A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara) (16 page)

“This didn’t start until I found Daniel and
realized what I’d done,” the ghost answered her, a look of pain crossing his
face as he looked down at the boy, still sitting on the ground. Akira nodded.
That was why she avoided certain subjects with ghosts. Even seemingly calm
spirits could get dangerous if they got too upset.

“And I’ve been trying so hard to get someone
inside to listen to me, but they just won’t.”

Akira stood. The boy was no longer weeping, just
playing with the grass, trying to make blades move to no avail. “They can’t see
you or hear you.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “Why can you?”

Akira lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “Just
lucky, I guess.” She tried to keep the words light.

“Not so lucky if you’re scared of me,” the ghost
answered. “I won’t hurt you. Not on purpose, anyway.”

Hmm, Akira thought. He was perceptive for a
ghost. Or maybe a hint of her true feelings had slipped out. But she could see
that his edges had started to solidify. He was calming down.

“I thought maybe we were trapped here until there
was a service. You know, a funeral. But they’ll never find our bodies.”

Akira knew that wasn’t right. She was quite sure
that Dillon had had a proper funeral, as had plenty of the ghosts she’d known
in the past. A funeral wasn’t a magic ticket to another world. But she glanced
at the house, thinking of the woman inside. She didn’t want to lie to this
ghost, but maybe she didn’t need to tell him the whole truth, either.

“Do you want me to tell them where your bodies
are?” she asked, trying to keep her voice neutral.

***

A relative. Damn it. She was about to talk to a
relative.

These things just never ended well.

Akira stood in the doorway, trying to decide what
to say, how to approach the subject. Oh, by the way, your ex-husband was just
careless, not malicious? He didn’t actually murder your kid, just hid the body?
No, that wasn’t the right starting place.

Zane and the blonde woman were sitting on the
couch, Zane holding both of the woman’s hands in his. Although she knew there
was nothing romantic or sexual in the touch, Akira felt a slight prickle of
annoyance. Not that there was anything serious between her and Zane, but still,
somewhere less than twelve hours ago, those hands had been touching her in very
intimate places. Seeing them touching another woman just felt wrong.

Lucas was standing next to Zane, watching his
brother. Two men stood a few steps behind him, also watching intently. FBI
agents, Akira wondered? They could be, she supposed. They fit her stereotypical
image of FBI agents, with unflattering suits, boring ties, and short hair.
Farther away, where the family room met the kitchen, another cluster of people
stood gathered around a table, some with heads down over a map, some talking in
quiet voices.

So many people, she thought. Hell. Could she
really do this? Before she had a chance to decide, a shock—as if she’d just
been doused with ice water—ran through her. She shuddered convulsively and
gasped, feeling the energy pouring into her veins, jolting its way along her
spine. The adult ghost appeared inside the room, no longer pink-tinged.

“Don’t do that,” she hissed at him. Ugh, it hurt.
She shivered again, blinking back tears of pain.

“You could feel me?” he asked, surprised, as the
people closest to the door, including Zane, all looked in Akira’s direction.

“Of course I can,” she started to say irritably,
but before more than the second word slipped through her lips, she noticed the
people looking at her and pressed her lips together, looking up and away and at
anything but them.

Before she had time to do more than take another
breath, Zane was standing in front of her, his hands on her shoulders. “You
okay?” he asked. She looked up at him. His face was serious and she could see
the worry in his eyes.

She had told him nothing about ghosts, she
realized. Nothing at all. All he knew was that she didn’t want people to know
she could see them, and that she didn’t like having her ability. And yet he was
still worried about her, still quick to jump up from what he was doing to make
sure that nothing was wrong. She nodded at him and tried to smile.

“They’re both ghosts,” she whispered to him. “And
both here.”

His eyes widened just slightly and he glanced
over his shoulder at the woman sitting on the couch and then quickly back at
Akira. “What do you want to do?” he asked her in a hushed voice.

She shrugged uncertainly, feeling helpless. “Did
you tell Lucas? About Dillon?” Grace and Nat and Max and Zane had all spent
some time sitting in the car after Akira had confirmed that it was, in fact,
haunted and that Dillon could hear them, but only Zane regularly visited. Akira
didn’t know whether that was because Zane had warned the others off or whether
it was too painful for them. The idea of a ghost could be comforting, but it
was also an ever-present reminder of loss. She understood if it was easiest for
the Latimers to let Dillon be, trusting that he was okay in her company.

She paused, because Zane was shaking his head no.
“We decided to wait until he was home for a visit.”

“So, does he know about me?” she whispered. “My,
um, quirk, I mean?”

Zane shook his head no again. But he didn’t have
a chance to say anything further, because Lucas was abruptly speaking, his
voice carrying across the room, “Folks, we need some privacy for a while.
Please clear the room. Jane, why don’t you set up in the front? Mark, maybe you
could take a couple of people on a lunch run?” Quickly, efficiently, almost
ruthlessly, and within the space of sixty seconds, everyone except Lucas,
Diane, Zane, Akira—and the ghost—was out of earshot.

“He really does read minds, doesn’t he?” Akira
said to Zane.

He managed a smile. “How’d you guess?”

“All right, what was that about Dillon?” Lucas
asked, crossing to where they were standing.

“Dillon?” Diane stood, also joining them by the
door. “What’s going on? Who’s Dillon? Is there someone out there?”

Akira looked at them, at Lucas’ frown, Diane’s worry,
Zane’s concern for her.

Great.

Double the relatives, double the trouble. Then
she took a deep breath and started to explain.

Diane fainted. Then she cried. Then she got mad.
Akira was impressed with the range of her vocabulary and secretly glad that her
ex-husband was the ghost and not Diane. She didn’t want to know what Diane’s
energy would look like, and Rob took the yelling without as much as a flicker
of his own energy. Then Diane cried again.

