There were some people it was too difficult to say good-bye to, so I didn’t try. Mom, of course. If I’d made a point of going into the office to say good-bye to her that day, however casually, she’d’ve been calling the cops and the hospital before I got the words out of my mouth. Once a mother, always a mother, and I’d have to have some spectacular reason for breaking the awkward but practical truce that we never spoke to each other unless on specific coffeehouse business. Kenny was bussing tables; we exchanged “Hey”s. I’d never said goodbye to Kenny and this wasn’t the time to start. I had seen Billy for about two-thirds of a second earlier in the afternoon, when he blasted into Charlie’s long enough to fling over his shoulder at the nearest parent the information that he was spending the rest of the day with the equally hyperactive friend accompanying him. He did not acknowledge me; I was part of the family backdrop. What was to acknowledge? My importance lay in the availability of the eight muffins and two-each-from-every-bin-and-four-if-they-were-chocolate cookies they took with them as they blasted out again.
Mary and Kyoko I said “See you” to. I waved to Emmy, who was in the main kitchen looking harassed, but I was beginning to suspect that her harassed look was covering up the fact that she was having a really good time and didn’t quite believe her luck. I always checked out with Charlie, to make sure there weren’t any last-minute gaps I might be able to fill, to make sure our schedules for tomorrow matched. I’d told him about the swap with Paulie; I only said I was tired, and I know I looked it. We didn’t say good-bye either. Our ritual went, “See you tomorrow, Sunshine,” and “Yeah.” I said “Yeah”, as usual. Even on days off he said “See you tomorrow” because even on days off he usually did.
I hadn’t realized that I never said good-bye to anyone about anything.
Mel. He was on break when I left, and he wasn’t jiving with some guy or guys in greasy denim about overhead cam shifts through hot pastrami or meatloaf sandwiches—or for that matter discussing world news with one of our more coherent derelicts. Mel was leaning against the corner of the building drinking coffee and muttering to himself. I knew what he was muttering about: he’d given up smoking ten years ago but he still wanted a cigarette every time he drank coffee, and he drank a lot of coffee. Sometimes his fingers twitched, not from the caffeine jag but from the memory of doing his own roll-ups. This made him drink more coffee. One day he was going to wake up and discover he’d turned into a coffee plantation, and then Charlie’s would have its own fresh home-grown beans even if we had to replace our chief cook. There are worse things to wake up and discover you’ve turned into. A vampire, for example. Although the books say you’ll know it’s coming.
Mel looked up and saw me, and his face eased into his good-old-boy smile. Mel used his charm as deliberately as laying an ace on the table, so you could see exactly what it was. It was one of the good things about him. Whatever he might not be telling you, what he did tell you was the truth. I’m your friend, Sunshine. He still looked like someone who should be wearing greasy denims rather than an apron, although the tattoos confused the issue: greasy denims and a long hooded cloak? Hmm. I wondered if sorcerers ever used food splotches instead of cosmetics.
“Hey Sunshine.”
“Hey.”
“We still on for Friday afternoon?”
I nodded, probably too vigorously, because his smile faded. “Something wrong?”
Nothing that wasn’t wrong the last time you asked me that question, I thought, only it’s got wronger faster than maybe I was expecting. I shook my head, trying to be less vigorous. “No. Thanks.”
He swallowed the last of his coffee, put the mug down on the ground, and came over to me. “Sure?”
“Sure. Yeah.” I put my arms around him, leaned my face against his shoulder (my forehead against the oak tree that was visible beneath the torn-off sleeve of his T-shirt), and sighed. He smelled of food and daylight. I could feel his heart beating. He put his arms around me. “Probably just lingering indigestion from eleven-twelfths of a Bitter Chocolate Death yesterday,” I said. I felt the small kick of his diaphragm as he laughed—he had a sort of furry-chuckle laugh—but he knew me too well. “Try again, Sunshine,” he said. “Do blue whales OD guzzling all that sea water? Your veins run chocolate—finest dark semisweet—not blood.”
Pity it looked red, then. It gave vampires ideas. I didn’t say anything.
“You can tell me about it on Friday, okay?” he said.
I nodded. “Okay.” If I said any more I would probably burst into tears.
I drove home slowly. I thought of going by the library, but decided Aimil came into the “too difficult” category, and she might conceivably make some kind of guess what I was feeling so gloomy about and I didn’t want to take the risk. What a really awful reason not to see someone for the last time. But I was so tired.
I sat in the car again at home and watched the leaves turning. It seemed to me a lot of autumn had happened in the last two days. I thought of the two days out of time I’d had after Con had diagnosed me and before he was supposed to come back and cure me. I’d known I was dying, but it kind of hadn’t mattered. It wasn’t only that I believed Con would find a way to heal me. It was that there wasn’t anything I could do. I didn’t have that luxury this time. I was going to have to go through with it, whatever it was. I’d always scorned the stories where the princesses hung around waiting to be rescued: Sleeping Beauty, spare me. Tell the stupid little wuss to wake up and sort out the wicked fairy herself. I found myself thinking that sleeping through it sounded pretty good after all.
Yolande was looking out for me, and her door was open before I’d climbed out of the Wreck. I walked draggingly up to her. I didn’t even know that it was going to be tonight. I remembered those extra nights I’d waited for Con, with death lying on my breast like a lover. What a long time ago that seemed. I tried to make this a hopeful thought, but it refused to work. It was like trying to blow up a popped balloon. Hello, Death, you again. Just can’t keep away, can you?
Saints and damnation. Mostly damnation.
Yolande drew me into her workroom. There was a little heap of…sunlight on her desk. What? I blinked. It looked like…as if there was a chink in the blind, letting a single ray in to make a pool there: except it wasn’t a pool, it was a heap, and there was no ray of sun. I could feel my eyes fizzing back and forth like a camera’s automatic lens, trying to find the right setting and failing. The heap cast no shadows. It was a small domed hummock of pure golden light.
I had stopped to stare, and Yolande went to her desk and picked it up. It seemed to flow over her hands, slowly, like rivulets of warm honey, or small friendly sleepy snakes. It was, I thought, as it separated itself over her fingers, a latticework of some variety. The filaments met and parted in some kind of pattern, and the filaments themselves seemed to carry a pattern, like scales on a snake’s back. It moved slowly, but it moved; it curled round Yolande’s wrists. My strange sense of it—them—being friendly but half asleep remained. “It will wake up when it touches you,” she said, as if reading my mind. “We had to put it together in great haste, and it’s not yet used to being—manifest.”