When I Cast Your Shadow

by Sarah Porter

  Then something in me snaps and I’m running over the grass and then the stones even before I consciously understand. I crash into her sidelong and we both stagger, water squelching in my socks, and I’m yanking the strap of her bag over her head and throwing it back onto the shore. It lands with a hard whack, rock on rock. She probably thinks she’s being mugged and she gets her arm back to punch me before she sees my face.

  “Fuck you,” I tell her, and it’s only as I say it that I really understand why blood is pounding up through my head and making it echo inside. My face is burning and slicked with tears and snot, because something inside me just broke completely. Those stones were meant to drag her under, pull her deep below the river’s surface and guarantee she wouldn’t ever make it out. “Fuck you, Ruby. And don’t tell me to call you Slippers because I never will again. You don’t deserve that name. You can’t handle it. Dad was right!”

  I expect Ruby to blow a fuse. Start screaming at me about how it’s her life and her decision. Tell me what a creeper I am for following her. But she doesn’t. She looks at me with wide, confused eyes and then flings her arms around my neck, and for a second I think she’s going to try to pull me in too, and drown both of us. But no, she presses her face against my shoulder and I can feel shivers running down her body in waves.

  “Everett,” she says, and her voice is quiet and crumpled. “Everett. How did you know?”

  “Fuck you, Ruby,” I say again, but it comes out weak and whining. “Did you even think about me and Dad? Did you think about anything except being as stupid as possible? Like hey, that maybe we love you, and we’ve already lost Dashiell, and this would completely destroy us?” Wind is driving the river in thin splashes over our feet, so I drag Ruby back across the rocks and then pull her down next to me. We’re sitting in a tangle on the grass and she’s shaking from more than the cold. She keeps hugging me the whole time and I’m holding her too, though I feel more like stomping her face in.

  “But that’s the thing,” Ruby says. “Dad hates me. He doesn’t realize he hates me, but if Dashiell shouldn’t have been born then I shouldn’t either. Because Dash is a huge part of me, and he has to be a huge part of me, because there’s nowhere else he can be now!”

  “You mean, like, Dash lives on in our hearts?” That seems like way too clichéd of an idea for Ruby, but I’m not sure what else she could mean. “I loved him too, Ruby. A lot a lot. But acting insane isn’t going to make him any less dead. Okay? Tell me you get that now.”

  Ruby barely seems like she hears me, though. “I started thinking—that dream I had—I started thinking you were right and it was a message—like his death and my death were all one thing and I’m already partly dead and that’s how it’s supposed to be. Like he was telling me what he needed from me. But I don’t know, Ever, I might have it all wrong.”

  Has she forgotten that I don’t know anything about her dream, except that Dashiell was in it? “I was being an idiot,” I tell her. “Your dreams are just dreams, Ruby. There is no message. I didn’t want to believe that Dashiell’s gone so I was fooling myself into this idea that he’s actually been visiting you. But that’s not rational. It was a weak wish-fulfillment thing, because I want to see him again so much. I’m sorry. I loved him too.”

  “Past tense, you loved him? That’s all wrong, Ever. Dashiell needs us to love him now. He needs us now so that he can be somewhere.”

  She sounds a little hysterical still. It seems like a bad idea to point out that dead people aren’t capable of needing anything, because I’m not sure she can deal with hearing that at the moment.

  “Yeah, well, he can live on in your heart a lot better if you live. Right? Is that what you’re saying?”

  Ruby finally lifts her face off my chest, so I can see it for the first time since I tackled her. She’s been crying—no surprise there—and her new slashed hair tumbles down in this wild triangle over her streaky cheeks. She stares off at the river like there’s something she can’t figure out.

  “I think—I feel like it’s more than that? I feel like, the way Dash needs us—it’s a lot more serious than what people mean when they say that stuff.”

  “Ruby? What are you talking about?”

