Antoinette Helaire's face is bright with a shock that takes a second too long to fade into glee when she opens her front door and finds Indy standing there.
"Indy!" she says, adorning her daughter's face with kisses so wet they make Indy grimace. "Did Sterling tell you to come by? How did you get here, anyway?"
Indy cannot imagine why her brother would ever suggest that. Especially since he is in Nepal. "Sterling?"
A face peeks out around one of the support beams leading down the hallway. Granted, it takes Indy a moment to recognize it as her brother's; he's grown out a scruffy, somewhat tangled beard, and he's traded his contacts for wire rim glasses. Lumberjack professor are the first words that come to Indy's mind.
"Hey, Indy," he says. "I was planning to call you."
Antoinette lays out cheese and crackers and olives on their kitchen island: dark granite, brown cabinets. An apple pie scented candle smolders on the dusty windowsill, and a breeze blows in from the screened-in back porch. The faded green walls and beige linoleum are as outdated as Indy remembers them. She rolls a cheese slice and stuffs it into an olive. She so badly wants to be alone.
"I was going to be at the auction, but your father had a function," Antoinette says with a dreamy sigh, as if she's missed some red carpet event. "He partied a little too hard, I think. He's upstairs sleeping it off right now."
"There's no point," says Indy around her olive. "The auction didn't really happen, anyway. There was a mass blackout, and some of the pieces up for auction have gone missing."
Antoinette gasps, jogging around the counter, taking Indy's face in her hands. "Oh, Indy. Were you attacked? Were you hurt anywhere?"
"Mom, no. It wasn't really that big a deal."
"It seems like it was," Sterling says, more into his glass of sparkling water than to her.
"What?"
"You showed up here without saying anything, which you don't really doâ"
"You're one to talk, Sterlingâ"
"âand you're clearly upset." Sterling sets his glass down. His voice is slightly gentler, which for Sterling, is worlds gentler. "Is something wrong?"
Pinned beneath the too-curious eyes of her family members, Indy writhes for a moment, unsure what to say to get out of this situation she has placed herself in.
When the moment passes and she still can't figure it out, she flees instead. "I'm going upstairs," she announces, easing off the barstool. "I'm grabbing some extra clothes from my room. Sterling, can you drive me back after that?"
She stays only long enough to see him nod before she disappears.
There was a time when walking into her bedroom would feel like tossing on a favorite sweater, when the scent and the very feel of its familiar air against her skin brought her instant comfort, a feeling of safety. Now it is all too foreign. The lavender air freshener hanging thickly in the air startles her. The shadows cast by her bookshelves, the ceiling fan, are all strange and grotesque. She doesn't remember most of the awards gathering dust on the top of her bookshelf.
The walls are a gentle lilac hue, the same color they've been since she was a little girl since she never cared enough to change it. Her bed, lumpy but inviting, faces the half-open window, through which the calls of birds and the whir of insects echo. The desk beside it is clear except for a stack of magazines, and a notebook from a high school math class.
Indy drifts about the room for a while, tracing lines through the dust on the shelves, remembering the memories, old photos of her and Percy in middle school, at high school homecoming, at graduation. Awards for academic excellence, perfect attendance, effort. The trophies gold and gleaming and bright, heavier than they look, tooâimpossible to miss.
The bed groans as Indy collapses on top of it; even the mattress below her back feels odd, misplaced. She thinks of Percy until it hurts her, and then she thinks of Pine. Why am I doing this, really? She wants to know and doesn't.
Rolling onto her stomach, Indy stretches until she finds her bag at the foot of the bed, wrestling Dobbs's journal from it. The leather is rough beneath her tired fingers as she flips it open, the scent of old, water-damaged paper rising into her face. She wishes the journal would answer her, like a genie, or a magic mirror. If it could, she'd ask it: Is any of this worth it? Is any of this possible? Have I been imagining it all?
She reaches the last page. Pauses. Sits up straighter.
The message is so brief, so sparse, and written in such tight, small lettering it would be easy to miss. Nevertheless, Indy notices it, a name scrawled in the journal's crinkly margins: find irene meskill
It's barely anything, as cryptic as it is. Yet to Indy it very much reads like an answer to her questions before: Yes, Dobbs seems to tell her. Keep going. Keep going.
