“Salubrious occasion is salubrious,” Sagan said softly.
Then a puzzled look crossed her mother’s face. “Wait. Was I supposed to get that from reading Afterworlds? Did I miss something?”
“Not about that. It was just . . .” Darcy didn’t know where to go from there. “Imogen’s really nice and I think you’ll like her. And I’m sorry for taking so long to tell you.”
Her father spoke up. “You chose the perfect time, Darcy.”
She smiled back at him, as if she’d told them on the first night of Pancha Ganapati on purpose, and not just because she was a lucky chickenshit. After all, the timing had been perfect.
She was fine with being lucky—this family, this made-up holiday, this certainty that she was loved.
This was her faith.
CHAPTER 34
MR. HAMLYN WAS ENRAPTURED WITH THE little dead girls, until I explained that they wouldn’t be to his taste. They had not been loved at the end.
“And you leave me with that?” he asked, pointing at the ghost cowering in the corner.
The bad man’s spirit had risen up a few minutes after his body had gone still. He was skinnier than I’d expected, in flower-patterned pajamas and white socks. He’d hardly noticed me, too busy staring out at the five little girls in his front yard. Maybe he’d always suspected they were out there, and thought his nightmares were coming true. Or maybe he thought the nightmare was happening now. He hadn’t said anything, just crawled into the darkest corner of the room and covered his eyes.
“Yes,” I answered Mr. Hamlyn. “I killed him. Now cut him to pieces, please.”
The old psychopomp looked me up and down, at the dirt beneath my fingernails, the shovel in my hands. His smile grew and grew, until it seemed twisted and wrong, too big for his face.
“I knew you had it in you, girl.”
I pointed the blade of the shovel at the bad man’s ghost. “Teach me how to take his memories apart.”
Mr. Hamlyn gave a theatrical little shudder. “They’re very nasty memories. You should start with something sweeter.”
“I’m not going to make a quilt out of him. I just want him gone.” I looked out the window at the little girls. “And to set them free.”
“He’s dead. His memories won’t hold anything for long.” A shrug twisted his frame. “But I suppose we can hurry things a bit.”
That was when Mr. Hamlyn showed me what was in the pockets of his patchwork coat.
It was a piece of memory he’d found, something awful. It was so rare, he said, that I could travel the river for a hundred years and never feel one brushing against the back of my neck. But I would certainly notice if that ever happened—the shiver that holding it gave me was very particular, like an eel wrapped around my spine, cold and squirming.
He said it was like a diamond, forged under unimaginable pressures, so that it cut lesser memories to pieces. Such threads formed only when something unimaginable happened, like the death of a whole city by fire. He had seen it happen half a dozen times.
“Be very careful with it,” he said. “Anything that can cut a ghost can cut you too, even in the afterworld.”
It was the perfect tool for psychopomps like him.
The little girls faded as we worked. The bad man had remembered them best of all, better than their own families, even. As his ghost parted into bright, shimmering strands, the girls dwindled and sputtered, finally departing one by one.
Free at last, or simply gone.
I saw more than I wanted to that night, the bad man’s whole grisly career flashing past as his threads pulsed in my hands. But as awful as those visions were, there was something elegant in Mr. Hamlyn’s work. Like a cross between a surgeon and a storyteller, he teased out and sliced away single threads from the tangle of a life.
But he had no desire to collect anything so foul, and in the end we cast all those carefully cut pieces into the Vaitarna. That’s all the river was—endless millennia of human memories boiled down to black sludge. I wondered how it could smell so sweet.
“Thank you,” I told Mr. Hamlyn when we were done.
“There’s no thanks better than being right.”
I looked at him. “Right about what?”
“That you would call me.” He smiled. “Though I admit, it was sooner than expected.”
I started to say that there was no way I’d ever be calling him again. But how could I be sure? My future was up in the air, both as a valkyrie and as a human being.
Everything changes when you take a life.
* * *
It would have been easy to let the river carry me home, but my real body was here in Palo Alto. I couldn’t leave it behind, or my shiny new car, for that matter.
When I turned on my phone for directions back to the highway, it woke up sputtering: six messages from my mother and fourteen from Jamie.
Maybe if they’d left only one or two, I would have listened to them. But the thought of all those voice mails growing steadily more anxious made me switch the phone back off. But first I texted them both:
I’m okay. Will be home this morning.
The highway was easy to find, and there were plenty of signs pointing to Los Angeles. But my timing was terrible once again. After four hours of driving I found myself approaching LA smack-dab in the middle of morning rush hour.
It was also breakfast time, and I hadn’t eaten since lunch the day before. Maybe I didn’t need sleep anymore, but here in the overworld food was not optional.
I stopped at a place called the Star Diner in North Hollywood, choosing it for the parking spot right in front. A mercifully efficient waitress brought me scrambled eggs and toast, which I devoured in about three minutes. Eating simple, ordinary food edged me back toward reality.
