all ready, selling the rights to the tribute album—and what? You’re pissed that I won’t be a good little corpse and lie down so you can start embalming me?”
“That’s not what I’m saying at all! I don’t know that you’re in a rational frame of mind.”
Whitney holds up her hand. “Just think about it, Colin. I know you’ve still got a lot of anger toward Nancy, but right now she’s someone you can trust who really wants a second chance to be there for you. I’m going to leave the papers here, and you can look them over while Nancy and I go and grab a bite to eat. We’ll bring you back something, and then we can talk some more.” She takes out a gleaming pen and places it atop the papers.
He follows them to the door, and as he looks out at her, weariness overcomes him. When he speaks, his voice is quiet. “You can’t go back, you know. We can’t. People can’t. I can’t go back to being the person I was before I was sick, and you can’t go back to being that person’s wife, because he doesn’t exist anymore.”
“Of course he does,” Nancy says. “He’s just sad.”
Colin closes and bolts the door behind them, then picks up the legal pages. Walking to the window, he cranks one wide open and drops confetti of ripped white paper onto the street below.
“Agatha?” he calls, but there’s no response from the kitchen.
Colin walks in, expecting to find her perched on the countertop or drinking the rest of the bad milk from the carton. But she’s not there, and the window to the fire escape is wide open.
On her way down the metal stairs, she runs into one of Colin’s neighbors—a pale looking man with floppy bleached hair. He is smoking a cigarette, and the corner of his mouth looks bruised. He scoots over so she can sidle past him.
“Don’t like front doors?” he asks her.
“Don’t like good-byes,” she says. He nods like that makes sense.
She feels bad leaving like this, without explaining to Colin what she’s done. She tries to tell herself that he’ll figure things out, but she knows that her cowardice will cost him.
As she walks down the road, she thinks about the real first time she met Colin, outside of a club in New Mexico. She’d been washing dishes and was on a break, just leaning against the cool stucco of the building next door and listening to the music.
He’d staggered out a moment later, his shirt wet with sweat, and leaned against the wall, too. Neither of them spoke, but in that moment she could tell that their skin itched the same way. Itched to keep moving, to escape. To keep looking for the mythical city where they would be sheltered in its shadows.
When her break was over and she headed toward the kitchen door, he gave her a look of sympathy that, for a while, made her feel less alone. She hasn’t told him that they have run into each other before. She won’t ever tell him.
Another memory rises up, unbidden—Colin leaning toward her in the kitchen tonight. His eyes were dark with something that might have been revulsion but that she could pretend was desire. And she hates that she’s leaving, but it’s better than being around when he realizes how much there is to despise her for.
He watches crows, black wings gleaming like oil, peck garbage strewn across a sandy lawn. The sun hurts his eyes, but he’s determined to sit on this bench, near the one place he knows she can’t avoid.
Shading his face with a hand as he looks over at the graveyard, he wonders at the garden of white stone and granite. Grander and more austere than the tacky spectacle he’s finding dying to be. When he was a kid, all the songs he loved were full of romantic ideas about eternal souls and the deaths beyond death, and finding out how mundane and embarrassing it’s turning out to be is lowering, not unlike finding out all the stately Roman buildings had once been painted garish colors.
“Here you are,” Agatha says. He jumps a little and turns toward her. She’s wearing a silvery sundress and has that horrible earring in one ear. He didn’t even notice she’d taken it from his apartment.
“I figured you’d come here eventually,” he says.
She sits down next to him on the bench, but she won’t meet his eyes. “I figured the same thing about you.”
“Why would you say that?” He tilts his head to one side.
She ignores his question. “I want to tell you about ghouls. I came back to tell you—to face you. We live on putrid flesh, we’re strong, and we never get sick.” She sucks her bottom lip in a nervous gesture. “We live a long time, too. And it’s not all bad, the roving.”
“Okay,” he says.
“See those markings?” She points toward the wall to the graveyard, which is covered in marks like the kind hobos left each other at train stations. “That’s how we communicate.”
“Are you sure you’re supposed to tell me your secrets? I guess it doesn’t matter, but—”
“I have to tell you,” she says, crouching down beside the bench so that she can trace the marks in the dirt. “Here’s how you mark your territory. And here’s the symbol for danger. This is the one for safe place—which is similar to this one, for good place.”
He stares at the marks. A secret lexicon for a secret life.
“Are you freaked out?” she asks.
“Very,” he says, then takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “I’ve been thinking, too, and I want to tell you, I get it. You were waiting for me to die. You’ve been taking good care of me, bringing me food.” He laughs, nervously. His hands are sweating. “But you were getting me ready to eat, right?”
Agatha stares at him silently.
“And I wanted to tell you that I’m okay with that. I mean, I want you to. Go ahead.”
She leans very close to him and opens her mouth against the place where his shoulder meets his neck. He can feel her teeth, sharp against his skin. He shivers and he reaches out to pull her against him. She shifts until she’s half risen from the ground, leaning between his legs, her body as cool as his own. His heart is speeding, but time has slowed, time is moving like the honey oozing on his floor. “Is this what you pictured?” she says. The movement of her mouth, the scrape of her teeth is exhilarating and awful.
“I don’t know,” he says. His heart is hammering against his ribs. Every instinct is telling him to push her away, to run, but he slides his hand to her hip and holds himself still. This is better, he tells himself. Because for the first time in months, he feels the thrill of life in every ragged breath.
“You’re wrong,” she says slowly, drawing back from him.
“Wrong?” His neck throbs where her lips have been.
“I’m not going to eat you, Colin Lainhart. You’re not rotten enough for me.”
He frowns, disoriented, distracted. “But what did you want, then? I don’t understand.”
“I like you. I don’t have a lot of friends, moving around the way that I do. You’re funny and nice, even though you’ve been ill and in pain. Why wouldn’t I like you?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “People aren’t liked because they deserve to be.”
“You might wish I didn’t like you,” she says.
He reaches up and touches her dark hair. It reminds him of the crow’s feathers. “Why would I want that?”
She pushes away from him so that she’s standing. “I fed you human flesh. In your food. You were so sick that you couldn’t tell.”
His stomach twists.
“You’re going to live,” she says. “I sentence you to live.”
“Oh.” There is a great roaring in his ears, and he rubs his face. Moments ago he felt ancient, but now he feels confused, stumbling like a small child.
“You’re like me now. I turned you. You’re going to like the taste of spoiled food and things with strong flavors. You will crave human flesh, but you don’t have to eat it all the time. Be careful, Colin.” With that, she turns and starts walking in the direction of the highway. The crows, startled, go to wing.
“Wait.” He stands up and grabs her arm. “You can’t leave.”
“I’m not sorry.” She jerks her arm out of his hand. She’s right; she is very strong. “You can’t make me say that I’m sorry.”
At least she’s no longer moving away from him. She’s standing right there, breathing as if she’s been
