A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara) (22 page)

“Your pa would have made him marry you.” Henry tilted his
head, trying to understand.

“And then I would have been married to Tommy Shaw!” Rose’s rejection
of the suggestion brought her to her feet. “For the rest of my life? No, thank
you!” She paced away, across the kitchen, skirt flaring around her from the
strength of her movement.

Akira eyed her cautiously. There was no color change yet,
just the chill in the air, and Rose still seemed in control. But emotional
ghosts made her nervous. She looked at Henry. He was watching Rose, but he must
have seen the movement of her head, for he looked back at her. Maybe he
recognized her anxiety, because he changed the subject, saying to Rose, “I got
him back for that snake.”

Rose turned, and her smile lit up her face. “I knew that was
you. How did you do it?”

“I got the janitor to let me in,” Henry answered. “Old Mr.
Jackson, he didn’t mind. He thought it was funny.”

“Mrs. Brown was so mad. She gave every boy in class
detention. She knew it had to be one of them, but no one would own up to it.”

Henry grinned back at her, and for a moment, Akira could see
the boy he must have been. “I kept it real quiet after that. Didn’t want to get
beat up for getting them into hot water.” And then seeing Akira’s confused
expression, he added. “Tommy Shaw put a garter snake in Rose’s lunchbox one
time. We must have been about thirteen, fourteen years old.”

“Thirteen.” Rose shuddered. “It was my brand-new Hopalong
Cassidy lunchbox, and I was so proud of it. When I opened it up and that snake
slithered out, I cried.”

“I went down to the springs and caught some brown snakes.
Nice big ones, a couple feet long. Harmless, but easy to mistake for
cottonmouths. Stuck ‘em in Tommy’s desk. When he opened his desk, you could
hear the screaming half a block away.” Henry chuckled at the memory.

Rose smiled, too. “I wish I’d been remembering that snake
when he asked me out. I might have thought twice.”

A silence fell.

Akira gripped her glass tightly. She didn’t want to ask but
she had to. Henry’s existence depended on it. “Pennyroyal tea?” she prompted
cautiously.

“My parents would have sent me away. Everyone in town would
have known. People always did.” Rose’s words were more sad than heated, and
Akira took a deep breath, realizing for the first time that she’d been holding
it. She understood now what the pennyroyal tea was for and what Rose had done,
and she felt a pang of sympathy for the scared teenager Rose must have been.

“It doesn’t matter,” Henry said. “God can forgive anything.”

“Well, I didn’t ask to be forgiven,” Rose responded with a
toss of the head. “I died before I could have.”

“First John 1:9 says ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful
and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.’”
Henry answered. “It doesn’t say anything about whether you have to be alive or
dead when you confess.”

“‘The dead were judged according to what they had done,’
Revelations,” Rose snapped back. “I went to Sunday school every week, too,
Henry Powell.”

As the two ghosts argued about the Bible, Akira thought. She
was convinced that fading away was bad. Maybe she was wrong: maybe slowly
fading was just a gradual transformation. But if Henry became like the boys in
the back, repeating the same actions as if on an endless loop, she felt some
essential part of him would be lost forever. No, Rose needed to convince him to
go through the hole or door or whatever it was.

But burning in a pit of everlasting fire? It didn’t sound
good. She could understand why Rose was reluctant to take the chance.

Still, if the Bible was literal truth, she’d be in that pit
of fire, too, for the sin of communicating with ghosts. And yet what choice did
she have? If there was a God and he didn’t want her to see ghosts, he shouldn’t
have made so many of them. Asking her to stop meeting ghosts was like asking
her to stop the tide: she just wasn’t that powerful. But, wait—if there was a
God, wasn’t he all-powerful?

“No,” she interrupted the ghosts, turning to Rose. “You can’t
be right, Rose. You won’t go to hell. It doesn’t make sense.”

“The Bible doesn’t have to make sense, it just is,” Rose
replied, as Henry frowned.

