Hey all. Going to my first RRS in Dallas and planning to buy and sit on the Oklahoma side (a little cheaper as a neutral). anything I should know about before or after the game? Does your ticket get you into the state fair or is that a separate ticket?
Should specify, going with some buddies (no wives involved) and we are flying in early Friday and staying in lower Greenville
I tightened my mask as I ducked between two rows of trees. The strip mall was desolate, my gray Sonata an island in a sea of empty parking spaces. Ms Nguyen’s Nail Salon and Spa was empty, with two or three small women with their heads buried in their phones sitting criss-cross on their pedicure chairs.
I attempted to lower my voice as I walked into the shop. “I’m looking for Mrs. Marlee,” my voice came out more raspy than intended. The front desk clerk didn’t look up from her phone.
“Mrs. Marlee out back, go round shop,” she replied, the shop music switching to another traditional Vietnamese song. I nodded, quickly rushing back outside and going to the back of the store.
The dumpster stunk with a door sandwiched in between it and a large power box. I knocked twice, Marlee not allowing a third as she swung the door open with a smile. “Amy, it's good to see you.” She pressed her body against mine, the warmth of her smile radiating throughout her hug. “Able to find it ok?” I nodded, head buried in her shoulder.
“It’s good to see you, Marlee,” Her hand found my shoulder as she guided me in. The room was quaint, a small area rug with two chairs sitting opposite one another, and a water machine flanking the right of the door. I placed my purse on the floor and sat in the chair. Marlee sat across from me as she collected a pen and a notebook placed on the floor to the chair’s right.
"Amy, how are you feeling today?" I tried to smile. I really did. My act flashed across my face before faltering. I swallowed, tears welling up in my eyes.
"I watched him eat breakfast this morning," I said. Marlee didn't respond, just held her pen loosely and waited. "He holds his fork the same way Eli did. Like a, uh, like a shovel almost, fist wrapped around the handle." I demonstrated with my hand, squeezing an invisible fork, my sniffles peppering my retelling. "Richard thinks it's charming. He laughed and said boys will be boys."
Marlee wrote something down. “How did that make you feel?” I looked down.
"I left the table."
"Where did you go?"
"The guest house." I pressed my thumbnail into my palm. "I told Richard I had calls to make."
"Did you?"
"No."
“Did you say anything to him?” My eyes found the floor again. The rug was ornate, garland and gold patterns.
“I don’t take to him,” I snarled, even catching myself off guard with my disdain.
She nodded slowly. Outside, I could hear the faint pulse of the nail salon's music bleeding through the wall, tinny and distant.
"Amy, we've talked about the guest house being a place of comfort for you. But I want to make sure it isn't becoming.."
"WHAT? A crutch? A place I hide?" I laughed, and it came out ugly and mean. "Sorry," Marlee’s eyes seemed to beckon me from the edge. “The alternative is the main house, and the main house is where they all are.”
She didn't write that down. I appreciated that she didn't write that down.
"Have you been journaling?"
I reached into my purse and produced the notebook she'd given me three sessions ago. Cream colored, spiral-bound, with a small watercolor iris on the cover because she'd asked me what my favorite flower was and I'd said iris without thinking, and then cried because Eli used to pick them from the garden and leave them in a juice glass on my nightstand when he was little back at the old house.
"I wrote two letters," I said.
"Can you read one for me?"
I opened to the first page. My handwriting was uncharacteristically small, cramped like I'd been trying to hide it even from the paper.
"Dear Richard,
I can’t look at you. I've been trying to trace it back, find the exact moment, the way you find a crack in a wall and follow it up to the ceiling to find where the water got in. I think it was the morning you came home with the paperwork. Eli had been gone four months. Four months, Richard. You walked in with a folder from some agency I'd never heard of, set it on the kitchen island, and smiled at me like you were presenting a solution.
I know you are grieving. I know that. I hold that knowledge in my hands every day like something hot I can't put down and can't keep holding. But a stranger is sleeping in our house, in a bedroom down the hall from our son's bedroom.
Sometimes I dream of that phone call. That it’ll be you instead. I wake up, my pillow wet from tears, happy or sad, it’s all the same. But that’s not fair, I know you wish it was you too. I wish it were me. I wish it were both of us.
We can’t change that, and I hate you.
The room was very quiet. I closed the notebook.
"You said you wrote two," Marlee said carefully.
