Hannah set the bag on the table in front of me, then retreated to the opposite side of the room. I peeked inside. Three small, golden biscuits. I saw a bundle of red set on a stone by the side of a trail. I saw Greer. I pushed the bag away from me and looked out the back window through a gap in the curtains. The lawn was overgrown and the flowers Mom had planted our first year were in bloom. The sky was bright and cloudless.
“You haven’t missed much,” she said. “They’ve turned the power back on for now and we’re getting supplies again. Mail too. Astrid got a letter from some long-lost uncle. Don’t think I’ve ever seen her so happy. Other than that, the Marvins sit on their side of the border and stare at us, and we sit on our side and stare at them.”
“They’re stalling,” I said. “As soon as the reporters leave—”
“The adults say they can work something out.”
I laughed. Hannah turned toward the wall. Her lips drew taut, and she took a hard breath. I stared at the floor in front of the couch.
“There’s a cookout in the park tonight,” she said. “I guess everybody’s sick of eating out of the school cafeteria. I thought you might want to—”
“I’m not going to a party.”
“It’s not a—look, the kids want to see you. They want you to come back.”
“I can’t do that. You know I can’t.”
“No,” she said. “I don’t.”
I looked up. A shaft of sunlight had cut across her face.
“It’s like the flu,” she said, that old intensity coming into her eyes. “Right? The way it’s transmitted? These kids would do anything to make sure you never get sick. We can make it work. You just have to want to.”
I lowered my head, twisted at a bit of fabric at the edge of the couch.
Hannah’s voice softened. “They get why you’re here,” she said. “But they miss you. So do I. What do you think?”
“I think if none of you ever met me in the first place, then you wouldn’t have anyone to miss.”
Hannah started to reach out to me, but I got up from the couch and went upstairs to your room. It was as neat as ever. Clothes put away. Desk clean. Books arranged on the shelves alongside your trophies and ribbons from track. Your bed was rumpled, though, which was strange. I wondered if I’d been sleeping there all this time.
I sat on the floor with my back pressed up against the foot of your bed. In front of me were four large plastic bins with blue tops. They were the ones you kept in the attic, so I figured I must have pulled them down at some point. I popped off the lids. The comics inside were just as you left them, alphabetized, with the titles divided by hand-labeled sheets of white cardboard. Alias. Alpha Flight. Avengers. Batman. Blue Devil. The Brotherhood of Wings.
These were the single issues, before they’d been collected into volumes. Mint condition. I pulled them out in a stack and sat there with them in my lap, shuffling through the covers and then dividing them into four piles, one for each of the four volumes. I started at the beginning and worked through the series until I found myself back at Behold, Abaddon.
“So how does it end?”
Hannah was standing in the doorway. Some time must have passed because the light coming in from the window behind her had turned a twilight bluish gray. She nodded toward the comic in my hand.
“He didn’t just end it with everybody dead, did he?”
I shook my head. Hannah sat down behind me, on the far side of the bed.
“So what happened?”
I turned through the pages until I came to Cardinal running through the Aerie as bombs exploded all around him.
“Cardinal had built this experimental time machine,” I said. “He used it to go back a hundred years, to when Liberty City was still Abaddon. He thought that since he knew what was going to happen, he’d be able to stop everything before it started. He thought he could bring his friends back.”
“Did he?”
I moved the last stack. Pulled an issue from the bottom. Cardinal surrounded by a crowd of men and women in rags. His armor shattered and burned, hanging off him in pieces. His wings gone.
“He tried,” I said. “But everyone thought he was crazy. They drove him out of the city and exiled him to the Gardens of Null.”
“And that’s it?”
“There was supposed to be more, but . . .”
“But what?”
I didn’t say anything. Hannah got up from the bed and moved through the room, her hands brushing over your trophies and your pictures and your books. She stopped at your closet and opened the door. Hangers rattled and pressed shirts swayed. Your running shoes were lined up neatly by the hamper. A scent I thought of as distinctly you—grass and sweat and just-washed clothes—drifted into the room.
“Your brother’s not at college, is he?”
I turned and looked out the window by your bed. Lucy’s Promise was a black swell against a gray sky. I thought of the waters of the reservoir and how it felt to dive into them, to feel the world recede as the cold seeped into my veins. More than ever before, I wished that I was Cardinal, the real Cardinal. I wished I could fly out over the Marvin lines and land by that shore. I told myself that if I could, I wouldn’t be such a coward this time. I’d dive in and never come out.