history books, the foreigners who had to be kept out at all costs to keep our country safe.