Lucas, though, got colder. The charm disappeared,
leaving only the dangerous toughness in its place. If he’d been the brother
interviewing her in Tassamara, Akira would never have taken the job, she knew.
And while Diane cried and screamed, he disappeared to arrange the search for
the bodies.

Rob had lost his job several months ago, he told
Akira. The house was headed into foreclosure, and he and Diane had split up. He’d
bought the swing set when Diane was pregnant, and Diane had always said it was
too big for the boy. When Daniel fell while Rob was at the house taking care of
him, Rob broke. He’d taken Daniel’s body and driven the car to an old quarry
that was filled with water, a place that he and Diane had gone diving in
earlier, happier days. He’d headed straight into the water. He hadn’t been
thinking about a next, about what happened after, he’d just despaired.

“I couldn’t imagine telling her,” Rob said,
watching Diane cry. “I didn’t know how much worse it would be not to be able to
tell her.”

She nodded. He wasn’t the first ghost she’d met
who had been surprised and frustrated by his afterlife.

“So what happens now?” he asked.

Akira shrugged. Personally, she was hoping for a
ride back to the airport and a smooth flight home. But he wouldn’t mean what
would happen to her, he wanted to know what would happen to him and Daniel and
she had no idea.

“Aren’t you supposed to find us a white light?”

Akira sighed. She’d warmed up to Rob’s ghost
during the past half-hour and if he could handle Diane’s diatribes without
losing control, he could probably handle what she had to say, too. “The 1970’s
has a lot to answer for. Watergate, bellbottoms, disco. And that whole white
light idea.”

Zane was perched on the couch next to the sobbing
Diane, patting her back helplessly and handing her tissues. At Akira’s words,
he looked up. She could read the plea in his eyes, and she tucked her hands
behind her back and sidled sideways, closer to the door. He was doing a fine
job with the tissues, much better than she would in his place. His look changed
to one of mild exasperation and she tried to look apologetic without implying
that she would be helpful. Crying relatives were better than angry relatives
but not by much. She never knew what to say or do.

“I suppose that makes sense,” Rob said. “In the
earliest afterlife myths, there’s no white light. In fact, in Plato’s Republic,
in the story of Er, there’s a rainbow.”

“The story of who?” Akira asked.

“Er. Yes, Er. Not Um. I know the jokes.” He was
looking around. “But there should be a passageway first. A door. A staircase.
Something like that.”

Abruptly, he disappeared. Startled, Akira looked
around. Was he gone? But no, he’d just walked through the glass. He was
outside, talking to the little boy. Now that Akira had absorbed some of his
energy and he had calmed down, he could get close to the little ghost without
hurting him. Akira slid open the door and stepped out onto the patio.

“Do you see a door, Daniel?” the father was
saying.

“Dada, Dada,” the little boy chortled happily,
hugging his father’s legs. “Dada.”

“Oh, Daniel,” Rob scooped the ghost boy up,
hugging him close, and burying his face in the boy’s blond head for a second.
Then he said again, “Do you see a door, Daniel? Look around really carefully.”

The boy obeyed, then shook his head. “Back door,
Dada?” he asked, pointing at the house.

“Not the door to the house, another door.”

Daniel shook his head again, then frowned, and
kicked to be let down. “Dis way?” He sounded almost curious, as he walked past
the swing set. Rob watched him, eyes searching as if he was trying to see what
Daniel was seeing. “Come, Dada,” the boy ordered, holding out his hand. “Come
wit me.”

“I don’t see it, Daniel.” Rob sounded sad. “But
you go ahead.”

“No, Dada.” The little boy shook his head, and
waved at his father imperiously. “You come. Come me. Dis way. You see?”

The grief on Rob’s face was so intense that Akira
could hardly bear to look at him, and his voice was choked, as he repeated, “I
don’t see it, Daniel. You go ahead and I’ll—and I’ll catch up to you someday.”

“No, Dada.” Returning to his father’s side,
Daniel took Rob’s hand. “Dis way,” he insisted.

Rob looked down and smiled sadly, letting himself
be tugged along, as he said, “I’ll come with you as far as I can, Daniel, but
then you have to go on your own, all right? You won’t know her but Grandma will
be waiting for you and you’ll like . . . oh.”

On that final word—a startled but at the same
time almost calm exclamation—Rob and Daniel disappeared.

Ghosts disappeared.

They’d be there one day, and then the next, they
weren’t. Nothing about that surprised Akira.

But they didn’t disappear because they went
somewhere.

Where was there to go? They disappeared because
they were energy, and the energy changed forms or dissipated, right?

Right?

Akira sighed. She was staring out the window of
the plane, waiting for everyone else to take their seats, and trying to think
through what had happened today. Oh, not the drama of it all. Not the emotions,
the people, the dynamics, the complicated stuff. She just wanted to understand
the science.

Damn it, ghosts were energy. They didn’t go
places. Of course, theoretically, other dimensions could exist. The
cosmological multiverse theories postulated a potentially vast number of universes.
In fact, there was a cosmologist—at MIT, maybe?—who was working on a taxonomy
of universes beyond the observable one that people experienced every day. She
wondered what he would have to say if she could tell him what she saw.

“You okay?” Zane was buckling himself into the
seat next to her, pulling the long shoulder strap across his body and snapping
it into the clasp, but his worried eyes were locked on her face.

She ignored his question. “I’ve wasted a decade
of my life,” she said, as the realization hit her.

He didn’t smile, just tilted his head as if
encouraging her to go on.

“Energy research. I should have been studying
quantum physics all this time.” She shook her head. She’d gone into physics to
try to understand the way the universe worked, and she’d focused on energy
because her father had always insisted that the ghosts she saw were just
energy.