The Great Below

The End

On Octavia's first night of freedom, she dreamed. It wasn't much, just sitting in the passenger seat dozing in and out as the sun slanted in and strobed at her through the passing trees. She could see clearly the texture of the clouds – the way their tops fanned out across the sky, wispy-gold, their under-bellies heavy with the promise of rain.

When she glanced toward the driver's seat, Alex smiled back at her. There was no damage to his face, no hint of pain in the way he effortlessly steered the car. She wanted him to say something, but instead he reached across the console and patted her knee. His hand was warm.

Again, it wasn't much. But it wasn't a nightmare.

#

Octavia woke to perfect silence. Some part of her knew it would be a fleeting moment – the laziness before fully waking and remembering some awful piece of information she desperately hoped to forget – and she tried willing herself back to sleep but it wouldn't come. The first rays of light drifted across the carpet.

On her door, Nick had taped a scribbled note. Out for a smoke.

She went to the bathroom to look in the mirror, then wished she hadn't. She looked like she felt. Octavia examined the farewell shiner that encompassed half of her jaw, dwarfing the knife-slice on her bottom lip. At least she hadn't lost any teeth. She opened the drawer next to the sink to watch the little tubes and compacts rattle around.

They could go to the hospital soon.

In the kitchen she picked up the plastic bowl still overturned on the floor and placed it in the sink. She stood at the patio door, which had frosted over at the edges, and ran a hand under her shirt and over her stomach, picking at painless scabs. She stared at the far rail of the balcony and the dead grassy hill beyond, a pain knotting behind her eyes.

She hit the door with the flat underside of one fist.

It was a hollow sound, unsatisfying and slippery with the cold. She went to retrieve the plastic bowl from the sink and threw that at the door. No good – it bounced away into the living room behind her. She lifted one of the kitchen chairs with both hands and swung it. There was a cracking noise and the collision felt solid. Her hands, powerful. When she looked, a hairline split had formed near the bottom of the door. But she wasn't better yet.

She dumped two shelves worth of paperback books out of Victor's case in the living room – books on boxing and weight-lifting, self-help books on success – before giving up and hauling the entire case over instead. A neighbor from below pounded on the ceiling. Octavia pounded back, perched on her knees and elbows. She couldn't see well anymore but she wiped at her face with the sleeve of her black hoodie and grabbed one of the hardcover self-help books and cracked it against the floor in response until the jacket was shredded and the rest of the book leaped out of her hand. She kneeled that way, forehead against the carpet, for a long time.

Octavia tip-toed through piles of garbage on the living room floor to the front window. There was a row of neighbor's cars with the windows iced over. At the edge of the covered parking Nick stood in a cloud of his own steaming breath, talking on his cell phone. He covered one ear, head bent.

The hospital.

Octavia moved to fling open the window only to find it child-safety locked beyond all use. She pounded it with her fist and Nick glanced up. He squinted against the sunrise, still listening to his phone. He dropped a cigarette butt and smashed it out with his foot.

She stared, hoping to read his response, but he had no discernible expression from three floors away. His body language betrayed nothing. Nick held his phone in the air. Waved it at her.

"What is it?" she cried, but he couldn't hear. "Nick?" She kept banging the window, but he'd turned toward the car. Octavia tore to the back bedroom for her shoes.

She nearly took a tumble on the first flight down, reminding herself of the debacle that was Jacob Corrigan. The time she had spent running from his office downstairs to the lobby, and out into the slippery snow, had been the last thirty seconds of his life. They had gone frantically, heart-pounding, colors blurring past. Then he was gone.

Octavia stopped. Let the pounding slow, let herself breathe. Focused on the thin, stained carpet stretching ahead of her. What if this was it? The last thirty seconds of something else, something so terrible that she couldn't give it a name for fear that more emotion would burst out of her.

She sat down on the next stair and deliberately laced both shoes with trembling fingers.

Wiped her face dry with her sleeve.

These would be the last moments of not knowing – a space as long or short as she made it, but a definable space in which Alex Corvin lived.

Octavia came to the outer door, where she took a calm, steadying breath. The light enveloped her the moment she emerged, long streams of distant heat that painted her legs, her feet, and the asphalt yellow. Nick was closer then, but hunched over, lighting two cigarettes at once that dangled from his lips. She walked, hands part-numb and tingling.

She'd nearly reached him when the sun intruded again, causing her to shield her face. Octavia stopped, turning into it, and let the orange fire glow behind her eyelids. The calls of a few distant birds. A quiet whoosh of traffic. Nick didn't tell her, not yet, and she allowed the moment to be what it was: beautiful. He was handing her a cigarette. 

The sun was blinding, and warm, and it felt like oblivion.