Morning sunlight slanted in through the diner’s picture windows, as if the afterworld didn’t exist. The tables were trimmed in cheery, glittering chrome. Sitting there drinking coffee, I didn’t feel like someone who’d cut apart a ghost last night. I wasn’t sure how I felt, exactly. Not angry anymore, because the bad man was gone, but not triumphant either. I should’ve been exhausted from driving all night, but even that was missing. It was as though I’d excised some part of myself along with the bad man’s memories. Only the cold place remained.
Then I reached into my wallet to pay, and a business card slipped out. It had a blue seal in the upper left corner, and the name Special Agent Elian Reyes in the center. I remembered what he’d said to me on the phone:
You should always report murders, of course.
And that’s what I’d just done: committed murder. What else would you call breaking into an old man’s house in the middle of the night, waking him up, and leaning on his chest until he has a heart attack?
It hadn’t been an accident.
The business card was frayed and soft from being in my wallet. I’d memorized the information ages ago, figuring that if you have your own personal special agent, you should know his number. Learning the digits by heart had seemed funny at the time.
It didn’t seem funny now.
You should always report murders, of course.
What would happen next back in Palo Alto? Someone would find the bad man’s body, sooner or later. The police would be called, and couldn’t fail to notice the smashed bedside table and the pills scattered across the floor. They would ask the neighbors if anyone had seen something strange, like a car pulling up at three in the morning. Maybe a wild girl digging up his lawn with her hands.
As I sat there staring at the dirt under my fingernails, the eggs in my stomach began to squirm. I’d turned on my phone in front of the bad man’s house, and sent two texts, and made that collect call from near my house. In a phone company databank somewhere were numbers connecting me to his mysterious death.
The kicker, of course, was my fingerprints on the handle of his shovel, which I’d slid back into its spot beneath the bed before leaving.
A dry little laugh forced its way out of me. I wasn’t a particularly clever murderer, was I? Nor was my defense going to be the sanest thing ever heard in a California courtroom: “I did it to free five little dead girls, and so my ghost friend doesn’t have to worry about the bad man ever again.”
I took a slow breath, letting the fear of being caught flow through me. It was better than feeling nothing. Better than letting the cold place grow until it swallowed up the rest.
There were so many things I couldn’t change: what had happened to those people in the airport, whatever was wrong with my mother. Last night, at least, I’d done something rather than nothing.
And you can’t put a valkyrie in jail. We can walk through walls.
If there was a punishment for what I’d done, it wasn’t going to come from the world of phone records and fingerprints, of laws and prisons. It would come in the transformations taking place inside me. As Yama had tried to warn me on that lonely island: whether ghosts were real or not didn’t matter, what mattered was what we decided to make ourselves.
I slipped Agent Reyes’s card back into my wallet, and left the waitress a big tip.
* * *
My mother was waiting on the front steps when I got home.
“Nice car,” she said when I got out. I think she meant it.
“I know, right?”
We took a moment together, amazed that my father had spent real money on me. I sat next to Mom on the steps, still uncertain how to feel. In trouble seemed wrong, like something for little kids, not murderers. I couldn’t tell whether she was angry, or sad, or exhausted. Or maybe just sick.
“Did Jamie tell you about Dad’s note?” I asked.
“Of course.”
“Then what is it? Your diagnosis?”
“Not yet, Lizzie.” She held up a trembling hand. “You disappeared for twenty-one hours. You don’t get to set the terms of this conversation.”
Angry, then. I didn’t answer, just nodded.
“Where the hell did you go?”
“Driving.”
“For twenty-one hours?”
“Yeah, I know.” I still wasn’t tired. I wondered if I would ever sleep again. Probably not without Yama’s lips to help me, and would he ever touch me again after what I’d done? “Driving helps me think. It’s a pretty comfortable car.”
Mom took a deep breath. I could hear her biting back harsh words.
“Jamie told me you have a boyfriend.”
“She did? Seriously?”
A grim smile crossed my mother’s face. “She didn’t say anything until this morning, when you still weren’t home.”
I sighed. Fucking LA traffic. “Yes, I have a boyfriend. But this had nothing to do with him. I just needed to get away.”
She gave me a long, appraising stare. But she turned away with a sigh, as if I were something unknowable.
Fair enough. I didn’t even know myself.
“Are you going to die?” I asked.
“Not any time soon. But we’ll get back to that, and to your boyfriend.”
Not any time soon. If that counted as good news, then the world sucked.
Mom stood up and went over to the car, opened the driver’s door, and leaned in. “Jesus. A thousand miles, Lizzie?”
“Like I said, it helps me think.”
She shut the car door and came back to the porch. She stood over me, a parent over a child. “Where did you go?”
Only the truth would do. “Palo Alto.”
“Is that where your boyfriend lives?”
“No. I went to your old neighborhood.”
She stood there staring at me, her anger blunted for a moment. This telling-the-truth business was oddly effective.
“You know that old photo in your room?” I asked. “I needed to see the house where you grew up.”
She shook her head. “Why?”
“Because you never told me about Mindy. She was haunting you and you didn’t tell me. But she was there, Mom.” I could feel the cold place retreating as I spoke, so I kept going. “Every time I played outside when I was little, she was there. And even now when I’m traveling, or when we drive anywhere, she’s there in the way you worry. Every day of my life, her ghost is with us. Every day!”