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The man peers closely at it. Turns it over as if there might be some secret message written on the back. Scratches at his eyebrow. Hands it back.
“Well?” Jordan asks impatiently.
“Yes, I think so,” he says. “I give her apples. Sweet, sweet girl.” Then he twirls a finger around his ear. “But she was too crazy.”
We don’t use that word, Jordan thinks but doesn’t say. “Did you ever talk to her? Like, do you know anything about her? Where she lives or—”
“Sure, sure,” he says. “I talk to her. But only when her eyes were …” He pauses, trying to think of how to say it. “Only when her eyes could see me,” he finishes.
“Right,” Jordan says. “So you don’t know where she lives, or—”
“Sorry.”
“Did you ever see her with friends? Family?”
The man shakes his head. “No.” He blows on his hands to warm them. “Maybe once she told me of a sister. Young.”
A sister here and now?Jordan wonders.Or a sister hundreds of years ago?But this doesn’t seem like the kind of question he can ask.
“Did you ever see the sister?”
“No, never.”
“Okay.” Jordan picks up an apple so green and bright it hardly looks real. “I’ll take this,” he says. “And two bananas.”
“Two dollars.”
Jordan pays him in quarters: his laundry money. “Thanks for your help.”
“I hope she’s okay,” the man calls after him.
Me too.
Jordan steels himself and walks over to the drug trio sitting on the stoop of a former bank. Only one of them appears to be conscious now. His face is scabbed and filthy. Looking down at him, Jordan feels a mix of pity and terror.
“I’m looking for someone,” he says.
“Fuck you.”
Jordan holds out the photo, which is getting water-streaked and wrinkled. “Do you—”
“Never seen her.” He leans back against the wall. “Don’t want to see you, neither.”
Jordan hesitates. “Do you need any help?” he hears himself ask. Not that he has any idea what he could do. But this man might be sick or hurt, or maybe he wants a hamburger—
“I need you to get your candy-ass the fuck out of here.”
CHAPTER 71
That night I lay on my thin mattress with my hands folded over my chest like a corpse. Breathing. Waiting. Trying not to feel anything at all.
I didn’t belong here. Not in this hospital, not in this time.
“I’m not tired!” Andy shouted from somewhere down the hall. “You can’t make me sleep! I have rights!”
I closed my eyes. Breathed more. Waited longer. Counted the slow beats of my heart. And finally, when I was on the edge of sleep, it happened. I saw myself standing at the lip of a great precipice. Below me was a swirling, cloudy blackness, and I knew that if I could get through it, I’d be on the other side. Back in the world full of people I had to save. Back to where I was supposed to be.
My breathing became shallow and my eyelids fluttered like I was already dreaming. Tingling waves passed over and through me. It felt like my cells were vibrating. Shimmering.
