“That’s a lie.”
“So you’ve heard.”
“Yeah,” he says woodenly. “I’ve heard. We’ve all heard.”
“Is Mina Ma . . . is she—”
“She’s angry,” says Sean. “She’s swearing to cut off Matthew’s unmentionable parts if he so much as hurts one hair on your head. Which means she’s not yet sad. Look, we don’t have to talk about this.”
“I want to come home,” I say very quietly.
“It would be nice, wouldn’t it?” His voice is so expressive for a minute that I can see him. His jeans are creased, his shirt rolled back to the elbows and rumpled. He looks tired. He hasn’t shaved in a couple days, his jaw’s rough, his hair is messy. He looks . . . sad.
I want to see him so badly I could break something.
We’re quiet again. It’s not that I have nothing to say to Sean. There’s just so much to say and I don’t know where to begin. There’s something fierce and silent blazing across the line.
“I’d better go,” says Sean at last. “It’s morning here. I’ve been in London, visiting this theater, and I only just got home. I need some sleep.”
I know this is the last time he’ll call me. This might be the last time we ever speak. I want to say something that tells him how I feel, but I don’t know how.
“Eva,” he says, and my eyes tear, “do you still dream of cities?”
“Yes,” I say.
I hear the sound of him swallowing. “Do you dream of me?”
“Yes.”
“I thought things might have changed.”
“I haven’t changed.”
“No,” he says. “I haven’t either.” He hangs up.
I put my phone back in my pocket but keep gazing ahead at the hot shimmering concrete. If I blink or move, the concrete will change, time will fracture, and I’ll lose this, this moment with the sound of Sean’s voice and the feel of him close to me. If I concentrate on the concrete hard enough, on that exact spot, I can feel his breath on my hair, his fingers on my skin. I can feel myself running off that train and into his arms.
But my eyes grow raw and blink against my will. I draw myself reluctantly back to the city, to the real world. I fiddle with the bracelet of shells that he gave me.
I keep walking. There’s nothing else to do.
As I turn the corner, I realize my assessment of the Indian climate was off by a few days. It’s beginning to rain. Within seconds it has turned into a torrential shower.
Around me, people are shrieking as they run for cover. The rain is warm. Before I can find a rickshaw, a car pulls to a stop beside me. A Scorpio, dark and faded and severely battered in places.
The passenger door opens. Ray and I stare at each other for a minute. He nods at the rain. “Do you need a ride back to the house?”
I hesitate, then climb in. “Thank you.”
“No problem,” he says. His jaw seems to be under severe strain.
“Are you following me?”
“Obviously,” he says. “Didn’t you see me outside your window last night with the night-vision goggles?” I laugh. He doesn’t smile back, but his face twitches like he almost wanted to. “I was on my way home and saw you.”
“Thanks for stopping. I’m impressed.” I add mildly, “You still drive.”
Ray’s hands jerk on the wheel.
I could kick myself. “I didn’t mean it like that,” I say. “I was only surprised. If I’d been in your place, I probably wouldn’t want to drive ever again.” Ray glances at me. I look back earnestly. “It was an awful thing to say, but I really didn’t mean it that way.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to cry myself to sleep,” he says. He hesitates. “Not that it wasn’t true. I did kill her.”
“It was an accident,” I remind him. “The guy on the motorcycle was going too fast, you didn’t have time to do anything. Besides, she should have put her seatbelt on.”
“It wasn’t her fault,” he snaps.
“I didn’t say it was,” I snap back. “I’m only saying you could blame anyone if you wanted to. The motorcycle driver, you, Amarra. I think losing someone is bad enough without blaming yourself for it, too.”
He’s quiet for a minute or two. Then: “How do you know all that? About the bike coming? That she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt? Did someone tell you?”
“No.” I hesitate before telling him the truth. “I saw it happen. I kind of dreamed it while it was happening.”
Ray’s face is a mixture of disbelief and fascination. His hands grip the wheel very tightly. “I didn’t know that was possible. How does that work?”
