I nodded. What the hell else was there to do?
“How did they …” How was I supposed to ask him how they had decided who would take which body? How had Kyrieana decided she would become Lottie? Did they roll a die? Draw straws? Rock, paper, scissors? “Kyrieana, did she choose Lottie’s body?” My throat felt tight and stiff. Why couldn’t I have just gone crazy?
“Oh. I don’t know actually. She never said. I didn’t think to ask, sorry.”
It shouldn’t have mattered, but that was the only part of this story that involved my Lottie, so to me, there wasn’t anything more important. “Doesn’t matter,” I mumbled.
Eric hesitated but then picked up with his story. “They watch everything that’s done so they’ll know how to undo it. That’s how they knew all sorts of formaldehyde and shit is put in those bodies that’s not supposed to be there. And you probably don’t want to hear all these details.”
I was about to tell him he was right. While I had wanted to know why Kyrieana had chosen Lottie, or if Lydia had chosen first and Lottie was just leftover, I didn’t want to hear how Kyrieana, even if I actually kinda liked Kyrieana, had taken over my dead fiancée’s body and brought it back to life. But then I remembered sitting by the lake with her that afternoon, the breeze gently blowing those long strands of soft, wavy brown hair around her delicate face, those slender fingers playing in the grass, that thrill of endorphins, and, well yeah, testosterone, when our legs brushed against each other as I reached across her to pluck away an invading spider. “No, it’s ok. Tell me.”
“We were right about them needing help. A lot of help. Somehow, they’re able to let these guys who are here know what bodies to keep an eye on, then as soon as they have the chance, they dig up the bodies, rebury the casket, then get the hell out of there. Lydia made it sound like they start … claiming the bodies, those are her words … as soon as they’re in the van. I told you they don’t have a lot of time. It’s like all this energy they have is used to fix all the shit that doesn’t work anymore. And all the crap that’s not supposed to be there makes it harder, they have to use up a lot of energy just to get that shit out …”
“How do you just get formaldehyde and methanol out of your body?”
Eric shrugged. “Same way we get anything out of our bodies when we’re alive. We know what killed them both. Lottie’s spinal cord was severed, some of her organs, like her liver was pretty badly damaged, she had a lot of broken bones,” Eric’s voice had dropped and he finally stopped. We both sat in silence for a while. I already knew all of this. We had been told the full extent of her injuries at the hospital. We had also been told she had most likely died very quickly. I remember someone – some doctor, maybe an intern – telling me at least she hadn’t suffered. And then Eric was pulling me away, out of the room, and I had no idea why. I had a vague ghost of a memory of him telling me he was afraid I was going to kill that guy.
“Just finish,” I sighed.
“They both woke up in their new bodies several days later in a house in Waco. She described what it was like, waking up in a foreign body. She could remember her language, her life, everything that had happened, but she had no idea how to use this body. She had been watching people at the hospital, at Jamie’s funeral. The way they talked, moved, smiled, hugged, cried. But she couldn’t figure out how to do any of that. Lottie had woken up first and when she finally got her neck to move, to turn her head to look at her best friend, she saw her lying there crying.”
I held my breath. No. That wasn’t right. I couldn’t breathe. I felt like someone was holding a pillow over my face, suffocating me. My Lottie. How had this happened to her? What the hell had gone wrong? What had been going through Kyrieana’s mind when she woke up? Or was it Lottie’s mind? Did she know she was supposed to have died? That she was dead? Was she thinking about me? Her mother? I wanted nothing more right then than to leave that room, drive the short distance down Essen Lane to her apartment, to beg her to just let me hold her again, to promise her – even though I had no idea how I could ever fulfill it – that nothing like this would ever happen to her again.
“Could she speak to her?” I finally asked. I already knew the answer. She hadn’t even known how to translate her own name. How would they have spoken to one another?
