Happily Ever Afterlife Page 7

  "Nobody comes to see her?"

  He snapped out of his daze. "Uh, not really, no. I used to talk to her when she was still a bit more with it. Played a lot of bridge."

  The girl smiled, her lips the red of fresh blood, but even with a smile she still looked worn and miserable.

  "That's good. I...I didn't know she was this sick. I would have come sooner if I had."

  "Yeah, she got sick pretty recently. Are you related?"

  She looked at him sharply. "What?"

  "You just look a lot alike." He waved one hand vaguely over his face. "The face, mostly."

  "Oh. Yes. She's my, uh, grandmother."

  "Really? She never mentioned you."

  The girl shrugged. "I don't really see my family a lot. I hadn't even heard from her in years."

  Javier nodded. "I guess I can see that. Sometimes it's hard to keep in touch."

  He extended a hand, trailing IV tubes. "I'm Javier, by the way. Javier Alvarez."

  The girl eyed him for a moment then took his thin, bony hand. Either he was feverish again or her hand was cold as ice; it was hard to tell. Long, black nails dug into his palm.

  "I'm...Aurora."

  "Nice to meet you. Wish it was under better circumstances, but..." He twitched one shoulder.

  She smiled a little at that. "It happens. Have you..." She glanced at the beeping machines surrounding his bed, "been here long?"

  "About a year. In and out before that. You know it's bad when the nurses know you by name."

  "I'm sorry." It sounded like she meant it, too.

  "Me, too. They're not even cute."

  She gave him a bemused, sideways glance. Her eyes were a startling shade of green he'd never seen, almost yellowish like new spring leaves.

  "Are you, ah...on the mend?"

  "Not at all."

  "Oh. I...I'm sorry."

  He shrugged again. "No need to apologize, unless you made me sick."

  Aurora just stared at him, and he fidgeted, picking at the bedspread.

  "Sorry. I'm told that having a sense of humor in my situation is weird. I figure it's just a coping thing."

  "I guess." She looked back at Harriet.

  "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to distract you. Just don't, uh, get a lot of new faces around here."

  "Oh, no, that's alright... I just didn't know she was so out of it." She sighed. "I guess there's not really much I can do for her now."

  "I'm sure she still appreciates it."

  The girl gave him a dry, humorless smile.

  "I doubt she even knows I'm here. Or would know who I am."

  "Nah. Grandmothers have an instinct. My abuela is back in Mexico and hasn't seen me since I was, like, twelve, and I still get food packages from her. They just know this stuff."

  She looked thoughtful at that. "I suppose so."

  He smiled back and their eyes met for a long moment.

  "Am I bothering you? I can go, if you want to sleep." She hovered there, awkwardly on the edge of his side of the room. Javier waved at the chairs next to his bed.

  "Absolutely not. I don't sleep for shit anyway these days."

  Aurora took a seat on one of the uncomfortable, sterile hospital stools, perched like a raven on the cemetery gate, and they talked through the night and into the morning. She rarely smiled, and when she did it was not a happy smile. He got the impression even the sad smiles were unusual for her. Her eyes never seemed to quite smile along with the rest of her, and despite the strange golden glow, they always were distant and pensive. She was also one of the best listeners he'd ever met, and he unintentionally found himself sharing strangely personal details. Some part of him felt as though they'd known each other for years. Their conversation ranged the length and breadth of pets, family, and travel. Aurora moved around a lot, and didn't talk to her family very much. No pets, because she claimed animals just didn't like her.

  "All animals? Or just some?"

  "All animals." There was a tinge of sadness in her voice at this.

  "Not even dogs? My dog loves everyone. He's pretty stupid, but he's got a lot of heart. More heart than brains. It's probably why we get along so well."

  That got an almost smile out of her.

  "Probably not even him."

  Javier told her about his family, the large collection of aunts, uncles, and cousins spread throughout the southwest and back into the old country, too. She seemed to be fascinated by how well everyone kept in touch with each other.

