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When they update the group chat on the situation, Camila sends them dozens of funny TikToks and cute animal videos. Mother Superion, clearly informed by Camila, leaves a voice note in Italian wishing Beatrice the best and giving her some succinctly summarized old wives’–well, old nuns’–advice on how to alleviate the worst of it. Yasmine calls that afternoon, and she regales Beatrice with an update on her newest research investigation. It’s a voice, not video, call, because Beatrice had feebly pushed the screen away from Ava when it had settled on her face. Ava soon understands it’s not out of vanity or embarrassment for the rash; it’s so Beatrice can rest, eyes closed, with her head on Ava’s chest, and make only soft, periodic sounds of acknowledgement without seeming rude. Each one vibrates through Ava’s ribs.
A couple times, Ava pokes her, with a silent, you done? look. Beatrice shakes her head. She must appreciate the distraction. Her back going stiff from the stillness, Ava finds a distraction of her own by trying to beat her Temple Run high score.
Eventually, Yasmine bids them both goodbyes.
“Thank you for calling,” Beatrice tells her. “Let me know if you find anything else interesting.” She swallows thickly, yawns. “Maybe in a few days, I can help you find sources.”
“That would be very fun,” Yasmine agrees, “but only when you feel better. And I hope that’s soon! I hope you feel better soon.”
“See ya, Yasmine,” Ava says.
“Bye!” she repeats, and signs off.
She leaves them with a few links to books she’s liked recently. Ava clicks on one and checks it out from their local library as an e-book. Clearing her throat, she starts the first line. “When Sutty went back to Earth in the daytime, it was always to the village. At night, it was the Pale.”
“You have a good reading voice,” Beatrice murmurs. She’s said it before, but each time it sends warmth down the length of Ava’s aching spine.
“Yeah?”
Beatrice nods. “Sorry, didn’t mean to interrupt. Go on.”
Ava sucks on a smile. “You never have to apologize for complimenting me. Don’t you know that by now?” She looks back to the phone. “Yellow of brass, yellow of turmeric paste and of rice cooked with saffron, orange of marigolds, dull orange haze of sunset dust above the fields, henna red, passionflower red, dried-blood red, mud red: all the colors of sunlight in the day….”
She reads until Beatrice’s breathing slows and her body grows heavy.
-
For dinner, Beatrice sits up. Lilith corners Ava before she can leave the bedroom. “Eat later,” she instructs. “We’re going to the pool.”
Ava frowns. “The pool?”
“It’s low-impact exercise.”
“Yeah, I know that, duh. But…right now?”
“What’s your pain?”
Ava stiffens. “What do you mean?”
“Don’t insult me. What’s your pain.”
Ava glances down.
“Ava,” Lilith says. “Mary will stay with her. It’s just for a little while.”
“Okay,” Ava relents. “Let me go tell her.”
Beatrice presses a kiss to the crook of her neck when Ava hugs her. “Have fun,” she says. She smells like fresh calamine.
“If Lilith drowns me, I’m counting on you for vengeance.”
“I swear it on my life.”
“I’ll take that,” Ava says. She fetches her swimmers and lets Lilith put her arm around her shoulders. In one breath, she sucks in smoke—in the next, chlorine. Teal water lies, flat and still in a rural community pool, shut this late on a weekday.
Problem is, it lies like that a foot below Ava. She hardly has time to process before she’s falling in with a splash.
She surfaces, gasping, chemicals stinging her eyes. She stares up at Lilith, whose wings buffet the air, with her mouth open in shock. “Lilith!”
“Oops,” Lilith says, lips curled in a smirk.
“I can’t fucking believe you,” Ava swears. She tilts back so the water cushions her, letting her float. “What happened to low-impact?”
Lilith’s eyes widen. “Did I….”
Luckily for Lilith’s conscience, Ava’s back twinges no worse than before. The water, warmer than it had felt at first touch, has even started to feel soothing. “No,” she admits, begrudging. “But last one in is a rotten egg, so. You stink.”
“In that case, I’ll live.” To punctuate this, Lilith teleports poolside and throws a foam noodle at her.
“Hey!”
