Some Quiet Place (24 page)

Once I’m certain he’s dead, I join him in darkness. For once there are no dreams. Just the peace of surrendering to oblivion.

Twenty-Three

I wake up on the ground. Above, the trees hover, shielding me from the bright glow of the moon like a protective mother. Nighttime. There’s only a portion of the sky visible, but somehow the fact that the stars have come out is comforting. A cool breeze stirs my sweat-drenched hair.

Remaining on my back, I look around. I’m in some kind of clearing, in woods I don’t recognize. It takes me a moment, but when I do remember everything that’s just happened, I wish I hadn’t. Landon, knives, Moss, Rebecca, the illusion, the woman who saved me, Nightmare—it all comes back. But the shack is nowhere to be seen. The Element is gone, dead, and I’m alone.

The same instant I realize this, I also comprehend that the pain is gone. All my cuts, bruises, the bullet holes in my back, the stab wounds in my calf and hand—they’re healed.

Is this because of the woman I’d been calling Rebecca? Because of Moss? Or just … me?

Now that I’ve thought of her, she actually appears, crouching beside me. For the first time, she isn’t hidden in layers of clothing. I recognize her face from the memory, and her hair as well—long and straight, the color of leaves after Summer has left. She’s dressed simply, in jeans and a long-sleeved green shirt. On her feet she’s wearing stylish, heeled boots. There are lines on her face that indicates she’s not as young as I’d originally assumed, though her eyes are bright and sharp.

I lean up on my elbows, my lips trembling as I relive the whole ordeal. The woman brushes my hair off my shoulder, a tender, unusual gesture for her. We sit there like that, quiet. I should know her. Our pasts are intertwined. She saved my life. But even having possession of the truth doesn’t make me feel connected to any of it.

“Looks like he found me after all,” I finally murmur. Because of Nightmare, I’ve been alone for thirteen years, empty and surrounded by a web of lies.

She hops to her feet. “I’m sorry you went through all this,” she says abruptly. And I know she means it. She never intended for any of this to happen. For a few more minutes, we stay there in comfortable silence, sharing the overwhelming knowledge that it’s over. It’s all over. There are more questions I’d like to ask her, of course, so many more. For now, though, I let us simply exist.

Then the woman ruins the moment by saying, “But I can’t
believe
that none of it broke the fucking illusion. You still look like Elizabeth, and I still can’t talk about anything.”

Sighing, I think of the day Landon died. The pain of remembering isn’t quite as strong now as it was in the shack; the illusion is attempting to realign, to hold on. I find myself falling back to my old ways, thinking of the facts. And they’re simple:
I
am Rebecca. Landon was
my
brother … my twin. Fear loved
me
.
I
lived in that house by the ocean.
I
am something more than mortal. And to run from Nightmare—to deal with my twin’s death—I asked this woman to do the impossible: make me human.

The thought of my family urges me to ask one question. “So you can’t tell me where Rebecca’s—” I stop, correct myself. “Where my mother is? She wasn’t killed; I know that much.” Moss appears on my shoulder, humming, and I touch her cheek. She giggles.

The woman—I still don’t know what Emotion or Element she is—just shakes her head.

I purse my lips, wishing I didn’t have to accept this. And I still don’t even know what I am.
Later,
something says inside my head.
Later.
I settle back on my elbows, deliberately emptying my mind. “So what now?” I murmur.

Still standing, my companion looks up at the sky, and I follow her gaze. The stars stare back down at us—cold, timeless rocks. They make me think of Fear, and a pang of longing consumes me.

After a moment, she just shrugs. “Now, you live.”

“Wake up. We’re almost there.”

The woman’s profile swims into view. It’s still night, so the moon’s shadows hide her features, but I recognize the slope of her lip, the lines of her chin and jaw. I blink up at her, my cheek resting on a cracked leather seat. Is this one of the dreams?

When the woman hisses impatiently and reaches over to smack my cheek, I know it’s no illusion. The hours before drift back: we’re in her car, on our way back to Edson. We’d been over eighty miles away, she told me.

