Beyond (14 page)

What’s falling on us right now is called a Pineapple Express. That’s when a storm comes all the way from Hawaii, filling up on the warm waters of the South Pacific and dumping it on the coast here.

I head back to the car before I get washed over the edge.

Shutting out the rain, I check my cell phone and find new texts from Mom. The usual stuff:
where R U? what U up 2? how U feelin?
I text her back:
me + Lexi nowhere special, feeling fine
.

Mom probably knows exactly where I am. She’s been tracking the GPS in my cell since I refused to wear my magic ring everywhere.

Flicking through the photos on my phone, I see shots of me and Lexi from our fashion show today. Her looking hot, me not. Then I find two pictures of Ryan that I dug
up way back before I got nailed. One is from the digital yearbook on the website of his high school, up the coast in Heron’s Landing, where he graduated last year. It’s a standard academic mug shot. The other pic is from the greenhouse site, showing him holding a basketful of hothouse tomatoes, with a big ridiculous smile.

Maybe we could have been something.

I’ve got the night-blooming jasmine he gave me on my bedside table, filling the air with soothing scent molecules.

When Lexi joins me I’m drying out with the heat on and the stereo blasting. She tosses her slicker in back and rubs her hands in the rush of warm air from the vent.

“Where now?” she shouts over the music.

“Nowhere.”

She’s okay with that. So we ease the seats back, putting our feet up on the dash. The stereo’s so loud I can’t hear myself think. And I like it.

Forgetting everything. Breathing easy for a while.

“Quick, turn on your TV,” Lexi tells me when I answer my phone. I just got home from our spa day an hour ago.

“Why? What’s—”

“Channel nine. Quick!”

“Okay, calm down.” I flick on the little TV on top of my dresser. “Now, what am I looking at?”

“Just watch.”

It’s the six o’clock news. A woman wearing sunglasses is standing on the lawn in front of a house, with a bunch of microphones aimed at her. She’s leaning on a bearded man who’s got his arm around her shoulders.

“I thought not knowing was worse than anything,” she says, her voice cracking. “But now we’ve lost him all over again. We never gave up hope. It was all we had. Now there’s just … nothing.”

The caption at the bottom of the screen reads
PARENTS OF MURDERED BOY
.

The woman starts to break down. “I’m sorry … I can’t …” She turns from the camera sobbing, and the man leads her toward the house.

The picture cuts to a reporter. “This afternoon the parents of Leo Gage were notified that the remains found last week after a landslide in Edgewood were positively identified as their son. It was eighteen years ago that Leo went missing. Back then he was just thirteen years old when he was last seen on a sunny September day in this small coastal town of Ferny.”

His picture fills the screen. A grinning red-head, with
amber
eyes. My heart skips a beat.

He’s the guy from the hospital clinic, from my nightmare in the scanner. He’s not painfully thin and sickly in the picture, like when I saw him. But I’m sure.

My knees go shaky and I sit down on the foot of my bed.

“Hey, you still with me?”

I jump at the faraway voice coming from the phone in my lap. Oh, Lexi.

“That’s him,” I tell her.

“Yeah. They identified the body with dental records.”

“No. I mean, that’s the guy I saw at the clinic yesterday.”

There’s a long silence on her end.

On the TV they’re showing old footage of the original search from years ago. Cops and volunteers combing the woods. Dogs trying to pick up the scent.

“You sure?” Lexi asks finally.

“Yeah.”

“Wow. That’s just …”

The screen shows the MISSING poster of Leo Gage.

“This is deeply weird,” Lexi says.

Below his photo on the poster, his height, weight and description are listed. And at the bottom it reads:

Last seen wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans and black rain boots
.

What he was wearing at the hospital.

Leo Gage.

Unbelievable. As they show the interview with the grieving mother again, I realize she looks familiar too somehow. And that blue house behind her.

I’ve seen that place somewhere.

But how? Where? The memory stays teasingly out of reach.

I focus on the house. It almost feels like I’ve been there. Been inside.

I gasp.

“You okay, Jane?” I can’t speak.

Because I know where I’ve seen that woman, and her blue house. It was when I died and my shadow came for me. Sharing its memories, showing me pieces of its life.

His life. This dead guy. Leo Gage.

It was him! He was waiting for me when I flatlined.

“Jane, can you hear me?” Lexi asks.

I try to find my voice.

“Jane? What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” I say. “He’s my shadow.”

Me and Lexi sit in front of her computer watching a stranger’s home movies.

After they identified his body yesterday, Leo’s story has been all over the news. They keep playing footage from when he disappeared. Interviews with the parents, their pleas to whoever took their son to let him go. Candlelight vigils held in a nearby park. Neighbors tying blue ribbons for Leo Gage around trees, street signs and mailboxes.

And then there are these movies. Heartbreaking stuff from when he was a kid. Leo in his pajamas on Christmas morning, with his hair sticking up from bed, knee-deep in torn gift wrappings. Sunburned at the beach, carrying a shovel and pail. Bouncing on a trampoline. All happy and hyper. Then, when he’s older, skateboarding in the driveway and wiping out.

Leo Gage. My shadow has a name. I’m trying to wrap my head around that.

I went sleepless last night, coming to grips with all of
this. Lexi’s been helping me piece it together. It’s great having an insomniac best friend, on call at all hours.

