Not Quite Alive

by Lyla Payne

  “Proceed at your own risk, Grace, because once you see a nine-months-pregnant woman naked, you can never unsee it.”

  I laugh on my way out, stopping in my room to pick up my phone. There’s a text from Beau that makes me smile, and I spend a few seconds just staring at it like a dope.

  I love you and I’m stupid excited to see you tomorrow. Hurry up!

  It cannot come fast enough, I type in return. I love you, too.

  The brief exchange does wonders for my mood as I wander into the kitchen and root around in the cabinets for some semblance of dinner. My afternoon and evening took a toll on my own appetite, but now that I’m confronted with food possibilities, I do find myself a little bit hungry. The ingredients for macaroni and cheese—the good, homemade kind—are in the fridge and pantry, so I spend the next fifteen minutes throwing them together.

  When Amelia comes downstairs, I take a deep breath and get ready to admit, for the first time, that my nickname around town might be more apropos than I originally thought.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  My phone rings in the middle of the night, slamming me out of a strange dream that is—somehow—an even worse reenactment of the double date Beau and I went on with Leo and Victoria last month. It takes a few seconds for me to recover my wits and figure out what, in fact, constitutes reality, and then I see Beau’s name on my caller ID.

  “Hello? Beau? Are you okay?” The questions come out in a nervous rush, my voice full of sleep and my head full of cotton.

  “I’m fine.” His response is tight. “I wanted to know if you could switch your flight to the 8 a.m. Brick and Birdie are taking it, so it would be easier that way.”

  His hard tone tells me that he isn’t moving up our reunion for pleasurable reasons. I do my best to swallow past the sawdust on my tongue. “I guess. Why?”

  “They found Lucy.”

  “Beau, I’m so—”

  “She’s alive,” he interrupts, the two words so sharp they feel as though they could cut into my ear.

  “Oh my God. How?”

  “It’s a long story, and honestly, Mallory only relayed the barest of details when she called. They’ll be here tomorrow by ten, so if you can make it, too, we can all be debriefed at once.”

  Debriefed? I swallow again, afraid to ask any questions. “Okay. Yes. I’ll be at the airport by seven.”

  I glance down at my watch on the nightstand. It’s four a.m., now.

  “See you then.” He hangs up without another word, leaving me feeling hurt and cast aside for another woman.

  Even though that might be technically true, I know it’s not the whole story. Beau didn’t want to believe that Lucy was dead, but I insisted. I put him and his brother and sister through an emotional roller coaster of grief for a woman who’s still alive. But I saw her ghost…how is this possible?

  I flip on the light, pull on some clothes, and toss more into my overnight bag, along with my makeup and travel bottles of shampoo. The lingerie I set out last night goes back in the drawer. I doubt there’s any reason to lug it around. Beau sounds pretty upset, probably for a couple of reasons. One of them is surely that I was wrong, although it’s not my fault.

  Once I’m ready to go, more or less, I write a note for Amelia and leave it on the kitchen table with her keys on top so she can’t miss it. I get a text from Birdie saying they’ll send a car to pick me up at six-thirty, which is still two hours away, but I don’t plan to sit around twiddling my thumbs. Daria has some explaining to do, and if she’s true to her whacked-out schedule, there’s a good chance she hasn’t been to bed yet.

  True to my whacked-out schedule, I get in the car and drive to her trailer instead of calling, even though it is the middle of the night.

  Well, maybe not technically the middle, but five in the morning counts as such for all the normal people of the world. Daria isn’t any more normal than I am, though, and she doesn’t look sleepy or surprised to see me when she opens the door in a pair of leggings, leg warmers, and a headband a little before five.

  I can’t help my expression, which feels incredulous. Daria always looks as if she’s coming or going from a costume party. “Have you started dressing era-appropriate for whatever ghost you’re visiting? If so, I can only assume Farrah Fawcett needed help crossing over earlier tonight.’

  “You should stick to ghost therapy,” she informs me with a frown. “Because you’re not very funny at all.”

