I get up before my parents, shower, and get dressed—I laid out clothes last night but change my mind at the last minute and put on Nate’s green flannel shirt. It doesn’t smell like anything anymore but it still feels good, soft from hundreds of days on his body, and it feels like the right thing to wear.
And then I wait, still listening, for Mom and Dad to make their coffee and eat their toast and put on their armor for the day. I hear their cars cough and growl in the driveway, then roll away, cutting through the cold air like knives. I count to one hundred, to make sure they are gone, and that feels good, too. I send Mel a text:
sign me in
Time to go, I tell myself. I say it again, out loud, and my voice bounces against everything in the house, every object throwing the sound back to me as if it’s saying goodbye. I tuck the note for my parents under the bright yellow sugar bowl on the kitchen table, touch it once for luck. Pull my jacket on and my backpack over it, buckle my helmet, unbuckle my helmet and set it down gently on the floor. Climb onto my bike, and go.
The air thrums in my ears as I pedal faster and faster, then slow for the stop sign at the corner, and I’m just about to turn toward the bus station when Mel pulls up next to me in her car.
“Get in,” she says.
“Did you get my text?”
“Yep. No deal.” She reaches down and pulls the lever to open the trunk, then stares at me, waiting.
“Mel, I—”
She slams her hand against the steering wheel, a slap like a gunshot. “Get in.” Then she takes a deep breath and says, “I will do whatever you need, I will cover for you, I will lie and cheat and steal, but before you do whatever it is that you’re about to do, you need to come with me.”
Underneath her promise, there’s a threat.
I lay my bike carefully in the trunk, but it doesn’t entirely fit. The back wheel sticks up into the air and will not submit to my pushing at it.
“Leave it,” Mel hollers. She’s leaning out her window, watching me. “It’ll be fine.”
It’s only a few silent blocks to school. Mel pulls into the parking lot at her usual speed, whirling into her assigned space so quickly that the trunk lid thumps against my unfortunate bicycle. The only good thing about not having been able to close it is that I can take the bike out again without needing to ask Mel to pop the trunk, without saying a single word as I walk it to the rack and lock it up.
“Be right back,” I whisper, even though I don’t know why Mel insisted that I come here or how long it will be until she lets me go. I check my phone while we’re walking to the front door.
I’m supposed to meet Chase at the bus station in half an hour.
All I can hear as we navigate the hallways is the ticking of clocks.
Ms. Pace’s room is empty except for us. There’s a flock of plaster skulls lined up along the shelves, casts of students’ faces painted for Halloween. They will fill the case in the front hall when they’re dry, empty eyes greeting us in the morning and watching as we walk to class, our footsteps echoing in their hollow cavities.
Mel beckons me to the back of the room, where a row of easels stand waiting, covered with drop cloths.
“What are we doing here?” I ask her.
“Okay, okay,” she says. “Keep your pants on.”
She walks behind the easels, gathering the ends of the drop cloths together like a bouquet. “Ready?”
The sound of the cloths sweeping through the air is like a flock of birds lifting into the sky and then I am looking at something both familiar and completely strange.
Each easel holds a square canvas. Each canvas bears a close-up black-and-white image, a section of a photograph. An eye and the curve of a nose. Half of a mouth and chin, a cheekbone and an ear. The pieces are out of sequence, so it takes me a minute to realize what I’m looking at.
Nate.
“Do you like it?” Mel asks quietly.
“What…” My voice is hoarse, the way it was the night of the séance.
“I made them. For you. I took his yearbook picture and blew it up and cut it into a grid, and then I mounted each square onto its own canvas. It was pretty simple, actually.”
My brain is reeling, trying to make sense of what my eyes are seeing. I look at Mel. Is she crazy? Is she messing with me? “Is this a joke?”
The pride on Mel’s face begins to slip into something else. “No. It’s…I saw your father in town a few days ago and he told me about your brother. What you found out. At first I was mad that you didn’t tell me, but then I thought of this project and—”
“This is not a project,” I say. “This is not like your fake band or your farm sculptures or your art installations.”
“N-no, of course, this is d-different,” she stammers. “I did this for you. To help you.”
“Help me what?”
“Face the truth. He’s dead, Tallie.”
“No, I know, but—”
“Your brother is dead.”
“He’s not. I mean, he is, technically. But in another way, he’s not.”
“Do you know how crazy that sounds?”
“Since when have you cared how anything sounds? You love crazy. You collect dead animals and stuff them and dress them up. How is anything I’m doing weirder than what you do?”
“Because,” she hisses, “what I do, I’ve been doing for years. I’ve always been this way. But you…you were so normal before. Even when I first came to see you and it was right after the accident, you were totally normal. And now…”
I ask calmly, “What?”
“You’re…different.”
I smile.
“Of course I’m different,” I say. “What kind of person would I be if my brother died and I stayed exactly the same as I was before?”
“I thought we were friends. So why didn’t you tell me about…” She glances at the pictures, Nate’s face divided. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
I hurt her, I realize. But I can’t linger, there’s no time. So I have to hurt her a little more.
“It’s none of your business,” I tell her. “I have to go.”
