“Now that we have you here, and safe, we look for a way to return you to the twilight without actually killing you. We need a victim without a murder. It’s like a riddle. There’s always an answer, even if it doesn’t make immediate sense.”
“Can we do it?”
Apple meets my eyes in the mirror. “Do you want me to lie?”
The temptation to say yes, lie to me, yes, deceive me, give me something I can hold onto and believe is strong—oh, it’s strong. But it’s not what I need. “No.”
“I don’t know. This is something new. Something I’ve never tried to deal with before. But we’re on the Ocean Lady—Bobby Cross can’t touch you here. We have time.”
Apple has been a teenage girl for longer than I’ve been dead. She rendered a grown man younger than herself somehow, ripped away everything time had given him and replaced it with spotty, sullen servitude that will only end when she says it’s finished. She can’t understand what it is to feel my body aging and dying with every minute that passes, to be trapped in a cage made of my own flesh. Her face in the mirror is serene. As far as she’s concerned, we have our answer. We have time.
I keep brushing her hair, and wonder how long it will take before time runs out. Apple is silent, letting me work, until the last tangle is gone, the last hint of a knot has been eliminated, and her hair is smooth and soft and still smells of apple cider vinegar. She turns then, reaching up to take the brush out of my hand, and looks at me solemnly.
“We will figure this out,” she says. “I know you don’t want to stay here, and honestly, I don’t want you to. Someone would use you as a weapon sooner or later, and there are already plenty of those lying around, waiting to be wielded against me. We’ll get you back where you belong.”
“I may have some ideas about that,” says a voice. We turn, both of us, toward the doorway.
Emma is leaning there, arms folded across her chest, and she is an aberration in her sea-green diner uniform and starched white apron, with her long red hair and her grave expression. She looks like something from another time, my time, and this is Apple’s place, frozen a decade and more before I knew what it was to want something better than I had.
That’s the trouble with time. It keeps happening, no matter how hard you push back against it, how much you ask it to step aside and pass you by. Even in the lands of the dead we have new and old and in-between, and the gap between what’s modern and what’s archaic expands and contracts depending on who’s around. Here, now, Emma is modern, and the sight of her alone is enough to make my bones ache with wanting to leave this kingdom of signs and portents for her cold land of milkshakes and moments preserved in endless amber neon.
“I was talking to Bon,” continues Emma. “She came over from Ireland. I didn’t know a routewitch could do that without harming themselves, but she seems to have managed well enough, for all that she’s fairly firm on never going back.”
“It’s hard,” says Apple. “We don’t do oceans well. Airplanes make the problem less extreme, but then we pick up distance so fast that sometimes it goes sour, and that can be dangerous to everyone around us.”
“Good. Very good.” Emma turns to me, and her eyes aren’t modern at all. Her eyes are filled with something ancient and terrible and unforgiving, and I want to run from them, I want to run from them and never look back.
I stay exactly where I am. Those eyes may be the key to my salvation, no matter how terrible they seem.
“Rose,” she says calmly, “how much do you know about Orpheus?”
Chapter 13
Sing Me a Song to Move the Stones
WE’RE BACK IN THE MAIN ROOM but the other routewitches are gone: Apple shooed them away once she was done staring at Emma and decided to move us somewhere a little less private. The only one she didn’t chase away is Bon, who sits by the window stealing uncomfortable glances at Emma, like she’s afraid the beán sidhe will change her mind about wailing for her. Laura’s popcorn is long finished, and with the kitchen closed she can’t get more. She sits at a nearby table, hands folded, watching the scene with an expression of dazed disbelief. This must all be very strange to the true living.
Gary is by my side. He can’t touch me without sending the flesh crawling all across my body, and I can’t do what I want to do, which is crawl into his lap and never let go, but at least we can be together. Technically.
And in the middle of the room, Emma and Apple, standing a few feet apart, their eyes locked. They are taking each other’s measure and finding one another wanting at the same time, and it would be funny if it wasn’t so damn unnerving.
“You were going to tell me about Orpheus,” I say.
They both turn to look at me. I shrug, trying to look as guileless as possible.
“You asked what I knew about Orpheus,” I say. “Since I’m assuming you asked because it might get me out of this incarnation and back where I belong, I want to know why, and that means I need you to stop creepy-creepy staring at each other and start talking.”
“Orpheus?” asks Laura. “The son of Apollo? Lyre player, creator of the Orphic mysteries?”
“Husband of Eurydice,” says Emma calmly. “Only living man—not demigod, despite his adoptive parentage—to have traveled to the underworld and returned with his soul intact.”
“But not with his wife,” objects Laura.
Gary raises a hand, trembling slightly, doing his best not to look at me. I would say this was killing him, if not for the fact that he’s already dead. “Can I get some sort of summary here? I’m lost.”
“Orpheus was the son of Apollo, whether he was a demigod or not,” I say, not reaching for Gary’s hand, even though I know he needs the reassurance. He needs something to hold onto. How strange this all must be for him, to be back on two legs and yet unable to cling to the woman whose death he lived for. How strange, and how awful.
Not that it’s much better for me.
“Adopted,” says Apple firmly.