"The second one is to the stranger." I didn't offer it.
“Do you mind reading it?” I looked down at the crumpled-up paper still in my purse. I had written it the night before, wrapped in Eli’s old blanket in the guest house, the dried tears still omnipresent. My head found my hands as I dropped Richard’s letter, a fresh wave of tears forming new ponds of sadness on the page.
"How did it feel? Writing the letter to Richard?"
"A little better afterward. Not much."
Marlee smiled. It was a sad smile. She then got out of her seat, gliding over to my chair, and took my hand. “Amy. Are you still against a form of separation? That environment sounds…” Marlee paused, searching for a word, “unhealthy.”
"There's a photo opportunity next weekend," I said. Batting away her couples counseling. "Richard's communications team has arranged something at the Creamery on Fifth," I said it the way I said most things about my life now, flatly. "Myself. And the boy."
"How are you feeling about that?"
I looked at my hands.
"His name is Noah," I said, and I don't know why I said it, whether it was to remind Marlee or to remind myself that I was capable of saying it. "Noah is eight years old, and he likes dinosaurs, and he has never done anything wrong." I pressed my thumbnail into my palm again, harder. "And I don't want to stand next to him in front of a camera and smile. I don't want to be in the same room as him."
"But you will."
"But I will." I looked up. "Because that is what I do, Marlee. I perform."
She wrote something down.
“Before we close, have you had any more incidents, Amy?” I felt my lip curl and my blood run hot. I got up in defiance, but composed myself enough.
“It’s not the same, I don’t know how it is, but even visiting him, it’s different. It’s felt that way for the last month.” Security and Management at Paradise Forever had been instructed to forget about my overnight sleepover. A governor’s wife breaking into a cemetery and sleeping next to her son’s grave was not a story we would let see the light of day.
“Since Noah came?”
“Since he came.”
******
Richard's communications director was a man named Brett who wore quarter-zip pullovers regardless of the season. He talked with his hands.
The Creamery on Fifth was twenty minutes from the house. Richard’s security sat in the passenger seat. Richard and I sat in the second row. Noah sat in the row behind us with Brett. Brett wanted him in our row. I turned slightly toward the back, where Noah sat with his tablet, earbuds in, legs dangling.
I could still hear it.
Not the audio itself, the earbuds handled that, but the percussion of it. The frantic tapping of small fingers against the screen. The tiny bleed of sound effects that escaped the seal of cheap foam, or at least it bled into my head. Some game with bleeps and small victories, a sound like coins collecting. That specific rhythm. Urgent and then waiting and then urgent again. Eli used to play in the back of the Highlander, before we moved, before everything, his knee bouncing against the seat. Oh, how it used to annoy me. Four-year-olds rarely change their activity with a stern talking to. How I missed those kicks.
Richard said something about parking. I nodded.
Brett and his tablet led the way, pausing halfway and forming a huddle. He walked us through it quickly: reporters from the Gazette and the Ledger, a photographer from the Governor's office, some regular patrons who'd been encouraged to be present and had agreed to sign releases. A warm, organic moment. Exactly the kind of event the communications team had been steering toward since the adoption finalized.
"Thirty minutes, maybe forty," Brett said. "Ice cream, a few candids, some questions. We've got a prepared statement ready for you, Amy, so you won't need to field anything directly."
I nodded. The sun was bright, and I was wearing the right shade of lipstick, and my hair was done, and I was a governor's wife, and I knew how to stand correctly.
"One thing," Brett said, glancing briefly toward Noah, who was still absorbed in his tablet. He lowered his voice not quite enough. "The team thinks it would read really naturally if he called you-"
"No." Richard put his hand on my arm. I corrected myself. "I just don’t think I can," I said.
Brett smiled the way men like Brett smile when they decide to wait you out. "It would really land. A unified family presentation, especially after the Hendricks piece last month-"
"Mom is fine," Richard said, looking at me. His eyes did the thing they did now, the careful thing, the thing that used to be tenderness and had become management. "If it happens naturally, Amy."
I looked at the Creamery's hand-painted sign. I had taken Eli here forty, maybe fifty times. He always got the black raspberry with rainbow sprinkles, and the sprinkles had to go on top because he didn't like them mixed in, and Gerry knew that without being asked after the third or fourth visit.
"Fine," I said.
"Mom, it is," Brett said, already typing something.
We walked in.
