Nua recovers his ability to speak first, and he lets the bag fall off his shoulder to the ground, taking a step away from the ghost in the doorway. “How…”
Penny steps around us, going to his sister, and I can’t even breathe. They’re the same, there’s no denying that. Tall and skinny, although she has a slight edge over him on both fronts, but their hair is the same shade of blonde with just the right amount of light brown streaking through, their eyes the same glistening hazel in the dim light. She looks paler than he does, but I suppose that can be attributed to the dying-and-coming-back-to-life thing that she’s done recently.
Nua says it again. “How…”
“You’re dead,” I say quietly, and she smiles, then shakes her head. Penny sniffs, then says, “Let’s all take a seat before these two faint.”
She glances at him, affection in her eyes, and then nods and reaches both her hands out to us. Nua and I glance at each each other, and then he slowly picks up the bag again, and we hesitantly take her hands. Her fingers interlace with mine, familiar, bony and strong, these are her hands, there’s no doubt about that. Her skin isn’t cold nor feverish, not like how she felt when I touched her in last few days we spent together. She feels warm. She feels new. She feels alive.
Penny leads her leading us out of the building in the middle of the intersection, and down the tunnel to the left. It’s all lit by electric and battery-powered lanterns and flashlights, and everything is dirty. And then Penny brings us into a tent with a hole in the ceiling, and a fire lit in the center of it. The smoke drifts up through the hole and away into the earth, and there are a few old chairs around it. Ava lets go of our hands and sits down in one of the chairs, sighing. Penny leans against the back of it and gestures for us to do the same.
Neither of us can take our eyes off her. The smoke rising from the fire between distorts her slightly but we’re used to her being surrounded by a cloud, although it seems she’s stuck to her resolution to stop the cigarettes as she touches her twin brother’s arm with a shaking hand. He grins at her, then looks over the flames at us. “You probably have a few questions.”
“You died,” says Nua quietly, and she laughs a little. “Yes.”
“No,” he whispers. “You died. In your sleep. We woke up, but you didn’t, Bayan carried you away, you weren’t breathing, we thought you were dead, we thought we watched you die.”
She purses her lips, nodding like all of it is new information, and then says quietly, “Penny, can you get us some coffee or something?”
“Of course, duckling,” he says, smiling at her, and touches her head before slipping out of the tent, leaving us alone with our very alive very not-dead wife. Nua says it again. “We watched you die.”
“I’m not denying that I died,” she responds, staring at her hand. She’s holding it out in front of her, watching her fingers tremble like they did when she had just stopped smoking. I stare at her. I never thought I’d see her again, I thought she was trapped forever in memory but she’s here, sitting in front of us, breathing in the underground rebel air. “Ava.”
She clenches her fist and looks up at me, and then laughs, burying her face in her hands, and sweeps her hair away. “Okay. I know. You want answers.”
“We need answers,” says Nua harshly, and she looks at him, unperturbed. “I’m not sure that I have them all, Nua, but I’ll try my best.”
“You died,” I say quietly, one more time, and she looks at me, a grin pulling on her lips. “Oh, Aber, you think my mother would just let me go that easy?”
We both stare at her, and she adjusts herself on the chair, pulling her sweater around her, and thinks for a second of how to best explain. She has her wedding ring on her left ring finger, but also another golden band around her thumb. “I did die. You’re right. I died for about five minutes. But my mother, she was going to do anything to make sure I didn’t stay that way. The doctors, they were monitoring me, night and day, remember?”
She holds up her finger and wiggles it, and I say softly, “The vitals thingy.”
“They could tell when I was about to die. You said Bayan took me away, I don’t remember that. All I know is what he told me, that he put me in the ambulance. My mother had donated me. My body, I mean. To the doctors.”
“What, did they experiment on you?” asks Nua, and she shrugs. “They’ve been working on this, yes, experimental new procedure to transplant healthy organs to those who died of an isolated organ incident. I was sick in my lungs, so they tried it.”
“They gave you new lungs?”
“Healthy ones,” she says, touching her chest with a slight smile, “and a heart, because mine had stopped beating. They weren’t sure if they’d have to do that part.”
