When we finally found seats, I practically collapsed into mine. I was shaking. I crossed my arms to make it less obvious. It didn’t work.
“Cold?” Jamie asked from across the aisle.
I wasn’t, but I said I was anyway, because that made more sense than the truth. “Be right back,” he said as he stood up. “Watch my stuff?” I nodded, then leaned my head against the glass. People swarmed the platform, trying to make it on board before the train pulled away. I watched them, hypnotized, letting my vision blur out of focus, until something snapped it back.
No. Not something. Someone.
A man stood out in the crowd. Not because of what he looked like, or what he wore, but because I knew him.
Abel Lukumi watched the train pull out of the station, wearing the same dark suit he had worn when I’d seen him at the hospital, after Jude had made me slit my wrists. The same suit he’d worn in Little Havana, when he’d slaughtered a chicken and had me drink its blood. My lips parted to speak or scream, but by the time Jamie came back, he was gone.
I stared out the window for seconds, or hours maybe, as people stood up, sat down, moved around the car. What did he want? Why was he following me?
I didn’t know what to do or say to Jamie and Stella. They didn’t really know about Lukumi; they wouldn’t understand. Noah would, but he wasn’t there.
“You’re sweating,” Stella said as she slipped into the seat beside me.
I was. I was shivering, too.
“Do you have a fever?”
I shrugged.
Her expression softened. “Try to rest, if you can?”
I couldn’t. “I’m scared,” I said, though I didn’t mean to say it out loud.
“I know,” Stella said.
I wanted to scream that she didn’t know, that she would never know, because this wasn’t happening to her, it was happening to me. I wanted to scream that it wasn’t all right, and that it never would be again, because I’d killed people and that wasn’t the kind of thing that you could ever fix. Even if they’d deserved it. But I was tired and my friends were tired, and even if they didn’t fully get it, they understood what it was doing to me. They could lie to my face and pretend it was going to be all right, but I saw the truth in the fear in their eyes. I was getting worse. Much worse. And time was running out.
I was drenched in sweat when I woke up an hour later. I lifted my head from the seat, and the movement shook images loose from my dreams. Lukumi standing on one side of the platform, a black feather in his hand. Me standing on the other, a human heart in mine. The train tracks between us were filled with bodies without a scratch on them, except for a smear of blood beneath each of their noses. Bile rose in my throat. I stood up, grabbing the seat for support. Stella didn’t wake up, but Jamie turned as I crossed into the aisle. He pulled out his earbuds.
“Where’re you going?”
“Bathroom,” I said. I didn’t know if I would be sick, but better safe than sorry, and anyway, I needed to change my shirt, which was plastered to my skin. I haltingly made my way down the aisle, grabbing my bag on the way to the tiny train bathroom.
But I’d grabbed Noah’s bag, I realized, once I was locked inside. His was black and mine was gray. I blinked. My vision was filmy, so everything looked gray. I put the lid of the toilet seat down and sat on it, holding my head between my hands, blinking again. My T-shirt clung to my skin, making me itch.
Whatever. It didn’t matter about the bag. I’d change into one of Noah’s shirts. He wouldn’t mind.
I rummaged through it, but I could barely tell one piece of clothing from another. I bit my lip, clenched my jaw to keep myself from losing it, to keep myself here. As I did, my fingers curled around something in his bag that wasn’t clothes. I pulled it out.
My hand shifted into focus, and so did the thing in it. A straight razor. Noah’s razor. I remembered asking him once why he used it. He’d said it was the sharpest kind.
It gleamed under the fluorescent light. The weight of it was solid and reassuring, somehow, in my hand. I wasn’t shaking anymore. I could stand up.
I looked at it, and then at myself, in the mirror. Pain shot through my stomach—in an arc, it felt like. Left to right.
No one else felt like this. No one else was acting like this. Not Stella, not Jamie. Something inside me was different.
Something inside me.
Something inside me.
