Chapter 13 #2
“It’s a pretty pink,” Wren admitted. “It brings out the blue of your eyes.”
She turned her attention back to Poppy, being helped onto the raft by Hayes. It wobbled a little as Hadley, dressed as Jenny from BLACKPINK, hugged her, and wobbled again when Poppy bent down to wrap her arms around Wren in a behind-you hug.
“Hey, you,” Wren said, patting her arm. “I’m so glad you could make it, and you look amazing, as per normal.” Poppy was always a contender for the Best Costume awards at the Halloween festival in October.
Poppy settled down beside her, and Hadley immediately sat down on her other side. Dane reached behind them and used his long arms to pull out Poppy’s bent wings, so they rested behind Wren, Poppy and Hadley.
Poppy leaned forward to look past her to Dane. “Hey, Hot Doc,” she said, laughing. She nudged Wren in the ribs. “That’s what she calls you anyway.”
The problem with best friends was that they had no problem embarrassing you. “Jeez, Pops.”
Dane ignored her comment and smiled at Poppy. “Hey back, pretty fairy.”
Poppy laughed, amused, her dark blue eyes now black. “So, I hear you are taking over old Dr. Morris’s practice.”
Dane pushed up the sleeves of his coat and raked back his hair. “I’d rather—”
“—shove a scalpel in my eye,” Wren finished for him. “Dane thinks he can actually say no to Luna,” she told Poppy, teasing him.
The truth was that she thought that if anyone could defy her godmother, it was the man next to her. Because he was so calm, so stoic, few people realized you could only push him so far. Dane only did what Dane wanted to do.
Poppy clucked her tongue. “Nobody has managed it yet,” she told Dane, sounding completely serious. “You do know that she’s a witch, right?”
Wren rolled her eyes. “She’s not a witch, Pops. Or, if she is, she’s Witch-lite.” She turned back to look at Dane. “Poppy is on Team True Believer.”
From behind them, Hayes groaned. “It’s a testament to our long friendship that I allow you on my non-believer raft, Pops.”
Hadley turned to look at him. “I’m a True Believer, too, Dad,” she reminded him.
“But I’m stuck with you, princess,” Hayes retorted, the love for his daughter reflected on his face. “Pops, not so much.”
Poppy placed her hand behind her back, and Wren leaned back to see the middle finger she raised. Her friend might look like a fairy, but she was pure thug.
Poppy nudged her in the ribs with her elbow, and Wren, grimaced: she always had bony elbows. “I can’t believe that you, after spending most of your life in H-Town, won’t consider the possibility that ghosts exist.”
“It’s because I was raised in H-Town that I know they don’t exist,” Wren countered. “I mean, it’s a ghost-friendly town, and with all the phones around surely someone would’ve captured them on camera by now.”
Dane took the beer Hayes held out and handed it to Poppy. He looked at Wren and grinned, mischief in his light eyes. “So, what’s your excuse for seeing a ghost in the mirror of the dance studio?”
Why was he throwing her under the bus? “I did not see a gh—”
Poppy gripped her forearm. “You saw a ghost? How could you not tell me?” she demanded, her eyes wide. “Are you being serious right now? We’ve been friends for more than twenty-five years, and you kept this from me?”
Wren glared at Dane, who simply smiled and sipped his beer. “I would have, if I actually believed I’d seen one,” she stated, shaking her head. “I’ll admit to seeing something, but it wasn’t a ghost.”
“You keep forgetting that I saw her, too,” Hadley said, and both Wren and Hayes tossed their hands in the air.
“I did some research, and I think she was Lila Finch, a dancer who fell from the balcony of the old theater in the twenties,” Hadley said, sounding like she was ordering coffee at Mickey D’s.
Poppy turned to face Hadley. “That’s so interesting, Hads. Tell me more. What, exactly, did you two see?”
Wren whipped her head around to glower at Dane, who was trying not to smile. “Do you see what you’ve started?” she demanded. “And when did you start believing in ghosts?”
“I told you when we first met that I don’t not believe in them, that I’ve seen and heard things in theater that made me think there might be things out there we can’t explain.”
“Like what?” Wren demanded.
“Patients telling me about near-death experiences, and spirits leading them away. And then back into their bodies on my operating table, and I was left with no rational explanation as to why they survived. Rescuers telling me about people leading them to survivors, people they would never have found without help, but when they looked around, they were gone.” He shrugged. “I could go on.”
Despite seeing whatever she’d seen in the mirror, Wren still couldn’t make the leap. “I can’t get there, Dane.”
