I wish I was still holding the flashlight so I could see his face more clearly. At the same time, I’m terrified of it, and of the distance I might find there. “I left you a note at the Governor,” I said. “I wanted you to meet me here.”
“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.