Freshwater(43)

“You’d be like the older twin, though, because you take care of me.”

“I’m not very good at that.”

Ada shrugged. “Eh. In your own way.”

I changed my drink to straight tequila. “No, I’m good at hurting people and leaving people, and I’m really good at hiding you so that nobody can get you again.”

“And you’re good at fucking,” Ada added, holding her bottle out to me.

I clinked mine to hers in salute. “And I’m good at fucking.”

“And making them feel special.”

“Oh, I’m reaaallly good at that.” I smiled at her, but it was bitter and she knew it.

“You did your best, As?ghara.”

“Yeah.” I looked into my bottle. “I shouldn’t even have existed.”

“Oh god, are you getting to the sad drunk stage?” Ada reached for my bottle and I hugged it to my chest.

“Fuck off!”

She laughed. “Okay, stop whining then. You had to exist. I wasn’t ready.”

“But, like, you should’ve been, you know? You should’ve had time to do it when you were ready, not the way it happened.” I was getting a little sad. Maybe her grief was contagious. I was remembering the day she realized it wasn’t her fault, three years after I arrived, when she read the definition of rape online and burst into tears in Ewan’s garden in Dublin, crying and crying as he held her.

“You should’ve had a chance to be ready,” I said.

Ada sipped her drink, tilting her head back. “Shit happens,” she said.

“Okay, now you sound like me.”

“Hah. I’m just trying to be at peace. If I don’t, I’ll end up blaming Soren for me losing Ewan and that kind of makes me want to find the bastard and stab him in the face.”

I tapped my bottle against hers. “Shit, I’m down with that.”

Ada smiled and put her head on my shoulder. “Don’t leave me,” she said. “I don’t think anyone else will want me without you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. I’m the damaged and broken one; you’re the bright and shiny one. Who are they going to love more? They don’t have to do any work with you.”

“I’m not going to leave you, but then you have to come with me, okay?”

“Come where?”

I exhaled. “You know where.”

Ada hesitated. “It’s just that I’m scared, As?ghara. I want to, but what if it doesn’t work?”

I put down my bottle and put my arm around her. “I know,” I said, and we sat together for a long time, saying nothing.



Ada surrendered to me in October, a year after Uche died. She was seeing a man named Hassan then, a capoeira teacher who she’d met at a club in Harlem during her breakup with Donyen. It was on a night when I was out hunting in her body, and Hassan had been standing by the club exit, dressed in tight black, his hair pouring down his back. I let him take Ada to his apartment, where he danced in his living room, his locs flying in the air. He kept talking the whole time, hard and fast, and his words jumped and scattered and cartwheeled. I was tired of them, so I climbed into the stretch of his black satin bed and watched him pull off his shirt. He was still talking.

“Shut up and fuck me,” I said.

I remember how he stopped, shocked, before he gathered himself and climbed onto the bed with me. For the rest of the night I got to be myself in my meaty form, doing meaty things. I didn’t have to think about Ada losing Ewan and neither did she, so it was good. It was a white blank space of pleasure and I felt free inside it.

The morning that Ada’s surrender happened, she was sad because she’d had a fight with Hassan the night before. I was tired of everything, tired of the number of times I was going to have to watch her be in pain. So I sat her down in her yellow kitchen and splayed her out on a chair. She propped up her elbows on the raw wood of the kitchen table, stained with old splatters of turmeric and tomato. Uche’s corpse sat across from her, his lung clot turning him gray as he watched her with gutted eyelids and still blood. Ada stirred miso paste and dehydrated seaweed into a bowl of hot water, talking softly to him as if he was alive. I stood behind her with my palm on her shoulder.

“Where did they put you?” she asked. “Tell me and I’ll come find you.”

I purred in her wrists. I was keeping a fine balance by bringing Uche’s shade here, maintaining a delicate tension between Ada’s world and that of the brothersisters.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,” Ada said. “They stopped me. And I know you’ll want me to stay with them, but Uche, honestly, I don’t want to anymore.” She stopped stirring for a moment. “I wish I could tell them that.”

I watched as Ada reached for her prescription bottle, pressed down and turned, popping the lid open. They were painkillers—Donyen had taken away all the muscle relaxants after she heard about the suicide plan. I tried refilling the prescription, but Ada gave it to Hassan because he had a thing for pills and injections, so all we had left were the painkillers. I figured we could manage with them.

“I wish I could’ve said good-bye to everyone without them freaking out, you know? No crying, no trying to lock me up. As if I was just traveling. Plus, there’s no need for them to worry—I’ve got family waiting.”