The Vestiges of Grief
The ringing in her ears was deafening. The ocean bobbed around her, stinging her wounds, but she couldn’t feel a fucking thing except the salty tears painting her cheeks. A small motorboat sailed away from her, losing itself to the fog. Soon it was gone. Like nothing had ever happened.
Like nothing had ever happened.
Maybe if she stayed here long enough, the tide would take her the way it would take her mother’s switchblade. She closed her eyes, letting more tears fall. The switchblade. She would never find it. It was claimed by sea and sand.
“All the demons used to come ‘round
I’m grateful now they’ve left…”
Joel’s voice echoed in her mind.
She could barely hear the gunshots from the fucking Rattler complex she'd left in flames behind her. Her hair, slick with sweat, water, and blood, stuck to her face.
She looked down, clutching the ring and pinky fingers of her left hand. Blood flowed steadily from both, but she couldn’t feel it.
She’d have to cut them the rest of the way off.
And she didn’t have her switchblade.
She could have been sitting for minutes or days, time had no meaning anymore.
But something had cracked. Given way. It wasn’t like how the movies made it. No swell, no big burst of release, no loud, heaving, animalistic cries.
What was now… wasn’t. What had been was now… not.
She’d never seen the road beyond this.
To be honest, part of Ellie hadn’t expected to even have made it this far. Had some part of her thought she was going to die doing this? No, that couldn’t be. She hadn’t thought about dying, she had planned not to die… but had something in her still entertained it?
The other boat bobbed on the water behind her. She could take it up the shoreline if she wanted. Or down. Or anywhere.
She could go anywhere.
Anywhere.
It was up to her.
Choice. Finally. Free choice. Her choice.
Her body could have been stone when she finally began to move. Heavy limbs, exhaustion, an all-consuming grief. Things she couldn’t see before now seemed so clear.
She strode toward the small motorboat, hoping maybe her foot would catch on the switchblade, but it didn’t. She made an effort to look, but the weight of her emaciated frame threatened to pull her under the water and leave her there to be consumed.
A flash of Dina’s face streaked across her mind, but she couldn’t let herself see it. It was blurry, like looking at her from behind dirty glass. She couldn’t even bring herself to think her name.
Their backs had faced each other as she left, but Ellie would have felt Dina’s eyes on her if she had turned around to watch her go. Ellie hadn’t even looked back when she’d reached the gate to the farmhouse. She hadn’t looked back through any of this, except to one moment. The one that played over and over in her mind. That dank fucking hallway. Those echoing fucking cries.
And his eyes.
Joel’s fucking eyes.
The motorboat creaked as she dropped herself into it. Could she sleep? Could she ever fucking sleep again? No one ever told her what would happen after this. After anything. After.
After.
After.
Like everything was new.
The heat of the sun beat down on the back of her neck. Hotter than she would have expected. Burning, even. The grass came up past her waist. Everything was still, even the wind chimes on the porch were dormant. No sheep by the barn. No music coming from inside. No wind in the air.
The main door laid open, and the screen door in front of it was just slightly ajar. She never had gotten around to fixing it. She guessed Dina hadn’t, either, after she’d left.
It looked the same inside. Worn, but well-loved. Decorated. Pictures of her, Dina, and JJ. Pictures of her, Dina, and Jesse. Even Robin’s letter was still sitting on the table.
This wasn’t right.
“Hey you,” a warm, deep voice came from the kitchen.
Ellie looked up to see Jesse. He was pale, like all the blood had been drained from his body, and he had that grotesque hole in his cheek from where he’d been shot. Ellie jumped. But it was like he… didn’t know he was dead. “She’s upstairs. Sshh. JJ’s asleep. Maybe you can surprise ‘em.”
Ellie looked down at herself: she was still wearing the white tank top, blood-soaked, her jeans caked with dried mud and stiff with crimson.
“Here,” he said, reaching toward her, taking her backpack off her back. “Fuck, something got you good,” he continued, looking down at her hand. The upper halves of two of her fingers were still hanging off. “Go on,” he urged, a smile on his face, excited as a little kid for Ellie to go upstairs. It was as if he didn’t quite understand what had happened or what he was looking at.
Ellie turned and began climbing the stairs. What the fuck was she doing? She wasn’t ready for this. None of this was right. She turned back, wanting desperately to run out the door, but there was nothing behind her. Nothing but shadow. Like the entire house had disappeared behind her.
She had nowhere to go but up.
She continued one stair at a time, slowly as she could muster.
Finally she reached the top. If she went right, she could go to her studio. She could wrap herself up in her art and her music and never leave. Or she could go left. Face the thing she loved more than the very breath keeping her alive. Face the thing she’d hurt beyond repair. Face the thing she feared the most. She craned her head to the left and looked into the bedroom.
She was sitting on the bed. She was at the top of the stairs but she was also sitting on the bed.
Jesus Christ am I that skinny? Ellie thought as she looked at herself.
The Ellie on the bed wore a clean white shirt and a pair of pajama shorts. She sighed, closing her eyes and opening them again, shivering just slightly.
Dina and JJ slept soundly in bed behind her.
No, no, no, no, I know what the fuck this is, the Ellie just outside the corridor thought. She watched herself stand up and close a window in the bedroom, then walk toward the open door. Ellie stepped aside and let the version of herself from just a few months ago step out into the hallway.
She was skin and bones. Her body was slumped over. So tired. So defeated, yet so determined. So utterly consumed.
Ellie watched herself as she walked toward her art studio and opened the door. But there was nothing behind it. Again, only shadow. Ellie wanted to reach out and stop her doppelgänger, but it was like she couldn’t move. She stared as the other Ellie stepped into the darkness and was gone.
