“Do you still see my memories?”
I forced my eyes open and nodded against the pillow.
His voice was barely a whisper. “I see yours, too.”
I mumbled, “I really screwed up, didn’t I?”
He touched the bloodstain on his cheek—my blood—and rested his forehead on the edge of the bed. “Oh, Dee. What am I going to do?” Time passed, unnoticed. Was I sleeping? Blink. An image of him kissing my cheek softly, or maybe it really happened. Then a hollow feeling in my gut, when I realized he was gone.
And then just sleep.
thirteen
I woke up to a beeping cell phone and loud voices downstairs. Mom and Delia. No surprise there. They argued like other people breathed; it was instinctive and unavoidable. I buried my face away from the too-bright sun; I must have really slept in.
Rolling onto my stomach, I extricated the phone from my back pocket (good thing I’d rescued these jeans from the laundry when I went out to meet Luke, or else the phone would’ve gotten washed). I sat up and wiped the sleep out of my eyes. I felt like I’d been dead for the past few hours. I’d been lost in a dreamless sleep so heavy I’d slept through my phone ringing.
Luke.
I was instantly awake, the events of the melodrama that was now my life running through my head. I flipped open the phone: fourteen missed calls, three new texts. Every call was from James. They started at about six a.m., with the last one just a few minutes ago. I opened the text messages.
First: wakey wakey.
Next one: i need 2 talk 2 u.
Last one: call granna.
I didn’t call Granna, of course. I called James. He picked up before the first ring had even finished.
“What are you, sleeping in a coffin these days? I’ve been trying to get you for hours.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Did you call Granna?”
I climbed out of bed, stiff from sleeping in my jeans. “No, I called you. You called me fourteen times, so I figured it was important.”
“It is important. I think something’s happened to your grandmother.”
“Huh?”
“Call it my spidey sense. Did she bring you that stuff she was making?”
Come to think of it, she hadn’t. I felt a little guilty for forgetting about it. “No. She didn’t call, either. Is this your crystal ball spidey sense we’re talking about, or just common sense?”
“Crystal ball. Would you please just call her and find out if I’m right? I mean, I hope I’m not, but I’ve had the most awful feeling about it since early this morning. I couldn’t sleep. I even did a Deirdre.”
“You threw up?”
“Yeah. Please call?”
“Okay, okay. I’ll let you know.”
I hung up, but before I had a chance to call Granna’s number, Mom shouted my name from downstairs. She had that barely-in-control sound to her voice that meant someone was going to fry.
Oh. What if she knew about last night? She would torture me, kill me, and then perform a black rite to resurrect me to kill me again if she found out. Mom had never bothered to have the sex talk with me—that might have actually required finding out how I felt about something—but she’d made it quite clear what she thought of girls that did more than hold hands with their boyfriends. I still remembered the time she dropped me off at Dave’s Ice when I first started, and Sara was kissing her boyfriend in the parking lot. I remembered wondering why I would want someone’s tongue in my ear, and then Mom saying, “Girls like that have no self-respect. Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?”
I kinda wondered what Luke’s tongue would feel like in my ear.
“Deirdre!” Mom shouted again. I stalled, scrubbing off the bottoms of my feet so it didn’t look so much like I’d been wandering around the neighborhood all night. “Don’t make me come up there!”
I steeled myself and headed down to the kitchen. Mom, Delia, and Dad were posted at various points in the room, all holding coffee cups, all looking tired and strained in the strong late-morning light coming in the windows. So it was to be three on one. Hardly seemed fair.
“Good morning,” I said. Admit nothing, that was my plan.
Mom barely looked at me; she gulped her coffee before speaking. “You’re supposed to be at work this afternoon, right?”
The question was so far from what I’d expected that my voice was a bit incredulous. “Yeah, at one.”
“Dad can drop you off, but James will have to pick you up, or if he can’t, you’ll have to call in and take time off. I can’t get you.” She drained her coffee cup and set it in the sink. Dad looked hangdog, and I bet a fight had preceded my arrival.
Mom continued. “Delia and I have to go to the hospital.”
With a faint prickle of dread, I echoed her. “The hospital?”
Delia withdrew an enormous set of keys from her purse and took my mother’s arm firmly. “Granna fell down or something. The EMTs aren’t sure. It’s probably nothing serious.”
“Fell down?” I repeated again. Other people’s grandmothers fell down. Granna wasn’t the frail, falling-down type. She was the hauling-and-painting-furniture type. She was the beating-herbs-into-green-pulp-to-drive-off-the-faeries type. For some reason, I thought of Eleanor’s fearsome smile right before she’d left.
“Or something,” Delia said loudly, louder, if possible, than her usual voice. “We’re just going to see if she’s all right. I’m sure she’ll be released shortly. It’s just precautions.”
Mom glared at Delia, and I wondered what that argument had been.
Impervious to the slings and arrows of her sister, Delia looked regally down at me. “You saw her yesterday, Deirdre. Did anything seem unusual to you?”
I had probably been too self-absorbed yesterday to notice anything out of place. The only unusual thing there yesterday had been me. I shook my head. “She seemed fine.”
Mom shot a triumphant look at Delia. “Let’s go.”
The two of them pushed through the door, leaving Dad and me alone. As usual, he was quiet, all the words he might have said already used up by Delia and Mom. Finally, he scratched his chin and looked at me. “You’re seeing that flute player from the competition?”
Talking with Mom was difficult: you had to follow rules and play her games. Dad was easy. I nodded.
“Do you like him?”
I didn’t feel embarrassed, but my cheeks reddened anyway as I admitted the truth. “A lot.”