The bell above the door was the same. The floor was the same black and white tile. The photographs on the wall were the same photographs, old Main Street, county fair ribbons, and a signed picture of some sit-com from the 90s I couldn’t quite place.
Gerry was behind the counter in his apron, and he looked up, and his face did what I feared it would do, which was go soft at the corners before he could stop it.
"Amy." He reached across the glass case and took both my hands. He was sixty-three or sixty-four, had owned this place since before Richard was in politics. Eli liked him, and he liked Eli, but then again, so did everyone. "It's good to see you in here."
"It's good to be here, Gerry." And some small part of me meant it, standing in this room, which still smelled of waffle cone and cold cream, which had not changed, and wasn’t trying to change.
The reporters were near the windows. The photographer adjusted something on his camera. Richard had drifted naturally toward a family seated at one of the small tables, doing what Richard did, which was to exist comfortably in public.
I looked down at Noah.
He had put the tablet away. He was studying the cases with the particular intensity of a child who takes ice cream seriously, hands clasped behind his back, leaning forward on the balls of his feet.
He looked so small, so innocent. I didn’t love him, wouldn’t even go as far as to say I liked him. I didn’t dislike him; I wouldn’t say I hated him, or at least I wouldn’t admit to myself if I did.
"Do you know what you want?" I asked.
He looked up and smiled, his blonde curls parted in the middle. A toothy grin, missing a few from a recent visit from the tooth fairy. He pointed. "That one." Black Raspberry. Rainbow sprinkles on top. He made sure Gerry knew.
The air went out of the room, just briefly, just for me. I tried to bury my thoughts in a cone of pistachio with caramel drizzle as Noah went up to take his two scoops from the counter. If his hair were brown, I could have tricked myself into thinking Eli had his back turned to me. Alas, it was blonde, and my mind was in no mood to play any optical tricks.
I had turned toward the reporters, the prepared statement organized in my mind in the way I organized these things, a clean structure, an opening acknowledgment, two sentences about community, and a close. The photographer raised his camera.
"Amy, can you speak to the adoption and how Noah has-"
"Mom." A whisper.
I continued turning. "The Governor and I have always believed in-"
"Mom!"
I turned.
Noah was standing very still near the counter, one hand pressed flat against the glass of the ice cream case. His face had gone a color I did not like.
"Mom," he said again, and looked directly at me with an expression I could not catalog, not fear exactly, something more confused than fear. "Mr. Gerry." He turned toward the counter, his right eyebrow seeming to twitch faintly. "I don't… I don't like the noise."
The Creamery was not loud. The music was low, the conversation ambient, the refrigeration units humming their constant hum.
"What noise, buddy?" Richard was already moving toward him, flashing a smile for reporters as he knelt next to Noah.
Noah pressed both hands to the sides of his head, crushing his ice cream cone against his sandy hair. "It's too-" he stopped. "I feel too tall." The waffle crown crumbles fell harmlessly to the floor as the purple and black stain started dripping from his temple. "Everything's dizzy. Mr. Gerry, I feel too tall."
Gerry leaned over the counter. "Hey, pal…"
Then his knees went, and he sat down hard on the tile, legs splayed, hands holding himself up as if he was lounging on the beach, but his face was anything but relaxed. He looked up with bewilderment at Mr. Gerry.
The laugh came out of him, loud and wrong. It filled the room in a way that had nothing to do with joy. His face contorted around it: mouth stretched too wide, eyes pressed shut. Pure terror. Pure pain. His left hand went to his stomach. His right came up toward his mouth as though trying to contain it or stop it or push it back in. Neither hand succeeded. He kept laughing. The laugh kept coming. It was the most frightened sound I had ever heard.
I was already there. I don't know exactly when I moved, but I was beside him with my hand on his back, and he was warm, too warm, and he leaned into me, his purple mess making a dress of my navy blue blouse, but sons can be messy. I scooped him into my arms.
"We're going outside," I said to no one and everyone. "Richard."
The bell rang again as we went through the door, and behind me I heard Brett say something about rescheduling, and the photographer lowering his camera, and the reporters beginning to murmur, and the refrigeration units, still humming, indifferent.
Outside, the sunlight was sharp, and Noah squinted against it and kept his hands pressed over his ears, his laugh growing fainter. We hurried him back to the car, and I cried out for a hospital.
“It’s ok, it’s going to be okay. Mommy’s here for you, Eli.”
