She held the other woman’s face in her hands. “Lynn, come on now. Don’t do this.”
“‘Here is no water but only rock,’” Lynn choked out. “‘Rock and no water and the sandy road.’”
“Lynn!” Lucy shrieked into her face. “You’re not making any sense.”
Lynn’s eyelids fluttered, and the tiniest of smiles snuck into her words. “T. S. Eliot often doesn’t,” she muttered, and then fell still. Her mouth was open, and her swollen tongue remained out, the cracked lips refusing to close back over it.
Lucy let go of her, and Lynn’s head slumped to the side again. Frantic, Lucy ripped at the pack and pulled out the bottle of water they’d pooled together from what remained. Only two inches were left. The rays of the midday sun bounced off it sending tiny gorgeous rainbows across Lynn’s gray face.
She dropped to her knees beside Lynn, jamming her fingers deep into the hair at her temples and jerking her head backward so fiercely they both went over into the dirt.
“Open your eyes,” she screamed at her. “Look at me when you’re telling me you’re leaving me alone.” Lucy peeled Lynn’s eyelids open and her pupils dilated in the sun.
“Can’t close ’em again . . .,” Lynn said. “Too dry.”
Lucy realized there was no reflection on Lynn’s eyes of the tower above, no answering glint from the burning sun. Tears poured from her own eyes as she realized how far gone Lynn was, and she tore the cap from the bottle, pried Lynn’s teeth apart, and dumped water down her throat.
Lynn gagged and convulsed against the force, but Lucy jammed her jaws together and pinched her nose, not pulling her hand away until she saw Lynn swallow. She curled the other woman’s hand around the bottle.
“You’re not dying without me dying too,” Lucy said sternly. “This is one decision you don’t get to make alone.”
The barest suggestion of a smile stretched Lynn’s flaccid lips. “It is what it is,” she said.
And the sun moved across the sky.
Lucy dismissed the flash of light on the horizon as nothing more than a spasm of her dying brain. All her senses felt sharpened as she struggled on, distinctly feeling each contour of the road beneath her, the sound of her frayed and bloodied jean leg dragging against it. Taste alone was elusive, her own tongue now swollen to the point that the idea of fitting food into the increasingly small area of her mouth was ludicrous. Her saliva was gone, her eyes felt like apples left to wither on the tree.
The flash came again, this time bearing with it the faintest hum that in her delirium Lucy mistook for an insect. She waved her hands around her head to fend it off, and the movement sent her to the ground, tearing a hole in her jeans at the knee. The knobby white skin of her kneecap poked through and she stared at it, amazed at how easily her dry skin had peeled away from the lower layers, how slowly her thick blood rose to the surface.
The sound grew louder, and she felt vibration underneath her that seemed to pierce through her skin and rattle her bones. The light on the horizon was gone; in its place a dark shadow hurtled toward her. Her fevered brain struggled to find a word that would make the phenomenon sensible.
“Car,” she croaked, the word sticking in her throat and resisting her enlarged tongue. The single syllable roared through what was left of her logic, and she said it louder, hoping to cut through the fog of fear that had immediately swirled around the one word.
“People,” she said, rising to her feet, not knowing whether to run into the desert and hide or toward them with her arms uplifted. Then she remembered Lynn’s still body left miles behind. Lucy straddled the yellow line in the middle of the road and put her hands into the air, wishing she could touch the light-blue dome that stretched above her and pluck down the merciless yellow glare of the sun.
The car came to a stop in front of her, the waves of heat rolling off its hood so thickly Lucy feared they might knock her over. With her hands still in the air, Lucy said in the strongest voice she could muster, “My name is Lucy, and I can witch water.”
Part Three
CITY
Twenty-Five
Lynn’s skin was so dry it didn’t dimple around the needle when the woman put an IV in her.
“She’ll be fine,” Lucy said. “She’s too proud to die.”
“Pride won’t keep your mom hydrated,” the nurse said simply, and hung a bag of liquid next to the bed Lynn lay in. A thin pulse pressed against Lucy’s fingers, light as the wings of a butterfly. Lucy pressed back against it, not bothering to correct the woman’s assumption that Lynn was her mother.