I couldn’t sleep but I didn’t want or have to. I was wide awake. Paolo was definitely out. He rolled right off my lap and rolled into the metal frame of the bed and continued to sigh in his sleep, his right hind leg twitching in a circular motion.
I sighed. What to do? I wished that somehow, the watcher would stay all night, but what sort of life would he have if he slept during the day and watched only me by night? I wasn’t too sure about anything else either.
What to do when neither he or Eric were around? What I wouldn’t give to have them surround every hour of my life. It sounded selfish but they were so unbelievably super human, compared to me that is, that I imagined that they only spent time with me because they needed someone to make them feel better about themselves.
Well, if I didn’t have either, I could always bring in a third. I remembered the diary and while I didn’t want to be reminded of Jack or his love, I was highly addicted to the story, even if, in my reader-professional opinion, it wasn’t very thrilling in words.
I stacked the pillows and reclined against them and magically opened the diary with my oh-so-amazing locket.
Should have seen that coming.
Just as I thought, I wouldn’t get a happy ending. The companions of Jack come to threaten her and while they’ve promised to stay away from Sally, they’re not convinced. And it ends:
Sally emerged from her sleep in the cool of the night with Jack’s calming eyes open to greet her. She stared back until their world was the only one that existed. She remembered the moment she told him she loved him and the moment they first kissed. Those moments seemed so blissfully helpless against the doom that had already desecrated their hopes for any future together.
“You stayed,” she whispered.
He nodded and continued staring.
“I love you,” she attempted and moved closer to hold him. The cool of his body and of the night gave her more serenity and she turned up to his eyes. “They’re gone?”
“So they say,” he muttered, finally allowing himself to win the fight and hold her against him gently.
“They’re gone,” she repeated wistfully.
He stared into her eyes. “I keep telling myself that perhaps I can’t really leave. Maybe I can’t even walk away. I couldn’t even force myself to contemplate while you slept here after I nearly gave you a heart attack,”
She would have teased him by telling him how happy that made her, that he couldn’t leave her like she knew she could never do with him, but he seemed pained by his indecision and she kept quiet, staring at him, playing his shirt idly.
“Sally, I don’t know if I could even stand to stay away from you another moment. I don’t think I can and this visit has reminded me just how fragile you are. I am selfish. I am the lowest, greediest of all the things in existence but I can’t be without you and I won’t. Will you please consider joining me? Forever, I mean?”
She looked deeply into his eyes and sighed heavily through her nose. “Gladly, I would do anything for you. You know I would. I’ve done much bigger things for you and this is nothing. As long as you love me, as long as you care about me, as long as you know for sure, without a doubt that you love me like I love you, eternally, profoundly, you can have me for that time. But I need to know you love me,”
He stared into her eyes and understood and kissed her forehead. “This isn’t what you want,” he whispered over her lips. “I will try to protect you anyway I can,”
“If you can. Don’t force yourself for my comfort. I swear that I will get over it,” she added a feign smile he couldn’t possibly call her on. “I’ll have forever, after all,”
He pressed his lips against hers.
I shut the book but didn’t lock it and I thought through the entire story. I bit the hinge idly as I sifted through the memories I had made through the book…
Eric…Eric was a lot like Jack in some ways. They were both so calm underneath it all. They had such profound eyes. And the watcher…him too. How he dedicated his loyalty to me as Jack eventually did to Sally. And Eric and…it hit me. The reason I had confused the watcher’s voice with Eric’s image in my dreams. Their voices were so perfectly attuned, their words…their appearances…
I had to do something to get the notion out of my head, to disprove it! I turned down to the diary. Eric knew something about the locket and the diary meant something to it.
I was so glad for running into things—literally—because I had found a tissue box that looked like the diary in my uncle’s study. Now how to track it? This was all assuming that the watcher was coming back.
I looked around and found my phone and that was all I needed. I grabbed the diary lookalike and put tissues in it and my phone. They were nearly the same weight. I put it face down on the window sill.
“Come on, Paolo,” I picked him up and he groaned. I wrapped my hand up in the velvet square cover and walked down the stairs, succeeding in not killing myself.
Paolo and I settled into the love seat and I waited, broodingly, for something to happen. I didn’t know the rest of my plan, but how difficult would it be?
I woke up and sat up. Paolo stood up on the couch and shook his coat.
“Paolo!” I groaned. I rubbed my eyes and observed the room. Quiet and light. I walked into the kitchen and peered at the clock that said 9: 03 so it must have been noon. I ran up the stairs and I flung my door open. It was missing. I ran over to see if it had fallen into the bush. Nothing.
I quickly got ready to go to school. I wasn’t sure how I’d ever get there in time but I couldn’t just stand by and let the charade go on. It felt like it was something else, another reason for the sudden betrayal, but I didn’t let it develop in my head.
I left and walked down the same road I rode in the morning.
Beep!
“Sorry!” I complained until the car stopped in front of me. I stopped in my tracks, scared of whoever might step out of the car. Eugene and a bunch of his friends? The escaped killer?
