The Last Word, page 3
He laughed. One of the first times she heard what she would know as a Shawn-laugh: an abrupt, genuine bark of surprise.
Okay, he said. Please explain.
She took a deep breath. No self-editing.
One.
Two.
Three.
Okay, she said. First, if you’re immortal, you won’t age, right? But everyone around you will. Your friends, your family—she tapped her chest—me, hopefully. You’ll watch everyone you care about grow old and fall sick and die, and at first you’ll grieve and move on and form new connections with new people. But you’ll keep using them up. Watching them wilt like spinach.
He nodded. Still listening.
And if you’re immortal, your perception of time will change, too. Ever notice how as you get older, time seems to accelerate? Picture that on warp speed. You’ll be on, like, your eighty-sixth wife and kids, with more descendants than you can possibly care about, and every birthday and graduation will race by in a heartbeat. You’ll start to wonder—what’s the point if they keep turning to dust, anyway?
And that’s not even the worst part.
Somewhere around here, she remembered to breathe.
Eventually, humanity will end. She lifted the bottle and took a long swig. You know it. I know it. Could be an asteroid. Nuclear war. Supernova. Or, in a few billion years, the sun will just swell up into a red giant and incinerate the earth anyway. Right? It’ll happen. And where does that leave Immortal Shawn? You can’t burn up or die. But the earth will be gone. No people, no cities, no ground to stand on. You’ll drift helplessly in the frictionless void of space for eternity. Unable to move and unable to die, no matter how desperately you’ll wish to. And I promise, you will.
Her voice lowered to a whisper.
Floating.
Forever alone.
Wishing you’d picked a different superpower.
She’d set the empty bottle between them like a mic drop. Silence again. Shawn had only stared at her over the forgotten chessboard, staring, staring, until she was certain she’d lost him, or worse, scared him, that the rest of the evening would go fine, but he would politely break up with her sometime next week in search of a less complicated model.
Instead, her future husband smiled.
You should talk more, he said.
Something about this gave Emma a chill.
It still does, six years later and three states west, at the snarling edge of the ocean. Cold seawater laps at her ankles now. Her sneakers are soaked.
There’s a violence to the storm swells on Strand Beach that entrances Emma. You can’t know it from the safety of the shore. You have to be there, with the salty vapor in your eyes, or better yet, inside it, as ten-foot breakers crash at your feet, pushing and pulling with a million rolling tons. Like standing at the edge of a meat grinder—a few steps farther and it’ll rip you away. Even the sound is deep enough to get lost in.
She whispers, “I miss you, Shawn.”
She listens to the roar for a moment longer.
And another.
Another.
Until the hairs on the back of her neck tingle and she imagines a lensed, veiny eyeball crawling up her back. All these weeks and it’s never occurred to her—despite the old man owning a damn telescope—that Deek might watch her at the beach. He obviously was yesterday. Now he’s worried about her, the poor decent guy.
She’d turn and wave cheerily to his house if she could. Nothing to see here.
Everything is fine.
Then she turns away from the ocean, as if it were all a normal afternoon walk, and heads home in wet, squelching shoes.
Everything is fine.
On the way, she notices a second trail of footprints in the dark sand alongside her own. Joggers do sometimes pass through here, although she can’t recall seeing a soul on the Strand today. She looks back, making sure the beach is still empty, and then she walks a little faster.
Everything is perfectly fine.
2
The walk back always feels longer.
Laika greets her at the trail’s sandy edge, happy and oblivious as always, and Emma falls into a crouch. The dog leans against her, and for a moment, the sturdy love of a golden retriever is all she needs. She grips fistfuls of cream-white fur.
“Space Dog,” she whispers.
That’s me, those black eyes seem to say.
“I love you.”
I love you, too.
Laika can’t comprehend this, but she’s named after history’s very first dog in space. In 1957, Soviet Union scientists fired off the original Laika (an adopted stray mongrel) into low-earth orbit inside the six-foot cone of the Sputnik 2 satellite. What’s it like, to hurtle so far from every soul on the marble? Emma can only wonder.
