As I Wake

by Elizabeth Scott

  “But you’re here,” he says, as if that’s all that matters, as if I don’t see what’s happening to him. As if he doesn’t want to see it.

  “Do you . . . do you know who told Clementine about me? Who sent her to find me when you and I—?” I say and then stop, because I know the answer. I see it in the ghostly shimmer that marks where solid skin of his shoulders should be.

  I see it because he’s here.

  “No,” he says. “I’ve asked her, but she says she’ll only tell me after I go back. When I can’t—when I won’t be here. I wish . . . if I could do it again, I’d tell you about her, I swear. If I had, you wouldn’t be here.”

  He shoves his hands in his pockets and blows out a breath. “You might not have wanted to be with me but I—at least you would still be there. I can’t . . . I can’t live in a world that doesn’t have you in it. I don’t want to live—”

  “Stop,” I say, my whole body shaking. “I’m not—no one is worth this, what you’re doing.”

  “Ava—”

  “I wouldn’t do it for you,” I say, and the words come out strong and clear, echo into the night. Sound almost true, even though they aren’t.

  “You have,” he says. “You could have turned me in a dozen times or more, starting from the first time we met, but you didn’t. You wanted to be with me. I wanted—I want—to be with you. This place—I see the beauty in it. The warmth. But I can’t feel it, and I don’t . . . even if I could fit in here, I wouldn’t want to. It’s not—it’s not home. Don’t you feel that too?”

  I shake my head but I do feel it, I have felt it with every breath I’ve taken since I woke up in a bed I didn’t know, found myself in a place where I belonged but was not—and can never be—from.

  “Liar,” he says, and when I look at him, he’s grinning, a smile I know, that makes my blood sing inside me, every beat of my heart reminding me of what I know. What I remember. How the only happiness I’ve ever known—the only real happiness—was with him.

  I look at him, and he is so pale. So close to disappearing. To death. He would die for me.

  And he will, if he stays.

  “I don’t—it’s not easy for me here,” I say, careful to keep my voice steady. To not show how much each word costs me. “But I could fit in. I could be something more than I ever was before. Be someone. I know you’re sorry about everything, and I—we—lived in a place where trust wasn’t easily given. I understand why you didn’t tell me about Clementine, I do, but I don’t—I don’t want to go back. I don’t want you.”

  He stares at me, and his eyes are full of memories I know, that we share. The world we lived in and more and more and more beyond. Forever. Always.

  His eyes are full of love, and I see, finally, that he didn’t tell me about Clementine because he didn’t think he had a choice. He knew who I was, he knew where I’d been, where I’d come from. He’d known I’d see Clementine’s power and be afraid. So he made his choice, and when it sent me here, he came.

  He loved me—loves me—enough to be here now. He came, waiting and hoping for me to remember my life, remember him. He came here, hoping I’d understand.

  He’s dying just to say he is sorry.

  “Go home,” I say, my voice sharp, and I want him to, I do, because I don’t want him to die. Not ever and not—not over me. Not because of me.

  “Come with me,” he says softly, and takes a step toward me. When he touches my hands I know I should pull away but I can’t. Just this once, just for this moment, let me—

  I can see my hands through his.

  I pull mine away, curl my fingers into my palms, digging my nails into my skin. Force myself to look at him.

  “No,” I say. “I’m here and if we go back, Clementine will—she’ll still be there. We won’t be safe, not ever. What we had is . . . it’s gone.”

  “Gone?” he says. “We’re forever, Ava. Don’t you remember how we both saw—”

  “Stop,” I say, but my voice is shaking.

  “If we go back, it would be different. I know it would be. I would do anything—”

  I take a deep breath. I close my heart.

  It hurts.

  “Then listen to me,” I say. “I can have—I do have a future here. A real one. Go back and let me—let me have that.”

  He looks away from me then, stares at the road I saw when I woke up and didn’t know where I was.

  “This is what you want? Where you want to be?”