Dewey's garage smells like cannabis, earthy and rank, and the charred-sugar, electric singe of steel guitar strings. Granted, Dewey's garage normally smells something like this, but there is something about it today that is grating on every one of Jude Chernenko's nerves, as if every particle in the air is personally attacking him, clinging to the walls of his nostrils. The reverb from the amplifier is deafening, manmade thunder, and he wonders why the lights above the stage are turned up so bright today. He can hardly see beyond the glare.
Dewey turns his head, says something into the mic. Asher strums his guitar again, but the sound is nothing, just vacuumed space. Jude blinks.
The mic booms again, and it echoes, and the echo is a name: Jude. His name.
Jude. Jude? Chernenko. What the fuck, man.
Jude.
Jude.
Jude
Except Dewey and Asher aren't the ones speaking anymoreânow the voice is inside his own head, pressing against the insides of his skull. A hollow pit forms in Jude's stomach. He knows exactly what this is. He should've seen it coming sooner.
Drumsticks clatter to the ground as Jude rushes to his feet, muttering something he's sure sounds incomprehensibleâhis tongue is stoneâbut hopes at least translates to something like, "I'll be right back." His legs are stiff, awkward, like it's the first time he's ever used them. By the time he makes it to the back hallway where the bathrooms are, he's clinging to the wall to keep from falling.
Why?
He's losing the feeling in his fingers, his muscles turning to rubber. It takes several tries to get the bathroom door open, and once he does, he collapses inside. Cold flesh to cold tile.
She promised. She promised it would stop.
At this point he can only hope the bathroom door has shut behind him; he couldn't shut it even if it wasn't. As it always does, his body has betrayed him, locking into cold, numb paralysis, bone becoming glass. Jude stares up at the ceiling, chest caving, breath leaving his lungs. At last the vision takes him and he thinks, more peacefully than he'd expect, Maybe this is the one that will take everything.
Jude gasps and the world rushes back in.
"Jude!"
The faces of his bandmates swim slowly into view, and for a moment Jude is taken aback by the fear in their expressions, the crust of what he's afraid are tears in Asher's eyes. He's never seen them so worked up before.
"Jude," Dewey sighs. They lock hands, and he tugs Jude's still faintly trembling body up from the floor. "What the hell was that, man? You were likeâtotally unresponsive."
"More than that. He wasn't breathing," Asher says. "I thought you were having a fucking seizure. Jude, what are you on?"
Nothing is the first word on Jude's tongue, because it's the truth. Nevertheless, he swallows it. He can't explain, and he knows they wouldn't believe him even if he did. He has tried so many times before.
It is so much easier to lie.
The world tilts a little under Jude's feet, and he leans against the wall to steady himself. He listens to the haggard sound of his breath in his throat, the rush of blood in his ears, the quiet cacophony of being alive when he really shouldn't be. He quivers, as if he's just returned to secure ground after dangling over a ledge. This is how it always is. The visions take him. They spare him. Jude both curses and wishes for the day when they won't.
"Chernenko." Dewey claps a hand on the back of his neck, where the skin has gone clammy and cold. "Seriously. What'd you take? None of that experimental shit, right? I've told you. You don't know what's in those."
"I didn't take anything," Jude says, trying to keep his voice light. "I think I just ate something bad. I tried the discount sushi they have at the grocery store today? Should've known that shit was shady."
It's a shitty excuse, and Dewey and Asher both look at him like they also think this is a shitty excuse.
"I'm sorry," Jude says, staggering back to the main stage, sweeping up his drumsticks from where he dropped them against the mats. A plastic water bottle crinkles in his hands as he takes a sip, crushes it within his palm. "I think I need to head home and rest a bit. Can we pick up here tomorrow?"
"Sure, man," Dewey says, though he sounds unconvinced. "Whatever you need."
Asher also looks unsure, though he has round eyes and the sort of childlike face that makes him look unsure most of the time. "You sure you're okay?"
Jude points a drumstick at him. "Nothing a nap can't fix, Ash. Really. Don't worry about me."
Before anyone can ask anything else, Jude slings his backpack over one shoulder and makes his speedy escape, rolling the garage door up and slipping under it before it's even completely open. Metal crashes down to concrete again with a resounding clash. The sound rolls up from the earth and through Jude's bones. He is hollow. He does not belong to himself.