Come In and Cover Me (22 page)

She kept all her file folders in the china cabinet by the front door—she didn't have any china, and the shelves were the perfect size. She headed toward the front room, crossing through the doorway into the entrance hall. A beam of light reflected off the hardwood floor, and bits of dust danced in the air. Silas had left a pair of shoes and a white shirt by the door.

As soon as she rounded the corner and could no longer see Silas, Ren spotted Lynay sitting on the windowsill, crushing something in her hands. Or rubbing something slowly. She stood as Ren approached, and Ren could see that it was not clay on her hands this time. This was a dark, vivid red, and it was dripping onto the floor. Two drops, three drops, hit the floor with a heavy splish. It was a thick liquid.

The girl stepped on Silas's white shirt, the brown of her feet handsome and smooth against the ivory. One drop fell from her hand to her foot, running down her arch and landing on his shirt. The red spread across the white.

She considered calling Silas, but she kept silent. He wouldn't be able to see the girl, anyway. And she did not want him near Lynay. Not when the girl's blood-colored hands were spreading dark stains over Silas's shirt.

Lynay came closer with her red red hands outstretched, and Ren couldn't help but step backward. The girl was as calm and serene—and beautiful and bare-chested—as ever. She reached for Ren's face, and Ren stumbled. She fell backward, hitting her elbow hard on the floor and yelping in pain. Lynay and her dripping hands were gone then, of course.

Here and then gone. Always here and then gone. The girl was going to give her whiplash.

She wasn't sleeping. There were nightmares that she could not remember well, nightmares with running and bright sun and the sound of things breaking. Once she was walking through a canyon and saw her mother standing in a driveway. Her mother toppled over backward, straight-legged, and her head hit concrete with a sickening sound. Then her mother bounced up, smiling, because it had not hurt at all. And Ren knew it was not her mother at all but something wearing her mother's face. The bone-on-concrete sound did not leave Ren's head even after she woke up. She dreamed she and Silas had found an immense pear, shoulder-high, that was as lightweight as a beach ball. They dribbled it and rolled it, then tossed it back and forth. As it came toward Ren, it blocked out the sun.

Other times she was running and running, and there was the scrape of claws at her back, blood on the ground around her. Once she felt teeth sink into her forearm, and she screamed as she sat up in bed. She was tired of waking up crying, out of breath. It had been a long time since she had nightmares. Now she lay awake next to Silas, staring at the ceiling, just as she used to during the long, wary nights in her parents' house.

She no longer wanted to make friends with Lynay. She was not curious or flattered. She was on edge. It rattled her, constantly rounding a corner and seeing the girl. After all this time trying to summon the right ghosts, she found she just wanted them to leave. She couldn't shake the sight of the girl's hands dripping red, even though Ren suspected the liquid was paint. Paint was a good thing for Lynay, right? She painted what she loved: her pottery. And the girl herself didn't seem threatening. She was as nonthreatening as a dead girl with red dripping from her hands could possibly be. Still.

Ren had not seen Scott since she left the site. She considered that the girl had managed to convince Scott to let her trade hauntings with him. Like switching seats on a bus. She stifled a laugh.

How long since she had sat beside him in the canyon? Eleven days? Twelve? He didn't usually stay away so long.

Silas shifted in his sleep, his hand landing on her hip.

He was an affectionate sleeper. She had given him two men's T-shirts—just solid colors, no logos—to add to his drawer full of typing-on-the-computer clothes. He didn't seem to care where they came from. She thought they were both left from Daniel, who never came back to claim anything.

Daniel. For months and months she had thought that she was happy with him. She realized now that she had not been. That seemed as if it would be an obvious thing: happy or unhappy. But it had not been obvious at all. She had not been happy with Daniel. She had not been happy with other men, either, although she had not been unhappy. They could not have made her unhappy because her happiness was unrelated to them, independent of them. They had been peripheral.

She watched Silas's face. The moon was bright and cast a light through the shutters. Eyelashes and soft lips and angled jaw and three eyebrow hairs that broke formation and pointed skyward.