Laika twists her neck to look up at her, now eerily direct, and Emma wonders how well golden retrievers can intuit human emotion. Reading faces is one thing—after the funeral, Emma mastered the wincing I’ll be okay smile. But does it fool Laika? Has it ever?
I know, those black eyes say.
I know everything.
She notices Laika’s fangs are red. “What’s wrong with your mouth?”
It’s blood.
She catches the dog’s muzzle, knuckles her jaws open, and sweeps her fingers behind her teeth. She recovers a knot of slimy gristle.
“Laika?”
Warm breath in her face. Goatish, rancid. Emma struggles to hold her.
“Laika—”
As the retriever nuzzles back down to something in the grass. A hand-sized slab of pale flesh, dusted with sand, pawed around. Sour with decay.
Laika glances up proudly.
I’ve found a treasure.
Emma studies it. Carrion? A chunk of sea lion, picked by gulls? Turning it over with her foot, she sees the tissue is too naked, too perfectly cut. Like something plastic-wrapped in a grocer’s meat department. Another possibility nips at her thoughts, but she knows there’s a mundane explanation, that she reads too many crime novels and it can’t possibly be human flesh.
Still.
She digs a trench in the sand with her shoe and buries it. Laika watches with disappointment, another bead of blood-drool hanging from her lip. She’s cut her mouth, probably on a shard of sharp bone.
Emma wipes it away. “You dumbass.”
Then she tugs her back to the house without looking back. “Let’s get your mouth fixed.”
Night falls as Emma cleans the gash with hydrogen peroxide. It’s an inch long, cutting along Laika’s outer gum. Painful but not serious. No sutures needed. Laika lies still on the kitchen tile, those black pupils locked on Emma’s, whining only occasionally from the Q-tip’s antiseptic sting. Such trust breaks her heart. No creature should trust another so entirely.
I love you, Mother.
“Yeah? Stop eating stupid shit.”
Yes. I ate a bad thing.
Since arriving on the Strand, Laika has happily devoured rotten crabs, jellyfish, and kelp. Every low tide reveals a fresh banquet of chipped teeth and gastrointestinal hell. She licks her gums, watching Emma stash the peroxide under the sink.
It was a bad thing.
But I do not regret it.
Lastly, Emma reties Laika’s Don’t Stop Retrievin’ bandanna over the collar around her neck. For some reason, Laika genuinely loves this stupid piece of fabric. When it’s off, she mopes. When it’s in the laundry, she searches the house for it. Emma remembers when Shawn bought it at a pet store years ago—no reason, just because he liked her dog—one of those jokey little gestures that, over time, hardens into part of your life. She thinks of him every time she sees it.
The edges are fraying. It’ll come apart soon.
Emma showers. She indulges in a single cigarette at her tiny smoking window in the laundry room, making sure to blow every last molecule outside with her handheld fan. She finishes her cold cheese pizza and returns to her e-book about the serial killer who frequents his victims’ funerals—a stupid premise, honestly. Every few chapters, she takes a turn at Hangman.
In silence, her mind returns to troubling things.
The man in her bedroom the other night was only a dream. He couldn’t have evaporated through locked doors like a phantom.
Unless . . .
No. Not possible.
He can’t still be inside the giant house. Emma has already searched every inch. She even checked illogical places, like inside the cobwebbed laundry chute. But now her mind returns to ground zero: the master bedroom. In the bathroom, a long and luxurious vanity with dual sinks—Jules must have been married at least once—leads to a walk-in shower with heated tile and a cast-iron claw-foot tub she’s never used. Cutely, the hot and cold valves are starfish. But back to that long vanity . . . it’s so long, in fact, that the bathroom has two entrances.
Her stomach flutters.
Because a cunning intruder could have silently circled the upper rooms while she searched. He could still be upstairs, right now—
She stops herself. I’m being paranoid.
