Bobby opened and shut his mouth like he was a catfish stuck wriggling on the bottom of dried-up Lake Moultrie. He didn’t say a word.
“That’s more like it.” Lena smiled and picked up our visitor badges from the counter.
“So long, Bobby,” I said as we headed out back.
The farther we made it down the hall, the sweeter the air and the thicker the smell. I looked in the doors of the rooms we passed, each one like some kind of messed-up Norman Rockwell painting—where only crappy things were happening, frozen into little snapshots of pathetic life.
An old man sat in a hospital bed, his head wrapped in white bandages that made it appear gigantic and surreal. He looked like some kind of alien, flipping a little yo-yo on a metal track, back and forth. A woman sat in the chair across from him, stitching something inside a wood hoop. Probably part of some needlepoint he would never see. She didn’t look up, and I didn’t slow down.
A teenage boy lay in another bed, his hand moving across some paper on top of a fake wood-grain tray table. He was staring off into space, drooling, but his hand kept writing and writing, as if it couldn’t help itself. The pen didn’t seem to be moving across the paper; it was more like the letters were writing themselves. Maybe every word he’d ever written was in that one big pile of letters, each one stacked up on top of the next. Maybe it was his whole life story. Maybe it was his masterpiece. Who knew? Who cared? Not Bobby Murphy.
I resisted the urge to go take the paper and try to decode it.
Motorcycle accident?
Probably. I don’t want to think about it, L.
Lena squeezed my hand, and I tried not to remember her, barefoot and helmetless, on the back of John Breed’s Harley.
I know it was stupid.
I pulled her away from that door.
A little girl at the end of the hall had a roomful of folks, but it was the saddest birthday party I’d ever seen. She had a Stop & Steal cake and a table covered with cups of what looked like cranberry juice, covered with plastic wrap. That was about it. The cake had a number five on it, and the family was singing. The matches weren’t lit.
Probably can’t light them in here, Ethan.
What kind of crappy birthday is that?
The thick sweetness of the air grew worse, and I glanced through an open doorway that led into some kind of hallway kitchen. Cases of Ensure, liquid food, were piled from floor to ceiling. That was the smell—the food that wasn’t food. For these lives that weren’t lives.
For my Aunt Prue, who had slipped away into the vast unknown when she was supposed to be asleep in her bed. My Aunt Prue, who had charted unknown Caster Tunnels with the precision of Amma working on one of her crossword puzzles.
It was all too horrible to be real. But it was. All of it was happening, and not in some Tunnel where space and time was different than in the Mortal world. This was happening in Greater Gatlin County. It was happening in my own hometown, to my own family.
I didn’t know if I could face it. I didn’t want to see Aunt Prue this way. I didn’t want to remember her like this.
Sad doorways and an open can of Ensure, in a puke-peach hall.
I almost turned around, and I would have—but then I reached the other side of the doorway, and the smell of the air changed. We were there. I knew because the doorway was open, and the particular scent of the Sisters crept out. Rose water and lavender, from those little bundles the Sisters kept in their drawers. It was distinctive, that smell, the one I hadn’t paid much attention to all the times I listened to their stories.
“Ethan.” Lena stepped in front of me. I could hear the distant hum of machines beyond her, in the room.
“Come on.” I stepped toward her, but she put her hands on my shoulders.
“You know, she might not be—there.”
I tried to listen, but I was distracted by the sounds of the unknown machines, doing unknown things to my entirely known aunt.
“What are you talking about? Of course she’s there. It says her name, right there on the door.” Which it did, on the kind of whiteboard you’d find in a college dorm, in faded black dry-erase marker.
STATHAM, PRUDENCE.
“I know her body is there. But even if she’s there, your Aunt Prue, with all the things that make her your Aunt Prue—she might not be there.”
I knew what she was saying, even if I didn’t want to. Which, a thousand times more than anything, I didn’t.
I put my hand on the door. “Are you saying you can tell? The way Link could smell her blood and hear her heart? Would you be able to—find her?”
“Find what? Her soul?”
“Is that something a Natural can do?” I could hear the hope in my voice.
“I don’t know.” Lena looked like she was about to cry. “I’m not sure. I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to do. But I don’t know what.”
She looked away, down to the other end of the hall. I could see a watery streak work its way down the side of her jaw.