“Well, you know how Alisha told you that echoes are imperfect? The Weavers are trying to fix that. One day, if they figure it out, we’ll be spare bodies. And if our others die while they’re still young, they’ll wake up in the new body.”
He nods. “That’s why she thought Amarra was still here?”
“Yeah. And she was right in a way. I don’t think she’s here the way Alisha believed she was,” I add quickly, “but when they made me, they had to put some of her cells, some of her consciousness, into me. To make me grow the same as her. A small part of her was always part of me. It meant that sometimes, usually when I was asleep and my mind got quiet, I would dream bits of her life.”
“Jesus,” he says, “didn’t that feel weird? Like you were spying?”
“There was nothing I could do about it.”
“Did you ever—” He stops.
I get it. He wants to know if I saw them. Together. “No. I saw you once. Just your face. And I saw the accident. That’s all.”
We sit in uneasy silence for a few minutes. The rain has soaked me, and without the sunlight, it’s cold. I huddle up. Ray flips a switch near the wheel. The air-conditioning turns warm. He doesn’t say anything, but a little color creeps back into his face. His hands don’t loosen on the wheel. His eyes are far away, following Amarra through the mist she vanished into. His anger and his grief fill the car like cigar smoke. I have no idea how to pick my way through it. I can only step cautiously, one step at a time.
I study his profile for a minute. A long minute. And I realize something.
“It was you,” I say.
“What?”
“You’re the reason she decided to get rid of me.”
The lack of surprise on his face confirms what I’d guessed. He’s known all along. “I thought you didn’t know,” he says.
“I didn’t until about a week ago. But you did. You said something to me, months ago. You said I shouldn’t even exist anymore. You thought I’d be long gone; you didn’t think I would turn up.”
“You weren’t supposed to,” he says, but not unkindly. “She said she’d done this thing where they’d get rid of you so that you wouldn’t replace her if anything happened to her.”
“She did it because of you. She wouldn’t share you. I wondered. She put up with me all her life, but one day it was too much? I couldn’t figure out what tipped her over. It should have been obvious. It was you.”
Ray doesn’t say anything for a moment. Then, carefully, he asks, “So does that mean you’re going to . . . you know . . . that they’ll—”
“Yes,” I say, my voice flat as paper, “when I turn eighteen.”
He glances at me. He doesn’t say anything, but the expression on his face is almost one of regret.
Another difficult, awkward silence fills the space be-tween us.
“We haven’t gotten off MG Road yet,” I say, looking out through the rain. “Is the traffic going to be this bad the whole way back?”
He nods. “It’ll be jammed long before we get to Amarra’s house. Could be over an hour before you get there. Do you want to stop somewhere and change clothes?”
“Where?”
“My house is about five minutes away. You’re a bit shorter than my mother, but her clothes should fit you.”
“Won’t your mother mind?”
“Nah. She?
??s in Paris with my grandparents this week.”
“Have you been there?”
“Where, Paris?”
I nod.
“We used to go every summer,” he says, “until a couple of years ago. I loved it. But with A-levels and everything, I have a much shorter summer break, so I don’t get to go as often.”
My phone buzzes and my heart leaps, but it’s only a text from Lekha. I squirm guiltily. It was silly to hope it would be Sean again. I shouldn’t be thinking about him at all, but I can’t help myself. I can’t stop picturing him living a normal life. Does he think of me much? Does he tell himself I’m the wrong person to be thinking about?
Ray pulls in through a pair of open gates and stops his car in front of a tall white house. It seems quiet, except for a dog barking.
“There’s no one home,” he says, “unless you count Sir Jacques.”
“Sir Jacques?”
“My mother named him. He has some stray dog and some husky in him, so hell if I know what she was thinking. If you’ve ever seen a dog that looks less like a Sir Jacques . . .”
I follow Ray to the front door. He unlocks the house and leads me in. He glances at me, at the wet clothes, and then looks quickly away again. They’ve stuck to every line and crease of my body. I’m suddenly self-conscious.