“Not the Bible.” Akira waved that away. “Here’s the thing: if
God wanted you to burn in a pit of fire, you’d be there already. You’ve got a
lot of energy, but you can’t be more powerful than God, right?”

Rose looked doubtful, but Henry nodded eagerly. “That’s
right,” he said. “There’s no loophole that lets souls escape damnation. If you
were damned, you’d be in hell already.”

“Plus,” Akira added, “If you take Henry through the door, you’ll
be saving his soul, and God would have to appreciate that. That has to outweigh
anything bad you did while you were alive.”

Rose frowned, and crossed back to the table. Standing next to
them, she looked down on Henry. “Can’t you go on your own, Henry?” she asked,
her voice plaintive. “I like it here.”

Henry stood, reaching for her hand, and then sighed as his
hand went straight through her. “Rose, I had to leave you in life. Wasn’t
nothing I could do about it. But I loved you from the time I was a little boy,
and I’m not leaving you behind now.”

Akira bit her lip. Poor Henry. He was so sweet, so earnest,
and the thought of him loving Rose his whole life made her eyes prickle as if
she wanted to cry. Rose had to see that she couldn’t just let him waste away.

“All right,” Rose sighed. She looked over her shoulder and
her chin lifted. “But if I wind up burning for eternity, I’m going to be very,
very angry at you.” She swallowed hard and Akira could see that she was
mustering her courage. And then Rose turned, and with a sweep of her peach
skirts, stepped away and was gone.

“Thank you, Akira.” Henry’s eyes sparkled and his shoulders
straightened as if a huge weight had been lifted off his back. “Thank you so
much. You take care now.” He dusted himself off, tugging at his clothes as if
to make himself look a little neater, and then he, too, stepped forward and was
gone.

Wow. Akira sat, stunned. There was a door. And spirits could
go through it. And she’d just helped ghosts move on to another place. It was
amazing.

And then she realized what she’d done, and her mouth dropped
open, and she jumped to her feet, saying, “Wait, wait. Henry, come back! Rose!!”

Oh, shit, she thought frantically. What about Dillon?

Dillon grieved.

Akira couldn’t blame him.

The house was quieter, lonelier without Rose and Henry. Akira
missed Henry’s calm presence in the kitchen and Rose’s lively charm, and it was
worse for Dillon. The boys in the backyard were no company at all, so all he
had was Akira.

He took to spending more and more time in his car.

“Grace bought you ten new Kindles, Dillon. Don’t you want to
come into the lab and try to fry them?” Akira asked in desperation one
miserable day at the end of August. It was lunch time and she was sitting in
the car, air conditioning at full blast.

Whoever had chosen this car had been an idiot, she thought
wearily. A black car parked in the sun in Florida in August was an oven, and
even with the air-conditioning, she felt as if she was baking. But it was even
hotter outside the car, and she was worried about Dillon. She knew he could
stretch to reach the lab if he wanted to, but he hadn’t been willing to make
the effort for days.

What she really needed, she thought, was a ghost
psychologist.

“Maybe later,” Dillon said from the backseat. “You should go
in, though. It’s hot out here for you.”

“That’s for damn sure,” Akira muttered, checking the a/c
settings for the third time. Maybe it was broken?

“Tell me again how it happened.”

“Oh, Dillon.” Akira partially turned to face him, leaning
back and letting her head rest against the warm glass of the window. She felt
sticky with sweat. “I’ve told you.”

“When Henry died, he couldn’t find Rose,” he prompted her. “Start
there.”

Akira sighed. At least he didn’t want to hear about the door
again. She hadn’t seen the door herself, so she couldn’t really describe it,
but she felt as if she’d spent hours trying to explain it to Dillon. And then
he’d spent days trying to look over his shoulder, because of how she’d
described Rose’s way of looking at the door, as if it was somewhere behind her.
It was almost as if he hoped he’d find it, just out of sight behind him.