“No,” Eric said. “She understood what crying meant. She had seen so much of it at the funeral. But she couldn’t figure out why Kyrieana was crying, and she didn’t know how to talk to her, she couldn’t really move much. She wanted to make some sort of sound to let her know she was here with her because she thought Kyrieana was scared or that maybe she was hurting. That happens sometimes if a body is badly injured. They heal the worst of the problems but a broken arm is still going to hurt like hell. She couldn’t do anything though except lie there and watch her best friend cry in this strange body she didn’t even really recognize.
Anyway, after a while, one of the guys who had been helping them came in to check on them, saw they were both awake, saw Lottie crying. He figured she was in pain, so he started checking her out again,” Eric paused, he must have seen me flinch, “they weren’t like that, Dietrich. Nobody messed with them. He just checked for broken bones, visible bruises, listened to her heart and lungs, stuff like that. And he talked to her, in English, and of course Lydia couldn’t understand anything he was saying. But she said something weird kind of happened, but she didn’t really think anything of it at the time, because she was kinda dealing with a lot of shit of her own. But this guy, a doctor, I guess, was just talking, trying to be calming and soothing, I suppose, but Lydia was watching her the whole time and at one point, he said something and she swears it seemed like Lottie understood him. Which should have been impossible.”
“Holy shit,” I muttered. A hat trick of holy shits. This was one hell of a ride. “Did the doctor notice?”
“Lydia thinks so. He kinda looked at her funny but then just brushed it off, probably just assumed it was a coincidence because nobody wakes up being able to understand a language from a planet they’ve never been on.”
“So she woke up this way. From the beginning. She woke up as Lottie and Kyrieana.”
Eric just watched me. He had already reached that conclusion but he didn’t want to agree or disagree with me. This wasn’t a detached interest in a remarkable discovery; this wasn’t even a good story you might tell over a few beers and a game of pool. This was a revelation that was threatening to kill me all over again, to drag me into a deeper part of Hell than I had ever known existed. If we were right, then my Lottie, the love of my life, my only love, had spent the past two years trapped in her body as someone else. It would mean that she had always known who she was, and who she could never be again. She had awakened from death, resurrected, but no longer herself. Had she wondered then, as she lay there crying in that room in Waco, Texas, if I had survived her death? If I would survive in this afterlife without her? Was she crying for me, knowing that even if she came to me, she wouldn’t be Lottie, not the same Lottie, and that I may not still love her? Is that why she had never tried to contact me?
“God,” I whispered.
Eric shook his head sadly. “God had nothing to do with this.”
I closed my eyes. No. This wasn’t God’s territory. This afterlife was not His.
Chapter 7
For the first time in a month, I had one of those dreams that night. We were sitting on the floor in our apartment in Houston, swatches of colors spread around us, and like jigsaw puzzle pieces, Lottie would hold two up together, squint, shake her head and throw them aside. I tried to help. I felt completely useless. I grabbed a swatch and flipped it over. Majorelle blue. I held it up to her, a little too much purple for her to make the immediate eye association, but she grabbed it anyway, held it closer to my face with that God-she’s-so-sexy smile then shook her head. “Nice try,” she tossed it aside. I didn’t care what colors she picked for our wedding, but I was not wearing a tie that matched my eyes. I had so
me dignity left. Somewhere.
Lottie was preoccupied with peridots and … hell, I didn’t even know. She was so focused, so intent on finding the perfect combination of colors. She said everything about our love was flawless. Our wedding had to be a reflection of that. I told her we should elope to Vegas and in the end, the result would be exactly the same. Lottie just smiled and held two swatches together again, asking me what I thought, and I had to bite my lip to keep from telling her that I thought we could be in Vegas in less than a day if we looked for flights now. Instead, I told her those two colors looked exactly like the two she had just shown me. “Dietrich, the last two were peridot and ivory. These are peridot and creamy ivory.” She was fucking with me. God, I loved her so much.
“Hm. You’re right. That changes everything.” I reached over and grabbed the swatches from her hands, pretending to study them more carefully, but really, I was only studying her. She was studying me, too, that hybrid smile still on her face. This time, I knew what it meant.
