Afterworlds

  “Did Jamie tell you about Dad’s note?” I asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Then what is it? Your diagnosis?”

  “Not yet, Lizzie.” She held up a trembling hand. “You disappeared for twenty-one hours. You don’t get to set the terms of this conversation.”

  Angry, then. I didn’t answer, just nodded.

  “Where the hell did you go?”

  “Driving.”

  “For twenty-one hours?”

  “Yeah, I know.” I still wasn’t tired. I wondered if I would ever sleep again. Probably not without Yama’s lips to help me, and would he ever touch me again after what I’d done? “Driving helps me think. It’s a pretty comfortable car.”

  Mom took a deep breath. I could hear her biting back harsh words.

  “Jamie told me you have a boyfriend.”

  “She did? Seriously?”

  A grim smile crossed my mother’s face. “She didn’t say anything until this morning, when you still weren’t home.”

  I sighed. Fucking LA traffic. “Yes, I have a boyfriend. But this had nothing to do with him. I just needed to get away.”

  She gave me a long, appraising stare. But she turned away with a sigh, as if I were something unknowable.

  Fair enough. I didn’t even know myself.

  “Are you going to die?” I asked.

  “Not any time soon. But we’ll get back to that, and to your boyfriend.”

  Not any time soon. If that counted as good news, then the world sucked.

  Mom stood up and went over to the car, opened the driver’s door, and leaned in. “Jesus. A thousand miles, Lizzie?”

  “Like I said, it helps me think.”

  She shut the car door and came back to the porch. She stood over me, a parent over a child. “Where did you go?”

  Only the truth would do. “Palo Alto.”

  “Is that where your boyfriend lives?”

  “No. I went to your old neighborhood.”

  She stood there staring at me, her anger blunted for a moment. This telling-the-truth business was oddly effective.

  “You know that old photo in your room?” I asked. “I needed to see the house where you grew up.”

  She shook her head. “Why?”

  “Because you never told me about Mindy. She was haunting you and you didn’t tell me. But she was there, Mom.” I could feel the cold place retreating as I spoke, so I kept going. “Every time I played outside when I was little, she was there. And even now when I’m traveling, or when we drive anywhere, she’s there in the way you worry. Every day of my life, her ghost is with us. Every day!”

  Mom didn’t answer, but I didn’t have any more words, so we were silent for a while. I wondered if Mindy was standing on the other side of the front door, listening.

  Finally my mother said, “You don’t know what it’s like, when your best friend disappears.”

  “Maybe that’s because you never told me about her.”

  “I’m not going to apologize for that. Not today. And it wasn’t something I could just tell my child about. They found her in her own backyard, Lizzie. You have no idea.”

  I nodded, even though I knew better than she did how horrible it had all been. I’d seen every detail played back in the bad man’s memories. The only thing I didn’t understand was why my own mother had hidden it from me.

  “Look, I get that it was awful. But—”

  “If you get it, then why would you disappear for twenty-one hours? Why would you drive away and turn your phone off? You vanished, just like she did!” Something shuddered in my mother’s chest. “At three this morning I got up and checked the backyard, Lizzie, in case you were buried there!”

  Her voice broke at the end, and the sound of it was awful, like every fear she’d ever had was tangled in her lungs.

  “Oh, right,” was all I could manage.

  She was staring at me, waiting for more, and I wanted to say how thoughtless I’d been, how I would never disappear again. I wanted to break down and cry.

  But I kept seeing what I’d been doing at three that morning.

  “I’m sorry,” I said at last. “Really sorry.”

  She nodded at that. “Good.”

  “But I’m not Mindy. Okay?”

  My mother thought about this, as if it were something that could be debated. But finally she nodded again. Then an odd look crossed her face.

  “I never told you her name.”

  “Really? Maybe I looked it up online.”

  Mom shook her head. “But that was her nickname. In the newspapers they called her Melinda.”

  “Then you must have told me.”