-
They return to find Mary lying beside Beatrice on Lilith’s bed, Mary’s laptop open between them. Some movie score plays over the tinny speakers. Mary hits the space bar when she spots them. “Hey, Ledecki, how’s it going?”
Ava tilts her head. “Mm, the Olympics might have to be pushed back a little bit.”
“Damn, I’ll let ‘em know.” She nods at Lilith. “Hey.”
Beatrice waves at them, awkward and goofy. It would be cute, if her face weren’t pale with discomfort again.
“Have you taken the Benadryl?” Ava asks.
“Not yet,” Beatrice says. “I thought I’d wait until I could say goodnight.”
“Oh,” says Ava, because despite it all, that is very sweet. “Let me get changed, we can go to bed.”
“Actually….” Beatrice trails off, eyes flicking nervously to Mary. Her tongue touches her chapped lip.
“We were talking,” Mary fills in. “We think it’d be a good idea if I stayed with Bea tonight.”
“So you can sleep,” Beatrice says. “You’ve been with me every night, Ava, and you look….” She swallows.
“I look?”
“Tired,” Bea finishes. “You look tired. And I want you to rest.”
Which is rich, coming from someone with eye rings that would make a panda jealous—but the note in Beatrice’s voice is keen, plaintive.
“I’ll stay with her,” Mary says, before Ava can find the mettle to argue. “You can have my bed.”
“I can’t take your bed, Mary–” She glances at Lilith. “And–”
“I did not take you to a pool just so you could immediately throw it away on the couch,” Lilith says, dry. “I can manage the pull out.”
Ava blinks, for a moment. There’s a joke, there, somewhere, part of her brain promises. She can make that about an actress and a bishop, somehow.
“Please,” Beatrice says. “For me.” She still has what looks like painful acne across every glimpse of exposed skin.
Ava sees in her eyes, how little she wants Ava to be hurt by this—how much guilt has pooled in the well-developed rain barrel of Beatrice’s chest.
“Fine,” Ava says, finally. “My turn to play Goldilocks, then.”
Beatrice relaxes.
Ava points at her. “Benadryl?”
Beatrice sighs. She nods. Mary hands the pill sleeve to her, and she swallows one.
“And in the meantime,” Ava says, coming and settling next to her. “What are we watching?”
“Saving Face,” Mary says.
“Oh, fuck yeah.”
Lilith clearly feels the same; she comes and sits on Mary’s side.
The four of them sit against headboard of Lilith’s big bed, watching as Wil drops to the floor when Vivian tries to kiss her. Three pairs of eyes flick to Beatrice.
She sighs. “Don’t.”
-
Ava does not, actually, manage sleep through the night. She only wakes up once, though.
She wakes up to the sound of quiet talking. She has to pee anyway, her bladder informs her, so it’s not really being nosy if she gets out of bed. She’s taking care of bodily functions.
She pauses outside of Lilith’s room for a brief moment, but the voices have stopped. Now she only hears the long, shaky breaths of cried out tears.
“They were talking about Shannon,” a voice says, barely more than the rumble of the street.
Ava starts, and only barely manages to keep herself from swearing, loudly. Her pounding heart slows. Lilith. Just Lilith. She moves closer to the couch.
“Shannon?” she hears herself say.
Lilith’s silhouette nods. “The last time I remember Beatrice this sick, Shannon was still around.”
“Oh.”
“They miss her,” Lilith says, each word precise. “They–” She breathes in through her nose. “We miss her. Still.”
Ava’s eyes sting for Lilith, then. For Mary. For Bea. For all of them.
“I know,” she says. She remembers the ragged hole in her chest when they thought Mary had died, the time spent separated from Bea, for what she’d thought would be forever—imagines that stretching, without end. She remembers Shannon in a cold blue room, her straight back bending, sobs wracking her, crumpling her face, dropping her to the floor only for her to dissipate, black smoke.
For what?
She wants to hold them all, then. She wants to play Jesus like she hasn’t in years, and raise the dead.
“Go to bed, Ava,” Lilith says. It’s not unkind. It’s the Lilith she met outside of Arqtech, with a photograph hidden in her hands.
