With a smile, he reaches for my shoulder. I feel a slight shock skitter through me where his fingers are, like when you grab a door handle after shuffling around on the carpet. He puts his other hand on the radio button. “You mean like this?” he asks.
The station changes.
“Holy shit!” I shout, excited. “How did you do that?”
Before he can answer, Carson lifts her head, and then I hear the song. It’s one that Carson and I loved in a jokey way, because it contains this lyric that says, “Call me Mr. Flintstone, I can make your bed rock.” We found that hilarious. Slowly, a smile spreads across her tear-streaked face.
“Callie?” she whispers.
“Yes!” I shout. “I’m here!”
I turn back to Thatcher, and his quiet rage at Leo’s presence is palpable. “She senses me,” I say.
“She knows you’re here, Callie,” Leo assures me.
“No,” says Thatcher. His face is tight and aggravated. “She doesn’t. You’re making a superficial connection right now. This isn’t a game—we’re trying to connect with her in a deeper way, on a soul level.”
Leo rolls his eyes. “Good luck with this guy,” he says to me. Then he leans over to Thatcher and whispers, “Relaaaax,” before he slips out of the car and into the night.
Carson starts up the engine again and we drive toward her house.
“Show me how to do that,” I say to Thatcher.
“What? Touch the button on the radio?”
“Yes!” I say. “Something! When will I be able to connect for real?”
“You are on your way to connecting for real. Your energy soothes them on an unconscious level. That’s the second level of the soul—it’s beyond the conscious—and it helps them know that you’re okay. If you keep getting frustrated and upset, they’ll feel that, too. And it won’t have the desired effect.”
I fold my arms over my chest. “So I should smother my emotions?” I ask. “Like you do?”
Thatcher looks me right in the eyes. “My feelings are not your concern.”
“So you admit that you have feelings. Well, there’s a step forward.” I know I’m being mean, but he’s telling me I have to let my entire world go, like throwing out a used napkin or something.
Thatcher’s jaw clenches as he faces forward. The streetlights cast sporadic streams of light over his handsome features as we drive—we’re almost back in my neighborhood—but his expression doesn’t change. Regretfully, I think I might have hurt him.
After a moment, he stares at me intently, the blue-gray of his eyes almost swirling. “I care more than you will ever understand,” he says, his voice a loud whisper. “Being a Guide isn’t a privilege—it’s a punishment. It means that I couldn’t help someone move on. That someone is still suffering because of my death. And it’s the heaviest burden any ghost has to carry.”
Oh my God. I don’t know what to say. A punishment? I’ve been wondering why anyone would do this willingly. “Someone in your family?” I ask him. “Someone never got over losing you?”
He nods quickly. What he’s dealing with seems like one of the most awful things anyone could experience. “I find comfort in helping other ghosts move on,” he says. “But I’m trapped in the Prism for now.”
Thatcher holds my gaze. I see his pain, his torment. My heart aches for him. I wonder what it would be like if, after years, Carson didn’t get over my death. If she remained perpetually grieving.
“How do I help them move on?” I ask.
“I told you that memories inhabit the first level of the soul. The unconscious is the second level, and that’s what we’re trying to connect with now. But Carson and Nick, and your father, won’t fully release you until we haunt the third level of the soul.”
I wonder again when we’ll go to my father, but I’m afraid to ask, afraid to see him and acknowledge the state he’s in. Facing Nick is hard enough. My father must be devastated.
“What’s the third level?” I ask.
“The heart.”
“The heart,” I echo. And I wonder when Mama reached that stage with me. Was it when I was twelve? On the day I went to her grave without my father and lay on the grass in front of her stone in the warm sun, trying to gather everything I remembered about her and hold it close to me as tears ran down my face? I felt a release that day.
“I remember so much,” I whisper into the darkness of Carson’s backseat.
Thatcher nods. “I know.”
“But you . . . ,” I start. “You remember your life, too?”
“All the Guides do,” he says. “We failed at our haunting, and the obliviousness of dying, the amnesia of the initial entry into the Prism that protects most ghosts, has worn off. So yes, we remember.”
“That’s harsh.” I ache for Thatcher and the Guides, and for myself, sad that we have to suffer. But I’m also glad that beings like us are in the Prism, that everyone’s not all calm and unemotional like most of the ghosts I’ve seen.
“So why do I remember everything?” I ask, worried that I’ve already somehow failed at haunting, too.
“You’re a special case, Callie. But you have to let go of some of your questions. Solus is the answer to all things, but you can only get there if you find peace—and help your loved ones find peace—in the present. Try not to fear the unknown.”
“You sound like you’re reading something from a textbook,” I say.
“I’ve said it a few times, to a few ghosts.”
“Slowpoke!” Carson chides the car in front of her in her signature I-never-curse way, and I laugh.
“Thatcher,” I say, staring at my friend as she drives. “I don’t want them to forget me.”
“They won’t. You didn’t forget your mom, right?”
I shake my head no.
“As hard as it is to accept, it’s good for them to let you go.”
Carson has a slight smile on her face. I want to believe that just my presence, just my being here and somehow connecting with her unconscious, put it there. But she’s not feeling comforted because we’re sitting in this backseat giving her good vibes. She’s smiling because Leo changed the radio station and she experienced a tangible connection to me. No matter what Thatcher says, that’s undeniable. I want to connect like that.
“Can’t I help them let go in my own way?” I ask him. “I think if I could move something or show them that I’m really here—”
“Playing with energy like that is dangerous, Callie—it can drain the Prism of its reserves.” Thatcher’s voice is back to being serious, firm—I despise how quickly he can put up a wall. “We are not supposed to connect to Earth in that way—we’re souls now, not humans.”
Internally, I roll my eyes at what we’re “not supposed” to do. Externally, I stay quiet and turn to the window to watch the houses in my neighborhood pass by. When we pull up in Carson’s driveway, I look down the street at my own house. The light in my father’s study is on.
My heart sinks as I stare at Dad’s window. How many nights did he stay up late working while I texted with Carson or went online to plan my next stunt: bungee jumping, river rafting, finding the tallest, fastest roller coaster? Why did I never knock on my father’s door to say good night? Or snuggle against him while he watched a military documentary, or tell him I loved him?
I sigh. When I was alive, I was so busy chasing a rush that I didn’t let myself experience the parts of life that I miss the most now. Since I died, I haven’t once wished I could get back into a car and speed down the docks. But I’d give anything to hug my father again.
As I watch Dad’s shadow move across the drawn curtains, I promise myself that I’ll show him I’m here—I’ll prove it to even his scientific mind. I may have died, but I’m not gone, so I have no intention of “letting go.” Not if it means never telling the people I love what they truly mean to me.