Between Seasons (16 page)

“Yeah, I guess.” Sara shrugged again. “I’m not a danger to myself or others, if that’s what you mean.”

“Huh. Well, considering you’re my next door neighbor, I’ll take that as a good sign,” she teased, but her smile slipped as she watched Sara take the kettle off the stove when it whistled and pour water into the mugs. “Just… I’m here for you, too, you know. Whatever it is, you can talk to me.”

Sara handed Megan her tea without a word and sat across the table. “Thanks. This is, uh, something I’m not ready to discuss.”

Megan set her cup down and held both hands out in front of her, her tone agreeable. She looked... apologetic. “Hey, no problem. I’ll back off.”

They sipped their tea in silence, Sara’s foot bouncing under the table. Patrick’s fingers twitched as the void in the conversation grew uncomfortable, and he released a long, irritated sigh, regretting it immediately when Sara’s head snapped in his direction. Megan seemed oblivious, though .

“So, how’d you enjoy your first summer on the east coast?” Megan asked, voice cheerful.

Sara slowly swiveled her head back. “Oh, uh, good, I guess. I didn’t really do much except hang out around the house. You and Roger took Steph to the beach a few times, right?”

Megan chattered about their trips down the shore, Patrick grateful to her for filling the space with sound. Sara glanced out the window, nodding and murmuring, “uh huh” and “oh yeah?” at appropriate intervals, all the while sneakily casting glances every few minutes toward the counter where Patrick leaned. It was unsettling –she seemed to stare right at him, but he knew she couldn’t see him .

At least he didn’t think so.

“Are you ready for the fall?”

“Huh?” Sara pursed her lips and drew her eyebrows together, clearly not expecting the question. Patrick had been too caught up in studying the slim lines of her face to pay attention to the conversation, but he ’d heard that.

Pride goeth before the fall
, he thought. He had no idea what that meant, but the words ricocheted around in his head.

“Well, you know, fall is actually pretty nice around here, but it gets fairly chilly. Do you even have the clothes for that? I mean, it probably never really got that cold in L.A., right? You lived in Portland for a while too?”

“Yeah, I grew up near Portland. It gets colder there... like, in the forties.”

“I’ve heard it rains a lot there.”

“No, not really. I mean, it’s not like it’s Seattle or anything. Do you get a lot of snow here in the winter?”

“It depends on what you mean by a lot. Last year we got a ridiculous amount – four feet in the span of a week.”

Sara’s face blanched. “Really?”

“Oh, yeah. We were actually trapped in the house for a few days. There was just nothing Roger could do. Media’s pretty small, but it took the city, like, a week to get all the streets plowed.”

Patrick could see the wheels turning in Sara’s head, and he knew exactly what she was thinking – if it snowed that way again, she’d have nowhere to escape to, no place to get away from him. It was a good sign she was imagining herself still in the house then, though. He’d take whatever part of her he could get, as long as she stayed.

“Don’t worry,” Megan added. “That was really unusual. Normally we get an inch or two here and there. Enjoy the fall while it’s here, though –it’ll get a lot colder than forty .”

The picture of the barren landscape in winter came to Patrick’s mind. He hated looking outside and seeing everything dead. The trees were nothing but skeletal structures, and while he knew they were just hibernating, gathering energy to bloom again in the spring, it made him feel as though the entire world was just as destitute as he was –no hope, no joy. With spring this year had come Sara, and he knew joy like he’d never experienced. Now that fall approached , he wasn’t sure what Sara would really do. She was so scared all the time… so nervous.

If she left him in the coming weeks, it would be terrible… but it would be appropriate. Entirely what Patrick had come to associate with the fall. He’d died in the fall, and he would die again if she abandoned him.

It sounded melodramatic – and maybe it was – but he didn’t have anything except her. Death had stripped him of every pleasure and not given him anything in return but years of waiting for something else to happen. Sara provided warmth and comfort. Taking that away would be the cruelest thing. Being dead sucked. Being left behind sucked. Not having Sara would be torture.

Megan stayed another thirty minutes, she and Sara discussing the issue of getting the house ready for the winter. Patrick kept his place in the corner, brooding about the possibility of life without Sara. Each breath he took rattle d in his dead lungs, pushing his chest uselessly to contract and expand. He ached for this woman. With each blink of his eyes, every movement of his body –she was everything , and to lose her would be worse than… anything.