******
His little body went limp as we turned out of the parking lot. Whatever had been behind his blue eyes two minutes ago, that reaching, frightened thing, faded slowly. He fell silent, and the rush that had made me move without thinking, that had put me in the parking lot holding him before I'd decided to, drained back out of me as quickly as it had come. I looked down at Noah the same way I looked down at a book I had tried to convince myself I would read to grow my worldview when we both knew I would rather get lost in another romance novel.
By the first light, I had shifted him carefully off my lap onto the middle seat, into the space my purse had occupied on the way over. His legs still dangled in my lap, his matted hair, sticky with raspberry, rested on the leather. I straightened up and looked around the car, terrified of the judgmental glare of Richard, Brett, and the others.
Richard was lost in conversation on the phone, body facing towards the window, voice so low it was clear he desired a private venue. The security guard swiveled his neck back and forth. He and the driver had stayed in the car, only snapping back into action with the terrible laughing. Brett was looking directly at me. The little hair he had left was doing something unfortunate in the air conditioning. His fingers were going in front of my face, snapping or gesturing or both.
“Is he ok?!”
“Who?” The question was innocuous enough, but was met with a scowl from Brett.
“Noah!” I looked down at the boy. His mouth was slightly ajar, and a little piece of chocolate had seemed to wedge itself into one of his open gums. I reached for his forehead, placing the back of my hand. Warm. But not out of the ordinary.
“He’s fine.”
“Go back to the mansion,” Richard yelled from the back. I looked back with confusion. We were less than 2 miles from the children’s hospital. “We’ll be there soon,” Richard said into his phone before setting it down. Our eyes settled on one another for the first time in what seemed like weeks. I wanted to protest. Tell the driver that we need to take the boy to the hospital. Yell at everyone that what just happened wasn’t normal.
But I didn’t.
Maybe it was Richard. Maybe it was still my shock, or worse, my indifference to the situation.
Whatever it was, I was silent.
As we pulled in, a white blank van sat idling on the side of the house.
Richard came to my seat, gave two small pats on my hand, and gathered Noah against his chest. Noah's head lolled against Richard's shoulder, eyes closed, mouth still slightly open. “The doctor is here if you want to come.”
I froze. I lingered in the car and was a few paces behind Richard as he carried Noah’s seemingly lifeless body through the hallway. Noah's legs hung, head bobbing gently with each step. I took a right instead, escaping to the guest house, wrapping myself in his blanket, tucking Eli’s first teddy bear in my arms, and there was nothing left to do but cry.
******
“Amy, we have to talk.” Richard’s voice shattered the silence around me. My head shot up, the left side of my mouth still wet with my drool.
“I dreamed about it again,” my stare did its best to evade him. “Richard, I should have, if only-”
Richard’s arms were around me, cradling me like a child. “There’s not a minute that goes by that I don’t think about him.” A sob escaped my trembling lips as I wrapped myself tighter around Richard, my nails pressing themselves into his pinstriped shirt.
“Then why..” my voice trailed off. If he really cared, why would he have brought the stranger into our home, into Eli’s home? My grip loosened as I tried to make space between Richard and me. I pushed him off me and rose to my feet, Richard staring up at me from the bed he sat on. “Then why did you bring him here?” My voice was quiet. “Are you-, are you trying to replace him?” My words were harsh, and I expected Richard to look back at me with the hatred I had for him, but his face was more sincere. More forgiving.
He rose gently, taking my hands, daring me to look up at him.
"Honey," he said, smiling. "Eli can replace Noah." I dropped his hands and took a hesitant step back.
“Wha-”
“I know you felt it today, at the Creamery.” Richard took a step forward, closing the gap between us. “Amy, that was no accident. Eli was back, a whisper of him, but it was him.”
I wanted to hit him. Comparing our angel to the stranger.
“I hate you. If I could, I’d leave.”
He looked down at the floor, his perfectly manicured hair falling out of its shape. “We can have him back; he was back today, but we can make it permanent.”
“What are you talking about?” My voice shivered with hesitation.
“The van, the doctor, Dr. Weiss, Eli can live within Noah.” He looked at me with care. I looked for some sort of tell. Had he lost all sense? Was this some elaborate scheme? Had he finally fallen into some irreversible grief that was metastasizing itself into something unholy? “We’ve been trying to spark it for a few weeks, but it was you, the Creamery, the ice cream, that finally broke the barrier.”
