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Ken shook his head. “He was a really nice guy. She never asked him out though.”
The lights were flickering so much now that Ken turned to squint at them. “Sorry. I think we have a bulb about to go out. I can fix it—” he stood up, and my mom shook her head.
“No, it doesn’t matter. Please, do you have any ideas about where she might have gone after she got off work? Anywhere she talked about?”
I forced myself to focus on the little packets of sugar and the newly appointed coffee stirrers that Ken had set out for the day before they were destroyed by the first customers. I was pretty sure that I was the one making the lights flicker. I needed to calm down if I was going to let them talk. Because if I got any more upset, I was worried I might blow up something in the kitchen or at the register. Then Ken really would have to pause this conversation.
I forced myself to count the Stevia packets, then the Sweet n’ Lows while I half-listened. Ken was telling her that for all he knew, I was headed to the bus stop to go home like I always did.
Then I heard him say the words, “But we can check the security footage.”
The lights flickered again as I felt the excitement fizz through me. “Yes!” I shouted, and the light bulb above us made a popping sound, then went dark.
Ken frowned apologetically. “The wiring is fucked.” He glanced up sharply at my mom. “Uh, I mean it’s messed up.”
My mom didn’t even acknowledge it or the fact that the lobby had been plunged into semi-darkness. “Can we look at the footage on the security cams now? Please, I know you have to work. But you know she wouldn’t disappear like this.”
The tears started to well up in her eyes again, and Ken’s jaw tightened. He put a hand on my mom’s shoulder. “I know she wouldn’t. And it’s no problem. I can have Amy cover me.” He gestured toward the back room. “Let’s go.”
10. MEGHAN
Oquirrh Mountains, Utah
1 year before
My clothes were changing.
I realized it when I saw the shoe on the side of the road. When I looked down at my feet, I was no longer wearing the coral shoes I’d worn to Gracie’s. Instead, I had on my old gray-striped slip-on flats. The comfy ones I wore while padding around the apartment before bed.
I wasn’t sporting the gray culottes or the navy crop hoodie that were a dirty mess beside my bones anymore, either.
They had been swapped for sweats and my John Lennon t-shirt. The clothes I wore when it was just me, bumming around the house.
I couldn’t say why. Only that I didn’t really want to be wearing the coral shoes or the outfit I’d carefully chosen for my date at Gracie’s anymore.
When I imagined myself in my fuzzy bathrobe, I could suddenly see it.
Changing clothes was fun for a few minutes. I tried on my old prom dress from high school. The high heels I’d bought but never worn last year. Even my swimming suit. But without a mirror or anyone else to see my outfit, I kept the sweats and the Lennon shirt.
I thought about going fully nude for a hot second. But even dead, I wasn’t quite comfortable with the idea of being a nudist ghost. Not to mention, my actual body had been stripped bare in a way I’d never in my wildest dreams imagined I’d see. So the idea of clothes was comforting, and I kept them.
While I might not have been wearing the coral shoes anymore, they did become the new epicenter of my existence.
I spent most of my time on the dirt road, where the fading side of the shoe could be seen sticking out behind a small collection of pebbles and sticks on the dusty shoulder.
I drifted in and out of memories while I kept vigil, listening for any sound that might be an approaching car.
At first, I worried I would reach the end of the memories. That I would run out. But the more I drifted the more I realized that the memories I had at my fingertips were like an enormous library had been unlocked. The book of my life, every word and image perfectly clear. It felt like the one beautiful gift I still had left.
On day two of my vigil, a flurry of movement nearby took me out of a memory I’d been savoring from when I was two and saw my first caterpillar. I hadn’t known I could go back that far. I quickly learned that even those memories were available in crystal clarity if I reached for them. I watched the little black speckles on the caterpillar’s back and the way its sucker-cup feet moved rhythmically across the twig in the grass. I could still feel the perfect awe I’d felt then, as clearly as anything. My chubby little fingers, dirty from the crackers I’d just shoved into my mouth, eagerly reached for the caterpillar. “Gentle, Meghan,” my mom said beside me. The sunlight that filtered through our big catalpa tree leaves turned her hair into ribbons of gold as she picked up the twig that the caterpillar was climbing and carefully placed it in my outstretched fingers.
Back on the dirt road with the coral shoe, a shiny black raven landed right beside me with a little gray rock in her beak. I tucked the memory of the caterpillar aside as the raven hopped closer to the pile of pebbles and sticks, then set it down on top of the shoe.
“Thank you,” I told her. She cocked her head and studied her treasures, then spread her wings with a little mutter of satisfaction. She landed in one of the taller pines a few yards away, in what appeared to be a sizable tangle of sticks but must have been a nest.
Three days later, the same raven visited her treasure box again with a shiny red berry. If I hadn’t seen her gently lay her treasures down near one another, I wouldn’t have seen anything other than debris. But knowing it had all been carefully arranged by the bright-eyed, glossy black bird made me feel good.
At first, I was worried that she might move my shoe again. Each time she visited, she fussed over her little collection, moving a twig a few inches or taking one of the pebbles into her beak again before carefully placing it atop the little mound. But more days passed and more pebbles, and then what appeared to be part of a dried fish tail appeared, I accepted that this was simply where she had chosen to keep her treasure box.
