It’s as if they were never there at all.
Lane was found at the research facility, but despite being questioned by the authorities, he couldn’t provide any information about what happened leading up to the event. Either stubborn willfulness, loyalty to Jesse’s memory, or his head injury made that account impossible. Or so he says.
In this second drawing, to the left of the stone marker holding their place in this world, sits Brinkley’s tombstone.
She hears that laugh again and the sound of ice hitting a glass.
I’ll visit soon, she promises and moves the sketch aside.
And the third picture…
The backdoor slams and the overhead bulb swings wildly, casting the images in and out of whirling darkness.
Sneakers squeak across linoleum. They’re followed by the scurry-click of nails.
“Gloria?” a girl calls out.
A dog’s snout inserts itself beneath the crack of the door at the top of the basement stairs and sniffs. A snort and sneeze follow. The girl mumbles something in her high-pitched I’m-speaking-to-a-dog voice and then the basement door swings open.
“Gloria? Are you down there?” Maisie calls out.
“Yes,” Gloria says, unable to keep the hint of a smile out of her voice. She manages a half turn in her rickety metal seat with the help of her cane.
Feet pound the battered wooden steps.
Then Maisie—Maya—is standing before her, grass stuck to her cheek, a thin sheen of sweat shining across her brow. Her black hair in a messy bun on the topmost part of her head.
“I got the front and back done,” Maisie says. “I was wondering if you have a weed eater or one of those trim-y things.” She makes a motion with her hand and a sound with her pursed lips that can be mistaken for a machine gun. Gloria does have an Ultimax 100 upstairs, under the floorboards of her bedroom, but she is certain that would not count as a trim-y thing.
“The weed eater and hedge trimmer are in the garage,” Gloria says. But she also thinks they are likely so old they might not start at all. While her guns are always ready for use, the same cannot be said of her lawn care equipment. “Don’t you have something better to do with your Sunday? Don’t kids go to the movies or something?”
She’s told Maisie this no less than five times today. But she couldn’t deny that the girl seemed to actually enjoy herself. For the five months she’s lived here, she’s cooked, cleaned, and completed the yard work with enthusiasm. She seems as happy in the grocery store as she is in the mall.
Gloria has no experience with teenaged girls, so she is not entirely sure if this qualifies as normal behavior.
She redecorated the spare room upstairs, and at least that is recognizably the epitome of teen girl, complete with an unmade bed, clothes on the floor, and a stereo that plays a tad too loudly.
Gloria wouldn’t have it any other way.
“Are you kidding?” Maisie snorts. “I’ve been waiting my whole life for someone to trust me with power tools.”
“Maisie,” Gloria says. But she feels so tired suddenly. Her head swims. The darkness presses in on the side of her vision, tunneling it. Maya, she thinks. I’ve really got to start calling her Maya. Even when we’re alone.
All strength leaves her body. She feels herself slump, hears Maisie’s frantic cry. There are more pounding footsteps, rattling stairs, a dog yips, but it all sounds so far away. Like Gloria is hearing this commotion at the end of a long hallway. Just on the other side of a closed door. All she can do is swim in that infinite darkness—that warm place where anything and everything exists in the same moment, where anything could rise to the surface of that inky black and become the now.
Something cold hits her teeth.
Someone is begging her to drink.
She obeys, opening her lips on reflex. She inhales and coughs. Something cracks against the floor and skitters into the dark.
Ice. Ice in Coke.
Gloria gets her eyes open again at last and sees the girl near tears.
“I’m sorry,” Maisie says. She steps back, still holding the plastic tumbler full of soda. “I didn’t realize you were drawing. I wouldn’t have talked your ears off like that.”
Gloria licks the soda off her lips and reaches for the tumbler. “It’s okay.”
Maisie hands it over with a frown.
I’ve scared her, Gloria thinks. I’ll have to try harder not to do that after everything she’s been through. This child has had enough scares to fill a lifetime.
