When I Cast Your Shadow

by Sarah Porter

  I can’t let myself break down sobbing in front of her, I can’t let myself fall.

  You haven’t lived long enough yet to demonstrate love. We’ll just have to wait and find out. But he knew the whole time; of course he knew. I could scream and howl from the wild relief of it—at least he believed in me before he died. So even if he did shoot up again, it wasn’t because—

  I hear a clink and look up. Paige is putting tea bags into two cups, watching me hard across the counter.

  “I would have tried anyway,” I tell her. I pull myself up straight. “Always. Dash could have told me the truth.”

  “Have a seat, Ruby,” Paige says in a tone just snide enough to let me know she can see how faint I’m feeling. She nods toward the sofas. “Go on. It’s probably not easy for you to be in this apartment, is it?” Where he died, she means.

  I’m just settling onto one of her gray sofas when it hits me. I’m thinking of Paige saying that was how the song went and suddenly I’m remembering watching her from a bench in a park. I can see her swishing along in a different lace dress, this one white with red roses embroidered at the hem; she’s wearing baby-blue lipstick and crescents of blood red are painted above the crease of her lids. And Dashiell’s voice is there, singing so close to me that it’s almost like his voice is spilling from my chest: “Her eyes are red and her lips are blue; she must have drowned in a cold, cold sky. And oh, how she must have cried, to see herself going down.…”

  Paige has walked on a few yards but now she glances back to see the singer—where is he? And then she turns and examines him more deliberately, and her mouth curls into a slow smile.

  I remember that happening so clearly, and I’m positive it was the first time they met. But I definitely wasn’t there and I never even heard it as a story, I know that. I know Dash never told me.

  “Ruby? Don’t pass out on me, please.” She sets down the mugs on a tiny silver table; green tea with ginger, I think. She perches on the ottoman across from me and tips her head. “I won’t be calling an ambulance for another inert Bohnacker. Go out in the street if you have to do that.”

  “I’m fine,” I say, but my face is suddenly blazing at what she said and my nails are digging into my palms. “I’m fine! I just need—I came because—”

  “Like I don’t know that, Ruby?” Paige is smirking, holding her tea against the slight roundness of her belly. “You want me to tell you everything I know. About your dear brother’s last days. No detail is too small, is it?”

  That’s what the police say; just like I thought before, she wants me to think that this is like an investigation, but anything she says will just lead me away from the truth. I take a deep breath because this is the part I’ve been practicing in my mind all day. This is the part I have to get right.

  “No,” I say. “I don’t want you to tell me anything. Because I’d never know how much of what you said was lies, or if any of it was true, and I’d never be able to stop wondering, and that would just make it all so much worse.”

  “And why would I lie to you?” There’s a dark flash in Paige’s eyes.

  “To get at my dad,” I tell her. “You pretty much said that when you were at our house. I’m not going to let you use me as a way to mess with him.”

  I leave out the other reason why she might lie. If Dash were murdered, she’d be the obvious suspect.

  Paige gives another hard laugh. “Why, what good thinking, Ruby! Dashiell said you were a bright girl.”

  “I just need to see where it happened.” The words come out like a slow, hard wind, driving up from someplace deep inside me. But I know it’s right; I know I’ll see more of the truth on my own than I could ever learn by listening to Paige tell it her way.

  “You mean my bed?” Paige asks and arches her brows. Her tone says, That’s not the only thing that happened there, Miss Slippers.

  “Yes,” I say. “Then I’ll go. You won’t need to call an ambulance for me.”

  For a while we just stare at each other. She has deep brown irises; somehow I’d thought they were blue. “Fine,” Paige says at last. “Don’t think you’ll be welcome here again, though. This was your one chance.”

  Paige stands and I get up and follow her. It’s a Manhattan apartment so all the rooms are small; her bedroom barely fits a big wrought-iron bed that was maybe made from an old cemetery fence, a gilt mirror on one wall, and a dresser. Lots of embroidered pillows are piled on the bed and a matching coverlet lies wadded in a heap. Something looks wrong to me, though.

  “I guess the sheets are different.”