If she had been a spiritual person, she might have been tempted to believe the house is haunted. The structure is alive with suspicious creaks and groans, and Laika often reacts to noises too subtle for Emma’s ears to detect. The gutters drip. The wiring crackles. Moisture sweats from the walls and pools in the basement. One of the most frequent semi-paranormal events is also the oddest. A few times a week, Emma is struck by the scent of butter, sickening in its oily richness. The odor seems to move around the house, sometimes lingering in doorways, sometimes wafting from the closets. It seems especially fond of the teenager’s room. But she’s not spiritual—not remotely—and it’s just a house. Just timber and nails and concrete. And glass walls facing the sea.
Whatever bad shit she senses here, she knows: I brought it with me.
And I’ll take it wherever I go.
In the distance, Deek has already guessed her word.
AUSTRALIA?
She flips him off.
It shouldn’t be possible. Lately she’s been cheating by googling words that are statistically harder to guess. It hasn’t helped. Deek bulldozes her every time, like his telescope can see into the open cavity of her brain. It’s upsetting. Emma doesn’t like to be seen. Being seen burdens you with an image you have to maintain.
Even out here, miles from cell signals and traffic lights, Emma must be conscious of her clothing. Her hygiene. Her daily routines have an observer, as benevolent and presumably nonjudgmental as Deek is (a man with a spare toilet on his deck). She still must wear a shirt. People—no matter how kind—still mean work to Emma. She often wishes Deek’s spaceship would veer off, or that this minor miracle never happened at all.
TALK SOMETIME? her neighbor writes hopefully. IN PERSON?
She responds in a perfectly noncommittal way, editing it in her brain first to find the correct blend of cordial and aloof. No promises, but no excuses. She’s danced this dance for years and knows every step.
She’s not antisocial.
She thinks.
As a child she remembers feeling paranoid that she was being watched, that every reflective surface was actually a secret camera a la The Truman Show. A world full of eyes studying her, judging her, narrating her actions. No room was safe. At no point was she ever alone. Later as a teenager, she experienced episodes of sudden and overwhelming dread, a wave of strange fear that hit without warning and halted her in her tracks. There was no cause, no explanation. All tension. No release. She remembers hiding in a school restroom stall because only the ceramic walls felt safely opaque, with her arms crossed over her chest and gasping shallow breaths and later telling her mother: I don’t understand what’s wrong with me. My heart races sometimes and I feel like I’m afraid of something.
But there’s nothing there.
That’s called hormones, her mother had laughed, slurping box wine on the couch.
Neither of them knew that her mother’s liver would fail that year. Or that she’d be granted a lifesaving transplant the following October. Or that she’d continue to drink her shitty box wines, kill her new liver, and die of complications three hours before Emma’s senior prom. She was putting on her dress at a friend’s house when she got the call.
Things got better in college, when Emma focused all of her energy on her physics degree. And Shawn was a uniquely good person, perhaps lifesaving in his goodness. For a few years she was happy in Salt Lake City—even with her unfulfilling job—with Shawn’s love and a small house in Wasatch Hollow, praying every month for a baby to fill the guest room.
Now, here on the Strand, it’s all caught up to her again. But it’s not paranoia anymore. It’s aged into something worse: an alarming numbness. She’s aware of her senses, but she can’t really feel them. Cheese pizza is tasteless. Ocean air is odorless. Flannel bedsheets feel like nothing at all against her skin. Sometimes she experiences a sickening jolt, like realizing the parking brake is off and the car is moving without your permission.
She never chooses to walk to the ocean’s edge.
She just finds herself there.
And now, as she dances this dance for the millionth time in her life, she knows it’s not about reading time or self-care anymore—she’s keeping Deek at a distance to protect him.
He’s written a final message, illuminated by a faraway desk lamp.
JUST KNOW YOU’RE NOT ALONE
His house is dark. He’s asleep.
It’s suddenly past ten, as if time has skipped, and the recessed lightbulb above Emma’s reading sofa is the only other illumination for miles. No cars. No passing ships or planes.
