“Zeth.” Lacey’s other hand finds her brother’s. Her eyes are already starting to shutter. I’ve seen it happen a million times before. A patient’s eyes are still open, still technically functioning, but they’re not showing the patient what’s in front of them anymore. I have no idea what Lacey’s pale blue eyes are showing her right now, but she smiles. And it’s a beautiful, surprised smile. “Zeth. It’s…it’s going to be okay. Now, everything is going to be…okay.”
Zeth shakes his head. I’ve seen men come apart before. I’ve seen Zeth coming apart these past couple of weeks, showing more and more of himself to me every day, but now…now is an end to every wall he ever built to keep the world out. It comes crashing down on him. And it crushes him. “I’m sorry,” he breathes. “I should have done better. I should have done better. I should have done better.”
I can see the will of effort on Lacey’s face as she struggles to focus, to have just one more cognitive thought. “You did…your best. You gave me…your best. The only one…who ever did. Thank…”
I see the moment when she goes. There’s a light inside people, their souls shining brightly through their eyes. I’ve witnessed that light go out many times before. I recognize the moment for what it is—whatever made Lacey Lacey leaving her body—but I just can’t believe it.
I don’t even believe it when her hand falls limp in mine. It only hits me when Zeth chokes out a single sob. When he lets go of her hand and carefully places it on top of her chest. When he stares down at her lifeless body, a look of utter shock written on his face.
I go to him. I wrap my arms around his shaking, battered and bruised body, and I hold him. He doesn’t acknowledge me. He just continues to stare at his sister. On the floor beside us, Lacey’s body lies in a pool of her own blood. Her expression is strangely serene, and it hits in a wave of hurt that she was right. Everything really is okay for her now. Everything really is okay.
The poor girl who only ever ate the moons out of her favorite cereal because she hoped it would make her invisible. The poor girl who made herself small to feel safe. The poor girl who only ever wanted peace. Conceived of violence. Lived a life of violence. Poor Lacey, the girl who only ever wanted peace…
She dies in violence, too.
I. Can’t. Breathe.
Michael picks up Lacey’s body, his face blank and lost. We follow him. Zeth doesn’t say a word. He’s still completely shut down, apparently nothing going on in his head. Tears still streak silently down my face as we make our way out of the rundown movie theater, leaving Charlie and O’Shannessey’s bodies behind us, along with the dead bodies of two other men I don’t recognize. Michael says they’d come to kill Zeth. I feel no remorse for their deaths.
We’re in a car then. Not one I recognize. It’s bright outside. The sun is shining. I sit in the front with Michael, while Zeth sits in the back with Lacey, her head in his lap. He doesn’t touch her. He stares out the window, blinking at the world. It doesn’t even occur to me to ask where we’re going. The towers and high-rises, the concrete teeth of the city, grow smaller and smaller in the rearview. Seattle disappears.
An hour passes and not a single word is spoken. Michael pulls off the freeway at an obnoxiously big home-and-hardware store, the kind where you can buy chainsaws in bulk. While he’s gone, I reach my hand back through the gap down the side of my seat, and Zeth puts his hand in mine. Michael returns bearing two flat head shovels and a flat look on his face. The shovels go into the trunk. I don’t need to ask what they’re for.
After that, it’s the sky and the freeway and the spreading forest, dark and ominous, that invite us in, deeper and deeper. We don’t see another car for twenty minutes as we pull off the freeway again and wind our way down roads that start off as blacktop and end as dirt tracks, choked and bumpy with the roots of so many trees. I don’t know how long we sit in the car before I realize we’ve stopped moving. A long time, I think.
“We have to move,” Michael says eventually.
Zeth’s fingers twitch, his hand still in mine, but other than that he doesn’t move.
“Zee? We can’t take her back to—”