As always.
fifteen
Astoria
November 2018
By the time we touched down in Boston, the sky was already beginning to bruise. The mottled purple swallowing the dimming light as the sun made its retreat.
I stepped out of the airport with the same feeling I did every time.Relief.Excited smiles beamed around me. Children running between their parents legs, businessmen jutting out the doors with their phones clutched tight, and even a group of young women wearing matching sweatsuits and sashes that readBrideandBridesmaid.Everyone travels for one reason or another.
A young boy passed by my leg, looking up at me with a toothy smile before his father tugged him along. Were they on vacation? Perhaps visiting family?Not running, that’s for sure.
Fishing around in my pocket, I pulled out a penny, setting it over my thumb. For a moment, I’d forgotten I had a travel partner until Grim stepped up beside me, all of my belongings in tow. Paying him and his quizzical brow no mind, I tossedthe penny over my shoulder, closed my eyes, and made a silent declaration to this next chapter of my life.
“Did you just make a wish on a coin? In the doorway of a dirty airport?” he questioned, wrestling one of the heavier bags over his shoulder.
“Why even speak if you can just read all of my thoughts?”
“Perhaps I just enjoy hearing your sweet voice,” he said, giving me a knowing look before stepping up to the curb and hailing a cab.
Leaning into the open window to speak with the driver, Grim looked back at me and winked. He was relaxed.Happy, even.I could almost picture us this way, an elderly couple enjoying a visit to our grandchildren in the city.
Shaking that dangerous nonsense out of my mind, I found my penny on the ground, picked it up, and pocketed it for safekeeping. I'd use it again when it all fell apart and I’d be forced to start over.
It had become a tradition; one I’d followed through with every airport I visited and every trip I’d taken. It was the way I wished good fortune into my next life, hoping and praying that this would be the time it would stick.
Futile, it may be, but that didn’t stop me from trying.
I rubbed my palms together, smiling when I found that my skin moved differently against itself than before. I’m sure Grim thought I was strange for becoming emotional over gray hair and a wrinkled face.
Itwassilly.
But I’ve spent countless mornings before a mirror, tugging at strands, scouring my scalp like a prospector panning for gold. Desperate for a glint of gray, proof that I was moving forward, that my clock hadn’t stopped. That I wasaging.
I turned my hands over, marveling at the quiet signs of life etched into them. The stretch of skin pulled taut over bone. Thecalluses roughing my knuckles. The deep, familiar lines that told stories no one else could read.
It’s strange, isn’t it? How, in the end, what we have to show for a life lived are these bodies—flesh and bone, worn and marked. Memories blur with time, but the body holds our records.
“Astoria, darling, this young man is going to take us to our hotel.” Grim was looking back at me, holding the door open as the cab driver put the last of my bags in the trunk.
“Where are we going?” I asked, ducking into the small yellow car. I’d asked him this too many times to count.
“To the hotel.” Grim slid in beside me, his leg warm and solid against mine, and casually draped his arm around my shoulders. “I have something to show you.”
I had half a mind to argue if only to prove I still could. It wasn’t like me to just go along with what Death wanted. I’d made an entire afterlife out of resisting him, but the stranger in the front seat kept me compliant.
Maybe I wasn’t losing my edge. Maybe I was just... tired of fighting the inevitable for sport?
Boston wasn’t the same as I remembered. The last time I was here, it was with James and the boys, before Beatrice was born, before everything softened and shattered in the way time tends to do. The cobblestone streets had been swallowed by smooth asphalt, and the charming brick buildings now stood shadowed by sleek towers of glass and steel.
The harbor yawned beneath a settling fog, the last light of the day bleeding out in a slow sigh. An entire day, gone, spent in transit. Not that it mattered. I had thousands more to waste, if I wanted. Still, there was something about the city now…
It was beautiful in a different way, foreign and familiar all at once. Despite everything,despite him, I felt that familiar itchagain. The need to wander and pry open the edges of this new life and see what spilled out.
“What brings you love birds to our great city?” the cab driver called over his shoulder in a thick Boston accent. He wore a well-loved Red Sox ball cap and a dark blue sweatshirt, his dark hair streaked with gray and pulled into a bun beneath the brim.
“Life,” I offered.
