Ashes to Ashes (5 page)

Five

THATCHER TRACES A PORTAL
in front of us, using his hand to cut an opening through what was—only moments before—empty air. Hundreds of tiny points of light blaze into a glow like sunspots framing the portal. We walk through together. This time, I sense him with me in the space, traveling at a smooth speed almost like we're two bullets lined up inside the chamber of a gun. I wonder what this would feel like if I were still alive, if my body were really here and hurtling through dimensions like this. I bet it would be the ultimate rush, but as a ghost, the motion feels natural and almost calm. It's silent and effortless, and in some ways it seems instant, but I don't trust my notion of time.

When we get to the other side, I take in a sharp breath.

It's my bedroom, just as I left it. My middle dresser drawer is open, and a blue tank top hangs over its edge. Something inside me starts to crack. I'd considered bringing the tank top as part of my day-after-with-Nick outfit, but I went with a plain white T instead. Half a glass of lemonade rests on the nightstand—Carson's, left behind after she helped me get ready for my night with Nick—and my pajama shorts are balled up next to my pillow. The bed, as always, is unmade.

This is my room, these are my things, this is what's left from my life. But I'm absent. None of these objects means anything, really, but seeing them in this moment, they mean
everything
.

Thatcher is watching me carefully. He must read the heartbreak in my face, because he comes closer to me and says softly, “Tell me about them.” He points to the photos over my bed. “This one looks like it has a story.”

It's a shot of me and Carson on a ski trip in the mountains of North Carolina. My gaze skips over to a collage of moments spent with Nick. But I can't go there right now. I turn my attention back to Carson. Her left cheek is bright red because she's just face-planted on a black diamond—it was more like ice skating than skiing that winter because it wasn't cold enough for good snow.

“It was icy,” I say. “She's actually a good skier.”

Thatcher eyes me disbelievingly. “Like all girls from South Carolina,” he says, and I laugh.

His face lights up at the sound, and I feel a flash of self-consciousness. But then he turns back to Carson's picture and smiles, and I appreciate his kindness. I think about my best friend and how she was right about this “other side” all along.

“Is the Prism like limbo?” I ask. “Is that why there are all these ghosts here?”

He looks at me again, the smile replaced by a serious expression.

“The Prism is a stage that souls pass through before traveling to the next dimension. Beyond the Prism is the big, thumping heart at the center of the universe. It's the place where we learn the true meaning of existence, once we merge with it. We call the heart of the universe Solus.”

He spells it for me.
S-o-l-u-s
. But the way he says it, it sounds like he's saying
solace
. I was never really sure whether to believe in things like God or church or any of that. The way Thatcher's talking, though—even as he says these official phrases that he's obviously memorized and rehearsed—lets me know that he does believe. Like when you ask preachers about God and they give you a lot of information that sounds kind of made up, but they have so much faith in it that it all rings true, somehow.

“Giving the people we love a sense of peace around our deaths—that's our goal,” he says. “Did you see how easily Ella walked alongside her family? That's because they're easing into acceptance of her passing.”

I nod as Thatcher talks, not because I completely understand what he's telling me, but because I want him to keep talking. This room is filled with memories for me, pictures and objects and corners I could get caught up in—memories that could devastate me if I let them. But there's something in the rumble of Thatcher's deep voice that's distracting and soothing, and after what I've been through—you know, dying—I could use some comfort.

As he explains more, my gaze lands on the framed photo of me and Mama that sits next to my bed. She's wearing a big sun hat and smiling right at Dad, who took the photo. Sitting in her lap, I'm staring straight up at her face with an expression of total love. If your mom dies when you're six, you never get to that time where you fight with her and go through all that hard stuff—you just get to the point of utter adoration. And that's when she was taken from me.

I wait for Thatcher to pause, to stop explaining things about Solus, which I know is this huge, answers-to-all-the-questions-in-the-universe thing. It's not that I don't care; it's just that I'm focused on something else. And when he finally does take a breath, I ask, “So you were going to tell me . . . why did my mother leave?”