He grinned at her and placed his free hand on her knee. “You’re pretty stubborn, Wren Dunlop.”
“And you’re going to get pretty wet if you don’t can the ghost talk in front of Poppy,” Wren whipped back.
“Sweetheart, you could try, but if I go in, so do you.”
Dammit, there was no chance of shifting him. Oh, well, she’d just have to sit next to him, hold his hand, and watch the floating parade pass them by. Wren looked up as Hayes sat down next to Hadley.
“I just got a message, the parade has started from the beach up from the inn,” he said.
And as if Luna had ordered it, a band of mist rolled across the lake, skimming its surface. It would make the parade of witches and warlocks look a little spookier and otherworldly. The photos of the parade would be Instagram-worthy. Luna would be pleased. And really, wasn’t that all that mattered?
“Excellent,” Poppy said, and threaded her hand through Wren and Hadley’s arms, a pretty fairy queen holding court amongst her minions. “I intend to drink too much wine and cause mayhem. Are you in, Bird?”
Always and absolutely. It was, after all, what they did.
* * *
The following Tuesday, after the dancing lesson had concluded, Silas sat on the stairs inside Dane’s cottage with Lila and Ruby. The Reverend was absent, having departed upon what he had termed a spiritual retreat to some monastery in Upstate New York. Silas did not know when he intended to return.
Three, two, one…
The door opened.
Wren entered, her gaze fixed on the small glowing device she carried.
Despite observing these things for some time now, Silas regarded what mortals called phones with suspicion.
They used them to converse with each other—by voice or written word—as if by magic.
He understood letters, handwritten and sealed with wax, and carried by horse. These contraptions … he did not.
A sheen of perspiration lay upon Wren’s throat and brow, evidence of her exertion during what they called “dance” practice.
Dancing it was not. Dane, however, looked as fresh as he had earlier.
Silas knew the reason. While the dancer and the children practiced, the doctor spent his time either watching her or looking at his infernal phone.
“Well, that’s unexpected,” Wren said.
Dane relieved Wren of her bag and water bottle with quiet efficiency, then tapped her phone. Wren’s eyes lifted to his.
“News?” he asked.
All three ghosts inclined forward as one.
“I’ve just received an offer,” she said slowly. “To choreograph a music video. In London.”
He brushed a damp lock of hair behind her ear. “Is that good news or bad?”
“Good … I guess. It’s for a very famous brand.”
She showed him the screen. His brows rose in clear approval.
“When would you need to go?”
Wren wrinkled her nose in a way that was, Silas supposed, fetching. “After Lammas. Three weeks or so. They are still working out schedules.”
Was this the turning point in their relationship? If the dancer left, perhaps Dane would return to his work.
“No!” Ruby cried.
“She cannot leave!” Lila said, clutching at Ruby, though her hands passed straight through her. “They haven’t even talked about how they are going to keep seeing each other!”
“Or if they will,” Ruby added mournfully.
“Is he the one who’s going to stay, or have we been barking up the wrong tree?” Naomi asked.
Silas ignored the women. It was better to end matters cleanly, because how could such an attachment endure when there was an ocean between them? They should end it now. Tonight.
Silas studied their rigid postures; their yearning was plain, even to his skeptical eye. It would not be so simple. Love, he decided, was exhausting. He was grateful he’d never thrown himself into it. Watching these two was wearying enough.
“Are you going to take the offer?” Dane asked, stroking her cheek with his finger. When he encountered moments like these, of tenderness, of need and connection, Silas felt a flash of jealousy as sharp as a slip wound from a scalpel.
He and his friends had watched the progression of Dane and Wren’s relationship, all of them with interest, his female friends with clasped hands and heart-filled eyes, he with mounting dread.
Keeping his distance, humans deserved privacy too, he’d watched them sitting on the steel jetty, feet dangling, sometimes talking animatedly, sometimes saying nothing at all, always comfortable in what they could give each other.
They watched that square box, the “television,” limbs entangled, and when they were with their friends, they were always, whether it was a hooked foot or a hooked hand, physically connected.
Barely a minute went by without one looking at the other.
And sometimes, just briefly, when watching them, Silas thought he might have an inkling of why men crossed oceans for women, why they painted portraits and drank themselves to death when under love’s spell. Women could wrap the male species up in silk-covered chains.
Wren looked at him with big eyes and lifted both her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she said.
“Does Dane even know what he wants?” Lila added, equally frustrated.
Silas felt compelled to, just this once, take the doctor’s side. “Does Wren know what she wants?” he asked.