Neither of them would ever truly live.
It wasn’t the cold or the hunger that birthed her misery in freedom. They wouldn’t kill her, just as her growing fever wouldn’t kill her. It was the loss.
Rain had blessed her passage from the ship with drinkable water. More had been collected in her empty cola bottles. She could pass from the rotting woods into the next nightmare far differently than she’d come to this land.
But the dead wood felt like home. So she built her own hovel out of mud and sticks like all other vagrants breathing air, eating bugs, and surviving on fumes she’d come across over the years. Eugenia’s own cove near the water, far from the ship. Far from the captain’s farmlands.
So she might work through a backlog of buried thought and feeling, yet occasionally wander far enough north in the night to see the ship’s lights at a distance.
She wasn’t alone.
Her beautiful Li Wei, his memory was with her, toasting marshmallows over a campfire she didn’t have. Like he sat at her side on the muddy banks of the massive river that fed a lake that housed a cruise ship that should have never made it so far inland.
The Mississippi wasn’t pretty.
Its inlets stank.
But so did she… in that stupid blue dress.
A dress she was going to keep until the day she died. Because she missed another man more than the ghost at her side. She missed all the ugly moments they shared punctuated by blue cotton.
Because she was sick.
Because she was broken.
Because all the women went back and she never would.
When the dogs finally ate her, she’d be wearing that dress.
Because the fact that Aaron might have been right about everything was too terrible to swallow down.
This, she told Li Wei; she told him everything. Sometimes crying, sometimes laughing, always horrendously honest. How much she missed him and the life they should have had. How angry she was that he left her as if he stood a chance at finding his parents. How much she envied him for loving so hard that he knew she would live without his help, but his Mama and Bàba would not.
Sometimes, she railed as if the imagined phantom might reply, screaming out hateful things. How could he have left her? Didn’t he love her enough to stay?
Of course he had. He loved her as much as any man had ever loved.
Even as much as Aaron loved her.
And Li Wei would have married her, and they would have been happy. But…
The world died, and men like Aaron lived.
Li Wei was too good; he would have been slaughtered protecting his wife. Aaron would have killed anything and everything that might even approach her.
Like Neil.
“I miss you.” There had been a great deal of honesty in solitude, but that she had never dared mutter aloud.
Her new phantom answered back, “I shouldn’t have done it.”
Fever had grown worse by the day. A diet of bugs and weeds, of raw vermin and the occasional slow bird tended to do that.
Fallen log supporting her weight, Eugenia plopped down and stared as the world’s ugliest river flowed past. “The bigger question is which it you mean. The slavery? The manipulations? Level 9? Fucking Jessica?”
“Jessica.”
What was there to do but shrug then frown. “She’s popular for a reason.”