She had done this with her mother once upon a time. Her mother tended to fall asleep early on the couch, while her father was still watching Johnny Carson. If Ren stayed quiet, sometimes her father would forget she was in the room and not send her to bed. She would sit with her back to the sofa—she was usually sitting on the floor, using furniture only as a backrest—and she would twist her head around and watch her mother sleep. Her mother's eyes never completely closed, and Ren could see the white slits of her eyeballs. Her mother had three freckles on her right cheek and a red birthmark just behind her earlobe. She had the silver shine of cavities in the left side of her mouth, bottom and top, but no silver at all on the right side. Ren had cataloged every line and curve of her face. Maybe that was some marker of love—a hunger for a person's smallest details, a compulsion to memorize the bits and pieces that came together to make the whole. How long since she had seen her mother's face? She couldn't remember, couldn't call up a clear image of her face, but she could see the cavities exactly, perfectly, and those freckles and the shape of her ear.

There must be a reason this girl was following her.

She was becoming more and more aware of a terror other than the nightmares. It was Lynay's fault. Lynay's red hands had clarified the parrot woman's words, and now the words were sharper things. Ren could no longer pretend she didn't understand the puzzle. While she lay in their bed, she would run the pads of her fingers over the curve of Silas's shoulder, pressing herself against him so she would feel the rise and fall of his chest. She loved the sound of his breathing. Sometimes she would position her face where she could feel his breath hit her forehead: She would register every inhale and exhale and try to lull herself to sleep by the rhythm.

He was a new and inexplicable thing, and there must be a price for having found him. She had been with him for nearly three months now, three months of long days and nights together. She had wondered if the down-a-rabbit-hole quality of the canyon had worked some sort of spell on them, made this connection seem stronger than it was. But they were out of the rabbit hole now. And even in the canyon, the early mornings and manual labor, the monotony and sore backs, the disagreements over explanations and evidence and which way to smooth out a wall did not lend themselves to facile relationships. He was a new and inexplicable thing.

The fear, also, was new. At first she had slept more deeply with Silas than she had since she was a child. For nights on end she had slept without waking once to the cry of an owl or the snap of a branch or the brief snatch of a song. Then the parrot woman spoke, and since her warning, sleep had ebbed and the fear had grown. At night it pulled at Ren, tugging at her thoughts when she closed her eyes. Her need for Silas pressed on her chest, and she kept one hand on him. She could not stop confirming his heartbeat. She lay staring at his face or the ceiling or the shadowed topography of the sheets, and prayed. Please live forever. Please be next to me, forever and ever without end, amen.

She was not used to these twists and turns her mind took without her consent. Scott used to tell her she had a mind like a moth, stopping for a second at one idea and then flying off again—“hither, thither and yon,” he had said, which was ridiculous because what teenage boy used a phrase like that? (“Hither, thither and your face,” she had answered.) But that was before she had trained her mind to be straight and tidy. She was normally very good now at keeping her mind on track—moving forward, never back. No tangents. Thinking only the thoughts that should be thought. Suddenly that had changed. Her mind was letting in all sorts of unwanted visitors. It was as if Silas had worked his way inside her head, and he'd left the door wide open behind him. Now Scott and her mother and Lynay and Non and anything else wandered in and took up residence.

Was Non's message a warning? Was that the same reason Lynay had paint-blood on her hands? Would something happen to Silas at the site? Or was it a threat? Did these spirits have a power that Ren had not suspected? Could they hurt someone? They'd never seemed like anything more than tricks of the light, shadows flashing across the wall. They were memories without substance. But maybe they were stronger than she had realized.

She had lost Scott, and that loss had burned out her circuits. His disappearance had been incomprehensible. At twelve years old, she could not compute it and had never anticipated it. But now she knew, lying warm next to Silas, that one day he would be gone, whether because of some young thing or because of a crash of metal and glass or because of bedsores and bony hands that struggled to hold a glass of water. He would be gone, and she would be broken beyond repair. She knew this after only months.