A dog bounds into the room, padding toward us. He’s a powerful animal, shaggy like a wolf, his teeth bared in a grin as he gambols around Ray. He’s dark gray with white patches on his belly. The sound of his barking makes me want to step away, but I stay where I am.
After nuzzling Ray and sniffing me suspiciously, Sir Jacques licks my hand and wags his tail. I scratch behind his ears.
“Weird,” says Ray. “He doesn’t like strangers.”
“Animals like me better than people do,” I say truthfully. “They don’t look at me and sense something’s wrong.”
Ray mutters something in French, too low for me to hear, and marches away. “I’ll get you some clothes.”
He returns in a couple of minutes with a silk shirt and tight blue jeans. “I don’t think she’s worn these in years, but they’ll fit.”
I thank him.
“I won’t look,” says Ray. He begins to turn away but jerks to a stop. I stop as well, my wet T-shirt halfway up my torso. I lower it back down. His expression has changed. “You don’t have her scars from the dog bite,” he says.
“Scars were one of the few things I didn’t have to copy.”
“But you have her tattoo?”
I move my watch a bit up my wrist to show him. The little snake gazes up at us. Ray shakes his head. “It’s so strange how like her you are. You could be her.”
“That was the point,” I say.
He doesn’t move, but I see his hands tighten into fists, his expression clear as the brightest of days. In many ways, Ray and I are alike. We can’t usually hide what we’re feeling. We have impulsive faces, voices that express everything.
I can see everything on Ray’s face now, the agony, the thoughts rushing through his head. I see him marvel at how like Amarra I look. I see him remember that he’s kissed my cheek and held my hand and touched my skin and it felt so like she did. I see him realize that, if he wanted me and I wanted him, I wouldn’t feel any different from her. His expression flickers, tempted, angry, and rigid. I swallow.
“You’re not her,” he says. “You’re only an echo of her.”
“Only an echo,” I agree, “and you’re a minefield. I have to step around you so carefully so you don’t blow me up.”
He comes closer and reaches out to me. I wait, watching him, not breathing. After an eternity, his hand falls to his side again.
“You’re not her,” he says again.
“Turn around,” I tell him softly. “I need to change out of these clothes.”
13
Perfect
Ray offers me coffee. He takes me to the kitchen, with Sir Jacques padding after us. “Why are you giving me coffee when you could just ask me to leave?” I ask him. “Is today one of the days when you need to see me? Or one of the days it hurts like hell?”
“You’re surprised,” he observes. How astute of him. “Because I haven’t always been nice to you?”
“Yes, that would be why.”
“I have manners.”
“Oh?” I ask politely. “Have these manners been in Disney World the last eight months, then?”
“Funny,” he says, then adds, “I told you no one wanted you here, and that was a nasty thing to say. But I’ve been angry. I say some not-nice things when I’m angry. Does that mean I can’t be a nice person?”
“Depends. Are you a nice person?”
He flashes me a suspicious look. “Do you always ask this many questions?”
“Yes. Should I have mentioned that earlier?”
There’s a pause in which he stirs his coffee, somewhat violently. Sir Jacques growls low in his throat, a contented sound.
“Sugar?” says Sir Jacques’s master.
“Yes, please. Four teaspoons.”
His expression is slightly stunned as he counts the teaspoons into a cup. I notice he only has one teaspoon of sugar in his coffee. One more than Sean, who likes black coffee, one less than Mina Ma, who likes hers a little sweet, and certainly far more than Erik, who could run out of all the types of tea in the world and still wouldn’t drink coffee. I listen to the clinking of the teaspoon against the sides of the cups. It’s such a familiar sound that I’m transported, to a place that smells faintly of hand cream, and the hills rising in the distance through French windows. I am spooning sugar into cups of tea and coffee for my guardians.
The clinking of the spoons has stopped. I focus on Ray’s pale face and grief-stricken eyes and pull back to reality. I wonder if I’ll ever stop half living by the lake, wanting it.
