“How?” At that moment, it was the only thing I wanted to know.
“It’s simple. Just go.”
“What do you mean, go?” She was making it sound easy, but I had a feeling there was more to it.
“You imagine where you want to go, and then you just go.”
It didn’t seem possible, even though I knew my mom would never lie to me. “So if I just wish myself to Ravenwood, I’ll be there?”
“Well, not from our back porch. You have to leave Wate’s Landing before you can go anywhere. I think our homes have the Otherworld equivalent of a Binding on them. When you’re at home, you’re here with me and nowhere else.” A shiver went down my spine as she said the words. “The Otherworld? Is that where we are? What it’s called?” She nodded, wiping her cherry-stained hand on her jeans.
I knew I wasn’t anywhere I’d been before. I knew it wasn’t Gatlin, and I knew it wasn’t Heaven. Still, something about the word seemed farther away than anything I’d ever known. Farther even than death. Even though I could smell the dusty concrete of our back patio and the fresh cut grass stretching beyond it. I could feel the mosquitoes biting and the wind moving and the splinters of the old wooden steps at my back. All it felt like was loneliness. It was just us now.
My mom, and me, and my backyard full of cherries. Some part of me had been waiting for this ever since her accident, and another part of me knew, maybe for the first time, it would never be enough.
“Mom?”
“Yes, sweet boy?”
“Do you think Lena still loves me, back in the Mortal realm?”
She smiled and tousled my hair. “What kind of silly question is that?” I shrugged.
“Let me ask you this. Did you love me when I was gone?”
I didn’t respond. I didn’t have to.
“I don’t know about you, EW, but I knew the answer to that question every day we were apart. Even when I didn’t know anything else about where I was or what I was supposed to be doing. You were my Wayward, even then.
Everything always brought me back to you. Everything.” She smoothed my hair out of my face. “You think Lena’s any different?”
She was right.
It was a stupid question.
So I smiled and took her hand and followed her inside. I had things to figure out and places to go—that much I knew.
But some things I didn’t have to figure out. Some things hadn’t changed, and some things never would.
Except me. I had changed, and I would give anything to change back.
CHAPTER 3
This Side or the Next
Go on, Ethan. See for yourself.”
I didn’t look back at my mom when I reached for the doorknob.
Even though she was telling me to go, I was still uneasy. I didn’t know what to expect. I could see the painted wood of the door, and I could feel the smooth iron of the handle, but I had no way of knowing if Cotton Bend was on the other side.
Lena. Think about Lena. About home. This is the only way.
Still.
This wasn’t Gatlin anymore. Who knew what was behind that door? It could be anything.
I stared down at the knob, remembering what the Caster Tunnels had taught me about doors and Doorwells.
And portals.
And seams.
This door might look normal enough—any Doorwell looked pretty much like the next—but that didn’t mean it was.
Like the Temporis Porta. You never knew where you were going to end up. I’d learned that the hard way.
Quit stalling, Wate.
Get on with it.
What are you, chicken? What do you have to lose now?
I closed my eyes and turned the knob. When I opened them, I wasn’t staring at my street—not even close.
I found myself on my front porch in the middle of His Garden of Perpetual Peace, Gatlin’s cemetery. Right in the middle of my mother’s plot.
The cultivated lawns stretched out in front of me, but instead of headstones and mausoleums decorated with plastic cherubs and fawns, the graveyard was full of houses. I realized I was looking at the homes of the people buried in the cemetery, if that’s even where I was. Old Agnes Pritchard’s Victorian was planted right where her plot should have been, with the same yellow shutters and crooked rosebushes that hung over the walkway. Her house wasn’t on Cotton Bend, but her little rectangle of grass in Perpetual Peace was directly across from my mom’s plot—the spot where Wate’s Landing was sitting now.
Agnes’ house looked almost exactly as it had in Gatlin, except her red front door was gone. In its place was her weathered cement headstone.
AGNES WILSON PRITCHARD BELOVED WIFE, MOTHER & GRANDMOTHER MAY SHE SLEEP WITH THE
ANGELS
The words were still etched into the stone, which fit perfectly into the painted white doorframe. It was the same at every house as far as I could see—from Darla Eaton’s restored Federal to the peeling paint of Clayton Weatherton’s place. All the doors were missing, replaced by the gravestones of the dearly departed.
I turned around slowly, hoping to see my own white door with the haint blue trim. But instead I was staring at my mother’s headstone.
LILA EVERS WATE BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER SCIENTIAE CUSTOS
Above her name, I saw the Celtic symbol of Awen—three lines converging like rays of light—carved into the stone.
Aside from being large enough to fill the doorway, the headstone was the same. Every nicked edge, every faded crack. I ran my hand over the face of it, feeling the letters beneath my fingers.
My mom’s headstone.
Because she was dead. I was dead. And I was pretty sure I had just stepped out of her grave.
That’s when I started to lose it. I mean, can you blame a guy? The situation was a little overwhelming. There’s not much you can do to prepare for something like that.
I pushed on the gravestone, pounding on it as hard as I could until I felt the stone give way, and I stepped back
inside my house—slamming the door behind me.
I stood against the door, breathing in as much air as I could. My front hall looked exactly the same as it had a moment ago.
My mom looked up at me from the front stairs. She had just opened The Divine Comedy ; I could tell by the way she was still holding her sock bookmark in one hand. It was almost like she was waiting for me.
“Ethan? Changed your mind?”
“Mom. It’s a graveyard. Out there.”
“It is.”
“And we’re—” The opposite of alive. It was just starting to sink in.
“We are.” She smiled at me because there wasn’t really anything else she could say. “You stand there as long as you need to.” She looked back down at her book and flipped a page. “Dante agrees. Take your time. It is only”—she flipped a page—“ ‘ la notte che le cose ci nasconde.’ ”
“What?”
“ ‘The night that hides things from us.’ ”
I stared at her as she continued to read. Then, seeing as there weren’t that many options, I pulled the door open and stepped out.
It took me a while to take it all in, the way it takes your eyes a while to adjust to sunlight. As it turns out, the Otherworld was just that—an “other world”—a Gatlin right in the middle of the cemetery, where the dead folks in town were having their own version of All Souls Day. Except it seemed like this one lasted a lot longer than a day.
I stepped off my porch and onto the grass just to be sure it was really there. Amma’s rosebushes were planted where they had always been, but they were blooming again, safe from the record-breaking heat that had killed them when it hit town. I wondered if they were blooming in the real Gatlin, too.