You will lose him.

It was the fear that made her know it was true. She recognized it and could not run from it. She would lose him. And she could piece herself together—she knew after Scott that no matter what happened, she could piece herself back together—but the cracks would be there, spidery and endless, all her pieces glued back in the right shape but never whole again.

She watched his face, and he wrinkled his forehead.

Someone was singing. A wordless hum, sweet and soft.

Lynay was standing on the rounded footboard of the bed, the balls of her feet balanced on the polished wood as if she were climbing a tree and pausing before leaping for the next branch. Her hands were stretched toward Ren, palms up, and they were pale in the moonlight, no longer covered in red.

Ren sat up, turning herself so that she partially blocked Silas. The small of her back was against his.

“I'm tired of this,” she said, whispering, and part of her hoped that she was crazy, that this was a dream and not a thousand-year-old girl pantomiming in her bedroom.

“Ren?” asked Silas, smacking his lips.

“Go back to sleep,” she said, trying to keep her voice light while she kept a careful watch on Lynay.

Silas rolled over without opening his eyes.

“Well?” asked Ren, still quiet. Lynay was looking at her with something like pity, something that could have been kindness or knowledge or judgment, depending on how the shadows from the moonlight fell.

Lynay looked to Silas, lying on his back. She stepped from the footboard to the floor, landing too easily, as if gravity had forgotten her. She was next to Silas now, his body separating her from Ren. She was so close to him that her stomach brushed against the mattress, or, at least, appeared to.

“Stay away from him,” Ren warned.

Lynay did not stay away. She leaned down toward Silas's face. For the first time since Ren had seen her, the girl's hair was loose around her face. It was matted and very long, past her waist, like shallow waves falling. She raised her hand to Silas's face and did not touch him, traced the lines of his face in the air, the outline of his jaw and ears and nose and eyebrows.

Ren placed her own hand over Silas's chest, reaching through Lynay's dark hair and feeling nothing but air. Instead she felt Silas's breathing and his heart, still steady.

Lynay looked at Ren, and there was a raw longing in her eyes, but it did not seem to be longing for Silas in particular. It was not lust but something more general. There was envy as well. And there was pain. Her eyes shone, wet.

Silas stirred, muttering under his breath.

Lynay pressed her wrist to his forehead and held it there, skin touching skin, closer to a mother checking for fever than a lover showing affection. She leaned closer, and Ren knew the girl was about to kiss Silas. She would have been jealous if the girl had seemed more solid. Instead she thought of a succubus stealing life with a touch of her lips. Then, as Lynay tilted her head, her hair fell across Silas's face. He frowned and swiped at his nose, sniffing. The sound echoed through the room.

When Silas spoke, his voice was clear and alert.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Immediately after Scott's accident, her parents treated Ren as if she had nearly died herself, as if she had woken up in a hospital room bruised and swollen and asked for ice chips through cracked lips. As if they had hugged each other and wiped tears from their faces and had brought her home carefully wrapped in blankets and bandages and helped her from the car with their arms around her waist.

They were everywhere—sitting on the edge of her bed to tell her good night, handing her orange juice when she came downstairs in the morning, opening the front door just as her hand touched the knob on her way in from school. They wanted to talk. No, they wanted her to talk. For weeks, they would ask her precise and thoughtful questions about school and homework, gymnastics and friends and television. They would listen for as long as she could talk, and when she stopped, they would lean forward slightly, encouraging more.

She felt that she could not talk enough, could not fill up enough space with her words. The one thing they never asked her about was Scott. She did not want to talk about him, about the accident or about his absence. She deeply appreciated her parents' evasion.

Her first birthday after the accident, her thirteenth, fell in the midst of the attention and evasion. Ren's mother insisted on a dance-party theme. Anna had found a disco ball that actually worked and hung it from the den ceiling, so the dozen or so girls attending stood in clumps and swayed their shoulders to Michael Jackson. It was a small room, and the lights from the disco ball flashed large and frantic across the furniture and bodies and the backs of heads.