My American soldier slept with his whole body gone slack and his breathing soft and steady. He stayed on his side with his head tilted just enough to leave an opening between his neck and the floor. He hadn’t yet refastened the top buttons of his tunic, so the smooth skin below the edge of his hair remained exposed and vulnerable. I kissed him there once, right above his top vertebra, drawing gooseflesh without waking him.
My fingers reached into the dark corner for my red scarf—the scarf I never seemed able to complete. I’d been knitting until my fingers ached and chafed, just so some anonymous French soldier could wear it without knowing its creator’s tiniest likes and dislikes. He wouldn’t know I resembled Lillian Gish, or adored Stacia Napierkowska, or hated to be alone in my apocalypse room. How much better a use for the scarf—tightly knitted with care and love—than to wrap it around the neck of sleeping, lovely Emerson.
I wound it around his throat once, twice, three times without him stirring. I closed my eyes and imagined a delicate tug. A gentle urging. Nothing sharp or jolting, like a needle through the flesh or a missile plunged through one’s roof. It would be more like a siren call to a sailor. Pure and poetic. Absent of agony.
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain.
Wasn’t that what he had said?
My fists clasped the loose ends of the scarf behind his neck. I counted to three and then . . . I pulled.
Emerson awoke with a start and a gasp and grabbed for the noose around his windpipe. His boots banged against the floor—thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
“No! It’s all right. Don’t make a sound.” I yanked the scarf with all my strength, but he kicked and struggled with a racket that would surely draw attention.
“No, Emerson! Stop fighting and come with me. Come with me!”
The needles swung in the air, still attached to my unfinished creation, and his boots knocked the ground in a cloud of ash. Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump! Thump!
“No! Stop or I’ll have to stab you instead—I swear I will.”
His hands were in my hair, my face, pushing me away. His boots kept pounding. The rest of him writhed and grunted and struggled.
“Come with me. Hold still. Hold still! Merde!”
Footsteps hurtled toward us from the hall.
“No!”
I gave a good tug then, one that stopped him from gasping and thrashing. He arched his back and was almost there—I felt him rushing toward me. The room warmed and brightened. I was Stacia Napierkowska in brilliant black-and-white, and he was my leading man, come to share my broken bedroom while the moon transformed us both into ravishing silver creatures.
Five young men in uniforms like his pounded into the room with footsteps that hurt my ears. The floor swayed. They called his name, furrowed their brows, forced off the scarf, wrenched him away from me. With one final burst of energy, I slashed the tip of a silver needle across the back of his neck and painted a streak of red on one of the last parts of his body untouched by battle, the same place I’d kissed mere moments before.
The soldiers surrounded him, but I saw his boots moving about, caught a glimpse of his blond hair and bruised throat. He panted and choked, and his friends spoke all at once:
“What happened?”
“What’s wrong with you?”
“You could have fallen into that god-awful pit!”
“Was that a seizure?”
“What the hell happened?”
I crouched on all fours to see past his protectors’ arms and legs. From within the wall of olive-green bodies, my soldier’s gray eyes locked upon me. He jumped to his feet.
“There she is! The g-girl. The girl’s still here.”
A dark-haired soldier with scabs on his forehead turned my way, and soon the whole crowd was gawking at my corner, including Claudine, who had stumbled in behind them.
“Why’d you do that, Emmeline?” Emerson pushed toward me, but his comrades pulled him back. “I was gentle with you.”
“Emerson?” asked a fellow soldier.
“I was nothing but gentle. Why’d you attack me like—like some animal?”
“Emerson—”
“She tried to kill me.” He struggled to get at me, his teeth gritted, his knuckles blanching. “She tried to—”
“Jones!” shouted the dark-haired one with a tug that knocked him off his feet. “There’s no one there.”
My American soldier’s eyes changed at those words. Mon Dieu, how they changed. He gaped at me with the uncomprehending stare of a person whose mind told him one thing while his eyes insisted on another. In another moment, he’d refuse to even look at me. I knew I’d soon become something he’d fight to forget for the rest of his living days.