  She purses her lips in frustration and then shakes her head hard. “I don’t know. It’s just an idea that keeps coming to me. That Dashiell needs us now way more than he did when he was alive. We have to be ready to fight for him, Ever, and if you won’t then I’ll do it by myself!” She glances over at me long enough to give me a confused frown and then goes back to gazing at the river, and her eyes look so far away that something blurs inside them.

  Then she looks at me again, but this time the sadness is gone and her expression is teasing and confident.

  “Never-Ever,” Ruby says, but the voice is not her voice. It’s dropped by at least an octave and she’s doing such a perfect imitation of Dashiell’s sly sassing tone that my flesh crawls like massed worms. “Our little Miss Slippers was in such a distraught state that I probably couldn’t have held her back on my own. And to think that you nearly ignored me. What would have happened to our sweet girl then?”

  “What the hell?” I sputter. “Ruby, Jesus, don’t—”

  “You said you wanted to see me, Never-Ever,” Ruby says. She really sounds exactly like him and there’s something distracting and shifty in her eyes even though she’s staring straight into mine. “So why don’t you welcome me home?”

  That does it. I aim a hard smack at her cheek, and another, and she sort of tumbles over onto her side but she doesn’t even put up her arms to defend herself. She doesn’t cry out. I slap her again but she doesn’t react at all, just slumps on the grass looking vague, and I can’t understand what’s going on. I start to wonder if she’s having some kind of seizure, but then her mouth opens and she looks at me like she can see me. My hand is hanging in midair above her face, poised to strike.

  “Everett, stop!” Her voice is back to normal. Squeaky and girlish.

  “Ruby, that was the most, the absolutely most messed-up, emotionally disturbed thing you have ever done! I don’t care what you’re going through. That was—” I can’t even speak. Anger is so thick in me that it’s making my mouth feel swollen and my tongue trip.

  Ruby pulls herself back up to sitting. A little away from me, now. “I know I was being selfish, Ever. I really, truly appreciate that you came after me and stopped me. I do. I guess I already should have thanked you, but you don’t need to hit me!”

  It takes me a long moment to understand that we’re not talking about the same thing. “I don’t even mean that! I mean—that thing you were just pretending.”

  From Ruby’s expression I could almost swear that she’s genuinely stunned and bewildered and innocent. That she has no idea what I’m talking about. But she’s just proved what an incredible actor she is, so that only infuriates me more.

  “Pretending? I didn’t even know you were following me! Who do you think I was pretending for?” She looks around. We’re almost completely alone in the park and the mist is condensing into something more like drool, but there is someone hidden under a big umbrella walking near us. Ruby drops her voice. “Maybe I wouldn’t have gone through with it. I don’t know. I just know—it felt like I was dragging around a dead copy of myself, and I couldn’t stand it.” She hesitates. “Please don’t tell Dad, okay? He’d probably send me to a mental hospital for real if he knew.”

  I stare at her. All that awful faked confidence is gone from her eyes, and they’re green and scared and full of racing reflections off the clouds. “Ruby, you know that is not what I’m talking about!”

  But she doesn’t know. I can see that now. She’s shaking hard, her face is shiny with rain, and she stares at me like every word I’m saying is coming to her in a nightmare where nothing makes sense anymore.

  “Everett? Can we go home? I’m freezing.”

  I stand up and go get her handbag from where I threw it and toss the rocks back
on the bank. She’s up, too, and waiting awkwardly, holding herself tight. I hesitate, because she doesn’t deserve it, but then I take off my jacket and hand it to her.

  “Come on. Do you have money for a cab? Because I don’t.”

  “Probably. You can check in my bag.” The jacket sticks to her wet dress and she has to wriggle to get it on. “Everett? What were you talking about? What do you think I did?”

  I don’t answer that. Because if what I think just happened, happened—if Ruby really misses Dashiell so much that she’s going into fugue states where she pretends to be him and she’s not conscious she’s doing it at all—then that is definite clinical insanity. It’s way worse, even, than the fact that she was about to attempt suicide. That is denial he’s dead to such an extreme that it crosses every line I can think of, straight out of reality and into some horrible zone beyond.

  And that means I need to think about what to do, before I do anything.