“It was her time to merge with Solus,” he says carefully. “She fulfilled her purpose for being in the Prism, which was haunting her loved ones—you, your father . . . she stayed with you to help you accept what happened to her and move on.”

“So you mean my mother . . . she didn't leave until . . .”

“Until you let her go,” says Thatcher, finishing my thought.

I sink down to sit on my bed.

Right after Mama died, Dad and I went to her tombstone in Magnolia Cemetery every day with fresh flowers. Dad stayed quiet, mostly, while I would tell Mama about what I'd done in school, because she used to always ask me about that when she was alive. After a while, though, we just went to her grave a few times a week, then only on Sundays after church. Eventually, we stopped with church altogether, and we stopped visiting the cemetery, too, except on her birthday.

But it wasn't like I never thought about her. It wasn't like that at all.

I whip my head around to glare at Thatcher. “I didn't let her go,” I say, feeling defensive. “I wouldn't ever—”

“It doesn't mean that you forgot her,” he interrupts. “It just means that you had healed enough and accepted her death so that she could move on. It's a good thing. It's what I'm going to help you do for the people you love.”

Did I move on from Mama?
I guess so. I found reasons to be happy again, moments of light. I even grew to love my life and all the potential that lay ahead. My mind flashes to Nick, my summer plans, maybe going away for college.

The knives of grief stab at me once more and slice into my heart, making me clutch at my chest as if I could protect it from their assault. The Future. The Possibilities. They're
gone
. Involuntarily I shake my head no—back and forth, faster and faster—and I don't know whether I'm trying to wake up from a nightmare or if I'm trying to clear away all the dreams I used to have. Everything I hoped for, all the experiences I never had, they're in the past tense now, or some tense where things don't even exist, they never did—they're just
what might have been.

When I meet Thatcher's eyes, he turns away quickly like my sadness is an affront. He's uncomfortable dealing with my pain. His shoulders tense up as mine slump and I crumple to the floor. No support, no kindness, no outreach from him and I'm flailing. It dawns on me that he's trying to tell me that my purpose now—my
future
now—is to help everyone I love let me go. How can I possibly do that when
I
don't have the strength to let
them
go?

A rustling outside catches my attention. Nick is pushing open my window.

“Oh,” says Thatcher quietly. “Is this your . . .”

“Nick.” I say his name like it's the most important word that's ever crossed my lips and rush toward him.

“Callie.” Thatcher protests, but I ignore him, getting to Nick just as he climbs inside and perches on the window seat. I reach out to hold him, but my arms pass right through his torso.

Nick hunches over, his body shaking. Is he . . . crying? It's so soft I can hardly hear it, but I think he is, and my heart takes another stab. He picks up the stuffed penguin he won for me at the state fair last year.

His dark brown hair is hanging down over his face, and I want to grab him, I want to say to him
I'm here
, I want to make him laugh by telling him that tears will just mess up that penguin's cheap fuzz-fur even more.

Thatcher moves closer to us. “You're not here to interact with him in a physical way,” he says. “We're going to
haunt
him. That sounds like something out of an old ghost movie, I know, but what haunting really is—at least in its true form—is a practice that helps your loved ones grieve.”

I drop to my knees next to Nick's feet, unable to listen to Thatcher, unable to focus on anything but this sensation of complete loss. It's like my throat is filled with glass as I fight against the tears that are piling up inside me. The grief is amplified by the fact that I'm feeling it alone, that I can't melt into Nick's hug, that there's no one to hold me. He has to be feeling the same. I'm not there for him any longer. I guess he came here to feel close to me.

I put my hand out to touch Nick again—I can't help myself—but my fingers just pass through his. Still, I feel a ripple of energy and I look up at him hopefully, but his face doesn't change.