“She’s . . . but . . .” He grabbed hold of his throat and struggled to swallow.
“Please stay,” I said. “Make my life as romantic as it should have been. You said you were ‘half in love with easeful Death,’ and I could help you. I could bleed your troubles away.”
The troops didn’t have to carry this one out like my pale German soldier, whose groans still haunted me. My American boy got up like the man his father wanted him to be and shoved his comrades aside, turning his back on death like a fool. The last part of him I glimpsed before he climbed out of my room was the red slash I’d made on his neck—the same shock of scarlet as my unfinished scarf, now curled in a pile on the floor.
One day soon, I assured myself as his footsteps grew fainter, that wound will harden into a scar, and every time his hand brushes it, he’ll be forced to think of me. He’ll be sorry if the Germans shoot off his arm or the side of his face, and he’ll realize I could have kept him in one piece. We could have been rapturous and beautiful together. He will be sorry no one will ever truly understand him.
The gaggle of Yanks followed him out, until only Claudine lingered in my shell of a doorway.
“You need to go, Emmeline,” she said in French, and she screwed up her mouth and wrinkled her forehead. She looked so much harsher and uglier than a fifteen-year-old girl who used to share beds and rag dolls and secrets with me. Her brown hair hung to her waist in a ratty mess, and her threadbare dress drooped over the protruding bones of her malnourished body. “It was horrifying enough you attacked that German boy and got Papa killed, but the Yanks are supposed to be helping us. Get out.” She grabbed hold of a piece of the plaster wall. It crumbled to dust in her hands. “Get out for good. Stay away. You don’t belong here anymore.”
I called her name, but she clambered over the rubble and escaped down the corridor on whining broken floorboards. I swore I heard her cough up tears, as if she missed me after all.
It was just I alone in the room again. Only the weakest rays of moonlight loitered with me, and the darkness forced itself upon my shoulders.
Across the floor near my empty corner, a metal object caught my eye. I raised my chin and crawled through the ashes to a small brass cylinder.
Emerson’s lighter.
“Ahhh,” I said in a whispered sigh. He carried my mark on the back of his neck. Now I possessed something of him.
I tucked the lighter beneath the blue rug that concealed my other soldier’s bloodstains. I nestled this new trinket next to a button from a German army uniform. Treasures from those who slipped away.
Boys were curious creatures by nature. Soon there would be another young man who would steal into the wreckage to see the forbidden part of our poor old house. One day I would get things right, and someone would choose me over the war. Someone would treat me as if I were Stacia Napierkowska, and I would take good care of him, and he would stay with me.
I snuggled my shoulder blades back against the wall and returned to my knitting, with the lump of Emerson’s lighter rising beneath the rug. The next night my old friend the moon would return,
casting his silvery spell, and I would wait. I was always a patient girl.
I could wait.
VERSE CHORUS VERSE*
LEIGH BARDUGO
Kara Adams clutched her daughter in a tight hug, turning Jaycee slightly in her arms to make sure the cameras got the best angle. Kara wasn’t proud of it, but she did it, and Jaycee would thank her later when she saw the footage on TMZ.
Babygirl had put on a lot of weight at Wellways, but it would come off when she started rehearsing for the tour—Kara would make sure of that. They’d have a new chef on the bus, raw foods, lots of kale. Jaycee had gotten stuck with Kara’s rotten metabolism, and that meant she put the flab on fast and took it off slow. She had dropped the weight before, though never without a little help. Besides, Kara still had a prescription for Adderall and she could always have her doctor up the dose. That wasn’t quite playing by the rules that the staff at Wellways had laid out, but they didn’t have to shake their asses in front of a stadium full of twenty thousand people. Besides, it was alcohol that had gotten Jaycee into trouble, not a little pick-me-up. Wasn’t any different than a stiff cup of coffee.
