Page 21 of All Her Ghosts

I glance sideways, tearing my attention from the swarm to scan his face. I expect fear, anxiety, revulsion, but instead I find a kind of pain that matches mine, his smiling mouth for once bracketed down in an unshakable kind ofgrief. But he doesn’t flinch from it like everyone else. He takes his time, looks every approaching ghost in what remains of their faces, and gestures for me to hand him my carpetbag. Reaching in, he pulls out a dollar bag of off-brand milk caramels like it’s the answer to the question I swear I feel in this sea of dead and pleading eyes.

“Grandpa candies?” I ask, the words catching in my throat.

Bas crouches. He drags a cinder block close, pulls the package open at the seams, candies heaped up in a pile on top. The human ghostsdraw closer. Dangerously close, empty mouths working soundlessly, nipping shreds of energy from the air. Thirty feet behind us, the lights in the convenience store flicker. But Bas doesn’t flinch. He takes my hand again and stands.

Solemnly, his eyes on the approaching shapes, he nods.

“Grandpa candies for Grandpa ghosts.”

His words punch me in the chest. I can’t hide the way my eyes leak, even in the steady drizzle. I hurt, every bone seized in a vise grip, grieving down deep in my gut, and yet I feel—sovindicated.

He gets it. Bas understands. He feels it, too, this wretched helplessness, dogged by a need to fix what everyone says can’t be mended. I can tell he shares the infuriating futility of it, the awful impotence that carves my soul like a jutting broken bone, forever whittling me down with a damning need towitness.

We can’t stop them from suffering, but we can bear it with them. We—weowethem this.

I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but IknowI owe them this. Flinching from their pain would dishonor their deaths, their suffering, and I can’t do that to them. Not when they’re hurting already. I have to look at them, each and every one, remember them when they can’t remember themselves. I must stand with them, to show them that they’re not alone.

I’m here.

For all the little good it does, I’m here.

Scrubbing a hand over my eyes, my runny nose, I grab a caramel, hold it out. My feet carry me forward, hand extended, caught up by a bone-deep need more natural than breathing. An offering. An apology. A purpose—

Bas catches my hand, fingers tangling, gently but firmly drawingme back. Startled, I snap into my right mind, scrambling away from the outline of a hand about to touch my own. Oh my god, what was I thinking? Its touch would have killed me. The ghost would have consumed every electrical spark in my body and wandered off down the road without missing a beat. I almost justdied.

Bewildered, I turn, gripping Bas’s hand so hard I must be hurting him, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He scours my face like he’s looking for something, pale behind his freckles, the almost desperate way he cups my cheek in one calloused palm. Caught in the bonfire blaze of his focus, my breathing stops. Time smears around us, disjointed and unnecessary. Language melts straight out of my head. Something like a dream, a memory, flickers in the corner of my eye, blue-lit by ghosts. I smell flowers, cold black water—

But the moment breaks on the sharp upturn of his grin, trembling only slightly. Shaking his head, Bas turns away.

“There’s a car coming,” he croaks, swallowing a lump in his throat. Tugging me behind him, we run, hopscotching out over the parade of mice and vole ghosts and into a neighboring yard.

A decommissioned police car rounds the corner, marked with the school district instead of a precinct. We plunge back into the woods, ducking down in time to watch the security officer idle past, eating a cheeseburger with a look of intense boredom. Not a second later, a black van flies in the opposite direction, and I swear the school nurse is driving it, her face hard and intense, snarling with tooth-chipping enunciation into a headset.

Muffled in the underbrush, Bas mutters a baffled swear. Turning, he demands, “They’re sendingG.I. Janeafter truants now?”

“Apparently,” I whisper back, laughing. “Let’s get out of here.”

We retreat into the woods. Chips crunching in my carpetbag with every bounce, we dodge from one thin strip of trees to another, darting across yards and behind houses. Bas takes every window as a challenge, executing perfect barrel rolls behind cover, his stealth hampered by my wheezing laughter and elephant grace. Together, we wander the woods, talking about anything and nothing, outrunning ghosts and imagined pursuers until the school buses scream past, open windows spilling out childish roars.

Bas turns, a question in his eyes. I shake my head. I don’t want to go home. Ideally, I’dnevergo home. But I don’t know how to say that, explain the weight of my mom’s and my history, so instead I kiss him again—

(Inevitable and golden, sunbeams leaking through his smile. Finally here, finally welcomed, finally home, home, home—)

Bas loses his balance, tipping over into a bank of leaves. Entirely by earbuds and by accident, he drags me with him. I land on his chest, rolling aside in time to keep from crushing all the air out of him. I settle for putting his hand to sleep instead, tucking my head in the crook of his arm.

Questions tap at my teeth so hard I fight to swallow them. I want to ask—did he fall because he felt it too? The un-memory of sunshine and the sensation of home? But I can’t bear the answer, the risk it won’t be yes. I don’t want to be the thing that shatters this perfect moment with my pervasive strangeness, so I keep my mouth shut, my lips (for the moment) to myself.

Shoulder to shoulder, I stretch out, swiping a one-winged angel shape into the musky pile of rotting leaves. A spider skitters across the back of my hand. As long as it’s not a tick, today I don’t even mind.Fingers splayed in dappled sunlight, I reach for a fallen branch and build my passenger a bridge.

The song in our shared earbuds ends. Fumbling for the MP3 player, I hold it up between us.

“Is it your turn? I can’t remember.”

“Got any oldies?” Bas grins. Leaves crunching, he sits up clutching an imaginary microphone, dips an elaborate Tommy Tutone: “Jenny, I want your number…”

My chest feels so full of moths it might explode.

I protest, grinning. “That’s not how the song goes.”