Apple gave us the name of the airline along with the tickets. I glance along the rows of ticketing counters until my eyes catch on a sign that might be the one I’m looking for, and I start walking. All I have is a fake ID that was good enough for domestic air travel but won’t get me onto anything international, a backpack, and a heart that feels like it’s going to explode in my chest, leaving me dead on the floor. Could I be a road ghost if I died in an airport? I’ve met homecomers who died in bus stations. Maybe this would count. Maybe this would get me onto the ghostroads, into the twilight.
But I don’t think it would get me onto the median. I don’t think it would drape a coat around my shoulders and put a burger in my belly and take things back to the way they’re supposed to be. At best, I’d be like the rest of the homecomers, delusional to the point of completely breaking from reality, willing to do anything, anything, if it would get me home.
I stop in the middle of the walkway, so abruptly I nearly overbalance. My heart is hammering again, even harder, and my gut is clenching tight, like someone has shoved a fist into my stomach, grabbed everything they could touch, and squeezed. Homecomers will do anything to get home. They’ll lie and cheat and steal and never realize that they’re doing it, and they don’t understand they’re dead, and they don’t realize they’re never getting home.
Which is more likely? That Laura and the routewitches are sending me across an ocean to descend into the Underworld and steal my death back from the Greek gods of the dead, or that I’ve already found my death somehow, already walked in front of a moving car because I forgot it could hurt me, already swallowed the wrong kind of berry from a roadside bush, and now I’m a homecomer who doesn’t know it? Oh sweet Saint Celia, am I already lost?
“Her Majesty told me to watch for someone who looked like they were having a quiet little nervous breakdown, and here you are, and here I am, and I suppose that means the day is going the way it should,” says a kind voice beside me. I manage not to flinch as I turn my head.
There’s a man there, dressed in a blue and red uniform that manages to look uncomfortable and formal at the same time, like something from a theme park. His hair is short and neatly styled, and he’s smiling at me. That seems like the important thing right now. He’s smiling at me, he sees me, and I don’t have any desire to demand that he drive me to Michigan. I would, if I were a homecomer. Right? I’d do anything to get home, not just stand here gaping at him like a fool.
“Rose?” he asks, and when I nod, his smile widens. “Hi. I’m Carl. You’re supposed to be looking for me. Do you know why?”
“You have something for me,” I say.
“I wasn’t expecting you to be alone.”
“My aunt is returning the rental car.”
He nods. “Good. Your package arrived. Will you come with me?”
I nod, gripping the strap of my backpack tightly enough that the nylon bites into my palm, and I follow him away from the counters and the lines of weary travelers, already tired even before they board the planes to their final destinations.
Carl leads me to a door marked “authorized personnel,” says, “It’s just a break room,” and swipes a card. The door opens. We go inside. It’s such a small thing—people go into rooms all the time, every day, without remarking on it—but it feels like it changes the world.
The break room is plain, with white walls, a chipped Formica table, and a mini-kitchen, refrigerator and microwave and vending machine. Carl gestures for me to sit down. I do, watching as he crosses to the counter, opens a cupboard, and takes down a box of sugared cereal, cartoon mascot beaming at me from the front of the box like some modern-day Trickster figure. There are so many gods and demons swirling around me right now that I almost expect it to wink and offer some advice.
It doesn’t. Carl plunges his hand into the oat and marshmallow mix, pulling out a plain brown envelope. It smells like sugar when he offers it to me. “Everything you need,” he says. “Tell the Queen I keep my word.”
I blink, unsure what I’m supposed to say to that. “You’re a routewitch?”
“I’m a hybrid,” he says, mouth a bitter twist. “I’m a routewitch and an umbramancer, and that means I got both and I got neither. But the umbramancers don’t have their own Court to keep, so we either work solo or we find a way to win ourselves into the graces of the Ocean Lady.”
I take the envelope. I can feel shapes through the paper, passports and luggage tags for the bags we don’t have with us. “Is that what you’re trying to do?”
“I’m trying to prove that I’m loyal.” The twist softens, becomes a more ordinary frown. “I’m tired, and I’m lonely, and I don’t have a home to go to. I want to go to the Ocean Lady and rest for a while. That means proving myself.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
There’s a conflict on the other side of those two words, something long and slow and bitter as only human divisiveness can be. Carl is courting Apple’s favor, and he’ll tell me, if I ask; he’ll try to make me understand whatever I say I want to know. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something I should know or not. Right now, right here, I’m a routewitch and I’m Apple’s envoy, and he wants to please her by pleasing me.
“Do you know who I am?” I ask, curiosity and concern.
He nods. “I couldn’t miss it if I wanted to. Distance and the dead, that’s what I have, that’s why I live in the liminal spaces. You’re both. You’re Rose Marshall, the girl in the green silk gown cast over in flesh and bone, and you’re like a wound in the world. This shouldn’t be possible. This shouldn’t be true.”