I looked at my face in the mirror.
“Something inside you is different,” my reflection said.
The razor hovered just an inch above my lower belly. A rushing sound filled my ears, like the sound of a thousand voices breathing, Yes. There was so much pressure, but my fingers didn’t shake. I looked at myself again.
“Get them out,” my reflection said.
Time skipped forward. One second I stood there, facing my reflection, listening to it. The next, my hand had already drawn the razor against my stomach.
It was just a tiny line. An inch long, no bigger. Little beads of blood welled from the cut, jewel-like and shimmering. Vivid. Everything was, actually. Whatever haze had clouded my vision had now lifted. I didn’t feel sick or hot. The only strange thing was the pressure in my fingers, drawing the razor to my stomach again.
A knock on the bathroom door startled me before I could trace the line again.
“Mara?” Jamie’s voice was muffled through the door. “We’re here.”
Mechanically I wiped the blade off with the hem of my shirt and put it back into Noah’s bag. I dabbed at my skin with tissues and exchanged the T-shirt I was wearing for a clean black one. I walked out of the bathroom on steady feet, feeling impossibly light. Almost giddy.
“Feel better?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said brightly as a trickle of blood ran down my stomach. “Much.”
29
I HADN’T BEEN TO NEW YORK since I was little, and I didn’t remember it like this.
We were practically the only non-suited people on the train, but when we stepped onto the track and climbed up the stairs, we blended right in. Penn Station swarmed with people—a man with dreadlocks down to his waist bumped my hip with his briefcase and apologized, but as I stepped aside, I was hit by a stroller being pushed by a mother with glazed, dead eyes. We got out of there as fast as we could.
The taxi line wasn’t much of an improvement. We were sandwiched between a preteen couple with matching acne, loudly making out, and an old couple wearing matching tennis shoes, arguing loudly over a map in a language I didn’t know.
“Ouch,” Jamie said.
“You okay?” Stella asked him.
“Oh, I am,” he said quietly. “But that dude’s wife just told him, ‘If they had to put your brain in a chicken, it would run straight to the butcher.’ ”
“You understand them?”
“Hebrew,” Jamie explained, and then it was our turn in line. “Where to first, ladies?”
“I need a shower,” Stella said.
“Hotel?” I asked.
Stella tugged at a strand of hair. “I guess. If we have to. But I don’t like using you for that stuff, Jamie.”
“Pish tosh. But my aunt has a place on the Upper West Side. We could go there.”
“Except wouldn’t she maybe wonder why her nephew and his two female friends have turned up on her doorstep on a random school night?”
“She’s not there. She’s at her condo in Florida right now till the summer.”
“How would we get in?” Stella asked.
“I’m sure we could figure it out,” Jamie said. “And she’s not even my real aunt. She’s my mother’s BFF. Even if we’re being looked for, no one would tie us together.”
Good enough for me. Stella agreed, and so Jamie gave the driver directions to his aunt’s house. I didn’t pay much attention. My gaze kept wandering to my stomach. It was still bleeding a little—there was a small wet spot on the T-shirt, but luckily the shirt was black. No one would notice.
r /> My thumb kept running over the tiny line, and I realized I was picking at the seams of the cut. I couldn’t seem to stop. I kept thinking about the train, and the edge of Noah’s razor, and the relief—the release—when I’d pressed it against my skin. A voice whispered in my mind.
Something inside us.
Get them out.
I glanced at Stella nervously. She didn’t see me; she was staring out the window on the left, and Jamie was looking out the one on the right. I ran my fingertips against my belly, pressing into it. I didn’t feel anything—no, wait. I slid my hand left, toward the inside of my left hip, pressing down. Something seemed to—to shift, like a tight muscle being kneaded out of place, but small. What was that?
“Stomachache?” Stella asked.
Caught. “Mmm-hmm.” I crossed my arms and folded myself slightly over them.
“We’ll be there in a few,” Jamie said.
