crazy stranger who thought maybe he could help this loony girl who everyone talked about. How he would soon be dead like this poor crawdad.
Why? I wanted to hit him. I was suddenly so intensely angry, furious at this kid. What gave him the right? “Asshole!” I yelped, and I tried to rip my hands away from his grip. But again, he just held on to me, a pained look on his face. Well, he would get his, I thought ruefully, but then I thought better of it. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t.
Here I sat, inexplicably, when I should’ve been in isolation. A crawdad in my hand instead. In my chest, under my ribs, a swirling heat came to life, and then my skin, every cell, awoke. The heat exploded, radiated from my middle to my limbs, my hands. Just like with Sophie.
My hands. I was powerless to stop it.
I opened my eyes when I felt it. It surged through me, out of me, around me. This coursing, burning current coming from my core, churning out into the rest of me. It was part of me, coming from me, but also alien and outside of me as well. It felt powerful and alive, but it was also unwieldy and reckless.
And there was the blue. Everything indigo. Rennick stared at me, smiling, expectant, his eyes wide. The crawdad’s antennae or claw or something tickled the inside of my closed hands. I realized then that Rennick’s hands were both cupped around mine, and we slowly opened our hands up, and the crawdad was moving, pinching. Alive.
I dropped it on the ground, watched it wriggle around.
“I knew it,” he said, reaching down to pick it up. “That is crazy! Holy shit!” He held the crawdad, looked at it in amazement. “I’m sorry to force you, but you had to find out. I knew someone else like you. Once. A long time ago. And I heard that you—”
“It wasn’t dead to begin with,” I said, disbelieving, shaking my head, watching the blue leave my vision in swirling inky puddles.
“It was.”
“This is some kind of trick. Who put you up to this?”
He furrowed his brow, leaned in close to me, said quietly, “You brought that thing back to life.”
I stood up and shook my head. I stepped away from him, pulled myself inward. This was some kind of joke. Some kind of cruel joke. “You don’t know anything.”
He stood, took a step closer to me. “I heard about your sister, Corrine. I Googled you and I—”
“You don’t know anything.”
He squinted at me. “I do,” he challenged.
And it was the weight of everything on me at that moment, the frustration, the guilt, the helplessness of not being able to do anything about anything, not being able to pull my arm away from this guy. He deserved it. I brought my knee up hard, right into his groin. “That’s for not letting me go.”
He doubled over, surprised, out of breath, and inexplicably laughing.
“Jerk,” I grumbled, and took off. I was hollowed out, unraveled.
I hailed a cab back to the Garden District. Rimsky-Korsakov’s
He didn’t follow me back to my house.
4
I dragged myself up to my room and fell into bed, exhausted. I closed my eyes and the room spun. The world spun out of control around me. I concentrated on my breathing, slow, steady. My body ached, my nerve endings frayed and raw. I stripped down to my bra and underwear and lay on top of my covers. I was hot, too hot. My mind wanted to puzzle through everything that had happened, but my body wouldn’t let me. The exhaustion was ridiculous. My head felt heavy and fuzzy, full of cotton.
I fell asleep quickly. And I slept hard, dreaming of an indigo light, glowing, pulsating, coming for me in waves, each one getting closer. Ready to swallow me whole.
I woke sweaty and alarmed just as the indigo light reached me in my dream. I sat up with that airless feeling in my throat, as if I had just screamed. I took a few deep breaths and calmed myself down, noticing that the sun slanting into my room had the half-lit pink look of twilight. I watched the shadows of the pear tree dance on my bedroom ceiling. Their movements made me think of Gershwin and old Fred Astaire movies, the beautiful dancing sequences. Black and white. Rhythmic. Soothing. Mezzo piano. Quiet.
I pressed the palms of my hands together in front of my face as I sat there and tried to remember what it felt like to just touch someone that way, palm to palm. Did it always carry so much heat? Back in my before-life? When I gave high fives? When I held hands with Cody through the vintage horror movies on Friday nights at the Casablanca Theater? When I held on to Sophie so I wouldn’t lose her at the mall?
That crawdad had to have been alive to start with, just unconscious, asleep, something. I was ninety-nine percent sure.
But I had felt something. I couldn’t discount it. That same kind of current, that same kind of buzzing beneath my skin, around my skin, enveloping me when I held that crawdad.
Who was he? This Rennick Lane? What did he know? And was there any possible way that he was right? That I had this power to resuscitate something recently dead?
It was a ridiculous question. Sophie.
I hadn’t resuscitated Sophie. I hadn’t helped her. I hadn’t done anything but ensure that she died, that she ceased to live. She would no longer thumb wrestle with my dad, plead for a dog, play video games with all the lights off, or beg me to read her the first Harry Potter one more time.
“But you have the best Hagrid voice!” she would tell me, giving me those puppy-dog eyes. And when that wouldn’t work, she would whistle through her teeth for me, that lonely little gap in her front teeth. It always made me laugh.
I threw my legs over the side of the bed, pulled on some clothes. The twitching movement of the crawdad in my palm seemed too near, too recent and real. I needed a reality check—something I had avoided for too long.
I went into my parents’ room and got out the album. When we moved here, Mom had set right to changing Sophie’s room into her home office so we wouldn’t have to be reminded by her favorite stuffed green lizard lying alone on her bedspread, her empty window seat, her glittery sunglasses sitting on her dresser. The room was empty of Sophie’s stuff now; it held a computer, a really cool glass-topped desk. A treadmill. None of us ever went in there anyway.
But my parents did look at the Sophie album. It had all of our favorite pictures of her through the years, through her nine years. Only nine years.
I never looked at it.
But I had seen Mom looking at it. Lots of times. Just a few weeks ago, I heard a racket in her room, stuff being thrown around, a loud crash, and when I got to the door, the Sophie album was open on her bed. Mom sat with her hands in her face, her sobs shaking her shoulders, Dad picking up the remains of an antique crystal candlestick off the floor. One of her favorite flea market finds.
The pain in my rib cage, the weight of the guilt I was carrying, was astonishing. As I pulled the maroon photo album off the bookshelf, it was like I couldn’t get a big enough breath into my lungs, not enough air in there along with all the guilt. But I needed to see. I needed to remember, to know what my hands had done.
I knew there was never any intent. God no.
But it is what it is. That’s what Granddad always used to say. I had spent the past six months of my life trying to swallow that bitter pill, and now this guy with the hair was going to come out of nowhere and—grab my hand, for God’s sake! He deserved worse than what I gave him.
I sat on the floor cross-legged and opened the photo album. There she was. Her school photo from last year. The way her curls popped up in the back, that crazy cowlick. Oh God, how it hurt to look at her.
Handel’s
