“You know how,” he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose.
“Sammy came back, but…” I thought back to the night in the chamber, the sensation of my body being ripped in two. “After the exorcism, he was gone.”
Fletcher scooted to the edge of the swing.
“Lauren came back that first night. Her spirit. I saw her, felt her. I didn’t see her again for months. I still don’t understand it, and that’s why I warned you away, Corrie. When you open this doorway, portal, whatever it is, you close the door on a new life, a new love. I didn’t understand it at the time. I’ve never been able to get close to anyone. At any moment, Lauren might appear. I wouldn’t risk her finding me in bed with someone else.”
I squeezed my hands into my shins, thinking of the night Sammy had appeared at Sarah’s house.
“It’s not enough,” Fletcher whispered. He rested his hand in the emptiness beside him. “And yet it’s more than I ever hoped for. I’ll never have a wife, children, a family of my own. I gave all that up the night I called her back.”
“Is she here now?”
He shook his head.
“She was, just before you came out.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to…” I fluttered my hand in the air.
“It’s okay. I can reach out for her now and she comes - not always, but most of the time. We sit and talk, mostly reminisce. I live in the past, in a tiny block of two years when we had each other and our whole lives ahead of us.”
“Does she talk about death? About what comes after?”
He shook his head.
“There’s no carry-over between our world and theirs. I asked once, and she said human words don’t exist to explain it. I’ve accepted that in life, I’ll never know.”
I nodded and looked toward the dark beach, the silhouette of palm trees, the sparkling of the dark water lapping the shore.
“I don’t want you to live the rest of your life waiting for him, Corrie.”
Tears slipped over my cheeks, and I tried to agree but couldn’t seem to get the words out.
“Come, sit with me now,” Fletcher said, patting the space beside him. “It’s nice to have a friend.”
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 J.R. Erickson
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
J.R. Erickson, also known as Jacki Riegle, is an indie author who writes stories that weave together the threads of fantasy and reality. She is the author of the Northern Michigan Asylum Series as well the urban fantasy series: Born of Shadows. The Northern Michigan Asylum Series is inspired by the real Northern Michigan Asylum, a sprawling mental institution in Traverse City, Michigan that closed in 1989. Though the setting for her novel is real, the characters and story are very much fiction.
Jacki was born and raised near Mason, Michigan, but she wandered to the north in her mid-twenties, and she has never looked back. These days, Jacki passes the time in the Traverse City area with her excavator husband, her wild little boy, and her three kitties: Floki, Beast and Mamoo.