  “I didn’t keep the sheets Dashiell died on, Ruby-Ru.”

  I’m staring and I can almost see the line of Dashiell’s arm hanging over the side of the bed. “They were blue that night,” I say without thinking. “Like, the palest possible blue. Silk broadcloth.” Beautiful sheets; they must have cost a fortune.

  I wasn’t looking at Paige but she jerks in the corner of my eye. “Did the police show you a picture?”

  How did I know that? “No.” I hesitate. “Maybe somebody told me? I don’t remember.” No one told me, and no one showed me anything. I can see for myself. I kneel down to touch the edge of the mattress, exactly where his head fell back; I know Paige is staring but I don’t care what she thinks. “And you weren’t here.”

  “We’d had a fight,” Paige says coolly; of course, she must have had to repeat the story over and over; it must taste stale and crumbling in her mouth. “I went out and I didn’t come home until after eleven the next morning. He was already cold.”

  God, how I see it all, and feel it: that night two months ago glancing through the daylight, this room doubling back on itself. I remember to look around the memory for Dash’s murderer, but I don’t see anyone.

  “He was alone,” I say, and press my forehead to his; even though he’s long gone I can feel it, like a memory made flesh. “You didn’t come back and Dash died all alone.”

  “That’s what happened,” Paige agrees irritably. “Ruby, I’ve had enough of this.”

  “He’ll never be alone again,” I say.

  She really jumps at that. I don’t know why I said it, but it felt like the truth. “Most people would say the opposite. Now could you please leave?”

  But I can sense him, and he’s right here. Maybe even if it’s too late to save him I can at least make it easier. I can hold him so he knows he wasn’t abandoned at the end.

  Paige bends down, grabs my elbow, and yanks me stumbling onto my feet. “Out! Out, out, out. My God, you’re a creepy little thing, Ruby. Get out of my home.”

  She didn’t want to call an ambulance, but she’s ready to call the police if I don’t go. I don’t want to be forced to explain to my dad or Everett what I was doing here.

  “I’m going. You don’t have to freak out.” I pull away and stalk out across her living room without waiting for her—neither of us drank our tea—and grab my coat and bag. I think she’s watching me from the bedroom doorway but I don’t turn around to check, and I don’t say goodbye. I leave. I shut her front door behind me and make it as far as the elevator before I start shaking so hard I can barely press the button.

  I needed to find a place where impossible things could be true. And I stepped through her door, and then I knew things I couldn’t know. Dashiell’s memories should have vanished when he died, but instead they woke up in my mind and their eyes flashed wide open and shining. They looked at me.

  Maybe Dash is dead, but he’s close enough that I can catch the edge of his dreams.

  EVERETT

  Just keep shooting. Keep dodging. If something is moving, it is by definition something that should get the living crap blown out of it. If it’s something tall and pretty—some goddamn golden-haired elf lord—then that’s even better. That is just begging to get mowed down and then have a whole barrage of extra lightning slammed into its twitching corpse. I’ve learned that there are certain people who can never be dead enough.

  Becaus
e he did something horrible to her, even if it was in a dream. And maybe she let him do it. And because she still defends him anyway. She tried to say hello to me an hour ago and I couldn’t stand to look at her. I just grunted and after a few minutes she went away pissed.

  But now she comes back with two bowls of pasta, with the rest of the leftover chicken and spinach mixed into some gooey cheese sauce—Ruby is a pretty awesome cook—and plonks one in front of me. “Dinnertime.” Then she curls up at the far end of the sofa and starts reading, with her bowl on her lap and her posture strongly expressing that I have hurt and offended her, and that I’m an asshole, but that hey, she’s not going to let me starve just because I’m throwing some incomprehensible tantrum. And I am hungry, I guess.

  “Thanks.” I still don’t want to look at her. Food provides a decent excuse not to, though. I pause my game and start mauling, eyes lowered. For a while we ignore each other, or pretend to, but then the food starts to run out and it’s like I’m exposed to a new kind of enemy fire, blasts made out of awareness of my sister sitting near me. And awareness of that brother-thing still probably inside her, watching me and whistling coward down deep in her brain stem where I can’t hear it. Laughing at the way I freaked out.

