The Book of Blood and Shadow (16 page)

The thing is, no one noticed. I was simultaneously infamous and invisible. Chris and Adriane were the hometown heroes, the golden couple, repository of innumerable yearbook superlatives and hallway-PDA citations. Whereas I, after all this time, was still the new girl, imported under shady circumstances. It had never bothered me. The four of us had been a self-contained unit, with our own stories, our own bad habits—practically, when you considered all the inside jokes and references and things that didn’t need to be said, our own language. That was supposed to be enough.

I did my homework. I ate in the library. I flinched at loud noises and sudden movements and kept away from the dark. I shamelessly abused my independent-study privileges, even
though there was no study left to be done, given that the files had disappeared and the Hoff had been shipped down to a rehab facility in Texas, and as often as possible, I got the hell out. Some days I went to the movies, letting the flicker of color and light carry me into someone else’s story, but there was only one theater in town and only so many times I could sit through
Crap Blows Up: The Sequel
. Mostly I went to campus.

There was a small, round plaza on the western edge of the college green that I’d walked through for years, never paying much attention to the names and dates engraved on the pavement stones. That’s where I sat, on one of the stone benches rimming the circle. It emptied during class periods, which guaranteed me regular forty-seven-minute increments of isolation.

The names were students, the years carved next to them either the dates they’d graduated or the dates they’d died—there was no explanatory plaque to make things clear, but the general situation was clear enough from the thick letters engraved at the center of the circle:
PRO PATRIA
. You learned that one in Latin I, partly because it was remedial, partly because the ancient Romans were so high on dying that way.
Pro patria, for country
. If that hadn’t clued me in, the names engraved on the benches would have done the trick. Not people, but battlefields, Normandy, Omaha Beach, Rhine Crossing, Bastogne, Ardennes—apparently whatever wealthy alumni endowed the memorial thought it only fitting that Chapman’s brave dead children be stuck in battle for all eternity.
Sic transit gloria
.

The green was green in name only. Where it wasn’t a dull, bare brown spotted with a few sad patches of gray snow that had forgotten to melt, it was a sickly yellow, the color of hair sprayed with cheap Sun-In, then doused with chlorine. In summertime, the grove of trees bordering the western edge passed for an overgrown wilderness separating the classroom buildings from the
barren athletic fields, but three months of snow and frost had denuded the branches. March wasn’t a good look for this corner of New England. Chapman was passable in the dead of winter, as much a snowy wonderland as any of the other carefully picturesque towns dotting the highway, but March was a dead zone of desiccated grass, sagging trees, and melting snowmen. Even the sky gave up for a few weeks, forgoing color for a thick miasma of gray.

It was quiet, quiet enough that I could hear the crunch of leaves beneath a shoe, just behind me. I flinched at the sound of it, imminent invaders of my sanctuary—and the crunching stopped, abruptly. Not, then, the noise of a student who’d overslept, clomping toward class, but of someone who crept, silently and carefully, freezing in place with his noisy misstep, hoping not to be noticed. Someone there to watch.

I told myself that if I pretended it wasn’t happening, if I pretended I hadn’t heard, if I didn’t provoke, then nothing would happen. I’d been the kind of kid who liked to map out contingency plans in case of burglars and kidnappers, who lay in bed practicing fake sleep, under the theory that if I looked harmless enough, the troupe of rampaging killers I imagined climbing into children’s windows up and down the East Coast would understand that I was no threat and would, after dumping our nonexistent family silver into their burlap sacks, leave me alone. But I was all grown up now, enough to know that looking harmless only made you easier prey. I turned around.

The tree was too narrow to hide him completely. He peeked out from behind the bark, his face cloaked in shadow.

Max?
I swallowed the word, along with the hope. Stood up. Squinted into the woods, looking for the telltale glint of glasses—or a knife. Waited for him, whoever he was, to decide, to move toward me or run away. Fight or flight.

He held his ground, watching me watch him.

“What?” I said sharply. This prey would show no fear.

He knelt, never taking his eyes off me, never moving his face out of the shadow, and played his hand across a patch of gray snow.