  I could see her weighing this, and not quite believing it. But it was the only possible explanation.

  “Mom, will you just tell me about your diagnosis now? Please?”

  “Okay.” She nodded and closed her eyes. “You know how I’ve been tired all the time? My doctor thought it was anemia, not a big deal. That’s why I’ve been taking iron tablets.”

  “You have?” My voice was weak. Now that she was finally telling me, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to hear this.

  “But iron didn’t help, and my blood counts kept getting worse. A lot of conditions can cause this, so there were a lot of tests—lupus, hepatitis, HIV.” She opened her eyes. “It wasn’t any of those. It didn’t make sense to tell you until I knew something for sure.”

  “But you told Dad.”

  She nodded. “With my blood counts, it might’ve been something that could cause heart failure. Maybe out of the blue. So yeah, your father had to know.”

  “Heart failure?” I shook my head. “You said you weren’t going to die any time soon.”

  Mom nodded. “My heart’s fine. The diagnosis went in another direction. What I have is called melody . . . crap.” She cleared her throat and tried again. “Myelodysplastic syndrome, it’s called. Everyone just says MDS.”

  I took my mother’s hand. “What does that mean?”

  “It means my blood’s all messed up, right at the source. They finally got around to testing my bone marrow. There are stem cells in there that make your blood cells. Mine are broken.”

  “Broken? How the hell does that happen?”

  “They don’t know. When I was a couple of years younger than you, I worked as a house painter. We used benzene to strip the paint back then. We should’ve worn masks, I guess.”

  “And that’s what did this to you? Some chemical you inhaled, like, thirty years ago?”

  “We don’t know.” She took both my hands in hers. “But the important thing is that it’s not genetic. You don’t have to worry about this happening to you.”

  “But I do have to worry about it.” The reaper was in me, sweeping across my life, across the lives of everyone around me. It was in the marrow of my mother’s bones. “So what happens next?”

  “Well, nothing wonderful. Blood transfusions, maybe a stem-cell transplant. We’re talking about years of dealing with this, and we don’t know how it’ll work out. But I’m younger than most of the people who get this disease, which is lucky.”

  Lucky, like surviving a terrorist attack.

  “Real luck is taking another flight,” I said softly.

  My mother didn’t hear me, or she didn’t understand. “I’ve got decent health insurance, so we probably won’t lose the house. And this is not going to make me an invalid, so you don’t have to be chained to your mother. You’ll be off at college for most of it.” She looked at me. “Are you following all this, kiddo?”

  I shook my head. “I got lost somewhere between blood transfusions and losing our house.”

  “Right.” She took a slow breath. “I guess you didn’t sleep last night.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Maybe we should go into details later. Along with that boyfriend conversation we’re going to have.”

  “I’d like to go to bed.”

  My mother hesitated, just to show that she was within
her rights to make me sit here apologizing for the rest of the day, but had decided to be merciful. “Okay. But you know I have to meet him, right?”

  I nodded. “He’s really nice and I think you’ll like him.”

  “I hope so.” She hugged me then, hard and long, and when we finally pulled apart, she was smiling. “I’m glad you got home in one piece.”

  I felt forgiven, at least a little, even if my mother only knew a tiny slice of what I’d done the night before. Her absolution fell on something darker than she knew.

  She held out a hand. “Keys.”

  So I gave her the keys to my shiny new car, as if that made up for everything, and told her I was going to bed.

  * * *

  Mom stayed outside, giving the new car another once-over, so I slipped into her room.

  “Mindy?”

  No answer, and the closet was empty. I had an awful thought: What if the bad man’s memories had been the only thing keeping her from fading? What if I had just erased my ghostly friend?

  But then I heard a giggle behind me.

  I turned and saw a shadow scampering away. Following the giggling to my own room, I found Mindy sitting on my bed.

  “Finally!” She smiled, patting the blanket for me to sit beside her. “I thought Anna was going to yell at you forever. She’s pretty mad, huh?”