“I, uh, had to pee.”
“Pee, then.” Lilith lies back down on the pull out couch.
Ava takes two more steps before the bathroom and stops again. “Lilith. I’m…it sucks. I’m sorry.”
For a long moment, she doesn’t think Lilith will answer. She remembers when Lilith had died, saying I’m sorry, to Mary, hearing her say, Me too, with Ava’s arm braced under her. I’m sorry had seemed the thing to say, when someone’s sister was dead. Now, she briefly wonders if Lilith will hit her for it.
“We came back,” Lilith says, instead. “You, me, and Mary.”
“Yeah,” Ava says. “We did.”
Lilith sighs. “Good night.”
“Good night,” Ava echoes. She pees and goes back to sleep.
-
“Here we go, Bambi.” Mary sets the plate down in front of Beatrice.
“Bambi?”
“Yeah, Bambi. You know. Spots.”
“Bam-bea,” Ava says, delighted.
At the same time, Beatrice opens her mouth– “Those are not the same kind of spots.”
Mary spreads her hands, smirking, smug. “Spots are spots.”
“I don’t know how many more nicknames I can come out of this ordeal with.”
Mary and Ava look at each other.
“That wasn’t an invitation to think up more.” Beatrice is exasperated, but there’s real humor in her eyes, in the curve of her lips, for the first time in days.
“Lanternfly,” Lilith says, lofty, from the table where she’s working leather.
Beatrice turns her head to look at her. “You wouldn’t.”
Lilith shrugs.
Ava frowns. “What?”
Mary rolls her eyes. “Not again with the insects, Jesus.”
“Not Jesus,” Beatrice corrects. “Just Lilith.”
"Easy mistake," Lilith forgives.
-
“Wow, you are still really bad at that.”
“Wha– What’s wrong with the way I cut onions?”
Mary arches her eyebrows playfully.
“No, no, don’t you do the thing where you come over and–”
Mary’s already gently hip checking Ava out from behind the cutting board, taking her expertly sharpened kitchen knife from her hand. She sets about chopping with a chef-like speed and uniformity. The warmth of the overhead light colors her cheeks, glints off the blade and the translucent cubes of fresh-cut white onion flesh, spilling over the board. Outside the windows, the setting sun sprays pink-orange over the clouds.
Ava’s smiling, but she still says, “They taste the same, you know.”
“Oh, is that right?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Whatever you say.”
“Ugh, not this one again,” Lilith says, from across the counter on the L-shaped couch. She has Beatrice propped up on a pillow against her knees, and is absentmindedly braiding her wash-damp hair for her. A Finnish show plays on TV, some slow, desaturated mystery with lots of landscape shots that the two of them have been watching on and off for the last few days, since Beatrice got well enough to move out to the living room.
Mary follows Ava’s gaze. Setting down the knife, she leans up against the counter beside her. Quietly, in her ear, she confides, “I can’t tell a single man in this thing apart.”
Ava raises her eyebrows, superior. “I can.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, this one’s the guy with the…” She purses her lips. “Face.”
Mary laughs and elbows her softly. “See?”
“Doesn’t matter,” replies Lilith, with her enhanced hearing. “They’re all insufferable.”
Ava and Mary make faces at each other and snort.
Beatrice tips her head to look questioningly at Lilith.
“Don’t move,” Lilith admonishes, nudging her head back the way it had been facing. “They’re talking about the men all looking the same.”
Beatrice hums. “I do like Tapani, though.”
“Of course you do,” Lilith agrees, rolling her eyes.
Normally, Beatrice might return with an and what’s that supposed to mean? Instead, with the affectionate resignation of someone known too well, she closes her eyes. Unlike Lilith, she doesn’t need subtitles to understand the dialogue.
Gentle, Lilith combs her sharpened nails through the bottoms of her hair, careful not to scratch the scalp. Her deft fingers hold tension in the parted thirds. Beatrice leans deeper into the touch.
“C’mon,” Mary says, to Ava, who otherwise would have soaked in the contentment on Beatrice’s face for hours. “You can try to redeem yourself with the garlic.”