  ALOYSIUS

  Not yet a hundred years dead, and how many lives have I sucked down and savored and taken for my own? Seven, if memory serves, though some have been on the mayfly side and might slip my mind. If a body is not one’s own, not one’s personal gut and sinew—well, it does tend to alter one’s attitude as to how best to make use of it. Having already died, and violently at that, the terror has quite leached from death, and all that remains for me is death’s unspeakable boredom. I grasp, as none of the living can, how very ephemeral the pleasures of the flesh must be. So why be overly fussy about preserving the flesh in hand? There’s more where that came from. Why, new lives squeeze forth on the daily, plump and squalling, and why should I not make lavish use of that supply?

  Over the years, I’ve come to see all of them, bakers and barbers and courtesans, rakes and ingenues, in the just same light: as potentially mine. Mine, if only I can seize them.

  When I can, though of late it’s proved disagreeably tricky to snap up mortal husks. But that, ah, that should be about to change.

  Life is wasted on the living, I always say.

  I pace in the gray, waiting for news of the efforts to locate our bitty truant Mabel—there’s nothing to see here, and there never is, except in those choice intervals when we happen to entertain a beating heart as our guest—and while I wait I slip into a reverie. A nostalgic accounting of those I’ve owned before, until such time as I’d gulped down the juice they had to offer, and cast the rinds aside.

  Ah, once upon a time the soft-skinned and blue-eyed Martin Rhodes was mine; he was a luxurious fleshling, prettily muscled and slim, with a face that let me exploit without mercy all the dumb and dewy damsels who flocked to him. The boy was strong enough to come in handy for dirtier tasks as well, until one night I shattered him with an unfortunate combination of excellent Scotch, a cliff, and a sports car. Call me profligate, if you like, but I was in no mood to save my pennies. And it was all worth it, wasn’t it, in the final accounting? Why, I hadn’t drunk Scotch that fine in twenty years!

  There was somebody’s twelve-year-old sister, can’t put a name to her, only a decade after my murder; such a squealing, doughy little lambkin that not a one of my old enemies felt the slightest apprehension when she showed up peddling flowers. I’d even let them knock her around a while, just for old time’s sake, before I used her hand to slice their guts. Betwixt hits I’d have her work the streets—opium and good steaks don’t come cheap—and when she came down with a troubling case of syphilis I plopped her naked in a snowbank. That took care of that, and I began to think of making a more secure provision for my future sojourns amongst the living.

  My own mother, though, was my first; she was the easiest to come by, after all. She waddled straight up to me, here in my vaporous domain, and gawped at me with fondly rheumy eyes. A quick snap, a moment of senile mewling, and the acquisition was made.

  I suppose I entertained a certain naïve optimism as to her usefulness. I found to my chagrin that her arthritis made her hardly worth my while—I might as well have put on a rusted-out bicycle, creaking and lurching every inch of the way—and soon enough she tripped and fell. As it happened, she was standing on the roof of her tenement, rather near the edge. And then, well, she wasn’t.

  She’d had her nerve, I thought, outliving me.

  “Aloysius,” Charlie says to me as he lurches grayly into my ken. He’s speaking in a voice that I might characterize as breathless; that is, if any of us had such a thing as breath, or voices for that matter. It’s evident that he dreads the consequences of coughing up some tidbit, but fears still more what I might do to him if he withholds his information. His quailing is only proper, of course. “Aloysius, I … we’ve searched everywhere, we didn’t want to believe it at first, but he … gone, I mean. Gone!”

  “Slap a name on this he, Charlie. Pronto. I’m about to lose patience.”

  A spasm convulses the gray smudge that I know to be Charlie; the best approximation one of us can give of a pathetic cringe. “Dashiell Bohnacker.”

  “You don’t say.” Charlie would never dare impart such unwelcome news if he hadn’t made very, very sure of the facts beforehand. He knows as well as I do how this development will stymie my plans—and coming right on the heels of Mabel’s escape, well, it’s the sort of insolence that the other dead might find a sliver too inspiring. “Quite a few of you must have been slack indeed, then, in the performance of your duties. Worthless nitwits, the lot of you. And I suppose you were dawdling about and paying no mind, while that impudent lout worked up the brass to defy me?”

