Sean whispers, “I can’t wait until this is all over.” “Me, neither,” I whisper back. We keep walking. The sky is dark. Our only guides are the yellow light coming from the cracked street lamps and the faint white glow of the moon.
Finally Sean stops walking in front of a narrow gray house, with a heavy brass 1414 hung upon the blue front door. “This is it,” he says in a voice that no longer sounds like his own. Sean grabs the doorknob. He turns it. The door is unlocked. Sean whispers, “Fate.”
He opens the door. There’s a skinny staircase leading up with a yellow paper lantern dangling above it. Sean takes the gun out from under his shirt with shaking hands. He whispers, “Go.” And I start walking slowly up the stairs.
Right foot.
Left foot.
Right foot.
Left foot.
“Call her name now,” he whispers.
I take a deep breath. “Nina,” I call out.
“Louder,” he says.
Right foot.
Left foot.
Right foot.
“NINA,” I say again.
“That wasn’t loud enough,” Sean says.
Left foot.
Right foot.
“NINAAAAAA!” No answer. “NIIIIIINNNNNNN-AAAAAA!!!!!”
Left foot.
Right foot.
Left foot.
“Belly?” We hear a voice coming through the door at the top of the stairs, very quiet, barely more than a whisper.
My heart stops. “Belly? Is that you?”
Sean’s breath catches in his throat.
I squeeze my eyes shut and I inhale deeply. I smell sweetness and spice. Oranges and ginger. Nina. I’m not scared anymore.
We reach the top of the stairs and push through the door. We’re in a large living room—dark wood floors, big fluffy couches, framed drawings covering every last bit of wall space, and there, standing by herself in the center of the room, is my sister.
My sister.
Looking both exactly like and completely different from the person I remember.
Our eyes meet just for a moment, and I feel a warmth spreading outward from the middle of my chest. When she sees me she starts to smile, but then she looks behind me, at Sean, and stops. Her jaw drops, her lips pull back. It looks like she’s screaming only no sound is coming out. I have never in my life seen Nina afraid before. But now, she is terrified.
She is not supposed to be terrified.
My heart pounds painfully in my chest. Icy sweat springs out of every pore in my body.
She is not supposed to be fucking terrified!
That final call that came in on Sean’s cell phone back at the motel, the one that I answered with my feet, I thought that was Nina. I thought I heard her voice saying hello through the phone. And I thought she had been listening to everything Sean and I were saying after I kicked the phone under the desk. I thought she knew we were coming to Haight Street. And I thought she was leading us to her. I thought she was going to save us.
But I was wrong.
Everything I thought was wrong.
“Nina,” I hear Sean’s voice over my shoulder. I turn. He’s staring at her, his nostrils flared, his eyes glowing. He barely even looks human.
“Sean,” she says. “What are you doing here?”
Sean reaches for the gun inside his shirt.
“I think you already know that,” he says. “This is for what you did to me…” He sounds like he’s reciting lines from a script he rehearsed in his head a thousand times over. “This is for what you made me do to him.”
He raises his arms, the gun clutched between his shaking hands.
Nina just stands there, frozen, staring.
The gun is pointing straight at her.
This is it.
This is it.
This.
Is.
It.
And then, an explosion. Not a bullet out of the gun, but something within me: Nina is not the only one who can save us.
Suddenly I am flying through the air screaming, “LEAVE MY SISTER ALONE!!!”
I stretch out my arm, catching Sean right under his chin, snapping his head back, hard. And then I slam both my shoulders into the middle of his stomach with everything I’ve fucking got. We tumble down to the floor. Sean lands on his back, a wheezy whistling noise escapes from his lips. The gun is knocked from his hand and slides spinning across the wood.
And for a moment we are all silent and completely still. I don’t think a single one of us can quite believe what I’ve just done.
“FREEZE! PUT YOUR HANDS ABOVE YOUR HEAD!” I look up. Five uniformed police officers have materialize out of the shadows. They stand over us, their guns cocked and aimed at our heads. Sean turns to the side, the expression on his face one of such complete and utter bewilderment that for a second I actually feel sorry for him.
But just for a second.
“What’s going on!?” he says. “Ellie? Ellie?!”
All I can do is shake my head.
A police officer yanks his arms behind his back and cuffs him. Another one starts to read him his rights. Two others lift him up, his body limp like a doll’s, his head hanging down. His feet just barely brush against the ground as he is carried backward toward the door.
But right before he is pulled through, he looks up, and there is a hint of something else on his face. Something that looks an awful lot like relief.