  “I guess I’ll put off my audition for Saturday Night Live, then,” I say, stepping over the threshold and blowing on my hands. “I’m glad you’re up.”

  Joking around with Daria makes me feel like this is an average morning, at least aside from the hour, but the uncontrolled jitters in my bones remind that it’s not. Lucy Winters is alive. She’s coming home. Beau thinks…what? That I lied? That I was wrong?

  “What’s up?” she asks by way of response, heading back through her office to her comfortable living space. It’s cleaner than normal, suggesting how Mel’s kept busy during their slow period.

  “You know that ghost I was asking you about last week? The one who didn’t seem to know that she was dead?”

  “Vaguely.” She flops onto the sofa, sending up a puff of dust, and reaches for what looks like a Bloody Mary on the coffee table.

  “Well, it turns out she’s not dead at all.”

  That might be the first thing I’ve ever said that’s surprised Daria. Her eyebrows wing up and she pauses, lips on the rim of her glass, while she studies me. “No way. You’ve got a doppelganger? I haven’t seen one of those since my grandma died.”

  “Wait, what’s a doppelganger?”

  “Here, hold on.” Daria sets down her drink with a longing sigh, then gets up and heads back into the tidy office space.

  I trail her, too out of sorts to sit down, and watch as she digs through a pile of colored folders on one of the desks. Based on the pictures of Grant and Will, plus one of the whole family, I assume it belongs to Mel, and think about the call I missed from her last night while I was reading.

  “Ah, here we go.” She extracts an orange folder and holds it out to me.

  There’s a sticky note on the front with my name on it. “What’s this?”

  “Your friend was researching the reasons your ghost might not think she’s dead. I honestly forgot about the doppelganger possibility until she brought it up.”

  I flip open the folder to find half a dozen articles on the subject. The words blur in front of my tired, stressed eyes. I close it, holding on tight. “I’ll read through it, but why don’t you give me the short version.”

  “Basically, a doppelganger is the spirit of a living person that visits another living person—usually a friend or relative—to ask for help or understanding of some sort. It has to do with astral projection, which is another term I’m guessing you’re not that familiar with, but there’s research on that in there, too.” She wanders back to the couch, and I shuffle after her. “It means that your consciousness can travel while you’re asleep.”

  “Ghosts of alive people? Why have I never heard of this before?”

  “Well, it usually happens just before a person dies. Like my grandmother visiting the morning she passed to tell me that she wanted me to have her favorite pearl ring. Things like that.” Daria chugs the rest of her drink. “So people usually assume they were visited after and not before the death.”

  I chew on my lower lip, trying to make sense of it all. Ultimately, though, it jibes because it has to—it’s the only explanation I’ve ever heard for why someone would see the ghost of a living person.

  I really wish Daria would have given me this option before I blabbed to the Draytons about Lucy being dead, but maybe if she had, we wouldn’t have called in Mallory and Lucy would still be missing.

  There’s no way to know for sure. This explanation is the only one I’m going to get.

  I hold up the folder and give Daria a thin
smile. “Thanks. Tell Mel thanks for this, too. I’ll read through it on the plane.”

  “You going somewhere?”

  “D.C.”

  “To see your boyfriend?”

  I shake my head, trying to steady my breathing. “No. To meet a dead girl.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  It’s a good thing I brought the folder of research to read on the plane, because both Brick and Birdie ignore me the whole time. Birdie drinks, despite the early hour, and Brick alternates between pretending to read the latest John Grisham novel and looking longingly at his sister’s booze.

  Basically, I think we’re all having a bad day so far.

  The research is interesting. I learn about astral projection and sleep states, the theories behind doppelgangers and how they almost always arrive asking for some sort of help. Mel’s research doesn’t, of course, explain why Lucy chose to come to me—a woman she’s never met. I’ve long thought there must be some kind of ghostly network the spirits use to share tales about their favorite living mediums, but she’s not dead. How did her subconscious find me? And why?