  Charlie tries to speak, or perhaps to sputter, or most likely to whine for mercy. I quell him with a look; not that I have eyes to look with, naturally, but he can sense my stare nonetheless.

  Charlie’s panic when he came to me? Why, it was quite the thing.

  RUBY

  Manhattan receded into fog, the towers so gray and diffuse that they seemed to be falling to the opposite side of the earth, and the river seemed to widen until it became a new and undiscovered sea. I thought then that my dream was more than a dream, and that I was carrying my own dead body in my arms to put it to rest in the waves. I thought there was more than one person inside me, that I was filled with Ruby and Dashiell and all the hatred and envy and resentment people had ever felt for Dashiell, but none of the love, and that I couldn’t keep going on like that.

  I wanted the truth of what had happened to Dash, and I thought I could see it shining in the river’s depths—as if I could catch hold of him there, and dream all his dreams. We’d be together again, and we’d know each other perfectly.

  It was some kind of wild trance, though, because when Everett grabbed me all those thoughts vanished in an instant. Then I was sick at the realization of how close I’d really come to doing it. Now I’m soaking in a hot bath, trying to get the deep chill out of my body, and the last thing I want to do is go under the water. Just watching the lights wobbling on the surface is pretty disquieting. I already drowned in my dream and now I never want to feel those sensations again, my lungs choked and glutted.

  If I don’t want to die—if I know I don’t want to die—then why did I almost kill myself today? Why did I make Everett save my life?

  “Ruby?” he calls through the door. He went from spitting with anger to over-the-top nice, and now his voice bends and flows like he’s trying to wrap it around me. I really scared him and I know it wasn’t fair. “Ruby? Pizza and watch Cosmos? Sound good?”

  “That sounds great, Ever. Thank you.” I’m being too nice too, uncomfortably nice, as if that could possibly make up for everything I put him through. “I’ll be there in five minutes.” He must be worrying that I’ll try something again because I don’t hear him walking away from the door. He’s waiting there listening. Just in case.

  So I get out, splashing loudly, and open the drain, and wrap myself in towels. I don’t really know what I was thinking, chopping my hair off like that, and I’ll need to get someone to fix it up a little, but when I look in the mi
rror it could be worse. It’s almost stylish. But that black dress is ridiculous, at least for someone like me. What kind of vampire princess trip was I on? I stare at the velvet wadded up with the crimson toes of my boots sticking out beneath it and I can barely remember why buying it seemed like such a wonderful idea, or how I thought I’d be fooling anybody.

  I change into fluffy pink pajamas and a red robe with cartoon animals on it. Everett’s finally gone to the kitchen, and when he sees me walk in I can tell he’s relieved that I’m back to more or less normal. “Are you better now?”

  “Way better,” I say, but Everett is still looking at me warily and I know he must be wondering if he should tell our dad what happened. He’ll feel obliged to tell, to protect me from myself, unless I can persuade him that my behavior today was really just a passing aberration; I couldn’t even blame him if he did. “That fight with Dad made me crazy, Everett. I couldn’t believe he said those things and they completely spun me out. But I’m over it now. I promise I won’t do anything like that again.”

  The timer rings and Everett gets pot holders and pulls the pizza from the oven, frowning down at it as if it presented some unsolvable problem. “I am still concerned. About that thing you said this morning. That you think Dash was murdered.”

  “That was a bonkers thing to say. I was just really upset, Ever.” Am I lying now? I picture Dashiell the way I heard they found him, naked in his girlfriend’s bed in the East Village with his head hanging over the edge and the needle still in his arm. Eyes wide and gray in the silvery morning light. I try to feel the truth behind the image: did someone else’s hand slide in that syringe and press down the plunger? It seems unthinkable that Dash did it to himself, and the idea that it was murder shines like a bright bauble, like a secret trying to be revealed.