SYDNEY woke up the next morning in the too-large bed in the strange hotel, for a moment unsure of where, when, or how she was. But as she blinked away sleep, the details trickled back, the rain and the car and the two peculiar men, both of whom she could hear talking beyond the door.
Mitch’s brusque tone and Victor’s lower, smoother one, seemed to seep through the walls of her room. She sat up, stiff and hungry, and adjusted the oversized sweatpants on her hips before wandering out in search of food.
The two men were standing in the kitchen. Mitch was pouring coffee and talking to Victor, who was absently crossing out lines in a magazine. Mitch looked up as she walked in.
“How’s your arm?” asked Victor, still blacking out words.
There was no pain, only a stiff feeling. She supposed she had him to thank for that.
“It’s fine,” she said. Victor set his pen aside and rolled a bag of bagels across the counter toward her. In the corner of the kitchen sat several bags of groceries. He nodded at them.
“Don’t know what you eat, so…”
“I’m not a puppy,” she said, fighting back a smile. She took a bagel and rolled the bag back across the counter, where it butted up against Victor’s magazine. She watched him black out the lines of text, and remembered the article from last night, and the photo that went with it, the one she’d been reaching for when Victor woke. Her eyes drifted back to the couch. It wasn’t there anymore.
“What’s wrong?”
The question brought her back. Victor had his elbows on the counter, fingers loosely intertwined.
“There was a paper over there last night, with a picture on it. Where is it?”
Victor frowned, but slid the newspaper page out from under the magazine, and held it up for her to see. “This?”
Sydney felt a shiver, somewhere down deep.
“Why do you have a picture of him?” she asked, pointing at the grainy shot of the civilian beside the block of mostly blacked-out text.
Victor rounded the counter in slow, measured steps, and held the article up between them, inches from her face.
“Do you know him?” he asked, eyes alight. Sydney nodded. “How?”
Sydney swallowed. “He’s the one who shot me.”
Victor leaned down until his face was very close to hers. “Tell me what happened.”
XXXI
LAST YEAR
BRIGHTON COMMONS
SYDNEY told Serena about the incident in the morgue, and Serena laughed.
It wasn’t a happy laugh, though, or a light laugh. Sydney didn’t even think it was an oh-dear-my-sister-has-brain-damage-or-delusions-from-drowning laugh. There was something stuck in the laugh, and it made Sydney nervous.
Serena then told Sydney, in very calm, quiet words (which should have struck Sydney as odd right then and there because Serena had never been terribly calm or quiet) not to tell anyone else about the morgue, or the body in the hall, or anything even remotely related to resurrecting dead people, and to Sydney’s own amazement, she didn’t. From that moment, she felt no desire to share the strange news with anyone but Serena, and Serena seemed to want nothing to do with it.
So Sydney did the only thing she could. She went back to middle school, and tried not to touch anything dead. She made it to the end of the school year. She made it through the summer … even though Serena had somehow convinced the faculty to let her do a trip to Amsterdam for credit, and didn’t come home, and when Sydney heard this she was so mad she almost wanted to tell or show someone what she could do, just to spite her sister. But she didn’t. Serena always seemed to call, just before Sydney lost her temper. They would talk about nothing, just filling up space with how-are-yous and how-are-the-folks and how-are-classes and Sydney would cling to the sound of her sister’s voice even though the words were empty. And then, as she felt the conversation ending, she’d ask Serena to come home, and Serena would say no, not this time, and Sydney would feel lost, alone, until her sister would say I’m not gone, I’m not gone, and Sydney would somehow believe her.
But even though she believed those words with a simple, unshakeable faith, it didn’t mean they made her happy. Sydney’s slow-beating heart began to sink over the fall, and then Christmas came and Serena didn’t, and for some reason her parents—who’d always been adamant about one thing, and that was spending Christmas together, as if one well-represented holiday could make up for the other 364 days—didn’t seem to mind. They hardly even noticed. But Sydney noticed, and it made her feel like cracking glass.
So it’s no surprise that when Serena finally called and invited her to come visit, Sydney broke.
*