A Phantom Enchantment (16 page)

After dinner, Owen and I cleared dishes, and I brought out the cake while Crespeau made some strong French press coffee. We were all sitting down to dessert when someone knocked on the door.

“No, don't get up,” I said. “I'll get it.”

I opened the door to see Mademoiselle Veilleux. “You came!” I said, perhaps a bit giddy from the champagne. I took from her yet another bottle of wine and helped her off with her coat. She looked radiant in a form-fitting raspberry dress with an exquisite silk scarf of Chinese characters. She'd worn her hair down for a change, and it looked rich and lush against the delicate material of the dress.

I felt a presence looming behind me and saw Mademoiselle's eyes go soft and glassy. When I turned around, Crespeau stood staring at Mademoiselle Veilleux in wide-eyed awe. It was as if all the music and chatter and clinking of silverware fell away, and they were the only two people in the universe. Except for me, of course, standing right between them.

I took a step back, and Crespeau gave me a brief questioning glance before we all realized we'd better introduce Mademoiselle to the rest of the party. I took my seat next to Owen.

Crespeau introduced everyone, and I leaned over to Owen and said, “Flynn will be devastated.”

“How about your grandmother?” he said, grinning.

I turned to look at Grandma, knowing she'd never be jealous. In fact, she looked apple-cheeked and young again, happy to be here on Christmas Eve instead of in our somber house back home, where memories choked us.

“Emma, can I talk to you for a moment outside?” my grandmother said rather suddenly.

I didn't know what this was all about, but we got up from the table, Crespeau rushing to my grandmother's side to help her out of her chair. He led us into the kitchen and showed us the door that led out to his small garden courtyard.

Before we went out, my grandmother said, “Nicholas, do you happen to have a cigarette? I don't normally smoke, but I like to on special occasions.”

“Of course,” he said, retrieving a pack and handing her a narrow cigarette and lighting it for her.

Then we stepped out into the cold night air. The sky was clear and flush with luminescence from the city's twinkling lights.

“Well, I'm having a splendid time,” she said. “What's wrong with you? You've been acting like you've seen a ghost.”

“I don't know,” I said, shivering a little in my short sleeves.

“Owen's in love with you,” she said. “Just as sure as that man in there is in love with Mademoiselle Veilleux.” I looked guiltily at my grandma, then dropped my eyes. “Look,” she said, taking a quick puff of her cigarette, “I know we haven't had much chance to talk lately. It's hard to get a word in edgewise when Barbara's around. But I know how tough this year has been on you. You've suffered more losses than anyone your age should have to. Which means, you have to find happiness where you can.”

My grandmother had always had this ability to see right through me. She was highly intuitive that way.

“It's just . . . I feel like I can't . . . I can't . . .”

“Get over Gray?” she said. I felt tears begin to well in my eyes. “I know, sweetheart. Gray's disappearance devastated us all. And your father's been so worried about you. It was all I could do to stop him from coming here months ago and moving in with you at your dorm.” I cracked a tiny smile. “But all of us are amazed at how well you're doing here. You're really thriving. And you seem so mature and independent. And now, there's this opera with Owen. You've always been so creative. You take after your mother that way.” She stopped talking, but I could hear her swallow the lump in her throat. “Your mother would be . . . so proud of you. I just know she's up there somewhere looking down at you, and she wants so badly for you to be happy. We all do.” A tear rolled warmly down my cheek. “And Gray would want you to be happy, too.”

“Would he?” I said, beginning to sob.

“Of course, Emma. Why would you ever doubt that?”

“It's just, I've had these dreams, Grandma. These horrible dreams and Gray is in them, and he's so different—angry and mean and jealous.”

“They're just nightmares, Emma,” she said. “Your fears playing out in your head. You've always been prone to them. Well, ever since that damn lightning strike. How I wish that had never happened to you.”

“You and me both,” I said.

“But you've got to do away with dreams and nightmares for a change and embrace your real life. Start over again. And I think Owen could help you do that.”

“I know,” I said, feeling so much better now that my grandmother had given me her blessing to move on. Maybe that's what I'd been looking for all along. A sign that I didn't have to save myself for Gray anymore, even though I'd made a promise that now lay at the bottom of the Seine. “Thank you, Grandma,” I said, throwing my arms around her and giving her a huge hug. She felt smaller to me and more fragile physically even though mentally she was still tough as nails. “You've always understood me best,” I said.

“You too, kid,” she said. “You know I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Merry Christmas.”

“Joyeux Noël.”