I want to hug him for hating my current situation as much as I do, even if his reasons are very, very different. Instead, I nod and clutch the envelope to my chest for a moment before opening it. Two passports fall out, along with pre-printed tickets to the British Museum, strange plastic transit cards, and a map of London. Quickly, I make all the diverse pieces of my journey disappear into the appropriate places, tucking them into my pockets and the inside of my backpack.
When I look up, Carl is watching me with anxious eyes. “You’ll tell her?” he asks. “You’ll tell her I helped you?”
“I’ll tell her you’re loyal and deserve a chance to rest,” I say. “Everyone deserves a chance to rest.”
He relaxes slightly. “Thank you.” He pauses before he says, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“The things some people say, about you and the truckers. Are they true?”
There are so many things people could be saying about me and the truckers. Somehow, people never seem to talk about the ones I’ve fucked, or the ones I’ve tricked into revealing themselves to the police after I discovered that their vehicles had been transformed from innocent pieces of a supply chain into rolling charnel houses by the desires they couldn’t find the strength to set aside. I’ve been their angel, both guardian and avenging, and people couldn’t care less, because there’s no blood for them in those stories.
“No,” I say. “I’ve never killed a trucker, I’ve never caused an accident. I just try to be there for the ones that have to happen. Sometimes an accident can’t be turned aside. You must know that.”
“I do,” says Carl, and he looks relieved. “I never believed those stories, but . . . you know how people talk.”
Do I ever. “Thank you for your help,” I say, swinging my backpack back over my shoulder. “I need to find Laura before she decides I’ve run away and goes home.”
Carl nods. Again, he’s the one to open the door, maybe because he’d have fewer questions to answer if someone happens to see us. I’m young enough to be taken for a niece or the daughter of a family friend, and clothed enough for no one to assume anything else.
The caution, while practical, is unnecessary. There’s no one outside the little room, and when he leads me back to the counter, Lau
ra is already there, the first signs of panic beginning to show around her eyes. She gasps when she sees me, one hand flying involuntarily to cover her mouth. There is no concealing her relief.
My own feelings are a little less clear-cut. It’s hard to stop the gratitude that floods through me when I realize how worried she was by my absence. She cares about what happens to me.
She’s also my enemy, or she was, before all this started. She’s the one who locked me in a Seal of Solomon and threatened to wipe me from existence; she’s the one whose life has been shaped and defined by my death. If not for me being there the night when Tommy crashed and burned, she could have grown up to be anything. But I was there, fulfilling the role Carl had been so concerned about. The accident had been inevitable. If Tommy raced, Tommy died, and the boy Tommy was had always been destined to race. Laura saw me, Laura blamed me, and the rest is history, stretched out between us in an unbroken, unbreakable line.
I don’t know how to deal with Laura Moorhead being genuinely concerned for my safety. So I swallow my fear and my confusion and my anxiety and say, “Carl was just showing me the bathroom, Auntie. Did you get the car back okay?”
“I did,” she says, with a wary glance at Carl.
“We have a mutual friend,” he says. “She told me you’d be coming. Do you need to check a bag?” He starts toward an empty station, drawing envious glances from a few of the people waiting in line for the attention of one of the people in the same uniform. The sign above it reads FIRST CLASS. I don’t know if Apple ordered Bon to book us first class tickets, but I wouldn’t put it past her.
I actually sort of hope she did exactly that. This may be—will be, if I’m lucky—the last time I ride a plane. It would be nice to get the full experience.
“One,” says Laura faintly. She steps up to the counter, and I am forgotten as she and Carl begin the steps of a dance that seems familiar to the both of them, yet is entirely alien to me. I take the opportunity to look around, studying the people who surround us.
Some of them are so nicely dressed that it makes me feel scruffy and out of place. My shirt is clean, but there’s mud on my shoes, and my hair doesn’t seem to want to behave itself. A consequence of lemon juice applied more than sixty years ago in pursuit of those perfect blonde curls on my prom night. Fat lot of good they did me. I would have been better off buying a pair of brass knuckles and punching anyone I didn’t know who drove through town. Bobby Cross would still have killed me. I could at least have given him a black eye first.
There’s a gaggle of teenage girls in the line, waiting behind their parents and adult chaperones for their turn at the counter. All of them have phones in their hands, their fingers moving even as they chatter at one another, sending messages back and forth through the ether, never slowing, never still. They’re beautiful. They are what I appear to be, and they don’t understand yet how unrelenting the world is. Anyone who says teenagers don’t understand what it is to suffer has forgotten too much about their own teenage years to get a voice in the conversation—teenagers suffer, children suffer, everyone suffers—but teenagers are still fresh and fair enough to believe that someday the suffering will stop, or at least change forms enough to be bearable.
They are bright and shining and immortal, these girls; they know they’re going to live forever, know it all the way to the bottom of their broken, unbreakable hearts. There’s a reason there are so many teenage ghosts in the twilight. When you’re that young, the idea that the world got along before you and will continue after you is just this side of unbelievable. Teenagers can have a hard time letting go of the idea of existence.
