Page 44 of Ringer
She couldn’t say she blamed Lyra and Caelum. They’d spent so much of their lives in closed rooms, surrounded by charts and IVs and sharp-edged equipment made for cutting. Gemma didn’t blame them for not wanting to waste another minute.
“They’ll be back,” Gemma said to her mother. “They’ll find us again, when they’re ready. That’s what friends do.”She was sure, absolutely sure, that it was true. They just needed to find their own way back.
She was both desperate to see Pete and dreading it, but she couldn’t delay it any longer; he was asking for her. Pete had gone into shock soon after being picked up by the police, and for nearly twenty-four hours he’d been in critical condition, floating in and out of consciousness, while they tried to regulate his organ functions and his temperature. His parents had flown up from Chapel Hill, and they told Gemma only after she’d been admitted did he stabilize. Even though he was unconscious, by then, kept under by a course of anesthesia, it was like he knew.
He’d been moved only that morning from the ICU to a recovery floor. Still, the room they had him in was dark, all the blinds sewn up against the light—“so he doesn’t get overwhelmed,” his mom said, and gave Gemma a hug, before slipping outside with her husband to give Gemma and Pete privacy.
He was propped up on several pillows, but his eyes were closed. She inched toward the bed, scared of waking him, and scared, too, that he wouldn’t wake up. He was so pale, even in the dark she could see veins in his forearms and his chest. He was hooked up to an IV, and an EKG, and the sound brought Gemma back to her childhood, and terrified her: What if Pete was sicker than anyone thought?
But he opened his eyes when she kneed the bed accidentally, and smiled.
“Gemma,” he said. His voice sounded raw. Just hearing him say her name like that, like it was the name he’d been waiting to say his whole life, made her lose it.
“Oh my God.” She started to cry. She couldn’t help it. She loved him so badly; she wanted him to know that. It didn’t even matter whether he felt the same way. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks,” he said. He cracked the smallest, faintest smile. “I forgot my mascara at home.”
It was the second time in a day she’d laughed and cried at the same time. She managed to adjust the hospital bed, so she could climb in next to him, and he laid his head against her chest.
“I thought I would never see you again,” he whispered.
“Shhh.” She put her hands through his hair. “I’m right here.”
“I was so scared.” His voice broke. In the dark, their bodies lost form: they could have been a single person, a single body entangled together in the sheets. “What’s going to happen, Gemma? What’s going to happen to us?”
Gemma leaned back and closed her eyes. She imagined, somewhere in the woods of eastern Pennsylvania, a spider weaving a web in a well. After rain or wind came to destroy it, it wove. It wove with thread so fine itwas almost invisible, and she wondered if the spider was ever afraid, that its life was bound up in something that could be blown away with a breath. It wove anyway, either way.
Spiders were funny that way. They leapt first, and the web followed. It was a kind of biological faith, that demanded belief and then turned it real.
“It’s going to be okay,” Gemma said. “Trust me.” She didn’t know if it would. But she didn’t know it wouldn’t be either, and that, she thought, was what being human meant. You built your life into meaning, you transformed it into liquid faith, again and again, like a web; you did it blind, by instinct, because to not do it would be to stop living. And the darkness sieved through. It flowed and gathered and dropped, but it wasn’t strong enough, wasn’t real enough, to touch what you had made.
That was the true gift: to have a story that was still unfolding, like a thread unspooling, and as it did, this single thread separated light from dark, meaning from senselessness, hope from fear.
“It’s going to be okay,” she repeated. She put a hand on Pete’s chest, above his heart, and he put his hand on top of hers, so the rhythm of his heart passed through her palm and back to his. She heard, for a split second, the sound of his life and hers, drawn together along the string of an ancient instrument, and that stringhummed with the sound of a thousand thousand other lives, and when she closed her eyes, she saw a spider buried deep underground, spinning music, pure music, for the world.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 29 of Lyra’s story.
PROLOGUE
Monday, May 16, 3:19 a.m.
They looked nervous.
“Jumpy, you know,” he would say, and each time he saw them clearly in his mind: both of them skinny, with complexions the color and texture of wet clay, and eyes like someone had knuckled holes in their faces when they were still wet. “Like they were on the run.”
Of course, plenty of the people who walked into the Four Crossings Motel looked nervous: it was that kind of place. And even if Guy’s mom, Cherree, was always telling him to turn away anyone with track marks or the jumpy look of a major addict, he knew they’d only bought the place because she’d wanted to cash in on the pill poppers and dopeheads, a whole new generation of druggies—suburban moms, and men still wearing their ties from the office, and thirtysomething dental hygienists—who needed a place to crash while they got high.
And then there were the usual cheaters and hookers and lowlifes who came in and out regularly. Guy even knew some of their names. He’d gotten a hand job from one of the working girls, Shawn, who wasn’t a girl at all, more like forty-seven. Up close, she’d smelled like barbecue potato chips.
He knew what people looked like when they were sleepless, desperate, guilty, and plain high out of their minds.
Gemma Ives.The girl’s ID was all messed up, warped like it had gone through the washing machine, and the picture was scratched. He could tell she’d lost weight, though, since the picture was taken—if it even was her in the picture. The guy didn’t have a license at all. He just wrote his name down in the register. It was all about covering your ass, Guy knew, if somebody flatlined in one of the rooms. They just needed to show due diligence. But their debit card matched the ID, and it worked, so he figured fuck it.
“One room, one night,” was all the girl had said. She kept looking over her shoulder, and every time the insects pinged against the glass, she jumped.
As if she were being watched.
As if she were beingfollowed.
