Dust to Dust (14 page)

My eyes open with a start and I see a glow coming from my nightstand as my phone lights up with a text message.

The clock reads 3:19 a.m., and the text is from a number I don't know.

It says, “I'm outside.”

Thatcher.

I race to the window and open it, staring out into the tree and down at the grass below, but finding no one. I pad gently downstairs, careful not to wake my father. In the entryway, I can see someone trying to peer in through the glass that frames the front door. When I open it, I'm face-to-face with Thatcher's lips, his blue eyes, his strong gaze . . . and lots of piercings. My heart thuds.

Wendy
.

“Hi,” she says, as if it isn't three in the morning. As if she's here for afternoon tea and cookies. “Can I come in?”

She perches cautiously on the arm of my mother's overstuffed floral chair in the corner of our formal living room, which is on the opposite end of the house from Dad's bedroom—he shouldn't wake up. I offered Wendy juice or water, but she shook her head and went straight to the chair. Her boots are up on the fabric, but I'm afraid to ask her to put them on the floor. She makes me nervous.

I sit across the coffee table from her, on our stiff-backed blue sofa.

“Sorry if I was rude before,” she says.

“It's okay.”

Leaning forward so I can see her eyes, which have remained downcast, I ask her, “How did you find my house?”

“How many Callie McPhees in Charleston do you think there are? It wasn't hard.”

“But why?” I ask her. “What made you believe?”

She reaches into the pocket of her cargo shorts and brings out a small green figurine, one of those little toy soldiers that kids play with. He's holding a big gun over his head, like he's wading through water. She fingers it carefully.

“‘The treasure is in the tree,'” says Wendy. “I know Thatcher told you that.”

It's almost like she enters a trance when she explains how they used to play a game, she and Thatcher. He had his favorite army guy, this one, and when she was a toddler she used to think it was funny to hide it from him. Eventually, that became their game, finding it and hiding it, finding it and hiding it. “We called it ‘the treasure' so our parents wouldn't know what we were talking about,” Wendy says. “When Thatcher died, I looked for it for weeks. I was desperate, sure I'd never find the last place where Thatcher put it. But I did. A few years later, I remembered a knot in one of the trees out back, and I stuck my hand inside. There it was: the treasure.”

Her eyes fill up with tears, but no wetness falls on her cheeks. They just create pools that her pupils seem to swim in when she says, “No one in the world would know that except for me. Us.”

Us.
It's such a little word, just two letters, but the way Wendy
says it is so filled with such pain and loss. I understand. Completely.

“I don't know if—” I start.

“Wait.” Wendy puts her hand forward to stop me. “I have more to say.”

I sit back against the sofa.

“This week has been strange,” she says, furrowing her brow. “I've been having weird dreams, which is your fault.” She narrows her eyes at me. “And today, I had this urge to drive home, to hold the treasure in my hand again.” Her fingers move over the toy. “When I did, I felt a sense of calm, of peace almost. It was like . . . my brother was near.”

Of course. Thatcher has been spending time with Wendy, trying to help her see that I was telling the truth.

“He
is
near,” I say to her, and as I do, I see a ripple in the curtains by the front window. I wonder if Wendy does too.

She frowns. “I know you know that when I was little, I was sick,” she says. “Having a little sister with cancer wasn't easy for Thatcher, but he was patient and loyal. He never complained about our parents missing his football games, never mentioned the fact that I got twice as many gifts at Christmas for a while.”

She smiles, her face shedding some of its tired angst, and I see even more of Thatcher in her now. “He was the perfect big brother.”

“That's not hard to imagine,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“In the afterlife . . .” I pause, wondering if she's really understood what I've told her about how Thatcher and I know each other. It sounds so strange, so unbelievable. But she nods with
acceptance, and so I continue. “He was a guide for me, always taking care of me and never thinking about himself or his own needs. He protected me, too.” As I tell her this, I realize it's true. I was like a petulant child who chafed under what I thought of as his rules, but really he was guiding me toward Solus, the closest thing to Heaven there is.

“He was always that way,” she says. “When the doctors told us my cancer was in remission, Thatcher was the first person there to hug me and hold my hand. He had tears streaming down his face. An eleven-year-old boy with so much love for his sister that he cried in front of the whole hospital staff.”

She wipes away a tear herself, and it leaves a trail of black on her cheek, where her eyeliner runs. I take a deep breath in, almost choking on the emotion that's rising in my throat.

“After that, things were great for a few years,” says Wendy. “The cancer never came back, and our family felt normal again. Mom and Dad always went to Thatcher's games, I got into photography with a camera Thatcher bought me for my ninth birthday . . . everything was normal.”

I stay still, sensing that the story is about to drop off a cliff.

“About a week before Thatcher's senior homecoming dance, I started to feel sick again. It was just a bug, I was sure, but he got worried. He was doting on me, treating me like a little kid with cancer. I was twelve then, and I didn't like it. I snapped at him, said mean things. . . .” She grimaces at the memory. “I said I wanted him to get out of my face.

“On the night of the dance, I heard Thatcher tell my mom he
didn't want to go, that he didn't want to leave me alone while I was sick. Looking back, I know he was only expressing concern, and I should have just reassured him. But at the time, I felt this deep sadness and guilt. I'd made him miss so much of his life already—he couldn't miss homecoming because of me, too!

“I told him that he was making me feel sicker by being around me. I told him he had to go. So he did. And then he died.”

She grows quiet, like she's done talking.

“Wendy,” I start, leaning forward, “what did you mean the other day, when you said that he blamed you?”

“He wasn't a drinker,” she says, her eyes holding mine. “I know he left the house upset—I saw his face as he closed the door behind him; he looked so hurt. And I made him feel that way. He wouldn't have had that much to drink if he wasn't trying to block out what I said. Even at twelve years old, I knew that instantly when we heard how he died.”

