Chapter 2 Three Weeks Before

I died with my cheek against steel, and I woke up with my cheek against a pillowcase that smelled like lavender detergent. For a long moment I did not move at all. I lay on my side with my eyes open, watching a strip of morning sun crawl across a wall I knew, painted a blue I had argued over for an entire weekend. Somewhere below the window a garbage truck ground its gears. A bird, ridiculous and cheerful, said the same three notes over and over. No humming, no hundreds of feet. My hands were the first thing I checked, because hands were what I had left on the door. I lifted them in front of my face. Ten fingers, nails chipped from the pharmacy shelves but whole. Palms clean. The skin I had torn off on that gap of steel was just skin again, unmarked, pink, ordinary. Nursing training takes over before grief does. That's the one useful thing it ever gave me. I pressed two fingers to my own neck and counted against the clock on the nightstand. One hundred and forty beats a minute. Pupils likely dilated. Oriented to place, because I knew exactly where I was. Oriented to time, because I did not. "Hey." A hand settled between my shoulder blades. Warm, broad, familiar. "Mar. You're shaking. Bad dream?" Daniel. I have thought about what I should have done in that second, and the honest answer is that there was nothing to do. My body made the decision for me. Every muscle I owned locked at once, and I held myself so still that he felt it, because his hand paused, a quarter inch off my spine. The man who had stood twelve feet back with his palms open was rubbing my back and asking if I'd had a bad dream. "Yeah," I said. My voice came out scraped raw. "Bad one." "You were talking in your sleep." He propped himself up on an elbow, hair flattened on one side, the sheet creased across his chest. Alive, rested, nine days of grime gone from his face. He looked at me with a faint worried crease between his eyebrows, exactly the way he'd looked at me the night my father's old watch broke. "You kept saying her name. Elise. Over and over." "I was just worried about her." "Of course you were." He kissed my temple. The kiss was real. That was the worst part, and I would spend a long time learning how to hold it. It was a real kiss from a man who loved me. "You're freezing, babe. Stay in bed. I'll start coffee." He left and I listened to his bare feet on the floorboards, the squeak of the third step, the kitchen tap running. Then I grabbed my phone off the charger and stopped breathing. Monday, It was eleven minutes past seven in the morning. I knew that date. I had stared at it, at the digital clock in a pharmacy a week and a half into the end of the world, because the pharmacy's calendar had still been turned to the right month and I couldn't stop thinking about how normal it looked. The sky came down on the twenty-third. The alert, the first screaming broadcast, the day everyone remembered. Twenty-one days. I sat on the edge of the bed and put my head between my knees and breathed through my mouth until the room stopped tilting. The phone slid onto the rug. I did not pick it up. I was twenty-six, again. I had been twenty-six and ten months when I died, and I was twenty-six and ten months now, and the only thing that had changed was that somewhere behind my ribs there was a record of a world that did not exist yet. Slowly, like pulling a splinter, I thought: they don't know. Daniel didn't know. Whatever he had decided in the dark, whatever arithmetic he had done to be able to stand there with his hands open, it hadn't happened yet. As far as he was concerned, I was the woman he was going to marry, and I'd had a nightmare about my sister. I stood, my legs held. I went to the bathroom, locked the door, turned on the tap so the water would cover the noise, and put a towel over my mouth, and screamed into it until my throat tasted of metal. When I came out, I washed my face. In the mirror, I looked terrible and also unmistakably young. No hollows under my cheekbones. No cut on my lip from a fall on the ridge road. I stared at myself until I recognized something in the eyes, a flatness that had not been there the last time I'd looked at this particular reflection. Then I put on a sweatshirt and went to find my sister. The kitchen smelled like syrup and burnt butter but I heard her before I saw her. She was humming, off key, a song from a commercial. Elise stood at the stove in Daniel's oversized college sweatshirt with her damp hair twisted up in a clip, flipping a pancake with the focus of a surgeon. Her face was bare and clean and smooth. Her fingernails were painted a chipped coral. Her shoulders had the loose, easy line of someone who had slept eight hours in a bed. She turned around and saw me, and she smiled. I have tried since to describe that smile accurately, because I know it was the key to everything. It was not forced. It was not cruel. It was open, bright, and a little sheepish, the face of a twenty-four-year-old who knew she'd burned the first batch and wanted me to forgive her before I saw. It was the smile I had worked for. Fourteen years of double shifts and skipped meals, and her braces, and her prom dress, and every scholarship form I'd ever signed with my own tired hand. "Morning, sleepyhead," Elise said. "You look awful." "Thanks." "No, I mean it nicely." She crossed the kitchen and wrapped her arms around me, chin on my shoulder, the familiar weight of her against my back. Those hands, resting over my collarbones. Those exact hands. They had flipped a lever on a wall. I didn't scream. I don't know how I didn't. I stood there inside the circle of my sister's arms and let her squeeze me and felt something terrible happen in my chest. It wasn't hatred. I wished it had been hatred. Hatred would have been clean. It was love, still there, still warm and stupid and fully functional, like a limb that doesn't know it's been cut off. "You're crying," Elise said, pulling back. "Bad dream." "Aw, Mar." She swiped her thumb under my eye. "It was just a dream." "Yeah." I nodded. I made myself smile. "I'm sure it was." Behind her, on the counter, Daniel's phone buzzed against the granite. He was at the coffee machine with his back to us, humming along with Elise now, the two of them off key in perfect, practiced harmony. The screen lit up where it lay, face up between the fruit bowl and a pile of mail. I was close enough to read it. Marcus, Hale Group: Ridge site passed final inspection. Mr. Hale wants the full structural team on site Friday for the door test. Bring your code. The preview cut off there. Daniel turned, saw me looking, and swept the phone into his pocket with an easy, careless motion. "Work stuff. Boring." "Sounds important." "Not really." He crossed the kitchen and slid a mug into my hands, hot, chipped, the one with the faded lighthouse. "Eat something, Mar. You're too pale." I took the mug. I looked at my sister, flushed and glowing at the stove. I looked at the man I had been going to marry, smiling at me over the rim of his own cup. The sun came through the window above the sink and lit the whole room gold, and the syrup was warm, and nobody in that kitchen had any idea what I was. They were both smiling at me. Neither of them knew I had already died at their door. I lifted the coffee to my lips so I wouldn't have to say anything. That was when I heard it, so faintly I almost mistook it for the refrigerator. A slow, patient mechanical tick, rising up from somewhere beneath the floor, beneath the building, beneath the whole waking city. I glanced at the wall clock above the stove. Its hands were moving, silent as a held breath. Whatever I was hearing, it wasn't coming from there.