I want to ask them how they get their hair to hang just so, to smile and listen and maybe say something clever enough to make them laugh. I’m an urban legend, remembered from shore to shore. I’ve bartered with gods and faced down monsters. The approval of these girls who should be my peers is the one thing I’ve never had, and I don’t know how to get it. My teen years, such as they were, are too far behind me now.
“Rose?” The voice is Laura’s.
I turn. “Yes, Aunt Laura?” It seems safest to keep reinforcing our familial connection now that we’re trying to leave the country together. Better not to risk forgetting.
She’s still at the counter, a half-amused look on her face. “Come show Carl your passport so he can issue our boarding passes,” she says.
I do, producing both mine and Laura’s from the pocket where I’d tucked them. Carl types something on his computer, the screen angled so neither of us can see what he’s doing. When he’s done, he hands my passport back to me and gives Laura hers for the first time.
“Thank you for flying with us,” says Carl, all smiles, as he hands our boarding passes and luggage tag to Laura. “Security is right over there.” He points, looking at me as he does so. Then he winks, and I smile a little. I have more allies than I had any right to expect.
“Come on, Rose,” says Laura, and she walks toward security, and I follow, leaving the highways of America behind me, on my way to something new.
Chapter 17
My Driftglass Heart
BON DID, INDEED, get us first class tickets, whether at her own whim or because Apple ordered her to do so. We cross an ocean in seats comfortable enough to live in, Laura sipping champagne when not trying to sleep, me drinking cherry Cokes and watching an endless stream of movies and television shows and documentaries on the seatback television screen. TV sure has changed since I was a kid. Everything is bright and colorful and fast, so fast, like they’re afraid we’re so bad at paying attention that we’ll wander off if they let our focus falter for a second.
Maybe that’s true of the living. Only it can’t be entirely, because there’s a whole season of a show about British people baking cakes, and that’s more soothing than frenetic. People are still people. It’s just the trappings that change.
I expect some jolt to run through me when we pass outside the reach of the American roads, some feeling of transition, of change, of something to mark the moment. I don’t get it. The plane glides on, the flight attendants bring us dinner and drinks—more champagne for Laura, more Coke for me—and we’re flying into the blackest night I’ve ever seen, leaving land and love and familiarity behind us.
I’m coming back, I think fiercely, and I don’t know whether I’m talking to Gary, or to Emma, or to myself. Because it feels like my own ghost is standing on the shore behind us, the shadow sketched by all the stories people tell about me, the girl in the green silk gown watching mournfully as her past and her future rolled up in one impossibly present body fly away without her. She needs me as much as I need her, and leaving her behind aches as I would never have thought possible.
I drift off to the sound of the show’s presenters making terrible baking-related puns, and my dreams are full of prom dresses dyed pomegranate red, perfumed with roses and lilies.
When I wake, the plane is in its initial descent into Heathrow. Laura is watching me with wry sympathy, a champagne flute of orange juice in her hand. I’m glad she’s not the one flying this plane; I’m pretty sure there’s more than just orange juice in there.
“You slept through breakfast,” she says. “I would have woken you, but I thought you needed the sleep more than you needed the rubber eggs.”
My stomach lurches at the thought. I grimace. The “fasten seatbelt” sign is on, but . . . “Do I have time to use the bathroom?”
“If you’re quick,” says Laura. “This is first class. International first class. I think as long as you don’t commit a murder, they’ll let you do whatever you want.” She laughs. There’s a bitter note there that I don’t want to examine too closely.
I fumble with my belt and stagger from the seat, legs numb from sitting still too long. There’s a flight attendant on a fold-out seat near the bathroom, her own belt fastened. She smiles indulgently at the sight of me, tapping the wrist wh
ere no watch resides in a gesture as recognizable as it is increasingly outdated. I nod my understanding, silently agreeing to hurry, and shut myself in the bathroom.
I’ve been in closets bigger than this room. Peeing is no more pleasant when it happens in a flying bus, but at least it’s something new, and studying my surroundings, sparse as they are, provides a temporary distraction. I clean myself up and wash my hands, feeling a spike of unreasonable pride at how well I’ve managed something normal people do every single day, that I used to do every single day, back when I was accustomed to being a biological creature. The habits of living are easy to fall back into. That should frighten me. It doesn’t. I’m on my way to fix this, to descend into the Underworld and get my death back. I’ve never been farther from home before, and I feel like I’m finally almost there.
Laura looks up when I return to my seat, and asks, “Everything okay?”
I nod. “Totally fine. No problems.”
“I never wanted kids if I couldn’t have them with Tommy,” she says, and sips her probably-orange juice. “I still feel like I’ve just seen my eldest through toilet training.”
I snort and look away, out the window, where a new country is appearing.
From above, England looks like America, or maybe America looks like England: it’s hard to say. There are rolling hills and patches of forest, there are houses and office buildings and highways, gray lines sketched across the landscape like the outline of a picture yet to be finished, and we’re still so far up that there aren’t any details. I’m probably committing some sort of blasphemy, thinking it looks the same as home, and yet there’s a comfort there, because if it looks this much like what I know, it can’t possibly be as hostile as I was afraid it would be. It can’t possibly hate me.
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