Ghost Flower (36 page)

“Just something to make you sleep. You were getting too close, asking too many questions, so we decided it was time.”

Had he said “we” or “me”? His voice was starting to sound like it was coming from a long way away. He came toward me, and I got ready to fight him. But my hands were like big clumsy paws. Someone else’s paws.

I felt myself being lifted up and moved.
Oh good
, a part of my brain said.
He’s just taking me to the bed. I’m so tired. Maybe if I just take a nap,
I thought.
Just a little nap and then I’ll have more strength.

The next thing I was aware of was a wall of heat hitting us. Sunshine pricked at my closed eyelids, and I realized we’d somehow
moved outside. I struggled to form the words “Where are you taking me?” but I’m not sure if they came out because I didn’t get an answer. I tried to open my eyes but had to shut them against the brightness.

After only a few steps he stopped. There was a grunt, and I had the sensation of being lowered, like he was bending over. Then I felt something against my back, and his arms were gone. It was slightly cooler, and the light had dimmed.

I opened my eyes and recognized I was in the trench I’d seen in front of the trailer, the one he’d joked about as the mud baths. He took a step away, and then from over the lip of the trench the blade of a shovel swung into view. I was showered with dirt.

He was going to bury me alive.

I tried to sit up, but my head swam. And at some point when I was sleeping someone had bound my hands behind me. I tried to kick and discovered my legs were bound too. “NO!” I opened my mouth to yell as the next shovelful of dirt fell on me, catching me on the chest and neck. Coughing, I turned my head as the third one was flung over. I took a breath as the fourth one came and got a mouth full of dirt.

I fought against the dirt and the pull of unconsciousness as hard as I could, coughing and retching. I screamed his name, anyone’s name, I pulled on the ropes, and I used every ounce of energy I had to keep my eyes open. The light above me began to swim, and then there was dirt in my eyes and a heavy weight on my chest and on my legs. And I was falling backward, spiraling, descending, screaming, plunging.

Into nothing.

T
here is a phone ringing. I have to get to the phone, but my arms are so heavy. The road beneath me is warm, and I’m crawling toward it on my stomach. The phone I’ve got to—

I knock the receiver off and try to say hello, but my voice won’t come out. I bend down, contorting myself to get my ear near the swinging orange receiver. “Hello,” I try to croak again.

“Hello, Ro,” the voice, her voice, Liza’s voice says. “It’s time to wake up. It’s safe now. You’re safe.”

“But how—” I start to say and get a mouth full of dirt.

I woke up coughing.

The sky was a muted blue above me. The earth was cold around me. My head swam. My arms ached in agony.

I was alive.

I listened attentively for footsteps. What had happened? Where was Grant?

The shadows were longer now, and I guessed at least an hour had passed since I blacked out. I forced myself to sit up, sending a chorus of agonizing flares through my head. Shifting slightly, I discovered
that someone had unbound my arms. My legs were still tied together, and I tried to reach for them. But my fingers were too numb from being under me. Instead I used my arms to haul myself up to the side of the trough. I sat there, legs dangling into it, catching my breath for a moment, marveling at the feeling of the sun on my face.

I turned and saw him.

Grant was lying on his stomach in the dirt. His face was half-turned, his glasses askew, and the eye I could see was open. A massive pool of blood flowered from his head.

I was sure he was dead, but just in case, I crawled to him. The feeling had begun to come back in my fingers, and I used them to feel for a pulse on his wrist. It was faint. But it was there.

I turned him over. His lips were moving.

“Hold on,” I said. “I’ll get help.”

“No, stay.” He held onto me. “It’s—”

I was not going to let another person die in my arms.

There was a hammer lying near him covered in blood, which explained his injuries. But not who had inflicted them. Or if the person was still there.

I had to get us away.

I fished my phone out of my pocket but saw that he had been telling the truth about there being no service. With trembling, clumsy fingers, I worried the knot in the rope around my ankles until it loosened enough for me to pull it off. Barefoot, I staggered to his truck.

It was locked. “Where are your keys?” I asked him, but I could have been asking the air, the wind.

