Page 29 of Installment Immortality

Weirdly enough, Arthur was only the second strangest thing about the trip so far. The absolute strangest was the total lack of mice. Elsie was fighting with them, and Arthur had intentionally not invited any, wanting to enjoy this trip on his own terms and without anyone telling him what he had or hadn’t supposedly said in the past. So it was just the three of us riding along until we reached Ohio and angled toward Columbus, where the prospect of a hot shower, a decent meal, and one of the only uncomplicated family reunions we had available to us awaited.

Ted had been calling daily to make sure his kids were still alive, but he hadn’t sounded nearly as interested in the answer as I would have expected him to be, given that we hadn’t informed him before taking off with Arthur. Both his kids were gone, and he was still just flat, vocally and emotionally. It was sort of terrifying.

Losing Jane had broken more than a few hearts, and we were going to be seeing the damage echo through our family for a long time to come. I guess every death is like that. No matter how much warning you have, how much time you have to prepare, death changes things, and even if the dead linger, it’s never going to be the same. It never could be.

Elsie turned down an ordinary, almost generic-looking suburban street, driving deeper into the heart of the city. Houses passed us on all sides, painted the same six HOA-approved shades of blue, gray, and beige. Lawns still gleamed green, spattered here and there with jeweled dustings of fallen leaves. Ohio was so much better at a dramatic autumn than Oregon was. They really understood how to do fall and frost there.

Of course, nothing would ever beat Michigan, where I’d been alive and young and free to run through the fallen leaves, letting them crunch underfoot, unaware of just how sharp and temporarymy senses were. There’s nothing in this world like being alive. It’s why even knowing ghosts endure after death isn’t a good enough reason to give up on living.

“Everything here looks like it came out of a 3-D printer owned by a model train enthusiast,” complained Elsie.

“That’s very specific,” I said. “A for effort, even as you’re edging closer to coastal smugness than I like. If you say the words ‘flyover state’ in any sort of tone that implies you mean it, I will wash your mouth out with soap.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Elsie.

“What’s a flyover state?” asked Arthur.

I gave his reflection in the rearview mirror a hard look, and found nothing there to indicate that he was kidding. “It’s a nasty thing people on the coasts say about people in the middle of the country,” I said. “Like ‘oh, that place doesn’t matter, it’s just a flyover state.’ Meaning a state you fly over in order to get somewhere important. It’s a mean, shitty thing to say, and I like to think I helped to raise you both better than to think like that.”

“I don’t know whether you raised me at all,” said Arthur. “But I feel like you’re right, and that’s not something you should say about the places where people live.”

“I didn’t,” said Elsie, sounding chastened. “I just said it looked 3-D-printed. That’s not the same thing as saying anything bad about Ohio. I don’t like cookie-cutter suburbs. We have them in Oregon, too.”

“All right,” I said, and indicated a house up ahead of us on the right. “That’s them. We’re here.”

Elsie pulled up to the curb and stopped the car, getting out faster than I would have thought possible. She stretched languidly, linking her hands above her head, before slamming her door and shoving the car keys into her pocket. Arthur got out more slowly, moving with the cautious slowness I had come to recognize as his way of approaching entirely new situations.

“Have I been here before?” he asked, voice low.

“A few times, when you were much younger,” I said. “Sarah lived here for most of the year until she graduated high school, and you used to come out and visit during the summer.” Not that Sarah had attended an in-person high school. Virtual and home schooling had been safer for her and everyone else involved. It had allowed her to get an education without accidentally rewriting the histories of the people around her to make herself the most popular girl on campus—not a position she would have enjoyed very much to begin with.

Since Sarah hadn’t been able to socialize much with her peers, Angela and Martin had been overjoyed to have her cousins over during the summers, giving her people roughly her own age to spend time with. And when it hadn’t been possible for the cousins to come to Ohio, they’d gladly sent Sarah to Oregon, keeping her in touch with her social group.

“Ah,” said Arthur, sounding disappointed. “Is Sarah here now?”

“No. She’s in Michigan with Alice and Thomas.”

His disappointment grew, becoming visible. “Oh. I hoped she’d be here so I could see her.”

“Well, I’m glad she’s not,” said Elsie. “I might not be able to resist smacking her for what she did to you, and I don’t think that would end well for me.”

“No, probably not,” I said. “You both ready?”

They nodded, and I started toward the house, letting them follow along at their own pace.

I was halfway up the walk when the door banged open and a tan blonde woman with an almost-funereal expression stepped out onto the porch, a cherubic-looking little girl propped against her hip. Charlotte was six years old, and in the middle of that growth stage where she became all arms and legs and huge blue eyes, gangly as a colt. She was wearing a West Columbus Zoosweatshirt with a ring-tailed lemur on the front, and staring at me like she’d just seen, well, a ghost.

Shelby’s expression wasn’t much different. Like mother, like daughter. “Mary?” she said, Australian accent flattening the syllables of my name like a butterfly pressed between two sheets of glass. “Is that really you?”

“It’s really me,” I said.

“Can’t be,” she said, setting Charlotte on her feet. “Mary didn’t come back from England. If something had changed, surely you would have called and told us. Alex was in bits.”

“I mean, technically, I was the one in bits,” I said. “But yeah, it’s really me.” Elsie and Arthur were getting closer, coming up the walkway with slow, careful steps. “Can we come in?”

“Aunt Mary?” asked Charlotte. Her voice was high and piping, with just a trace of her mother’s accent mixed in with the Midwestern tones she was learning from everything around her. It was oddly charming as a combination.

“Yes, sweetie,” I said, and flickered myself, vanishing from where I stood and reappearing right behind her.

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