When he hovers on the edge of his seat, refusing to budge, I jab at the call button to ask for a nurse. “Go. Before I have them throw you out.”
He sighs. “I’ll give you some time to think it over, but I will return. It’s for your own good, Judeth.”
“No, it’s not,” I tell him. Taking my grandfather’s money, abiding by his terms, would be worse than death. Not just for me, for everyone. “If you come back, I’ll tell younoagain and again and again. I won’t do what he’s asking. Not if you offered me the whole world.”
“Things will begin to move very quickly from here,” he says quietly, placing a hand on my ankle as he stands. “I can’t stop them, not without what we discussed. But I will be watching you, Judeth. I have to. And when you change your mind—which you will—please reach out.” He lays a plain business card on my hospital tray.
At the door, he turns. “Your grandfather was a titan, a good man. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
My eyes burn into his. “My grandfather was a monster.”
1THE INVITATION
I never saw a light or a tunnel, no angels or music or anything with form. Only the deepest black, pulsing softly like a newborn’s heartbeat, and the sensation of continually falling. I don’t recall the things others describe during a near-death experience. I only remember the nothing—the familiarity of it, raw and powerful. And how it felt to be swallowed.
Sweet and safe like relief. A release.
That was seventeen years ago. It’s been swallowing me ever since.
I stop in the street and place a hand below my navel.Empty. I’m a shell with no yolk, no reason for being. Maybe that’s why I lost the baby three months ago. I’ve been empty since the night I left Solidago, my childhood burning behind me, my past ignited like a powder keg, taking my home; my mother, Winnie; my soul with it. Myabilities. The power that kept me company, kept me safe, then left me for dead. Literally.
Maybe that’s why Roger left, why he packed up his collection of alpaca sweaters and his Prada sunglasses, that cologne he believed made him smell like Joshua Tree (it didn’t). Maybe that’s why his coyote smile faded. He could finally feel my emptiness too.
But I’ve decided to stop the nothing by finally giving it what it wants tonight. Because ever since I woke up in that hospital,informed that I had been dead for an incredible seventeen minutes and eleven seconds, the impulse has gnawed at me until it finally wore through like a rat at the wires of my brain. I never should have come back to life, never should have survived. I died and I was supposed to stay dead, like all the other women in my family. And there’s only one way to make it right.
I mustreturn.
I have a stash of SSRIs at home, bottles filed neatly in a drawer. Taken with enough vodka, I can return to that fateful night when it all went wrong, my rage an inferno, my grandfather’s estate burning in the distance, lighting up the sky like a pyrotechnics event, stealing everything I ever loved. Back to the black and the void, the impact of my body with the earth, the silence that followed, like honey poured into my ears. I can go back. I can die again, this time for good. Maybe then our twisted legacy will end.
I can be at peace.
Movement streaks past and I look up. A black cat with one eye stands at the end of the road, peering at me. It’s another drizzly Seattle night, not great weather for a street cat to be out in. Instinctively, I crouch, inching forward, fingers outstretched. The cat freezes, then dabs at my fingertips with its leathery nose, whiskers twitching. I’ve always had a way with animals. The days I’ve volunteered at the shelter have been some of my happiest. My mother called it “a touch of God.”You’ve got a touch of God in you, Judeth Phoebe Cole,she would say whenever I could approach a feral cat or pick up a toad after the rain or take a puppy from its mother on the street with ease. But that was when I was little, in the San Francisco walk-up before my dad got sick, when our world still made sense. That was before we came to Solidago, before my abilities began to show, before I learned I had the devil in me instead.
I haven’t been Judeth Cole for a long time since.
I reach into my bag and pull out the heel of my leftover tuna sandwich from lunch. I won’t be needing it anyway. Gently, I scrape the creamy, fishy innards onto the pavement for my new feline friend. The cat is ravenous, quickly devouring the fish in a few bites,and allowing me to deliver a scratch behind an ear, fixing its one golden orb of an eye on me. In the swollen round of its pupil, I think I see something dance, like smoke. I blink and its gone. And the cat takes off down the cross street, disappearing into the night.
I stare after it, standing at a crossroads. To the left, my condo lies waiting in the distance, that drawer calling me, a promised escape from my stolen existence. And to the right, in the direction the cat ran, the lights of my favorite bookstore are sending an ebullient glow into the gloom like the beam of a lighthouse across the rocks.
It will take time, I think,for the pills to take effect. I can’t just lie there waiting to die.
I turn toward the light, something warming in me. I should choose a final book to read, send my soul out on a flood of words, spend my last moments basking in the single simple pleasure I have left. I should read my way into oblivion.
I follow the cat.
The evergreen awning flaps against a soggy wind, but the letters printed across it are bold in the night—Orman Used & Rare Books. I’ve been coming here since I moved to Seattle a decade ago, a city built on scrabble and gut and sheer, unadulterated obstinacy, qualities I can relate to. There’s something about its tightly packed shelves, the jumble of books that begin neat and orderly at the front of the store, where they keep a tidy but thoughtful selection of new releases, but grow increasingly chaotic toward the back, where the older, rarer editions can be found. Something about all those little windowpanes and the ivy running along the other side of the building, the longevity of the place, soothes me. And in more recent months, something about the man behind the counter, the younger one that I’m not used to seeing here so often. The casual shirts he wears untucked, unbuttoned at the neck. The fit of his jeans. The discreet knot of shining hair, always darker at the roots but banded in butterscotch where it’s bound at the nape.
When I enter to a gentle jingle of the bell, there are only a few minutes left before closing. I stayed at the office longer than usual.
He smiles. “Welcome.”
Mine is a face he sees often, even if we’ve never exchanged names. For a second, the world seems to tip when I realize he won’t see me again after tonight. Will he notice? Will someone tell him how they found me in my condo, stretched across the bed, his book splayed open on my chest? Will he remember this night and feel sorry for me?
“Looking for something new?” he asks brightly.
I glance down at the tight, black laces of my boots, before meeting his eyes. “No. I think something old tonight. Something…familiar.”
He looks excited by my reply. “We just got a shipment of mid-century paperbacks from an estate sale. They’re in excellent condition. I started shelving them over here,” he says, coming out from behind the register to point me down a middle aisle. “But feel free to rifle through the boxes as well.”