Cameras flashed. It was blinding, like watching a whole sky full of constellations go off. Jaycee did look better. She was smiling and waving, a little pale maybe, but that was nothing a little bronzer wouldn’t fix. Her hair had grown out since she’d given it that buzz cut that had landed her on the cover of Star and OK! and every other supermarket rag. A few more weeks and it would be long enough for a cute bob. Kara would get someone they could trust to handle the story with an upbeat spin, something like Jaycee Adams: New Life, New ’Do!
“How are you feeling, Jaycee?” one of the reporters shouted.
“Good!” said Jaycee, grinning broadly. “Happy, healthy, very blessed.”
“You gonna visit Carlos Ravelo?”
That was the kid Jaycee had hit with her SUV on the way home from the Attic, a club on Sunset. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t old enough to drink. Jaycee Adams did not get carded, especially not when she was ordering up bottles in the VIP section of a new club desperate to get a mention on a decent gossip blog. Jaycee’s lawyers had claimed she’d been on prescription painkillers for a knee injury she’d gotten during choreography, but the blood and urine tests had told a different story: weed and tequila, Jaycee’s favorite way to relax. Luckily the Ravelo kid had been fine, a little banged up, but a fat check had put him back in the pink fast enough.
“Carlos is the sweetest,” Jaycee said. “We’ve been e-mailing. He’s even doing some songwriting. He’s good!”
She drew out that gooood, really letting her drawl come through. It wasn’t even deliberate. Jaycee was just a natural, always had been, funny and sweet and charming. Kara had known it from the first time Jaycee had put on her tap shoes, from the first pageant, from the first warbled note of “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.” That was her showstopper, the song that first got her noticed. Because Jaycee actually had talent, not like these other girls coming up.
“Meet anyone fun in rehab, Jaycee? How’s Marcus?”
Kara stiffened, but Jaycee only wagged her finger. “You know it wasn’t rehab. Just needed a little rest to get my head together. I had the time to do some soul-searching and now I can’t wait to get into the studio to record.”
A natural. A real pro. Every producer Jaycee had worked with said the same thing. She’d managed to dodge the Marcus Price question entirely. That little bastard. Just the sound of his name made Kara’s blood boil. She knew he’d been the one to leak those topless photos of Jaycee. Of course, Jaycee had been dumb enough to send them.
“Isn’t Wellways a rehab?” shouted another reporter. Couldn’t let it go, could they?
“It’s a place to get better,” Jaycee replied. “And that’s what I needed to do.”
“Okay everybody,” said Kara. “Time to get my baby home. Cornbread won’t keep.”
They all laughed at that, good-natured, happy to have gotten their shots and a few quick quotes. You had to give the beasts a little meat. Otherwise they could turn on you.
Jaycee was quiet on the ride home from the airport. Kara had wanted to pick her up at Wellways, get a shot of Jaycee with some of the more normal-looking kids, laughing and sitting in the sun, make it look more like a summer camp and less like Jaycee was some kind of criminal. A place to get better. Exactly. But the head nurse had insisted that wouldn’t be possible.
“We value quiet here,” Louise had said over the phone. “We’re not going to disrupt the other clients’”—they always called them clients, not patients—“treatment so that you can hold a press conference. Why don’t you just take Jaycee straight home and let her have a few days without that dog and pony show?”
Kara had heard the judgment in Louise’s voice. She hadn’t met her, but she didn’t need to. Kara could picture the woman perfectly: wide Midwestern hips and a no-nonsense haircut to prove she meant business. And Kara knew what Louise thought; she got the message loud and clear: Kara was the bad mother, the stage mom, offering her poor daughter up to the paparazzi for a cheap buck.
But what Louise didn’t understand, what these women never understood, was that if Jaycee didn’t get in front of this story, then the press would just make something up and it wouldn’t be pretty. Kara had seen it happen with that girl who broke down all over Twitter and the other one, the cute one with the freckles who ended up making a movie with that porn star. This had to be Jaycee’s triumphant return, not the first hint of a downward spiral. You had to come out proud and unashamed, show them you were ready to move on, give them a little piece so they didn’t take a bigger one, get them on your side. That was how the game was played. Jaycee had worked hard for what she had, and Kara wasn’t going to let anyone take it.
