by Jamie Craig
“It’s beautiful.”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it? The other coin is just as beautiful.”
“Who made them?”
“I don’t know. I’d sure like to find out, though. Okay, as soon as I touch this coin, it’s going to make me pass out. Don’t panic or try to wake me. When the vision is done, I should wake up on my own. If I don’t, or I can’t, call Nathan in. He’s seen this before.”
Ruth nodded her understanding. Her wide brown eyes were the last things Olivia saw before her fingers closed around the glowing silver.
Isaac’s familiar smile, the achingly beautiful cut of his jaw and the liquid heat of his eyes, the long, graceful fingers that could make me scream and whimper in turns. Talking, telling a story I don’t recognize, laughing. The smile should be for me. Who else would make Isaac seem so relaxed, so at ease, so young? Young. He’s younger. There are fewer lines on his face and he doesn’t have the tension in his jaw or the few extra pounds on his surprisingly lanky frame. Don’t want to look away. I don’t want to do anything but watch him, and I reach out. But there’s nothing to touch, the details blurring in the fading light. The smile’s not meant for me, and neither is his laughter. I’m hearing a private conversation. A conversation between him and Remy. Jealousy leaves a bitter taste on my tongue. I want Isaac to look at me like that. I want him to laugh and tell me a story I’ve never heard before.
I force myself to look away from Isaac, taking in the various details of his room. Remy’s talking, and I concentrate on turning. My neck? My eyes? My entire body? Not sure. I turn, I spin around, I search for her, ignoring Isaac despite every instinct to find him again. I force the direction of my vision, and there’s a sort of separation, as though something thick and muddy clings to my skin, pulling me back every time I take a half step forward. I lunge. It yanks. I heave. It thickens. My bones trying to escape from the prison of flesh and blood. I’m part of Remy. Three heartbeats. Who has the third? Why is it surrounding me? Echoing brightly and brighter. Seeing what she’s seeing, but I’m myself too. I move. I exist without her, see her, see all if I break the invisible bonds holding me.
My muscles ache, like the strain of escape is too much. No, deeper than my muscles. The damage could very well be physical, I don’t care. I fight, force my limbs to move through the resistance. I cry out, the sound escaping my voice, her voice, into my ears, out of my head, through the slow sludge of time, always moving in one direction. The strength of it disrupts something, and the tension snaps away. Floating. Above Remy. Away from Isaac. Higher than I need to be.
A full view of the room below, and I consume every detail of the apartment. Not in bits and pieces. Not one at a time with the clarity of a fever dream. I see it like a crime scene, compartmentalizing everything to what matters and what doesn’t. The coin throbs like a burn against my palm, pulsing with every beat of my heart, the silver working into my skin, pressing deeper and deeper. I welcome it. I invite it to sink deeper, to brand me if it must, to leave its mark on my being.
Stacy.
Stacy, Stacy, Stacy. I chant her name, finding my way back through the ribbons of darkness winding themselves together like vines, like green snakes on the temple walls, like starlight through the endless void. I turn myself toward her, or where I think she must be, or what I believe could only be her. I dive for her, reach, pull her as I reconstruct the details of her life. Pushing my mind forward and backward, pushing my instincts out.
I expand. Into all times. There’s a Los Angeles for every second and I can pinpoint any location, any tick of the clock, mark of the calendar. Any regret, second chance, dream, hope. I could be greater than myself and larger than Gabriel and beyond conception. Beyond Isaac and Remy and Nathan’s echoing rage. His frustration that’s my frustration, his confusion.
Nathan misses her, but he can feel her if he tries. He can feel her and it hurts him like the coin. He can feel her but he doesn’t know her, doesn’t know if these are dreams or visions or hopeless, cruel fantasies. It’s nothing. It’s all of those things. I see his tears. They’re all silver lines.
“Help her. Help her, dear God. Help her please.”
“It’s fine. She’s fine.”
“She’s not breathing. She started to cry and I tried to wake her up. I’ll call nine-one-one.”
“Wait. Look, her eyes are opening.”
“Nathan?” Olivia whispered.
“Yes, I’m here. Do you know what happened?”
Olivia shook her head. “I didn’t see her. I tried. I was looking for her. What happened?”
“I’m not sure. There was a crash and then Mrs. Montenegro started screaming for me. Are you feeling okay? Can you sit up?”
Olivia nodded, allowing Nathan to pull her upright. She wasn’t a woman prone to crying, but tears scalded her face and there was a deep, uneasy pain in her chest. It reminded her of the guilt she used to feel when she “forgot” her homework or “forgot” to do her chores because she wanted to focus on soccer practice.
“What happened? Can you talk about it?”
“I…I don’t know. Oh, my hand!”
Nathan took her by the wrist and turned her hand palm up. She tried to relax her fingers, but she couldn’t ease her grip on the coin, so he did it for her, gently straightening each finger. Once the coin was exposed, she saw that her skin was entirely unblemished. Despite the pain still radiating up her arm, there wasn’t a hint of a burn on her flesh.
“I felt it. I don’t know what happened. I thought…I thought I felt it…”
“It was a dream.”