I tossed the swatches aside and leaned over to kiss her, tasting the remnants of the pinot grigio she’d been sipping on while examining the spots of color all over our floor. My tongue pressed gently between her lips, and her hand clasped behind my neck pulling me down closer toward her, then sliding us down on the floor until I was mostly lying on top of her. One hand cradled her head and the other began unbuttoning her silky red blouse, my fingers gently tracing over the goosebumps as they erupted across her flesh. I moved my lips down to her neck, that smell of pears and honey always so strong there, licking her skin, tasting her as she pulled at my shirt. She pulled it over my head and let her fingertips glide over the contours of my chest, my nipples, my abdomen, to the edge of my jeans then up my back. She was driving me crazy.
And then, unexpectedly, she pushed me onto my back, and straddled me, looking down at me with that same smile, that same passion in her eyes, but there was something mischievous there now, that look she got when she knew she’d surprised me and that excited her. She leaned down to kiss me again, and I slid my hands down to her hips, pushing at her pants and she let me take them off. She was naked now, sitting on my lap as we pulled at my jeans, and in a minute, we’d start making love, I knew that because this was a memory, and over an hour later, we’d both be tired and sweaty and bearing the carpet burns from having sex on our apartment floor, but there was no more.
Because like that, the humming of the air conditioner broke through the moans of my dream, the sweat that was dripping from my forehead was real, the racing heart, the shortness of breath, the obvious throbbing erection, it was all too real. Except for being alone in a hotel room in Baton Rouge, not in our apartment in Houston, not with Lottie. I lay there in the dark listening to the steady humming, the occasional closing door from somewhere along the walkway, footsteps on the stairs. I waited. I waited for my body to remember it was dead, this was just an afterlife. Lottie was not with me. There was no sex in Hell.
I could see the red lights of the digital clock on the night stand beside me; I would have known what time it was even without a clock in the room. It told me it was 3:34. And so I kept waiting. My phone was beside me and I picked it up, not really sure what I would do. I had no interest in surfing, didn’t have any social media accounts, and didn’t even have any games on my phone. I found myself typing out a text to Lottie. It was an impulsive thing to do, and halfway through it, I realized it was also probably a stupid thing to do. Sane, sober people don’t send text messages at 3:40 in the morning. But I finished it and deliberated for a few more seconds on whether or not I would tap the send button before swiping my finger across it. I hoped she was one of those people who always remembered to turn the Do Not Disturb function on at night.
I tossed the phone back on the pillow beside me and rubbed the palm of my hand across my eyes. This would only be my third day in this hotel room, and I was already getting sick of it. I ran a hand through my hair and thought about getting up then, finding somewhere to go jogging, maybe by the lakes again, when I saw the screen on my phone light up beside me. Lottie had texted me back.
My message to her had been short, only telling her I’d had a dream that wouldn’t let me go back to sleep and if I remembered correctly, there was absolutely nothing to do in Baton Rouge at 3:30 in the morning. I opened her message. “I always have nightmares. I’ll wait outside my apartment. Come pick me up.”
It took less than ten minutes to get there, and as I drove by her building, I saw her small body glide down the stairs. She must have been watching for me. She slid into the seat next to me. It was barely 4:00 a.m. “Should we just drive around?” I asked.
“Sure, as long as by drive around you mean get on I-10 and head east.”
“Ok. How far east?”
Lottie smiled at me. “New Orleans.” I wondered whose idea that had been. Lottie was occasionally spontaneous, but more often she planned things meticulously, like fretting over the difference between ivory and creamy ivory. But I headed back toward the interstate anyway and headed east. We had been to New Orleans often enough, but I didn’t know if Kyrieana had. Would it be different for her, to see the familiar streets, taste the familiar beignets, smell the unmistakable stench of Bourbon Street, hear the corner musicians playing some touristy version of jazz that had become just as much a part of New Orleans by now as real jazz had? I wondered what it would be like to experience it all for the first time, even though she had experienced it so many times before?
