Dead Set

  “I guess I’m really going this time,” said Zoe, feeling a little overwhelmed and lost; so much was happening so fast.

  “Yeah, kiddo,” said her father. “And this time I really mean the fifty-year thing.”

  “It’s a deal,” she said.

  Valentine limped to the platform and hugged her. “I’m glad we really, finally met,” he said.

  “Me, too,” said Zoe. “Will I see you again, in the tree fort?”

  Valentine shrugged. “I don’t know. Where we’re going, I don’t know if I’ll be able to get there.” He brightened a little. “Anyway, you don’t need me there anymore. You can take care of yourself.”

  She leaned down and kissed him on the cheek. “Don’t worry, I’ll always need you.”

  Zoe’s father took a coin from his pocket and dropped it into Zoe’s hand. “You know how I told you that some spirits cling to things from life? I liked to pretend that I was above all that, but the truth is, I wasn’t,” he said. “The club where your mother and I met had these drink tokens they sometimes gave to regulars. I had this one with me when I died. Give it to her for me, will you?”

  Zoe turned the coin over in her hand. It was penny brown, but as large as a quarter. On one side was a ragged anarchy A in a circle. On the other side were a skull with crossed beer bottles and the words Fuck You Very Much. Zoe grinned, remembering the same words on her mother’s jacket years ago.

  “I’ll give it to her first thing when I get back,” she said, slipping the coin into her pocket.

  “Time to go, dear,” said Mrs. Somerville.

  “But wait,” said Zoe. “What happens to all those people who helped Hecate?”

  Valentine, Caroline, and her father all looked at one another. “I have no idea,” her father said. “Some of them probably didn’t want to help her. We all did things we didn’t want to do here. The ones who did side with her, maybe they’ll have to answer for it somewhere, sometime. I don’t know. My guess is they’ll stay right here hiding in the city forever, afraid to move on.” He looked around at the growing crowd. “But it’s not my job to worry about it and it’s not yours . . . so fuck them all.”

  Caroline gave Zoe a small wave. “You have a good trip home, and a long and lovely life when you get there.”

  “Thank you,” Zoe said. She called to her father, “When I come back old and wrinkled, you’ll recognize me because I’ll be the old lady in the Germs T-shirt.”

  The bus doors hissed closed and the engine ground to life. Zoe sat up front and slid across the seat to the window. She waved to Valentine and her father as the bus pulled away. It moved slowly through the dense crowd of smiling faces. She turned for a last look at the beach just as they were passing the abandoned amusement park. It looked kind of cool in the sun, she thought. Absynthe would love the place, she thought. Maybe Julie and Laura, too. What was she going to tell them about all this? If she told the truth, they’d think she really was crazy or, worse, showing off by pretending to be crazy. It was a strange kind of problem, she thought. Then the light faded from the windows and the interior lights on the bus dimmed. Suddenly everything was very soft and dark and quiet. For a second it felt like falling, but she wasn’t scared at all.

  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 was that long!” yelled her mother, breaking down into red-faced sobs. She tried to speak, but she had trouble breathing. “I thought you were dead.”

  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 sai
d. “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?”

  Zoe took a deep breath. “Iphigene,” she said. “You see, there was this record shop and a man named Emmett. Well, really Ammut, but I’ll get to that part later.” She talked for hours, and told her mother everything.

  When she was done, she could barely keep her eyes open. She was too tired to even take a shower, so her mother helped her to bed. After she had slipped under the covers, her mother sat beside her. “Do you believe me?” Zoe asked.

  Her mother stroked Zoe’s hair and nodded. “I used to believe in things, once,” she said. “God. Ghosts. Guardian angels. I used to believe the world was a crazy, bad, beautiful game we were supposed to play forever.” She shrugged. “So, yeah, I guess I believe you, because it’s the best thing I’ve heard to believe in a long time.” She got up from Zoe’s bed, went to the door, and flicked off the light. “Besides,” she said, “you’ve had a week to come up with a better lie than that. So, how can I not believe you?”

  “Love you, Mom,” said Zoe.

  “You, too,” said her mother, and pulled the door closed.

  Even though she was still covered in grime and dried blood, it felt wonderful to lie in her bed between the cool, clean sheets. Zoe was in her body again, in this world, and she had to admit that she was happy to be back.