Olivia shook her head. “That wasn’t a dream. I saw them, Nathan. I saw Remy and Isaac.”
“You saw them? Together?”
“Talking. They were talking about something. I don’t know where, but I saw them.”
“Then at least we know she’s still all right.”
“We already knew that.”
“Now we’re sure.”
“Nathan…can you feel her at all? Can you sense her? Like…like there’s a connection?
Nathan’s brows came together, and she saw she hit a nerve. There was a flash of pain in his blue eyes, and a slight tremble in his bottom lip.
“I don’t know why I said that. I thought I saw…I thought I felt a connection.”
He blinked, returning to normal, and Olivia understood how she could be fooled into thinking he was still sober. How had he learned to be such a good actor? How many times had he used that ability against Isaac? Against Remy? Or was Olivia the only one he felt comfortable lying to?
“Did you see Stacy?”
“No. I tried. I sensed her. I sensed everybody. But I woke up too soon. I didn’t get a chance to do what I wanted to do.”
“I think I should take you home.”
“No,” Olivia protested. “I want to try again.”
Nathan shook his head. “I agreed to help you and go along with this, but I’m not going to stand by while you hurt yourself.”
“I’m not hurting myself. I’m perfectly fine. I need to get used to—”
“Olivia. If you do need to get used to something, you should do it gradually.”
“No. It’s like swimming in a cold lake. You need to dive in and get it over with.”
“That may be, but if you dived into this lake and anything happened to you, Isaac would kill me. Quite literally.”
“He’d never hurt you.” Olivia licked her lips. “He loves you.”
“She can stay here if she needs to rest,” Ruth cut in. “We have plenty of room. An extra bed if you need it.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Montenegro,” Nathan said, rising and hooking his arm around Olivia’s shoulders. He didn’t do anything as foolhardy as try to pick her up, but she did lean on him heavily as she rose to her feet. Her legs felt like jelly, and her spine didn’t seem interested in remaining straight. She swayed heavily, the world moving with her in a most unreasonable way. “But I think it’s best to get her back to her own ho
me.”
Olivia would have rather stayed, but she didn’t protest. She didn’t think she needed to be near to Stacy to make this work. Having a control in this experiment was a good idea, but ultimately unnecessary. What did it matter if she was in the next room or forty miles away? She could be four hundred miles away. Once she understood the Silver Maiden’s secret, whatever it was, there would be no obstacles. She half-limped back to her car, leaning heavily on Nathan. Judging from the concerned looks he kept giving her, he probably thought she was staggering toward her final breath. Physically, she had been weakened by the experience, but that didn’t matter. There was more than just her physical body, more than the unfortunate side effect of her exhaustion. But she couldn’t explain any of it to him. She didn’t have the vocabulary to truly convey what she’d seen, what she’d experienced. What she now knew to be true, and how that might differ from fact and the laws normally governing the universe.
“You know, you kind of look like you had a really good drug trip.”
Olivia laughed lightly. Even her laughter seemed different. Like she could taste it now. “I wouldn’t know.”
“You never experimented in college?”
“No. I got my highs from organized sports. Did I miss out?”
“What do you think?”
“No drug feels like this.” Olivia sounded a little loopy. “It’s weird.”
“What is?”
“Everything. I was fighting something. I don’t know what. But I broke free and I still feel like I’m free. Like there was a rock tied to my ankle, and it’s gone now.”
“I see.”
He didn’t. But that was okay. Nathan didn’t need to understand. No, Isaac was the one she needed to explain this to. She didn’t even know where to begin or how to start. Remy didn’t seem so far away now. She still didn’t understand how to find the other woman physically, but she didn’t seem so far away. None of them felt that far away. Ten years was nothing in the grand scope of all of creation and all of time.
“I need to see the other coin.”
Nathan looked at her with a skeptical lift of his brow. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. It’s not my coin. Not like this one. I know that now. But I still need to see it.”
“What about what you saw? With Isaac and Remy? What were they doing? What were they saying?”
Olivia could summon the full conversation from her memory like she’d been an active participant. Every breath and laugh, because she’d been with Remy, joined with her, inside her somehow. But it wasn’t her place to recount it.
“Ask him. He’ll remember.”
“It was ten years ago.”
“He’ll remember,” Olivia repeated, turning her attention to the window. “He’ll remember because he was happy. You always remember the good times, don’t you?”
Nathan didn’t answer. That was all the response she needed.
Chapter Eleven
The booze splashed the sides of the sink before swirling down the drain, spinning in infinite gyres until disappearing from sight. Nathan flicked the faucet on, washing away the last damning drops of vodka, clutching the empty bottle against his chest like a prize. It would eventually join his growing collection of empties, but for the moment, he wanted to enjoy the smell of the vapor escaping through the narrow neck. This was becoming something of a tradition, and if the looks Olivia had been giving him that afternoon meant anything, something of a problem. If she realized the bottle in his apartment was really multiple bottles and not the same lonely one he bought before Christmas, then she probably thought the worst of him.
