When people die, she explained, they stop breathing. They do not have to eat, they no longer speak, and they cannot think or miss us like we miss them. They do not, ever, ever wake up. She kept giving us more examples, like we were too stupid or little to understand—like the six of us left hadn’t sat there and watched Grace’s lights go out. Dead cats cannot purr, and dead dogs cannot play. Dead flowers—Miss Finch pointed to the bundle of dried flowers on my teacher’s desk—do not grow or bloom anymore. Hours of this. Hours of being asked, Do you understand? But for all of her answers, she never got around to the one question I had wanted to ask.
“What does it feel like?”
Dad looked up sharply. “What does what feel like?”
I looked down at my plate. “To die. Do you feel it? I know that it’s not the same for everyone, and that you stop breathing and your heart stops beating, but what does that feel like?”
“Ruby!” I could hear the horror in Mom’s voice.
“It’s okay if it hurts,” I said, “but are you still in your body after things stop working? Do you know that you’ve died?”
“Ruby!”
Dad’s bushy eyebrows drew together as his shoulders slumped. “Well…”
“Don’t you dare,” Mom said, using her free hand to try to pry his big one off her other trembling fingers. “Jacob, don’t you dare—”
I kept my hands clenched together under the table, trying not to stare at Mom’s face as it paled from a deep red to a stark white.
“No one…” Dad began. “No one knows, sweetheart. I can’t give you an answer. Everyone finds out when it’s their time. I guess it probably depends—”
“Stop it!” Mom said, slapping her other hand down on the table. Our plates jumped in time with her palm. “Ruby, go to your room!”
“Calm down,” Dad told her in a stern voice. “This is important to talk about.”
“It is not! It absolutely is not! How dare you? First you cancel the party, and when I told you—” She strained against his grip. I watched, my lips parting, as she picked up her water glass and threw it at his head. In ducking, he lifted his hand from the table, just enough for her to wrench away and stand. Her chair clattered to the ground a second after the glass shattered against the wall behind Dad’s head.
I screamed—I didn’t mean to, but it slipped out. Mom came around to my side of the table and grabbed me by the elbow, hauling me up, nearly taking the tablecloth with me.
“Cut it out,” I heard Dad say. “Stop! We have to talk to her about it! The doctors said we needed to prepare her!”
“You’re hurting me,” I managed to choke out. Mom startled at the sound of my voice, looking down at where her nails were digging into the soft skin of my upper arm.
“Oh my God…” she said, but I was already in the hallway, flying up the stairs, slamming my bedroom door shut and locking it behind me, closing out the sound of my parents screaming at each other.
I dove under my heavy purple bedcovers, knocking the row of carefully arranged stuffed animals to the ground. I didn’t bother to change out of the clothes I had worn to school, or turn off the lights, not until I was sure my parents were still in the kitchen, and far away from me.
An hour later, breathing the same hot air under the comforter in and out, listening to the rattle of the air vent, I thought about the other significant thing about turning ten.
Grace had been ten. So had Frankie, and Peter, and Mario, and Ramona. So had half of my class, the half that never came back after Christmas. Ten is the most common age for IAAN to manifest, I had overheard a newscaster saying, but the affliction can claim anyone between the ages of eight and fourteen.
I straightened my legs out and pressed my arms in at my sides. I held my breath and shut my eyes, staying as still as possible. Dead. Miss Finch had described it like a series of stops and nots. Stopped breathing. Not moving. Stopped heart. Not sleeping. It didn’t seem like it should have been that simple.
“When a loved one dies, they don’t get to wake up,” she had said. “There are no comebacks or do-overs. You may wish they could come back, but it’s important that you understand they can’t, and they won’t.”
Tears slipped down the side of my face, dripping into my ears and hair. I turned to the side, smashing a pillow over my face, trying to block out the screaming match downstairs. Were they coming up to my room to yell at me? Once or twice I heard heavy footsteps on the stairs, but then Dad’s voice would float up to me, booming and terrible, yelling words I didn’t like or understand. Mom sounded like she was being gutted.
I drew my legs up to my chest and pressed my face against my knees. For every two breaths I was taking in, I was lucky to get one out. Inside my chest, my heart had been racing for what felt like hours, jumping with every shatter or thud from downstairs. I stuck my head over the covers just once, to make sure that I had locked the door. That would make them even angrier if they tried it, but I didn’t care.
My head felt light and heavy all at once, but worst of all was the pounding. The dum-dum-dum at the back of my head, like something was inside of me knocking against my skull, trying to break out.
“Stop it,” I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut against the pain. My hands were shaking so hard I couldn’t keep them over my ears. “Please, please stop!”
Hours later, when my feet carried me downstairs, I found them in their dark bedroom, deep into sleep. I stood in the sliver of light coming through their open doorway, waiting to see if they would wake up. I had half a mind to climb into bed between them like I used to do, into that small space between them that I knew was warm and safe. But Dad had told me I was too big to be doing such silly things.
So instead, I walked over to my Mom’s side of the bed and kissed her good night. Her cheek was slick with rosemary-scented cream, cool and smooth to the touch. The instant I pressed my lips there, I jumped back, a flash of white burning inside my eyelids. For one strange second, the image of my own face had leaped to the front of a long series of jumbled thoughts, then disappeared, like a photo drifting into dark water. Her blanket must have shocked me—the jolt traveled all the way up to my brain, flashing it white for a second.
She must not have felt it, because she didn’t wake up. Neither did Dad, even when the same strange thing happened.