Delirium - Lauren Oliver [113]
That night, as I’m slipping out of the bedroom, I hear rustling behind me. When I turn around, Gracie’s sitting up in bed again, blinking at me, her eyes as reflective as an animal’s. I touch my finger to my lips. She does the same, an unconscious mimic, and I slip out the door.
When I’m on the street I look up once toward the window. For a second I think I see Gracie looking down at me, her face as pale as a moon. But maybe it’s just a trick of the shadows skating silently over the side of the house. When I look again, she’s gone.
The house at 37 Brooks is all dark when I push my way in through the window, and totally silent. He’s not here, I think. He didn’t come—but a piece of me refuses to believe it. He must have come.
I’ve brought a flashlight with me, and I begin a sweep of the house, my second of the day, refusing for superstitious reasons to call out for him. Somehow I can’t stand it. If he doesn’t answer, I’ll be forced, finally, to accept that he never received my note—or, even worse, did receive it but has decided not to come.
In the living room I stop short.
All our things—the blankets, the games, the books—are gone. The warped wooden floor lies bare and exposed under the beam of my flashlight. The furniture sits cold and silent, stripped of all our personal touches, the discarded sweatshirts and half-used bottles of sunscreen. It has been a long time since I’ve been afraid of the house or frightened of walking into its rooms at night, but now a sense of the cavernous empty spaces around me comes back—room after room of tumbling-down things, rotting things, rodents blinking at you from dark spaces—and a deep chill runs through me. Alex must have been here after all, to clean up our stuff.
The message is as clear to me as any note. He’s done with me.
For a moment I even forget to breathe. And then the Coldness comes, a surge of it so strong it hits me in the chest like a physical force, like walking straight into the breakers at the beach. My knees buckle and I go into a crouch, shivering uncontrollably.
He’s gone. A strangled sound works its way out of my throat and breaks the silence around me all at once. Suddenly I’m sobbing loudly into the dark, letting the flashlight fall to the ground and blink out. I fantasize that I’ll cry so much I’ll fill the house and drown, or be carried away on a river of tears to some distant place.
Then I feel a warm hand on the back of my neck, working through a tangle of my hair.
“Lena.”
I turn around and Alex is there, bending over me. I can’t really make out his expression, but in the limited light it looks hard to me, hard and immobile, as though it’s made out of stone. For a second I’m worried that I’m only dreaming him, but then he touches me again and his hand is solid and warm and rough.
“Lena,” he says again, but he doesn’t seem to know what else to say. I scramble to my feet, wiping my face on my forearm.
“You got my note.” I’m trying to gulp back the tears but just succeed in hiccuping several times.
“Note?” Alex repeats.
I wish I was still holding the flashlight so I could see his face more clearly. At the same time, I’m terrified of it, and of the distance I might find there. “I left you a note at the Governor,” I said. “I wanted you to meet me here.”
“I didn’t get it,” he says. I think I hear a coldness in his voice. “I just came to—”
“Stop.” I can’t let him finish. I can’t let him say that he came to pack up, that he doesn’t want to see me again. It will kill me. Love, the deadliest of all deadly things. “Listen,” I say, hiccuping through the words. “Listen, about today . . . It wasn’t my idea. Carol said I had to meet him, and I couldn’t get a message to you. And then we were standing there and I was thinking about you, and the Wilds, and how everything is so changed and how there’s no time, there’s no more time for us, and for