Ellie turned back toward the bedroom to see Dina and JJ sleeping, but they were now in different clothes. JJ looked bigger. Dina looked exhausted, even in sleep. She wore one of Ellie’s old collared long-sleeve shirts. She slept on her side, curled up close to JJ, who was clutching the sleeve of Ellie’s faded shirt. Dina’s hair looked longer.
JJ stirred, his eyes opening slowly and looking in the direction of Ellie. He yawned, stretching, reaching toward her.
My little potato.
Everything in Ellie ached to hold him, but her feet wouldn’t move.
Then Dina stirred, her eyes fluttering the way they always did when she was waking up.
“What’s up, goober?” she asked, looking over at JJ. Seeing he was reaching toward something, her eyes looked up and before they fully fell on Ellie…
Ellie's eyes flew open and her abdominal muscles contracted.
“Fuck,” she muttered, gingerly holding the wound at her side.
It had been two weeks since she left the boat on the shore of somewhere in Northern California. She’d ridden up the coast as far as the gas would take her, then left it and started off on foot.
She looked down at her hand, wrapped in a ripped-up old tank top. She’d found a somewhat clean machete a week and a half ago and doused it with alcohol, searching for the place that had the least amount of rust on the blade and then sliced off the hanging remnants of the upper half of her ring and pinky fingers on her left hand. It had fucking hurt.
But everything fucking hurt.
She’d had the same dream every night since she’d put her feet back on solid ground. Traveling to the farmhouse. Seeing Jesse. Seeing herself. Seeing Dina and JJ. But she always woke up before Dina saw her. Every single time.
Maybe it was better that way.
Ellie didn’t think she could take having to look in Dina’s eyes, even in her dreams. Her nightmares.
The days of travel felt endless. Something in her felt lighter, and she could write Joel’s name in her journal again and had even started to be able to sketch his eyes… but those eyes had been replaced with Dina’s in her mind. A lifeless stare from the person she wanted to spend the rest of her life looking at. That empty glare filled her with more fear than anything else she could imagine.
And she’d done it to herself.
If Dina could fucking see her now. Huddled in a little cavern in a forest. Missing two fingers. Missing pieces of herself she would never get back. Missing her Potato. Missing Jackson. Missing her guitar, her art… missing everything that made her whole.
She was pieces.
Pieces slowly fusing, quietly being pulled back together to form some version of herself. Something that wore her face but was profoundly changed beneath the flesh.
Northern California had been fairly quiet. She hadn’t seen another person since Abby and the boy in the boat. She’d only encountered three infected in two weeks. And it was gorgeous here. She could fucking stay. She could.
But she couldn’t. Didn’t want to.
She didn’t know exactly what she did want to do, but she knew what she didn’t want to do, and so she let the time pass and her legs carry her through more days which turned into weeks. California became Nevada, and she still had little interaction with people, though she’d spent a few days with a small group near Lovelock. She traded her hunting skills for medicine and clean bandages. They’d even helped clean up the ragged job she’d done on her fingers.
No one asked what happened, and she wouldn’t have had the words to tell them if they had. They barely exchanged words beyond the hunting and the help, and Ellie was grateful for it.
Nevada became Idaho, where she came across a group of wild horses and found herself skimming old passages in her journal and remembering when she and Dina had seen a similar sight on the way to Seattle. Those days were a lifetime ago. Multiple lifetimes.
As she neared the old state line into Wyoming, she could barely imagine what JJ must look like now. The months she’d been away… how long had it really been? She lost all sense of time while she was gone - why would she need it?
How long had it been? How big was he now? Could she even bring herself to go see them?
And where would they be?
Jackson? The Farmhouse?
Dina had talked so fervently so many times about wanting that house, and Ellie had tainted it. Like the rust of her grief had infected its way into everything, taking over anything good and leaving it dank and decayed.
But her heart had started to heal. She found another grouping of horses just outside Wyoming, and they let her get close enough to feed one of the foals.
“Hey buddy,” she said quietly as the colt happily munched on the apple in Ellie’s hand. “You guys like it out here?”
One of the other horses sighed into Ellie’s hair, tickling the side of her face.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she said, laughing, and the sound was almost foreign to her. But holy fuck did it feel good to laugh.
“Okay, go on, buddy,” she said to the colt as he finished the apple. He turned and began running through the grass. She turned to some of the other horses. “Take care of him.” One of the mares sighed again and ran off toward the colt. “He’s your family,” Ellie muttered as the other horses followed suit.
She was maybe 20 miles outside Jackson. She’d have to be careful approaching, she knew hordes of infected were in the area. Patrols usually kept them at bay, but they could still be lurking around. She wondered if she’d run into any of the patrols. She made a mental note to try and stay just off their usual routes - she didn’t know what she would do if she unexpectedly ran into one of them. Fuck, what if she ran into Tommy?
Tommy. How the fuck do I tell him that I let her go? He wasn’t there. He wouldn’t… he wouldn’t understand.
Or maybe he would.
What the fuck was she doing? When she got back… where was she going to go?
She wanted to see them - every inch of her skin buzzed with how badly she wanted to see Dina, to hold her, to smell her hair, to play with JJ, to see him smile…
But how could they take her back? Could they even stand the sight of her?
What would Maria say? Robin?
She thought she’d been the talk of the town the morning after the dance when Seth had gotten drunk and been a grade-A douche and she’d yelled at Joel.
Maybe they’d forgotten about her.
They probably thought she was dead.
They probably moved on.
They had to. Everyone had to. That was the way things worked. Moving on until the vestiges of grief were nothing more than voices in the shadows.
Ellie’s body wanted to launch into a full-blown run for the rest of the twenty miles and somehow also take them as slowly as possible so she could suss out what to do when she arrived.
You could fucking apologize, El.
That would be a hell of a fucking start.