Ghost Medicine (32 page)

Giving myself to Luz, our giving, took the biggest part away. Gave the most away.
This is what I want.
I said that to myself, I know she did, too.
This is what I want.
Gabriel and Tom saw it, too.

Angels sleep all around us, but up there on that mountain, that was their graveyard. It was marked by that fallen plane, a cemetery cross that says,
This is where you come
, sitting in the shadow of a stone hand that keeps coming back to me in my dreams, that I see every day, looking over my shoulder like I remember seeing Gabe look back, hearing thunder; those gray fingers pointing upward, saying,
This is where you go, this is where you go
.

Three boys rode up there.

Not one of them came back.

Maybe all boys die like that.

Sometimes I see myself lying in the dirt, on my back on a warm, starry night, with my feet up on those rocks that contain a swirling and noisy fire, listening, laughing, seeing the sparks spinning above me into the blackness like dying stars, disappearing, becoming something else.

I know you will believe that such a place, and such people, and such events could not be in this world, and that's okay with me because I don't need anyone to come looking for anything around here. There's too much stuff that I haven't found yet.

But I told the truth here.

I told them all I would.