When we went back inside, the mood seemed to have changed radically. Crespeau and Mademoiselle Veilleux were standing to the side, stunned to silence by something, and everyone else was gathered around my father, who was uncharacteristically staring down at his cell phone with tears in his eyes.

“What happened here?” my grandmother said, and I got a sinking feeling that someone had died.

My dad looked straight at me, and I saw his lips moving but was unable to hear what he said. A strange ringing had begun in my ears, and my legs were trembling.

Owen came toward me and put his arm around me, repeating what my father had just said.

“Emma, Gray's been found.”

C
HAPTER
16

I
hadn't wanted to go home. I had tried to avoid it. But something or someone had wanted me there.

Because of the holidays, we couldn't get a flight out of Paris until the twenty-ninth, and the wait was torture. I did talk to Gray's mother, Simona, and his sister, Anna, both of whom confirmed what my father and Owen had told me on Christmas Eve night. That Gray had been found alive in the middle of the Atlantic.

He was recuperating in the hospital and unable to talk to anyone, except apparently a reporter who had written this “feel good” piece for the
Miami Herald:

Tears were streaming down my cheeks as I finished the article. I hadn't really believed it until I'd seen it in print. But there was no doubt about it now. Gray was alive. And I was heading home to see him.

The relief I felt for Gray was immense, yet there was something preventing me from being heady with joy, like I ought to have been. Gray had been missing for two months, and I had mourned him. I had said good-bye to the man I loved. And now he was back.

But when someone came back from the dead, he wasn't the same person, was he? And that was what I was most afraid of.

In order to get a flight home during the busy holiday week, my family and I flew out of Paris on a rainy Sunday morning, so early it was still dark when we took off. With the six-hour time difference, it was almost like time stood still, with the sun just rising over Boston as we landed.

After a short pit stop home to freshen up and change, my dad and I headed over to the hospital. Gray was asleep when we arrived at his room. I felt a whoosh of emotion when I saw him, like all of the love and regret and sorrow and fear I'd stored up over the past few months had unleashed itself and was conspiring to choke the breath out of me. Even more terrifying was that the man lying in the hospital bed looked like the Gray from my dreams. His normally trim dark hair was long and scraggy and bleached blond, and his full lips were brittle, chewed away by salt and sun. His skin was brown as a walnut, and his face was all sharpness and hollows, his cheekbones protruding like wings.

My father's hands gripped my shoulders to steady me. I hadn't realized I was shaking. But I was staring at someone who, until a few days ago, I'd thought was dead. That would shake anyone.

Sitting at the chair by his bedside, I grabbed his hand because I still worried this could all be a dream, that it wasn't real. Even though his hand was thin and dry, it was warm. Blood ran through his veins, and a pulse beat at his wrist. Everyone and everything in the room disappeared as I leaned in to hear his heart beat, and for a moment we were back on our own island, the only two people in the universe.

Two years ago when I'd been struck by lightning and fallen into a coma, Gray had been the one to pull me back from the brink. Now I was the one pulling him out, calling him back.

“Gray,” I said softly, feeling no self-consciousness at my father's eyes on me. “It's me. Emma.”

Even though I'd thought him unconscious, he stirred at my words. His eyes fluttered open, and they were Gray's eyes—hazel, sad, but older and wiser, too. They were as familiar to me as my own eyes. And in their depths was none of the fear or dread I'd felt when we'd met on that nightmare shore. Here was solace and relief and love reclaimed.

“Gray, I'm here,” I said. I wanted him to know as I did that this was real. I had no idea if he remembered any of our visits through the mirror, or if he did, if he'd perceived them in the same way I had.

“Emma,” his voice croaked as he squeezed my hand with what little strength he had.

“He's awake,” I said, turning to my dad with tears in my eyes.

“Yes, Emma,” my dad said, affirming what I still doubted.

A doctor came into the room, looking very brisk and efficient in his white coat with his clipboard. “Is he okay?” I asked him, so thankful to have someone here who could answer the thousand questions swirling in my head.

“He's much better than when he first came in,” the doctor said. “We've got him on fluids, and he's slowly regaining his strength. He's going to be fine. He's a fighter. I'm Dr. Sorentino.”

After shaking the doctor's hand, I laced my fingers with Gray's again, and I thought I saw him smile. And in that moment, he was my Gray again. The world made sense.

Shortly afterward, Gray fell asleep, heavily medicated as he was. But we stayed for over an hour until Gray's parents and Anna showed up. I broke down at the sight of Anna, who'd believed all along that Gray was still alive. She had kept her faith while mine had faltered.

