Tourist | Epilogue
The sight of Redistance’s facade brings my feet to a sudden, scuffling stop. Fingers tug at mine and Paiden turns back to me, laughter on her lips dying as her momentum pulls against the gravity of my inertia.
“Allie?” She steps close, brushes my cheek with her thumb. “Hey, it’s okay. You’ll be fine.”
Logically: yes, Paiden, I know that already. Emotionally: I want to turn and run. Run all the way home and burrow into the blankets and clean laundry piled upon my bed. (Clean, at least. Finally.)
Paiden brushes my fringe—too long, she keeps reminding me—out of my eyes and gives me the most radiant smile in the entire world. I would swear on my dying breath that on the rainiest day, I could feel the sun’s warmth when she smiles at me, and I can feel it now. She thaws my frozen bones, breathes life back into my moribund soul.
I turn my face up to meet hers, and, oh, how happy I am to have her here with me. With her golden hair held back by a bouquet of a hairclip and her sunbeam eyes, I’d believe I’m staring right into the face of all that is good in the world.
“Hey Allie,” she says.
“Hey,” I say. She kisses my forehead and leans back, fingers intertwined with mine.
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to, you know. Nobody would think less of you.”
Over her shoulder, I catch Chase as he spots us through the gallery windows. He starts to wave, then frowns and tries to pretend he hasn’t seen us at all. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that he’s not so good at pretending anything.
I shake my head. “I need to.”
My new therapist told me not to give way to the fear. That the more power I give this anxiety, the harder it’ll be for me to gain ground later on. It will grow more and more immense until the thought of facing it down is more than I can bear. So this is where I draw the line: I will not let Lissa’s past drive me from my gallery. But.
But.
“But, please don’t let go.” I plead.
“Of course.” Her shoulder bumps mine and I feel only a tiny nudge from that anxious revolt. It’s all wrapped up in comfort and safety and the fear burned into this brain, but we can work with that, can’t we? As we walk the last few steps, I rest my head on her shoulder, breathing in the orange-blossom scent of Paiden. We’re a team, her and I. Our team may feel different after my half-death, but I love her nonetheless.
Chase greets the two of us with a bear hug the instant the bell above the door tinkles. “How long have you been hovering here?” I ask, laughing in his embrace. My words muffle against his broad chest.
“No comment.” He grins down, pats my shoulders. “How you holding up, A?”
“I’m good,” I say. Paiden squeezes my hand and before I close my mouth she’s speaking up for me.
“She’s not, but she’s doing her thing,” she says. She and Chase smile together—in the know, comrades who share the long-but-not-so-long-suffering pain of the people who love someone with—
With depression.
Because that’s what this is about, isn’t it? It’s what connects Lissa and I across lives that never crossed paths. When I stepped through our front door, soaked and dripping rain and tears onto our carpet, Addison pulled me close and held me as I choked out, “I think I might be depressed.” That was as far as I could get, a letter from Lissa clutched in its plastic bag in a tight fist. How human she was, how full of love and pain and confusion and anger.
And how ersatz of you, she wrote, to take what I am and make it something new? I could hear her voice speaking these words to me; when I closed my eyes I found myself in a room with only Lissa, as if she were real and alive.
You didn’t need to die, I thought.
I didn’t, but neither did you, and where would you be were my body not here for you? I was sick, you see, and I’m not sure you can understand just what that means yet. I hope you never do. But if you’re here, reading this letter, then I fear you might understand a little too well. I could picture that sardonic smile, though I’ve never seen such an expression in photos of her. The slight tilt of her mouth, the crease between her eyebrows, half-hidden by her fringe.
You are not human, her words spoke, slanted and looped across the page. You are something wonderful and new. I don’t know what that means, and I doubt you do either. But please: do what I didn’t. Don’t give up. Please live for me, but more importantly, live for you.
So I picked up my paintbrush and lived for me, for Lissa, for Sam and Chase and Audrey and Paiden and everyone this body has loved. Each stroke was something new, every colour pulled from the desaturated memories of this summer, and the oversaturated memories from before.
Can a computer create art? A question that has haunted artificials to this day, from the times before phones could truly speak back. A fucking stupid question, because when I look around at the paintings hung upon the walls of the gallery, all I see is art.
My art. Not quite real, not quite surreal. Bright and grey both pulled together, familiar faces drawn across each other with translucent lines like overlapping constellations. A Chase-esque man pulled from an unreal lake, both terrifying and enticing next to a painting of a glass woman filled with a blue flame that licks forth from her mouth. But is it not the light of a phone’s screen that illuminates her clear-cut lines? These paintings all lead on to each other, pulling eyes towards the massive canvas at the the center of the gallery. Follow the lines of the mechanical arm dripping red, the curves of the people with eyes bright and dull spinning beneath the stars, the points of the starburst glare of lights through a windscreen.
Audrey is standing before this last painting, her bubblegum hair pulled into a barely-contained side braid. She doesn’t turn to greet us, and when I stand next to her I catch the shimmer of tears in her eyes. She is looking at Lissa—the Lissas I have painted, who are so clearly Lissa—swept together with the rest of us. We are all of us intertwined, happy and sad and angry and afraid, flowers in our hair, covering our eyes, filling the spaces between us. Sam is not here with us now, but she is here in this painting: sharp and agitated, small and fearful, oil smeared across her face and bright flowers clutched in her hands, lightning in her hair.
There is a text on my phone, one I will never show another living soul, from Sam. The only message I’ve received from her since that day in Lissa’s house.
“Lissa would have liked it.” Her way of letting me know she came to see my exhibition. Her being nice to me the only way she knows. I treasure that she tried.
The four of us look up at the painting and I can’t help but feel pride in my chest, because I really do love what I’ve made.
There are our faces, our hands, everything we’ve felt from the day we lost the lives we knew. And there are Lissa and I, at the center of the shapes and colours and people we have loved, all flowing together into the looping shape of infinity.
∞