  "And you see them all the time?"

  "Oh, yeah. Well, I don't, anymore. But everybody always knows everybody else's business. Not even sure how, really. I figure my aunts must just be on the phone with each other all the time."

  "That sounds wonderful."

  "Are you kidding me? I couldn't even try to buy a cheap temporary car without all five hundred uncles giving me tips on the best make, model, and price range. It's ridiculous."

  They rambled back and forth like that for a while, until the clock beeped around five and Aurora glanced out the window.

  "I probably need to get going."

  He looked out the window as well, and saw the edge of the city's skyline was beginning to turn purple and pink. "What, are you going to turn to stone?"

  She stood up and stretched. "A lady needs her beauty sleep."

  "Fair enough. Nice talking to you, though. I don't sleep so good, so this was a nice break from late-night TV."

  She nodded, eyes wide and serious.

  "Will you be back to see...her?" He'd almost said me, and mentally kicked himself for forgetting that her grandmother was dying right next to them.

  "Most likely. Probably tomorrow night." Aurora paused in the doorway and waved to him. "Take care."

  He smiled. "You, too."

  She was gone as silently as she arrived. As he sat alone watching the sun rise, he found himself impatient for it to set and for her to return.

  * * *

  The sun was a thin sliver on the horizon when she got home. Foolish and careless of her; a few minutes more and she would have been stuck at the hospital till sunset. The cool, dark interior of the abandoned apartment she had claimed was as welcoming as a lover's kiss, and she breathed a sigh of relief. The windows were all carefully boarded over and sheets hung over the scrap wood to ensure no stray rays of light found their way inside.

  The woman, who called herself Aurora for now, kicked her boots off and wandered into the bathroom. There was a gaping hole in the wall where the toilet had once been and a claw foot tub with one side smashed out. The sink still worked, though the porcelain was chipped and cracked, and she splashed water on her face before regarding herself in the mirror hanging askew over it.

  That was one part the stories all got wrong; she'd been looking at the same reflection for two hundred years, growing a little paler with every year, but overall unchanged.

  Every so often she liked to alter her appearance, out of paranoia. It had been years since one of the people keeping watch for her kind had caught her trail, but the fear never really left. She'd gone with the punk-goth look back in the late eighties, admiring the passion and furor the young people in it seemed to possess all the time. At some point, she knew that she'd felt that sort of drive. It was long gone now, worn down by the exhaustion of a long, long life. The crush of watching the people she loved sucked dry by time and pass on without her, leaving her here. Like poor Hattie. She'd expected it to be bad, but the horror of finding her granddaughter a withered shell in a hospital bed... there was no preparation for that. An aching lump choked her throat, and a thin bloody tear trickled down her cheek. Years, decades, centuries of her descendants moving forward while she stood still like a stone in the river. You could get used to it, but it never stopped hurting. Not really.

  Exhaustion hit her abruptly as the sun rose. She could feel the press of the light outside like the hand of an angry god. Beneath a threadbare rug, she had torn up rotting floorboards and dug out a place in the cold dirt and ruste
d pipes when she first came here, expanding the crawlspace. Aurora tugged the boards back down after her, and stripped off her clothes, hanging them carefully on pipes. Explaining how you got chunks of loose soil on them in the middle of the concrete jungle was always so complicated. Down in the dirt, Aurora, formerly Annette-Marianne-Mary-Rose, pulled soil back on top of her, eyes already fluttering into unconsciousness. The last thing she saw before blacking out for the day was Javier's smile in hospital, sweet and unabashed as he stared at her. A slight smile curved her lips as she slept.

  After full dark set in, she made her way back to the hospital. Ordinarily, hospitals were one of the places she avoided; so many helpless victims packed into one place, along with the scent of illness, created a bad combination. But, she'd said she would return, and that meant something to her.

  The nurses didn't see her as she went by their desk, blending in with the shadows. Hattie was, sadly, unchanged; the respirator wheezed and beeped for her. The flowers she'd picked on her way here seemed suddenly pathetic and helpless, but she set them on the nightstand anyway, kissing the old woman on the forehead.

