“Don’t you want to see your parents? Even if you don’t want to see, you know, you – seeing them might help. Mellie said that’s why Reece is stuck here; because he doesn’t want to leave his mom. I’m pretty sure you don’t have that problem, but it can’t hurt to try.”
“No thanks,” he says quickly, stepping away from the window slowly. “You can go, though. I know you want to.”
One of my palms passes through the mattress and I fall backwards, my head hitting the pillow behind me and barely keeping me balanced. Andy smiles, but his eyes are still dark. One of his hands is pulling at the bottom of his shirt; he fidgets even as a ghost, apparently.
I wonder what it must feel like, to not have to wear a binder. For him to actually feel comfortable in his own skin for once. And, of course, he had to die for that to happen, and he still isn’t any happier. His fingers are still wearing away at the hem of his sweater, and he won’t look me directly in the eyes. Again, I get the feeling
that there’s something he isn’t telling me, but I can’t force him to. Even if I could, I don’t think I would – he deserves to have secrets as
much as anybody.
“I can stay here,” I say, pulling myself back up out of the mattress; my torso feels heavier and sticks to the sheets on the way out, something that hasn’t happened since I learned how to balance my weight on things. “I know you probably don’t want to be alone right now.”
“No,” he says, again a beat too quickly. “Go. I’ll be fine. I need some time to think, anyway.”
He gives me a look that tells me not to contradict him and turns away, pretending to fiddle with the curtains again even though I know he’s given up on moving them.
I don’t even know why I want to go to the hospital. Curiosity? Closure? Some morbid fascination with death that I’ve acquired since I became a dead person? More than anything else, I think I just need to see; I need proof that Andy’s really gone, that there’s no way of getting him back, even though his ghost is evidence enough. I also think part of me is hoping Mellie will show up, because she always seems to end up at the hospital when I do. I need to talk to her again, even if she doesn’t want to talk to me.
“Okay.” I struggle to sit up and swing my legs over the edge of the bed. Andy’s back is turned to me, and even though he’s still super skinny, he looks a lot more filled-out in this form. I think I can even see the barest hint of muscles straining under his shirt.
He doesn’t look back as I leave. I kind of hope he’ll stop me, but he doesn’t.
♠♠♠
The hospital is just as bleak and depressing as I remember it. Not that it’s been very long since I was here last. How long has it been since Jeremy died and Andy was hospitalized? A week, I think, but time has been blurring in my head lately. I’ve been dead for at least three months, but I don’t know the exact date anymore. I guess it doesn’t really matter.
It takes me a little while to find Andy’s parents. I can’t exactly walk up to the service desk and ask where they are, so I’m forced to search the entire hospital for them. I know Andy will be in the morgue by now, probably awaiting an unnecessary autopsy, but what confuses me is that his parents are still here. They should have gone home hours ago; there’s no reason for them to hang around now that their son has inevitably been pronounced dead.
But yet, there they are, sitting in the waiting room on the third floor. Andy’s mother has her head in her hands, so I can’t see her face, but his father is looking at the opposite wall with a stony expression; he’s not crying, but his frown is deep and wrinkles are creased in his forehead and cheeks. The third floor… The morgue is in the basement, and the emergency room is on the first level of the hospital. Why the third floor?
I look around for a sign, searching the doors near the waiting room and the nurses’ station. I find an overhead sign by the exit, with arrows on either side designating what each section of the third floor is. I’m in the ICU right now – the Intensive Care Unit. Andy can’t be here; this is a place for people who are on the brink of death,
not those who have already died. Why are his parents in the waiting room? What are they waiting for?
Maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. Is this another memory, maybe one of a week ago when Andy was here last? But he was never in the ICU; his injuries weren’t bad enough. And his mother certainly wasn’t crying then.
A doctor dressed in blue scrubs with a generic lab coat layered on top walks out of one of the hallways leading to the back rooms and joins Andy’s parents. His mother looks up slowly after the doctor places one hand on her shoulder; there are tear tracks under her eyes, and some of my pity is replaced with disgust. How can she just sit there crying when she’s part of the reason her son is dead in the first place? She has no right to be mourning him. If she really cared, she should have done something to help him a long time ago.
I can’t hear what the doctor says to Andy’s parents – I don’t dare get any closer just in case I slip up and touch someone again. I hover in the doorway, the large, glowing exit sign above my head, and watch their conversation. The doctor is smiling sadly, his eyes narrowed slightly, and Andy’s father is still facing the wall. His mother says something in response and nods her head, standing and motioning for her husband to do the same. He lumbers to his feet, and the two of them follow the doctor’s steady footsteps back down the hallway.
My feet touch down on the floor and I shadow them, keeping my distance. Too much time has passed; it doesn’t make any sense for Andy to still be here. Even if he was still alive when he got here,
he’s long gone by now. His spirit haunting his old bedroom is more than enough proof of that.
