Alive (31 page)

“Stephen!” she yells, padding off barefoot down the hall.

My dad, clean-shaven and dressed in a suit and paisley tie, whooshes past her. “I can’t find the camera battery. Have you seen it? Morning, Stel.” He lifts his chin and nods
before jogging over to look under the living room sofa. I follow him with my eyes, feeling weird and adrift. Thoughts, theories, and opinions are mixing wildly in my brain, half-formed, the cogs of
steampunk machinery turning over and over, clicking in and out of place. And yet neither of my parents can see through me to this place of palpable turbulence.

Inside the laundry room, I slip into a knee-length navy-blue dress. I realize with a pang that it’s the one Mom bought me for my Stanford admissions interview. I haven’t told them
yet that I missed the application deadline. I don’t know when I will. I zip the dress. How can any of that matter when I’ve just found out that my ex-boyfriend’s face matches the
face of a dead boy? Which means what, exactly? That my ex-boyfriend is, in fact, dead?

At least the dress covers up my scar nicely.

I’m pinning my hair into something less shaggy and more coifed when I hear a scream from the kitchen. “Mom!” I rush out. “Are you okay?”

“Shoot, shoot, shoot.” She blots at a dribble of coffee on her cream pencil skirt. “It’s not coming out.”

“Here, let me try.” I hurry to wet a dish towel.

“No, no.” She shoos me away. “I’m an idiot.” She smacks her forehead so hard I expect it to bruise like an overripe apple. She shakes her head, chin dimpled and
lips pressed together. “Can you go put Elsie in her christening gown? I need to change. It’s ruined.” The look on her face is pained.

“Of course, Mom. Are you sure?” Tears have started to pool in her eyes, so I throw the dish towel down on the cabinet and scurry off to Elsie’s room. I shut the door behind me
to seal off the chaos. Elsie peers at me through the bars of her crib.

“’Ella?” She removes her thumb from her mouth and scrunches her tiny sausage fingers. “’El-la.”

I rest my back on the door and take a deep breath. The room smells like vanilla and baby powder. “Yes, hi, Elsie,” I say patiently. “Our family has gone loony tunes, Elsie. Did
you know that?”

I
have gone loony tunes, that’s for sure. I’m finding it impossible to come up with a non-crazy explanation for the fact that I’ve been seeing a dead man walking.

Elsie pats her hands together before depositing her favorite thumb back between goopy lips. Soft baby curls practically float off the top of her head, and I watch her balance on a base of two
chunky toddler thighs.

A frilly white gown six inches too long hangs from the edge of a changing table. Folded on top of the table are a pair of petite lace gloves and a matching bonnet.

I cringe at the bonnet. “Don’t blame me for this,” I say, fingering the abundance of white ruffles.

Elsie will be baptized at the Church of the Sacred Heart, the same church my parents and I have been attending every couple years for Christmas since I was born. The church’s symbol
consists of a traditional heart shape, adorned with a crown of thorns and bursting with flames. Mounted on top of the burning heart is a cross and below that a lance puncturing the bleeding organ.
Since my diagnosis, I’ve never liked attending. The image unsettles me, and I’m approaching Elsie’s baptism with dread.

What’s so sacred about a heart anyway? Mine’s gone, replaced by somebody else’s. The doctors switched it for a better model and I’ve been suffering ever since. Suffering
like that supposedly sacred heart of Jesus.

Gently, I lift Elsie from the crib and set her baby bottom down on the plush carpet. She giggles as I unbutton her onesie. “That’s right. Be good for Stella,” I coo. Her tiny
body shivers under the light draft from the air-conditioning vent.

Elsie reaches for me, fingers splayed, in that way babies do, back arched—stretched—striving like she’s trying to grab a star. I slide the christening gown off the hanger and
hold it to my chest, looking down at her squirming. “Once all this white goes on, Else, all bodily functions must cease,
capisce?
”

Elsie cooperates when I sit her up and pull the frock over her head. Once I’m finished, it’s hard not to laugh. There’s more ruffle than there is Elsie. Sometimes it pays not
to be the Replacement Child, after all.