Then he ran away.

“Wait!”

But I didn’t run after him, because if it had been Max, he would have come to me, and if it wasn’t Max …

You didn’t run after a killer.

Not even if you wanted, more than you’d ever wanted anything, to watch him die.

He’d left something for me, in a smooth patch of mud-streaked snow. It was the size of a hand with its fingers spread. And where the center of the palm would be, he had scraped an eye speared by a lightning bolt. A message for me.

He was watching.

12

I wasn’t invited to the funeral. That was in Baltimore, and it was for family. I didn’t qualify. Not until Chris’s mother emailed me, asking me to go to the campus memorial service on the Moores’ behalf and then, afterward, to Chris’s dorm room to help the dean pack up his belongings. I was family enough for that.

The chapel was full of kids from the college and Chapman Prep who didn’t know Chris any better than the egalitarian minister who prattled on about Chris’s achievements—read haltingly off bullet-pointed index cards—and God’s plan. “We can’t be angry at God,” the minister said. God was everywhere in the service, shepherding Chris through a “short but meaningful life,” shielding his grieving loved ones in “the bosom of His love,” leading Chris to a “lasting peace where someday we will once again be
together.” His God, under this theory, had planned it all, from start to finish, might as well have wielded the knife. And because of this, because he was in control, because he was watching, we were supposed to be grateful for his interest, no matter its form. We were supposed to say thank you.

“No one knows why Chris was taken from us,” the minister said, and I carefully steered my thoughts away from the bloody letter, from the fear that I knew why, that the why was me.

My parents flanked me, both of them in dark-hued work clothes, their hands at their sides. It was the first time the three of us had been in any kind of religious building together since Andy’s funeral. That day, at the insistence of my grandparents, we had sat in the front row of Temple Beth El, holding hands and mouthing the words of the kaddish, the traditional Jewish mourning prayer that ignores the dead in favor of paeans to the God who took him away, all of us, my Jewish grandmother, my lapsed Catholic father, my Buddhist-when-and-how-it-suited-her aunt, all of us except for my mother, who pressed her lips together, shut her prayer book, and later, despite the epic fight she’d waged against my father to get Andy a bar mitzvah, let my thirteenth birthday pass unnoticed.

I only had one dress that was dark enough and conservative enough to be appropriate for the campus memorial, and I chose it with regret, because—shallow as it sounds—it was one of my favorites and I knew that after this, I would never wear it again. I didn’t cry.

13

The door to the dean’s office swung open on my second knock.

“Can I help you?” He was younger than I’d expected, probably in his early thirties, though prematurely balding.

“I’m Nora Kane? I was supposed to, uh—” I stopped, realizing there was someone else in the office, sitting in one of the mahogany armchairs facing the dean’s desk. “Sorry. I’ll come back.”

The dean shook his head. “Please, come in. We’ve been expecting you.”

The other half of “we” stood and faced me. “So you’re her.”

“This is Eli Kapek,” the dean said.

I waited to hear why I should care.

“Eli Kapek,” he said again, like it was supposed to mean something. Then, when it obviously didn’t, “Christopher’s cousin.”

Something stretched across Eli’s face, something approximating a smile, but not quite getting there. “Forgive me if I’m not particularly pleased to meet you.”

I searched his face, wishing, weirdly, that I were blind, as that would give me the social leeway to cross the room and press my fingers to his sharp cheekbones, his narrow chin, his nose that, while crooked and slightly too large for his face, fit the asymmetrical arch in his eyebrows and quirk at his lips, and maybe my fingertips could detect something my eyes couldn’t, reveal what I was looking for, which was: Chris.

But it wasn’t there. Chris took after his mother’s side. His dark skin, his kinky, wild hair, his round, open features, none of it was here in this stranger’s sharp, pale face.

I couldn’t hate Adriane for whatever had happened to her, for failing to protect Chris and herself and letting a strange toxin take its course; I couldn’t hate Max for whatever had happened to him, for trusting me to defend him, maybe somehow save him, when he couldn’t do it himself. And I couldn’t hate the Moores for leaving town, and leaving me along with it, because any obligation they had to me had died with their son, and you do what you need to do to survive.