“I’m so stupid. I mean, of course you were drawing. No one just sits down here in a dark, deep, basement for fun, you know? I’m so sorry.”
Gloria’s face cools with each swallow.
“Don’t apologize. I’ve lived with this a long time,” Gloria tells the girl, forcing a smile she doesn’t feel. “You can’t take any of it personally.”
“It was still really stupid,” Maisie says. “And now you’ve also got all this.” Maisie sweeps a hand over Gloria’s body, pausing longer at the cane.
All this.
A broken body to go with my broken mind.
Maisie stoops and grabs up the fallen cane, tilting the black polished wood toward her. It looks golden in the overhead light, the wood shining.
“Should I drive you to the ER?” she asks. And she could do it.
In just four weeks, she’ll be eligible to trade in her learner’s permit for a full license.
“No, I just need a minute,” Gloria tells her, voice tight. She feels the sweat roll down her temple and under her chin.
Her gaze slides down the black cane to the sketches that’ve fallen on the floor.
Gloria thinks she must’ve knocked them off the table when she slumped. And not just the three fresh ones, but the whole book. When its spine hit the concrete, it must’ve vomited its contents on the cold floor.
Maisie follows her gaze. “Oh, I’ll get them.”
She bends down to gather up the drawings at once. She peels back the top flat and sweeps the pictures into the book with her other hand.
Gloria realizes she’s still talking. “I was thinking after I finish up the yard and take a shower, I’ll make lunch.”
“You have school tomorrow. I’m sure you can think of better things to do with your last summer Sunday. Do you want to drive to school tomorrow? We can use my handicap sticker to get a good spot.”
Maisie pauses. “Actually, Gideon texted me to say that he wants to take me to school. He wants to see us before he goes to Europe. He says it’ll probably be a long time before we see him again.”
Not long enough.
“I told him he could. Is that okay?” Maisie asks.
Gloria can only shrug. “What time is he supposed to arrive?”
Maisie doesn’t answer. She’s still hunkered on the floor, staring at one of the sketches.
Slowly, she stands and turns a picture toward Gloria. Gloria’s eye only glances at the page before she meets those bright, blue eyes again.
“Promise me this isn’t going to happen,” Maisie says, her girlish voice tight with anger.
“I drew that months ago. Almost a year. Before I had you.”
“Promise me.” Maisie shakes the picture at her.
Gloria is forced to consider the drawing again, the only drawing she’s ever done where she herself was the subject. She sits at this very table, in this very basement. Only it isn’t drawings that litter the tabletop. It’s her blood and brains. A smoking gun lays on the concrete floor, inches from her open hand.
Gloria thought that would be her ending for a long time. After all, what else was left for her?
Ever since Caldwell walked into their lives eleven years ago, she didn’t think she would survive.
But then her brother died, and she didn’t. Her best friend died, and she didn’t. And so many others were dead—and she wasn’t.
She hunted Caldwell, and he was dead. But so was almost everyone she loved.
After that much hea
rtache, all she wanted was peace.
Maisie kneels down and places one hand on Gloria’s knee. “I know you’re in a lot of pain, and I know you lost a lot of people you love, but I did, too.”
Her lip trembles.
“And I know that all that FBRD stuff has probably got you worried about work or having enough money…”
Gloria recalls the way Maisie looked three months prior, sitting at her little folding card table in her yellow kitchen. They’d ordered pizza, which Maisie had covered in parmesan and red pepper flakes, and they ate mostly in silence while a news program played on the television in the other room.
Following the administration’s order to immediately dismantle the FBRD and permanently terminate all aspects of the death replacement industry, affected providers have been given notice. “Those with pending replacements will be allowed to complete the service they have paid for,” Lieutenant Harris Baldwin told a NWRTV reporter. “But no future screenings will be offered going forward.”
Due to this announcement, major upheaval has been seen in the medical, emergency, and law enforcement fields who were most closely linked to the death replacement industry.
