We fell into an angry silence, and I thought about Elijah instead. How did his powers work? What was he doing? Why was he going to grief counseling, and visiting Merrill Evans, and everything else? What did he do that he didn’t have to do?
He surrounded himself with death and darkness—the night shifts, the mortuary, the grief thing—and I could understand that. He lived the kind of life I’d love: no entanglements, no crowds, just peace and quiet and bodies to take care of. But I knew that I was different from most people, and most people don’t like those things. Why was he so much like me? Is that why I wanted so badly for him not to be hunting us—for him not to be the bad guy? Because I wanted him to be like me?
“Diana,” I said, “why would you surround yourself with death?”
“That’s … kind of a deep question. Are you asking why I became a sniper?”
“No, I mean if you were Elijah. Or maybe, I don’t know. Why did you become a sniper?”
“Don’t pretend like you suddenly want to talk about me,” said Diana. “If you just want to brainstorm that’s fine, you don’t have to get all awkward about it because I misunderstood you.”
“I’m not pretending,” I said. “I just want to know why someone would live like that—is he damaged? Is he scared? Maybe your feelings would help explain his; I’m just grasping at straws.”
“So I’m damaged now?” asked Diana.
“You surround yourself with death,” said Potash to me. “Why do you do it?”
“That’s different—”
“Why?” he demanded.
I hesitated. “Because I enjoy it.”
“Maybe Elijah does, too,” said Diana. “He ‘remembers’ right? That’s his power? Well, maybe it’s like a memorial thing—he likes the solitude so he can pay his respects to the dead people he ‘remembers.’ You told me that was a big part of the job for you when you worked in your mother’s mortuary.”
“That doesn’t hold together,” I said. “If he liked death for the same reasons I like death, he wouldn’t be at grief counseling.”
“Because you don’t get sad?” asked Diana.
“Because death is quiet,” I said. My heart sped up, like I’d gotten a burst of adrenaline from somewhere, but I was just sitting in the car. “Death doesn’t move, and it doesn’t talk, and it doesn’t … make noise.” I almost said “yell,” but that seemed so on-the-nose, it made me grimace just for thinking it. It wasn’t even the full reason. Marci never yelled at me, and she was dead, too, and that didn’t make me happy at all. My dad never yelled anymore, at least not where I could hear him, and he was still completely alive. The answer wasn’t that easy. I mumbled for a minute, wondering what I’d even been talking about, trying to regain my footing in the conversation. “Grief counseling is a thing you do with people,” I said at last. “They’re alive, and you listen to them talk. I would never do that. He’s not like me.”
“Those counseling sessions are where people talk about the dead,” said Diana. “They remember their loved ones. Maybe for Elijah it’s something more—maybe he needs to remember, in order to survive. It’s all about what they lack, right? So he needs other people’s memories because he doesn’t have his own. Maybe counseling helps keep those memories … fresh, or whatever.”
“Except he’s only done it the one time,” I said. “We’ve been watching him for weeks, and he’s only gone there once.” And then there was the answer, just staring me in the face. “He’s not remembering the dead,” I said. “He’s remembering the living.”
“That’s not grief counseling,” said Diana. “That’d be some other therapy group.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Nobody goes out of their way to remember the living,” said Potash. “Not unless they’re lost, like with the MIA memorial. The rest of the time we just remember the dead.”
“We remember the dead because we’re alive,” I said. “Maybe for dead people it’s the other way around.” I felt my eyes grow hot as I spoke, threatening tears, but I gritted my teeth and blinked them away. “And that’s who Elijah spends all his time with: dead people.”
There was silence in the car for a moment, and then Diana began to nod. “Dead people from this community.”
“Who else was at that grief session?” asked Potash.
“Exactly,” I said. “If Elijah is absorbing the memories of the recently dead, those grief counseling sessions would be full of people he knows—or thinks he knows. He might be there to meet one in person, which is why he only started going recently. He’s meeting someone related to a very recent death.”
“I’m driving,” said Diana, “one of you call Ostler.”