Maybe it was for me. Maybe it’s a coincidence. But I can’t get that flash of pink hair out of my head. I shove my hands in my pockets and plow through the cold wind. At least I have my knife for protection, since I don’t know for sure what I’m walking into. A gun would be better, but that’s long gone. I keep thinking about how we just left Walker Delacroix over on that island. He knew his way around, though, and he could have come back on any of the boats. I’m sure nothing bad happened to him. I was nice to him, so maybe he’s going to give me something. He told us to look in ‘the boneyard,’ whatever that is. We didn’t have a chance, but maybe he went there, found something of Eternity’s, and he’s going to return it to me to give my parents. Like he said, he knows a thing or two about missing sisters. And if he was going to get revenge on any of us, it would be Angel.
I’m almost to the board with the list of ice cream flavors when a girl steps from beside the building, blocking my path. Her hair is pink now, and tattoos peak through the rips in her black jeans, but my heart stops anyway. A few tattoos and a dye kit can’t hide the freckles across her nose, the eyes staring back at me, eyes of the rarest lavender. I blink, knowing I’m seeing things. People do that, see the person they lost in every crowd, around every corner.
She’s still there, though. She doesn’t look like the version of my sister I’d hallucinate, the one I lost four years ago. She looks like someone new. Someone else.
Still my feet stay planted to the ground, and I keep staring like a total weirdo. She’s probably going to kick my ass for creeping her out. She looks like she could, with her motorcycle boots and hands shoved in the pockets of a black leather jacket.
“I thought that was you,” she says in a raspy voice. “I saw you on TV. Breaking news, live from Wild Isle, blah blah blah.”
“E?” I manage, croaking the word.
“H,” she says, eyeing me warily, like she really does think I’m a creep.
“It’s you,” I say, still not sure this is real. I must have fallen asleep at the house, and the double dosage of my pills gave me vivid dreams instead of knocking me out into a dreamless sleep like a single dose does.
“A version of me,” she says, pulling out a pack of cigarettes. “Smoke?”
I want to wrap her up in my arms and never let go, but I don’t know if she’d like that. I want to ask a million questions all at once, but none come. I swallow the painful lump in my throat, then nod. “Okay.”
We sit on the curb in front of the ice cream shoppe. We smoke one cigarette in silence. Then we talk about how I got there, and how I wound up on the news. It’s so fucking bizarre, I still feel like I’m dreaming. But at the same time, it feels comfortable, like not a day has passed.
“So,” I say when we finally fall silent, not even knowing how to talk to her, where to begin with the rest of it, the last four years. I’ve imagined this a million times over those years, but the amount of shit that’s gone down is overwhelming now that I’m sitting next to her. “What’s new?”
She laughs quietly, tugging at the cuff of her leather jacket. “That looks new,” she says, nodding at my arm.
“It was my way of resisting arrest.” I skim my thumb over the gnarly cut running the length of my forearm. The bandage got some of the doctor’s blood on it, so I figured it was better to take it off and toss it with my gun than get arrested for his murder.
Her brow rises. “A bit dramatic, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I say. “I would have died if some horny couple hadn’t walked by and seen me on the ground right afterit happened. They wrapped my arm up and called 911. Still probably would have bit the dust if they’d been two minutes later.”
“Well, I’m glad you made it,” she says quietly.
“I had to get transfusions,” I say. “It’s weird, y’know? Knowing a bunch of random strangers’ blood is running through my veins.”
She rubs the heel of her boot against the pavement. “I would have given you mine.”
“I know,” I say, shoving my shoulder against hers. “Same for you. Anyway, it’s not all foreign juice. Mom was a match. Must be that Finnegan blood.”
I shoot her a grin, and she smiles back a little, her eyes crinkling at the corners. She got the Finnegan eyes, some recessive trait that mom carries, but that, according to family lore, only shows up once per generation.
“She kept telling them to take more even when they told her she’d given too much,” I say. “She’d just yell at them to keep going. When they finally refused, she stood up to give them a piece of her mind and fainted dead away.”
“Sounds like Mom,” Eternity says, sniffling a little.
“Can I ask you something?” I say after a minute.
“Are you going to ask why I didn’t come home?”
“Yeah, I was.”
“I couldn’t,” she admits. “I left everyone on the island. I had to go back, help them get out. I’ve been doing it for a while now, watching from the shore, sneaking over to get one or maybe two people at a time. And then you came along and blew it all up at once. If I’d known that was an option, I’d have been home already.”
“Would you?” I ask, tilting my head to look at her.
She won’t meet my eyes. “I thought about it,” she says. “If you think I forgot y’all… I didn’t. I just… It’s like that wassomeone else. That part of my life was unreal. It was so far away. If you asked me, I’d say of course I was going back. But first I had to get through this day, and then this day, and then this day… That’s how you survive. I don’t know how to unlearn that. There’s no past, no future. There’s just today.”
I nod slowly, trying to understand something I can’t begin to comprehend.