Shame warred with need. I couldn’t let them see that I’d cut myself. I had to figure out a way to get ten, maybe twenty minutes alone.
The cab pulled over to the curb, and Jamie said in that voice of his, “You never saw us.”
“I never saw you,” the driver repeated, sounding dazed.
“You drove this astonishingly hot underwear model from south Texas. You wanted to lick his abs.”
“I wanted to lick his abs.”
“You’re such an asshole,” Stella muttered as she climbed out of the cab.
“I get my kicks where I can.”
As we waited for the traffic to stop and the light to change, Jamie took the opportunity to throw up into a garbage can.
“Ugh, gross,” a high-heeled, miniskirted girl squealed as she walked by.
Head still bent, Jamie raised his middle finger at her, then spat into the garbage can and wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
“Ugh. Gross,” he said. “I’m never going to get used to that.”
“You’re not supposed to get used to it,” Stella said. “You’re supposed to not do it.”
Jamie’s aunt’s house turned out to be a brownstone on a relatively quiet tree-lined street. We walked up the front steps, and he peered in through the glass door. It was dark.
“How are we supposed to get in, again?” Stella asked.
“My cousin once told me a story about breaking in post-curfew using a spare key from under a fake rock or some such. Maybe . . .”
Jamie hopped back down the steps and ducked behind a small gate in front of the garden apartment. There were some wilted plants there, and a package with the word “perishable” on the side of it, and—
“Fake rock!” Jamie said, bending down. “Score.” He held up the key, hopped back up the steps, and unlocked the front door. Stella and I followed him inside.
The house was gorgeous. The parlor still had most of its original details—an ornate plaster medallion in the center of the ceiling, carved woodwork between the parlor and the kitchen, and a massive fireplace with a mirror as the overmantel. Stella whistled.
“I know, right?” Jamie said. “Bedrooms and bathrooms are upstairs. Take whichever ones you want. There’s a package outside for my aunt. I’m gonna bring it in. Shall we convene in an hour for food plans?”
Stella nodded. I did too, even though I wasn’t hungry. I was already on my way up the stairs.
“How do you feel?” Stella asked. She was following behind me.
“A little better,” I lied. Then crinkled my nose. “You smell ripe.” I needed to get rid of her.
“Yeah, I feel gross,” she said. “I desperately need a shower.”
“I hate to say it,” I lied, “but you really do.”
We each claimed a bedroom, but just as I’d hoped, Stella did not pass go or collect two-hundred before she ducked into the bathroom, duffel bag in hand. When curls of steam began to filter out from the beneath the door, I set Noah’s bag on the bed in the room I’d chosen. I had his razor in my back pocket still, but I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted. What I needed.
After a minute or two my hand closed around a tightly rolled T-shirt I’d buried near the bottom of his things. I took it out and unrolled it, finding the scalpel I’d hidden there. That was what I needed.
My fingertips seemed to tingle as I held the metal up. I knew, objectively, that what I was about to do was crazy, but somehow my feet carried me toward the guest room door, and my fingers turned the lock so no one would be able to stop me. And then I lifted up my shirt and began to cut.
30
OH GOD, OH GOD. STELLA, get in here!”
My eyes fluttered open, just enough to see a blurred outline of Jamie leaning over me.
“What’s wrong?” Stella’s voice, from a distance away.
“It’s— Mara did something!”
He grabbed a towel, and I felt pressure on my stomach.
Did I get them out did I get them?
“Don’t you dare even try to talk, you idiot,” Jamie said to me. He propped my limp hands over my stomach, over the towel, then sprang up to get the door.
“What happened?” Stella said as she appeared in my frame of vision. “Oh. Oh my—”
“I wanted to use Noah’s laptop for something,” Jamie said, “and I knocked on the door to get it from her, but she didn’t answer. So I knocked again, louder, and still nothing. And I just had this bad feeling, so I used a needle from the sewing kit to pick the lock, and I opened the door, and she was like—”
“Oh, God,” Stella whispered.
