“What are you talking about, Martha?”
“Nowhere Man. Jim’s musical? Everyone gushed about how brilliant it was. And it was. But it was strange, wasn’t it, how suddenly after weeks of whining, being unable to write a single word, Jim had it all come together on the eve of his debut at Spring Vespers? Like magic?”
She stared at me, her face grave.
“You were the magic.”
I was unable to speak. I felt as if a glaring light were suddenly shining into my eyes.
“You showed them to me the night of the snowstorm. Those dream soundtracks. I never forgot them. I committed the words to heart. I recognized your voice immediately when Jim showed me what he’d written. ‘You’re my Sunday best, my new-car smell, / You’re Chateau Margaux, no zinfandel.’?” Martha shook her head. “Jim thought nothing of passing off your words as his own. Did he say he was just borrowing them? That he’d give you credit later? He swallowed everything around him, leaving nothing behind.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s so funny. For such an energetic person, the space around him was always so cold. And anyway, his grand plans for himself always exceeded his actual talent.”
She shrugged with a look of resignation. I felt a wave of hot emotion in my chest.
“Jim didn’t steal the lyrics from me,” I said. “I gave them to him. They were just sitting in a drawer in the dark, no use to anyone. I had to help him.”
Martha surveyed me so intently, I felt light-headed.
“Everything I’ve done in this Neverworld,” she said, “the good, the weird, the absurd, the exhausting, was for you. Pushing the discussion in a calculated direction. Asking you the pointed questions so I’d appear impartial. Distracting the others from seeing the rot that kept bubbling up around you all the time. Mold, breaking glass, tar, oil, tumbling trees, falling Lookout Towers—God, Bee, it was like trying to hide a typhoon swirling around you, all because of this secret you were hiding. That you were there that night.”
She shook her head, biting her lip.
“I even spent a million hours talking to this kooky professor with scary facial hair and bad breath at Brown to learn the art of persuasion, to implant the idea in all of their heads that you had to go on, because you had to be the one to tell our story.”
My mind was crawling stupidly over her words like a crab, trying to make them out.
What was she talking about? I had voted for Martha. Martha was going to live.
“I couldn’t tell you what I was doing because you’d have tried to stop me. You’d have messed it all up. We had to get to the bottom of Jim’s death for the vote, but you had to stay beyond blame. You had to remain Sister Bee.” She shook her head. “I’m only telling you all this so you’ll know. So you’ll see. Because we all have our words tucked away in notebooks in drawers in the dark. You can’t just give them away, Bee. They’re yours. Like a fingerprint. Like your children. They are the light that shines your way. Without them, you’ll be lost.”
She reached out and gently tucked loose strands of hair behind my ears.
“Never, ever give away your words again.”
Martha. I was so wrong.
“Anyway.” She removed her glasses, folding them, carefully setting them on the seat beside her with a faint smile. “Chapter Seventy-Two. This is only the beginning.”
She stood and, mumbling something that sounded like breadcrumbs, she dove into the water, kicking into the turquoise depths.
I sat there, shaken, unable to move.
So absolutely wrong.
I lurched to my feet, shading my eyes.
“Martha!”
There was no sign of her.
Whitley and Kipling, swimming a few yards away, turned in alarm.
“She was just here. Martha. I—I have to tell her. I have to let her know—” I was untying the skiff, grabbing the oars, crying as I steered the boat between the trees. “Martha!”
I jumped overboard, swam into the darkness, reached out into the empty cold.
When Whitley and Kip hauled me back into the boat, I was sobbing.
“She was just here. And now it’s too late. Too late. Don’t you realize? Martha. She’s never coming back. I have to tell her. She’s gone, and it’s too late now to tell her—”
“Shhh,” said Whitley, hugging me and wiping the tears from my cheeks. “It’s all over now, Bee. Look around. It’s almost gone.”
Look around. It’s almost gone.
If only someone had told me that before. About life. If only I had understood.
We didn’t speak after that. We didn’t need to. All we did was wrap ourselves in the blanket, and gaze out at the water.
Cannon was already somewhere else.
The sun was setting. It had turned the bold orange of children’s paintings, and it was casting a warmth on our faces so gentle it seeped into us, filling every dark hole and lighting every corner. I’d felt this way before, back at Darrow on some ordinary Tuesday with my friends, when one of them said what I felt and life sharpened into focus, as it did sometimes. There was a momentary stillness, a sense of the eternal in the strands of our laughter like windblown ponytails, in the touch of our shoulders, side by side.
Something began to happen to me. Whether it was death or some other state in the mystery of all life, I didn’t know. It pulled me to the bottom of the boat, leaving me staring up at the vast yellow sky. They had more time in their last wake, Kipling and Wit. But they would feel it eventually. I could see them crouched beside me, whispering words I couldn’t hear, uncertain yet unafraid, their hands warm as they squeezed mine, waiting for what came next.
I would never let go of them. Never.
Then their faces dissolved into the darkening day, and I slipped away.
I was floating in milky space.
Something hard was shoved down my throat. I heard footsteps.
“Good morning.” A man was speaking. “How you holding up?”
There was a clattering noise. Someone was beside me.
“I know this is difficult. As I explained yesterday, we’ll be taking this one step at a time. Her weaning parameters look very good. So I’m hoping to remove her breathing tube today. We need to see if she can follow commands.”
There was a flurry of activity, hushed whispering. A hand touched my arm.
“Beatrice? Can you open your eyes for me?”
I blinked. All I could see were streaks of color.
“Oh, my God.”
“Beatrice?”
“There. There she goes….”
“Bumblebee?”
“Can you show me two fingers?”
Dizziness. I was floating in a swamp. I tried to lift my hand. My throat was on fire.
“What about your other hand? That’s great. Wiggle your toes.”
Someone was leaning over me. Suddenly a light beamed into my eyes, sending a hot purple pinball knocking around my skull.
I blinked again.
That was when I saw a TV on the wall. It was a morning talk show, the sound muted, the date at the bottom of the screen snapping into focus.
7:21 a.m. September 10.
I was alive.
As I fell back into the warm, watery darkness, my final conversation with Martha drifted through my head. It felt like she’d just left me moments ago. Her confession had turned me inside out. It was the secret I’d kept so deep inside my heart it had actually remained buried, out of sight, like a missing airplane that had vanished with such totality, some questioned whether the passengers had even existed.
Whitley hadn’t realized how right she was.
When you think about it, we all killed Jim.
No one had ever questioned me—not my friends, not the police, not my parents. No one. Because I was the good one, Sister Bee.
I’m going to the quarry. Meet me.