“What does your heart want?” It’s the question the woman with sad eyes asks me in dreams. I wonder if she knows the answer. There’s such sorrow in her voice, as if she knows what I want and knows already that those things are stars in the sky, entirely out of reach, no matter how high on my toes I stand and stretch for them.
But stars sometimes fall.
“So,” I say to Ray, pushing my fragile hopes into a corner, “you’re not as angry with me as you used to be?”
“I don’t know what I am,” he says, clunking coffee cups down in front of me. “It’s so strange to see you and hear you and you’re so much like her. It’s painful, but also nice.” He watches me, on my knees with his dog that doesn’t like strangers. “You and me, we’re not as different as I thought. As people.” He clears his throat. “I didn’t expect to like you. I blamed you for stealing her life. I can’t just forget about that, but I can’t be angry all the time either. It’s bad enough missing her every single day without being angry, too. I don’t even know if I like you or if I’m confused because I want her back so badly.”
I listen to the extremes of his voice. His feelings are so exposed. He has a wild, reckless way of making choices and gestures, but he also has an earnestness I like.
“So maybe we could be friends?” I say softly, treading cautiously among the mines. “You get to see her face when-ever you want, and I get to hang out with you.”
“Why would you want to hang out with me?”
I wonder why myself. Spending time with him confuses me, makes me wonder who I am. Who I am supposed to be. But there are parts of it that are nice, too.
“You seem okay,” I say, “and spending time with you is what Amarra would have done. You know I’m not her and I don’t particularly like being her, but there are rules I have to live by.”
“I figured the rules wouldn’t matter. If you only have a year, why bother? I mean,” he adds hastily, “I don’t really know . . . I didn’t mean you have nothing left. . . .” Sheepish guilt crosses his face. “I should shut up now.”
I shake my head. “It’s fine. It’s not like I forget about it if no one mentions it. Yo
u’re right, it doesn’t seem like there’s much point. But a year’s something.”
He holds his cup between his hands and gazes at it intently. “I don’t know if we’d ever really be friends,” he says at last. “Too weird.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “At least we’re not still at each other’s throats.” I lift the edge of the drapes and look out the window. “It’s stopped raining. I’d better go. I’ll return the clothes at the exam next Thursday.”
Ray and Sir Jacques follow me to the door. I briefly glimpse the conflicted, wounded look in Ray’s eyes. How much must he have loved her, I think sadly.
“I miss her, too,” I say at the door. It’s a tiny truth I hadn’t acknowledged even to myself. “All my life she’s been there. I’ve listened to her voice. I’ve watched her on film. I’ve read her words in those pages. Sometimes I can’t believe none of that will ever happen again. Sometimes I wonder who I am without her. She’s always been there. It’s rather lonely now.”
“Yeah, it is. Happy birthday,” says Ray.
I walk as far as I can go before the humidity and the noise become too much. Then I flag down a rickshaw. The traffic is still quite bad, and the city rattles slowly past the open sides of the rickshaw. I answer the driver’s friendly questions in Kannada. I know it better than I do Hindi; I can barely speak a word of that. Mina Ma was disdainful of Hindi. “North Indian languages,” she’d say scornfully. “No need for them.”
Alisha is on the sofa when I get home, her legs tucked against her chest. She turns toward me when I come in, and then away again, as if the sight of me is much too painful. I see her eyes are red. Her brow is furrowed.
“I made you a cake,” she says.
I stop. “You didn’t have to do that,” I say.
“It wasn’t any trouble. Sasha insisted.”
“Thank you.”
“Eva?” she says before I can turn away. Her voice bursts out of her like she tried to stop it but failed. “I’m . . . sorry.”
I nod but don’t reply. There’s nothing I can say. It’s been tense at the house since we found out about the Sleep Order. It’s like someone reached in and turned the place inside out and nothing fits quite right. Nikhil won’t speak to his parents. Neil and Alisha seem strained when they speak to each other. The warmth and tenuous trust that gradually set in over the months since I arrived is shaky now, the equilibrium shattered. Everyone puts on a good face for Sasha, but no one wants to tell her that one day I’ll be leaving and won’t come back.