“Can you ask the nurse?”
Mom hesitates, but then says, “Okay.”
I wait until she’s out of the room.
“Stephen.” My voice breaks.
He is out of the chair and at my side, opposite Laurie and Millie.
“Tell me the truth,” he says, stroking my hair. “Are you okay?”
Tears are clogging my throat, but I manage to choke out, “Why can’t they see you?”
Stephen doesn’t answer. I can still feel the touch of his fingers at my temple. Reaching up, I cover his hand with mine and look at Millie and my brother.
“Why can’t you see him?” I ask accusingly, as if Stephen’s invisibility is somehow the result of their collusion.
“Dear Elizabeth,” Millie says quietly, “of course it’s the curse. Just as it’s always been.”
I shake my head. “But I drew the curse from him. I felt it inside me.”
When I say it, I can’t stop the shudder. My limbs convulse at the memory. Blood poisoning. That’s the only way I can think to describe it. I once saw a movie set sometime in the past when medicine sucked and a character died of blood poisoning after his wound became infected. I remember the gruesome close-up of the fatal gash. Black veins spidered out from the wound, evidence of the way his body had turned against itself.
That’s how Stephen’s curse felt when I drew it out of his body and into mine. Dark squiggles of resentment and malice that wormed through my veins, sickening and painful.
“I had to stop it,” Stephen finally says. “It was killing you.”
My voice is flat. “I’m not dead.”
“You would have been,” Stephen insists. He turns pleading eyes on Millie.
“It’s the strongest curse I’ve ever seen,” Millie tells me. “You wouldn’t have survived it.”
Anger is pummeling my chest, making me ache all the more. “You don’t know that.”
Her silence tells me that she doesn’t.
“Josie.” Laurie takes my hand. “How could he risk it?”
“I couldn’t.” Stephen leans down and presses his forehead to mine.
“You couldn’t,” I whisper, closing my eyes so I can just feel the warmth of his skin. I try to tell myself that this is somehow okay. That what I can feel, what I can see, is enough.
“Juice!” Mom announces from the doorway. At the sound of her voice, Stephen backs away. I open my eyes.
Mom presents a cup of apple juice to me with a flourish.
“Who’s the superhero now?” She grins and winks at Millie as if she’s just established some sort of comic-book-shop solidarity.
I try to smile, but I feel my lips wobbling. Laurie and Millie look at me with sympathy that verges on pity. I want to throw the apple juice across the room.
Chapter 33
I KEEP VIGIL. The doctors and nurses parade in and out. Elizabeth’s mother visits with Laurie. Elizabeth sleeps and wakes. The whole time, I stand in the corner, waiting for the moments when she and I are alone together, when I can keep her company. Even when she sleeps, I try to hold her hand. When she is well enough, she asks me to climb into the bed with her, to hold her there. We lie like that for hours, nothing but bodies and breath, wondering what will happen next.
* * *
As I keep vigil, the police remove my grandfather’s shattered, bloody body from the pavement in front of my building. He is the day’s only fatality, and the story goes that he was a man so severely affected by whatever struck those few blocks in Manhattan that he stabbed himself and jumped from the roof. His body will lie in the morgue for weeks, unclaimed. Finally, he will be given a mournerless funeral, a pauper’s grave, an anonymous death.
I do not need to read the coroner’s report to know: The knife may have surprised him, but he died from the fall.
I feel that remorse should bloom into its own kind of curse within me. But it hasn’t done so yet.
* * *
My father leaves messages.
I don’t know this until I stop off at home, three days after Elizabeth is taken to the hospital. Even though I am invisible, I need a shower and a change of clothes.
It is strange to hear my father’s voice, because he has no idea what’s happened. It is like the past is calling me, and doesn’t realize I am already in the future. He attempts a casual tone, as if he’s calling me up at college, wondering how my classes are going. He even asks me about Elizabeth, and tells me that he liked her, for the brief time they were in the same room. The sincerity of this makes me unsteady; the weight of all the things he doesn’t know fills me. I sit down on the floor, close my eyes, regain myself. I listen to his other messages—each one growing more urgent with my lack of response.
When I call him back, there is actual relief in his voice. He asks me where I’ve been, and I tell him that Maxwell Arbus is dead. This, I’ve decided, is all he needs to know.
Immediately—eagerly—he asks me if the curse has been broken.
I tell him that it hasn’t. Silently, I hope he will find a way to love me anyway.
* * *
I cannot return right away to Elizabeth. This is not the time for her to see my vulnerable need, my naked want.
I call Laurie and find that he’s up in Sean’s apartment. I tell him I’m sorry to interrupt, but he assures me I’m not interrupting. He asks me if everything’s all right with Elizabeth. I explain to him that I’ve come home for a short time. He says he’ll be right down, and I don’t try to persuade him to stay with Sean. I want to talk, even if I’m not sure what I want to say.
We don’t go to the roof. We may never go to the roof again. Instead he lies down on the floor of my living room, face to the ceiling. I position myself next to him, also staring up. I make noise as I do, so he knows precisely where I am.
“I like Sean,” he says. “But it feels a little different now. The possibility that he’ll know me—that he’ll know me completely—is gone. I was working up to telling him what happened in Minnesota. But this? We’re the only ones who are ever really going to know about it, aren’t we?”
“We are,” I tell him. “For better or worse, it’s ours.”
He turns to me and says, “Promise me something.”
“What?”
“Promise me that we’re not going to stop knowing each other. The last thing I went through, I went through alone. I don’t ever want to do that again.”