Among the Dead and Dreaming

by Samuel Ligon

  “No!” Alina says. “I want to go with you!”

  “I might be here all night, baby. I want you to sleep.”

  “No!” Alina says. “We should stay together!”

  I pull her into me and look at Mark, his eyebrows raised in a question, like, Why can’t we come with you?

  I shake my head. I still don’t know how it will play, and I can’t have her talking in there, saying too much. “I need you to take care of her,” I say to Mark.

  “No!” Alina says, burrowing against my broken ribs.

  I grit my teeth to keep from flinching.

  “It’s okay,” Mark says, rubbing his hands up and down her back, still looking at me, evaluating me.

  “It’s okay, baby,” I say. “Do you think I would ever leave you?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, and Mark says to me, “You might like to have us there with you,” and I give him a look, like, Please just do this for me, and he says, “We’ll pick up your mom in a little while, Alina.”

  I don’t want her to be dragged through something else—I know how they’ll treat me in there, and I don’t want her to see that, to identify as the fucked up kid of the beat up mom. I just need to get through this. Alone. I just need to go inside that machine and come back out, like I have before, and I don’t want her to see that. And if we do have to run, I need her safe and ready and not saying too much.

  “Baby,” I say, “we can talk on the phone if you want, while I wait—the whole time, if you want. Or you can just chill for a while. And the minute I’m ready to go, you’ll come get me with Mark. You two can eat something and watch a movie. You don’t want to go in there. There’s all kinds of gross stuff in there, diarrhea all over the place and people throwing up and screaming and bleeding, and just—”

  “Okay,” she says. “But you’ll call when you’re ready.”

  “Of course I will.”

  I pet her and kiss her and smell her and kiss her and transfer her to Mark, then walk inside for my long wait with the bleeders.

  “I fell,” I tell the nurses, a doctor, whoever asks.

  They try to make me tell the truth, but give up pretty quickly. They clean my wounds and tape my ribs and leave me for the oral surgeon, who tells me he’s going to sew me up and reset bones and pull the teeth that are goners. I can see a dentist in the morning, but I’ll leave tonight with a lot of teeth missing.

  All the time wondering what to do with Alina. She wants me to go to the cops, and it almost seems like I should. I can’t run with her, hiding her, especially after everything I told her in the tub, everything about my past and how she came to be. She took it all much better than I thought she would, but she’s in shock, of course, everything she’s seen. I can’t hide anything from her now. Burke’s family might still be alive in Texas, might try to claim her, but maybe after what he’s done, the cops will see that they’re the unfit ones, not me. I didn’t start any of it and was just protecting my baby. Anyone could see that. Mark’s getting lawyers set up, and I don’t let myself hope for anything with him, even if it does feel like we’re all together, and maybe, maybe, but I can’t let myself look into the future at all, because that never works, just that we’re together now, and Alina.

  The doctors and nurses treat me like an animal, another fucked up woman from the street. They’re not cruel. Just clinical. Indifferent. Mark never asked for anything in return. Him and Alina and the promise I made. I’ll take him and You can take me, but You didn’t take me. I’ll tell them I shot him if that’s what Alina wants. It’s what she knows. What she saw. What’s true. Part of what’s true. She’s going to need somebody to help her with that, everything she’s seen and what she thought she knew, everything she didn’t know. Mark will help. I know that now. Mark will help. And her back there waiting for me, alive.

  35

  Burke

  My Alina—the truest thing that ever happened to me. My baby. How I always knew her. How I felt her being born all those years ago at Huntsville. How I’ll always have her. My Alina. Me and Cash and Cinnamon and Nikki and me and my mother and Alina. All my dreams of Nikki and me coming truer and truer, falling in love like the movies you see, where it’s him and her and they can’t get enough, and it ain’t gonna end and it ain’t gonna wear off, me and Nikki and Cinnamon forever and Alina.

  Alina

  Mark puts me in her bed and sits on the edge reading to me like I’m a kid. I cried after we dropped her off. I couldn’t stop crying and shaking. Mark brought me back upstairs to Cynthia’s house and put ice cream in front of me. I can’t stop seeing a corner of it. I don’t want to look, but a corner of it’s at the side of my vision, her over him shooting. The way he flopped. Her noises, these piercing screeches like awful tortured birds. The sound of her shooting again and again. All the sounds. Only sounds. Because everything else is hidden at the corners.

  I felt better to be with her when she wasn’t dead and I thought she was and then she wasn’t and then she told me everything in the bath together. But now she’s gone and I don’t know if I’ll see her again. I don’t want to live in Cynthia’s apartment. I want to go home.

  But I can’t go home because that’s where everything happened and he’s there.

  “What if she just gets up and leaves?” I ask him. “After they fix her. What if she just leaves,” but even saying that, I know it’s not true, and Mark says, “She won’t leave. She’ll call us and we’ll pick her up.”

  “Are they going to put her in jail?”

  “I don’t know,” Mark says. “But whatever happens, we’re going to have good people helping us, people who understand that your mom was just trying to protect you.”

  “Where will I go? If she goes to jail?”

  I don’t want to wander between foster families alone while she’s in jail, but maybe Ashley’s mom will take me. Or maybe after she knows what happened she won’t want to take me. Maybe nobody will. Maybe I can live by myself somewhere until she gets out.

  I listen to the sound of his voice, but not what he says, as I drift off, and then he’s carrying me down the stairs like he carried her before, like she carried me when I was little, but I don’t act like I’m awake or anything. I let him carry me to the car and to her, my body loose like I practically am asleep, trying to keep it that way, trying not to be afraid, trying not to see anything at the corners.