“Spark it.” The words repeated back felt wrong in my mouth.
“This doctor, Dr. Weiss, believes that we can transfer Eli, or at least his consciousness, into Noah. It’d be like he never left us.” Richard said with a grin. His eyes seemed to search for the same enthusiasm.
“That’s, that’s impossible.”
“Amy, the Creamery. He was already here.”
He was. No matter how many rules of reality it broke, I knew it the way you know the floor is there in the dark. That boy was Eli today.
“Where is he?” Eli’s old blanket that had wrapped itself around my shoulders suddenly made its presence known against my skin.
“Dr. Weiss has him. He’s Noah again, well, he’s asleep, but it’s Noah sleeping.”
Noah.
“Why Noah?”
Richard’s eyes found his shoes again. “Noah was compatible. I looked for alternatives, I even tried to see if Eli could replace me,” a bitter, almost-laugh. “But options were limited.”
“What happens to Noah?”
“Honey,” Richard forced another disarming smile. “We can have Eli back, we can be back to our old family and the last months….we can just restart.”
“Does he have to share the body with Noah?” I searched for a crack in the happy facade and found instead the whole dam giving way. His right hand went to his forehead, kneading at it, and he paused a long time before he answered.
“Noah was in an orphanage; both his parents overdosed a few years back. They were ready to ship him off to a foster home. He had no future, or at least not a future worth living.”
“What are you gonna do to Noah?” My lower lip trembled as I took another awkward step back.
His step was more aggressive. He grabbed my two trembling hands, the first tears in our relationship. “Amy, Amy honey. I need you for this. Your bond. The bond with Eli. I just want to bring my son back. Our son is back. I’ve sacrificed so much, I just want to hold him again, please, honey, please.”
I pushed his hands away and tried to recreate the distance between us. “I can’t,” I was crying now too, “I want him back too, but this Frankenstein, this-, it’s wrong, and Noah, an innocent child, I, I just can’t!”
Richard’s face hardened. He grabbed my wrist. I tried to break free. Tried.
“Can’t?” He said quietly. “Or won’t?” I felt the color leave my face. Richard’s face seemed to snarl. He seemed to study me as he soon let go of my wrist and stepped back in horror. “Amy, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I just I-”
I didn’t answer him, or at least not immediately. I felt my wrist where he had been, the skin still red from his pressure.
"Richard," I finally said. "I get it. I do. I just can't."
He opened up his mouth for a response, but seemed to catch it before it came. He closed it in defeat, turned around, and walked out of the guest house.
******
Eli loved trains, planes, and anything to do with wheels. Before Richard was Governor, Eli and I would take the long way on the train to see Daddy. He’d wear his little conductor hat and would press his face against the glass as the scenery flashed out the window.
I held one of his model trains. Ten bucks from Walmart, but priceless now.
Could he forgive me? Could I forgive myself?
It was two days before I heard Noah screaming, running around the backyard. He had recovered and was back to himself. I saw him stuff his face with a cookie as he chased an errant ball he had kicked to himself.
It wasn’t fair. He lived, and Eli didn’t.
I looked over at the bedside table. The flower vase Eli used to use was speckled with water stains. The picture of us at Richard’s victory rally, Eli trying desperately to catch a few pieces of confetti and immediately trying to dispose of them into his mouth.
I looked down at the letter I had written to Eli, tucked underneath the vase. I hadn’t read it since I wrote it. I carefully maneuvered the vase out of the way and folded the letter into my pocket.
He will forgive me. I will forgive myself.
My son is coming home.
*****
Dr. Weiss promised the juicebox would be sufficient. He collected Noah from his nap, and he and Richard placed him gingerly into a little chair in the center of the room.
“The child may panic at first,” Weiss said, walking me through it one last time at the threshold. “The membrane has been punctured, and your presence may seem overwhelming as Noah transitions to Eli. You must calm the child down. Only then will the neurons be able to build new connections to welcome Eli in, or else it is purely instinctual.”
“What do I call him?”
Dr. Weiss seemed to hesitate. “Noah will suffice. Any other name may cause panic.” He pointed to a row of mirrors, “Your husband and I will be monitoring from the other side of the mirrors.”
“Will the mirrors be a problem? You know Eli seeming himself and not being, uh, Eli?”
Dr. Weiss let out a little smile. “That is an astute point, but luckily, it is part of the program that face-to-face experience will prove helpful during the transition. The recognition, even of a stranger's face, gives the mind something to organize itself around.”
