come home with me
For a while, there is no conversation. Well; no, there’s plenty of conversation. There has to be, if she’s going to stay sane.
Is she sane? The idea brings a cackle creeping up from her chest, barely tamped down before it can alert the whole world to her brief mental breakdown. Sane? Is it fucking sane to follow your ex-girlfriend to the ends of the goddamn earth? Is it sane to draw cards and don a mask and chase an old friend through the trees?
Sanity is subjective, she supposes. Has been for a long goddamn time.
In truth, her whole life has been bound neatly in that oh, what the fuck wrapping paper she’d tried so hard to leave behind. Ever since that bell rang. Ever since she gazed over the rim of a coffee cup to find Taissa fucking Turner smiling awkwardly back.
Sane. The very idea is laughable.
She’s trying, though. Goddamn, she is trying. Trying not to think about Wilderness rituals, about It, about a needle puncturing whatever chance she might have had to reintroduce Natalie Scatorccio to her life. Trying not to think about the disease cannibalizing her body, about bills piling on her doorstep, about dust collecting on her belongings several states away. Trying not to think about big brown eyes and smeared makeup, about Lottie Matthews saying, It is pleased. You’ll see.
Trying not to, but distraction is a drug with diminishing returns, and she is…
She is tired.
She is so fucking tired.
So, no, there was no conversation of any neat-and-clean sort that night. She leaned against a wall, hands on her knees, too weary even to cry as they took Natalie away, took Lottie away, took sense away. And now: what’s left?
“Van.”
Taissa says her name like it’s some priceless artifact, like she’s hoping her whole life will change if only she can hold the syllable in her mouth long enough. Van shuts her eyes. The car rambles along, punching a hole through her plans as it tilts away from Jersey, and she thinks—not for the first time—What the fuck am I doing?
“Van,” Tai says again, more worriedly, and Van rubs her mouth with the back of one trembling hand.
“Yeah. Yeah, hey.”
“You good?” Taissa is steady behind the wheel. Her eyes slide from the road to Van’s profile, searching for cracks. As if Van hasn’t been wearing the shrapnel of too many wars for…much longer than she’d like to admit.
“Sure. Sure, yeah.”
Taissa squints into the sun. She opens her mouth, then seems to think better of it. Shuts it again. She’s been doing this on and off for hours, for the whole of the drive back to Ohio. Van had let her drive in the dim hope it would hold Taissa’s attention, keep it off Van, keep it away from talking about any of it. They talk about other things. About the songs on the mixtape in the deck, about the driving habits of idiots on the freeway, about the rain pummeling the windshield. Not about any of…not about—
“What’s your plan, Van?”
Fuck, she thinks idly. And there it is. Plans. Like there’s ever been a point to throwing your weight behind plans. She made a whole bunch, once upon a time, and then what? A plane crash. Unimaginable horrors. Unlikely rescue followed by Taissa breaking her fucking heart, and yeah, sure, let’s pretend plans ever mattered to the universe.
What was Natalie’s plan?
“Need clothes,” she says when Tai stares at her long enough to risk both their lives. “Eyes on the road, Taissa.”
“That’s it?” A grimace drags at the corners of Taissa’s full lips. Lips Van certainly isn’t thinking about. Lips she definitely didn’t lean into as they devoured her just last night.
“That’s what I’ve got,” Van tells her wearily. “You?”
Give me something better, she begs, and Tai exhales.
“I don’t know. I just. I’ve got a feeling.”
Van looks at her sharply. “You don’t do feelings.”
It’s cold, barbed, and sticks right between Taissa’s ribs, as intended. She receives little more than a wince for her troubles, and you know what? Good. Tai thought she could stride into Van’s shop, apartment, life, and everything would just—go back? Go all the way back? Tai, whose wedding ring is buried in the pocket of Van’s blue jeans, who held to her like a woman who hadn’t taken a bite in decades, who—
“It just feels,” Taissa says carefully, “like…like something’s different. Or the same? Like it…I don’t know. Fuck, Van, we almost…Shauna—and now Nat, and Lottie’s…”
She’s dangerously close to rambling, to slipping away from the borders of language into a world of names sacrificed to a god none of them ever understood. Taissa never believed in that god. Taissa needed everyone to know she never believed.
“So,” she says, straightening her voice and her shoulders and her grasp on this conversation Van doesn’t want to be having. “I just think we could do with a plan.”