But a hand swayed out of the window and waved me over. “Come on!”
It was strangely familiar, that voice. I walked over and saw Catherine in the rear view mirror. Manners told me to kindly decline the ride but I wasn’t about to let Eric get away with anything.
“Hop in!”
I ran to the passenger side and jumped in, quickly buckling myself in. “Thank you so much,”
She drove immediately as though she knew I was in a hurry. “Big day yesterday, huh?”
I shook my head, turning out the window. “Big day today too,”
“Could I borrow your phone when we get to the parking lot?” I asked as we drove into the gates to Ginger.
“Sure thing,” she said, glancing over with wide eyes. “Is something wrong?”
I wished there would be. Something definitely terrifying—from me. I wanted to explode. I wanted to release all the energy tumbling within me, building. “Not yet,”
We got into the parking lot and she handed me her phone. I jumped out of the car and I saw the Mustang almost instantly. I walked over and I dialed my phone number without looking down and hit SEND. I got closer and closer and Catherine’s phone rang.
Suddenly, the chirping piano melody that I had recorded with Eric rang…from his car. When that first note hit, I didn’t believe it. The second one, I didn’t want to accept it. The third one, I couldn’t believe it was really happening and I hated myself for even trying.
Familiar footsteps stopped and I acknowledged them.
I walked across the lane to give Catherine her phone. “Thanks,” I said to her which was enough for her to understand that I would be fine…alone.
I walked over, without looking at him. I reached into the back seat and found the box tossed under a hoddie. It hurt my fingers to touch the black cloth and I took out the box. “I guess, it’s confirmed…people in this society…once they’re mem—members…become…immortal,” I choked. “Anything’s possible after that, right, Eric?”
Everything in me burned and ached…coldly. I’d never felt something so hard like I had been betrayed so many times and I resented him more than me for falling every time because he was so good and because I believed him so sincerely, so profoundly like he trusted me.
“So, tell me; you guys are really the same person, right?” my tears threatened the outer corners of my eyes as I turned up. “Jack, the guy from my stupid tree, and you?”
He stared, frozen in time.
I pulled out his hoddie and it hurt my fingers. “Who. Are. You?”
He didn’t react.
“Do you even know?” I hissed, more hurt than I could manage angry. “Who are you really, Eric? Huh? Do you even know?”
He looked downward.
My tears flooded out, my face hurt, but freedom came unexpectedly: “Do you still love Sally?” I swallowed back. The question seemed unbearable to coordinate, let alone ask. “You know,” I added some acid. “The person that I look like? My relative?” I began to sob and I couldn’t care less if someone saw me because I was in so much pain that I couldn’t control it. “Do you?”
Silence.
I nodded, tears falling over continually. I flung the diary, with all my escaping force at his chest and it echoed and fell into his hands.
Everything I could ever hope to be, everything that I had aspired to be didn’t even seem valid. Who was I, who did I want to be? Was there even a me left?
I turned around and walked toward the sidewalk.
“Where are you going?” he demanded.
“Home,” I muttered to myself as I wiped at my eyes.
I wandered aimlessly in Ginger, avoiding the creepy clones. I was so desensitized by the time I stopped crying—or was it that I stopped crying because I was so numb?
How stupid could one person be? I fell for both of them—all three of them and they only saw my great-great aunt Catherina. What else had I overlooked in the world? Did I do some other stupid thing?
“I should have seen it coming,” I began to cry all over again.
When I finally got home, by God’s good grace, I locked myself in my room, curtains shut, and cried the entire night while Paolo stayed locked in his kennel. I cried the entire night and when it was dawn, I wasn’t in a mood to sleep…or be awake, for that matter.
I avoided what was left of my friends and walked through the halls, looking for biology in a long route. I was about to turn when a chest was in front of me. I turned up through my lashes. Eric was looking down at me meaningfully, leaning against the wall. “We need to take a drive,”
As always, I couldn’t refuse him and I didn’t want to fight him. Even when we walked in light, almost unclouded light, in the meadow of grass before the playground, I felt nothing.
I followed after him instead of beside him and at first he found it weird then led the way, far beyond the tire swing and down a hill and another valley. It was a fort and it looked like a medieval castle.
He opened the door with a special key and let me into the darkness. He led me closely toward a room, up lit stairs and the room was high in a tower with a drawing table, a piano, a small cot, and a musical note stand thingy.
He walked over and sat at the piano and patted down my side of the bench. I sat as far on the edge as possible, not really responding to anything he did.
He began to play a slow, and by default, sad version of my song, as though he knew what he was saying this time. Those memories seemed so hard to take in. His face was in them. His name was written all over them. And yet they weren’t my memories either.
I wanted him to quit playing, to quit hurting me. But I said nothing. I stared at the keys.
He turned to me.
I turned him.
His eyes lit up suddenly, in some sort of realization that I didn’t care to know.
The song went on. I leaned on the side of the piano and I shut my eyes. And there was sleep.