“Have you been to New Orleans since …” how was I even supposed to ask that kind of question? But Lottie knew what I meant.
“No,” she answered. She looked out my window as we passed Blue Bayou and pointed, “You can’t see it now. On our way back you’ll have to look. They’re adding on.” I just nodded.
“What is it you want to see there? In New Orleans, I mean.”
She was quiet for a while, maybe thinking if I had known Lottie so well, I should have known the answer, but she sighed happily, “Everything.”
So I showed her everything I knew about the city, even though she knew the layout just as well as I did. But she was content to let me lead her around like she’d never been to New Orleans before. We parked near the French Quarter then walked to Decatur so we could have coffee and beignets and sat on the Riverwalk as the sun came up. The Mississippi River in Louisiana is a thick muddy brown, but sometimes, when the sun is rising or setting and the orange glow of its light catches the water just right, it can be as beautiful as any other river in the world.
We walked through some of the twisted streets of the French Quarter, occasionally stepping into shops as they opened their doors for business when something particularly kitschy caught her attention. She wanted to find the tackiest souvenir we could to bring back for Lydia. I assured her that wouldn’t be difficult in this city.
We made our way to Jackson Square and I let her lead me straight to the St. Louis Cathedral. I had been there once before when Lottie and I had taken a tour. We hadn’t been dating long; we were the same age, but Lottie was a senior in high school and I was about to graduate from college, but I often felt like she was so much older than me, so much wiser about the world despite having grown up sheltered, loved, secure. Hell, she even went to a private school.
I had grown up in foster homes around Berlin, being passed from one family to another. It wasn’t as bad as the United States, but I was a difficult child. I rarely spoke to the family I was placed with or made any effort to fit in. I certainly didn’t fit in at school. I kept getting moved ahead and was soon much younger than my classmates. Every attempt at sticking me in therapy met with the same stubborn resistance. I wouldn’t talk or cooperate with a psychiatrist anymore than I would a well-meaning would-be parent. I had no way of knowing then these people meant to care for me, that they meant, maybe, to even love me. At five years old, my mother had shown up at our apartment one day after having been gone for a while, I don’t even know how long, and told me I was
the reason her life was so completely fucked up, that she was sick of looking at me. That she was finally going to do what she should have done five years ago. That was the last time I had ever cried.
Lottie was so full of a confidence I had never had, that confidence that can only come from having grown up knowing you are loved, appreciated, wanted. What did I care what strangers told me? I took their tests. They fawned over my intelligence. I would walk through the mall, trailing a safe distance behind whatever family I was staying with at the time, and girls would smile at me, sometimes approach me, tell me I was cute, and I would turn away. I took so many aptitude tests that I started to wonder if I wasn’t being prepared for a future in professional test-taking. Grown ups who more often than not just scared me would come to talk to me about their companies, their industries, their agencies, how much potential I had. I never talked to them either.
Finally, at 14, I won my freedom. I had only applied to universities outside of Europe, mostly in the U.S. because I spoke English, and I decided on LSU because they offered me a full scholarship and stipend. I had to get permission to leave the country, but even the foster care system by that point had grown tired of me. When I left Berlin, I never had any intention of going back.
Standing outside the Cathedral now, I could tell that it was Kyrieana looking up at the flat façade of the white stone church. I asked her if she wanted to go inside, but she shook her head. There was something like awe and reverence in her eyes as she followed the spires upward toward the bright blue of the burning New Orleans sky. This was Man’s religion, Man’s God. Kyrieana didn’t understand it, but she respected it. We turned around and walked back toward the Riverwalk as the steam organ on the Natchez started playing, beckoning tourists to come ride her for an exorbitant fee. We paid to go through the Aquarium of the Americas instead, and Lottie – or Kyrieana – stopped to watch whatever was alive behind every single exhibit. Lottie and I usually skimmed the exhibits. We could make it out of the entire aquarium in under two hours, easily.
Resurrected (Resurrected Series Book 1) Page 9