  “Yeah, she was upset.”

  “You’re naughty, sneaking away like that.”

  I stared at Mindy. Her hair was combed straight again, tucked neatly into two little pigtails. She looked so happy, more at ease than I’d ever seen her. It was as if she already knew that the bad man was dead.

  “You didn’t used to be bad,” she said, still smiling.

  “I had something important to do. Remember how I said I’d fix things?”

  “Like what?” she asked, patting the blanket again.

  I sat down, speaking softly. “Last night I went back to your old neighborhood, and I got rid of the bad man. You don’t have to worry about him.”

  “What bad man?” Mindy asked.

  It took me a moment to speak again. “What do you mean?”

  “What bad man did you get rid of?” She giggled a little. “And why was he so bad?”

  “Because he . . .” I didn’t finish. “You don’t remember him?”

  She made a show of thinking, squinting her eyes. “Not unless you mean your dad. He was pretty annoying.”

  Of course. The part of Mindy that had been terrified all these years had existed only in the bad man’s head. All that remained of her now was what my mother remembered, the carefree child of eleven.

  Things were fixed far better than I’d imagined.

  I swallowed something hard in my throat. “Yeah, he was annoying. But he’s gone now.”

  “It’s just us three!” Mindy leaned across the bed and wrapped her arms around me. Her embrace was still cold, but there was a spark along her skin that had been missing before. When she pulled back, she was giggling again. “So what’s Anna going to do to you for running away?”

  “She took my car keys. In fact, I’m pretty sure she took my car. Who knows when she’ll let me drive it again.”

  “What a drag.” Mindy frowned. “Wait. When did you get a car?”

  “Yesterday. Lost it pretty quick, huh?”

  Suddenly we were both laughing together, not holding back at all. After the last twenty-four hours, I desperately needed to find something funny. It was probably lucky that my mother was still outside, out of earshot.

  But there was something freaky about how happy Mindy was. Her three decades of fear had been erased overnight. It felt almost as if Mr. Hamlyn were right, and ghosts weren’t real people after all. And if Mindy wasn’t really herself anymore, it was my fault. I’d taken away the hours that had made her the ghost she was.

  I decided to test something. “You know what my mother told me?”

  “What?”

  “That your real name is Melinda.”

  A thoughtful expression crossed her face, and it took a long moment until she finally nodded. “That’s right. That was my name.”

  Was, she’d said. Mindy was her real name now, because my mother’s memories were all that she had left.

  “Did you know my mother was sick?”

  She shrugged. “Sometimes she talks to doctors on the phone, about how she’s tired all the time.”

  “Okay.” Maybe stem-cell diseases weren’t an easy concept for an eleven-year-old. “But that’s it?”

  “I guess. Is Anna going to be okay?”

  I nodded. “They figured out what’s wrong. And she’s going to get it fixed.”

  Mindy smiled, and I knew that lying had been the right thing to do. If my mother died, Mindy would have no one left who remembered her as a living girl. What did that mean to a ghost?

  In any case, it was easier for me to pretend that my mother was okay.

  CHAPTER 35

  “SIX MONTHS!” DARCY CRIED. “I had six months to do this, and now I’ve only got six days!”

  Imogen didn’t answer. She was busy in the kitchen, filling the house with the scent of simmering meat. It was four thirty in the afternoon, but Imogen’s stew required hours of cooking. Of all their experiments in the Chinatown markets, from fried whelks to sea urchin to salted duck tongue, short rib stew had proven the most successful.

  Even in her deadline panic, Darcy felt herself getting hungry.

  “This is just like high school,” she muttered to herself. “I always did everything the night before.”

  “That’s the curse of being clever!” Imogen called out.

  “What is?”

  Imogen stepped from the kitchen, her hair in a headband, wearing an apron emblazoned with a black velvet painting of Shimmer-Tail (Nisha’s favorite Sparkle Pony). “All those years of doing schoolwork the night before, and still getting an A. Now you’re stuck with the habit.”

