Perfect Ruin

19

THE DARKNESS IS EMPTY OF DREAMS. There are stabs of red pain, hands pushing back my hair. I’m going to spend all of sixty years in this darkness, clawing at moments of awareness. I’ll never be free until I’ve become ashes.

Something burns in my throat and I struggle. “We’re here with you, love, we’re here,” Alice says, somewhere high above the surface of the black. But then I’m alone again.

Her voice was so sad.

Another voice finds me. If anyone could reach me here, it’d be my brother. He knows his way through every kind of darkness.

“Let her pull through,” he whispers. I think he’s talking to the god in the sky. He doesn’t even believe there is a god anymore. “I haven’t requested anything for three years. You owe me.”

The last time I heard my brother talk to the god in the sky, it was when I was seven or eight. He was supposed to be watching me, and I was sour that he was more interested in his writing, so I hid in a tree that surrounded the pond so that he’d be forced to look for me.

I waited for him to notice I was gone. When he did, he called my name. His voice changed each time he said it. It became more afraid. He didn’t consider that I might be hiding in the trees. He ran to the lake first, where I’d been setting leaves on the surface and watching them float when he last saw me.

Uniform and all, he dove into the green water. Pages of his manuscript were scattering in the wind and grass. But he didn’t call to them—he called to me.

I couldn’t answer. His fear had me paralyzed.

I’d only wanted to make him care. Just for a little bit. That was all. But I wasn’t prepared for the power of what I’d done.

Please, he’d said.

“Please,” he says now.

I’m a little girl in the trees. I can’t find the footholds to return down to him. I can’t go back to that day and undo it.

I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you. I’m sorry.