I eyed the trailer. They could be in there. And so could whoever did this to him. I was thinking that I had no choice but to brave it when I heard a whinny.

I turned and saw that big wild horse. The horse Roscoe’s family had gotten rid of, the horse they called Medusa because she terrified men.

Our eyes met. She stomped her foot and flared her nostrils like saying,
Come on, what are you waiting for?

I may have been able to fool Bain and Bridgette about my identity, fool them into thinking I was an imposter—but I could never fool a horse.

I knew what I had to do. Grabbing Grant beneath the arms, I dragged him toward the corral. “Here girl,” I whispered. She looked at me for a moment, baleful, blaming as though saying,
Oh, sure, you snubbed me before, but now you want me.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I told her. “I had no choice.”

As though she understood what I was saying in that uncanny way horses had always understood me, she flicked her mane once and came to me. Just like that. Like no time at all had ever passed.

She bent her head, and I hauled Grant onto her thick neck, then climbed up behind him. Gathering him against my body with one hand and a handful of mane with the other, I clicked my tongue and gave a slight kick, and we were off.

Riding a horse didn’t come back to me the way people say riding a bike does. It came the way breathing does, as though I had been missing something vital in my life, and now, at last I was intact, whole, alive again. This wasn’t just a ride. I was riding home.

There could be no going back now. No denying I really was Aurora Silverton, had been her all along. When N. Martinez looked for my Aurora Silverton’s prints by name, he’d learned my secret—and kept it for me. But it would now be an open one. And somehow all the reasons I’d had for pretending not to be myself didn’t matter anymore.

I caught snippets of memory as they rushed by me on the wind. The night it all started, wandering around outside the party whispering,
Colin, where are you? Colin?
Feeling unworthy to be with him because of what Stuart had done to me. Because I was a
filthy slut
.

A flashlight beam slashing across my face. Pain. Darkness. Far-off laughter. Voices whispering.

A truck-stop bathroom in broad daylight.

A newspaper that told me seven days had passed.

I still had no idea what had happened during those seven days. But when I woke up, I learned two things: Liza was dead, apparently of a suicide; and the police wanted me for questioning. I couldn’t remember what had gone on at the party or how I’d gotten where I was.

I was certain of only one thing, and that was that I had to run away. That I was not safe. That Liza might be dead, but
I
was the one who had been set up.

As the years went by, parts of my memory came back like the missing pieces to a now lost puzzle, and I became more and more convinced that someone had tried to kill me that night, with no idea who or why. I knew only that I felt confused and frightened when I thought about Colin, Bridgette, and Bain. Colin had no motive to harm me, that I could remember, but Bridgette and Bain did. Or rather, somewhere between twenty and forty million reasons, depending on Althea’s will in any given month.

I came back to Tucson after Nina’s death to be closer to my family, but with no plan. And then Bain walked into the Starbucks I was working at and gave me the perfect way in. If he and Bridgette thought I was an imposter, I’d be safe. And it would give me a chance to look for the proof I needed. Especially since I knew Colin had enlisted and was away.

What I’d told N. Martinez was true too—I’d wanted to pick my family. And be picked.

Mounted in front of me, Grant groaned. “Torn,” he said.

“You’ll be fine,” I assured him.

He slipped to the side, almost falling, and I had to drag him back up.

“Hold on,” I told him. “Just a little more. Hold on.”

As Medusa, that glorious, magical horse, and I galloped across the dusty golden earth, I discovered I was sobbing. “You can do it, sweetheart,” I repeated, and I don’t know if I was talking to him or the horse or myself.

“Just a little longer,” I repeated over and over, my tears showering over him. I urged Medusa forward, my thighs clamped around her to keep us steady, my hand knotted through her mane. I would not let another person die in my arms.

A building appeared on the horizon, and I remembered we had passed a fire station. Medusa’s hooves pounded the desert, galloping furiously. The firemen must have seen the dust we kicked up because they were standing outside, watching as I came up and yelled, “This man is injured; he needs an ambulance.” And they sprung into action.

Someone tied up Medusa, and I rode with Grant to the hospital in the ambulance, holding his hand. Still holding it when, before we got there, he died.