  Behind the partition, Javier slept, and something in her stomach twisted. He was tall, but so thin and wasted that all the tubes and machines around the bed dwarfed him. Even in a building full of the sick and dying, she could smell the infections within him. Death wasn't far away for either him or Hattie, but for him it seemed even more wrong. So young, around her age when she'd been turned. Too young to die; too young to live forever.

  As she stood there he stirred and blinked sleepily at her. A grin spread across his face.

  "Am I still dreaming?"

  She settled on the stool, tucking her long black lace skirts up properly.

  "Maybe."

  "I'm okay with that." He yawned and stretched, joints popping. "Want some Pan de Muertos?"

  Aurora arched an eyebrow at him. "Beg pardon?"

  "Bread. Tasty Mexican bread." He held out a box from the nightstand, still wrapped in postal paper and covered in stamps. She smelled sweet spices from the small round loaves tucked into a Tupperware container.

  "I'll pass, thanks. I just ate." Human food didn't agree with her these days, and she felt that vomiting clotted blood all over the floor would be a rather unforgivable faux pas.

  Javier shrugged. "Your loss. This stuff is like crack. My mother made it and sent me a ton. Not sure how she expects me to eat it all, but I guess that's a mother thing." He pulled a cake out and nibbled on it, then grimaced and held his stomach.

  "You alright?"

  "Yeah. Just a little nausea is all." With a final longing look he set the bread back in the box and brushed crumbs off his hands.

  "So. How was your day, darling?"

  She arched one eyebrow at that. "Uneventful. I slept all day."

  "What are you, a bat?"

  She gave a quiet, secretive smile at that.

  "You're the one who kept me up all night, sir."

  "Keep your voice down, we'll set the nurses to talking. Think of our families if the scandal got out."

  That startled a laugh out of her, a surprisingly light, girlish sound. Javier grinned, warm brown eyes shining like polished amber, and even though she knew she had to be careful to hide her teeth, Aurora found herself grinning back.

  It was another long night of rambling discussion and half-baked debate, only interrupted when a nurse stopped by to deliver his meds. He gulped them down with a well-practiced single swallow and a long sip of water out of the hospital sippy-mug. The water made him cough and he grimaced.

  "Fuckin' horse pills, man."

  "Antibiotics?" She recognized the smell from her many deathbed watches.

  He nodded. "Too many infections. Gotta cram as many antibiotics into me as I can swallow, not that I've noticed it's doing much good."

  She knew that already; she could smell death on him, too.

  "How long have you...?" She trailed off, aware there was no good way to end the sentence.

  "Had full blown AIDs? About a year. Managed just being infected for years, but then this pneumonia kicked my ass, and bam." A series of heavy, racking coughs shook his thin form.

  "I'm sorry to hear that." She truly was; she found it a bit startling to realize that.

  "You and me both, sister."

  "How..." She stopped. "Nevermind."

  "How did I get it? It's okay. You're allowed to address the elephant in the room."

  She shifted uncomfortably. "I understand if you don't want to talk about it."

  "Not much else to talk about these days. Pretty simple, boy meets girl, boy turns sixteen and is very stupid on his birthday. Girl is positive and knows it but doesn't tell him." He took another sip of water. "Talk about your worst birthday gift ever."

  "Jesus. You were only sixteen?"

  "Yeah. Last time I let a pretty face make me that stupid, believe you me. When I confronted her, she just started carrying on like it was somehow my fault. Can you believe that? I won't speak ill of the dead, but my description of her would rhyme with evil witch."

  "I..." She hesitated. "I would say I'm sorry but I guess that doesn't help."

  He shrugged. "Hell, you're at least still talking to me. My family either acts like I've got the damn plague or like God's going to descend from heaven and cure me at any moment. My grandma sends me all these saint candles to burn, like they're somehow going to make the infections go poof." Javier slid open one of the drawers on the bedside table and candles in glass jars rolled around inside. Aurora examined them, rolling some over.