I sit up in the passenger seat and my body protests. “Almost where?” I ask. A road sign flashes by, bright green:
10th Avenue
. “This isn’t where I live … what’s wrong?” I’ve suddenly noticed how fast she’s going; the speedometer is inching past seventy. As if we have somewhere we need to be. As if there’s not much time. But isn’t the danger, everything we’ve been running from, gone? The answer occurs to me before she has a chance to answer.
Fear
.

“Where is he?” I ask next. There’s no panic or worry, just a need to get to him. The windows are rolled down, and the air is curiously warm now, the stillness disrupted by gunshots rather than the moans of the lonely wind. Hunting season. I wonder if Winter knows the threat is gone, that the way is safe for her.

This leads me to thoughts of Nightmare, and I go rigid, clenching my jaw so hard it hurts.

The woman still doesn’t answer. She stares out at the expanse of black sky. Remembering that she’d once said Fear was too injured to take far, I’d guess that we’re heading toward the outskirts of town. For once, I don’t pepper her with endless questions.

I’ve never been on these back roads, and the headlights sweep past foreign trees and unknown houses. It isn’t until we pass an old windmill that I know where we are. The Halversons’ place. It’s a farm that’s been abandoned for years. Presumably a huge family used to live there and they all died from some sort of plague. Kids come out here on Halloween and dare each other to go inside for five minutes. It’s a rickety house with gray paint, a drooping wrap-around porch, and falling shutters.

The woman shifts into park and kills the engine. Still silent, she swings out of the car. I follow. The grass is long and uncut all the way up to the front door, and the hinges moan as she pulls it open. Inside, the air is musty and thick with dust. This was probably the only place she could bring Fear without being noticed. Tense, I follow her through a grimy kitchen and an empty, moonlit living room. There’s a single table in the dining room, and as soon as we round the corner I draw up short.

There … there lies the Emotion who’s taunted and tormented and loved me almost my entire life. Both my lives. The white moonlight slants down on him, making him glow, his flawlessness more pronounced. Even now, he’s beautiful. But his eyes, usually so sharp and vibrant, are closed. His chest is barely rising and falling, and his skin glistens with sweat. I’ve never seen Fear sweat before. My own breathing grows uneven.

“He’s dying,” I observe quietly, and it’s as if his wound is mine, because my stomach feels like a knife has been thrust into it. He tried to save me. This happened to him because of his unhealthy obsession with me.
Stop saying that
, my mental voice snaps.
It wasn’t obsession
. And now I have to admit that the voice is right—it was something so much more. And I should have done more to discourage him. I knew what happened to those around me. Even without the knowledge I have now, I knew.

I drown in a battle of detachment. And it’s while I’m standing there staring down at him that it occurs to me: this is Fear’s consequence for interfering the day Tim attacked me in the barn.

“You’re going to help him,” the woman says matter-of-factly, interrupting my thoughts.

I look at her, trembling. “What can I possibly—”

She tries to snatch my hand and I jerk back, a reflex. She rolls her eyes, letting out an annoyed breath. “I just need you to touch him,” she growls. “Put your damn palm on his forehead and keep it there until I tell you otherwise. Think you can do that?”

I do it without an instant more of protest. He’s freezing to the touch, even colder than usual. We wait, and it’s hard to keep still. Ten seconds. Twenty. Nothing happens. I don’t know what I expected, but something inside of me sinks. Fear is slipping away.
No. No.
This can’t happen. He isn’t mine anymore, and I’ve pushed him away for so long, and he loves someone that doesn’t exist, but all of that is so insignificant now. My grip tightens so much that if he were conscious, it would hurt. I close my eyes and strive to cope with the knot inside me.

“Damn it,” the woman says through her teeth. “I thought the illusion had faded enough that … ” She stops mid-sentence, and I immediately see why. Before our very eyes, the wound in Fear’s stomach is folding, drying, closing, until the skin is smooth and unblemished. My throat clogs with more questions, but instead of voicing them, I kneel so I’m right by Fear’s head. With trembling fingers, I smooth his hair back, and it occurs to me that this is the first time I’ve actually touched it in this life. It’s just as silky as I imagined it would be.

The woman watches for a moment. Then she rests her own hand on my shoulder. “He’ll be fine,” she tells me. “I’ll take you back, if you want. Or I could make up a bed for you here.”