Van’s plan was to live out the rest of her days in relative solitude. To write it all off as a bad movie, every scene a little more poorly-constructed than the last, until the credit sequence could only be a godsend. Van’s plan was to eat shitty fast food and dodge bill collector calls and crash out on her sofa until, one day, she just didn’t wake up again. That was her plan.
Seems out the window now. Seems to have all burnt up, and now she’s left sifting through ashes for…what?
Sanity. Christ. Remember that old song?
“I need my shit,” she says, as if anything in that apartment really matters. “I need to not be wearing these clothes anymore, I need…”
It wants us together.
It wants.
It—
“Stay,” Taissa blurts. “Stay with me.”
Van whips around, bewildered. “S’cuse me?”
“I’ve got the space. And you’re…Van, if you really only have months, or weeks, or—” Taissa sucks in a breath. Her voice is erratic, her eyes straying toward the passenger seat again.
Van turns away, letting her head rest against the window. “You have a wife. Or did you forget?”
“Of course I didn’t—”
“You have a life, Taissa.” She wants to be angry. She wants to, at least, at the very fucking least, sound angry. Instead, her words are coming out…calm. Pragmatic. Like she’s reading off a damn menu.
“You,” Tai says, “are in my life.”
I wasn’t. You didn’t let me be. You shut me out, cut me out like some kind of gay cancer, and twenty years later, you decide to give a shit again?
Say it.
Say it, Van.
Say it, and make her fucking go.
Except she’s dying, and Nat’s in a morgue, and Lot’s in an institution, and god help her, what does Van need?
“Your wife’s gonna just, what? Politely ask me to pay rent?” A laugh strangles itself in her throat. Taissa sighs.
“Simone’s in the hospital, and Sammy’s with her mother, and…look, she’s leaving me, anyway.”
“Yeah? Did she say that, Tai? Did she serve you papers?”
Another wince. God, where does Taissa get off, acting so hurt? Her knuckles are ridged, her grip on the steering wheel just this side of violent, and Van hates the age-old impulse rising in her chest. To reach over. To soothe the ache. To tell Tai they’re a team, they’re partners, they will protect one another to the last drop of blood in their veins.
“I have the space,” Taissa repeats quietly. “And I don’t want you to be alone, Van.”
“Don’t want me to die alone, you mean.”
“Yes, Van. That is exactly what I fucking mean.”
Van can’t help it. Can’t help raising her head, staring at Taissa, drinking her in. The woman who was once her whole world. The woman who ruined love for her. The woman who—
Is back.
Is back, and everything is getting so fucking insane again, and how many weeks does she really have, logistically? Four? Eight?
Everyone dies alone. She knows this. She knows it better than most. You can be surrounded on all sides when it happens, but in the end, it is just you at that finish line. You standing in that net, waiting to make that final save. Everyone dies alone, no matter what.
Still. Still, it gnaws at her. It claws behind her ribcage, thunders behind her eyes, rattles her teeth with every pill she forces down. She’ll die alone, but—but—
Is there something she could do to make it…less? To face it with a hand gripped tight in her own, instead of thrashing alone in a burning airplane?
Does she really want to die on that couch, unmissed and unnoticed for days? Can she really stomach that as the end to this long, winding, fucked-up story?
“Fine.” It slips out, not so much a choice as an imperative. “Fine, Tai. I’ll get my shit, and I’ll…yeah. Fine.”
The shift is instantaneous, the sun splitting a stormcloud. The tension seeps from between Taissa’s shoulder blades, her expression brightening, and no. No, Van is not letting her get away with this.
“It’s not for you,” she snaps. She draws her knees to her chest, gripping stiff denim in stiff fingers. “There’s just. There’ll be a funeral for Nat, and someone’s got to check in on Lottie, and I just…I owe that debt. We both do. So, yeah, fine, I can’t pay up from fucking Ohio.”
Taissa is quiet for a long time. Van closes her eyes again, focusing on the shush of tires over pavement, on the relentless fervor of the rain. Somewhere at the back of her mind, she can hear Lottie’s manic certainty: It is pleased. You’ll see.
She doesn’t want to see. Doesn’t want any of this. She left it all behind so long ago, worked so fucking hard, and all it took to burn the façade of home down with her still inside was one woman, one visit, one fucking kiss—
“Thank you,” Taissa says, so softly, Van’s not even sure she didn’t imagine it.
They don’t speak again until they’ve crossed the border.