“Henry was in a place that wasn’t a cloud and wasn’t foggy
and wasn’t a white light or a rainbow light,” she started obediently, “but it
looked something like mother-of-pearl, and he was trying to find Rose. He didn’t
tell me anything about how long he looked or what it was like to be looking for
her, just that he couldn’t find her. And then he was in the kitchen of the
house.”

Damn it, she thought, watching his face. Maybe she was the
one who needed a shrink. Was she really making herself miserable worrying about
a teenage ghost? But she couldn’t help herself. She hated seeing him so
unhappy. And even more, she hated not knowing how to help him.

“Do you think maybe my Gran is looking for me?” Dillon’s
words were almost casual, but his blue eyes were intent on Akira’s. “Maybe that’s
why she’s still here?”

What? Oh, hell. Oh, no. Is that what he was thinking? Over
the course of the past few months, they’d almost stopped talking about the
ghost in the Latimer house. Grace’s researcher was still working, uncovering
ever more obscure ghost stories, but Grace hadn’t interviewed a new medium in
weeks. Akira had been perfectly content to adopt an out of sight, out of mind
philosophy when it came to that particular ghost.

“Even if she was,” Akira said, trying to pick her words
carefully. “There’s nothing we could do about it.” Dillon didn’t look convinced
and she sighed. “Dillon, there’s no way to get close to a ghost like that. It’d
be like walking into fire. The power will rip you apart.”

“But maybe if she saw me, she’d calm down,” Dillon said
stubbornly.

“It doesn’t work that way,” Akira insisted. “Ghosts that have
turned red, they’re not thinking any more. They’re just energy.”

“You said it was like they were psychotic or hallucinating.
You can talk to people who are hallucinating.”

“Not if they’re attacking you. The energy is destructive. You
wouldn’t be able to reach her.”

“You said ‘her.’ You think it’s my gran, too.”

“What difference does it make?” Akira demanded.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” Dillon answered. “I want
to go to see her.”

“What? No!” Akira’s response was immediate and instinctive.
There was no way, absolutely no way, that she and Dillon were going anywhere
near that house.

Five minutes later, she shivered in the cold. The only good
thing about arguing with a ghost was that the more upset Dillon got, the cooler
it got in the car.

“Well, there’s nothing you can do about it,” she finally
said, feeling put-upon but triumphant as she pulled out her trump card. “You
can’t get there without the car, and I won’t drive the car there.”

“Fine, I’ll walk,” Dillon snapped at her. “I know the way.”
With an indignant push, he forced himself out of the car and started walking.

Akira watched him stomping across the parking lot, feeling
self-righteously annoyed at him.

And then self-righteously annoyed and a little guilty.

And then a lot guilty and only a little annoyed.

It was his grandmother, after all. And he’d lost Rose and
Henry. He was lonely. And being stuck in the car couldn’t be fun. Maybe she
should have found a nicer way to say no. But he was so stubborn!

With a quiet thunk, the passenger door opened, and Zane slid
inside the car. “Hot day for this,” he said. “Dillon, can’t you make it into
the lab? Make life a little easier on Akira?”

Akira shook her head. “He’s not in the car.”

“Oh?” Zane looked at her, the question clear.

“He’s decided he has to go visit your mom,” she said
gloomily, watching Dillon’s back as he crossed the parking lot. She wondered
how far he’d get. She knew he’d managed to get several blocks away from the
car: before she left, he and Rose had been having fun seeing how far up Millard
Street they could get. There was a little park at the end of the street that
they’d been trying to reach.

“Isn’t that going to be tough?” Zane asked.

“Impossible, I think.” Akira slumped a little in the seat,
closing her eyes and leaning back against the headrest. Was Dillon suicidal?
Could a ghost be suicidal? Maybe, if he was trying to destroy himself. If only
she’d made Rose and Henry wait. If only she’d thought about Dillon, not just
Henry. How could she have been so stupid? She berated herself silently, not for
the first time.

A warm hand closed around hers and she opened her eyes,
startled.