Her voice trails off at the end, and she stares into the fire again, her fingers curling against her collarbone, but then she takes a deep breath and looks up at us. “It worked.”
“Yeah,” says Nua, exhaling, and leaning back. “Apparently.”
“So you have someone else’s…”
“Lungs,” she answers when I don’t finish my sentence, “and heart, yes. People who volunteered to donate their organs before they died. And they managed to get the organs of someone so recently deceased it wasn’t that difficult to jumpstart the heart and get blood flowing, which eventually worked its way to my brain.”
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We stare at her some more.
“Or something,” she finishes, rubbing the fingertips of her right hand together. “It’s a bit more complicated but I admit I wasn’t exactly in the right mind when I woke up to listen to their explanation.”
“They cut you open?” I ask, and she smiles slightly, then lifts up her sweater. Over her chest is a mess of bandages, and stitches line her ribcage. Her skin is pale and the veins are visible bright blue through it as if she’s translucent, as if she’s dead. She should be dead. She died.
“When did this happen?” asks Nua quietly, and she shrugs. “I was almost gone when Bayan took me away from you. He said I crashed in the ambulance, and they got me alive again at the hospital, and then put me under for surgery. They had to work fast. Bayan said the whole thing took about thirty-six hours.”
“But he, you, when he took you away, that was weeks ago,” murmurs Nua. “You’ve been alive all this time.”
“What about Keol?” I ask suddenly, hope flickering in the pit of my stomach, although I don’t know why, the man always hated me, but maybe he’s still-
Ava shakes her head slightly, staring into the fire. “No. He’s dead, for real. I know that.”
“We got his ashes,” Nua reminds me, slightly absentmindedly as he stares at our wife, and I snort, gesturing to her. “We thought we got her ashes, too.”
“She gave you my ashes?” says Ava, looking up at me, and I shake my head. “Apparently not.”
Penny comes back then, carrying a tray loaded with cups and cracked saucers. He holds one out to Ava, and she takes it carefully, her hands still shaking, and then he places the tray on the folding table next to us and says, “Help yourselves.”
Neither of us reach for it, and Ava takes a sip of her coffee, then nods to the tray. “Drink.”
Nua takes a cup and passes it to me, then one for himself, although he doesn’t obey. “You’ve been alive all this time.”
“Bayan helped her,” says Penny as Ava drinks. “He helped her figure out where I was and got her out of the hospital for me.”
“That’s how he knew,” I murmur, and Nua places his cup down on the table. “You let us mourn.”
Ava looks at him over the edge of her coffee cup, then sets it on the saucer and on the table next to her. “You mourned for me?”
He presses his lips together, not answering, and she leans forward. The dark circles under her eyes show up bright in the firelight. “I know you’re angry. And I’m sorry. But I couldn’t get to you, I couldn’t risk getting to you without her finding out. I trusted Bayan, and obviously, that wasn’t stupid.”
“He didn’t tell us about you,” I say quietly. “Just him.”
“That was my doing,” says Penny when I gesture to him. “I didn’t want him to scare you, make you think he was lying. And Ava, when she got to us, she was still recovering, I wasn’t entirely sure she would even survive anyway.”
Nua and Ava are still staring at each other, husband and wife in a silent argument only with their eyes, glistening hazel versus deep ocean blue. The firelight reflects in hers, and makes her blonde hair look orange. A tear trickles down Nua’s cheek.
“Speaking of,” continues Penny in a quieter voice, “Ava, you should get some rest.”
“Penny-”
“You’ve had quite an exciting day,” says Penny quietly, glancing at us. “Come on.”
She glares at him for a split second, but looking into the face of her other half that she’s missed for two years, her gaze softens quickly and she allows him to lead her out of the tent. He comes back in a moment, followed by a big black dog, and takes his seat again, saying, “She can make it back to her tent herself.”
The dog sits next to him for a moment as he scratches behind its ears, and then curls up by the fire. Nua watches it, the light flickering across his unreadable expression, then stands up and walks behind our chair, then starts to pace. “I don’t understand.”
“Yes, you do,” says Penny quietly. “You just haven’t processed it yet.”
“She’s alive, been here for weeks on end? Her mother knows?”