“Adopted son of Apollo,” I say, rolling my eyes. “His mother was one of the Muses.”
“The actual Muses?” asks Gary. There’s a dubious note in his voice, like we’ve finally found the step too far for him to follow.
I’m not the only one who hears it. Emma rolls her eyes, muttering something in Gaelic before she says, “Why is it that there’s always a point past which belief won’t go? You don’t get that with science. Say ‘we can make light where there is none by flipping a switch, and also we’ve flown out to the moon to say hello to the rocks, and these are equal applications of the scientific method,’ everyone smiles and nods their head and says good for you, Science Person, congratulations. But when a bunch of ghosts and witches say Muses exist, everyone gets their knickers in a twist.”
“There are plenty of people who think the moon landing was faked,” I say mildly. I may not like Gary’s disbelief, but he’s my boyfriend, my ride through this sweet, endless night, and no one gets to scoff at him but me. “People question science all the time. Ask the ever-lasters.” A horrifying number of them enter the twilight through diseases that I thought had been cured when I was a kid. Shows what I know about the shit the living will get up to.
“Regardless,” says Emma. “She”—she points to Apple—“is the anointed queen of a society of witches, chosen for the role by the ghost-goddess of a dead highway. She”—she points to me—“is an urban legend without the sense God gave the little green apples, currently alive again due to the machinations of a cursed movie star whose car eats souls. I”—she points to herself—“am a beán sidhe, and the less you know of me, the better. And the existence of the Muses is where you can’t keep up anymore? Boyo, you should have dropped out of this conversation a lifetime ago if this was what you couldn’t handle.”
Gary stares at her for a moment, eyes wide and wounded. Then he spins on his heel and stalks for the door, slammi
ng it behind himself. Silence falls.
I turn to Emma. She looks ashamed of herself. That helps a little. It doesn’t help enough.
“He’s been dead less than a year.” My voice is tight, laced with regret and recrimination. When I was a new ghost, I’d still been fading in and out of existence, unable to keep a tight enough grip on myself to stay in a single cohesive timeline. For Gary to be dealing with this, so soon after his own death, is unfair to the point of becoming ludicrous. “What were you thinking?”
“That if we’re to do what we’re to do, you can’t be distracted by sentiment,” she says. “Rosie, you have to understand—”
“No one ever really does,” I say. “Some of us just pretend better than others.” My heart is hammering so hard it feels like it’s going to choke me. How can the living stand it? Bodies are a distraction, reacting to things whether or not they should, refusing to leave their residents in peace. I hate it so much I could scream.
Apple, who has been silent through all of this, says, “We should continue our discussion.”
“Have fun with that,” I say, and turn, and walk away, leaving the women who would decide my fate—who would decide my future—behind.
* * *
Gary has gone to the parking lot’s edge and no further; he stands where the concrete drops away into the dirt with his hands shoved in his pockets and his jaw set in a hard, miserable line. He doesn’t move when he hears me walking up behind him, doesn’t even move when I touch the sleeve of his jacket, careful not to come into contact with his flesh.
“Not what you expected, is it?” I ask. My voice is light. I’ve had a lot of practice keeping things casual.
“I knew you weren’t in Heaven,” he says.
“I’d look pretty funny with a big pair of fluffy white wings,” I agree. That’s enough to tease the faintest flicker of a smile from his lips, and so I press on. “I probably wouldn’t be able to fit in a normal car. I’d be stuck in convertibles forever. Those things are a pain. Too many moving parts. Give me something I know will keep me safe.”
The smile gutters and dies like a candle. Too late, I realize my mistake. “I never could,” he says. “Every time I try, things get worse.”
“Gary—” Automatically, I reach for his hand.
He twists away before I can touch him, turning to look at me. He looks so young, still the fresh-faced boy he was when I loved him the first time, when we both believed that we were going to live forever, because kids like us always live forever, protagonists in our own stories, blazing across the sky like stars. He looks so old, the man he was allowed to grow into lingering in the corners of his eyes.
I never had the chance to get old with him. Maybe I never would have. People fall in and out of love all the time. Maybe we wouldn’t even have made it to the end of high school. That feels more likely, somehow, than us having even half a shot at a happily ever after. Maybe this was the best we were ever going to get, him making the grand romantic gesture to join me in the afterlife, me so charmed that I went along with it.
I love him. I’ll always love him. But he looks at me, and I realize we don’t know each other anymore. He’s looking at me like I’m a kid, like I’m really the sixteen-year-old girl I appear to be, someone he should be sheltering from the world. Someone who can’t be trusted to keep herself safe. He’s been a car since he died, and while he can convey a surprising amount of information by spinning the radio dial, it’s not the same as having a conversation.
We love each other, sure. But do we like each other?
“I can’t save you,” he says, anguished, and I swallow the urge to wince, I suppress the desire to step away. I am not the girl who gets saved. I have never been the girl who gets saved. Even when I was mortal, even when we could look at each other without all these shadows getting in the way, I wasn’t the girl who got saved.
Why would I turn into her now?
“I don’t need you to save me,” I say, voice tight, hands clenched, unkind heart still beating too hard and too fast and too cruelly for comfort. “I can damn well save myself.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“That’s what you said.”
