Twelve
She awoke just as the bus was pulling up outside the liquor store down the street from her apartment house. It was dark out and she saw the night clerk step outside to stare at the bus that had pulled up where there was no bus stop.
“Last stop. Everybody out,” called the driver. The back door opened and Zoe stepped down onto the street. The door closed and bus rumbled away in a cloud of smoke, turned the corner, and disappeared.
Zoe headed for her building halfway up the block. Everything felt weird here. The air. . the acrid street smells and lights assaulted her. Buildings stood straight up and cars hissed by, honking and belching music. Everything was more real, but less so at the same time. She thought of Caroline having to get used to the sun again. She felt like coming home was going to be something like that.
The elevator wasn’t working, so she had to walk up the four flights to the apartment. Standing by her door, she realized she’d lost her keys. And her father’s razor. Except for the clothes she had on, she’d lost pretty much everything she had. There was nothing else to do. She knocked on the door.
It opened halfway on its chain and part of her mother’s face appeared in the crack. Her mother’s eye, the one she could see, was red and rimmed with dark circles, like she hadn’t slept in days. “Zoe?” her mother said. The door closed for a second, then burst open again. Her mother stood there for a moment. Zoe didn’t move, not sure what to expect. Then her mother flung her arms around her, hugging her so hard she couldn’t breathe.
“I knew you were all right. I knew you were going to be all right,” she said.
“It’s good to see you, too, Mom. Can I come in? I’m pretty tired,” Zoe said.
Her mother stepped aside so Zoe could enter the apartment. The living room looked as odd to her as the street outside had looked. Nothing had changed, except for the overflowing ashtrays on every flat surface and the smell of stale smoke. Zoe felt so different, so utterly and irrevocably changed, that it seemed to her that everything else should have changed, too. She shook off the feeling and turned to her mother.
“Hi,” she said feebly. “I’m glad I’m home.”
Her mother still stood by the front door, almost as if she was afraid to approach. Her hands were balled up in front of her mouth, and she regarded Zoe with wide, wet eyes.
“You’re hurt,” she said.
“It’s all right,” said Zoe. “Really, it’s not as bad as it looks.” Then she added, “But it was a rough couple of days.”
“Couple of days? It’s been a week,” said her mother. “Tomorrow would have been eight days.” She dropped her hands to her sides, but she was still tense and didn’t seem able to move from the door.
Zoe sat down on the edge of the couch. “It didn’t seem that long. Just a day or two, at most.”
“Well, it
Zoe got up from the couch and went to her. Her mother took a step back.
She held out a hand and after a minute her mother took it, as if she wasn’t sure that what was happening was real. “I’m sorry,” Zoe whispered. “I’m so sorry.” Her mother’s sobbing let up a bit and she stroked Zoe’s head.
“You’re filthy,” said her mother. “You look like you’ve been dragged behind a truck.”
Zoe laughed a little. “Just about.”
“Where have you been for a week?”
“Far away,” said Zoe. “Farther away than I ever meant to go.”
“What does that mean?”
“Can we do this sitting down?” Zoe asked. “I’ve been running for days. I’ve hardly eaten anything.”
“Running? Are you in trouble? Did someone do this to you?”
“Do I look that bad?” Zoe asked. She turned and caught her reflection in the hall mirror. It took her a moment to recognize the young woman looking back at her. This young woman had wild, dirt-caked hair. Her face and arms were covered with cuts and bruises. She still wore Emmett’s baggy clothes over her own. They were torn and the front of her shirt and pants were splattered with blood and Hecate’s ashes.
“Let’s sit down,” Zoe said. She took her mother’s hand and they sat on the couch.
“I know you want to know where I’ve been, what happened to me, but I’m afraid to tell you.”
Her mother let out a short, harsh laugh and took her hand back. “Just say it. What kind of trouble are you in?”
“It’s not that kind of trouble. And all the blood is mine, so you don’t have to worry that I murdered anyone,” Zoe said. “I’m just afraid that if I tell you the truth, you won’t believe me. I haven’t been real good with the truth lately.”
“That’s for goddamn sure,” said her mother. She reached for a pack of cigarettes on the living room table, took one out, and lit it with a disposable plastic lighter.
“Please don’t do that. It’s not good for you,” said Zoe.
“You don’t get to tell me what’s good and not good for me,” her mother said. “Sitting around for a week thinking you were dead, that’s what’s not good for me!”
“I’m really sorry. Nothing quite went the way I thought it would,” Zoe said. She held on to the back of the couch. The fabric was cool and scratchy against her hand, but it felt a bit more real than it had when she first came in. The world felt like it was slowly shifting back into focus.
“Look,” said her mother, exhaustion and anger framing each word, “just fucking tell me what’s happened to you, where you’ve been.”
Zoe looked away, gathering her thoughts, not sure where to begin. She took something from her pocket. “Someone told me to give you this,” she said, handing the coin to her mother.
It took her mother a few seconds to register what she was holding. She turned the coin over and over in her hands. “This club’s been gone for something like fifteen years. Where did you get this?”
Zoe took a breath, held it, and said, “Dad.” They sat in silence for a minute.
Finally her mother sighed and shook her head. “Zoe, what are you-”
“Do you want to hear where I’ve been or not?”
“I don’t want to hear a load of shit that’s supposed to make me feel guilty about your father being dead.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel guilty, I swear.”
“Don’t play games with me. Not after what I’ve been through. You could have found this coin on eBay.”
“But I didn’t. Dad gave it to me to give to you because it’s from the club where you first met. You even had the words on the back, ‘Fuck You Very Much,’ on the jacket you were wearing that night.”
Her mother stared at her. “How do you know all that?”
“I know about it because I was there. I told you, I went somewhere very far away, and when I was there I saw a lot of strange and horrible, and even some kind of wonderful things.” She put her hand on the low table where her mother’s cigarette butts spilled over the sides of a saucer. The sight of the ashes swept her mind back to Iphigene for a moment and she pictured Hecate burning, reaching for her. “One of the things I saw was my brother, Valentine.”
“What?”
“Why didn’t you or Dad ever tell me about him?”
Her mother stared at the cigarette smoke curling in the air between them. When she turned back to Zoe, her eyes were red and unfocused. “It hurt too much,” she said. “We didn’t tell anyone I was pregnant, at first. We were going to have a big party and tell people there, but then I had the miscarriage.”
“I’m sorry,” Zoe said, suddenly seeing the young girl from the club lying in a hospital gown, scared and heartbroken, knowing that her baby had died.
“When the doctor told us how far along I was, your dad and I counted the weeks and realized he’d be born about Valentine’s Day. So that’s what we called him.” She reached for the ashtray and stubbed out the cigarette. “No one knew but us and the doctor. How did you find out?”
“Remember the boy in my dreams I used to talk about? My imaginary friend? That was Valentine. He came to me in dreams in this world, and then I met him for real in the other world.”
“What other world?”
