Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
By the time Paige, Jasper, and I get back home, dawn bleeds through the trees, a new day threatening to overtake us while I’m still reeling from the last one.
Mom said the doctors will most likely discharge Margot before the end of the day. She might even be home in time for dinner.
Paige hoists a sleeping Jasper into her arms. He’s a little too old and tall to be carried inside like this, but when he peeks at me through slitted eyes over Paige’s shoulder, I don’t give him away. I miss being small enough to let someone else carry everything heavy.
Paige brings Jasper up to his bedroom on the third floor. Without Margot here, the second floor is empty. But it doesn’t feel empty. The familiar sensation of being watched traces over the back of my neck like someone’s cold fingers. It feels like Ingrid.
As I push through my bedroom door, I go for the lamp first, flicking it on. The specks of sunrise poking through the window bathe the room in a cool, pale yellow light.
I open my mouth to call for Finn, but to my surprise, he’s sitting cross-legged on my bed when I turn the lights on.
“Oh, Jesus—” I curse, a hand flying up to my chest.
Finn throws his hands up in surrender. “Sorry, sorry. I heard the car pull up and wasn’t sure the best way to not freak you out…” He trails off at the expression on my face. “Is Margot okay?” he asks.
“She’s fine,” I say. I don’t meet his eyes as I cross to my chest of drawers, tugging out shorts and a T-shirt and tossing them onto the bed. The shirt passes through Finn, and he looks on the verge of offended.
“But you’re not,” Finn says. He hops up, like he’s going to approach me, but he lingers at the end of the bed.
I sit, hands in my lap, staring at my sneakers. All of a sudden, I am wide-awake. “Why can’t I see Ingrid?”
Finn licks his lips. I can see him start to close up, like a hermit crab shrinking back into its shell. “Who?” he asks, too late to be believable.
“Don’t. Don’t lie to me. I know about her. Sloane told me.”
Finn curses.
“You said the others were gone. But I can hear Ingrid. And I saw her at the creek, standing over my sister,” I say.
“Whatever you think you heard or saw or—”
“Enough, Finn. I want the truth. Now.”
He sighs. Picks at the skin around one of his nails—bitten to the quick.
Quietly, he says, “We don’t stick around forever.
Not like the ghosts in all the horror movies.
” He flicks a glance my way. “Eventually, we fade. I don’t know how else to describe it.
I know that it happens. We show up here, and a few years later we… ”
“We what?”
“We disappear,” he says.
Disappear. Like a second death.
I swallow, but my tongue is dry and sticky. “And Ingrid?” It isn’t the question I want to ask, but it’s the easier one.
“I haven’t seen her since she faded, and that was ages ago, but I hear her, too, sometimes. Feel her. But it’s not the Ingrid I remember. She was angry, but not like this. When I do feel her, it’s this…cloud of anger and fear that drop onto your chest.” He shrugs. “I’ve never felt any of the rest.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” The anger I anticipate fizzles on its way out of my mouth, and sadness takes its place, squeezing my lungs and throat.
He shakes his head, hard, like he’s trying to physically dislodge the idea. “She scares the hell out of me. A few years of this is already too big to wrap my mind around. But the thought that I might really be stuck here, or that Sloane and Aisha might be, it—”
Finn closes his eyes. He doesn’t open them until the realization strikes me like a brick to the chest, and I answer my own unspoken question.
“You’re next,” I whisper.
“The longest anyone’s lasted is about three years,” he says. He rakes a hand through his hair and won’t meet my gaze as he says, “I passed that a week ago.”
I push to my feet.
A dead person can’t die again.
Except they can. And he will.
I press a hand to my chest. My heart thrums hard and fast beneath my fingers.
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” he says. “I thought I’d slip away, and you’d barely notice I was gone.”
“And now?” I want to scream, to throw something, to cry, to wrap my arms around him and hold him steady.
“I don’t want to go,” he says, and he sounds as young as he is.
“But my life is over, Jo. It’s been over since I left my house that night.
And as good as I am at pretending that’s not true, I’m running out of time.
And the more you try to get answers, the more likely you end up like me. You deserve better.”
“And you don’t?”
“Too late for that.”
I search for some kind of response, but my sleep-deprived brain finally gives up on me, and I’m left staring at him.
“I’m sorry, Jo. I’m sorry for getting you involved in all this. I should have left you alone,” he says.
He vanishes as the morning sun passes the tops of the trees. I consider calling him back, but my body decides for me, and I’m unconscious in less than a minute. My dreams are dark, full of empty coffins and bloodstained missing person posters.