Nathan released the bottle, dropping it into the bin like it might come alive and bite him. He could have told Olivia the truth. He could have stopped buying alcohol every single time he left the house. He had a self-destructive streak and he never tried to deny it, but this threatened to go beyond mild self-destruction and into actual self-harm. How long would it take before Nathan gave up and tipped the bottle down his throat instead of the sink? One month without signs of Remy? Two months? A year? A relapse seemed imminent enough without constantly setting himself up for failure.
Olivia had been right about longing for the known security of crawling back into a bottle. It would cushion him, lift the weight from his weary bones, and silence the howling darkness inside of him. He wanted to be strong for Remy, to stay sober for her sake and safety. But every second of every hour brought the reminder that he couldn’t help. He scoured the Internet for information about the Silver Maiden, contacted everybody he could think of, including Cora, for further hints or details. He prayed. He even started digging deeper into Gabriel’s background, not searching for anything specifically related to the coins, but something to use as leverage, but he never found anything he didn’t already know. He helped Olivia when she asked for it. But it all amounted to the same wretched nothingness. The items Remy had left behind at least reassured him she hadn’t been some sort of hallucination, but they didn’t free Nathan from his limbo.
At the end of the day, all he had was faith that Olivia had seen what she claimed she saw, and hadn’t been mistaken, exaggerating, or lying. He didn’t think she would do that, but he didn’t know her, did he? He trusted her because Isaac trusted her and because he did believe in the coins—he’d be foolish not to at this point—but trust and faith wasn’t science. It wasn’t evidence. The people who shelled hundreds or thousands of dollars to so-called psychics relied on the same feelings of trust and faith to justify their willingness to hemorrhage money to hear one final message from dead parents, spouses, and children.
What if he tried to use the coin? Granted, the last time he touched it, it had burned him. But that meant there was some sort of connection, some sort of reaction, which was more promising than if nothing at all happened. What if he clutched the coin like a miser and wished himself to be with Remy? Would it work? Could it be easy as that? The thought of handling it, of reaching for that ancient, inscrutable power, frightened him. He’d never questioned his own courage, as his job regularly entailed things that normal people would find terrifying, but watching Olivia calmly submit to these strange forces demonstrated he didn’t even know what courage was.
There was one way to remove an element of faith and replace it with a sliver of certainty. He knew it before Olivia said anything, but now he couldn’t ignore the suggestion. Eyewitness testimony was rarely reliable. Not because people lied, but because memories were malleable, subject to change in response to any number of stimuli. The older the memory, the more unreliable it became. It was natural to forget some details, enhance others, and even change the order or scope of events to bring what actually happened in line with what one wished had happened. In a way, Isaac’s memories were as unreliable as Olivia’s visions. But if he were trying to solve an old case and he learned of a potential eyewitness, he wouldn’t ignore the lead because memories were fickle, unreliable things. He’d at least conduct an interview.
Though the hour was late, he knew where he’d find Isaac. He drove slowly to the station, ignoring the little voice whispering at the back of his thoughts to turn the car around and retreat to the dark sanctuary of his apartment. The streets were busy for the middle of the night, and the parking lot half-full. He caught himself automatically scanning for Isaac’s car before remembering it, too, was gone. He had no idea what Isaac was driving these days. The realization that their lives were diverging more than they ever had before struck him as he walked through the front door.
More than one person waved hello to him as he passed. Nathan put on the act, nodding in return, occasionally offering a greeting, but his goal preoccupied him, comfortingly so. Or at least, until he saw Isaac standing next to someone’s desk waving an evidence bag in their face.
He looked worse than he had at Christmas. His jacket was gone, his shirtsleeves rolled up to expose his tense forearms. His tie was loosened, too, more evidence of a long and exhausting day spent in the company of files and g
runt work. Any time he had to face someone—a witness, a victim, a suspect—he always made sure to pull his attire together. He argued it made their jobs easier if other saw them as purely professional.
As Nathan approached, Isaac glanced up, taking a breath in his tirade. His eyes locked on Nathan, and he straightened, tossing the evidence onto the desk. “Fix it,” he barked at the other cop and took a few steps to meet Nathan halfway. “Did something happen? Are you all right?”
Of course he wasn’t all right. “Nothing has happened recently. Am I interrupting something important?”
“No, just the usual idiocy around here. Remember the bug in my phone? IA says they have a person of interest, but they won’t fucking tell me who. Or anything at all.” He paused, uncertainty etched in the lines of his face. The silence was awkward. “What can I do for you?”
“I need…I need to know what you remember about her.”
Isaac’s eyes widened. “Sure, of course.” He glanced around Nathan’s shoulder, then gestured for him to follow. “Lets find an empty interrogation room. That way we’ll get some privacy.”
Nathan trailed after Isaac into a room that was like everything else in the station—achingly familiar and intolerably strange all at once. He didn’t belong there, hadn’t belonged there in years, but it was still so easy to pretend he did.
“I don’t remember her,” Nathan said. “I feel like I met her, but I can’t even say that happened for sure.”
“You did. You interrupted us the one time I got her to come back to the house. You came home early from your parents’ house, remember?”