“No,” I respond instantly. “I don’t want to stay here.” There’s really nothing to go back to, but I find myself leaving Fear’s side and following the woman back to the car. The door hinges shriek as we leave, and clouds of white swirl through the air with each exhale. The woman doesn’t ask any questions as we get back into the car—which she probably stole, now that I think about it, since she has no need for one when I’m not around.

The night whizzes past once again, less urgent this time. Pressing my forehead to the glass, I close my eyes and try not to think about Fear. But it’s impossible not to. I know why I don’t want to be there when he wakes up; I can’t get those images of him and Rebecca out of my head. Knowing that he once loved me—someone that I destroyed—I can’t face him. I keep picturing those moments of passion, the way Rebecca and Fear touched. Gone. Fear’s been wandering the earth in pain just as long as I have. He found Elizabeth and loved again. And again, I ripped that love away from him. His pain, his struggles, his torment. All my fault. I can’t pinpoint the sensation that makes my chest hurt … or maybe I’m not willing to explore it. Not right now.

Once again the woman and I are silent in the car. The white lines on the road shoot by. It isn’t until we’re back in Tim’s driveway, back at the house that isn’t really mine, that she speaks. The engine idles as she shifts gears again, and the leather seat creaks when she twists to face me.

“I want to tell you something.” She hesitates, and stillness fills the space between us. “About the illusion,” she asserts.

I angle toward her, too. “Okay.”

The woman taps her knee with her finger. “When it breaks … it’s going to hurt. A lot. Not just physically.”

“Well.” I take this in. “Thank you for letting—”

“That’s not what I want to tell you,” she snaps. “I should have told you this the day you asked me to do the illusion … I just want you to know that you’re strong. Okay? You didn’t need the illusion to overcome w-what you’d g-gone through.” She clenches the steering wheel at this, and I know she’s struggling to speak past the power that not only affects me but both of us. She breathes deeply, then continues. “I only did it because we needed to get Nightmare off your trail. And it did, for years. So I don’t regret doing it. But you didn’t need the illusion to survive … to survive what you did. Do you understand me?” The power stops her from giving me details, and there’s still a portion of the illusion standing, so I don’t understand, not completely. But I nod. The woman nods, as well. “Good,” she says. “Good night.”

That’s my cue to go. Her polite way of telling me to get out. She’s never been polite before, so I quickly comply. The house is dark, but Charles’s car is in the driveway, so I know he’s home.

Preparing myself for the scene ahead, I watch the woman drive away into the night, back to Fear. And I have a feeling that when I see her again, things are going to be very, very different.

Even though it felt like a decade, I was only in the woods for two days. My not-brother yelled at me when I got home, and it wasn’t horrible for his first lecture. When he was done, his face was as red as Tim’s. But the menace was missing. Instead of looking furious, he just looked … weary. He’d returned to this house for me, altered his life for me, and this is how I repaid him. But the guilt I should have felt was absent, as the illusion taunted me with its resoluteness.

Three more days have gone by. I can’t bring myself to go back to school. My thoughts are consumed by my real family and the few glimpses of my old life that I’ve been given. No, that I’ve fought for. Why? Why fight for something I tried so hard to forget? That was what I was doing, throughout all of this. Fighting. Looking for the truth. Seeking to find a place where I belonged. In this way, I’m so human. I’ve observed it many times, thought it on countless occasions: give a person what they want, and it turns out it’s not what they wanted after all.

As the hours pass, I lie in the bed I’ve slept in for thirteen years. It feels strange now. Like I’m burying myself in someone else’s sheets. They smell like me, Sarah picked them out for me, but the ghost of what should have been fills this room like a choking perfume. The mural looms closer and closer and Landon’s prone form swallows my attention whole, no matter how much I try to concentrate on something else.

Charles doesn’t hover. No matter how much he’s changed, he was never good at that kind of thing. He loses himself in the car he’s invested so much hope in, and continues his shifts at Fowler’s. I’ve seen him poring over bills, though, Worry pressing close. I really didn’t give Charles enough credit over the years—he’s just as extraordinary as Maggie.