Penny makes a face, and Nua looks at him. For all their physical similarities, Penny and Ava don’t seem to be much like each other personality-wise. We’ve only known him for an hour and already he seems to wear his emotions on his sleeve, whereas his sister hid her disgust for her mother and pretty much everything else she felt. He doesn’t feel the need to keep from us his contempt, though. “Yes, she does. According to Bayan she flew into a rage when she found out, but he’s not sure if it was just because she was so broken-hearted about losing her daughter for the second time, and so soon. I personally didn’t think she has the emotional capability to feel guilt or sorrow, but anyway.”
Neither of us disagree with him there, and he pauses for a moment, running his foot over the dog’s back before saying, “She didn’t want you to know. Whosever ashes she gave you wasn’t Ava’s.”
“She gave us one urn,” I say quietly. “She said that it was Keol and Ava mixed together.”
“Keol,” says Penny quietly, looking out the door where he had led Ava to her tent. “That was the other man?”
Nua nods shortly, sitting back down next to me with a sigh, and Penny studies him for a second, then stands up himself. His dog jumps to its feet as well, its tail wagging, and he touches its head before saying, “I think you two should get some rest. Come on, Nano.”
The dog follows him outside, back into the tunnel, and I look up at the ceiling again. We must be half a mile underground or more, and all that surrounds us is concrete. I look down under my feet again, and brush some of the dirt away with my shoe, uncovering a rod of metal. Railroad tracks.
“We’re in the western track,” says Penny, starting to walk back towards the way we came. “The big center part, we call it Shan. The four tunnels that branch off of Shan are the tracks, and every track has a fire forum. That’s where we just were, the only places in here we can have big fires without smoking ourselves out.”
We’re walking back towards the Shan, I think. Tents and shelters line either side of the road, the railroad tracks, and suddenly there’s a rumbling above us. I reach for Nua’s hand, and Penny just looks at us, and then at the ceiling. “No worries. That’s a train.”
“Above us?” I ask quietly, and he nods, smiling slightly. “Yup. The western and the northern tracks are under some of the newer train routes, up on the surface. Parts of the eastern track, too.”
He leads us a few more feet, and then gestures to a big green tent. “That’s Ava’s.”
Nua stops, looking at it, and Penny glances at him. He rubs his lips together, then says, “I’m next to her, here. We’ve kind of saved you a little bit of empty space, so you can figure it out. See you tomorrow.”
With that, he goes into his tent, and Nano disappears along with him. Nua takes a deep breath, squeezing my fingers, and then goes into Ava’s tent. I follow.
There’s not much inside. A small table in the corner, and a large mat on the ground, long enough for her tall frame to stretch out on and wide enough for three people to lay down on. She’s sitting cross-legged on it, and looks up at Nua as he comes in, dropping the bag in the corner. He’s never stood above her like this before, looking down at her, but she just raises her eyebrows.
Nua exhales out of his nose, and stares hard at our wife for a moment, then kneels down in front of her so they’re level. He reaches out towards her face, and then with two fingers brushes a piece of hair away from her eyes and tucks it behind her ear, letting his fingers trail over her jaw. His voice breaks. “Why didn’t you tell us?”
She smiles sadly, looking down at her lap, but doesn’t answer.
Nua moves forward and wraps her in his arms, hugging her close to him, and I sit down next to her on the mat. They lie down together slowly, and then she says quietly, “We don’t have to be married anymore.”
He smiles slightly, letting her roll to her side so she’s facing me and he can wrap his arm around her from behind like how we all slept together in her bed, and he buries his face in her hair. “I know.”
I smile at her, and her eyes blink sleepily. I never thought I’d see them again, framed by brownish-blonde lashes that curl so much they almost brush her browbone, and I feel her fumbling below for my hand.
Nua’s arm is around her waist and my hand is in hers. He’s relieved to see her again, he never hated her, never wanted her to die. I just wanted her to find her brother again, so maybe at least one set of twins would be happy. I think of Abigala again, and then squeeze my eyes shut. I have no idea where she is, what she’s doing, if she’s okay. But for right now, I’m okay. And I’m tired. So I sleep.