The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions #1)(18)

I couldn’t hear what they’d been thinking as their lives drained from their bodies, but I could feel their relief. They didn’t want to hold on. They were happy to let go.

But not Beth. Not Sam.

This is what people who have never wanted to die don’t understand: the worst thing for those of us who do is feeling like we have to live when we don’t want to. We have to do things we don’t want to. We have to be where we don’t want to be. What we want is nothingness, numbness, because that seems better than living a life of quiet desperation. Quiet desperation is torture.

Others pretend at happiness for the world while they struggle alone in the dark, gushing with friends and wives and children whilst knowing the world is broken, that it can never be fixed. They know it and can’t unknow it—they can’t let go either. They want to, though, more often than not.

But Beth does not—did not—feel that way. She didn’t think that way. I feel her feelings still, as the underground spits us up into the semidarkness of the East Village, each of us rippling with the impact of her death in our own way.

Mara’s hand is in my hair as I lean my head back against the cracked leather seat of the cab we eventually decided to take. I try and reach for memories of Sam, because I feel a pattern forming, the design of something I don’t have the vision to understand, but Mara’s presence is distracting.

She wants to talk about what happened and I . . . don’t. Because talking about them means talking about myself and how they’re different from what I am. How they weren’t missing what I’m missing. They weren’t hollow. They didn’t exist because they had no other choice. They hadn’t grown up as I had, acting careless and reckless because on some level I felt I had nothing to lose. They didn’t see the world through a lens in which every scene contains a door marked exit, a door I’m unable to open.

They lived because they wanted to. Up until the end, when they were poisoned by a . . . nothingness.

But where did the poison come from?

Where did the address come from?

Mara will want to know what I know, and I’ll have to find a way to tell her about Beth and Sam without telling her I wanted to save them and follow them at the same time.

And then there are those words.

Don’t let her death be in vain.

Those were the words the professor had written to my father, words my father left to me—the words were meant for me. Before I was even born I was saddled with a burden I never asked for, never would’ve wanted, and don’t know what to do with now that I’ve got it.

These are the thoughts that sizzle and smoke until my mind is coated in a stale layer of misery. I hadn’t even noticed that Mara had taken me to the hotel, up to our room. She doesn’t turn on the light—the curtains are open, only the gauzy layer beneath is drawn, and the moon shines through them, outlining her hands, her arms, as she pulls off my shirt, hers, then both of us into bed. My eyes are wide open, staring at dark. She’s a soft curve behind me, hooking her arm under mine, her hand on my chest, her head curled against my shoulder.

“Something’s wrong.”

“Yes.”

“Are you okay?”

My voice is scraped out. “Are you okay?”

“You’re hurt.” I hear the shadow of something growing in her mind.

“I’ll heal.”

She lets out a breath, but tightens around me. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“I always do,” I say flatly, ignoring her.

She’s silent, all of her. I can’t even hear her heartbeat. Something’s wrong indeed.

I turn to face her, her eyes blurred with sleep and sadness. I cup her cheek, kiss her forehead.

“I love you,” she says.

I remember Jamie’s words and smile just a bit as I tuck her head beneath my chin. “That is your misfortune.”

In truth, though, it’s mine.





13


CASTLES IN THE AIR

THE ADDRESS VANISHES THE MORNING after. If Mara’d seen it, she’d have mentioned it, but she doesn’t, and the moment when I should have is long past. Another confession: I don’t want to talk to her.

From the first, Mara was curious about my ability, as was I about hers. She wanted to experiment, to test each other, which is well and good if one experiments killing/healing nonsentient creatures, in theory if not in practice. (A badly executed excursion to the Miami Zoo comes to mind—I’d thought Mara’s belief about her ability was a manifestation of her survivor’s guilt. She proved me very, very wrong.)

But when she first understood what comes along with my particular affliction—seeing others like us when they’re in pain—her first thought, quite literally, was to hurt herself to see if I’d then have a vision of her, through her eyes, and feel what she felt.

She’d only pinched her arm then, but when I asked her why all those months ago—

“When you first told me you saw me, in December, in the asylum—you said you saw what I was seeing, through my eyes,” she had said. “And when Joseph was drugged, you saw him through someone else’s eyes—the person who drugged him, right?”

She was right. She was right because she caused the asylum to collapse, and my particular affliction only allows me to see what’s happening from the perspective of the one causing said pain and/or terror.