“And, if it’s too much?”
“The door will not be locked. At any moment, you are free to leave and collect yourself. The process may last a few hours.”
“And what about Eli?” I asked, nodding towards the passed-out child in the room.
“Now remember, he is Noah for the time being. You see that little box on his right arm?” I squinted. The box was black and seemed to be glued to his skin. “If you yell out ‘Edgewood,’ the child will become incapacitated. Capiche?”
I nodded. Richard’s hug was on me again. He planted a kiss on my cheek, our first in months. “Thank you, thank you, honey. I almost lost hope, but our son is coming home.”
The room was cramped. Richard had collected Eli’s old toys from the guest house and placed them haphazardly around the room. Trains, foam planes, dinosaurs, a careless little museum of a dead boy’s life.
"Ready?" The radio crackled from somewhere near the mirrors.
I looked at my own reflection and gave a thumbs up to whoever was behind it.
The smell was sulfuric. I covered my nose before I got used to the stench. The boy coughed himself awake.
“Where-, who..”
“Hey Noah,” I crouched down to his level, “How are you?” Noah blinked hard, pushing himself up in his chair and shaking his head slightly, like a swimmer clearing water.
“Mom?” For one second, I let myself hope it was already done, that it would be that easy. It wasn't. It was Noah. The eyes were Noah's, the voice was Noah's, the way he said it was a small child reaching for the nearest safe word.
“Yes, it’s me.”
“Ma-, ma-, ma-” Noah’s head jerked forward, as if he were dry heaving. My hand found the back of his head before I decided to put it there.
"I'm here," I said. "I've got you."
And then, for a while, nothing terrible happened.
The next hour, we played. I painted the biggest smile I could manage, forced my voice to carry a delightful tone, trying to pretend the transformation had already happened. We ran the trains in long figure-eights across the padded floor. We flew the foam planes, and I let him shoot mine down and made the crashing noises he wanted me to make. We played hide and seek, and Eli's toy boxes made decent hiding spots for a small boy and excellent ones for me, and twice I folded myself behind them and listened to him pad around the room counting in his serious little voice.
"It's too high," he said.
I looked up from the train track. He was standing by the wall, his face gone cross and strange.
"What was that, Noah?"
"Umm." His eyes squeezed shut, his face winced as something behind it had shifted. "I mean, it's your turn. To seek."
I held his gaze a second longer than I should have. Then I turned around and started counting down from twenty.
At thirteen, I heard a click.
At ten, I heard a low, wet gargling sound coming from the middle of the room.
At five, I heard the thud.
I spun around.
Noah was on the floor, convulsing. His eyes had rolled back to the whites. Spit erupted from his open mouth in a thin geyser and ran down his cheek. I went to my knees beside him and reached for him. I looked over at the mirror, desperate for some confirmation from the radio. It's silence, tacit approval.
His head snapped forward and then back, cracking against the padded floor. I moved to cradle it, to keep it from hitting again. “Don’t.” The radio commanded.
I froze with my hands an inch from him.
Then it lifted. I paused in amazement as Noah’s body levitated in front of me slightly, an inch or two at most, but there was empty air between his body and the ground. His body shook rapidly from side to side. His legs kicked down as his arms seemed to twist and configure themselves into unnatural shapes. His fingers bent backwards, index finger seemingly outstretched towards me, glowed a gross purple.
With a thud, he fell back on the floor, still.
“Mom?” The joy melted over my heart, almost painful.
“Eli?”
“Mom,” His eyes found me, a different shade, but my son’s. “It’s too tall…”
“Eli are yo-”
“Mom, it’s too tall! Mom, it’s too tall!” His voice climbed. “Mom, it’s too tall!” He was screaming now, full-throated, heels drumming the floor. His eyes looked at me with unbridled terror as I tried to grab him, but he crawled away from me like a wounded animal escaping a hunter.
He was a mess of horror. His body had snapped back into place, but his gaze looked at me as if I were the unknown specter. I glanced back at the mirror. I could feel their eyes staring at us in anticipation.
“Edgewood!” I screamed. He went limp mid-scream as I collected his lifeless body and darted towards the door.
“Amy, what are you-” I kicked the door open and ran down the hallway. “Hey!” I heard the radio voice as two sets of feet came racing towards me.