  “So. How’s the war?” Ruby’s a little closer to me now and she puts her book down.

  “Sucks. There’s not nearly enough stuff to kill.”

  Ruby laughs. “Everett the Destroyer, wading through the blood of his enemies but still unsatisfied! Let them breed captive elves by the thousands, solely to slake the thirst of his blade.”

  “Now you’re talking sense.” I want to keep hating her, but it’s hard. Especially when I can hear the strained sound of her voice, like she’s putting on an act again, which probably means that she has something to hide. And once I start wondering what that might be it basically scares the hell out of me.

  “You hurt yourself?” Ruby nods toward my bandaged thumb and I don’t answer. “Ever?”

  I stare at the smears on my plate, and after a moment Ruby reaches out and takes my cut hand and starts gently stroking my thumb with hers. I can see from the corner of my eyes that she’s looking at me with this weird, hungry attention, and all at once I realize why.

  “You couldn’t wait until she’s asleep?” I say. “Like, her brain is blipping out now for no reason. You think she won’t notice that?”

  “I can’t always stop Ru-Ru from noticing more than I’d like,” Dashiell says. “But I didn’t think this discussion could wait, Never. Not after what happened today.”

  And I finally look up: Dashiell’s stare, so concerned and tender that you could swear he means it, lances straight out of Ruby’s face. He’s still pawing at my thumb.

  “You were going to freaking stab me,” I tell him. “So what the hell did you do to her?”

  Dash doesn’t answer right away, just turns my hand and inspects it. “You know, you dropped at least thirty feet when you threw yourself off that scaffolding. Quite the nasty fall that was, Never. So are you injured now? Anything broken?”

  I pull my hand away. “Just my thumb got hurt. I fell on the kitchen floor and smashed a plate.”

  “So the only harm that came to you was from what you did in reaction to your dream. Not from what happened in the dream itself. Isn’t that right, Never-Ever?”

  I know what he’s getting at. “I don’t care if it was a dream. What did you do to her?”

  “Ruby Slippers bounced out of bed on Saturday morning, full of life and perfectly healthy. The only danger lay in an impulse toward reenactment that came over her after she woke up, a drifting back toward the scene. But you know, Never, I took measures to keep her from coming to the slightest harm while she was still feeling overcome. She didn’t even catch a cold.”

  Reenactment. Drifting back. Ruby on the river’s brink with waves sloshing at her ankles, ready to keep walking forward. And now I remember: Dash said she swam to reach him. “Did you drown her?”

  “In a way Ru-Ru and I got lucky with the scenario that presented itself,” Dash says, answering the question without answering it. “I think you have a harder row to hoe than she did, Never. I wanted to tell you that I’m sorry for that, but it’s not something I have any control over; you’re the one whose mind dictates the details, unfortunately. But the salient thing is that it’s just a ritual, a rite of passage. It will be hard to get through it, but then on the other side you’ll be perfectly fine. We’ll continue with our plans and you’ll feel as strong as ever.”

  That’s why he’s here. “I’m not backing out, Dash. I wouldn’t have—tried to get away today—if you had just told me the truth already. About what was going to happen.”

  He tips Ruby’s head and smiles, examining me. “You still want to go ahead, then. With our adventure.”

  “I still want you to get the hell out of Ruby. She isn’t yours, Dash-Dot-Dot.”

  Weirdly, Ruby’s blondish lashes start to flutter halfway closed and the smile on her face gets wider, more blissed out. For half a second I’m not sure which of them I’m looking at.

  “Oh, I hate to disillusion you, Never. But that wasn’t at all how it seemed to me today, and you know I have a remarkably privileged view of the situation. My Ruby-Ru showed me her colors, and they were the truest of blues.”

  I want to ignore him, but I can’t. My heart starts this achy thudding and my breath feels thick. “What are you talking about?”

  “Miss Slippers told you she was off to the library,” Dashiell says—and the quirk of his smile tells me that Ruby was lying to me, and that he thinks it’s freaking hysterical that I was dumb enough to fall for it. “Didn’t she?”

