symbols, sunsets were symbols, the leaves falling outside, the mist rising up at dawn. It could get cloying being in their rooms, listening to them and their relatives make the meaningless into magic.
But maybe now I understood—because every single stroke of Ti into or out of me felt like a drum strike or a heartbeat, resonating far further than it had any right to do: pushing in—we still live; pulling out—we soon die … until things went faster and faster and life and death were mixed up in the friction of our passion and he cried out, ramming hard into me, life life life, and made me spasm around him, drawing him deeper in, farther in, taking all he had to give inside. He lay atop me, panting, and I bit his shoulder lightly just because I could.
When he’d moved off me, I walked out of the bedroom, turned the thermostat on full blast, and returned with an extra comforter to snuggle up against his side. “Tell me everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“About you. Everything everything.”
He propped himself up. “Why?”
“Because. I don’t want to die alone.” I separated myself and looked at him. If I blinked right, and fast, I could see him there, looking like a soft yellow haze beside me. “My whole life I haven’t been good at making connections. There was me and my brother, yeah, but other than that? No one else really. And most days he doesn’t even count. I do all right at work, but no one really gets me. School was lonely, except for the times that I was taking care of patients, because they were happy to see me, you know? I either talk too much, or tell too much, and it scares people off, and I’m not sure what to do about that.” I looked up at him, and saw his expression momentarily cloud. “Like now.”
Ti nodded. I decided to lay everything on the line. “And I don’t want to die alone. I want to die with someone that I know, that knows me. It’s not too much to ask. At least I hope it’s not.”
“You’re not going to die, Edie—”
I shook my head back and forth. “Answers. Everything. Now.”
“You might not like hearing some of it, you know. If I start talking, I’m not going to sugarcoat things, or lie.”
“I can take it.”
One of his eyebrows rose. “For starters, I’m married.”
My stomach lurched, but I kept my game face on. “Go on.”
“She was perfect. Completely perfect.” He sat up, perhaps so as not to make eye contact with me, and stared up at my ceiling.
“Was?” I asked. “You didn’t—” I imagined him rising up from the grave, hungry for the brains of his loved ones.
“No. She’s been dead for almost two hundred years. So have I. I was killed after what’s now called the Battle of Saltville, in October of 1864.”
I did some math. “In the Civil War?”
“Union Cavalry.”
This was more like it. I placed my hand on his back and scooted closer. “Tell me.”
“I was injured in the battle. Some Confederate asshole came through the hospital tent and knifed all of us.” His voice was distant. I waited without saying a word. “Then, for a long while, I don’t remember. I had a master. I don’t remember much else. I did what I was told.” He shrugged. “Around 1950, I woke up. I assume my master truly died, and some portion of my soul he kept in thrall was finally returned to me.”
“Woke up—straight from 1864?”
He nodded. “I could barely understand the language. There were states I hadn’t heard of. Cars. Planes.”
I waited patiently for him to continue.
“I only barely knew what I was. And when I figured it out, I spent a long time working at cemeteries, digging graves. One time to put bodies in, and another time to pull them out.” He turned to look at me over his shoulder as he said this, and I steeled myself not to cringe. “Eventually I became a funeral home manager so that no one would ask questions.” He sat cross-legged, and I moved to be behind him, holding him, my breasts and silly badge pressed against his back. “There was nothing like Y4 back then. Or maybe there was—I don’t know, the vampires are good at looking out for themselves, but maybe zombies weren’t included. But for me, there was nothing.”
“How did you survive?” I didn’t mean the day-to-day business of survival, he’d made do, that was clear. I meant the endlessness of marching time, the loneliness of utter solitude. How could anyone face that and stay sane with even half a soul?
“I had a wife and a boy. They died while … while I was otherwise occupied. I looked them up, as best I could. The Internet’s made it easier now, even though a lot of old records were lost. But I am sure they are in heaven. And if I do enough good here on earth, I’ll get to someday join them. Whenever it is that I manage to cleanly die.”
I blinked. “You believe in heaven? For real?”
“It exists. It has to. And I’m going to get into it.” He put a hand to his own chest. “When I do the right thing, I think sometimes I can feel my soul start to grow.”
Stating things you desired to be true did not make them be so. An old quote about wishes, fishes, and nets that I’d read once burbled up from my subconscious. Ti took my silence for the negation that it was, and turned to look over his shoulder at me again. “Your own soul’s on the line, and you don’t believe?”
I pushed away from his back. “If I believe that I have a soul—which even at this late stage in the game, maybe I don’t—that might make sense. There’s a spirit that people have when they’re alive that they don’t when they’re dead. I’ve watched people die before. I know.” Ti nodded. I knew Ti had watched people die before. Maybe even killed them himself, when he was someone else’s servant. Who was I to judge—I’d killed someone too. “But if you believe in a heaven,” I went on, pushing myself even farther away from him, “then you have to believe that someone’s keeping score. And if someone’s keeping score, if what we do really matters, then life ought to be fair. And I’m sorry, it isn’t. Shitty things happen to good people all the time, and bad people never get what’s coming to them. Don’t tell me that there’s a heaven as some sort of perverse reward for being good. That is bullshit of the highest caliber, bullshit through and though.”
“Then why do you try? Why do you care?”
I inhaled and exhaled a few times, with the effort of trying to put how I felt into words. “Because someone has to. Someone who really exists.” I crossed my arms on top of my breasts. “And also they pay me.”
Ti laughed. He reached out to grab me, and I let him. He pulled me near and held me close. “Not enough,” he said softly, after a time.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Definitely not enough.”
We lay there, thoughtful and quiet, the outside world forgotten, for a full thirty seconds. And then his phone rang. Neither of us moved for a second, because the sound felt so foreign and unfamiliar—it had no meaning in the new space we’d created. Then he sat up beside me and reached for his cast-off jeans.
“Hello? Yes. The address. Yes. Yes. I’ll bring cash.” He flipped the phone closed.
“Does that mean what I think it means?”
Ti looked at me, at all of me, naked atop the comforter on my bed, his expression bittersweet. “Get dressed.”
Chapter Forty-Three
As an afterthought, I grabbed Grandfather on my way out of the house, and shoved him inside my coat. Ti drove us to a bank first. I asked why we couldn’t use the ATM, but ATMs had limits, and the amount of cash Ti was drawing out required a teller. I was going to fight him on this, but he pointed out he’d saved a lot of money because he didn’t need to eat.
And then we drove. Fear and adrenaline and the magic of good sex could only last so long. I found myself drowsing against the door of his car. We were going to buy information, and then we’d see what came next. I hoped that some plan eventually included me sleeping in it, or me getting a prescription for modafinil.
We parked in a warehouse district that didn’t look so bad. There was no trash on the sidewalks, and the streets had been recently swept clean of snow. He reached under the passenger seat between my legs and pulled