Maybe this was all part of the plan. Maybe he was meant to be a martyr, but his brief life hadn’t included enough suffering. In truth, he’d had it pretty easy, aside from breaking his neck on the stairs. Or… maybe he was God. Maybe he was some deity with a memory problem, and this house was really Heaven . Sara and Megan, Mrs. Stout… they were all dead and simply occupying his personal space from time to time while he figured it out.

Patrick squeezed his eyes shut and considered commanding Sara to kiss him. He doubted that’s what a God would think about, and he didn’t feel very powerful. He blinked hard and pushed his thumbs into the corners of his eyes, wishing he really could make things the way he wanted. Of course, wishing never had done him a bit of good.

Sara grabbed her keys and muttered something about going to the library. The breeze blew the desiccated leaves from the imagined branches in Patrick’s head, and the fall winds howled in his ear, and he shivered. It wasn’t cold, not yet... not that he could ever get cold. He stood at the front door as it closed behind her, letting in a gust of still-humid and hot August air. This life would end, and he would lose everything that meant something to him. His parents were already gone, along with his fantasy of meeting them in Heaven . His religious faith changed every other day. The only concrete thing he had just walked out the door.

Patrick took a step and then another, wanting only to stop the longing and aching in his body, the perpetual winter numbess. His body felt stiff, like the starchy hay stuffed in a scarecrow, his joints frozen with ice from the pond where he used to ice skate. He pushed through the wood of the front door, determined… and then nothingness.

It was the sunshine warm on his face that woke him. He hadn’t felt the heat on his skin this way in… longer than he could remember. The bed sheets rustled against him, tangling in his legs. It felt nice –the pillow under his cheek was cool, but something warm and soft pressed against his body.

“Good morning, baby,” Sara whispered, lips curling against his ear.

He rolled toward her, gathering her to push his nose into the crook of her neck, breathing in the close, sleepy smell. It was bliss. This was Heaven ; it had to be. She threw the covers off with her leg and slung her knee over his thighs, capturing him in a pretzel-like embrace.

“Hey, angel. Whatdya wanna do today?” He clutched a handful of her hair and yanked playfully. It brushed against the palm of his hand, sliding through his fingers. He smiled and pulled her closer still , so giddy about the way she seemed to naturally fit against his side.

“I don’t know.” Sara laughed, the sound rumbling through her skin and tickling his face. “We can stay in bed all day if you want.”

He twisted his nose to the side and kissed her chin. “That sounds like a gas.”

“A gas?” She snickered and rubbed his hip. “We need to get you caught up.”

“Oh, sure, make fun of your idiot boyfriend who loves you.”

“I love you too,” she teased. “I do, you know?”

“Love you too. So much.” He kissed her chin again, biting lightly at her jaw line. “Mmmm, this is good.”

“Yeah. I never thought…”

“Me neither,” he admitted, slipping his arm around her slight waist and pulling the covers back over her torso. “It’s…”

“… a miracle,” she finished, grinning. “I do have a confession to make, though.”

“What’s that?” He stroked the fiery skin of her back under the tank top she wore.

“I think I might blow off writers’ group tonight.”

Patrick’s forehead drew up in confusion, taking in the mischievous light in her eyes. So dark, those eyes, barely a hint of dark green at the pupil and a ring of solid black at the edges. “That’s hardly a confession.”

“After the things I think I want to do to you, I might need one.” She waggled her eyebrows at him suggestively.

He threw off the blankets, and tickled her, both of them laughing. “You’re going to turn into a Catholic yet!”

She batted his hands away, grabbing at his forearm. “Come back to bed, Patrick.”

He rolled over and groaned, snapping to awareness with a start. He wasn’t in a soft, warm bed with Sara snuggled up to him. It was the same as always –he hovered in the air in Sara’s office where his bed had been, and the second he thought it, he managed to right himself. The scent of butter and sugar eddied around him. The cold descended through his limbs again, the heaviness depressing. Maybe he should run back out the front door again… at the very least, maybe he could pick up in that dream where he left off.

