Daniel Abraham - Unclean Spirits

The door thumped, someone throwing a shoulder against it. Someone was calling my name. Ex, I thought, the last shreds of dream fading. Ex was screaming my name. But at least he was pronouncing it right.

“I’m okay!” I shouted back. “Leave the door alone. I’m fine.”

“What the fuck is going on in there?”

“Bad dream,” I said. “I’m fine. I’ll be out in a minute. Just calm down.”

I’d been asleep almost four hours. I hauled myself up out of bed, vague and hungover. My skin felt sticky with rank sweat. My period had started a week early. I needed a shower.

“You’re all right?” Ex’s voice sounded like he was expecting me to lie. “Was it Coin again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” I said, the details of the dream already out of reach. “I’m fine. I’m just still waking up. I’ll be out.”

Ex’s silence seemed untrusting, but I ignored it and pulled myself into the bathroom. If he broke the door down to rescue me from a bad dream, I’d throw him out of my house. I was deeply weary of dealing with male bullshit. I felt tired and sluggish. Happily, I had my old leather backpack in the bedroom with me. Going out to hunt for tampons wasn’t something I particularly wanted to deal with at the moment.

The water helped. I washed my hair three times just for the pleasure of feeling the warmth running down my back. I prodded the wound in my side. It itched and felt odd when I tugged at the stitches, but it didn’t particularly hurt. The bruises on my knee and back were also starting to heal, going from storm-cloud blue to a deep green with yellow and brown at the margins. I got a glimpse of the tattoo, a remnant of my sixteenth birthday’s drunken binge, on the small of my back. In the mirror, it looked like oriental script, though I’d been assured by several people back at ASU that it wasn’t. I felt a sudden nostalgia for the days when keeping my parents from knowing I had a tattoo was the biggest risk I had to deal with.

I put on my own T-shirt, my old jeans, and pulled my hair back into a ponytail. I considered myself in the mirror, then without thinking, my hand reached out for the eyeliner. I didn’t give a damn what any of them thought, but looking decent made me feel better. When I came down the hall, the smell of steak, wine, and grilled onions greeted me like a friend. The windows were ruddy with the warm light of sunset. I had a momentary image, the memory of a dream I’d almost forgotten. A black disk like a sun that radiated like light, but different.

“Jayne.”

Ex was sitting alone on the couch. His blond hair was unbound and flowing over his shoulders. His expression was grim.

“Ex,” I said, folding my arms.

“I need you to make peace with Aubrey,” he said softly.

“I really don’t see how that’s any of your business,” I said.

He held up a hand, and his expression made it a request for silence instead of a command. I nodded my permission for him to go on. He stood up, his hands clasped in front of him in a way that made me think of prayer. He was taller than I was under normal circumstances, and I hadn’t put on shoes. I felt like a kid at the principal’s office.

“We’re going into something tomorrow that is already profoundly difficult,” he said. “We’ve gone over everything often enough that I know it starts to seem easy or certain. That’s why I keep going over it. But the truth is we’re taking a huge risk. We can’t be divided or distracted.”

“We can’t?” I said. I had been through about as much condescension as I was in the mood for, and Ex saw that.

“I’m not asking you to do this for him or yourself. I’m asking for me,” he said. “If something goes wrong, if someone gets hurt or killed, and it’s because I didn’t say the right thing or do what I needed to, then it’s going to be my fault. Right now, I’m afraid that you and Aubrey are going to be distracted. And I don’t want to see either of you hurt again.”

“Not on your watch,” I said. I’d meant to say it with contempt, but it didn’t come out that way. I felt myself soften a little. “So you want me to just blow it off?”

“Not especially, no,” Ex said. “But I want you two at peace with each other.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. We looked at each other in the warm light of evening. He was a hard-faced man, and he didn’t look away from me.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“They’re all out back. The kitchen’s too hot to eat in. And I wanted to talk to you first, so I sent them out.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll do the olive branch thing. But I’m not looking to forgive and forget.”

“And I’m damned glad of that too,” Ex said with a rare smile. It crossed my mind briefly that I should ask what he meant by the comment. But he was already walking toward the backyard, and with everything that changed in the course of the evening, by the time we spoke again I’d forgotten what he’d said.

I waited until I’d eaten dinner. Midian had cooked steaks in red wine and black pepper. The onions were sweet and tart, and he’d done something with butter and garlic that made broccoli taste good. We sat on the back porch, drinking wine and watching the stars come out. Aubrey sat a little apart, his smile tight and restrained. Chogyi Jake and Midian were both taking up the slack in the conversation by trading jokes and stories, cajoling Aubrey out of his funk and me out of my rage. I was almost feeling human by the end. Ex kept looking over at me, prompting me to make a move. I’d promised to make peace, but I still resented it.

It wouldn’t have killed Aubrey to open the discussion. He could start by apologizing again.

I knew I wasn’t being fair or even particularly rational. I tried to suck it up.

“Aubrey,” I said, and his head came up like he’d heard a gunshot. “You got a minute?”

“Sure,” he said. I led the way back into the house. I was pretty sure the others weren’t going to come anywhere near us until this was over. I sat on the couch, legs folded up beneath me, arms crossed. Aubrey took the hearth, watching me with his best poker face. We sat there in silence for a few seconds.

“Why don’t you tell me about your wife,” I said.

“Okay, fine,” he said, then took a breath, gathering himself. “Kim and I met when I’d just been accepted into the doctoral program. We were looking into some of the same questions, so we had a lot to talk about. It worked. For a while.”

Something changed in his expression, softening it. Nostalgia, I thought. He looked down at his hands as if the story was written on his skin.

“We’d been married for about two years when Eric showed up,” Aubrey said. “She was still here back then. We were both at the university, and she was doing some work on a study at the medical center. The money wasn’t great, but we were doing all right. Eric sent us both e-mail at first. He said he’d read our work and had some questions about the logical structures of parasitism. How parasite-host systems worked, what kinds of patterns you’d see in host behavior modification. He was really interested in reverse-engineering things.”

“But Kim wasn’t interested,” I said.

“She was. At first. Eric took us both out to dinner to talk things over, and it was great. Kim and I had both been swimming in the problems for so long, it was like we talked in code. Just having Eric there to explain things to made us look at everything with fresh eyes. I think both of us were pretty excited afterward. It turned into a weekly thing. There were probably five or six months that everything was great. And then the riders came up.”

He smiled, still not looking at me. He was seeing Eric and Kim, hearing conversations from years before. I might almost not have been there.