“I don’t want to fight with you, Rose. It’s just—you’re so young, and—”
“Stop. Right. There.” I take a step to the side, turning to stare at him. “Did you forget that we’re basically the same age? I died young, but I kept living. I kept living here, by these rules, while you stayed where you were and lived by a whole different playbook. I don’t need to be rescued. I don’t need to be protected. I need friends. I need people who are willing to help me and work with me and care about what I want. But I don’t need you out here beating yourself up because you can’t keep me safe. No one can keep me safe. I’m one of the biggest thorns in Persephone’s side, because I’ve never met a cliff I didn’t feel like charging over.”
A muscle jumps in the line of his jaw, pulsing as he swallows. “It doesn’t have to be like that.”
“Yeah, it does, because this is who I am. I’m not little Rosie Marshall from the wrong side of town anymore, Gary. I’m the girl in the diner, the girl in the green silk gown, and it’s not your fault you weren’t there the night I died, but you weren’t there. No one was there except me, and Bobby, and the road. I had to grow up in a damn hurry. Part of you looks at me and thinks this isn’t okay; thinks I’m a kid who loves you, who you shouldn’t love. Maybe that part even thinks it would be okay to leave me living just long enough to put a few years on me. Let me grow up until being a car isn’t a relief. Or maybe you’re thinking that if I can be brought back to life, you could be too. Young and healthy and together and alive. Am I close?”
He winces again. This time he looks away.
“I thought I might be. Gary, I don’t want to be alive. I want to be with you, but not if that’s what it takes. You’re seventeen here. You’re the age we were when we fell in love, and we’re both so much older than we look, and you need to trust me when I say that it’s not your job to save me. It’s your job to stand by me, and help, but you have to let me save myself.”
“Would you let them save you?” He gestures toward the rest stop, indicating everyone inside.
“I would let them help me,” I say. “I am letting them help me. You too, if you want to step up. I’m not letting anyone save me.”
Gary pauses, taking a quick, sharp breath, before he says, “Tell me about Orpheus.”
I don’t smile. It might look too much like gloating. “Son of the Muse Calliope. Apparently, there’s some debate over who his father was. Musician, philosopher, another famous dead asshole with daddy issues. But I’m betting the reason he’s relevant here is that he was married once, to a woman named Eurydice.”
“Funny name,” says Gary.
“Not in ancient Greece,” I counter. “Back then, it was probably like ‘Susan’ or ‘Diane.’ Normal and lovely and the sort of thing that sounds awesome on a wedding invitation. Which is exactly where they put her name. First the invite, and then the tombstone.”
I never got a white dress or a wedding night. I never got any of the things I’d been raised to think would eventually be mine. I got a shroud and the flowers went onto my grave instead of into my hands. Eurydice, though, she got the dress and the ring and the bouquet, or whatever their equivalents were back when myths still walked like men. And none of it was, or ever could have been, enough to save her.
“This is where the story gets fuzzy, which is fine, because it’s also the part that doesn’t matter. Maybe she was chased or maybe she was running because she was so happy to be married and alive in the sunshine. Maybe she got sick or maybe she fell down. No matter what happened, she ended up dead before her wedding night, and she went where the dead people go.”
“The twilight.”
“Maybe.” I shake my head. “I don’t know anyo
ne who’s actually met Persephone, you know? But I have her blessing etched across my back like it matters, like it means something. We’re in America, not Greece. We’re a long, long way from those old entrances to that old underworld. I don’t think Eurydice found herself in a diner, is what I’m saying.”
Those Bradbury towns; those expected afterlives. We create them with the things we believe will be waiting for us after death. Maybe all divinity starts like the old Atlantic Highway, with something that seems so powerful it becomes powerful, ascending into something greater. Maybe Persephone was a girl like me once, dead and running and hungry, until she rose up in flowers and flame, goddess of the underworld. Maybe she was always divine. It’s not my place and frankly, not my problem, to decide where the truth lies.
But when Eurydice died, Persephone and Hades were in charge of everything she knew, and she would have placed herself immediately into their care. I sort of envy her, in a distant, academic way. At least she had someone to take her by the hand and show her which way to go. I fell into the faithless twilight of the American dream, with no god to tell me what to do. I might still be a flickering shade if not for the hitcher who eventually took pity and led me back to myself.
It’s hard to imagine that someone like Hades would have had much patience for someone like Bobby Cross.
Gary frowns. “You think she went to Hell.”
“Not Hell,” I correct. “Hades. Saying she went to Hell is like saying someone in Palm Springs is going to Disney World.”
Confusion flickers across Gary’s face. “Which one is eternal punishment in that analogy?”
“Ask me again after you go to Disney World on Christmas Eve,” I say. “Eurydice died, Eurydice went to the underworld—or Underworld, I guess, capital ‘U’—and then Orpheus, whose mother was a Muse, who played the lyre like it had been invented just for him, played the stones away, and followed her down. He asked for permission to take her home.” In some versions of the story, anyway. In others, he had lied, or cheated, or stolen to win a second chance at her hand.