I
had a broken rib, and the bottoms of my feet were badly lacerated. But I refused to stay still, refused to let them sedate me and put me to sleep. There was one more thing for me to do.

I was grinding my teeth against the pain when I saw her in the doorway. She was wearing a white dress, and she had a paper airplane in one hand. Her braids gave off tiny clicking noises as she spun in a circle, making easy arcs with the airplane, around and around.

“Nina,” I said, “What are you doing here?”

She stopped and smiled at me. She looked like she’d grown; her arms were long and so thin. She said, “I came to see you.”

“I’m afraid I’m out of stories.” I felt horrible as though I were letting her down, but I was so exhausted. I couldn’t move.

She looked shy and a little nervous, like the first time I saw her. “That’s okay. I didn’t come for a story. I came to tell you something. I figured it all out. I know the answer.”

“The answer to what?”

She looked exasperated. “How to tell where you’re going, of course.”

“Oh.”
It’s too late for that,
I wanted to tell her. “What is it?”

She looked serious. “You can tell you’re running toward home when you stop looking behind you.”

She was right. It was so simple. I was stunned that I’d never thought of it.

She came and kissed me on the forehead and whispered, “Goodbye, Eve.” And then I saw there was another woman standing behind her. Her face was averted but she turned toward me now.

“Mommy?” I said.

She turned toward me and her smile was so radiant it made me feel like there were sparks in me. “How’s my girl?”

“Mommy, I’m so sorry,” I told her.

“You have nothing to apologize for, baby.”

I was crying now, the tears hot on my cheeks. “When you called that day, I was angry at you, so I didn’t answer the phone. I just let it ring and ring. I should have answered. And then the next day you—you were gone. I should have answered. If I had answered, if I hadn’t been so ungrateful and selfish, you’d still be alive.”

“No, sweetheart,” she said, smoothing a hand over my hair. “I was calling to say goodbye.” Part of me didn’t want to believe it, but somewhere deep inside I knew it was true. Had always known. “You couldn’t save me. No one could.” She kissed my forehead. “You have to forgive yourself.”

“I don’t know—”

“Shhh,” she said, putting a finger to my lips. And disappeared.

I opened my eyes and saw Althea being wheeled in through the door. Her body looked frail, but her eyes were alert and focused. “Help me up,” she said to the orderly.

“Ma’am, you should really stay—”

“I’m going to hug my granddaughter, and nothing is going to stop me.”

And then she was there with her arms around me, hugging me tighter than I would have expected possible and saying, “My darling girl. My darling Aurora. I love you, girl.”

“I love you too, Grandma,” I said, and my eyes blurred and I passed out.

I dreamed of N. Martinez in his neat police officer uniform standing above me, smoothing hair off my forehead and giving me a kiss on the cheek.

When I opened my eyes, he was sitting in a chair next to the wall in his uniform, dozing. My heart skipped a beat, and my mind whispered,
Wait, maybe
. He was slightly slouched, his hair was a little bit messed up, and he didn’t frown in his sleep.

He opened his eyes, and for a moment he looked approachable and friendly, like in my dream. But then he frowned again, and I knew it hadn’t been real.

Tell him how you feel,
I thought.
Tell him he makes you feel like confiding, tell him you’ve never met anyone like him, tell him you feel safe with him, you want to spend afternoons by his side flying kites and eating ice cream and doing nothing and anything and looking at the stars and naming your own constellations. Tell him you dream about him. Tell him you have never seen him smile.

I said, “I’m sorry I missed your sister’s birthday party.”

“Yeah. You could have called,” he said.

I looked down at my hands. “I know.”

He stared at me. And then, as though he’d been reading my mind, he laughed, his wondrous rich laugh, and he finished it with a smile. “You make me nuts,” he said.

“I know.”

“Why are you crying?” he asked.

I shrugged. How could I tell him it was because hearing him laugh, seeing him smile, were even better than I’d imagined?

The smile vanished, and he went back to frowning and messed up his hair like he wasn’t quite sure what to do. He opened his mouth, then closed it without saying anything. Sat tight-lipped.