Pete frowned. She was worried he would tell her she was being crazy again, and that she would start to cry, but he just shook his head.
“Look. I can’t imagine what it’s like for you—” He broke off, shaking his head. “I mean, being with her. Seeing your face . . .” He smiled but only barely. “It’s weird even for me. When you’re standing next to each other . . .” He reached out and knuckled the counter, like there was an insect there he needed to crush. “I’d be freaking out too.”
Gemma felt a chill go through her. She was a cold mist, barely hanging together. “You think I’m freaking out,” she said.
He looked at her. Pale eyelashes. Freckles, lips, the coral inside of his nose. She’d studied his face so often—thinking it beautiful, thinking it hers. But the face was just collision, random physical accumulation that meant nothing.
“Anyone would freak out.” He tried to take her hand but she balled her fist, and weirdly enough her other hand, the injured one, pulsed with sudden pain, as if she’d balled that instead. “She’s not you. She’s nothing like you. You shouldn’t be afraid.”
“I don’t think she’s like me,” Gemma said. “I don’t think she’s anything like me.”
But she realized, even as she said it, that this wasn’t exactly true. Wasn’t that the whole point? She could have been Calliope, and Calliope could have been her. People became different bodies by chance or accident or God, depending on what you believed; but if you had the same body, the same voice, the same hair and fingers and eyes and nails, then how did you know the difference? She would have to separate from Calliope, cleave her like some horrible head in a fairy tale, and even then she would have that doubleness inside her.
“Go rinse off,” Pete said, in a voice she hated: it was a tone her father used, hooking onto an I know best kind of thing. “It will make you feel better. I promise. By the time you get out, what do you want to bet we’ll be hitching a ride back to the twenty-first century in a buggy?”
Gemma couldn’t smile, even though she knew he was only trying to help. She wouldn’t let him help her to the washroom, either, even though she was hobbling on her swollen ankle and had to lean on the furniture for support.
The bathtub was old and spotted with rust. Pete had left blood behind, too, a faint ring of it where the water had turned color, and more funneling toward the drain. She pumped for water and was shocked by how cold it was. But at the same time she liked it, and liked the smell, too, like spring soil, and dirt newly turned over.
She stripped out of the clothes she’d been issued at the holding center and maneuvered into the tub, trying not to put weight on her ankle and careful, too, not to use her left hand. The shock of cold water even at her ankles made her gasp, and instinctively she went for a knob that wasn’t there. Then she wanted to cry again, not for the lack but for all the things she had always used, for how lucky she was and for her life, pure and simple, for the ability to stand naked and hurt ankle deep in cold water. She was alive: she’d made it out. Goose pimples raised the hair on her thighs and forearms. The water took blood from her skin and swirled it into pink. She was ugly and damaged, and for an instant, she didn’t care: she was alive. Her ribs held her, her heart held her, the world held her. It bound her like a promise.
Pete was right: she did feel better, infinitely better, once she’d watched a film of soot and dirt and blood wash away, as if it was carrying the memory of what had happened. Still, she was uneasy. She hadn’t heard anyone come back. The house was still silent, still wound up, like a coiled spring.
There were towels pegged to the wall, and she took one. In an adjacent room she found a closet full of dresses like the one Calliope had chosen, and she rooted around in a drawer until she found pants, a white shirt, and a dark vest, all of them obviously meant for a guy. But a pair of sandals wedged beneath the simple bed fit her pretty well, and she almost laughed when, feeling something crunch in the pocket of the vest, she fished out a half-empty pack of Marlboro Lights and a Bic lighter decorated with a peeling Steelers logo.
So. There were rule breakers here, too.
Pete wasn’t in the kitchen, although he’d swept up the glass. Calliope wasn’t back, either. In an instant, all her good feeling was swept away; she stood drowning in the air, in the emptiness. She was alone.
She was suddenly terrified. She launched herself to the door, ignoring the pain in her ankle, crying out: there was something behind her, something too terrible to look at; the weight of her fear had transformed into a monster.
She was outside, and the light was blinding. The cows moving across the pasture calmed her only slightly. She was alone and lost. She was shouting Pete’s name without even meaning to, and when she saw movement inside the barn, the shift of color and shadow, she went toward it with her arms outstretched.
“Don’t. Don’t.” His voice stopped her. She’d never heard anyone sound like that, and in that moment, though she was still standing in the sun, the shadow of the monster behind her reached out and swallowed them. “Don’t come in here. Don’t.”
For a moment he was still invisible. He was corners of himself, an arm and a leg, trying to move out of sticky darkness. And she was drawn toward him, to reach him, to pull him away, and so even as he plunged outside, like someone diving in reverse, she saw behind him the shoes attached to the ankles, and an arm—a small arm, a young arm—held motionless in a slant of light. Even if she hadn’t, she would have known by Pete’s face: it was as if all the skin had come off, as if the fear had come down and planed away everything else.
The barn is where the animals go to die.
He grabbed her, and this time Gemma felt that he was the one in danger of falling. “We can’t stay here,” he said. “We’ve got to get out of here. We have to get out now.” There was blood on his shoes.
She couldn’t move. Her thoughts had frozen: they were rattling together like cubes in a tray. “What happened?” she asked, even though she knew. But she couldn’t quite make sense of it—that pale child’s arm reaching into a triangle of sun, and a man’s feet fanned apart. Bodies.
“Jesus.” Pete was crying. He turned away from her and bent to put his hands on his knees, trying to breathe, retching a little. “Jesus Christ.” He just kept saying it, over and over, Jesus, Jesus, and Gemma felt the clean brightness of the sky above them, felt all the emptiness of that endless hurtle into space.
“She killed them,” she said. The words didn’t sound real. Pete just nodded. He was still doubled over. She wanted to put a hand on his back, but she couldn’t make her arm obey the command.
The barn is where the animals go to die.