“It will be an adjustment for all of us,” Vice President Franklin Murphy says during the official news conference this week. “But it will be better in the long run. We cannot continue to publicly endorse a system that recruits and emboldens terrorists.”
When asked what the nearly half a million active death replacement agents and thousands of A.M.Ps. were expected to do for work upon the termination of the program, Baldwin says, “They’ll be free to pursue whatever occupation or course of study they desire—just like the rest of us.”
That was the story. Jesse became an unstable terrorist due to the number of deaths that she had endured. Continuing to ask other death replacement agents to inflict damage on their minds was the same as creating and releasing mentally unstable individuals into the general population.
We exploited their abilities, the Massachusetts Governor had said. And here is the retribution.
“Everything’s breaking apart,” Maisie had said to that.
And Gloria had known what she was referring to. The Church also released a statement earlier in the summer, not long after the death of Caldwell and his wife Georgia—Maisie’s parents, Gloria reminded herself—that the North American branch and their three worldwide partners were considering a sharp redistribution of power now that their leader was gone.
“It might be better for all of us if we look ahead, rather than behind, as we forge our future,” a solemn man had said to the camera. He was meant to serve as Caldwell’s replacement, but one look at the squat, balding man had put Gloria’s mind at ease. Those two could not be more different.
Gloria had expected this. Without Caldwell there to control their minds, the Church was free to forge its own path. Gloria always suspected that Caldwell was behind the unification of The Church. He likely used it as a means to further his own power, and without him, it would dissolve.
Financially, Gloria’s life remained uncertain.
She could live on what she’d saved. She would never be rich. But she was far from starving.
“People kill themselves over money all the time, but you don’t have to worry about that. There’s my money,” Maisie says hastily.
Gloria clucks her tongue. “Don’t you dare bring that up again.”
They’d already fought over it twice. The portion of Maisie’s funds which she was able to acquire with Eli’s help was a fortune by any standard. But it was only a fraction of the Caldwell estate.
Just as well. Less of a paper trail should someone come looking.
“I’m just saying, if it’s about the money—”
How did Gloria explain to a child, a seventeen-year-old child, that it wasn’t money or pain or grief or loss that made her consider her own death in that way. It was just about being done. Finished.
She had a job, and she finished it.
“You’re all I’ve got left,” Maisie says. “You and Winnie Pug. So don’t you dare quit on me!”
She considers the girl’s face for a long time. She thinks, I have a new job now. Or perhaps it isn’t even a new job, but a mere extension of her original quest.
Eleven years ago a little girl went missing, and Gloria searched for her. And searched and searched, because all she wanted was to make sure that little girl was safe.
Here she is. She isn’t little anymore. But she is here, and Gloria can do what she can to keep her safe—for as long as she’s is able.
Gloria places one hand on the girl’s head and smiles. She plucks a blade of grass from her cheek. “I won’t quit on you.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.” She sets the Coca-Cola tumbler down on the tabletop.
“I remember you, you know,” Maisie says quietly. “The nice lady who fed me strawberries and let me watch Wheel of Fortune. You have the same afghan. And you smell the same. Like Coca-cola and lemon drops.”
Caldwell had used her affection for the girl only twice. Apparently, his own enemies had gotten too close, or Georgia perhaps was too unstable. But either way, he’d delivered his daughter to her in the dead of night, swaddled in a cotton blanket, clutching a stuffed cow. And Gloria had simply taken her.
“Do you remember?” Maisie asks, those blue eyes searching hers.
“I remember.”
She doesn’t say all that she could. About how she hasn’t ever quit looking for her. Since that day Caldwell—Eric Sullivan—took her from her adoptive parents…she’s never quit looking. That there is a box of sketches, perhaps a hundred deep, under her bed right this instant, in a box marked M. Evidence of all the years she searched and searched for this child. And here she is. All grown up and pretty as a peach as her mother would say.
