Page 28 of Installment Immortality

Elsie nodded, not looking at me. “She’s dead. She’s gone. If I can’t have her back, they sure as hell can’t keep her, and I wish they’d just let her go. Does that make sense?”

“It does, sweetheart,” I said. “You want to grieve, and they keep acting like she’s still alive.”

“That’s exactly it. How am I supposed to start moving on when they keep acting like she’s going to come home tomorrow and tell them all the things they’ve missed? It sucks. I don’t want them coming around me telling me what my mother would want me to do. She wasmymother, not theirs. They need to get over themselves and let us all have a little peace.”

“Sounds like getting out of here will be good for you.”

She laughed, bitterly. “Honestly, you have no idea.”

She left the room then, and I followed her downstairs and through the kitchen to the garage, where she popped the trunk of her car and loaded her suitcase inside, one-handed. Elsie had always been good about doing her upper-body workouts. Something about how all the girls she found attractive appreciated a well-toned bicep.

Then she walked around to the driver’s side door, opened it, and froze.

“No,” she said, in a voice that had gone suddenly stony and cold. “You were not invited. Get out.”

“I was invited,” said Artie—sorry, Arthur—from the back seat. He sounded utterly reasonable, like he’d been working on this argument for a while. “Mary came to see me first, and told me she had to go to the East Coast to fight the Covenant. I’m a Price, too. I should get to fight the Covenant before I come apart at the seams.”

Elsie shot me a pleading look. “And see, hesaysshit like this, like, all the time,” she said. “It’s almost as bad as the damn mice.”

“Arthur.” I bent down and stuck my head inside the car. “What do you think you’re doing? This is a serious mission, buddy.”

“And I’m serious about coming with you.” He looked at me placidly. “I’m not a child, you know. I’m a legal adult. And this is something the mice told me Artie never did. He didn’t like fieldwork. He never went voluntarily. The only time he did anything remotely dangerous was when he was trying to save Sarah.” His voice cracked on her name, longing and anger intermixed.

“We’re not saving Sarah this trip,” said Elsie. “We’re not going anywhere near her, so if this is some messed-up way of getting a look at her, it’s not going to work.”

“No,” snapped Arthur. “I’m coming with you because I’m a Price, and this is my heritage. And because I can feel myself crumbling away, a little bit more every day. I wasn’t built to last. I want todosomething before there isn’t anything left of me.”

“Where do you think you’re going, buddy?” I asked, gently.

“I’m notgoinganywhere. I’m just… dissolving, like cotton candy in water. It’s the weirdest sensation. I don’t dream anymore.” Arthur looked at me and shrugged. “I’m hoping if I go and do something I don’t share with Artie, that he doesn’t taint for me, it’ll give me something I can hold onto. A memory I know for sure belongs tome,and wasn’t originally a memory of him.”

“You’d need clothes,” said Elsie. I could tell from her tone that it was a pro forma objection, one last attempt to keep him off of our road trip.

Arthur responded by hoisting the duffel bag he’d placed on the seat beside himself, and flashing her a wide, toothy grin. “Way ahead of you,” he said.

Elsie sighed and slid into the car, getting herself situated in the driver’s seat. “You better not make me regret this,” she said sternly.

“I’ll do my best,” said Arthur.

I vanished, reappearing in the passenger seat, where I fastened my seatbelt and leaned back. “Time to hit the road,” I said.

Elsie started the car and we were off.

Seven

“If life is a highway, I’m not paying a single toll until somebody gets down here and fixes all these damn potholes. This is shitty road maintenance.”

—Rose Marshall

Pulling into Columbus, Ohio

Two days later

TWO DAYS IN A CARwith the Harrington-Price siblings was a lot less annoying than I’d expected it to be, probably because all my ideas of how the trip would go were based off riding with Elsie and Artie, and I was riding with Elsie andArthur.Almost but not entirely different. Elsie still fell back on some old habits when it came to dealing with her brother, even though he could make a legitimate argument for being a completely different person now than he’d been on their younger road trips.

So she argued when he wasn’t doing anything, just to keep herself awake during the night drives. She refused to let him take a turn behind the wheel. She kept control of the radio like she might die if she heard a single note of whatever he was into these days. And Arthur just took it.

If there’d been any question in my mind as to whether he was exaggerating how bad it was inside his head, it was answered by the end of the first day, when he hadn’t pushed back against her once. The Artie I knew wasn’t particularly argumentative, but hehad opinions, and he would have been making them heard, not just riding passively along in the back seat, trusting his sister to get us wherever we were supposed to be going.

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