  “It’s where I am,” I say. “I can’t live in my memories anymore. I can’t—I don’t want you haunting me.”

  “Ava,” he says, and I shake my head, saying “no” without words because if he says anything else I will break, I will beg him to stay, or I will go with him, and I do not want to be that weak.

  I don’t want him to die. I don’t want to go back and have this happen once more.

  I don’t think I’m strong enough to send him away again.

  I never knew what love was until Morgan, and he shouldn’t die for that. Loving Morgan means letting him go. Love—real love—can’t be defined. It just is.

  It just lives in your heart, like he lives in mine.

  “Go,” I say, and this time, finally, I mean it. I want Morgan to live more than anything else. I want it more than the pain of my own heart, breaking.

  “You—you mean it,” he says, and his voice is barely a stunned, broken whisper.

  I don’t have to say yes. I just walk away from him. I walk back to Jane’s house. To the room that is mine now. To the life that waits for me.

  I think I hear him say my name, once, but I don’t look back. I keep walking.

  Inside Ava’s room—my room, now, I have to think my room—I climb into bed. I close my eyes. All I see is him.

  I get up and walk over to the window. I look out at the road.

  It’s empty now.

  “Morgan,” I say, a whisper, and then again, louder. “Morgan.”

  There is no answer, and I know there won’t be anymore.

  Morgan is gone. He’ll be safe now. He’ll live.

  I’ll never see him again.

  I don’t cry. I can’t. It hurts too much, and I’m afraid that if I start, I’ll never stop.

  42.

  MORGAN IS GONE, and now Clementine is too.

  Jane is the one who tells me, says she heard Clementine moved away two nights after I told Morgan to go.

  “Moved?” I say, and Jane nods.

  “Apparently she called the hospital and said she’d bought a home in some retirement community out West, and was leaving right away.” She pauses for a moment. “Is she—is she gone for real? Back to where—?”

  I nod. Neither of us finish Jane’s sentence, say “Where she was from.” Where I used to be.

  “Did you—did you see her before she went?” Jane says after a long moment, and I look at her.

  “I heard you . . . you went out the other night,” she says. “And when you came back you looked . . .”

  She stops then, and I know why. I’d looked nothing like her Ava then. I’d looked broken in a way she doesn’t understand.

  “I didn’t see her,” I say.

  Jane nods, and tentatively reaches for me, touching her hands to mine. “Are you . . . are you all right?”

  No. A thousand, a million, a billion times no.

  But I am here, and Jane—I don’t remember this Jane, but I remember another one and Clementine knew what she was doing when she sent me here. I feel a connection to Jane. I had a mother, once, briefly, and it was Jane. And now, here, she’s in my life. Wants to be with me.

  “I’m fine,” I tell her, and am rewarded with a happy smile, with Jane’s joy. And it—it doesn’t make me into the Ava that was here but it—I like seeing Jane happy.

  I like knowing I can do that.

  It could be enough, maybe, or at least a start, but the problem is that at night I tumble into dreams that aren’t dreams at all. I tumble into memories and wake up ach
ing for a dying world and a quiet, cold life that offered me nothing but sitting in a still room.

  I wake up and think of Morgan, who is gone.

  Who I sent away.

  I like Jane, I do, but I am tired of her Ava’s life, of the routine of school and friends who say and do things that are beyond my understanding. I am tired of watching Greer and wondering why she doesn’t see what is obvious, wonder why she can’t see happiness waiting for her with Olivia.

  I am tired of Sophy and how her barely hidden rage makes my skin crawl. I am sure she did something that led Jane’s Ava to harm now, but I cannot figure out how she did it.

  I’m not worried about stopping it, though. This Sophy is nothing like the one I remember, wears her longing for power so strongly I am surprised no one else sees it. But then, this place is so much about how things look, and not how they are.

  Morgan would be nothing here, would be seen and ranked as “average” by Greer and Olivia, would disappear into the school, the world that is supposed to be mine. No one would see the sly humor in his eyes, his smile. No one would see that he watches the world and understands it even as he can see past it.

