“Young lady,” he said tiredly. “I’m eighty-six years old. My wife died seventeen years ago, God rest her soul. My son lives in Japan. I see him once a year, if I’m lucky. My body aches most mornings and it’s a good day if I can go to the bathroom without a problem. If today’s my day, so be it. I’m ready.”
It was exactly like what my grandmother Nan said when I’d warned her. Exactly what I knew in my gut as I stood across the street watching him, hesitating because I knew I shouldn’t tell. But I’d done it anyway.
“Did you know you might die today?” I asked too aggressively. I could see Liv coming toward us and I was angry at myself. He looked sick—deathly, if I was honest about it—much more than anyone I’d ever told. He’d had his time.
“Any of us might die any day,” he said without drama. “You included.”
Liv reached us then, thankfully too late to hear anything. She punched my shoulder lightly, raising an eyebrow. “What gives, Renfield?”
I steered her away, mumbling something about mistaking him for a friend from home.
“Who?” she asked, glancing back at him. “He’s like a hundred years old.”
I followed Liv the final few blocks to the thrift store, where she got some plaid pants and a leather jacket that looks really cool on her. I’d have found it first if I’d been seeing the clothes I flipped through instead of that man, outlined in the soft glow of the mark. What if he took my advice? Decided to go to a doctor after all? It nauseated me to realize I was hoping he wouldn’t. I was wishing him dead.
All because of a few sentences in an old letter I had little reason to believe. Clearly, didn’t believe or I’d never have warned him.
Would I?
This is why I need to understand death.
And this is why I’d come to Bellevue, far from home, much bigger and, above all, populated with an unusually strong minority of Greeks.
Some of them would have been able to read the original letter in the book Nan gave me almost two years ago. I didn’t need them to translate, though. That was already done. I needed answers about what it said.
Am I really Fate?
Does saving one person condemn another?
Are there others like me?
Chapter 2
“Luuucy, I’m home,” I called, hanging my school bag on a hook by the door and catching a whiff of chemicals. Eau de Manicured Dead.
Petra was hunched over a bunch of psych files at our antique dining table, one of the few things she’d brought from her place in Kansas. We’d bought mismatched chairs at a yard sale down the street and painted them red. They looked funky and cool in our otherwise boring apartment.
“How was it today?” she asked.
“Okay.” I shrugged off my coat, then sat to untie my wet Converse. They’d gotten soaked in the slushy walk from Ludwig & Wilton to the bus stop. I really needed boots. “You?”
“About the same.”
“Whatcha working on?” I crossed, barefoot, to the fridge.
“Ugh. Floor round-up for the staff meeting tomorrow. There’s so much here …” Over the bar counter of the kitchen I saw her wave at the papers spread everywhere. Petra shook her head. “I can’t even find time to organize my notes, much less figure out how to help these people.”
I nodded, having heard it before. Pretty much every week since she’d started at Vauxhall Mental Hospital. I worried she might regret moving, maybe enough to do an about-face. But when I finally had the courage to bring it up, Petra had dismissed it immediately. “What would I go back to?” she asked. “School’s done, couldn’t find a job, dumped the boyfriend …” She’d ticked off each on her black-painted fingernails. “I feel so needed here.”
She was talking about Vauxhall, but also about me.
I wandered closer to the table, soda in hand. Petra glanced at me, her dark bangs sticking up where she’d been resting her hand. Or pulling out her hair.
“Want to take a crack at it?” she offered.
“Uh, not in a million years?”
“It’s not that bad.”
“Mm-hmm. If you say so.”
Petra went back to her notes and I flopped onto the couch, typing a quick text to Jack: “lots of homework 2nite. procrastinating. how r u?” I tried calling Tasha, too, but her phone was off. Sleeping, I realized. It was almost three a.m. in Romania, where she was spending the semester. I could never get the time difference right. And I knew Liv was out for her dad’s birthday, which left me with nothing but schoolwork and laundry.
I was about to head to my room to start one or the other, when Petra said, “Hey, we got an admission this week you might be interested in.”
“Really?” I sounded casual, but my stomach felt like the floor had just dropped out. There was only one thing Petra could be talking about.
“Greek girl, eighteen. Attempted suicide.”
“Yeeeaah …?” A lot like my mother, but I could tell there was more.
“Her parents said she was having visions before her attempt.”
“What kind of visions?”
Petra paused and I could feel my heartbeat, fast and hard, all the way to my eardrums. “She said she saw death.”
Oh. My. God.
I’d been waiting for this, but only in the way you wait for a call saying you’ve won the lottery or been chosen homecoming queen—something on the barest fringes of possible. I half expected Petra might forget to watch for a patient like my mom. So I could learn what kind of person she had been, I’d said, this mother I never knew.
But I hadn’t really thought it would happen. What was the likelihood there would ever be one?
Except there was.
I leaned back slowly, not even sure what I was feeling. Shock, for sure. Elation, maybe? A weird euphoria that I might actually have found someone like her. Like me.
And fear. Definitely fear, because it meant this might all be real.
Petra nodded sympathetically. “It’s a little spooky how much she sounds like your mom, right?’
“It is.” I paused, playing the question in my head first to be sure I wasn’t giving anything away. “What did she mean about seeing death? Did she say how?” My mom’s psych file, which Petra read to me back in Kansas, had no details, so she couldn’t make a comparison. But I could.
“Her parents were pretty emotional when they spoke to the doctor,” Petra said. “They didn’t give specifics, just said she’d been depressed, progressively more so. Talked about being surrounded by death, even said—and I quote—‘the angel of death is lurking.’ Poetic, huh?”