A new job, indeed.
Maisie kisses the back of Gloria’s hand and sighs. Her knees pop when she stands and wipes her eyes. A weight settles against Gloria’s leg, and she looks down to find a flattened pug face staring up into her own.
She hadn’t been thrilled about the dog, but it was here now. For better or worse.
“What about this one?” Maisie asks, turning another sketch toward her. It was the one left on the tabletop.
The third sketch…
Gloria takes it between two fingers. Her other hand still rests on the polished, wooden grip of her cane, a cane she would likely need for the rest of her life.
“They look happy, don’t they?” Gloria whispers at last, running one finger over their smiling faces.
“Is it heaven?” Maisie asks.
“Heaven? No,” Gloria laughs, a short, bitter sound. “Well…”
Gloria regards the four figures: Brinkley in his James Dean leather jacket. Jesse in jeans and a black sweater, the sleeves pulled down over her hands. Rachel in a gorgeous mauve dress and petticoat that Gloria can still see so vividly when she closes her eyes. And Ally, too—blond hair wild in the ocean breeze.
They sit together on the porch of a house, a gorgeous A-frame with large looming windows.
They drink and laugh.
Gloria hands her the sketch. “I suppose this is as good a heaven as any.”
Maisie stares at the one-story, brick building with a mixture of horror and excitement. Kids with backpacks stream through the double glass doors in twos and threes. Others linger under clusters of maple trees, talking and laughing. Or by the bike rack at the edge of the sidewalk where it meets the circle drive.
“High school,” she whispers in fascination.
“Public high school,” a crisp British voice echoes, but with scorn and remorse.
Gideon leans across the console of his Ferrari 458 and takes her hand.
“You don’t have to go in, you know. I can have us in Paris by dinnertime. There’s more art and learning in that city than you’ll ever achieve in this hovel. Give me three months, and I’ll give you quite the education.”
She
snorts. “Stop flirting.”
She expected this. When he turned up on Gloria’s stoop at 7:15 in the morning with Starbucks and his best grin, offering to take her to her first day of real school, she thought he might try to pull something like this.
She thinks of Gloria’s face, of that horrible picture where she blew out her own brains, and Maisie knows she wouldn’t leave Nashville for all the money in the world. And certainly not something as alluring as a beautiful boy with a nice car.
I love him. But he doesn’t love me.
She forces a grin. It comes out awkward and nervous.
She wants to reach across the console and drag a thumb across his stubble. She wonders if he knows what she’s thinking. There’s mischief sparkling behind those black-rimmed glasses. It’s the glasses that are undoing her, and he seems to know it.
“Can’t you smell le baguette, darling?”
“No. Baguettes can’t compete,” she forces out.
“Baguettes can’t compete?” he scoffs. Throwing himself against the driver’s side door as if to get away from her. “Can’t compete with what?”
“Gym shorts and crappy hot lunch and riding a bus that smells like corn chips. Sorry, macarons and patisseries just aren’t on the same level.”
He laughs at her as if she’s just made the best joke in the world. “Darling, they aren’t in the same league.”
She rolls her eyes.
“And I suppose after this, it’ll be college,” he says, relaxing into the seat. “You’ll be some cute sorority girl who studies something adorable like veterinary medicine.”
“You know me too well.” She’s looking at the building again, at the thinning crowd, and knows she’s running out of time.
The silence grows thick in the car between them. Maisie’s head starts to feel swimmy. She doesn’t know if it’s the rich smell of leather, the cherry-scented air fresher, or her nerves.
Perhaps all three.
Gideon breaks the silence first. “We’re not part of this world.”
He rubs a thumb over her bare knuckles.
“I know,” she says. She doesn’t even argue. “But I’ve got to try anyway.”
How many years did she spend dreaming of this? About going to school and making friends? The kind of kids she’d go to the mall with to browse H&M racks and eat oily pretzels from the food court.
Dying Day Page 25
