Epilogue
In the months that followed, I folded myself back into the confines of my old life with an ease that scared me.
My parents welcomed me home with tears and hugs so fierce it was like they were afraid I’d disappear if they didn’t hold on tight enough.
They didn’t ask many questions, but weeks after my return, I would still catch my mom staring at me, trancelike, a furrow in her brow as if she was trying to decide whether I was really there or if her daughter had been replaced with someone she didn’t know.
I didn’t have the heart to say it was the latter.
We didn’t talk much about that summer. I spun a few stories about Lake Michigan, twisting the tales of my time on the road to keep up the ruse, and I told them about the girls, because I missed them so much, and if I didn’t share my memories, I worried that they would die with me.
My parents listened to my stories without asking any questions.
It hurt at first, their lack of interest, but after some time, I realized what was really at work, that my parents had been held in a sort of suspended state of being, a kind of suppression.
It was here that my parents had dwelled, in this thin not-reality where my being away was a question that needed no answer.
It was, I realized, the work of Death.
It took me three weeks to summon the courage to go out into the forest. But then, one cool night the first week of October, I did it.
I found a flashlight in the basement, put on my dad’s rain boots, and trudged out into the thicket, which had grown higher and denser during my time away.
I walked for a long time and had begun to suspect I was lost when I saw the clearing in the middle of the woods. Empty.
The playhouse was gone, just a bleached square of grass to mark where it once stood.
I lay down, closed my eyes, and imagined myself dying in the thick of the forest just like my sister had.
I thought of my body, bloated and soft, and imagined all the hungry things in the forest floor surfacing to consume me.
The vultures that would circle down from the sky to feed on the flesh of me.
I would give it to them freely and without complaint.
I would feel no pain.
I opened my eyes, gazed up at the sky studded with stars. Then I got up and left the forest.
I would never return.
After nine months of playing catch-up—of late-night tutoring sessions and extra online classes to make up for the ones I failed in my grief—I graduated.
As I climbed up onto the stage in my cap and gown, I turned to look at the crowd, and for a moment, I thought I saw them.
The girls, all six of them, sitting in the back row, their faces washed featureless by sunlight.
But when I stepped offstage, they were all gone. The seats empty.
I got into a college that was decent enough to make people think I was okay.
My life grew to become good in its own way.
I made friends and went out with them on Fridays.
I talked to a therapist every week. I started running again, not with a team, but in the evenings after my classes, just for the rush of it.
Life fell into its familiar rhythms. Nothing strange or gruesome. No shocks of death or brushes with my own mortality. With time, that summer with the girls faded to a grim and wonderful memory.
So I was surprised when I first saw the two of them walking across campus.
I noticed the girl first. It was bitter cold that day, but all she wore was a thin black cardigan and a matching skirt that stopped short at the middle of her thighs.
Her legs, at least, were sheathed in burgundy tights, and her shoes were sensible, loafers so well-worn and soft that they must’ve been vintage.
She was pretty enough to turn heads as she jaywalked across the intersection, seemingly oblivious to the cars that blasted their horns as she cut past.
But it was the man by her side that really startled me. He was tall and wiry, dressed in funeral blacks. A different face, but I would’ve known him anywhere. Death.
He followed the girl so closely there was no way she could’ve missed him, but she walked as though she were alone, her fingers shoved into the shallow pockets of her skirt, frail shoulders rounded against the cold.
She seemed young—younger than me, maybe.
Around Skye’s age if she’d survived that summer.
In fact, she favored Skye. Something in the set of her mouth, the look in her eyes when she met mine from across the intersection.
I expected her to walk out into the traffic again, but she stopped short.
I shifted my gaze over her shoulder to Death. He smiled and I saw that the girl was his, the way I used to be. I had the sudden urge to run from them both, the instinct kicking my heartbeat into a fast and terrible rhythm.
But when the light changed, I stepped out into the intersection anyway.
Not without fear, but in spite of it.
Death’s gaze held mine as we moved toward each other, meeting briefly in the middle of the intersection, passing so close that our hands brushed, and when they did, I caught a glimpse—just a flash, really—of us.
The girls on the beach as he’d seen us, wide eyed and afraid but brave enough to face him.
I heard his voice on the wind, in the sound of so many boots scuffing over concrete, in the rush of the passing traffic: Until next time.
I turned to look at him over my shoulder—to say goodbye or something close to it—but he was already gone.
I haven’t seen him since, but I know that one day he’ll come back for me. Maybe he’ll wear Skye’s face or my sister’s. Or perhaps he’ll send the girls, one last dispatch for old times’ sake. I think I would like to see them all, just one more time, before the end.