So here’s what we figured out—

Leo has been with me for a long time. Since I was little. Watching and waiting to take me down.

But now he’s not hiding in my shadow anymore. I saw him at the clinic, heard his voice. I’m sure he was that
thing
breaking out of the cooler at the shop and scratching under the floorboards of my room.

But who knows why he chose
me
to haunt for all these years?

And I never really lost him, when they brought me back from the dead and I broke away. I didn’t leave him behind.

It’s as if on my return trip to the living after I got nailed, the gate to the other side got left open a crack, setting him free. So he’s not just a shadow now—he’s a real
ghost
.

And he’s gotten stronger. Before, my shadow would manipulate my body to make me hurt myself. But on the night of the landslide it stretched beyond the limits of my flesh, reaching out to where those remains lay buried, bringing the hillside crashing down.

Then I realized something else when I was thinking about the familiar stretch of road that got buried in the slide. The place was so familiar to me because that was where Constable Granger found me walking the center line in my sleep. And that’s not the only time they caught me wandering unconscious on that road. It’s like I was always headed there.

Everybody has a theory about why I’ve been sleepwalking. Mom thinks it means I want to run away. Dad calls it a death wish. The doctor says it’s a side effect of my brain injury. But they’re wrong—I’m sure of it now.

It’s been my shadow all along. He led me to that spot, near his hidden grave. I just know it. Maybe so he could bring that hill down on me and bury me with him. Or maybe he was trying to get me run over on the way. But my shadow is behind my sleepwalking.

It wants me dead. I just don’t know why.

“Want some?” Lexi asks, offering me the bowl of popcorn she’s been munching on.

“It’s not really popcorn kind of viewing for me.”

“I know. It’s just that I eat when I’m nervous. Or freaked out.”

“You’re freaked? I just found out a dead guy’s been haunting me since I was a kid.”

On the screen, Leo’s laughing and wrestling with the family dog. I shake my head. That’s not the ghost I know—the dark thing he’s changed into.

Watching him, I feel a familiar shudder squirming up my spine.

Glancing back quickly, I find only empty air.

But I can sense it right now. My shadow.
Him
. In the room with us. So close. Like he’s peering over my shoulder to watch these scenes from his life.

“You okay?” Lexi asks.

“No. I’m not.”

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s here. He’s here.”

“Him?” Lexi frowns; then her eyebrows shoot up. She points to the guy on the screen.

I nod.

“Here in the room?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Behind me.”

“No way.” She gets up to take a look around, sees nothing. “So. What do we do?”

I just shake my head. What can I do?

“But it only ever hurts you if you piss it off, right? I mean, if you … cheat on it.”

“I—I haven’t done anything like that.”

I’m not telling just Lexi, but my ghost too. I’ve been playing by its rules. Why won’t it leave me alone?

“Maybe it’s just trying to scare you, then, like it’s been doing lately. Just … here to haunt you or whatever. You ever try talking to it? To him?”

“Just when I tell him to go away and leave me alone.”

“How about if I give it a try?”

“What for?”

“Can’t hurt, right?”

I shrug. “Okay, I guess.”

“All right. How do I start?” She thinks about it a moment. “Um, Leo? You there?” She waits for an answer. “Can you maybe give us a sign you’re here? Anything? Flick the lights or something?”

Silence.

“He doesn’t do tricks,” I tell her.

“Right. Okay, then. How about we get to the main
question? What do you want?” She pauses. Silence. “If you want something, you’ve got to let us know somehow.”

Not a whisper.

I don’t like this. We should stop.

“Why are you so stuck on Jane?”

I’m about to say “Quit it” when my thoughts start to go fuzzy. There’s a buzzing in my head.

No, stop! I try to speak, but my voice won’t work. Don’t!

My head’s spinning, and I almost fall off the chair. He’s taking control. Can’t fight it.

My left hand moves in my lap. I look down, watching it like it belongs to someone else. Then its shadow stretches up, reaching over to Lexi’s desk, dragging my fingers along with it. I don’t know what it’s going for till it grabs a pen. There’s a spiral-bound notebook beside the keyboard. My hand comes to rest on top of a page of Lexi’s notes.

Holding the pen tight in my fist, my hand starts scratching at the paper.

“What are you doing?” Lexi’s standing right next to me, but she sounds so far away.

Something’s taking shape on the page. The rapid strokes are sketching a dark figure in black ink.

“Jane, you still with me?” She passes her hand in front of my eyes, but I keep drawing. “Don’t screw around.”

I can’t answer.

“What is that?” Lexi leans in to look. “A bird?”

A bird? Yes. That’s it. Coming into focus now—wings
stretched out, a curved beak, the feet ending in claws. Maybe a crow.

“Jane, come on. Say something.”

My voice is lost. No words will come.

“Leo?” she tries. “Is that you?”

I lean on the pen too heavy, ripping the paper as I slash three lines beside the crow, making a
Y
.

“
Y?
Yes? Is that a yes?”

I retrace the letter, tearing deeper.

“Hold on.” Lexi lifts my hand so she can turn to a new page.

I start filling the fresh paper with a rough square, sketching a shallow triangle on top. I dig at the page, darkening the outline, then making a small rectangle standing inside the square. Like a door.

“A house?” Lexi guesses.

My hand pauses, then slashes another
Y
.