“Since always. Nobody’s out there. Nobody cares. You know what I told Stride when I first met him? I said death was just a cold nowhere. No heaven, no hell, no God. Nothing. I was a fool to start believing anything else. I mean, that’s what you think, isn’t it? You don’t believe in any of that.”
“It doesn’t matter what I believe.”
“When’s the last time you prayed? I mean, really prayed. God, please help me. Like that.”
Serena hesitated. “In Phoenix. When I was being abused.”
“Did it work? Did it save you?”
“No.”
“Well, see? It’s a waste of time.”
Serena could almost see the girl’s faith taking flight, like a departing angel into the sky. The strange thing was, as Cat’s soul grew emptier, Serena felt something taking hold inside herself that she hadn’t felt since she was a small child. A belief in something other than what she could touch, hear, and see. It spread throughout her body, and she wanted to wrap Cat up in its warmth.
“I have no idea what’s true or what isn’t,” Serena told her. “But one thing I do know is that if those terrible things hadn’t happened to me as a child, I wouldn’t be where I am today. I wouldn’t know Jonny. I wouldn’t know you. That’s the reality of my life. Does that make any of it better? Or less painful? No. Of course not. But I guess I’ve learned something in all my years of being hurt and angry. You have to be a little humble about knowing what it means to have your prayers answered. It may look very different from what you expect.”
Cat shook her head. “There’s nothing good in this. There’s no plan.”
“All we can do is wait and see. And hope.”
She heard the girl’s voice grow shrill with despair. “There’s no hope. He’s going away.”
“Don’t say that.”
Cat twisted around in her lap and stared up at her. “He’s not here anymore! He’s somewhere else. I can feel it, and I know you can, too. Don’t lie to me. I can feel him going away from us.”
“Shh. Don’t talk anymore.”
Cat buried her face again, and Serena kept stroking the girl’s hair as Cat sobbed. The light in the bathroom felt way too bright, and Serena closed her eyes so that she didn’t have to see it. With her eyes closed, words simply sprang into her head, and she moved her lips to murmur them aloud.
“God, please help me.”
Stride stood in the middle of Minnesota Avenue on the Point.
He was alone. The world had turned black and white, all of the color sucked away. The trees and lawns had no green; the flowers and the sky were white; the houses were all painted in shades of gray. Not a single car drove up and down the street. He listened for the roar of the lake behind the dunes, but the water seemed frozen into silence. He felt no wind, no warmth, no cold, as if this were nothing but a photograph of Duluth, not the place where he’d lived. He felt out of place here, a stranger. But along with it, he also felt no hunger and no pain. Every weight and care had been lifted from his shoulders.
He walked down the street, passing houses he’d known for years, but they looked abandoned. All the doors and windows stood open, inviting visitors, but with no one coming or going. No one worked in the gardens or sat by the bay shore. When he walked up to one of the doors, he looked inside and saw no furniture, just empty rooms perfectly free of dust. The people had gone away and left only skeletons of their lives behind them.
But not entirely.
As he walked, he heard something human. Music. He heard the plink-plink of someone picking out a country tune on a guitar. He walked faster, because he knew who it was. He’d heard that melody hundreds of times before. When he got to the next block, he recognized Steve Garske’s house, and there was his old friend on a three-legged stool in the middle of his yard, strumming chords. Unlike everything else around him, Steve was in color, his flannel shirt patterned in green and red, his torn jeans a stonewashed blue. He wore leather cowboy boots, and his foot tapped along with the music he made.
“Steve,” Stride said.
His friend looked up. “Well, hey, buddy. Welcome.”
“What is this place?”
“Don’t you recognize it?”
“I don’t. It’s not the Point. Not really. I don’t know what it is.”
“Well, you brought us here. You chose the place.”
“For what?” Stride asked.
“For your funeral,” Steve told him. “We all got our invitations, so we’re here to welcome you. The living say goodbye, but the dead say welcome. We’d never miss a funeral for a friend, Stride.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t worry. She’ll explain it to you. She’s here along with the rest of us.”
“Who?”
“The one you love. The one you miss.”
“Where do I go?”
Steve gestured down the Point. “Green bench, buddy. The usual place. She’s waiting.”
Stride stared down the colorless road that led to the bench by the water. He felt an urge to keep going, to find her, to see her. He knew the face that would be there. And yet he didn’t want to leave.
“I miss you, Steve.”
His friend chuckled and kept playing the guitar. “Back at ya, buddy. Right back at ya.”
Stride kept walking. Now he saw that he wasn’t alone. The farther he went, the more others appeared to welcome him. People from his past. The ones who were gone. The victims. He saw a teenage girl jogging the opposite way on the street, wearing a sports bra and shorts, her hair tied in a pony tail. She was soaking wet, even though it wasn’t raining. He’d never met her, but he knew who she was. He’d been trying to solve her murder when Cindy died. And he’d only done so years later, after he met Serena.
“Kerry?” he called. “Kerry McGrath?”
The teenage girl smiled with a sweet face he knew from photographs, but she didn’t break pace. She kept running, as if she had somewhere to go and would never get there. She pointed the other way, toward the end of the Point, because that was where he needed to be, and he was only halfway there.
She ran past him, and when he looked back again, she was gone.
Still he walked farther into the black-and-white world. More people came from the shadows. More of the dead. They emerged one by one, the people he’d left behind. The innocent ones, taken too soon. The deaths he’d investigated.
Michaela Mateo stood by the side of the street. All of the bruises and wounds had healed where her ex-husband had beaten and stabbed her. Her chestnut hair blew into swirls, but he still felt not even a breath of wind around him. She was beautiful again, perfect, the spitting image of her daughter, Cat.
“Oh, Jonathan, welcome!” she told him. “It’s so lovely to see your face again. Thank you for rescuing Catalina! Thank you for saving my girl! I wish you could stay here with me, but she waits for you. The green bench. She is there for you! Hurry!”
Stride walked faster, as if he could lift off the ground and fly.
He saw others returning to him, ghosts reminding him of their stories. Ahdia Rashid and her child, Pak, who had died in a gallery fire after the marathon bombing. Clark Biggs, whose heart had stopped in a lightning strike.