So they’d booked the flight and Kara had tipped off one of the friendlier paps, and when Jaycee had arrived at LAX, the mob had been waiting at the luggage claim. Jaycee had been ready—hair clean, looking adorable in pink sweats and a matching hoodie. It was too bad about the weight gain, but they might be able to spin that too, a role model piece for one of the teen magazines: Healthy and Happy at Last. Jaycee Adams Loves Her New Curves!
“You okay, baby?” Kara asked as they sped down the freeway. “You want a soda?” The car service had sent a big black Suburban and it was stocked with all of Jaycee’s favorites.
Jaycee shook her head. Now that they were away from the cameras, her face had a funny slack quality, as if it had taken all of her energy to put on a smile for the reporters.
“Was that true?” Kara asked. “What you said about Carlos?”
“He sent me some songs. Louise cleared them and printed them out for me. They’re really not bad.” Louise cleared them. Wellways only allowed supervised Internet access and Kara had gotten just that one phone call from Jaycee the whole time she’d been away.
Kara shifted on the leather seat and fiddled with the knob that controlled the air-conditioning. She didn’t like to think of that call. Her daughter had a beautiful voice—even just talking—sweet and husky, a star’s voice. But that night it had been panicked, trembling, barely a rasp.
“Mama,” she’d whispered. “Mama, please get me out of here. I want to come home.”
“Jaycee—”
“Please. You don’t understand. There’s something here.”
Lying on her bed that night, Kara had looked out at the moonlight shining off the Pacific and rolled her eyes. Babygirl must still be coming down from whatever was in her system. “Jaycee, you know what the judge said. You just need to stay focused and—”
“Mama, please come get me. Please. Oh god—” The phone had clattered as if Jaycee had put it down in a rush. But the handset must not have settled in the cradle, because Kara could still hear Jaycee and now her daughter was sobbing.
“Please,” Jaycee begged, but she wasn’t talking t
o her mother anymore, Kara felt sure of it. Then Kara heard the whir of some kind of machine starting up. It sounded almost like a power tool, maybe a saw. Something about that metallic whine had raised the hairs on her arms.
She’d sat up on the bed. “Jaycee?”
The whine rose to a grinding shriek as if it were being held right up to the phone, then there was a click and after a long moment, a dial tone. Kara had tried to call back but she’d just gotten the Wellways switchboard. “You have reached Wellways, where healing begins. Our business hours are . . .”
Before she’d known what she was doing, Kara had been in the hallway, toeing on her shoes, reaching for her purse, car keys in hand. She could get to the airport in under an hour. There were commuter flights still leaving up until midnight.
Then she’d stopped, hand on the doorknob. If Jaycee came out early, she’d be violating the conditions of her sentencing. She might have to go to jail. She’d lose endorsements for sure. Kara was being silly. Wellways had a great reputation and her daughter had a flair for the dramatic.
Kara had put her purse down, then her keys. She’d turned on the television in the living room and made a bed for herself on the couch. She’d had this feeling that if she went back to her bedroom, when she rested her head on her pillow, she would hear that high metallic whine, right up against her ear.
She’d called the next morning, demanded to speak to her daughter and to know just what kind of program they were running up there. But when she finally got Jaycee on the line after hassling with the receptionist and then that nurse, she’d just said, “I’m fine, Mama.”
“What was that last night? You about scared me to death.”
“You’re making me late for yoga.” Jaycee’s voice was sandpaper rough, strained and whispery, the way it got when she had too many shows back to back. Or when she’d been crying.
“Baby—”
Louise came back on the line. “Jaycee had a tough night but she’s settling in now. You can call again tomorrow.” And then she’d hung up.
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