I went to bed in my own room, but night after night I found myself waking up next to Ella, her hands in my hair. I’d shaved the whole brambly mess off when I got out of the hospital, and it was growing back wispy and darker. More like hers.
“Shh,” she’d whisper, the way she always had. “It’s over. It’s over now.”
I saw Audrey once on the High Line. She’d changed her style. Out with the bronzer and the flat-ironed hair, in with precise red lipstick and a pea coat with a Peter Pan collar. I liked it. She looked like Amy Winehouse dressed as Jackie O.
We sat on a deck chair in the sun and shared a cigarette, a French brand with a box that looked like pop art. Because she was Audrey she didn’t ask right away about Ella, or whether I was okay, or what the hell had happened to us since her dad pulled a gun on me and tossed me out into a long, cold night full of things worse than muggers.
I loved her for it.
She smiled when I coughed on the fancy imported smoke, watching me from behind Fendi shades. “Not so tough now, are you?”
I seized onto this piece of intelligence—what I’d looked like from the outside, two years ago. “Was I tough? When you knew me?”
“You were scary as fuck. You know that. You looked like a haunted china doll.” She peered at me over the tops of her sunglasses, eyes lined like Isis. “Now you seem a little … I don’t know. Lost?”
“How’s Harold?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Oh, he’s fine. In love again. As always. How’s Ella?”
I paused, letting the cigarette burn down between my fingers. How was Ella?
“Resolved,” I said, finally. “All that shit with the … all that scary shit. It’s resolved.”
“Good,” Audrey said, with a note of finality. She plucked the cigarette from my fingers and took a last drag, then pinched it out and put it into her pocket. She gave me a hug that was all elbows, then walked away without looking back.
I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t help walking by Ellery Finch’s building, staring up at the windows. Of course he’d disappeared, too, the same time as me, but his father must’ve written him off as a runaway. As far as I could find, he hadn’t even made the papers. Maybe they’d hired a private investigator. Or maybe they really had cared as little as he thought. But I doubted it. I didn’t know how you couldn’t care for Ellery Finch.
I had dreams about him sometimes. In my dreams we did things together that we never did in life—walked through parks, held hands in bookshops. I woke up from a dream in which we’d waded in water up to our knees with the realization that I could picture him now without seeing his near-murder in the trees. It had played and replayed till it burned itself away.
I would’ve gone on like that forever, I think, using paperbacks to shake old memories loose and roaming around as if permanently sun-stunned. But when I’d been home for just over a year, I ran into Janet and Ingrid drinking iced coffee outside an East Village café.
My vision went full dolly zoom, and I stopped so fast a woman ran her stroller up onto the backs of my heels. I got out of the way, muttering apologies but refusing to peel my eyes from Janet’s face. I walked toward her with my arms stretched out like a zombie’s, like she might get away.
She seemed happy to see me, but mildly so. Like it was a pleasant surprise, not a seismic shift in reality as she understood it.
“You look much better without the frostbite,” she said, standing up and taking my hands. Ingrid nodded coolly from beneath the brim of a Mets cap.
“How did you … what did you…?”
“Shh. Sit. Eat something. Ingrid?” Her accent was more British than I remembered it. Less … Hinterlandy.
Reluctantly, Ingrid handed over a square of oily cake wrapped in parchment. It slid like wet sand down my throat, but it did make me feel better.
“How did you get here?” I asked when I could talk again.
Janet reached her fingers down her front and pulled out a flat purse on a strap, like the money belts old ladies wear when they vacation in big cities. Which, I guess, is what they were. But she didn’t pull out a stack of traveler’s checks—she pulled out a flat booklet.
It was green leather stamped in gold. PASSPORT, it said across the top, and Hinterland. In between, a flower like the one on my arm. I held it gingerly, like it might evaporate, and opened it. There was a flurry of stamps inside, some with dates that made sense, and some that didn’t. The stamps were of doors, mostly, but one was a ship, one a train, another a stylized boot. The place-names were unfamiliar, so odd they slipped from my mind before I could understand them.
I smiled wider than I had in weeks. “More doors. You found them.”
“Not by myself,” Janet said modestly. “There was some mixing of refugee groups near the end. Some of them knew a few tricks I didn’t—more than you’d think relies on having the right paperwork.”
“Near the end? Of what?”
She tugged the passport from my grip and slipped it back into her purse, tucked the purse away. “Well. Things haven’t been so up to snuff in the Hinterland these days. I’m afraid we started a bit of a trend. One broken story begets another—you weren’t the only doomed princess to want a happier end.”
“Wait. I was doomed? What was my end supposed to be? I never knew.”
“I think it’s best if you keep not knowing, don’t you? Wouldn’t want to make any self-fulfilling prophecies. Anyway, the place doesn’t run the same without those stories ticking away. Things are getting a little … fuzzy.”
“I nearly fell through a thin place,” Ingrid put in.
“Right,” Janet said. “She was knee deep in the ground, nothing but black and stars under her feet, and the damned story kept trying to weave her out of the world. But we got her out all right, didn’t we?”
Ingrid made a face like it wasn’t that all right.
“Finch—did he come back with you?”
Janet’s face went soft. “He didn’t. That boy has other worlds to explore. We’re not always born to the right one, are we?”
I didn’t know how badly I wanted to see him again till I learned, one more time, I never would.
“I don’t know who I am without it,” I said impulsively. I said it like an ugly secret.
“Without the Hinterland? You weren’t back in it so long, were you?”
“Without the ice.”
“Ah. Well, you aren’t the first ex-Story to feel that way. It’s like half of you got sucked out with a straw, isn’t it?”
It was. It was exactly like that. “What should I do?” I asked desperately.
She touched my cheek, then wrote something down for me on the back of a napkin. An address, a date, a time.
That was how I ended up in a nag champa–scented psychic’s parlor on Thirty-Sixth Street. The psychic wasn’t in—she didn’t start work till noon, and it was ten a.m. on a Sunday—but the room was half-filled with people who had singular faces. Cruel features, or lovely ones, delicately drawn. More than one of us had feral Manson eyes, rose-red lips, chapped mouths bitten till they were bloody. I estimated two-thirds of the room wore nicotine patches, and nearly everyone had ink on whatever skin was visible. Tattoos of remembrance, bits of Hinterland flora or the outline of a dagger or a teardrop or a cup. Or a door.