“You didn’t love him,” Boppit said.
“And he didn’t love her.” Lilly nodded.
“He thought he did.” This from Boppit. “But what did he know?”
Lilly sighed. “So handsome. And all that money. You know, he would have been happy spending the rest of his life with you.”
“But she wouldn’t have been happy giving the rest of her life to him,” Boppit said. “He would have bored you sooner or later, Neave.”
“Maybe I would have bored him,” I said.
“No. He didn’t want enough from you to be bored by you.”
“In your own way,” Dead Lilly said to me, “you’re actually greedier about love than I ever was.’”
“One more?” I had the knife in one hand and a piece of bread poised above the toaster coils. Maybe this would be enough, I thought: me and Dead Lilly and Boppit running the company days and toasting bread nights, Annie secure and happy with Janey and Todd, Snyder hamstering away with his fantasy art. I could live like this, couldn’t I?
“It’s not like I’m alone. I have you two now,” I said. “I have Annie and Jane and sometimes in a pinch I can even count Snyder.”
Bop stopped and fiddled with a strap on his platform Mary Janes. He was in a youthful mood, he’d said when I saw them and asked why he picked them up in the first place. He was being sentimental. “For now.”
“What do you mean, ‘For now’? How long is ‘now’?”
“Don’t you worry about it.”
But from where I stood at the moment it looked worrisome. I’d become somebody who needed them. “Do you mean ‘Don’t worry because we aren’t leaving for decades,’ or ‘Don’t worry because worrying is a waste of time’?”
Boppit said, “We mean ‘Don’t worry.’”
I had an uncomfortably sharp view of myself sitting there in the middle of the night, talking to a uniformed dog in shiny Mary Janes and a figure that I accepted as my dead sister.
“Shhh,” Boppit said suddenly. His ears popped up and his expression got focused, though not on anything in the room. He whined softly.
Dead Lilly set a buttered crust down. Her expression was more serious than I’d seen it since she first arrived, her eyes black as the panes of glass behind her.
“We have to leave you for a bit,” Boppit said soberly.
“You’re not leaving me for good, are you?” The idea of their disappearing was so much more terrible than the fact of their having come to me in the first place. “Please don’t leave.”
Boppit’s eyebrows had popped up in that worried, protective look he used to have when he lay by my bed and kept watch in our childhood room. “We’re not exactly in charge, Neavie.”
I reached out to touch his uniformed arm, but when my hand got to it, the fabric had no substance. Only the day before I’d touched it and felt sturdy cotton. Now my hand floated through the arm and I jerked it away. He and Lilly got dim, then wispy.
I tried to settle in without them. More tired than I’d known I was, I almost immediately fell into a state I wouldn’t so much call being asleep as being unconscious. And in this state I had what in other times in my life I would have called a dream: Max Luhrmann and I were on Mars, with the whole lightless universe as a background. Hunched behind us were Bop and Lilly. I could feel their feelings. There was a touch of ferocity about their mood: They were on guard; they were a little frightened. In the dream Dead Lilly put her arm around me and I could hear her thoughts. She was thinking “Goodbye,” and every part of me rang like an alarm had gone off in my chest.
I swam up from the dream and looked frantically around for Lilly and Boppit, who were not there. I wanted to wake up like I had when I was twelve years old and be greeted with Boppit’s direct gaze and thumping tail. His eyes would catch whatever streetlight made its way into the room and I would lie down again, and sleep. But he was not here with me now.
I searched around the side of the bunk for something to read. The usual pile lay by my side: a few magazines, my copy of The Pirate Lover, a spare copy of Jane Eyre I’d picked up at a used bookshop. The one I’d read with Mrs. Daniels lived on a shelf in my apartment. This backup edition was an old-fashioned blocky thing bound in Moroccan leather, designed more to take up a lot of space on a library shelf than to be read. It weighed upward of six pounds and had a spine as thick and horny as wood. Some deeply stupid editor had decided to illustrate it with sighing maidens and flower-choked weddings. When I’d first found it I’d hefted it up and flipped through hoping to find drawings of scenes I had imagined with Mrs. Daniels: the pacing, feral wife in Mr. Rochester’s attic, the lightning-shattered chestnut tree where Rochester had first kissed Jane, the flames spiraling up his bedroom curtains. Nope. I’d bought it anyhow. Now it lay open in front of me to a page with an insipid young woman playing a piano. She was smiling flirtatiously, tipping her head and batting her eyelashes in a way that Jane Eyre would find contemptible. This improbable ninny was looking up at a slender man, who smiled goofily back, just as Rochester would never smile. I sighed, flipped the page, and fell asleep for the second time that night.
When I woke again my bunk was rocking. A low throb worked its way right through the wood and into my body. I reached for the light, flipped its switch. No power in the cabin, yet through its window I saw that a dim light shone on deck. Someone had disconnected the generator from the cabin. The Rubber Duck was moving, chugging almost silently along at no more than two or three knots, but moving.
“Boppit?” I whispered hopefully. “Lilly?” No answer. I was alone, except for whoever or whatever had untied the Rubber Duck and pointed her out to sea. As my eyes adjusted I found that enough light came through the windows for me to navigate around the cabin. The Rubber Duck hit a wave head-on, dipped down, and rose up. I pushed the blankets back, noticing that my hands were shaking. I swung my legs over the side and went to the door. The latch was locked or jammed, immovable.
“Hello!” I yelled. “What’s going on?” But my body had already told me what was going on. The inside of my chest was filled with something electric, churning.
“Ricky?” I called. “What do you want?” Silence. Only the thrumming, low-level gears, the occasional slap of a wave on the hull. “Ricky!”