Sign Here(99)

As I knelt down in front of her, I wondered if Cal would recognize the look on her face. If it was like in the barracks, where her choices—despite how they felt at the time—weren’t really her own, or more like slipping through that chain-link fence at the Farm, after she threw the grenade into the schoolhouse. In short, I wondered if Cal would be able to tell how far gone her young soul was. How much of Ruth was already ours.

I pushed a piece of hair back from her cheek and found myself hoping that we wouldn’t get it all.

Lily held Sean, who was frozen half within her grasp and also half reaching. Reaching, of course, for Mickey, who was spread out on the dirt near the water.

I walked toward the shore and knelt beside her, my fingers grazing the fine hairs at her temple. Even from across the clearing, I could feel the stagnant water in Mickey’s lungs, cold and deep. I could feel where her bones had been growing, the sudden cease in her cells, called off the job. There was so much goodness in there. An antidote to everything I, or Cal, or any of the nameless, faceless people across my conveyor belt had ever done. A balm for the burned and battered parts of the earth, roughed up by the rest of us. She carried it inside her—not because she was someone extraordinarily special, besides that she was good—and inside her, it would die.

I stood up and swallowed, looking away. I waved my hand, and Silas lunged back into action.

“Make me a deal,” he said, not missing a beat. “Dad used to talk about you. I know you can do it. Give me back my daughter, and I’ll give you anything you want.” His voice was the bottom of a waterfall, all rocks with no rest.

To make a deal with him meant a Complete Set. It meant finally, finally, accomplishing my one and only goal. It meant getting a one-way ticket back to Earth, to do it all over again. Which meant keeping my promise to Cal, finding her before she crossed the same threshold Ruth faced now. Validating her trust in me and ending her story the way she wanted. Saving the souls of the boys her father took, and hers as well. It meant saving mine.

But it also meant the eradication of all of them. Of Evan, of Silas. Even if I brought her back right now, it meant eradicating Mickey. For if I went back, if I completed my plan, none of them would ever exist. I would, which meant I wouldn’t make my deal, which meant my daughter wouldn’t make hers. She would die from the cancer inside her, instead of me. Therefore, the rest of them, my daughter’s kin from a life well and fully lived, would be gone too. I could have other children, produce other heirs. Perhaps they, too, would be good. There was plenty of good in the world; there were plenty of people with the same goodness inside of them. There would just never again be Mickey.

But as I watched Lily slam the dirt with her fists, it occurred to me that maybe never was better than gone.

“Please,” Silas said. “Bring her back.”

I looked at Mickey once more, or the sodden casing that used to hold her, and put my hand on my tablet.

At the end of the day, I am what I am.

“Sign here,” I said.





AFTER





PEYOTE





I FOUND HER EAST of Amarillo, hitchhiking along Route 40 just shy of Shamrock. I left home weeks earlier, driving the three main routes from New Mexico to Arkansas and checking each gas station until the cashiers began to eye me suspiciously, a man alone, asking if they’d seen a girl. But then, one bright, hot afternoon like all the others, I saw a shape on the side of the road, and I knew that it was her.

I pulled over.

“Hiya,” I said when she approached my window, dust from the road billowing around her like the tired folding of wings. I knew she carried the knife she took from Foster Mom Number Four, and I could see in her eyes as she peered into the car that she wanted me to know she contained something dangerous. She was twelve and skinny enough to be ten, but she had the same air of confidence she had in Hell, and I could see how people might’ve thought she looked older. But I knew better. After all, I had been waiting for her.

“You don’t know me,” I started, words I had practiced many times in the years I had waited. “But I know you.”

She glared at me in the same exact way the version of her I knew would have, if I had ever used such a tacky line. It was odd, I realized as I took her in. To meet someone you know so well before you knew them. I found myself wanting to upload all of our memories together into her fresh new brain, to get my friend back. But then she put her thumb in her mouth and set her teeth against the firm skin of her cuticle, a move I had never seen her make before, and I realized she wasn’t my friend. She was the clay before my friend was made.

Which meant she could be anything.

I reached inside my shirt collar, gripped the ball chain around my neck in one fist, and yanked it free. She watched me without responding, but also without walking away.

I held out my fist to the passenger side, where she leaned against the window. When I opened it, I kept my eyes steady on her face.

She recognized the soda-tab dog tag immediately, and her whole body relaxed, rigid shoulders and knees ready to sprint melting enough to show the kid in her.

“Do you know where I can find the Farm?”

I nodded. I expected this question—when we dropped the lockbox and key off on Jason’s doorstep, Cal warned me she, too, would have a hard time letting go of her goal. But I could see something in her then that her adult self didn’t—couldn’t—remember.