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“Memphis. Darling Memphis. How can I ever thank you?” Evie said.
“You can get well,” Memphis said. “We’ve still got a fight ahead of us.”
“Yes,” Evie said. The memory of Gideon flooded in. Mabel. It made her dizzy. She wanted to run away from what she’d seen. Evie tried to stand, swayed, and fell back into the chair.
“Back to bed with you, Sheba,” Sam insisted.
Theta and Sam helped Evie upstairs to her room and into bed. Theta shooed Sam away. “Scram, Lloyd.”
“But—”
“No ifs, ands, or buts to it. I need to see to her. You can bump your gums at her later,” Theta said, shutting the door over his protests. “Let’s take a look at you, Evil.”
Theta helped Evie out of her filthy dress. Evie wrinkled up her nose. “Something smells pos-i-tutely putrefied.”
“That’s you. Three days, no bath?”
“You might want to burn that dress.”
Theta made a face as she tossed it to the floor. “Mm-hmm.” She peeled back the dressing she’d made the night before. “Well, it looks better than it did. I’ve been reading Miss Addie’s spell book about herbal remedies and poultices. I applied fresh ones morning and night,” Theta said.
“Like a proper witch,” Evie said, peering down at the serrated injury. The puncture marks. The feathery charcoal veining mixed with a puckered pinkness and fading bruises. It would leave a substantial scar, she knew.
“Does it hurt bad?”
Evie winced and nodded. It was the wound to her heart from Mabel’s betrayal that hurt the most. “Theta, do you think that was really Mabel in Gideon?”
Theta sat next to Evie on the narrow bed. “It sure looked like her.”
“I wanted to see her again so desperately. I couldn’t bear the thought that she had left me. I couldn’t let go.” Evie took in a shuddering breath. “I suppose I was always a little jealous of her. She was smart and good. I wanted her to need me. If someone so good could need me, then I couldn’t be all bad.”
“Would you stop with that?”
Evie ignored Theta. “The truth was, I needed her. Desperately. Enough that I disturbed her rest.”
“I don’t know, kid,” Theta said gently. “Ling always says that when you walk in dreams, you find out that people are much more than one thing. Maybe you were wrong to disturb her rest, but maybe some part of Mabel wasn’t completely at peace.”
Evie took this in. What did it really matter now? The Mabel Evie had known and loved was gone. The real Mabel had been so much more complicated than Evie wanted to admit. Simplifying people was a way of not having to think too much about them, to make them fit into your own story. People were inconvenient, though. Behind the idea of a person you constructed to suit yourself, the people you loved had their own stories—whole worlds going on inside—and you ignored them at your peril.
“It’s funny. I used to feel that I wouldn’t care if I died. I just kept throwing myself at life, hoping I’d hit a bull’s-eye eventually. I thought death would be a relief from all that feeling. A relief not to have all that pain. Not to care so much,” Evie said. “I’m sorry. I’m probably shocking you. Blame it on my sickness.”
Theta let out a little ha. “You think you’re the only one who ever feels that way? For an object-reader, you miss a lot about people.”
“You, too?”
“Sure. Sometimes. It’s like being swallowed up by Loneliness, capital L.”
“That’s it.” Evie was so grateful to hear another person voice her feelings that she was afraid she would cry. She wanted Theta to stay right there on the side of the bed forever.
“I used to think nobody felt that way. Now? I figure everybody feels that way here and there,” Theta continued.
Evie swallowed against the lump in her throat. Her voice was husky. “How do you go on… with all that loneliness inside you?”
Theta held Evie’s hand and looked her straight in the eyes. “You gotta make that son-of-a-bitch spit you back out again.”
Evie laughed. Laughter was good. It was a step toward life.
“There’s things out there that wanna kill us. We can’t kill ourselves,” Theta said.