I turn to leave, but Mel runs across the room and grabs my arm. Her fingers are like iron. She pulls me until I’m looking at her. I expect her to look angry but she doesn’t. She looks hurt, frantic. “I bet you told Chase, though, didn’t you? I bet he knows all about this.”
“Again,” I tell her, keeping my voice even, “none of your business.”
“Why not?” she asks. “I was the first one to come see you after it happened. I was your only friend all summer and when school started. I took you to the séance and let you in the barn and I told you things about my parents.”
“I know,” I tell her. “And I’m sorry. But I have to do this on my own.”
“Bullshit,” she snaps. Then her tone shifts, becomes a furious creature. “I looked at your phone, y’know. I saw all the texts to Chase, I saw the playlist for Amy. For Amy. She doesn’t even like you anymore, but I love—” She claps her hands over her mouth.
The stairwell. The pictures she took. I thought I was a novelty to her, a fascination. But it was something else. A story she wrote and I misread, and maybe this is one of those chances another Tallie could have taken but that I—at least for now—will waste.
I can’t explain everything now, make her feel better, walk her through how I decided to do what I did, or whether it was even a decision. Retracing the steps of how we got here would be like running backward through an obstacle course. Life isn’t designed for rewinding.
Ms. Pace’s clock gazes down on us. I’m going to be late.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her again, and I am. So I make a small concession.
“I’m going to Boston. I don’t know when I’ll be back. You want to be part of this? Text me if my parents are looking for me. I’m sure my dad will call you first, since he confides in you now.”
“Okay, but…”
I pull my phone out of my pocket
and take a picture of the canvases. Then I hold it up and show it to Mel.
“But if you tell them where I am, I will send this to everyone in school, and your whole wacky-girl-who-doesn’t-care-about-anyone thing will be completely blown. Got it?”
She nods. I don’t feel good about making threats, but I need the insurance.
Nate’s eye watches me leave. I run through the maze of hallways that I know so well, relishing the pace of my feet hitting the floor, the sting in my lungs. My bike is waiting for me on the rack outside, an obedient pet, and I’m sure that if I looked up at Ms. Pace’s window, I would see Mel, but I don’t look up because it’s time to leave. And there’s just enough doubt in my heart that the sight of her might convince me not to.
—
We catch a bus from Molton to Worcester. No one tries to stop us. And it’s the same thing at the train station—even though I feel like there’s a searchlight shooting up into the air from the back of my head, giving me away, no one even notices that we’re there. It’s like we’re cloaked by something invisible.
I talk to Nate inside my head, replaying conversations we had before he died.
Will you go to UCLA if you get in?
Probably.
But it’s so far away.
I’ll pack you in a suitcase and take you with me. You can clean my dorm room and write papers for me.
I pretend he’s along for the ride, to distract myself from all of the questions that I should be asking myself. Doubts slice at my gut like razor-sharp butterflies and I pray, almost, that I will get through the day without another sinkable episode.
It’s nearly noon by the time we get on the train, and my nervous edges are dulled by the steady bumping motion of the seats and the rattling of the windows and the occasional hiss of the heating vents. A kind of fog brushes over everything in front of my eyes. When I look at Chase, slumped and dozing in the seat next to me, it’s like I’m watching a movie of him.
I think about what he said outside the bank, how backward everything has become. He wasn’t looking for me, but he found me. A treasure hunt without intention, an X across both our hearts.
But I don’t have a map for this, and there are so many reasons this will not work. We are running away, we are trying to fulfill an impossible mission, we are completely unprepared, and we might not be anywhere near as smart as we think we are. Doubts are scratching at the door.
I look out the window. The trees are dressed in their bright colors and all of the cars coming into Molton are full of people seeking the beauty of this change, but I can see it better. I see it for what it is: the slow, unstoppable death of innumerable leaves.
Storm clouds are gathering and they darken the landscape, changing the shapes outside into more menacing things. The metal towers that connect the high-tension wires look like giant dressmakers’ dummies. Water towers become alien ships landing among the trees, and the trees themselves blur and merge into one continuous mass. The train holding me and Chase and strangers hurtles past unseen details, toward everything that awaits us. My mind lifts, lightens, hovers. Time is suspended. There is only this, only us, only the crosshatched track on which we ride.
I hear tapping nearby and I close my eyes to hear it better.
“What’s that?” Chase asks. “Morse code?”
Oh my god, I think. He hears it, too. For a moment I am elated, and then I realize that the tapping is my own finger on the metal arm of the train seat.
“You know Morse code?” I ask him, tucking my blabbermouth finger and all the others under my leg.
“A little, just enough to recognize the patterns. Houdini used it to transmit fake messages from the dead to their relatives at his séances.”
“I thought he hated séances. Didn’t he spend years discrediting fake mediums and spiritualists?”
Chase grins. “Someone’s been doing her research.”
I free my fingers and scratch at my neck, which is prickling. “Just a bit of browsing online.” To pass the time while I was waiting for inspiration to strike.