“Amy!” Richard called out. “What are you doing? We’re a team on this, Amy!”
I ducked into the kitchen, laying Noah’s body down on the floor near the stove. The kitchen island was big enough to hide both of us.
“I’m sorry,” I breathed into his hair, “Eli, I’m sorry,” I cooed as I nuzzled his cheek.
“Amy!” Dr. Weiss’ voice was suddenly on top of me as he rounded the island. “Why did you stop the rit-” I put the knife in his chest before I knew my hand had found the block. His blood soaked his white jacket as the life evaporated from his eyes. I tried to drop him carefully, his weight proving to be too much, his fall revealing me to Richard.
Richard's footsteps stopped on the other side of the island.
I pulled at the knife. It was buried too deep in Weiss to come free. I grabbed a smaller one from the block and held it out, in front of me, and stood.
As he neared, Richard slowed down and held his hands to the ceiling. “Amy, what did yo-,” his eyes traced their way from Dr. Weiss’ lifeless corpse back to the knife I held towards him, “It’s fine, honey, we just need to finish the transfer.”
I shook my head, knife still brandished. “Enough. Richard, I can’t.”
“I dug up my own son for this.” His voice cracked. "I did that. With my hands. You are not the only one who has done something they can't take back. But it has to be for something, Amy. All of it. Him." He gestured at Weiss without looking. "It has to be for something."
I shook my head again. “No.”
“Put the knife down, Amy.” He took a hesitant step forward.
I shook my head again and prepared to strike, but I was too late. Richard wrapped his hand around mine, twisting as the knife clattered across the tile. I wrenched and bit down on his forearm, and he shouted, and his grip broke, and my free hand closed on the only thing on the counter behind me, the neck of a wine bottle, and I swung it into the side of his head.
It broke. It broke against him and kept going, and the broken edge of it did something to his neck, something unrecantable, that I will not describe, that I tried for a few seconds afterward to undo with my bare hands, pressing, as if pressing could put back what the glass had let out.
I tried to stop the bleeding. I did. Weiss, Richard, and the Wine created a shade of red I’ll see for the rest of my life.
******
Noah's body bounced gently in the passenger seat as I took one last look at the mansion in the mirror. The guest house. The light is still burning in the entryway. And, high on the dark face of the house, the balcony.
The highway flew past. I made it an hour before we had to turn off and get gas. It was dark and thankfully empty; the color of my clothes would raise questions I didn’t have answers to.
I didn’t notice at first. I don’t know if it was when I climbed back into the car or if he came back while I was grabbing gas, terrified of the blood-soaked woman outside the window. The car was quiet, and I miss that silence. “Why did you kill Eli?” As simple as a child asking a question.
I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t. “Why did you leave him on the balcony? He told me. He said it was too high. Why did you do it?”
It pierced me. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think.
“I didn’t mean to, I-,” I whispered to myself, loud enough for them to hear. “I’m sorry, can I talk to him, I’m sorry.” I made myself look at him. The car was dark. His small hand was pressed to his temple. “Can I talk to him? Please. Can I talk to him?”
He turned his head and looked at me, and his face was wrong now, subtly and then less subtly. Small sores had opened at the corners of his mouth. His eyes, which had been blue, had gone the gray of dishwater. Small creases along his forehead and eyes were too severe for someone in adolescence.
"Why are you all red?" he asked, this time more hesitantly. His little fingers, resting on the console, retreated. Some of them were still purple, their tips discolored.
"Please." I dug into my pocket. "I wrote him a letter. I wrote it a long time ago, I just need him to-" I pulled it out, and the words died in my throat. The letter had been in my pocket through all of it. It was soaked through, edge to edge, the ink run to nothing, the paper the same red as the floor I had left behind.
He looked down at the crimson note. He started to reach for it before the whites of his eyes rolled back again. He convulsed once, and a small trickle of air escaped his breath.
“Eli doesn’t wanna talk right now,” the boy said. “I don’t want to talk anymore either.”
I wanted to say goodbye. Apologize for everything I have done. I knew with time they would forgive me. Everyone would.
I don’t know if the police sirens I heard were real, but that’s not why I left. I dared one last look back. It was quick, quick enough not to lose my composure, but long enough to see his outline, his body hunched against the passenger door as he tried to curl himself as far away from me as possible. My hand wanted to hug him one last time. Beg for reconciliation, but I didn’t. I left the door open as I darted for the woods.