“Right. The final touches.” I’m crawling to my feet and turning to the changing table for the lace gloves and bonnet when I hear a voice say my name in an urgent tone.

Stella
.

A shiver brushes my neck. I turn, expecting to see my mother having entered the room in search of help scrubbing her skirt or pinning on a brooch. The words that are halfway past my lips stumble
and flutter helplessly into silence.

A streak of darkness blurs across the room and my blood freezes at the sight of a shadowed silhouette lurking in the corner behind the crib.

Tingles scuttle like insects over my scalp. I’m unable to move.

The figure looms, motionless, human in form but not in substance. Without taking my eyes off the dim outline, I inch closer to Elsie.

Its darkness sucks the light out of everything around it. Even the damp sunlight trickling in from the window is extracted from the air and sunk into shadow.

“Who…who are you?”

The figure cocks its head. Eyes on me. Watching.

Elsie babbles words that are intelligible only to her. She’s not close enough to touch. A needle of fear pins me like a butterfly to a display board. Heart flapping.

“Elsie, come here,” I whisper. The smell of baby powder and vanilla has been pulled out of the air and replaced by that of mothballs and urine.

I take a step closer to my sister, but as I do the figure dissolves, reappearing in a thick but foggy mass just behind her.

I scream.

Black fingers reach for her. The figure crouches. A head tilts hungrily and Elsie cries out, wails for “’Ella.”

I watch in horror as a shadowy hand plunges through the back of her tiny skull. A gray talon pokes out her mouth. She gags. Chokes.

I spring to life, unsure of what to do. I try to beat back the shade. Fists punch at the air. I fight to pull it off of Elsie and the thing screeches in protest.

Her strangled wails spur me to fight harder. Another shadowy, clawlike hand pushes through my sister’s small chest. Grabbing. Grabbing.

The stink of sour breath stings my nostrils. Whimpering, I nearly gag.

My vision is swimming. It hitches, giving the sense of a shift to double vision. I blink. Blink again. Wrenching my eyes to focus on the spot where my hands are gripping, I see only Elsie and my
fingers wrapping themselves around her neck as though they belong to someone else. I freeze. My rear end drops to my heels and I sit back slowly. My hands are rigid as they draw away from my baby
sister’s throat.

There’s nothing here. Nothing in the room with me. Her wails pierce the silence, grounding me. It wasn’t real. None of it was real. A trick. A lie. My stupid, stupid brain.

I scoop Elsie off the floor and hold her to my chest. Her chin rests on my shoulder and her screams bounce directly off my eardrums. It doesn’t bother me. She could scream all through the
night and I’d gladly listen.

I rub her tiny back and bounce her up and down the way she likes me to do.

There’s a click behind me. Footsteps. “Stella!” I twist around. My mom is standing above me. Air whooshes out of her and she pushes her bangs off her forehead. “You guys
scared me. Is everything okay?” At this point, Elsie’s wet sobs are beginning to dry up. I can’t see her face, but I’m sure the entire lower half is plastered in snot.

Dad follows closely behind Mom. Is it surprise that I see in both my parents’ eyes? And if so, surprise at what? That I’m here nicely cooing to my sister? I realize how far their
opinion of me must have fallen since my surgery.

Dad plants his hands over his belt and shakes his head. “Jesus, it sounded like an axe murderer was in here.”

Dad’s arm wraps around Mom’s waist and he pulls her near. I swish Elsie back and forth, wondering if when she’s ten years older she’ll look at me and this moment will
come to her in a weird flash of memory and she’ll wonder whether it’s true or just her imagination. She’ll wonder whether her sister really once tried to kill her.

“No,” I say, without smiling. “Just me.”

“You want to steal?” Henry says incredulously. “From my
father
?” I waited until we were in the parking lot of Harborview Medical Center before
unleashing my plan on Henry. “I thought you had a medical-something-or-other here?”