  As sleep swept over her, she heard a strange sound, like something scratching at her bedroom window.

  When she awoke the next morning, the covers were pulled tight and wrapped around her like a cocoon. In the night, her dreams had shifted randomly from Iphigene to this world, until she wasn’t sure which was which or where she was, and Valentine wasn’t there to help her figure it out. It was a relief to wake up in one place and have it stay that way.

  Zoe was wearing her underwear and an old “X” T-shirt she must have found on the floor the night before. She didn’t even remember changing. The clothes she’d worn in Iphigene lay in a pile at the foot of her bed. She laughed when she saw them. Her mother had been right. It really did look like she’d been dragged behind a truck. She kicked them over by her closet. The hoodie and T-shirt she’d wash later. The jeans might even be salvageable, but the sneakers were so caked with sewer filth that they were probably a total loss. She hated the idea of giving up a good pair of Chuck Taylors while she and her mother were broke, but she told herself they could probably find a used pair down at Goodwill.

  The sound of the television, the smell of coffee, and the noises her mother made in the kitchen seemed as out of place and exotic as a circus in the living room. Give it time, she thought. Iphigene sort of made sense by the end. This will, again, too. She went into the kitchen, where her mother was in a terry-cloth robe, putting milk into her coffee. Zoe hugged her briefly from behind.

  “Morning,” she said sleepily.

  “Morning. Sleep okay?” her mother asked.

  Zoe nodded, still trying to shake away the last few cobwebs.

  “Want some coffee?”

  “In a little while. I think I need a shower.”

  “Thank God,” said her mother. “I’m going to have to burn your sheets. I didn’t want to have to boil the rest of the house, too.” They both cracked up a little at that.

  In the bathroom, Zoe thought about how weird it was to laugh with her mother. Their relationship had become based so much on tension, that the absence of tension, even for a while, felt odd. Maybe not a bad odd either. It was kind of nice not to have her stomach tied in knots as she waited for the next explosion.

  The hot water in the shower stung her cuts and scrapes, but still felt great. As she washed, she felt between her breasts and found a small, round patch of raised skin—a scar from where the arrow had gone in. Zoe smiled. When she turned eighteen, maybe she would have something tattooed around it. What? A snake, maybe. An ouroboros. She stayed under the hot water until it ran out and turned cold.

  Her mother suggested that since it was already Thursday, Zoe take the next couple of days to rest before going back to school on Monday. It would also give them time to work out some kind of family emergency to use as an excuse for Zoe’s absence. At around noon, her mother dressed and headed out for another interview at the design company where she’d applied for a job before Zoe had left.

  “Good luck,” Zoe called as her mot
her left.

  “Thanks. There’s food in the fridge, if you get hungry.”

  “Thanks.”

  Her mother started to close the door, then came back in the living room. “Look,” she said, “I’m not going to lock you up or anything, but for the next few days, do me a favor and don’t go too far, okay?” She smiled at Zoe a little sadly. “I’ll be back in a couple of hours and I’d really like it if you were here when I got back.”

  Zoe smiled and picked up a cup of coffee she’d brought in from the kitchen. “Don’t worry, Mom,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Thanks. Is my hair okay?”

  “Perfect.”

  After her mother left, Zoe watched cartoons and then part of an old black-and-white Fred Astaire movie. After that, The Wizard of Oz came on. She fell asleep just as the flying monkeys were taking off to attack Dorothy and the others.

  When she woke up a couple of hours later, her mother still wasn’t back. She hoped that was a good sign. Maybe the guy at the design company had put her to work right away, she thought.

  While she’d been asleep, the flying monkeys had invaded her dreams. They’d circled overhead, just above the clouds, waiting for their chance to take her away. It didn’t feel exactly like a regular dream, more like something she was trying to remember. That night, she lay in bed, willing herself to stay awake. And then she heard it—a scratching at the window. When she went to look, there was nothing there, but the window frame was torn and splintered, as if by claws.

  Her mother was already dressed when she got up. She moved around the kitchen in an anxious rush, gulping coffee and wolfing down mouthfuls of buttered toast.

  “Choking to death is not a good way to start a new job,” said Zoe, pouring herself some coffee.

  “I’m so nervous,” said her mother through a full mouth. “I know I can do the work, but I haven’t worked in an office in so long, and everyone else there looks like they’re twelve years old and have been doing design since they were a fetus.”