  Before I know it, we’re off the plane and our cab is pulling up in front of Beau’s apartment, a condo near the Capitol that must cost more than I make in two months. I guess I’ll be able to ask her my questions in person. Providing she’s lucid and not completely unhinged after living in captivity.

  The Draytons did inform me that Mallory had found Lucy soon after she’d arrived in the Middle East, but the military had whisked Lucy away to the military hospital in Pakistan, where they debriefed her and treated her physical ailments before allowing her to travel home. The Draytons only learned of her rescue last night.

  The only reason they didn’t keep Lucy for longer is that she’s headed to the Pentagon this afternoon for another meeting, then probably on to Capitol Hill for more of the same. She wasn’t military, but she had spent years in the hands of people the government was very interested in finding. It’s going to be a shitty couple of weeks for her, no doubt, and we’re lucky to be getting even an hour with her to ask our own questions.

  Mallory answers the door, looking as if she hasn’t showered in a week or more. Her dark hair is oily and lank and there’s dirt smeared all over her face and caked under her fingernails. “Oh, it’s you. Come in, then.”

  She doesn’t make it clear which of us is you, but now that I’m aware of her past with Birdie, I notice how her gaze quickly flits to her old flame before shifting away. If being around Mallory makes Birdie uncomfortable, then the feeling seems mutual. In another time, another place, my imagination would be working overtime trying to interpret what that means, whether there’s any chance they’ll reconcile, but my thoughts are consumed by Lucy.

  Brick and Birdie are giving off vibes that promise they’re as nervous as I am, though Birdie is a little more lubricated. We step into the foyer and it’s impossible not to notice how nice it is—the hardwood floors, winding staircase, and tinkling, crystal chandelier high above our heads. Beau didn’t skimp on accommodations, that’s for sure.

  Then again, maybe his father picked it out, or perhaps he took over the lease for the Senator whose seat he’d claimed. It’s odd, but I can’t remember the two of us ever talking about how he found his apartment.

  The thick rug underfoot muffles our footsteps as we follow Mallory through a large set of French doors, down the hall, and then into a room on the left—a parlor of some sort, or perhaps a formal sitting room. One of those spaces that has no real purpose. I kind of feel like that at the moment. Extra. Superfluous.

  While I did have a role in finding Lucy, I don’t know her. If the military is letting her loose for a few hours to reassure her friends and family that she’s okay, or that she will be okay…well, I don’t belong in that circle.

  Yet Beau asked me to come, and here I am.

  In the ornate parlor, a fire pops and sparks behind a brick hearth. Paintings hang on the walls, but all of that blurs outside my field of vision, which is locked on my boyfriend. He’s sitting on the couch beside a woman who might have once been the love of his life.

  Lucy looks the same as she did in my last vision, the one she showed me of her room, except not as dirty or smelly—and her head is shaved. Her clothes hang loose on her starved frame and bumps and bruises on her pale skin are nearly healed. She looks confused, and empty, but my God, she’s alive.

  Beau shoots to his feet at the sight of us, his honey gaze landing on me while Brick pulls Lucy up and into a hug. Birdie goes next, neither of them noticing how the woman they’ve searched so long to find winces at the contact.

  I tear my eyes away from the reunion and walk carefully toward my boyfriend, my stomach hurting at the tightness around his eyes when he gives me a smile. The one arm he slings over my shoulder is probably intended to pass as a hug, but it feels more like someone has dropped a piece of ice down my back.

  I swallow hard and put an arm around his back in response, giving him a squeeze. He drops a dutiful kiss to the top of my head. This greeting pretty much sucks all the way around.

  “Hi,” he says softly, watching Lucy and the others as they get seated. While Lucy was sitting next to Beau on the sofa when we arrived, she waits until everyone is seated before choosing a spot that’s not too close to any of them.

  I dare to look up at Beau and give him my best smile. “Hi, yourself.”

