Deja Who (Insighter #1)(60)
“I was?” Nice? Really? Was it possible there were two Leah Nazirs living in the Chicago area?
“Yeah, you figured out that she’d died some ten or fifteen times already, always because she’d run out of time.”
Leah remembered. In 1881, Maya had ingested poison as a child in Wyoming and hid rather than confess what she’d done; by the time she’d been coaxed from her hiding place and rushed to the hospital, her time had run out. In 1927, she had ignored all the Danger signs, found a hole in the fencing, and sneaked into the William A. Clark house, which was (as the signs had warned helpfully) set to explode. Tick-tock boom. As a young mother-to-be in Seattle twenty-three years later, she hadn’t realized she’d developed eclampsia; when her labor started, so did her convulsions. By the time the baby had been removed via emergency C-section, Maya had been clinically dead for three minutes.
The cabbie brought Leah back to the present by saying the last thing she expected. “‘You were right to be afraid then, and you’re right to be afraid now. Your fear is a gift; not a thing to suppress or fight.’”
“How did you know what I—”
“She said it at least once a week, often enough that I memorized it. She was so grateful to you. I am, too.”
“Oh. Well, thank you.”
“She’s dead now. There was an accident by the side of the road and she got out to help. Got clipped by a truck crossing the midline.”
Leah groaned. “Of course she did. I’m so sorry.”
“Us, too. But you did help her when nobody else could.” The cabbie adjusted her rearview mirror, the better to gaze straight into Leah’s eyes. “I’ve hopes I’ll see her again in her next life. I’ve hopes she’ll live a lovely long life and die old and loved in her bed. You helped her break the cycle, you know.”
“I did? Hmm. She did, at any rate,” Leah replied, thinking hard. “Or it was broken for her. Something changed and the pattern broke. That’s . . . hmm.”
She didn’t say another word until the cab pulled up to her apartment building, which looked a lot like a long gray Lego upended on its side. The cabbie didn’t, either, but got out of her seat and gave Leah a slow, careful hug, which Leah managed to return in kind without bursting into fresh tears.
THIRTY-NINE
Leah’s studio apartment always made her sad, but never more than today. She much preferred Archer’s place. He might be only renting the tower, and his landlord might be gone all the time, and the place might be on the market, but it nonetheless felt like a real home.
Or maybe that was just the Archer Effect. Either way, her small studio (or was that redundant?) seemed to scream “this is the home of someone who does not care, does not anticipate marriage and children, and is only waiting to die.” Maybe it was the beige wallpaper. If she lived through the end of the month, she promised herself she’d repaint everything in Wild Moss. Or maybe Fennel Seed. Wild Turkey?
Her plan—get to a working phone to warn Cat—worked perfectly until she picked her broken cell phone up off the floor. She couldn’t believe she had forgotten such a vital detail. “Son of a fuck,” she swore, poking ineffectually at the thing. She had no landline as they were almost obsolete in the twenty-first century, and even if she did, Cat’s number was stored in the dead phone. She almost never called it, and couldn’t begin to recall what it was. Cat was one of those people who just appeared when they were needed, and existed quietly offstage when they weren’t. Which was a terrible way to think of her best friend, but if she got mired in her faults, nothing would get done.
Dead phone. Hmm. She had another phone. This one wasn’t dead so much as on near-permanent vacation. A homophobic client had not taken well to the news that he used to be Oscar Wilde. He managed to snatch her phone away, then tossed it into the vase of flowers on the small table beside her desk. Unfortunately they weren’t silk flowers but real ones that required water. (She’d never made that mistake again.)
She’d gone home and plunked her dead phone into a bag of rice, but assumed it wouldn’t work, assumed she’d need another, and acquired a new one. But rather than ditch the old one she behaved the way most people did: tossed it into a drawer and forgot about it. Did the rice work? Or not? Cells being so cheap these days, it didn’t much matter.
She went to the kitchen junk drawer, pawed through the mess of seed packets (she had never planted a seed in her life), Elmer’s glue (she could not remember the last time she used it, literally years and years ago), twine (did people even use that anymore?), expired stamps (or send snail mail?), broken pencils (why in God’s name did she save broken pencils?), and a battered cell phone.
She plugged it in to charge, gripping the thing so hard her knuckles ached, waited a couple of minutes, and then gave it a tentative poke.
“Yes!” Cat’s number, Cat’s number, CatCatCat . . . “There!” She pressed it at once, hoping she was catching her friend on a rich day, not a park day.
“Have you fucked up this thing with Archer yet?”
She was so relieved she could barely summon the energy to bristle. “Excellent, you haven’t been stabbed.” Then, “How did you know who this was?”
“Who else would be calling the crazy homeless lady who lives in the park? Social services? An Air Force recruitment center? AT&T?”