She kneels like a penitent begging God to take everything, and the woman in front of her seems eager to oblige. She has knocked most of the books off the shelf that holds her; it moves slightly with each lunge. I grab Julie under the armpits and drag her back a few feet. Her body is a loose pile, far heavier than it should be. She stares ahead blankly like her emotions have shattered.
Was she expecting it? Could she possibly have known? A mad hope, perhaps, a fevered wish festering in her heart, but I can’t believe she ever imagined the reality of this.
Her mother. Dead but not dead. Stepping out of dreams and into a nightmare.
This woman died a long time ago, but I wouldn’t have guessed from her appearance. Whatever inner fire allowed me to stave off the rot through all my years of roaming, Julie’s mother must have it too. She is gray, emaciated, her blond hair a mass of scabby dreadlocks, but her face retains the graceful beauty I saw in that photo. It’s twisted by her ravenous sneer, her rows of yellowed teeth, but it’s there. My sentimental mind swells with visions of her returning to the Living, whisking Julie away from the orphanage and healing all her bruises.
But then my eyes deliver a more rational report. Like all the Dead in this place, Julie’s mother is naked. Her skin bears constellations of knife and bullet wounds, the inevitable result of a life sustained on violence. Comparing them to M’s injuries, I feel confident that Nora could repair them on the joyous day they begin to bleed. But this woman didn’t die from bullets. This woman peeked into her daughter’s room, saw that she was asleep, and wandered into the city alone. Perhaps she walked in solemn silence, or perhaps she spit and howled at the night, tearing her clothes and her hair, screaming at the Dead to come and take what they destroyed the world to get.
And the Dead obeyed.
Although her face is unscathed, her body has been gnawed like meat left out for rats. Large chunks are missing from her calves and thighs and I can see the exposed muscles spasming to produce her lurching movements. Any of these bites would have been enough to convert her, but she could have recovered from them too if she ever shook off the plague. What is draining the sunny glow from my fantasies is the gaping absence where the left half of her rib cage should be. I can see her remaining lung drooping against her spine, tinted gray from the pallor of death and black from too many cigarettes. I can see her lifeless heart.
This hole, of course, is where Julie’s gaze has settled. She has already done the math. Her face remains still except for the glimmer of tears streaming down it.
I want a god to curse. I’ll take any of them, all of them; I’ll scream and blaspheme till lightning shuts me up. Someone has to answer for such preposterous cruelty, such monstrously drawn-out torture. But I am pounding on the door of an empty house. It’s just us. It’s just me, Julie, and her mother. And the three men in beige jackets marching toward us down the aisle.
“Who the hell are you?” one of them shouts. “How did you get in here?”
Julie shoves past me and strides down the aisle. Her shotgun is back in her hands and it’s firing—pump—firing—pump—firing.
The cavernous space rumbles with low reverberations. Three men lie dead on the floor, their brains mingled in a puddle between them, perhaps sharing a final confused thought.
I watch Julie search their bodies. She looks faraway and somehow removed from the room, like I’m watching her through a telescope. I know that Julie has killed people. She’s told me about some of them, from her first at age ten—stabbing a man in the back while he was choking her father—to her most recent less than a year ago: a standard rapist-in-the-bushes situation. But this is the first time I’ve watched her do it, and I’m troubled by how much it shakes me. Like I didn’t truly believe her until now.
She pulls a set of keys out of one of the guards’ jackets and walks past me to her mother. She unlocks the padlock on the cable, freeing it from the bookshelf. Her mother hisses and lunges toward her.
Julie punches her.
“Stop it,” she says in a hard, flat voice. “I’m your daughter. You’re Audrey Maude Arnaldsdóttir and I’m your daughter.”
Audrey stares at her with wide eyes and an open mouth. Then she lunges again.
Julie punches her so hard she falls back into the bookshelf.
“And you’re a coward,” Julie continues, her voice beginning to tremble. “And a quitter. And a fucking child. But you’re a human being, and you’re going to fucking act like one.”
Audrey rests against the bookshelf with her jaw hanging open, her eyes roaming around the room, refusing to meet Julie’s gaze. It’s impossible to tell if she understood anything Julie said, let alone whether it sparked any remembrance, but she seems momentarily pacified.
“Watch her,” Julie says to me, and steps out of the aisle.
Audrey and I share an uncomfortable silence while Julie clatters around the library.
“I’m R,” I mumble, putting my hand out to her in an absurd reflexive gesture.