Chapter 6
Erin ran her gaze around the room, her mind struggling to latch on to something, but all she could do was repeat, "I was supposed to be here."
"Your part of this process was done. This is their part."
"The grief."
"Yes."
Erin watched her mom's pale, tear-reddened face. "I want to help them. Comfort them."
"You really can't. We should leave."
Erin scowled at him. Just who did he think he was, ordering her to leave? "What do you mean I can't? Why?"
"Because affecting the physical world is only an illusion. I can't really hold open doors and press buttons. And you can't hug them or whisper anything they would hear."
"Are you sure about that?" She pressed her lips together in mutinous determination. She reached out and tried to touch her dad's hand. Hers went through his and he didn't react at all. No sudden shiver. No rush of comfort. Nothing she’d thought ghosts could do at a time like this. Erin tried again, her movements frantic, desperate, until she finally stopped and sobbed, "Why?"
"Because loss is loss. They have to say goodbye, using all the rituals of death we know. The funeral, the eulogy, the burial and the reawakening party where they all gather and tell stories about you. That's how they do it."
"And how do ghosts do it? How do I do it?" Her voice was raw, dragged from the pit of her stomach.
"Without holding on or looking back while your grief is fresh. You say goodbye, walk away and maybe tell me stories of them." His words were definitive, confident. A speck of dry land in the midst of a tsunami.
Calm could suck it. "And then what? Go into the light, or something?"
"And then we wait. Some wait for reincarnation. Some wait for judgment day. Some believe this is the heaven we've all dreamed of. Some believe this is purgatory. We make friends, perform jobs and when the pain has lessened, we check in on our family."
Erin knelt by her mother, watching her cry. It hurt when Mom cried. She could never stand it. But in this moment, her mom didn't have to be strong. And she wasn't. Grief crumpled her in her chair, her sobs almost harder than her body could handle. Erin laid her head on her mom's lap, just half an inch or so above it so she wouldn't sink through her mom. Like Davis had said, it was an illusion of comfort, but in that moment, she'd take it. "You make loss sound as simple as going off to college."
"In a way, it is. You just can't text home whenever you want."
She laughed hollowly. "I'm sorry. I'm just not buying what you're selling."
And then she cried, her sobs blending with her mother's and her father's until the sounds of grief filled the room with their pain.
"Erin…" Davis rubbed her back. "You can't do this."
She ignored him.
Davis shook her arm. "Erin, we have to leave."
She sobbed harder. There was no way she could leave.
"Erin…Erin…no!"
His shout made her eyes blink open just enough to see what made him sound so scared. But she couldn't see him or what he was looking at. Instead, what she could see was smoky black tendrils wrapping around her hand and her mother's hand, binding them together. Erin raised her head, ready to tell the wraith to get lost. This was her mother. Her father. Her family's grief and third parties were not welcome.
But as the smoke wrapped like black ice across her eyes, she knew something else, something more, was very, very wrong. She opened her mouth, screams of darkness rushing in so fast she could barely get out her cry for help. "Davis!"
Then she was yanked away from her mother, shoved out of the room and pulled to the left, around the counters, to enter the outpatient section the back way. Screams and cries grew louder in her ears. They reached the doors, but Davis didn't stop and open them like he usually did. He simply pulled her through them.
They could do that? Erin pondered that, but only for the fraction of time it took her to move through the door. It felt like wading through gelatin. This was really faster?
They didn't quit running until they hid in one of the outpatient rooms that resembled a smaller hospital room, complete with TV, desk and private bath.
Davis pulled her to the couch/bed by the large window and pushed her to sit. "Take deep breaths."
Panic sent electric tendrils of fear down her spine, over her shoulders and down her arms. Every time she tried to breathe, more of the black smoke rushed inside of her. Erin shook her head.
"Yes, you can." Davis grabbed her hands, his voice grim. "Your parents seemed nice."
She nodded rapidly.
"They must have been wonderful, if you feel so much pain now."
More tears fell down her face, blurring his darkened face even more.
"I bet your mom taught you how to cook and your dad taught you to ride a bike."
More like the other way around, but Erin couldn't speak to correct him.
"So who was the picture-snapper when you went to prom?"
Her dad. She could see it in her mind so clearly. He'd held the camera to his eye, snapping away at her and her date. Catching them from every angle. Before they'd left, he'd paused with her date, showing him each image on the digital camera, then he'd looked her date in the eye, his face completely serious, and warned, "Just so you know, I shoot guns even better."
Erin laughed, then stopped, shocked she could make a sound. The tendrils had receded a bit, no longer in her mouth.
"That's it, sweetheart. Happy thoughts. When did you get your first car? Your college acceptance? How did you celebrate your high school graduation?"
With each memory, the darkness pulled back until Erin could look Davis straight in his thick-lashed, worried hazel eyes. "That's how wraiths are created, isn't it?"
He nodded and rose to sit at her side. "That's the grief part. When you collapse in misery and let the darkness overtake you. You have to fight it with happy thoughts and happy feelings. You have to keep that balance at all times."
Erin closed her eyes for a moment, shaking her head at how close she'd come to disaster. But how was keeping emotionally balanced at all okay when such devastation happened? She wanted to scream and throw a tantrum like she had when she was three, not sit here and pretend to be mature. "And when the smoke was tying me to my mom?"
Davis held silent so long she forced herself to meet his gaze. "The wraiths can absorb all of your pain, all of your misery. And through you, they can attach to the living, sucking the joy and healing found in living right out of them."
"Can that kill them?"
A muscle ticked in his jaw, the pulse of it steady no matter how much he clinched it. "Eventually."
Death Is Becoming Page 6