Simona hugged me like I was the one who'd come home after being lost at sea. And in a way, I had been lost. I had struggled to reestablish my place in a world without Gray. And I had found it. Now that he was back, I wasn't sure where this left me.

My dad and I finally left the hospital, promising to return the next day. As anxious as I was to see Gray again, I worried about what we would say to each other. How would we acknowledge the seismic shift that had taken place inside both of us and between us?

When we got home, my father shut off the ignition and turned to me. “Why don't you stay?” he said.

“Where else would I go?”

“No, I mean stay here and not go back to Paris,” he said. “With Gray home again, it just seems to make sense for you to stay and finish your semester here.”

“But, Dad,” I said, “I've got to go back. We have the opera contest. And I'm already registered for all my courses. I'm doing really well there.”

“I know you are. But you'll do well here, too,” he said. “You can take all your AP courses at Lockwood. And it won't be such a hassle to take the exams. And the opera contest . . . well, it's a wonderful honor, of course, but your friends can continue without you, can't they? It's not like you've ever had ambitions to study music seriously. It's . . . an extracurricular.” A distraction, is what he meant. “It just seems to me that nothing could be as important as the fact that Gray is back. Don't you want to be here for him?”

“Of course I do,” I said.

“Emma, everyone would understand, given the circumstances.”

“It's not that,” I said.

“Then what? How can you think of going back now that Gray's here? I also think you need your family and friends around you now. This can't be easy for you, all this shock. It's been so nice having you home. Grandma's sort of bereft without you, and she's not going to be around forever—”

“Dad, stop it!” I said.

“Stop what?”

“Giving me a guilt trip. What if I
want
to go back to Paris? Would that be so horrible?”

“To be honest, Emma? Yeah, it would be. I just don't understand what could be so important that it would mean leaving us. You got to go away and study abroad. Now you should end your senior year here at home where you belong.”

How could I tell him? How to explain that from the moment I'd stepped off the plane in Boston, I'd felt that I no longer belonged here at all.

Maybe I would feel different in a few months or a few years. But right now, I belonged in Paris. I wasn't sure why. Was it the opera contest, the promise of my words being sung onstage and possibly performed professionally next year? Was it Owen? Or was it simply that I wanted to finish the journey I'd started and see where it led me?

“Can we talk about this later?” I said. “I'm supposed to meet Michelle and Jess in less than an hour.”

So far, Michelle and Jess had been the only relationship to weather the turbulence of this year. Elise and Owen hadn't lasted. And Gray and me? For now, we were an unsolved equation.

I was meeting them at eight o'clock at Melville's, the local beach seafood shack. It was a dive, but it had sentimental value. My friends arrived in the orange Volvo station wagon I'd lent Michelle for the year I was away. The sight of Michelle and Jess emerging from my orange boat of a vehicle and clasping their hands as they crossed the street toward me was one of the happiest moments I'd experienced in a long time.

They attacked me in a group hug, showering me with overblown words of affection.

“Emma, we missed you so much!” “You look great!” “How are you, our frog-leg-loving, horse-meat-eating, scarf-wearing friend?”

By the time we entered the restaurant, I was laughing so hard I was crying. We sat at our favorite booth, the one with the mural of Ahab harpooning a whale that looked far too chipper about the ordeal, and ordered a feast of fried seafood that came to our table in red plastic baskets with wax paper.

“Oh, how I missed clam strips,” I said.

We dug into the food, and I got caught up on all things Lockwood before Michelle brought up the giant elephant in the room.

“How is Gray?” she asked, grabbing my forearm for emphasis.

“He's okay,” I said. “We didn't get to talk. He was sleeping most of the time.”

“I still can't believe he's alive,” she said.

“Was it weird seeing him?” Jess asked.

“Yes and no. It was a little surreal after thinking he was gone, but at the same time . . .”

I told them about my dreams and admitted that a part of me had never really accepted that he was dead.

“You and Gray have always had that psychic connection,” Michelle said. “It makes sense that you'd get a feeling he was still alive. Because . . . he was. It really is a kind of miracle.”

“I don't know about that,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Don't get mad,” I said. “But . . . I did a spell.”

“Darlene's spell?” Michelle asked. “Damn, I knew that's what was in the gift bag. I told you not to mess with that voodoo stuff, Emma.”

“I know,” I said. “But I was desperate.”

I couldn't help remembering a story we'd read in middle school called “The Monkey's Paw,” about an old couple that makes a wish on a cursed monkey's paw to bring their dead son back to life, only to realize that their wish would be granted at a terrible price.