“What are you looking at me for?”
“Don’t you have some kind of, I don’t know, list of the dead?” Nina asked. “I mean, you know ...”
Alex frowned. “You’re dead, too. Do you have a list?”
Nina held up a finger. “Technically, I’m undead. You, my friend, are dead-dead. And we don’t deal in ghosts.”
Alex raised a challenging eyebrow. “I have a heartbeat. And a pulse. If anyone is dead here, it’s you. You’re way deader than I am. And we don’t deal with ghosts, either. We work strictly souls. Well, angels and souls.”
“Okay! Now that we know that everyone is dead—or undead—can we get back to this? Can we get back to searching for the Vessel? There’s got to be something informative in the journal.” I sounded a lot cooler and more aloof than I felt. In actuality, my fingers were twitching, anxious to devour the journal, to study every nuance of my father that could be culled from his writings. I wanted to know how he dotted his i’s, how he crossed his t’s. I wanted to know if there were long entries thinking about the daughter that he left behind; wanted to know if he wrote about my mother. My memories of her were fuzzy at best, the majority having been fed to me by my grandmother, who raised me after my mother’s passing.
Nina leafed through the journal. “We don’t even know why your father was searching for the Vessel.” Nina paused, cocked her head. “Sophie?”
I looked over my shoulder and Nina held the book open. I read the date—June 16, 1982. “That was eleven days before I was born.” I took the book from her, smoothed my palm over the image sketched on the page. “And that’s my mother.”
Nina came beside me. “Then that must be you.”
Lucas had drawn a very detailed sketch of my mother. She had the same slight smile on her face that I dreamed of. Her long, delicate curls were tied at the nape of her neck and her slim hands held the full swell of a very pregnant belly. Inside the round swell, Lucas had drawn a baby.
“I guess,” I said, trying my best to distance myself from my mother’s familiar eyes.
Nina flipped the page and I blinked. “You again,” she said.
Another baby drawing, this one me, without my mother.
“Why was he drawing pictures of me if he was just going to leave? Why was he drawing me in a journal that he used to log his searches for the Vessel?”
Alex squeezed my hand. “I don’t know, Lawson.”
Nina hugged me to her.
Alex looked from her to me. “I think the real question is—how did Ophelia end up with your father’s journal?”
I peeled Alex’s hand from mine and brushed my fingers through my hair, my eyes still fixed on the journal, on the sketch of me.
“Maybe you should sit down.” Nina’s cold hands pressing against my shoulders rattled me and I stepped away. “Maybe this journal will help answer some questions you have about your father, you know? It could be a good thing.” Nina tried to smile and I forced a nod.
“You know, I think I just need some air,” I said.
“That’s a good idea,” Alex said. “We can go for a walk.”
“Actually, I think I’d like to be alone right now.” I pulled my keys from the ring by the door. “I’m just going to go for a drive.”
I went down to the underground garage and slipped behind the wheel of my new-to-me ’91 Honda Accord. I’d always considered myself more of a rough-and-tumble SUV kind of girl, but since I’d written “My CRV was peeled open like a tin can by a power-crazed wannabe mystic” on my auto policy form—well, eyebrows at my insurance company were raised. After that, I figured a fairly nondescript sedan was a good way to go for a replacement car.
I sunk into my seat and practiced a little bit of deep breathing, determined not to cry. Or scream, or punch the steering wheel, or yell profanities to a man whom I’d never known and who would never hear them. Instead, I turned on the radio and pulled out of the garage into the inky black night, humming along to some throbbing new Lady Gaga beat.
The gentle flow of post-rush-hour traffic went to an immediate, brake-squealing stop-and-go when the sky opened up and started to dump quarter-sized raindrops onto the cement. I groaned and pulled around a soccer mom in an SUV the size of my apartment, angling onto the 280 Freeway exit. I had no idea where I was going, but according to the blurry green freeway sign, I was on my way south to San Jose.
I flipped on my headlights and thought about my father, thought about his careful script in the yellowing pages of the old notebook.
Nina was right; there could be things in that journal that answered my questions about him. If I knew enough about him to have questions.