Page 84 of A Light in the Darkness
“I need food.” I say, because it’s probably the only thing that will keep me from throwing up right now. And Taissa doesn’t need to bear witness to that. “What’s your favorite?”
She shrugs, as if she’s never really thought about it. “I stick to soup, usually, because of my teeth.”
I regret turning to her the minute I do and see her bracing her jaw, showing me her empty gums. I hadn’t even realized that the faint lisp I’ve been hearing wasn’t an accent.
I swallow the bile that rose to the back of my throat and manage a closed-lipped smile of my own.
“Well, how about mashed potatoes?” I pick up the box sitting on a shelf against the wall. It’s a well-stocked shelf, full of staples like beans and rice and canned goods. It looks like Elaine has prepared for nuclear fallout down here. Part of me thinks we may all be better off if that happened and we had to hunker together, cut off from the cruelty of the rest of the world.
When I see the blank look on her face, I have to wonder whether I’m the crazy one.
“You’ve never had mashed potatoes? Surely Elaine…”
“I don’t come to dinner with the rest.” Taissa says quietly. “Miss Elaine just brings my soup for me.”
“Oh.” I bite my lip, looking at the cans lined up on the middle shelf, broths, stocks, consommés. “Any preference?”
“I’ll try the potatoes, if you’re making them anyway.”
“Yeah?” I smile. “Are you sure? I don’t mind…”
“I’m sure. We’re sharing all kinds of firsts… may as well add this to the list.”
Something about the way she says it makes me laugh, so I open the fridge to get out the milk and butter. It’s lucky it’s an industrial size refrigerator, considering Elaine’s got it stuffed so full that the butter falls at my feet when I open the door.
“So…” I venture, filling the pot that I found hanging above the stove with water. “They rescued you guys?”
“Yes,” Taissa’s voice is quiet as she says it. I don’t want to push her to reveal anything more, so I simply smile at her, waiting to see if she feels like going on. “I’ve dreamed about stuff like that.” Her voice is low, almost like she’s embarrassed.
I lean in close to her, so that she knows what I’m about to tell her is just as much a confession as hers. She really is beautiful, like a porcelain doll. She even blushes a little, pink rising to dust the tops of her cheekbones when I tell her, “Me too.”
I set the water to boil and appraise her, deciding whether I should go on. She’s a child, which makes telling her things about myself strange, but at the same time, she’s lived through more than many women do their whole lives. I guess that affords her a special sort of adult privilege. “I used to dream that it would storm hard enough to shatter the windows, and the house would fall away like paper, the water would flood in and sweep my bed out like a ship to the sea.”
I laugh, because it sounds ridiculous to me now. I’ve been adrift at sea for years, looking for shore and unable to find it, unable to find a way to move forward. I thought I needed to know where I come from to know who I am, but truly, I don’t think that’s helped. Finding out your mother had it worse than you did kind of shatters the illusion that things will get better. They never did for her.
“That sounds lonely.” Taissa says quietly.
I was always lonely as a child. But given the choice of feeling lonely in the company of monsters or feeling lonely at sea, I would still choose the latter.
“Yeah,” I nod. “But in my dreams, it was peaceful.”
“In my dreams, when they rescued us all, everything was just magically fixed.” Taissa admits. “Not that way in real life.”
I want to laugh at that, too, because it’s wildly relatable. Instead, I shake my head. “It never is.”
I can feel her watch me as I measure out the ingredients and pour them into the pot. “Did they rescue you, too?”
The question gives me a moment of pause, because I don’t know how exactly to explain that. They did rescue me, of course. Remy did, the senator did, Rhea did. But I’m not sure how to explain that to her, or whether she needs that explained. “Yes, they did.”
“Do they do this kind of thing often?”
“Rescue people?” I ask, because it sounds sort of silly.
She’s a child, I remind myself again. She was pulled from the dark and brought into this world, so it’s only natural that she might think this is some sort of fairytale situation. Although, I guess I did think of Remy as an angel of vengeance.
I think of the night we killed together, when he told me that Giante would die whether I participated or not, how he assured me that the choice was mine alone, that what I was going to do would leave a mark on my soul.
I think of before that, when he came for me in the dark, when he killed Mac and Slick and kept me out of Wes’ clutches. And then I think of his confession, of him telling me that he’d bought women before to set them free.
