Page 53 of All Her Ghosts
I relent. How can I stay mad at him when he’s the only thing of mine I truly have?
Stepping back from the open door, chewing on my bottom lip, I tell him, “There’s only one bed back here. Is your… babynapper gonna be cool with that?”
In response, Cain flicks on the radio, spins it to a classic hits station with the military precision of an old man seeking his people.
Randy Travis, tinny and distant through the old RV speakers, promises a love that lasts forever. I wonder if he knows it feels like this? Like coming home and finding all the furniture gone, the structure empty, nothing left but the loss—the absence and the wrongness and the grief.
I reach out a hand. Sad smile flickering, Bas takes it. Our fingers tangle.
Stepping back from the doorway, I invite him in.
CHAPTER 16
94.5 3WS FM
“Forever and Ever, Amen” by Randy Travis
Funny how being a messed-up government science experiment doesn’t feel all that different from being a teenage girl. Hell, it’s almost a relief. Messed-up government science experiments don’t have to stress about being alone in the back of an RV with the boy they like. They don’t struggle to make small talk in the wreckage of their life crashing down around their ears. They don’t worry about what to do with their hands, hyper-aware of every inch of their body as they slip under the comforter that still smells like the woman who is probably not their mother. And when the boy they like kicks off his beat-up sneakers and flops down on top of the covers—well, that’s nothing to stress about either.
He’s just another messed-up government experiment too.
Brave in the darkness and the drone of the engine, I curl under Bas’s arm, my ear pressed to his chest, eyes closed in the slow roll of a distant ocean.
“What do you think it is?” I ask him. “Our matching un-heartbeats?”
Bas shrugs, jostling my head a little.
“I think it’s a piece of home.” His fingers drift through my hair,calluses tracing the shell of my ear where he tucked a flower only yesterday. “Haven’t you noticed? Hell is wherever we are.”
His words lodge somewhere deep inside my empty chest, caught like asphodel in a linen hem. I fall asleep to their echo, carrying them through strange dreams with pieces missing. Lost in my own head, I wander through a litany of familiar scents, sensations, the hazy outlines of places I should know like the back of my hand made strange and unfamiliar. The terrain flakes away beneath my bare feet and bones, broken, a stained-glass panel with only the leading left behind.
I hold a waxen fruit in my hands.
I hold death in my hands.
I hold the sky in my hands. One by one, I eat the seeds—the stars—sharing them morsel by morsel with a stained and grinning mouth until the night sky winks out.
I wake to an unsteady sunbeam poking me in the eyelid, the RV rumbling slow across uneven terrain. My neck aches. My mouth tastes like something might have died in it. Bas’s eyes flutter open, and I roll away before he can catch a whiff of me. Craning my head to work the kink out of my spine, I shove the curtains aside, squinting into the light.
We bump through a big grassy field turned into some kind of parking lot. Cars and old RVs sit in rows marked by unsteady spray paint as far as I can see out the little back window. Shoving myself upright, I wobble the bedroom door open, lurching as Cain reverses into a parking spot.
“Where are we?” I ask, frowning.
Bas sits up with a hiss, shaking out his arm. Trying to knead life back into the poor dead hand I slept on, he glances out the window.
“Flat.” He shrugs. “Probably Indiana.”
“Why Indiana?”
“Good visibility,” Cain answers, unfolding out of the driver’s seat with a groan and several cracking bones. “Good flea markets. No cameras, no ghosts, and no traceable transactions. Also, this diner is decent.”
He wings his wallet past my head. Even with one hand numb, eyes screwed shut and yawning as he emerges from the bedroom, Bas snatches it out of the air.
“Bring me back something.” Faster than my mother or I have ever managed, Cain bullies the table into its bench position, shoving cushions into place. “And clear out. I need to sleep.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Bas laughs, heading for the door. “Pappy needs his nappy.”
It’s weird, watching the smile kite across Cain’s face. His lips twitch almost against his will and suddenly he’s a different person. Not the cold lighthouse on a broken shore but a… afather.
