When we begin to walk again, he mutters under his breath, “You, she’ll want to see. Me, she’ll want to kill. Guess I’m in luck it’s too late for that.”
“I’m sorry,” I say again. “I’ll tell her it’s my fault. You did everything you could. I’m just a stubborn pain in the ass.”
“You said it,” he mutters, turning away, but even though his head is down and his hair is in his face, I see the hint of a smile.
“Hey! I think I liked you better when you were all doom and gloom,” I say, punching his arm.
“ ’Cause I was easier to ignore?” he asks, and by then we’ve reached the landing at the top of the hill. Though we’ve climbed pretty far, I’m not out of breath. Maybe because I don’t need to breathe? I try holding my breath to see, but my cheeks bulge like a chipmunk’s, right when Trey turns around to look at me. He laughs. “Are you holding your breath?”
“Um, I—”
“Don’t bother. Every dead person’s tried it out one time or another. But even ghosts need air.”
I feel myself blushing. “But what will happen to me if I don’t breathe? I can’t die.”
“Nah, but you’ll lose your shine.”
“Shine?”
“We all have a light when we come here. We call it our shine. See yours?” He points to my hand. With his bluish, dead fingers next to mine, the difference is striking. My skin is glowing white, not unlike the surface of the moon. His is more bluish. Some of the people who were milling about when we arrived looked almost watery, blurry. Blinking did no good. Their bodies were tinged with dark blue. Even in sun, they were in shadow. “When you pass on, you don’t lose your life all at once. Sure, you lose your body, but your life is still there. Shine’s your human life. The longer you’re here, in our world, the more shine you lose. The more you fade, the more your powers fade.”
I study Trey. Compared to the new souls who’ve just traversed the river, he is faded, bluish.
“Other things affect your shine. Your body being laid to rest is one of them. And, of course, you got to want to move on,” he says. “Some people keep their shine.”
In answer to my questioning look, he says, “Some people don’t want to go. Either they want to be alive or they want something else they could only get in life, and it eats away at them. They become evil spirits. Fiends.”
“Fiends?” I murmur, thinking of Jack, of how brightly he shone, how intensely hard it was to even look at him. But Trey had shone brightly, too. “What do they do that’s so evil?”
He opens his mouth to speak, but stops when he reaches the top of the hill. I come up behind him, and I can see stone walls, crumbling as much as the headstones on the riverbank. It’s a small house, or what remains of it. There is no roof, but the branches of old trees with fresh new leaves hang over it like a canopy. Ivy crawls up the black stones, almost completely claiming them. Here, the only sound is the twittering of birds. The line of people winds up ahead, but it’s perfectly silent; every one of them looks around, awestruck. It’s so peaceful and lush and green. I think I could fall asleep on this carpet of soft spring grass and never wake up.
I forget what we’re talking about when I see her. She is a small woman, as unremarkable in appearance now as she was in life. And yet I can’t take my eyes off her. The world slows and silences. She smiles and welcomes each person with a hug. Her hair and face are fair, and despite the limited sunlight leaking through the leaves above, something about her glitters like gold. She moves like a leaf on the wind, so gracefully, and those she smiles at seem to be affected by her, as immediately they begin to smile, too. She’s wearing an ordinary white baseball shirt with red sleeves, with a giant P on it, for the Phillies. I know it because she’d worn it all the time. She’d gotten it at my first—and last—baseball game at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. Somehow I’d expected her to be wearing a long, regal robe, or a crown, or something. But no, it’s just her, just my mom, looking exactly the same. The same as the day she died.
Suddenly I’m back in my bedroom, lying flat on my back in bed, with the summer heat pressing down on me and the iridescent ripples on the walls. My parents were weirdly absent from my life that summer, talking in hushed whispers about “adult things” they said I didn’t need to know about, so Lannie became my best and only friend. One day I’d been playing with Lannie all afternoon, and Lannie had been playing her usual games, pretending to be hanging by the neck from trees, making herself invisible when we played hide-and-seek. It put me in a foul mood, and I just wanted to get away from her. So I was alone in my bedroom with a pillow over my head to keep the visions away when my mother walked in. My mother tried to take the pillow off my head but I yelled at her. She told me she had something to say, something important, but I screamed at her to leave me alone.
I thought she’d fight it, tell me to behave or something, but she just did as I told her to. She put her cold, clammy hand on my bare knee and whispered an “I love you,” then walked out of my room. There wasn’t anything different about that, she was constantly saying she loved me, so much that I forgot what it meant. A minute later I heard the screen door slam and feet swishing on the grass. I scrambled to look out my window. In that red-and-white baseball shirt, she was walking toward the river. The way she moved should have made me nervous; she walked very deliberately, not like she was just going for a stroll. And she wouldn’t ever leave me alone in the house, not even for a minute, to go get the mail. But I was so angry, partly at Lannie and partly at myself for not having made any real friends, that I turned away and shoved the pillow over my head and held it there until the sirens screamed me back into reality.
I ran downstairs. I can still remember the look on my father’s face when he came home from work and the police told him that several people had seen his wife walk into the river. Some had dove in to rescue her, but she’d never been found. His body kind of crumpled and he grabbed my shoulder so tight that pain rocketed down my arm. “I didn’t think she’d go so soon,” he sobbed. I’d found those words strange at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I knew what he meant. Maybe it was how sad my mother always seemed. She always smiled at me, but it was as if she worked to achieve that smile. Whenever she thought she was alone, I’d catch her frowning, her brow furrowed as if the weight of everything was on her shoulders. Deep down, I guess we both always knew she’d leave us.
I’m so engrossed in the memory, I don’t see anything else around me, only her form, coming nearer. When she is close to me, she puts a hand on my cheek. Her hand is cold and clammy, as I remember it. “Kiandra,” she says. “How I’ve missed you.” She pulls me into a hug. Her smell is the same, sweet and clean.
There are so many questions I want to ask, but for now I just allow her arms to swallow me up and I press my cheek against her shoulder so hard that it hurts. “Mom,” I say. It comes out hoarse and watery, and I realize I’m crying.
It’s only then I see Trey standing beside me, fidgeting nervously. When I pull back, my mother’s giving him a look I often had directed at me whenever I did something wrong. Quickly I say, “It’s not Trey’s fault. He wanted me to leave but I’m too stubborn.”
She contemplates this for a moment. “That is true,” she says with a hint of a smile.
I frown. I don’t like her professing to know me. She left me. When I was seven, I wanted her so much, ached for her. The pain from those days was so bad, I can still feel it, but it’s an old wound. It’s been a long time since I’ve wanted her. Now, standing in front of her, hugging her, it’s like being presented to someone only slightly more familiar than a stranger. All I know is that I don’t want those wounds to be reopened. I don’t want to get so close that I ache and ache and nothing can fill that hole.