“Oh,” says Thatcher quietly. “Is this your . . .”
“Nick.” I say his name like it’s the most important word that’s ever crossed my lips and rush toward him.
“Callie.” Thatcher protests, but I ignore him, getting to Nick just as he climbs inside and perches on the window seat. I reach out to hold him, but my arms pass right through his torso.
Nick hunches over, his body shaking. Is he . . . crying? It’s so soft I can hardly hear it, but I think he is, and my heart takes another stab. He picks up the stuffed penguin he won for me at the state fair last year.
His dark brown hair is hanging down over his face, and I want to grab him, I want to say to him I’m here, I want to make him laugh by telling him that tears will just mess up that penguin’s cheap fuzz-fur even more.
Thatcher moves closer to us. “You’re not here to interact with him in a physical way,” he says. “We’re going to haunt him. That sounds like something out of an old ghost movie, I know, but what haunting really is—at least in its true form—is a practice that helps your loved ones grieve.”
I drop to my knees next to Nick’s feet, unable to listen to Thatcher, unable to focus on anything but this sensation of complete loss. It’s like my throat is filled with glass as I fight against the tears that are piling up inside me. The grief is amplified by the fact that I’m feeling it alone, that I can’t melt into Nick’s hug, that there’s no one to hold me. He has to be feeling the same. I’m not there for him any longer. I guess he came here to feel close to me.
I put my hand out to touch Nick again—I can’t help myself—but my fingers just pass through his. Still, I feel a ripple of energy and I look up at him hopefully, but his face doesn’t change.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “I’m sitting on my floor, right? I’m touching it. Why can’t I touch him?”
“You’re not touching the floor,” says Thatcher, and when I look down I realize that I’m slightly above it, just a hair, hovering. “You’re moving by memory, so it feels like you’re on the floor, but you’re not. You’re in a remembered pose. Anything physical you experience is an illusion.”
“I felt something, though. Just now. Our fingers tingled, not in a way I’ve experienced before.”
“You still have an echo of your soul left in this dimension, and it brushed his soul, but the Living aren’t usually conscious enough to notice that type of interaction.”
I want to push my sadness down, and the best way I know to do that is through action. So far, everything I’ve tried has been pretty ineffectual.
“How does this haunting thing work?” I ask Thatcher. “Will it make him feel better?”
“When it’s done right.”
I look up at him, a definite challenge in the set of my mouth. “Then teach me how to do it right.”
Thatcher kneels beside me. His warmth surrounds me almost as solidly as his arms might. “What your presence does is offer him a sense of peace. He may never realize that you’re here, but your energy echoing in the space with his is enough.”
I sigh, frustrated. “Isn’t there a way to show him that I’m really here?”
Nick’s phone rings, and we fall silent as he puts it up to his ear.
“Nothing,” he says, plucking aimlessly at the penguin’s fur with his free hand.
Sweeping his gaze slowly around the room, he quietly responds to the voice on the other end of the line: “Nowhere.”
It’s a while before he speaks again, and I try to decipher what the other person is saying, but I just hear muffled noise.
Then, suddenly, Nick’s face crumples and he lets go of the penguin, covering his eyes as he doubles over on the window seat and chokes on his next words.
“It’s my fault.”
A new kind of pain hits me—it’s guilt and sorrow and rage rolled into one storm of emotion at the unfairness of everything. He thinks my death was his fault.
“No!” I scream, but of course he doesn’t hear me, doesn’t even glance up. I search wildly around the room, wanting to throw an object to the floor, make my presence known. But when I swipe at the glass perfume bottle on my dresser, it’s like I’m a hologram. It doesn’t even rattle a little bit.
“Help me!” I shout at Thatcher in frustration. “Can’t you see that I need to reach him?”
“Calm down.” Thatcher’s voice is maddeningly composed. “Your energy is intense, and your memories are strong, stronger than most. But if you’re too worked up, we’ll have to leave.”
I stare at him hard. “You said you were here to help me make a connection. So do it already!”
“Callie, you—”
“Okay. I’ll come.” Nick’s voice interrupts Thatcher.
With a tightening in my chest and an ache in my heart, I watch Nick pull himself together as he hangs up the phone. He’s struggling to be brave, to be strong. I want to be there for him so badly. But I don’t know how. He walks over to my desk and fingers a pendant he gave me—an amber heart on a silver chain.
When I was little, my mother gave me a heart-shaped jade charm, and I kept it on my desk. After she died, I lost it—but I never stopped hoping I’d find it, so I could hold on to that piece of her. When I told Nick that story, he bought me the amber heart, “not as a replacement,” he said, “but as a reminder that other people love you, too.”
He removes it from its chain and slips it into his pocket. Then he crawls back out the window onto the strong branch of the oak tree.
I try to rush after him, but Thatcher gets in front of me and I repel back, that strange sensation of undulating waves pushing at me.
“Get out of my way!”
“You can’t reach him right now,” he says sternly.
“I have to talk to him!” I’m pleading with Thatcher to understand, to help. “He didn’t even realize I was here.”
“You need to calm down. Relax.”
“Don’t tell me to relax.” Nick’s car rumbles in the driveway, and I scream at Thatcher. “He’s leaving!”
“If you go after him now, you won’t be able to do anything,” he says, not getting out of my way, his stance one of a warrior protecting his turf. Even in death, he’s stronger than I am. I know it; I can feel the power emanating from him. “Do you remember what I was telling you? To reach them, you have to be in a calm state, and it helps if they are, too. Then they’re more open to sensing us.”
The car’s engine grows fainter. Thatcher steps aside, knowing he’s won. I rush past him and lean out the window, trying to see where Nick is heading.
“Callie, listen!” This time Thatcher’s voice isn’t distant or calm—it’s sharp and immediate.
I glare at him. “You’re more of a bully than a Guide.”
“And you’re the most emotional ghost I’ve met in years.”
“Are you telling me that other people just accept dying?”
“There’s usually an obliviousness for new ghosts, an amnesia about life that makes it easier to haunt. The newly dead are calm by nature.”
“Well I’m not,” I say.
“Clearly.”
“Are you saying I’m overly sensitive?”
“You’re less . . .” He stops, and I can see him weighing his words, something real friends don’t have to do. For some inconceivable reason, I wish we were real friends.
“Comatose?” I ask, thinking about Ella Hartley’s dull eyes.
Thatcher scowls. “Something like that.”
I drop my head back, sighing as I watch the shadows from the headlights of a passing car dance over the ceiling. Even shadows exist in this world with more solidity than I do. At least they’re visible.
Thatcher sighs, too. “I’m on your side.”