  “So where was she?” But I shouldn’t ask. I shouldn’t let him taunt me into wondering what he knows that I don’t.

  “She went to visit Paige. Not so long after you took your tumble, Never, Ruby Slippers went strolling up my old block in the East Village. It was nice to see the place again.”

  It takes me a moment to process all that—so he can only see the East Village by hitching a ride on somebody? He can’t just waft over there disembodied anytime he feels like it?—but then it hits me how crazy it is.

  “What did she want with Paige? Ruby—did she go to ask—” Ugh. I already know. Ruby said she’d forget her paranoid ideas about murder, but she was lying about that, too. Of course.

  Dashiell shakes Ruby’s head, her hacked hair swinging. “That was what Paige seemed to expect, but as it transpired Ruby didn’t choose to ask her anything. She went looking for me, in a sense. She gravitated toward the scene of my death, as surely as if she’d done the deed herself. And she found a bit more than I’d intended.”

  I could keep repeating myself, saying What are you talking about, Dash? over and over like some idiot automaton. But I’m suddenly sick of him jerking me around and I glare at him instead. He’ll tell me anyway, because he’s dying to tell me—to rub it in that he has Ruby by the balls, or by whatever counts as balls for a girl.

  “She’s starting to overhear me, a little,” Dash keeps on after a moment. See, I knew he would. He can’t stop himself. “There’s some bleeding of consciousness, back and forth, and I can’t entirely prevent it. I know how much you want to preserve Ru-Ru’s innocence, Ever, as far as my proximity is concerned, but the longer I’m in residence—we both know she’s a sensitive girl.” There he goes tightening the screws, even though he doesn’t need to. “But I was very touched by her response to what she sensed, to my memories seeping into her awareness. It was a beautiful demonstration of loyalty.” He grins. “I don’t think Paige enjoyed it much, though.”

  “So Ruby still loves you,” I snarl. “Even after you freaking murdered her. That doesn’t make her yours, Dashiell. You can’t have her.”

  The arch of his eyebrows—or actually of Ruby’s eyebrows, because it’s really important to remember that—says, Oh, can’t I? But what he says out loud is, “But I can have you instead? That’s the deal you want
to propose, Never-Ever? A fair trade?”

  Wasn’t he the one who proposed it? “You can use me. For a while. Until you do what you have to do. Get the money and whatever, like you said.” I stare at him, because I can’t shake the feeling that there’s a catch somewhere. “Do what you need to, and then get out.”

  “I wish I could make it easier for you,” Dashiell says softly. “I can’t. There’s no alternative method that I know of. We’re both obliged to see things through to the end.”

  Like it’s totally equivalent, me getting slashed to death and him obliged to swing the knife at me. “Whatever. And anyway I’m not obliged. I’m doing it on purpose.”

  “You’re doing it for your sister’s sake,” Dashiell agrees. “I understand that. It’s what a man would do, Never-Ever. And I truly appreciate it.”

  And then he’s gone. Ruby’s eyes roll back and her head pitches around—and then she’s launching herself off the sofa and staggering fast toward the bathroom under the stairs. She slams the door and I can hear her throwing up, coughing and sobbing. I’ve followed her by reflex and I’m leaning on the wall outside. “Ruby? Ruby, are you okay?”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” Ruby moans. “What is happening to me? What is—”

  What did it do to her, when she started overhearing Dashiell? How could anyone deal with that, some dead guy’s memories oozing up in their brain like toxic sludge? And he pretty much just came out and said it will get worse; he’s probably doing it on purpose, just to keep the pressure on me. It’s totally working.

  I’ve got to get him out, that’s all there is to it. He’s killing her.

  DASHIELL

  There’s always an eye to be kept on the darkness that loosed me—an eye for movement, an ear tuned to the chance of footsteps or breath. Distractions abound in my current environs: at the moment fingers are lathering her hair and bubbles skid down her wrists. On her pale thigh liquid fireworks burst, fantastically brilliant after my long stretch of sensory deprivation. I could forget to pay attention to what’s back there, drugged by the sensual intricacy of being so alive in my dear sister’s skin. Warmth, saliva, drumming blood.