“I didn’t get it,” he says. I think I hear a coldness in his voice. “I just came to—”
“Stop.” I can’t let him finish. I can’t let him say that he came to pack up, that he doesn’t want to see me again. It will kill me. Love, the deadliest of all deadly things. “Listen,” I say, hiccuping through the words. “Listen, about today . . . It wasn’t my idea. Carol said I had to meet him, and I couldn’t get a message to you. And then we were standing there and I was thinking about you, and the Wilds, and how everything is so changed and how there’s no time, there’s no more time for us, and for a second—a single second—I wished I could go back to how things were before.” I’m not really making any sense, and I know it. The explanation I’d reviewed so many times in my head is getting all screwed up, words leapfrogging over one another. The excuses seem irrelevant: As I’m speaking I realize there’s only a single thing that really matters. Alex and I are out of time. “But I swear I didn’t really wish it. I would never have—if I’d never met you I could never have—I didn’t know what anything meant before you, not really. . . .”
Alex pulls me toward him and wraps his arms around me. I bury my face in his chest. I seem to fit so precisely, just exactly as though our bodies had been built for each other.
“Shhh,” he whispers into my hair. He’s squeezing me so tightly it hurts a little, but I don’t mind. It feels good, like if I wanted to I could lift my feet off the ground and stop trying at all and he’d still be holding me up. “I’m not mad at you, Lena.”
I pull back just a fraction. I know that even in the dark I probably look horrible. My eyes are swelling up and my hair is sticking to my face. Thankfully, he keeps his arms around me. “But you—” I swallow hard, take deep breaths in and out. “You took everything away. All our stuff.”
He looks away for a second. His whole face is swallowed in shadow. When he speaks his voice is over-loud, as though he can only say the words by forcing them out. “We always knew this would happen. We knew that we didn’t have much time.”
“But—but—” I don’t have to say that we’ve been pretending. We’ve been acting as if things would never change.
He places a hand on either side of my face, wipes the tears away with his thumbs. “Don’t cry, okay? No more crying.” He kisses the tip of my nose lightly, then takes one of my hands. “I want to show you something.” There’s a small break in his voice, and I think of things coming unhinged, falling apart.
He leads me to the staircase. Far above us, the ceiling is rotted away in patches, so the stairs are outlined in silvery light. The staircase must have been magnificent at some point, sweeping upward majestically before splitting in two, leading to landings on either side.
I haven’t been upstairs since the first time Alex brought me here with Hana, when we made it a point to explore every room of the house. I didn’t even think to check the second floor earlier this afternoon. Here it’s even darker than downstairs, if possible, and hotter too, a black and drifting mist.
Alex starts shuffling down the hall, past a row of identical wooden doors. “This way.”
Above us, a frantic sound of fluttering: bats, disturbed by the sound of his voice. I let out a little squeak of fear. Mice? Fine. Flying mice? Not so fine. That’s another reason I’ve been sticking to the ground floor. During our initial exploration we came into what must have been the master bedroom—an enormous room, with the half-collapsed beams of a four-poster bed still standing in the middle of it—and looked up into the gloom, and saw dozens and dozens of dark, silent shapes massed along the wooden beams, like horrible black buds dangling along a flower stem, ready to drop. When we moved, several of them opened their eyes and seemed to wink at me. The floor was streaked with bat shit; it smelled sickly sweet.
“In here,” he says, and though I can’t be positive, I think he stops at the door to the master bedroom. I shiver. I have zero desire to see the inside of the Bat Room again. But Alex is emphatic, so I let him open the door and I pass inside in front of him.
As soon as we walk into the room I gasp and stop so suddenly he bumps into me. The room is incredible; it’s transformed.
“Well?” There’s a note of anxiety in Alex’s voice. “What do you think?”
I can’t answer him immediately. Alex has shoved the old bed out of the way, into one of the corners, and swept the floor perfectly clean. The windows—or what windows remain—are flung open, so the air smells like gardenias and night-blooming jasmine, their scents drifting in on the wind from outside. He has arranged our blanket and books in the center of the room and unraveled a sleeping bag there too, surrounding the whole area with dozens and dozens of candles stuck in funny makeshift canisters, like old cups and mugs or discarded Coca-Cola cans, just like they were at his house in the Wilds.
But the best part is the ceiling: or rather, the lack of ceiling. He must have broken through the rotted wood to the roof, and now an enormous patch of sky is once again stretched above our heads. There are fewer stars visible in Portland than on the other side of the border, but it’s still beautiful. Even better, the bats—disturbed from their roost—have gone. Far above us, outside, I see several dark shapes looping back and forth across the moon, but as long as they stay in the open air, they don’t bother me.
All of a sudden it hits me: He did this for me. Even after what happened today, he came and did this for me. Gratitude overwhelms me, and another feeling too, bringing with it a twinge of pain. I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve him. I turn back to him and can’t even speak; his face is lit up with flame and he seems to be glowing, transforming into fire. He is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
“Alex—” I start to say, but can’t finish. Suddenly I’m almost frightened of him, terrified of his absolute and utter perfection.
He leans forward and kisses me. And when he’s pressed so close to me, with the softness of his T-shirt brushing my face and the smell of suntan lotion and grass coming off his skin, he feels less frightening.
“It’s too dangerous to go back to the Wilds.” His voice is hoarse, as though he’s been yelling for a very long time, and a muscle is working furiously in his jaw. “So I brought the Wilds here. I thought you would like it.”
“I do. I—I love it.” I press my hands against my chest, wishing I could somehow be even closer to him. I hate skin; I hate bones and bodies. I want to curl up inside of him and be carried there forever.
“Lena.” Different expressions are passing over his face so quickly I can barely catch them all, and his jaw keeps twitching back and forth. “I know we don’t have much time, like you said. We hardly have any time at all. . . .”
“No.” I bury my face in his chest, wrap my arms around him and squeeze. Unimaginable, incomprehensible: a life lived without him. The idea breaks me—the fact that he’s almost crying breaks me—the fact that he did this for me, the fact that he believes I’m worth it—kills me. He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world. “I won’t do it. I won’t go through with it. I can’t. I want to be with you. I need to be with you.”
Alex grasps my face, bends down to look in my eyes. His face is blazing now, full of hope.
“You don’t have to go through with it,” he says. His words come tumbling out. He’s obviously been thinking about this for a long time and only trying not to say it. “Lena, you don’t have to do anything. We could run away together. To the Wilds. Just go and never come back. Only—Lena, we couldn’t ever come back. You know that, right? They’d kill us both, or lock us up forever. . . . But Lena, we could do it.”