She notices Laika is standing rigidly.
“What is it?”
Those black canine eyes stare out into the night. Her normally floppy ears move forward with attention.
Emma rises. “Did you hear something?”
She joins her golden retriever at the floor-to-ceiling windows and looks out into the vast panorama of dark beach. The stars are choked by rain clouds. This makes her strangely heartsick—December’s new moon was always her favorite time to view the spiral of Messier 31 with Shawn. The Andromeda Galaxy, dense with stars.
Laika whines with concern.
“Don’t worry, Space Dog. We’re—”
Alone, she’s about to say, when something triggers the motion-sensor light outside.
The LED floodlight is sterile and blue-tinged, like the illumination for a surgery wing, highlighting every blade of grass outside. The gravel driveway is drawn in harsh detail.
Emma squints through the windows and scans the sea of waist-high grass for a deer’s ass, for a human face, for anything. She knows Jules has four motion-activated lights installed to deter intruders, one guarding each direction. She’s tripped the lights before herself, and she knows the activation range is extremely short. About thirty feet from the house.
Meaning whatever moved, just now, is close.
Closer than the driveway.
The front windows are narrow. Her view is hemmed in. The house’s inland side is mostly wall, while the other three are mostly glass. She considers unlocking the front door and stepping outside onto the porch for a clear look.
It was probably a deer.
She stands at the front door. She tightens her fingers around the doorknob, one by one. With her other hand, she finds the lock latch.
Laika whimpers again. Don’t open the door.
“It’s fine,” she whispers.
But something isn’t. She can’t explain it. So she holds her face to the wood and checks the peephole first. The fish-eye lens shows a bright empty porch, but Emma isn’t fooled. She knows the aperture’s view is limited. A stranger can stand just beside the door, inches away, and remain unseen. She recalls Jules once mentioning that there’s a camera installed in the doorbell, but Emma doesn’t have the app to view it.
She realizes her fingers are already unlocking the door automatically, out of muscle memory. She stops herself.
Laika watches nervously. Please, Mom.
Don’t.
Her thumb and index finger hold the latch exactly on its edge. Another millimeter and it will release. This will make a distinct sound, a dead-bolt click-clack, audible to someone standing outside. He’ll know the door is unlocked.
Outside, the floodlight silently flicks off. Darkness again.
This also means nothing, she knows. It’s just a motion sensor. You can trick it by standing still. An intruder could be hiding on the porch, just inches away from her. Right beside this thin door. Waiting with a chest full of tense breath for her fingertips to nudge the latch the final millimeter, to make the error that costs everything.
Instead, Emma locks it back into place. Click.
She steps back. “It was probably a deer,” she tells Laika. “You wuss.”
In the kitchen, she gulps the rest of her ginger tea, now disgustingly cold. Printed on Jules’s coffee mug, a photograph of a bug-eyed Chihuahua that looks about ninety: Stewie 2008–2020. She keeps an eye on the motion lights, though.
Before going to bed, she checks every window and both doors—all locked and secure. There’s no way an intruder could get inside without breaking something. But she keeps turning it over in her mind, and by the time she’s finally asleep, her thoughts are a toxic swirl. The slimy carrion in Laika’s teeth, the second set of footprints in the sand, the accidental prophecy to Deek’s words: Just know you’re not alone.
That night, she sees the apparition in her bedroom again.
3
“Getting sick of this shit.”
The next morning, Emma paces room to room and spreads a fine layer of sand under every door and windowsill. Just a dusting, too faint to draw the eye, but enough to imprint an intruder’s shoe treads. So next time—if there is a next time—she’ll have evidence.
She rechecks the doors. Still locked.
The ghost’s appearance was fuzzier this time. The night was stormy and the bedroom was near pitch-black. She sensed a humanoid shadow by the closet door, but she couldn’t make out any features at all. No hat. No coat. Through the haze of sleep, she couldn’t even be sure if he was really there at all, were it not for the small noise he made this time.