“But you can't possibly think—” I try again, but Wendy's steely gaze halts my words.

“After Thatcher passed, it was like everything in our house was soaked in grief. And it was weird, because I think my parents had come to terms with the possibility that I might die, in a way, but they didn't even think about losing him. The shock nearly killed my mother. She got really thin. My dad started working late, not coming home. And me? I went a little crazy. Because on the first day after this death that I felt happy again, he came to see me—to show me how much he blamed me.”

“What do you mean, he came to see you?” I ask.

“Thatcher visited me in the spring after he died. I was at the beach and he gave me a message.”

“A message?”

She smiles, but it's not the good kind of smile. It's that cracked, crazy kind that makes people feel really uncomfortable.

Crash!
My mother's Tiffany lamp, the one on the corner table across the room, topples over and smashes on the floor.

Wendy and I lock eyes.

“I guess someone doesn't want you to hear the rest of what I have to say,” she says, her tone accusing.

“Callie?” I hear my dad coming out of his bedroom.

“Hide!” I whisper to Wendy, and she ducks behind the long blue curtain against the wall.

When my father walks in, I'm picking up jagged pieces of stained glass.

“I couldn't sleep,” I say. “I was going to read a little and I must have knocked into the lamp when I went to turn it on.”

“Be careful, you could get cut,” he says, coming over to help me.

“I'm sorry.”

“It's only a lamp,” he says. Then he gets the broom and sweeps up the mess. The toes of Wendy's black combat boots peek out under the curtain, but Dad never looks in her direction. I breathe a sigh of relief when we're done.

“Back to bed,” says my father.

I give him a salute. “Just one more chapter.”

He nods wearily and heads to his room.

“All clear,” I whisper to Wendy when I hear his door close behind him.

She steps out from behind the curtain with her keys in her hand. I can tell she's not in the mood to finish her story now—her eyes are dark and angry.

“Wendy, can we just—” I start, but she stalks toward the front door.

I follow her, mad at Thatcher for interrupting us and disappointed in Wendy for letting him get in the way. But then she reaches into her shirt. “Here,” she says, pulling out the chain that was resting under her black cotton tee. There's a ring on the end of it, heavy and gold. “This is what I really came to do.”

Their grandfather's ring.

I look up at her in surprise.

“You said you needed it,” she says. “Maybe it's better to get rid of this piece of him and try to forget.”

My eyes fill up. “No,” I say quietly, but she shushes me as she unclasps the necklace and slides the ring down the chain until it drops into my open, waiting palm. I grip it immediately, feeling its coolness, wondering at the power Thatcher says that it holds.

I stare at it for a moment, and then I open the front door. When she steps into the warm, humid darkness, I call after her. “Wendy?”

She turns, and in the soft glow of our porch light her features are softened, her harsh makeup faded, and she looks almost angelic, like a fragile, lovely ghost herself.

“Promise me one thing,” I say. “Promise that when you do find
peace—and you
will
—that you'll accept it. It's real. And it's coming from Thatcher.”

She tilts her head like she doesn't quite understand. And that makes sense, because what I've said is so New Agey and vague that I hardly understand it myself. But it has to do with what I know about haunting the right way. All of which her brother taught me.

“No thanks,” she says, and then she looks around the entryway, almost like she's talking to someone else. “I'm done expecting anything from the brother who tried to kill me.”

And then she's gone, back into the night.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

WHEN I WAKE UP in the morning, I open one eye and reach for the ring. I kept it under my pillow last night, and I tossed and turned, hardly sleeping. Wendy's parting words shook me. I know she was angry, and I'm sure she was lashing out because she felt her brother was trying to stop her from telling me the whole story. She really believes that Thatcher blames her for his death. Maybe he did blame her, at first. It isn't easy to be in the Prism, if you remember what life was like. But what she said . . . that Thatcher tried to kill her.

It can't be true.

But what if it is? What if that's why he interrupted our conversation with the stupid lamp shattering?

I shake my head—no. I know him. He isn't capable of that.

I turn the ring over in my hand, watching it shine in the early sunlight, wondering how it works, if it'll heat up or glow or something if I use it to call to Thatcher. I squeeze the ring again, and its energy makes me feel ill at ease. Am I just imagining that?

It's for emergencies only
. Thatcher's voice echoes in my head.

I roll over and press my face into the sheets, wondering if Dad will mind if I stay in bed a little longer.

But then I hear my father's voice loud and clear, and inflexible: “Callie May! Church in twenty minutes!”

Among the sanctuary's dark wooden pews and bright stained glass windows, I hear the whispers about me: “Praise be.” “Blessing.” “Miracle.”

When we sit down, my father bows his head and closes his eyes.

Since I've healed enough to get to church, we've been coming here every Sunday. We used to attend services with Mama, but after she died, Daddy lost some of his faith, I think. We only got here on holidays.

But now, today, I watch his open eyes and the way he sits—chest forward, head up, eyes trained on the pulpit. I can feel his faith next to me like it's a living being.

Mr. and Mrs. Yates, an older couple I've known since childhood, come by to say hello, and she takes my hands in hers. “You're a walking wonder, honey, that's what you are,” she says. I smile politely at her, and the others who say similar things to me as they pass. I've realized that to them, I'm a beacon of hope, a soul brought back from the brink, proof of . . . of what?

The truth is that I feel uncomfortable in church now, like people can see just by looking at me that I know something they don't about life and death and Heaven and God.

But when I focus on the candles at the front of the church and watch the way their flames flicker, suddenly I feel this overwhelming sense of safety, like nothing bad could ever touch me here.

When Pastor Williams calls us to attention, I reach into the pocket of my skirt, where Thatcher's grandfather's ring meets my hand, solid and true.