  No one would notice the freckles sprinkled across his face, dotting his nose and his cheeks, and want to kiss them like I do.

  Did. I did. I don’t want to do that anymore.

  I can’t.

  That night, I lie in Ava’s bed and look out her window. There is a gap between the top of her curtains and the glass, a gap where the stars shine through. I lie there and watch them.

  I am used to not sleeping now. I was used to it before only I don’t—won’t—ever wake up to see Morgan and—

  Push it away, push it away. He is safe now, and so am I.

  I yawn and feel my eyes grow heavy. I roll onto my side and close my eyes. I pretend Morgan’s face is not all I see as I drift off to sleep, but it is.

  I think it always will be.

  43.

  WAKE UP.

  I do, gasping, but for once I’m not in a dream that’s a memory, I’m here, in this place, but I feel—

  My skin feels tight, my throat feels tight, I can’t get enough air, I am not the Ava I am supposed to be and something knows this, is calling me.

  Someone.

  I get up and look out the window, dread pouring over me, filing me up.

  I see Clementine. She is standing on the lawn, standing right where I took my first steps out of Jane’s house.

  She is standing there, and she is waiting for me.

  I move out of Ava’s room quietly, slip downstairs and outside.

  Clementine doesn’t look surprised to see me. She doesn’t look like much of anything. She looks worn out, drained.

  “Thank you,” she says before I can say anything. “I—I wanted to make sure Morgan went home and you did that. He . . . I can’t feel him here anymore. Can you?”

  “No,” I say, and she almost smiles at the anger in my voice.

  But only almost.

  I stare at her and she looks away, stares up at Jane’s dark bedroom windows. “It’s funny. I promised her I could bring her daughter back and I did, in a way. You fought me, you know. You—I put safeguards in place. Your memory was supposed to be gone and I even made it so you’d get headaches if you did remember anything. But you kept going. All of this—I did all this for Morgan, and I’ll never see him again.”

  “He’s safe, then?” I say, meaning that he’s away from her, he’s free, and she looks at me then, sees what I mean.

  “He’s more than safe, and no, I’m not sorry for what I did,” she says after a moment, her smile all teeth, and shifts her weight from one foot to another, making all of her blur for a moment, not like Morgan’s pale fading but something stronger, something that makes all of her vanish for a split second. “He’s alive. He’s alive and he—he’ll be fine. He’ll forget you, I know it.”

  I stare at her smile, start to say something, and then see how pale she is. How faded.

  No shadow.

  “Yes,” Clementine says. “It’s happening to me too. I didn’t—my anchor died on me, you see. The Clementine here, who I kept so safe, who I made sure would sleep through all of this . . . she’s gone. Her heart stopped. Weak. I didn’t expect that, and now I’m stuck here. I thought I had it all figured out. I could come, I’d make sure the Clementine here was sedated so I could stay for a while. I just—all those years around death, watching my daughter throw herself away for what she thought was freedom, seeing her and her husband die, trying to keep an eye on Morgan while keeping my own head because I was sure I could find a way to make sure anyone dangerous could be sent somewhere else because there are always variations of where we are that need us. All that, and now—”

  She laughs, a soft sound that is like a sob. “But I never thought about what would happen if I went to a place where I was, or would be, and the me who was or would be died. I ran tests. I’ve never died before and I’ve been in worlds—” She shakes her head.

  “I never thought—I only thought about doing what I had to, and then going. But this self tied herself to me just like I did, didn’t she? I didn’t see—I never saw that if you went into a place where you already were, you had to deal with being two. Is that—is this how it is for you?”

  “I—”

  She shivers, and I fall silent. “I can feel all of them, all the versions of me I’ve seen and they—they’re calling me. I can’t hear anything but them. There are so many. I didn’t realize what I was doing. I should have thought about it more, but I wanted to stay alive. I’d gone from Security to Science. I was so close to dying myself and I wasn’t—well, I didn’t want to.”