“Like this.”
“Oh my God, Mara, what did you do?”
There’s something inside me, I tried to say.
“There’s nothing inside you, Mara.” Tears filled her eyes. “It’s in your mind. It’s in your mind.” More pressure on my stomach. My vision darkened.
“Call 911, Jamie.”
Get them out
“But what about—” Jamie said.
“I can’t tell how deep the cut is. She keeps moving her hands to cover it, but there’s a lot of blood and she’s pale and shaking.”
“Believe me,” I whispered.
“What did you— Oh my God.” Jamie’s eyes went wide.
“Don’t talk, Mara.” A hand on the back of my neck, cradling my head. “Jamie?” Stella asked.
“There’s something in the house,” he said, backing away.
“What? Jamie, I need you. She looks really . . .”
“It was just sitting by the door to the garden apartment,” he said. “It said ‘perishable’ on it, and so I opened it, but it was just this leather bag inside with a note.”
“What are you talking about?” Stella’s voice was shrill.
“I thought it was for my aunt, but the note said—the note said—”
“What?”
“ ‘Believe her.’ ”
Stella looked at me, then at Jamie. “What are you—”
“Someone knows we’re here. That note—that bag—it’s for us.”
“Did you look in it?”
“I thought it was for my aunt. I’m going to get it.”
“No, Jamie. I need you to stay—shit.”
Some of the weight lifted from my stomach. My eyelids fluttered, and I heard footsteps recede. Then they came back. Something thumped on the floor.
Get them out
“She keeps saying—she keeps saying that,” Jamie said.
“She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”
“The note, though. It says believe her, Stella. What does that mean?”
“I don’t know! I don’t fucking know. I’m just as lost as you.”
“What if—what if there is something inside her?” I heard something unclasp, and then, “Oh my God. Stella. Stella, look.”
“What—”
“It’s a bunch of—doctor shit. Gloves, thread, gauze, scalpels. Jesus, who left this?”
“Any drugs?” I felt pressure on my stomach again. Stella was trying to pry my hands away.
“No. Wait, m
aybe—yes.”
“Can you get another towel? She’s bleeding through this one.”
A few seconds passed before Jamie said, “Got them.”
“Switch with me so I can look in the bag?”
The pressure lifted on my stomach for a second, and I gasped.
“Press down hard,” Stella said.
“I am.”
“Harder.”
“Are you going to call 911?” Jamie asked.
Stella paused before answering. “We might not need to.”
“Meaning?”
“Let me see for a second.”
The pressure lifted. “She’s still bleeding but not as much, and it’s not superdeep. I could maybe close it on my own, but—”
“She’s saying that there’s something in there.”
There is there is
“Can you—can you hold her hands down so I can really look?” Stella asked.
There was pressure around my wrists, radiating through my arms and shoulders.
“Mara.” Jamie’s voice. “You’ve gotta let us look, okay?”
Jamie held me, pinned me down, as Stella prodded me with something sharp. My entire body winced.
“What—?”
“She’s right. She’s fucking right,” Stella said.
“How did she know?”
“How did she know?”
Another stab of pain. I screamed, I think, because one of them moved to cover my mouth with something.
“Mara, you have to be quiet. Jamie, what’s in the bag, drug-wise?”
“I can’t look while I’m holding her down.”
Stella’s shadow lifted, and I heard the sound of metal against metal as she rummaged. “I’m going to give her this so she stops moving.”
“No hospital?”
“She really didn’t cut that deep. I can do this, I think. Okay, Mara—Mara? Can you hear me?”
Yes
“I’m going to close your—uh, incision. It might feel like you can’t breathe, but you can breathe, okay? And you’re going to be fine.”
Get them out
“We will,” she said, and I felt the bite of a needle in my shoulder as she plunged a syringe into my arm.