  "Is that the grim reaper?'

  "Huh?"

  She pulled one out and showed it to him.

  "Oh. That's Santa Muerte. I don't think she's actually a church saint, but Grandma figured she was appropriate."

  "Santa Muerte." She frowned. "Saint Death?"

  "Yeah. She does all the unpleasant stuff normal saints won't. You know, drugs, sex, death. And AIDs patients, apparently." He gave a cheesy smile and weary thumbs-up.

  Aurora stared at the printed image of a skeleton wearing blue and white robes, surrounded by marigolds. It was nothing like the saints she'd been raised with as a child, but there was power in this image. Something about it was oddly compelling to her.

  "And flowers?"

  "They're for the Day of the Dead. You put marigolds and that bread out and burn candles for all your relatives that have passed on. When they come back from the land of the dead they come visit their families and so this is all for them to eat and stuff. You should take the candle, if you like it. God knows I've got plenty."

  "So it's like Halloween?"

  He nodded. "Basically, yeah. Except way cooler." Another fit of coughing shook him. "I guess next year I'll get to find out if that's true or not." The resignation in his voice was painful to hear.

  "So you believe in all this?"

  Javier looked out the window at the lights of the city for a moment. "I guess. Sort of," he said finally. "I'm not really religious anymore, but I like to think that there's something more. You could do worse for an afterlife than partying with your relatives for all eternity."

  "I suppose that depends on your family." The time she'd had with her family had been brief, but held enough pain to haunt her for several life times.

  He laughed, even though she hadn't meant it to be funny, and shut the drawer of candles again. "Good point. My family is pretty awesome, even with all their...quirks, so I like that idea. Are you religious?"

  Aurora turned the cool glass votive around in her hands. Normally, these candles were blessed and would scorch her hands, but Saint Death did nothing to her. Interesting.

  "I used to be."

  "Used to be?"

  She was silent for a moment, and then finally set Santa Muerte back on the table. "I guess I kind of figure if there's a God, he probably doesn't approve of me."

  "That's harsh. How bad can you be?"

  He held a hand out to her. She hesitated for a moment
, and then took it. His hand was incredibly bony and warm, and she could literally feel the infections burning inside him. Their eyes met and she smiled slightly. "Pretty much damned, I assume."

  "If that's so, you make a good case for damnation. It seems to agree with you."

  "I don't know about that. Being damned for all eternity isn't exactly a good thing for anyone."

  He let her hand go to pull another pillow behind his back to prop him up. "Maybe, maybe not. But at least you get eternity, right?"

  "You say that like it's a good thing."

  "Well, I figure if you have all eternity, you always have the option to try to make things right. Most of us are just trying to do as much right with what time we've got, but if you've got forever, it changes things. That's not so bad."

  Her smile turned sad. "I guess not."

  Javier fell asleep around four in the morning, drifting off when she left to stretch her legs out in the hospital cafeteria.

  The cup of coffee she'd never meant to drink went into the trash and she tucked the blankets around him. He was light and warm in her arms, and a distant memory from long-gone sunlit days surfaced; a baby bird she'd found tossed on the ground outside their cabin, carefully held in her hands, saved from the barn cat's avaricious paws at the last moment. She'd cradled it while her father found the nest and boosted her up to put it back. The feverish warmth and sensation of something delicate and desperately alive, fighting to stay that way, remained with her centuries later.

  She stood over the bed looking down at him and felt something like warmth for the first time in too long. It had been a while since she'd simply had someone to talk to at such great length. He never seemed to run out of things to talk about and was always interesting. She felt as though she could listen forever.

  If his train of thoughts seemed to drift toward the approaching dark, well, who was to blame him? He was a young man facing a certain death. Almost certain, a dark little part of herself whispered. There was no cure for his disease...with medicine anyway. There was always the option, however, of a different death.