  She closes her eyes.

  “That’s better,” she says. “It’s not you I don’t want to see, although that was always the idea. But now I just don’t want to see this place. I can’t believe—of all the places to die, this one?”

  She shakes her head, and opens her eyes. “I didn’t think you’d do it, you know. But you really do love him. You never would have turned him in, would you?”

  “No,” I say. “I wouldn’t have done that.”

  “How do you know?” she says. “How do you know what’s really in your own heart?”

  “I know,” I say, my voice strong, and it’s true. All I have now is my heart, and in every memory I have, in everything I know, I never once thought of Morgan as I was supposed to. He was never a number, never what he was supposed to be. I was afraid of it, intrigued by it—and him—and then lost my heart. And I lost it willingly. Gladly.

  It has always been his and I broke it so he could live.

  “You should have—if only you hadn’t been assigned to Morgan,” she says. “You are so loyal in the wrong way for—well, I suppose that’s why it was so easy for me to send you here. All I had to do was tell you he’d sent me to find you. To help you. That all you had to do was to take my hand and close your eyes.”

  “That’s how you—that’s how it happened?”

  She nods. “You were scared, and I knew—well, I knew who you were. I knew you had to go. So here you are. And now here I am. I—I’m almost sorry, Ava.”

  I take a step toward her.

  “Send me back,” I say, pleading, my voice cracking, and she shakes her head.

  “I—even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I can’t. Everything is—” She closes her eyes again. “I can’t stop hearing them, all of the people I am—so many, desert, ocean, palaces, stars—and it—no. I can’t. It hurts, just being here. Just breathing. I don’t know how Morgan stood it.”

  “He’s better than you.”

  “Don’t be so obvious,” she says, and then opens her eyes, looks up at the sky. “But you’re right. He is. And I—I can see why he loves you now. “

  “Who told you about me?” I say. “About us. At least tell me that. Just—”

  “That, I would do,” she says. “But I don’t remember now. All I can still see is you there, waiting. I can
still remember knowing I’d save Morgan, but the rest—it’s all fading.”

  She smiles at me then, a real smile, sweet and true, and I see Morgan in that smile.

  I think about Morgan then; I miss him, and nothing will change that, not ever, and then Clementine shudders again, her whole body shaking, and turns away, walking off into the night.

  She doesn’t look back, doesn’t say anything else.

  Doesn’t say she’s sorry.

  44.

  CLEMENTINE’S FOUND DEAD in the morning. It makes the Wake Up! morning news because the person who finds the body, a neighbor who stopped by when she saw the front door open, swears the body she saw looked like it had died weeks ago, but Clementine had just talked to people at the hospital about moving. Been seen there a few days before that.

  And, if that wasn’t enough, the neighbor is sure that she saw two bodies for a moment, the long dead one and another, a “twin,” two bodies somehow twisted together, both of their mouths open in unheard screams.

  The neighbor is currently in the hospital “under observation.” Seeing a dead body is hard for anyone, the doctor interviewed on television says. “The mind plays tricks,” he adds. “It will see things that aren’t there in an attempt to cope.”

  “It’s—it’s hard to believe she’s really gone,” Jane says as she turns off the TV. “And poor Mrs. Dean, finding her that way . . . There are friends—were friends. No wonder she saw things that weren’t there.” Her voice is hesitant on the last words, uncertain.

  “You think?” I say.

  Jane looks at me.

  “No,” she finally says. “I’m sure that—I’m sure there were things in that house that no one should see. But it’s over now, Ava, it’s really over. Clementine can’t—I know she hurt you, but she can’t anymore.”

  Jane’s right about that. I think of how I asked Clementine who had told her about me and Morgan, and how she’d forgotten.

  How she said she didn’t remember how to send me home.

  How that, even if she did, she wouldn’t.

  “It is over,” I say, and Jane frowns a little and touches my hands.