Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(61)

I lowered my head, twisted at a bit of fabric at the edge of the couch.

Hannah’s voice softened. “They get why you’re here,” she said. “But they miss you. So do I. What do you think?”

“I think if none of you ever met me in the first place, then you wouldn’t have anyone to miss.”

Hannah started to reach out to me, but I got up from the couch and went upstairs to your room. It was as neat as ever. Clothes put away. Desk clean. Books arranged on the shelves alongside your trophies and ribbons from track. Your bed was rumpled, though, which was strange. I wondered if I’d been sleeping there all this time.

I sat on the floor with my back pressed up against the foot of your bed. In front of me were four large plastic bins with blue tops. They were the ones you kept in the attic, so I figured I must have pulled them down at some point. I popped off the lids. The comics inside were just as you left them, alphabetized, with the titles divided by hand-labeled sheets of white cardboard. Alias. Alpha Flight. Avengers. Batman. Blue Devil. The Brotherhood of Wings.

These were the single issues, before they’d been collected into volumes. Mint condition. I pulled them out in a stack and sat there with them in my lap, shuffling through the covers and then dividing them into four piles, one for each of the four volumes. I started at the beginning and worked through the series until I found myself back at Behold, Abaddon.

“So how does it end?”

Hannah was standing in the doorway. Some time must have passed because the light coming in from the window behind her had turned a twilight bluish gray. She nodded toward the comic in my hand.

“He didn’t just end it with everybody dead, did he?”

I shook my head. Hannah sat down behind me, on the far side of the bed.

“So what happened?”

I turned through the pages until I came to Cardinal running through the Aerie as bombs exploded all around him.

“Cardinal had built this experimental time machine,” I said. “He used it to go back a hundred years, to when Liberty City was still Abaddon. He thought that since he knew what was going to happen, he’d be able to stop everything before it started. He thought he could bring his friends back.”

“Did he?”

I moved the last stack. Pulled an issue from the bottom. Cardinal surrounded by a crowd of men and women in rags. His armor shattered and burned, hanging off him in pieces. His wings gone.

“He tried,” I said. “But everyone thought he was crazy. They drove him out of the city and exiled him to the Gardens of Null.”

“And that’s it?”

“There was supposed to be more, but . . .”

“But what?”

I didn’t say anything. Hannah got up from the bed and moved through the room, her hands brushing over your trophies and your pictures and your books. She stopped at your closet and opened the door. Hangers rattled and pressed shirts swayed. Your running shoes were lined up neatly by the hamper. A scent I thought of as distinctly you—grass and sweat and just-washed clothes—drifted into the room.

“Your brother’s not at college, is he?”

I turned and looked out the window by your bed. Lucy’s Promise was a black swell against a gray sky. I thought of the waters of the reservoir and how it felt to dive into them, to feel the world recede as the cold seeped into my veins. More than ever before, I wished that I was Cardinal, the real Cardinal. I wished I could fly out over the Marvin lines and land by that shore. I told myself that if I could, I wouldn’t be such a coward this time. I’d dive in and never come out.

“Cardinal?”

Hannah sat on the bed by the headboard, waiting, clutching one of your pillows to her belly. I felt like someone had taken an entire universe and stuffed it down inside my chest. It was straining against my ribs and pressing down on my heart.

“My mom and dad had been fighting.” My voice sounded strange in my ears, as if it were coming from somewhere else in the room. “The night of the fifteenth. I guess Dad got sick of it ’cause the next morning he left early. I hadn’t slept at all, so I heard the door slam when he walked out. I didn’t see him again until that night. He must have gone to the park at some point, because by the time he got home, he was already infected.”

I closed my eyes and saw him as he was when I ran downstairs behind Mom. He was standing in the kitchen with his back to the stove. His eyes were red and glassy and he was covered in sweat. When he saw us, he started raving in a voice I barely recognized as his.

“Mom tried to calm him down, but he didn’t understand what was going on. He took the carving knife out of the block to keep her away from him. That’s when Tennant got home. He grabbed me and we ran outside. Things were already happening by then. Sirens. People running in the streets. Fires. Tennant told me to stay where I was, and then he ran back inside to get Mom.”

Hannah shifted on the bed behind me. I was there, with her, but at the same time I could feel that night on my skin. I could smell it. I could see you running toward the open front door and the way the light in the hall made the hardwood floor glow this molten brown.

“I heard them arguing, and then something glass broke and Mom screamed and Tennant kind of stumbled back into the doorway. He had one hand on the wall behind him and the other pressed into his stomach, like he’d just been laughing or something. And then he fell back against the wall and slid down, and his hand fell away and . . .”