I couldn’t hate Chris.

But Eli was a stranger, and there was nothing to stop me from hating him on sight, for who he was and what he wasn’t, for his failure to be what I needed him to be, and mostly for the fact that he was alive and Chris was not. It would have felt good, having someone to hate, someone other than an imaginary God.

“Can we do this now?” Eli said, not looking at me.

“Nora, Christopher’s parents asked me to tell you they would be very grateful if you could help Eli sort through Chris’s belongings. He’ll take care of the shipping and such.” The dean handed him a key.

I already had a key.

The dean ushered us out of his office. “You’re not coming?” I asked.

“We find it’s best to give close friends and family their privacy in these matters. Unless—?”

“We’re fine,” Eli said, closing the door on the dean. Then we were alone. “You don’t have to come, either.”

“Yeah, actually I
do
. The Moores wanted me to.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

I could have let myself into the room anytime I wanted; I’d been tempted. I’d spent a whole morning planted in front of the dorm, trying to will myself to go in.

But then I’d gone home.

Maybe I was afraid that once I stepped inside, I would never be able to leave. That I would wrap myself in a blanket that smelled like Max, curl up on the couch scuffed by Chris’s sneakers and reeking faintly of dirty socks and stale pizzas past, barricade myself inside in perpetuity, like an Egyptian bride burying herself alive in her pharaoh’s tomb. It would be easier with a stranger, I told myself. It would be a simple procedure: Unlock the door. Sort through closets and drawers and shelves full of memories.

Dismantle my safe haven sock by sock.

“I didn’t see you at the memorial service,” I said, trying to keep up as he sped across the quad. I had to take two steps to each one of his.

“I saw you,” he said. “You didn’t seem too broken up.”

“What’s your problem?”

He still wouldn’t look at me. “My cousin is dead. Maybe you heard.”

“You know, Chris never even mentioned you.”

“And?”

“And if you want to pretend that you were someone to him, and I was no one, that’s your business, but I think it’s kind of sad.”

“I guess you knew everything about him, and everyone that ever mattered to him?”

“Actually, I did,” I said. “You weren’t on the list.”

“And you were.”

I didn’t answer.

“So were you, like, secretly in love with him or something? Deep, unrequited passion?”

“I have a boyfriend,” I said. I did not say
asshole
. But he got the point.

He muttered something.

“What?”

“Your boyfriend,” he said. “You wanted to know my problem. That’s my problem.”

Of course. Max was everyone’s problem. “He didn’t do it.”

He offered another of his mutant smiles. “I guess I’ll just take your word for that. What a relief.”

I stopped abruptly, in the shadow of a large stone building, its somber gray face streaked with drying bird crap. “We’re here.”

14

The room was in ruins.

“Your boyfriend’s a slob,” Eli said, stopped in the doorway. I pushed past him. The mattresses were on the floor, stuffing oozing from their ripped seams. The drawers had been pulled out of both desks and bureaus; a thick layer of T-shirts, sheets, underwear, books, and notebooks blanketed the dingy linoleum tile.

I couldn’t breathe.

“Sit down,” Eli said.

“On what?” A strangled laugh. One wooden desk chair lay on its side, the other sat akimbo, one leg missing, its back snapped in two.

Eli took my arm and guided me to Max’s bare metal bed frame. We sat.

I swallowed hard. “The cops.” My feet were on Max’s navy sheets. I’ll get mud on them, I thought distantly. Max would hate that. He washed his sheets more often than most college students, or at least more often than Chris—though still not often enough to suit me. It was something we liked to argue about, when we were in the mood, Max politely pointing out that if I wanted his sheets cleaner, I was welcome to clean them, me politely pointing out that he was a sexist pig, him countering that if I really cared about cleanliness, I’d go take a shower and forgo putting all my dirty clothes back on.… Now I wished I’d taken him up on it. Just once.

Eli shook his head. “Uncle Paul talked to the cops, to make sure it was okay for me to be here. They said they just looked around and took the laptops. They left everything else the way it was.”