Their hearts keep beating, their chests instinctively taking in air, but their souls remain in stasis and their fates are left undecided.
Staying in the infirmary did no one any favors, so I force myself out by sheer will and spite. Ambrosia trails behind, pursued closely by Matt, while my feet carry me to unexpected places. I know they’re following me. They’re not being discreet about it. There isn’t a bone in my body that gives a damn enough to complain or command them to leave. (So, I don’t. I let them follow.)
And suddenly, we’re in Conin and Ezra’s apartment. The polished floor is the same, as is the sunken coffee table, the dark gray futon, and the empty shelves. It’s all the same as it was. Instead, this time, Ambrosia and Matt are in this bubble—this frozen, untouchable remnant of Conin’s and Ezra’s lives.
“Stop looking at it,” Ambrosia says.
The floor, the toilet, and the lip of the bathtub are stained with Ezra’s blood. The stains have congealed over in speckled patches. He’s falling again, the crash rattles the floor and vibrates up my spine. The knife that was resting in his palm when I found him lies complacent near the toilet.
I emit an unrecognizable noise.
It feels like falling, but it’s actually my feet carrying me forward. Every towel within the nearby vicinity ends up piled on the floor. I wet them all and start furiously scrubbing at the blood. Flakes unglue themselves, but there’s still so much, and it spreads along the walls and ceiling until it completely enshrouds my vision.
Crimson, crimson, crimson.
A pair of hands drag me away from the scene and rest me on something soft, like a cloud. Those same hands shape into a firm body and crawl next to me. Another figure sidles up at my other side. He has red hair and dotted freckles, with a dim smile appropriate for the situation. Matt reaches forward and slips away my glasses, discarding them gently on the nightstand. He blurs, briefly, before returning to me.
“It’s going to be okay,” he whispers. “I love you, Atlas.”
I love you, too.
Ambrosia embraces me. My shoulder blades pressed against her chest. Her chin rests against my neck, brushing hot air against my skin. My eyelids well with the accumulated pain from the past day, and they’re threatening to break the dam, but I don’t want to shut down now because I can’t shut down now.
Then Matt places a tender kiss on my forehead, and it’s over for me. The water rams through and spills everywhere. Tears flood the sheets, drip onto my hands, splashing Matt while he strokes my hair. Ambrosia clutches tighter, reassuring me she’s still there.
I wish ma and pa were here. I wish abu was still alive. In some fucked-up way, this feels like losing him all over again, but worse when Ezra’s and Conin’s lives are on the verge of no return. Abu's voice breezes in. It’s hard to discern what he says, but it’s unmistakably his voice. He’s speaking in Spanish, akin to a song, like distant echoes rising. The longer I attempt to decipher what he’s saying, the more I realize it doesn’t matter. It’s a melody. Abu is singing.
He croons the lullaby he sang to me as a kid, the one he taught ma, who would take his place on busy nights. I can’t tell whether his voice is a figment of my imagination or a call from beyond in the spirit realm, but it’s a wave of reprieve.
“You hear that?” Ambrosia asks. “Abuelito’s singing.”
“I can hear it, too,” Matt agrees. Even through the tears, it’s clear he’s soothed by it.
“You can hear him?”
“Of course. He never really left, Atlas.”
No, I guess he didn’t. I couldn’t feel him anymore when he passed, but there were still traces of his spirit in little fits and bursts—just as stubborn as he was in life. Abu had a powerful, indelible presence, one that couldn’t easily be wiped from existence. He’s still here and still watching over me, rooting for the Angelic cause.
I liberate myself with a deep breath. If I search around, Ezra’s tether is still there and pulsating with teeming life. It’s duller than before, but it remains, and I won’t let go. The tether beats with Ezra’s heart. It beats with mine. What tortures me is that I can’t say the same about Conin. I can’t feel him, his life force, his beating heart. It’s truly agonizing not having that confirmation.
Matt and Ambrosia never let go. They stay, molding their bodies with mine until we’re one big, amorphous blob. The tears taper away. An emotion resembling calm trickles through me, and my eyelids suddenly feel heavy.
I dream of drowning in my own tears.
Matt’s arm is draped around my chest. His knee bumps into mine, and I can’t help but let a chuckle escape. He snores softly, like he always does, that same one I’d listen to like a lifeline on the nights we’d spend together. (My, my, the unrequited crush I had on this boy. It’s too bad he ended up straight, and I had to respect he and Ambrosia were exclusively a thing.)
“Matt,” I whisper. He rolls away with a grunt and clings to an imaginary blanket. We fell asleep without climbing into the sheets, so he must be cold. I slip away, noticing Ambrosia’s absence and the lingering creases like the ones announcing Ezra’s departure the night I found him slumped over the tub.
Panic slams into me. I grab the fuzzy blanket placed at the foot of the bed and draw it over Matt, then proceed out of Conin and Ezra’s room in search of Ambrosia. I realize I was premature with my worries when I find her standing in the kitchen, preparing food at the stove.
“Good morning,” she says. “I let you guys sleep in. Matt wouldn’t admit it, but the stress was getting to him. This is the most he’s slept all week.”
Lured in as if by some magnetic pull, my gaze falls to the bathroom where every speck of blood has been wiped clean. No evidence remains that Ezra harmed himself. The room is bereft of any knife and stripped of the towels I mottled with Ezra’s blood.
Ambrosia’s silent, the only noise coming from the food she tosses around in the pan. She feigns ignorance as she casts tiny looks my way.
“What?” she questions.