  “That’s not fair. I’ve been trying to rewrite this stupid ending for months!”

  “Yeah, but in your heart of hearts, you know it doesn’t really count until the night before it’s due.” Imogen smiled evilly. “If you were a little less clever, you’d have a much better work ethic.”

  Darcy back stared at her. “Are you complimenting my intelligence or insulting my character?”

  “Just working out my own issues.” Imogen disappeared back into the kitchen.

  Darcy didn’t bother to answer that. Lately, Imogen was overwhelmed with her own anxiety about the first draft of Phobomancer. Two deadlines in the house at once was perhaps one too many.

  Open on Darcy’s laptop screen were a dozen documents, the twelve best versions of the end of Afterworlds. Some were dark and melancholy, some light and uplifting, and some straight-up Happily Ever After. Darcy felt as though she’d written every possible ending for the book, and now it was simply a matter of picking one.

  “I’m a writer, not a decider,” Darcy mumbled to herself. The words danced in her head for a while, as meaningless as the burble of boiling water from the kitchen.

  Maybe she was afraid to pick an ending, because once this book was finished, the die was cast. She would either be a success or a failure, all her realness determined by that single throw.

  Or maybe it was because she wasn’t so much a writer as a thief. She’d stolen her little ghost from her mother’s childhood, a kidnapping scene from her girlfriend, and the love interest from her own religion. Maybe she had no perfect ending because there wasn’t one to steal.

  Imogen popped out from the kitchen again, a paring knife in hand. “What do you think of River Treeman?”

  Darcy looked up. “Who’s that?”

  “No one, yet. But how do you like it as a name?”

  “Sounds like they had hippie parents. Or is this person an elf?”

  “Crap. Never mind.” Imogen disappeared again.

  Darcy shook her head, staring again at her laptop screen.

  If only Kiralee Taylor h
ad just told her how to end her book, or shamed her into fighting for her original tragic ending. But she’d made the whole experience a test of skill, in which Darcy either had to write a happy ending that went with the unhappy themes of her novel, or an unhappy ending that kept her unhappiness-hating publisher happy.

  The word “happy” had started to sound wrong in Darcy’s head, like a random collection of Scrabble letters.

  “What about Amanda Shearling?” Imogen called from the kitchen. “As a name.”

  “Sounds like a really rich person.”

  “Ugh.”

  Apparently, Imogen’s mechanism for dealing with stress was to make up bad character names and cook. Of course, both were probably more useful than Darcy sitting here staring, as if her eyes could arrange the letters on the screen.

  What if it was too late? What if she’d already written so many endings that she would never find the right one? Like kids who’ve told so many lies that they can no longer remember the truth.

  “Gen?” she called. “Once the stew is stewing, I think I need you.”

  It wasn’t long before Imogen emerged from the kitchen again, pulled out the chair opposite from Darcy, and sat down.

  “The ribs are stewing, the mushrooms soaking. What’s up?”

  “All my endings suck.”

  “How many pages are we talking about exactly?”

  “The last four chapters. Lizzie’s killed the bad man and chopped his memories up, then returned home and found out what her mom’s disease is. But after that . . .” Darcy stared her laptop. “Maybe the book’s already over. Killing the bad man is the climax, and confronting her mom is the denouement. Maybe I’m just waffling for another ten thousand words. Maybe I’m already done.”

  Imogen didn’t look convinced. “This isn’t an action movie, Darcy. You don’t kill the bad guy and then roll the credits.”

  “If it’s not an action movie, what it is? A horror-slash-romance? A Bollywood musical? An indie film about a wilted helium balloon?”

  “It’s not a movie at all, Darcy; it’s a novel. And novels are messy and tangled and complicated. If you end it right after the bad man dies, then we never find out what happens between Lizzie and Yamaraj.”

  Darcy shook her head. “Maybe the book’s not really about him. Maybe Kiralee’s right, and he’s just there for purposes of YA hotness.”