He sits up straighter, eager to share this tiny piece of his own weird history. “It’s true that Houdini wanted to expose the spiritualists who were scamming people, but he actually really wanted to believe that some of them could contact the dead because he wanted to speak to his mother’s spirit. He was just so disappointed over and over again that his hope was—”
“Shattered,” I whisper.
Chase nods. “It ruined his friendship with Arthur Conan Doyle, because Houdini just couldn’t go along with what he was seeing. He knew all the tricks. And then it got worse because other people couldn’t understand Houdini’s tricks, so they started saying he was a spiritualist, that he vaporized himself to escape from things.”
“But he must have still believed, right?” I say. “Because he worked out that message with his wife and told her to contact him after he died.”
“I think he was just desperate. He couldn’t let go. He couldn’t accept that the door between here and there was something that could hold him back.”
“Maybe he’d used up all of his escapes while he was still alive,” I say. Threads of rain are covering the windows now. “Or maybe whatever was over there was better than he thought it would be, so he decided just to stay.”
Maybe Nate is happy where he is. Maybe he imagined this, in his last moments, parts of him being given to other people. Maybe he wasn’t afraid at all. Maybe…
Chase reaches over, pulls my hand away from where it’s scratching at my neck, and gathers it into his own. “Maybe he wanted his wife to move on with her life.”
I will do that, I tell myself. As soon as this work is done, I will go home to the after and figure out what’s next. But a little part of me, behind that thought, says, There is no after. Not for you. You’ve lied, stolen, run away. You’ve already gone too far.
I set my head on Chase’s shoulder, and it dips under the weight of me, but it stays where it is.
When I wake up, it is only the waking up that tells me I slept. I have no recollection of any dreams or evidence of sleep, except for a sore neck and a small wet spot on my shirt where, apparently, I drooled on myself. I dab at it and then notice that Chase is awake, watching me.
“Morning, sunshine,” he says, even though it is early afternoon, only three hours since we left Molton. “We’re here.”
We shuffle off the train with everyone else and make our way down the long platform to the station. The lights seem to flicker and brighten as we pass underneath them, and inside the station, it’s like the sun itself is burning. Impossibly high ceilings, webbed with angled ironwork, pull our voices upward when we enter, and the smooth stone walls remind me of the columbarium. I have to touch one then. I stride across the room and Chase follows.
“Hold up!” he calls behind me.
The wall is cool when I press my hand to it, and I can’t resist putting my forehead against it, too. Chase looks worried. “Are you okay?”
Of course not, I say in my head. But it’s amazing how easy that question has become to answer with a simple lie. “Fine,” I tell him. And before he can ask me anything else, my phone pings. I thought I’d turned it off. My confusion is causing mistakes. I need to be more careful, or just go ahead and throw the phone in a trash can somewhere. But that will have to wait until Chase isn’t looking—he’s my ally, but he’s also made himself my keeper.
The phone’s been keeping its own secret. A text from Jennifer:
hi sarah. let me know when you get to town
Seeing my mother’s name there—I drag my eyes up the walls, climb with them to the ceiling, breathe and breathe.
“Everything copacetic?” Chase asks.
“Not now,” I snap.
“What?”
“Can you just— I have to think for a minute.”
He snorts. “Look, you wanted me to come along for this—”
“No!” I yell. “I didn’t! You told me that you were coming alo
ng for this. And really, this has nothing to do with you. So maybe you should get right back on the train and go home.”
“And let you wander around the city like this? I don’t think so.”
My hands are slick with sweat now, and I’m shaking so hard that I have to clutch my phone to keep it from falling on the floor. “I am not a damsel in distress, okay? So whatever weirdo reason you have for following me here—”
“Is everything all right, miss?”
A police officer has appeared next to us. His badge and his shoes and the handle of his gun are so shiny, reflecting the light like lasers in my eyes, that I have to look away. But this, of course, makes me look even more suspicious. I pull my sunglasses out of my backpack and slip them on.
“Everything is fine, Officer,” Chase tells him. “We were just rehearsing for a play. Was it convincing, do you think? Did we sound genuinely angry with each other?”
The man looks at me. “Is that true, miss? You were rehearsing?”
I cannot think straight because the paths in my brain are all full of sand. But I can imagine what Mel would say. “Well, life is a kind of rehearsal, isn’t it? Is anything really real?”
The police officer slaps his hand to his nightstick and says, “Keep it down over here.” As he walks away, I hear him mutter, “Goddamn kids.”
I hope he doesn’t have any of Nate’s parts.
The thought makes me look around the station, wondering. All of these people. What are they made of?
“Tallie,” Chase whispers. “I’m sorry. But I’m worried about you. You’re panicking or something. You need to calm down.”
I bat my eyes at him from behind my sunglasses. “You sure know how to sweet-talk a girl.” Then I hold up my phone. “I have to send a message to this woman.”
“Who is she?”
“I don’t know. Jennifer something. I think she has Nate’s—I think she has some information for me.”
“What about Nate?”
“Hmm?”
“You said ‘she has Nate’s.’ Has his what?”
“His doctor. The one who—worked on him. She might be able to introduce me.”
Some of the Parts Page 20