  Mark

  I finally put Nikki with Alina in Cynthia’s bed and take the living room couch, falling into a dream of Cynthia and me on a horse riding through trees, all these branches whipping our faces, my arms around her waist and feeling her ribs as she looks back at me smiling. We tumble through space still attached to the horse, meteors shooting around us, and she keeps up that soothing smile before turning into my mother and then Nikki, or maybe she’s been Nikki all along, and then she’s herself again, smiling, and we’re so glad to see each other, so glad to be near each other. I run my hands under her shirt, over the smooth, warm skin of her belly, where I’ve always put my hands before, and then we’re flying, not in planes, but soaring over various incredible pieces of the earth in our bodies. “We’re getting out,” she says. “We’re going away. Finally.”

  “This isn’t possible,” I say, even as we fly over farms and cities and deserts and oceans and, finally, above the geometry of the landscape, into black space.

  “It is for me,” she says.

  “That’s because you’re dead,” I say.

  She smiles back at me. “Look how we’re flying,” she says.

  “It’s just a dream,” I say. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

  She doesn’t care. I don’t care either.

  I wake and it’s silent in the apartment. Even the cat people upstairs are at rest. The dream lingers. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or to any of us. I think about Alina and Cynthia’s baby. About Nikki.


  She looked awful when we picked her up, her face horribly swollen under the gauze and stitches, her mouth all fucked up. We talked for a while after Alina fell asleep. I told her about my sisters, who I knew would look after Alina if Nikki had to do time. I told her about Lambert and Kara Tomlinson.

  “So you have something on him,” she said, “this political asshole. That’s why I get a big shot lawyer?”

  “That’s one way to look at it,” I said. “Or—I’m helping him. Now he’s going to help me. You.”

  “They’ll bring in other people,” Nikki said. “From the state. CPS. Everything back in Texas. I go to prison and what happens to Alina?”

  “You don’t know you’re going to prison. And, anyway, that’s why I told you about my sisters. People who can step in to help.”

  “Why can’t you do it?” she said.

  I walked to the kitchen counter.

  “Why can’t you take her?” she said. “Until I come back.”

  I poured more wine in my glass.

  “I would take her,” I said, surprised that it was true. I hardly even knew Alina.

  But, yes, I thought, I’d take her. And we’d wait for Nikki.

  It would have to be only about Alina. But I’d take her. That wouldn’t happen, though, because I was going to have my own legal problems.

  “I would take her,” I said again. “But I’m going to have my own situation.”

  “Because you helped me?” she said.

  “We’ll have to talk to the lawyers,” I said.

  “We’ll tell them you weren’t even there.”

  “Let’s just tell them what happened,” I said.

  “We should just take off,” she said.

  It sounded fantastic—running together.

  “But I’m done with all that,” she said.

  “Right,” I said.

  “For Alina,” she said.

  “We should go to bed,” I said, and she said, “I don’t want to close my eyes. I don’t want to think about it or replay it. I don’t believe any of that therapy shit about facing your problems to put them behind you. I believe in outrunning them.”

  I looked at her smiling at me with her broken mouth.

  “Come sit with me on this shitty couch,” she said. “Would you?”

  I sat beside her.

  “I want this night to last just a little longer.”

  “Because it was such a great night?”

  “Because she’s alive. We’re all here alive. For just a minute more.”

  She leaned into me and I wrapped my arm around her listening hard for her breathing, wanting to put my hand on her chest to feel her heart beating, on her neck again, on her wrists, all the places I could feel her pulse, the two of us here right now forever, the three of us, her and me and Alina asleep in the other room fine.

  Nikki

  I keep nodding off against him, the fog of drugs lingering over the pain in my body, my face and ribs and mouth, everywhere. Alina asleep in the bedroom. Burke gone where he belongs. Mark never asking for anything. I don’t want to be careful anymore. I don’t want to run and hide and be careful always for the rest of my life. I don’t know why he’s here, but I know I’d be dead if he wasn’t. Alina with Burke. Everything gone if it wasn’t for him. Here beside me.

  “She was in love with him,” I say. “Cynthia. With Kyle.”

  “Yeah. Now they’re together.”

  “That’s the only way? Dead?”

  “Together forever.”

  “I don’t believe that. But he was in love with her, too. He didn’t know how deep their connection was.”

  “They’re gone now.”

  “Let me have some of that wine.”

  I lift myself from his shoulder and he walks to the kitchen and pours me a glass, and another for himself. Whatever happens now, she’s alive and I’m alive. Mark here, too, with us. He brings me wine, and I fight the fog of drugs over the pain in my body, light now, almost floating. Everything we could have lost and didn’t.

  He lowers himself into the couch beside me floating.

  I don’t feel like I’m waiting for anything.

  I just want this night to last a little longer.

  Acknowledgments

  I’m grateful to the people who helped me imagine and reimagine this book—Joseph Salvatore, Jess Walter, Jane Ligon, Shawn Vestal, Paul Mandabach, Ellen Schuler Mauk, Robert Lopez, Lynn Trenning, Ken Collins, Brian Mandabach, and Kate Lebo. Thank you.

  Author

  Samuel Ligon is the author of a novel, Safe in Heaven Dead, and two collections of stories, Wonderland, illustrated by Stephen Knezovich, and Drift and Swerve. He teaches at Eastern Washington University in Spokane, and is the editor of Willow Springs.

  Photo by Heather Malcolm

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