Elegy - Tara Hudson

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his support, I didn’t think my mother could take the added stress of meeting her undead daughter’s living boyfriend. But this morning, I wasn’t sure I could make the trip across my mother’s tiny yard all by myself.

      Watching the flicker of light in her window, I nodded and, without thinking, reached out to give Joshua’s hand a grateful squeeze. Immediately, my hand slapped against the steering wheel. I looked down to see my hand shimmering, transparent, above his.

      “Perfect timing,” I growled, and yanked my hand back.

      Joshua sighed, pulled his own hand from the steering wheel, and ran his fingers through the air beside my cheek. An uncomfortable jumble of desire, anger, and fear shot its way through me and came to life as a blush on my cheeks.

      “One thing at a time,” Joshua reminded me gently.

      “You’re right,” I whispered, shaking my head at myself. “It’s just that I’m . . . I’m just . . .”

      When I trailed off, he laughed softly but without humor. “I know. Trust me, Amelia: I know.”

      He dropped his fingers and let them hover, a millimeter from the delicate spot above my collarbone. Then, with another heavy sigh, he pulled away and got out of the truck. I waited, fighting the urge to shriek with frustration—about Joshua, about the demons, about what I might view through my mother’s window. After a few embattled seconds, I climbed out of the truck too.

      I trudged behind Joshua, dragging my feet through the thick, dewy grass of my mother’s lawn. The yard really needed a good mow, but if I had to guess, my parents’ mower had died sometime after me and my father. I made a mental note to drag Joshua over here, while my mother was still at work, for a day of covert yard cleanup.

      If she’s still alive to need it. If any of you are.

      The cold, slithery voice in my head was my own, but I jerked back as though I’d been slapped. Shut up, I silently told the other voice. I don’t need your input.

      Unaware of my nasty inner dialogue, Joshua glanced over his shoulder to give me a small, close-lipped smile as we stepped together onto my mother’s porch.

      You okay? he mouthed.

      I just set my lips into a grim line and moved to peer in the front window, praying that my mother had left the curtains parted at least an inch or two.

      To my eternal gratitude, she had. Even better, she was sitting on the couch just to the side of them. From that position, I could easily see her profile as she faced the TV.

      I gusted out an enormous breath of relief and began to count off each indication that my mother was alive and well: the flick of her ponytail as she moved her head quickly from side to side; the tight clench and unclench of her hands to her closed lips; the almost violent lift and fall of her shoulders. . . .

      I stopped counting. Something was wrong. Very wrong.

      My mother’s entire body moved as though someone had attached puppet strings to it—she was jerking and shaking on the couch.

      Is she having a seizure?

      At that thought, I didn’t care if I alerted her to my presence; I practically threw myself against the window to get a better look inside. From that vantage point, I could see that, aside from the heavy crisscross of tears across her cheek, she seemed perfectly healthy. Alert, upright, and in relative control of her limbs. But as she pressed her fingers to her lips and shook her head again, I frowned harder.

      TV, I realized. She’s crying about something on TV.

      My gaze trailed upward to the program that had affected her so strongly. When I saw what my mother was watching, I froze.

      It wasn’t a sad movie, as I’d hoped. Not even a particularly moving commercial. The news played out across her small, outdated screen, just like I’d expected it would. And right now, the news featured a very familiar face.

      At first, I desperately hoped that she was just a newscaster. That she only appeared on the screen because she was giving a report on a violent car crash, as the headlines indicated. After a few more seconds, however, it became clear that the blond woman on the TV wasn’t smiling prettily from a newsroom. The picture was a head shot, the kind of photo that reporters place on camera when they can no longer show the real thing. When the person in the picture no longer exists to interview.

      As if to confirm my fears, the headline beneath the photo shifted. Previously, it had read:

      VIOLENT MIDNIGHT CAR CRASH

      Now, in two lines of garish, breaking-news red, the banner proclaimed:

      FORMER WILBURTON RESIDENT SERENA TAYLOR, 32,

      DEAD IN CRASH AT HIGH BRIDGE

      I didn’t have the chance to catch any more of the story because the sourness in my stomach finally rose to the surface. I dove to the edge of the porch, just in time to be violently ill off the side of it. Then, without a backward glance at my mother or even at Joshua, I ran away from that house as fast as I could.

      I didn’t remember when Joshua stopped me, nor did I remember how he convinced me to get back into the truck without being able to touch me. All I knew was that I went from tearing a feverish path through the wilderness near my mother’s home to sitting motionless in the passenger seat of Joshua’s truck as it bounced us down a roughly paved road.

      “What . . . what happened?” I asked hoarsely. I had a bad taste in my mouth, and I had a bad feeling about how it got there.

      “You were sick,” Joshua replied plainly. He kept his gaze trained firmly on the road, almost as if his life depended on how hard he could concentrate on the task of driving. I’d never seen him so intent on not looking at me.

      “Do you hate me now, knowing that I caused someone’s death?”

      My question dripped with self-pity, and I hated myself a little for asking it. But that didn’t mean that I didn’t want to know the answer anyway.

      For a long time—an eternity, to someone who’s asked that kind of question—Joshua said nothing. When he eventually cleared his throat, I cringed, ready for something awful. Ready for him to tell me, finally, that I’d put him at too great a risk.

      “Amelia, I love you.”

      He said it so earnestly, so fiercely, that I leaned back in surprise.

      “I love you,” he repeated. “And hell itself won’t stop that. Sorry to put it so dramatically but, well, it’s the truth. And I’m terrified because I can’t keep you or me or anyone we know from what’s coming. From what’s already here.”

      I nodded bleakly.

      “It must have happened right after we left. I don’t know how they convinced her to drive on that road again.” Then I recalled one image from the night of my death: a young girl with crazed, possessed eyes, watching while I drowned in the river below her.

      “Actually,” I amended, “I have a pretty good idea how they did it. But I just can’t believe they would choose . . .”

      When I trailed off, unable to finish, Joshua spoke one, low word.

      “Serena.”

      For some reason, I chose that moment to lose it. I dropped my face into my hands and began to sob messily, not bothering to hide my misery from Joshua. I cried like I hadn’t done in months, letting the full force of what I’d seen on my mother’s TV wash over me in a brutal, guilty wave. And as I sobbed, other things started to seep in along with the details of the morning news report.

      Memories.

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