Chapter Text
She watches, frozen, as the house across the street explodes. Golden light shatters it. She’s known since Arcadia that she would die soon. But she’d expected her . Not this. Not Him .
He spins, furrowing up the yard, shredding the flowers, a sort of cruel pointlessness to it all, now. Or is it merely obvious now? The hatred, the cruelty, the…
Fuck, god. So familiar.It all makes sense.
It’s all made sense since Arcadia in increasing measure, like a night hag sitting on her chest. Like flies buzzing in her ears.
She’d gotten dressed that morning. Eaten breakfast, put on a smile. Alan and Zoe and Anne had left without her. Zoe’s kind, sad eyes (sadder every day since Aunt Annette – since –) had seemed to know. She had kept up a game face anyway, then come back up the stairs, let the mask fall away.
Eyes red with years of unshed tears now glistened with gold. Her hair was a dusty copper from fervent neglect. She hadn’t brushed her teeth.
And even this abasement couldn’t satisfy. The golden angel, come to set her free, was not her .
She watches, hoping he’ll turn and face her, look her in the eye, plant one radiant bolt between her shoulder blades, send her where she belongs. But he doesn’t. Inexplicably, capriciously, he levitates uncannily straight into the sky, hovering over a roof a block down, then with a sonic boom –
She’s alone in the house. She’s alive. This is the pits.
Still. There’s no power, no running water, no rescue, no hope. She just has to wait longer .
She shuffles, bathrobe clad, over to the shelf. Picks up a book. Maggie Holt, number something or other, who gives a shit. She does Not read the inscription. She isn’t coming, to kill her or otherwise. She idly flips through the book for what…might be an hour?
Footsteps . Someone left the bathroom light on. There’s no power. And everyone’s either dead or evacuated. But someone left the bathroom light on.
When she was a child, she went to the Mall of America, and she stood on the balcony, and she imagined what it might be like to fall from it. No. Scratch that, half-truth that it is. She wanted. Very distinctly. To jump. And she did not. She learned, a decade later, discussing this in therapy, that this is called “l’appel du vide”. That it is a known, understood, perfectly normal psychological phenomenon. That everyone, from time to time, experiences it.
The light in the bathroom is very bright, almost pure white. She thinks it might be a freight train coming her way. She goes to check it out.
*****
The shotgun seat of the 1997 Mercury Cougar is familiar, worn in all kinds of idiosyncratic ways. There is a spilled soda stickiness to the console in front of her, a cigarette filmstink to the velour burgundy of the seat cushion. She remembers the bugs – the dead bugs! – on the window like they were yesterday. She presses her fingers against the window, spreading them out.
Deja vu , she remembers, is the sensation that you’ve been here before. Wherever here is. It’s not really a place , so much. It’s more like – you’re playing a tape back, watching things happen that you don’t even know where you’ve seen them, but you know they’ve happened before. The few times she’s experienced it she’s found that it has little to do with exact memory. Things that happen remind you of other things that have happened in inexplicable, frightening ways.
You don’t experience deja vu every time you step into your childhood bedroom and pick up a favorite book, after all.
“Almost done with errands, pumpkin.” He had said that before, or something like it, hadn’t he? He had to have. It’s so like him, a banality wrapped in a formality closed around a warm facade. The anti-Danny. Always an act, never an actor. Not enough to –
She swallows, her mouth suddenly dry.
Jamais vu , now. There’s a real interesting idea. The sense, simply, that you are unfamiliar with something you know you should be familiar with. The world peeled back, like the shell of a hardboiled egg.
golden yolk shining out
She feels, in her bones, in her heart, in her marrow, in her nerves, the phone ringing, before it rings. She swallows, again. “Taylor.” There’s a smile in her voice. She doesn’t deserve this.
“Yeah! How’d you know?”
“I dunno. Our psychic bond, I guess.” What she wants to be true, to have been true.
“Haha great. I love it. So okay I gotta talk fast because I only have two minutes and I need the other fifty cents to call my –”
“No.”
“No?!” Motormouth stops, brakes screeching.
“You don’t. You have all the time in the world. Later, you will, anyway. I promise. I need to –” she mulls over a hundred possible lies, ways to say she’s not ready for this conversation, even though she’s had nearly five years to prepare for it.
“Need to what? What’s wrong with you? Everything okay?”
Emma shakes her head. Her dad looks over at her, concerned. “I’m fine. It’s fine. I need to do something though and before I let you go I wanted to say thanks. For everything. For being a good friend. For being you, Taylor.”
“Oh. Kay?”
Emma nods brightly. “Bye now.” She thumbs end call. “Dad, stop the car.”
“Punkin,” he says, in bargaining mode already. “We’re almost home.”
“I’m getting out.” She unbuckles her seatbelt. Opens the door. He slows, then hits the brakes. Metal groans, and he looks at her in disbelief.
She stands on the curb, jerking her thumb at a small handwritten signboard on the sidewalk, grinning. “New cafe. Been wanting to try it.”
He shakes his head. “Fine. I was looking forward to trying that shortcut home, myself, but it’s fine. My treat?”
She nods. “As you wish.”
Inside, he grabs a booth and looks over the menu. She excuses herself to the bathroom. Inside it the light is bright and white, uncomfortably stark and industrial, unlike the rest of the atmosphere. Bathrooms are always a sort of liminal space, no matter how many soaps or seashells you put in them. She is beginning to understand why they are places to hide.
Lastly, presque vu . The feeling that you are on the verge of an epiphany. The sort of thing you might, if you were not otherwise aware, mistake for the convulsions of your vagus nerve as you hurl in the sink, because you didn’t even make it to the toilet before shock overtook you. Or, maybe, you would mistake it for relief, as you looked at eyes nose hair beautiful proper red hair and noticed they were all still there .
She had forgotten, after everything, how desperate she was to never go through that again.
A woman enters the bathroom, as she’s washing up. She wears a uniform that Emma realizes would have made her invisible, in the past. She’s waitstaff for the cafe. Not people. But she looks closer. Sees the woman’s olive skin, aquiline nose. The slight wave to her hair. She grows weak at the knees again. It’s the second time she’s seen her today, the second time she’s wanted her, the second time she’s been terrified of her. It’s been a very long day.
“I don’t know you,” the woman says, accented. “But I am to bid you welcome and hope that you have no regrets about your choice.”
Emma thinks back to the voice on the phone. A different person from the one in Arcadia that last day. She thinks back to all the choices she’s only the last few weeks had time to regret.
Deja vu, jamais vu, presque vu . She feels all three at once, and they’re all the same emotion.
She considers for a long moment. The woman, having delivered her message, turns to walk away. She’s almost to the door, when Emma says simply and truthfully,
“I don’t know yet.”
“We will see.” The door shuts behind her, and Emma is alone again.