brought her home with him.
More chills, more salty sweat. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Darkness threatened. Molly fought back to consciousness.
What were the laws of this place? The rain would purify them. Her bones would mingle with his. But then?
“Duncan?” she called to his spirit. Had he joined that never-ending patrol around the tower? Or flung himself up into the canopy? “Where are you?”
Suddenly she was afraid. She wanted reassurance. She had no answers, only more questions. Would she go out into the world with him now, or would they stay to wander through the ruins? How did it work? Would they take on disguises? Enter cities? Cross the oceans? Haunt the future? They could live a thousand lives. But in giving birth to themselves, would they forget their anchoring bones? Would they come to forget each other?
They had voices. Where was his voice? “Duncan?”
The flak jacket had fallen open. There was something in the pocket, an edge of plastic. She tugged and it was a sandwich bag containing a snapshot.
The photo was dog-eared and harshly faded. Even without the “Dec. ’69” penned on the back, Molly knew the era by its chemicals and paper. She could have guessed the basic image. It was straight out of a war movie, the girlfriend picture.
Wife, she amended, glancing at Duncan’s wedding band. The young woman had one, too. She was flashing it proudly, with bravura, grinning at their in-joke. Six or seven months pregnant, she was dressed—barely—in a polka-dot bikini. She’d snagged her man in the nick of time.
Molly laid her head on the flak jacket and studied the photo, sliding into its story. Duncan had taken it. They were on a beach. It was Hawaii, in the middle of his deployment to Vietnam. She wore a flower lei. Molly liked her. She was audacious, ripe to bursting, and wildly in love with the photographer. A real firecracker.
She did the math. Duncan had been twenty. A few months later, he had become a dad. A few months after that, he had faced his killer in this city of the dead.
Her face eluded Molly. The girl’s hair cast a shadow, and that bulging tummy drew the eye. But that wasn’t the difficulty. The face made no sense to her.
The girl had a hundred-watt smile and a sloe-eyed green gaze. A pair of rose-colored sunglasses perched on top of her bushy black hair. The humidity had blown her pixie cut to chaos. Molly could relate. Atomic hair, she called it. That’s why she’d chopped hers short with surgical scissors. Black Irish did not go well with the tropics.
Molly stopped. The air leaked from her.
She refused it. She had to be projecting. The fever was scrambling her mind. The ruins were stealing into her the way she had stolen into them, in darkness and fog. One step deeper, it seemed, and she might disintegrate.
The picture blurred, then sharpened. She struggled against it, then with it, finding her way into the impossible image. How could something so familiar feel so alien? The eyes, their shape, the nose, the smile, the hair…there was no denying it. That was her face in the photo.
Molly glanced at Duncan’s silent bones, trying to fathom it. What did it mean? Had she died and wandered and finally been led to her lover? Could she be her own orphan?
A drop of rain fell from the trees. Not yet, she commanded the sky. There were facts. She recalled them, an obituary in the
She fumbled at the belt holding her passport wallet and ripped open the Velcro and drew out her relic, a driver’s license issued in 1967 in Bay City, Texas, to one Jane Drake, age eighteen. The black hair was long and ironed straight, Cher style. The eyes were green and full of blue sky, as if all her life lay ahead of her. It was the same face Molly saw in her mirror, though younger and sweeter and smooth. But it was also the face in a photo buried next to the heart of a dead soldier. How could that be?
Rain began leaking from the canopy. A drop splashed across the photo. Molly raced on.
Once upon a time, she tried desperately. Once upon a time, a war bride lost her one true love. When he went missing, she went missing, too. She wandered off into madness, into the midst of mountain gypsies, and finally, into the mouth of a blizzard. That much was true. Jane Drake had died in a roofless miner’s shack in a blizzard on Boreas Pass.
Had she returned from the dead then, one ghost hunting another?
She searched her memory for Hawaii and young Duncan and the diamond on that finger, and the miner’s cabin and the blizzard. She tried to feel them as memories of her own, but none of it came to her.
The raindrops splattered across the photo. The image was melting before her eyes.
Molly blinked away the rain. Put away the ghosts. She was too full of ghosts.
She brought the snapshot closer. She looked at the tipped skull.
Here stood a young woman in her glory.
Here lay the bones that had broken her heart.
And—it was suddenly so obvious—in that womb slept their daughter, Molly.
The muscles in her face relaxed. The labyrinth unraveled around her. No longer a stranger to herself, she let the city take her over. Its canals became her arteries. Its stone told her story. Her tangled threads were simply paths among the ruins.
Had her mother sent her, Molly wondered, or had her father drawn her? Did it matter? They had never meant to lose her. They’d done the best they could, but the world had taken them away, the soldier in war, his bride in sorrow. She only needed to forgive them for their love. She leaned the photo among the bones. The rain ran from her eyes.
45.
Molly took turns. She traded bodies with the gecko clinging to the wall, and prowled a Buddha’s palm. She hitchhiked on a parrot perching in the branches. She became a butterfly hiding from the rain. She spied on herself down there.
She looked like one of
The thunder was majestic. She’d crawled to the knife. It looked like an Iron Age thing in her fist.
She knew the Blackhorse missing now. Even the bones still hidden in the forest had recited their names to her. They were all present and accounted for, even their ninth man, the rebel leader who had shot her father. His name was on the blade, “John Kleat.”
There was no telling where Kleat had traveled after they’d banished him from the city. She understood his hatred of the Khmer Rouge better than he did now. His bones remembered what he did not, the enemy who had slit his throat. Maybe someday he would rise up from the black water in the
They were driven by urges, these unburied dead. Where memory began and ended, she couldn’t say. They clung to their names, that much was certain, speaking them over and over. Also, no matter what they had become, they could not escape who they had been. She had been right to believe in Duncan’s goodness. Wherever he was.
“Duncan,” she called out.
She drifted in and out of delirium. The rain fell in slow strings. Now she was the gecko, now a butterfly, now