“Shit. That dream was so strange,” he muttered, noticing the way the light slanted through the window. It was getting later, maybe late afternoon.

“Was it?”

Patrick whipped around, nearly losing his balance. Sara sat at her desk, her back to him and laptop open in front of her.

“Sorry, Sara.”
Shit
! He’d broken his promise to keep quiet, stay away.

“What for?” She was distracted but calm, and Patrick wondered why she wasn’t freaking out. The nerves seemed gone, and in their place was this serenity and lightness he didn’t know what to do with.

The room shimmered with tension, although as far as he could tell, it was all one sided – she seemed to be complete unaffected, simply continuing to type. His mouth opened and closed without any words pushing past his lips . Maybe he was still dreaming.

“Uh, for… talking. I’ve been trying to –”

“Yeah, I know,” she interrupted. “I asked you to give me time, and you did. I appreciate it.”

She still hadn’t turned around. “Are you okay? I mean, earlier you seemed so, well, upset.”

“I dug it up.”

Patrick’s eyes went wide as she set a rusted coffee can on the desk to her side, the metal clinking dully on wood.

“Oh.” He had no idea what else to say. She appeared to have come to some sort of peace with the idea of him, enough to speak to him without going nuts , but he didn’t know what that meant. For all he knew, she was going to announce she planned to sell the house.

“And then I just wrote a scene. We were in bed together… I could see it in my head, Patrick. I could see it clear as day, except you didn’t look like you anymore… but I knew it was you because you called you me ‘angel’.”

“You… I… wow. I was asleep. Dreaming, you know?”

She laughed. “Ghosts can dream? Huh. I learn something new every day.”

Something was definitely off. She was too laid back, too calm… not anywhere near the panicked girl she’d been the last time he’d seen her or spoken to her .

“Not that I want you to go ape or anything, but why, uh, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know. I guess… digging up the can and, well, if I’m going crazy, I just… think I’m okay with it. I realized it’s not like I want to hurt myself because I’m imagining you. You’re nice. So what if you’re a figment of my imagination?”

“Well, I’m not. A figment, I mean.”

“Maybe. I mean, there is the can to consider. And the sea glass.”

“You have my books and records too.”

“Yeah, but,” she said, swiveling the chair and continuing to talk as it spun, “that stuff –oh, my God!” She stared in his direction , a horrified but fascinated expression on her face.

“What?” Patrick turned and looked behind him, expecting to see a spider or something on the wall.

She stood, the sea glass pinched between her index finger and thumb, and took a halting step forward. “Patrick?”

“Yeah.”

Another step in his direction. “I can… see you.”

His mind went completely blank, a dull roar ringing in his ears. It... wasn’t possible. There was nowhere to look that made sense –Sara’s face was too composed, the room too familiar. If he was surprised at her words, he was flabbergasted at his.

“I don’t look all gross or anything, do I?” Patrick asked, pressing his hands into tight bundles. The thoughts now swirling in his head were nonsensical –just because he saw himself as his very normal-looking nineteen -year-old self in the mirror didn’t mean Sara did… and maybe that was why she’d been a spaz when she saw him in the mirror that one time. She’d never mentioned it, and he never thought to wonder about it until now. It would be a real shame to have his skin hanging off or be all gross and skeletal like Mrs. Bates or something.

Sara peered at him, eyebrows drawing together. “No, no boogers or anything. Do ghosts get boogers?”

He threw his head back and laughed, the sound startling loud. “That wasn’t what I was ta –you know what? Never mind.” Without even thinking about it, his hands went to his hair, smoothing the feathered sides. “So… you can really see me?” Some semblance of rational thought returned to him, calming his shifting eyes and clenched fists.

Her fingers arced through the air between them. “Yeah,” she answered, her voice halfway between wonder and excitement. Her hand jutted forward, touching his arm. They both gasped and sprang apart.

“Whoa!” Her fingers hadn’t actually passed through him, although it didn’t feel the same as a regular touch. It was lighter, more delicate, like the flutter of eyelashes against his cheek. And he could feel the warmth of her skin even though his shirt. “That’s…”

“… different,” she finished, taking a step forward and touching his hair. “You know you’re in style again.”