“I don't understand,” I say. “I'm sitting on my floor, right? I'm touching it. Why can't I touch him?”

“You're not touching the floor,” says Thatcher, and when I look down I realize that I'm slightly above it, just a hair, hovering. “You're moving by memory, so it feels like you're on the floor, but you're not. You're in a remembered pose. Anything physical you experience is an illusion.”

“I felt something, though. Just now. Our fingers tingled, not in a way I've experienced before.”

“You still have an echo of your soul left in this dimension, and it brushed his soul, but the Living aren't usually conscious enough to notice that type of interaction.”

I want to push my sadness down, and the best way I know to do that is through action. So far, everything I've tried has been pretty ineffectual.

“How does this haunting thing work?” I ask Thatcher. “Will it make him feel better?”

“When it's done right.”

I look up at him, a definite challenge in the set of my mouth. “Then teach me how to do it right.”

Thatcher kneels beside me. His warmth surrounds me almost as solidly as his arms might. “What your presence does is offer him a sense of peace. He may never realize that you're here, but your energy echoing in the space with his is enough.”

I sigh, frustrated. “Isn't there a way to show him that I'm really here?”

Nick's phone rings, and we fall silent as he puts it up to his ear.

“Nothing,” he says, plucking aimlessly at the penguin's fur with his free hand.

Sweeping his gaze slowly around the room, he quietly responds to the voice on the other end of the line: “Nowhere.”

It's a while before he speaks again, and I try to decipher what the other person is saying, but I just hear muffled noise.

Then, suddenly, Nick's face crumples and he lets go of the penguin, covering his eyes as he doubles over on the window seat and chokes on his next words.

“It's my fault.”

A new kind of pain hits me—it's guilt and sorrow and rage rolled into one storm of emotion at the unfairness of everything.
He thinks my death was his fault.

“No!” I scream, but of course he doesn't hear me, doesn't even glance up. I search wildly around the room, wanting to throw an object to the floor, make my presence known. But when I swipe at the glass perfume bottle on my dresser, it's like I'm a hologram. It doesn't even rattle a little bit.

“Help me!” I shout at Thatcher in frustration. “Can't you see that I need to reach him?”

“Calm down.” Thatcher's voice is maddeningly composed. “Your energy is intense, and your memories are strong, stronger than most. But if you're too worked up, we'll have to leave.”

I stare at him hard. “You said you were here to help me make a connection. So do it already!”

“Callie, you—”

“Okay. I'll come.” Nick's voice interrupts Thatcher.

With a tightening in my chest and an ache in my heart, I watch Nick pull himself together as he hangs up the phone. He's struggling to be brave, to be strong. I want to be there for him so badly. But I don't know how. He walks over to my desk and fingers a pendant he gave me—an amber heart on a silver chain.

When I was little, my mother gave me a heart-shaped jade charm, and I kept it on my desk. After she died, I lost it—but I never stopped hoping I'd find it, so I could hold on to that piece of her. When I told Nick that story, he bought me the amber heart, “not as a replacement,” he said, “but as a reminder that other people love you, too.”

He removes it from its chain and slips it into his pocket. Then he crawls back out the window onto the strong branch of the oak tree.

I try to rush after him, but Thatcher gets in front of me and I repel back, that strange sensation of undulating waves pushing at me.

“Get out of my way!”

“You can't reach him right now,” he says sternly.

“I have to talk to him!” I'm pleading with Thatcher to understand, to help. “He didn't even realize I was here.”

“You need to calm down. Relax.”

“Don't tell me to relax.” Nick's car rumbles in the driveway, and I scream at Thatcher. “He's leaving!”

“If you go after him now, you won't be able to do anything,” he says, not getting out of my way, his stance one of a warrior protecting his turf. Even in death, he's stronger than I am. I know it; I can feel the power emanating from him. “Do you remember what I was telling you? To reach them, you have to be in a calm state, and it helps if they are, too. Then they're more open to sensing us.”