  It’s almost impossible to reconcile this moment, this meeting after weeks apart, with how I imagined this weekend would turn out. A lump forms in my throat, but I swallow it, trying to remember that my problems are nothing compared to what Lucy has been through.

  “She’s been waiting to talk until y’all arrived,” Beau says quietly, sitting in a free chair rather than opting for the loveseat, where we could have sat together. A cold trickle runs down my spine as I take another chair. “So, I guess we can get started.”

  “I think I’d prefer it if Mallory started,” Lucy adds in the ensuing silence, her voice scratchy and unused. It sounds as if talking is painful. “And I can finish.”

  Everyone is quiet for a moment, waiting expectantly for Mallory to tell her part of the story. True to form, the odd woman doesn’t seem to have been paying attention, and it takes her a moment to realize why we’re all staring at her. I hate the fact that we’re all sitting down because my limbs are full of ants. I hate that I’m in one chair and Beau’s in another. Honestly, I hate that I’m here at all.

  “Well, I found Lucy where Graciela over there said she would be, in the mountains of Pakistan. I tracked her to this small town and bribed some little boys to tell me where the American woman was being kept. They knew exactly who I was talking about, and the security was almost nothing when I staked it out.”

  She pauses, and my head spins. It’s not that I know an awful lot about the Middle East, but the fact that she could get into a relatively small place, ask questions, stake out a house, and somehow manage to extract Lucy seems…far-fetched. Or like it’s going to, at some point, turn into one hell of a story.

  “There was a family living there, plus two guys wandering around outside with guns. Nothing major.” She shrugs. “I reported back to the nearest military outpost. The colonel told me there wasn’t much they could do since Lucy wasn’t government, but I spent a few hours doing him a favor and he sent a couple of guys with me, you know, for intimidation.”

  I can feel my eyes bug out. “What kind of favor?” I blurt, realizing even before the last word leaves my mouth that the question is immature and perhaps not the most interesting part of the story, but jeez. I have to know.

  Birdie shoots me a murderous glare and Brick shifts on his end of the couch. Lucy, for her part, doesn’t react—she appears to be a little shellshocked, listening and engaged but perhaps not processing the conversation at the same speed as the rest of us. Then again, since she spent two to three days in debriefings, she’s surely already got the details memorized.
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br />   “I found something for him that he’d been missing for a long time.” Mallory doesn’t expand on the comment, her voice cold and flat. Something about the deadness of her dark gaze tells me she’s not going to say any more, and also that I wouldn’t want to hear it if she did.

  “So, you went back to the house…” Brick urges, casting an impatient glance toward me. At least it’s not venomous like Birdie’s was.

  “Oh, right. I went back to the house, the army guys did their part getting the guys with guns to stand down, and I paid the family a bunch of your money to let her go.” Mallory unwraps a piece of gum and sticks it in her mouth, taking a moment to chew it up before resuming her tale. “They were pretty happy about it, and happier to be rid of her. They’d taken her in as a favor to some local terrorist bigwigs, but everyone had basically forgotten about her after three years. No one ever came. Feeding her was a strain on their budget.”

  “Why did they keep her? The terrorists?” Birdie asks, shooting a guilty look at Lucy, like maybe it’s insulting to ask such a thing. “I mean, the Allied people surely wanted her dead, and they undoubtedly thought that’s what happened. So…”

  “The people who were holding her had no idea why she’d been taken. They saw an American woman and figured maybe one day she’d come in handy for a trade or negotiation and stashed her away for a rainy day.” Mallory snaps her gum in a way that would make the most accomplished eleven-year-old girl jealous. It sets my teeth on edge. “But no one came asking about her, and over the years, all knowledge of her faded away. You know how things are with these people—the guys who stowed her in that house in Pakistan are probably long dead by now.”

  It’s jarring, how she thinks this is common knowledge. Like we all understand how terrorist organizations work in the Middle East. Crazy woman.

  Takes one to know one, the devil on my left shoulder taunts, his long tongue tickling my ear.