I stare flatly at him. Grim. If I’m going to figure out how Levi—whichever Levi he is—is walking around and why he’s particularly walking around
me
, it seems like
the best place to start is here, researching the details of his death. Sometimes sick-girl logic comes in handy.

“I lied,” I say.

“Well, that’s comforting.”

“But who said anything about stealing?” I say, staring up at the building. An ambulance siren blasts through the adjoining driveway as it races up to the emergency room entrance. For
as long as I live, I will hate hospitals.

Henry twists the bill of his cap. “I’m sorry. Did you have another word you’d prefer I use? I’d hate to muck this up over semantics.”

“Taking a peek? Poking around? Anything that doesn’t make it seem like we’re committing a crime.” A technician in bright, polka-dotted scrubs wheels a patient past
us.

Henry throws his hands up and they fall with a clap onto his pant legs. “But we
are
! That’s the whole point.”

“We’re accessing your dad’s files, Henry.” I have to admit, rifling through Dr. Jones’s things does feel a bit icky, but I can’t think of another way and I
don’t have time to try.

“Files my dad has privileges to,” he corrects. The sliding glass doors to the hospital swoosh open and shut. Balloons disappear inside. Haggard-looking people stagger out from the
waiting room for a smoke.

“Same thing.
Relax
.” I try to sound like this is no big deal, but my palms are already slick with sweat. I have no idea what I’m going to find in those records, and
after hearing the short version from Daniel, I’m not sure I want to. “Other girls have malls, I have hospitals. Trust me, if there’s one thing I know, it’s this.”

He sighs. “I just wish it
weren’t
my dad. At least I’d feel like less of a jerk.”

“So you’d prefer a stranger catch us thumbing through hospital records?” I quirk an eyebrow. “Now it’s starting to sound like a crime.”

“You’d make a scary lawyer, you know.” He shudders.

“It’s in my genes.”

Together, we enter the bustling lobby of Harborview Medical Center. The antiseptic scent of plastic gloves and freshly mopped floors bowls me over. Nausea pushes at my throat. I take a step back
and Henry reaches for my hand. I wave him off. “Just a reflex,” I say, swallowing hard. I can’t wait until the last time I have to set foot in one of these buildings.

The hospital is a labyrinth of corridors and double doors that seal shut the second anyone walks through. “Do you know where your dad keeps his office around here?” The atmosphere of
Harborview is more frantic than at St. David’s, and I have a strong urge to wash my hands as soon as possible.

“Sort of. I think so. It’s been a while.” Henry turns on the spot, looking at each of the signs. He pauses when he lands on one hallway, thinking, then…“This
way.”

He leads me down a long passage lined with small waiting areas. People slumped in chairs. Coughing. Sour stench of sickness and apple juice.

I stick close to Henry. We wind up in an elevator. He punches the button for the fourth floor first, then thinks better of it and decides that it’s actually the sixth.

Although the elevator is empty, instinctively, we huddle close together. Coconspirators on our way to a heist. I inhale deeply the eau d’Henry, letting it calm me, since it smells nothing
like a hospital.

My chest emits a few painful pulses and I wonder how much effort it would take to steal a bottle of morphine from the pharmacy. Then I wonder more whether morphine would even work. I consider it
doubtful.

The elevator dings. We step off onto the sixth floor. Around here there are none of the sunny decorations that try so hard to be upbeat in the lower floors, but instead come off as looking too
bold and too impersonal, always primary colors. This floor is cool, quiet, like an office building. Our steps echo and so would our voices if we didn’t fall into a hushed silence. We’re
stopped at a reception desk by a bubbly voice.

“Hello there,” says a bottle blonde from behind a desk. “May I help you?”

Henry turns and puts on his church smile. I’d hoped we’d be able to march through unimpeded. “Hi, we’re looking for Dr. Jones?”

“His dad,” I add.

The blonde with the name tag that reads, in bold letters,
CASSANDRA
tilts her head and taps her fake-tanned chin with a French-manicured nail.
“Henry?”

“Yeah?” Henry shoots me a sidelong glance.