The hallway is long, flanked on either side by doors with numbers in the three-hundreds. There are two small nurses’ stations along the way, and one open room leading to what looks like an office. The carpet is a lurid shade of brown with light tan flecks, and the walls are white stucco.
This is nerve-wracking, for some reason. I wish Andy was here, but I also don’t. Whatever I’m about to see would probably be too much for him, and I don’t want him to go through Hell just because I’m a little spooked. That wouldn’t be fair.
The doctor leads us all to the end of the hallway and through a door labelled 362. There’s a clipboard with papers stacked inside of it hanging from the wall next to the door; I look closely, rustling the paper with my breath, and read Andy Nolan printed neatly at the top. What’s going on?
The door creaks on its hinges as it opens, and at first I can’t see anything but the outline of a bed from behind Andy’s parents. They stand in the doorway for a moment, his mother sniffling and his father still blank-faced, and I have to float until my head is nearly touching the ceiling to see past them.
My confusion only multiplies when I do.
Andy – the real, corporeal version – is laying on the bed, wires stuck down to his chest and tubes coming out of one of his arms. There’s an oxygen mask around his mouth and nose, his breath fogging up the plastic. Breath. I strain to look closer, nearly bumping
into Andy’s mother in the process, and see his chest rising and falling steadily.
Andy’s mom walks into the room slowly, taking a seat beside her son’s bed and resting her hand on his; his father hovers in the doorway, and I squeeze past him into the room.
I rub my eyes, shake my head, pinch myself even though I can’t feel it, but the image doesn’t change. Andy’s face is still bruised the same awful shade of green it was yesterday, and he’s once again dressed in a hospital gown that’s pulled down slightly at his neck to allow the heart monitor strips to stick to his skin. His hair is messy, as usual, but he looks peaceful; he’s lying comfortably on his back now and looks like he’s sleeping soundly. And from this close, I can see his chest moving with more clarity and hear the slight whistle every time he breathes out.
He’s alive. He’s alive. Relief floods through me; I didn’t kill him, and he didn’t ma
nage to kill himself. He’s here, he’s alive, he’s okay.
But… why is he a ghost? Why didn’t my touch kill him? I pulled out his soul – I saw it happen with my own eyes. I saw him stop breathing. I watched him die.
“Mellie,” I whisper into the silent room, even though I know she won’t come. “I’m gonna need a good explanation for this one.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“You’re still alive!”
Andy looks up at me like I’ve gone crazy. I probably sound like I have.
“In spirit, you mean?” He grins, but it falters when he sees the serious look on my face.
“No, no, like for real. You’re in the hospital. And I saw you breathing.”
I stayed at the hospital for at least half an hour just watching Andy breathe, like I thought he would stop the second I turned away. His mother had held his hand for a few minutes and then left, grabbing onto her husband’s arm and guiding him back out to the waiting room. I don’t know how long they plan on staying there, but they were still sitting on the rigid brown chairs when I left.
Andy narrows his eyes. “That’s not funny, Terra.”
“It’s not a joke!” I step forward, watching his expression carefully. He’s still standing by the window, running his fingers along the pane and pressing them down through the wood. He was
startled when he saw me float through the opposite wall; he looked like he was lost in thought. “Listen, I went to check on your parents, right?” Andy nods once. “And they were on the third floor. Do you have any idea how long it took me to find them?”
Andy shakes his head but doesn’t say anything, so I continue.
“It took forever. And I found them in the waiting room by Intensive Care, like where they keep the really sick people, but not the emergency room. So I waited, and a doctor came out and took them back to a room, and you were there! You were sleeping, but you were definitely alive; there were all kinds of machines hooked up to you and you were wearing a gown you would have hated.”
He cocks his head to the side and sighs, conflicting emotions on his face. He looks like he wants to believe me, but still thinks I’m joking. There’s got to be a way I can prove to him that I’m not.
“Here,” I say, reaching my hand out to him but stopping just short of touching his arm; now that I know he’s still alive, I don’t dare tempt fate again. “Let’s go. I’ll show you.”
“…I don’t want to.”
“Why not? It’s not like I’m gonna lead you to a dead body or something. You’re just sleeping. You need to see it and then you’ll believe me.”
“I do believe you,” he says, completely unconvincingly.
“No, you don’t.” I hold out my hand like I expect him to take it, even though if he tried to I would probably pull it away anyway. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I believe you. Isn’t that enough?”
A gust of wind ruffles the curtains behind Andy, the fabric pushing through his arm and coming out the other side. He shivers, but I know he can’t feel the cold.
“Okay, spill,” I tell him, pulling my hand back and crossing my arms. “I know you’re hiding something. After everything that’s happened, I think I deserve to know.”
He takes a deep breath and says the words I least expected to hear, “Mellie was here.”
I blink at him, watching him run his thumbs over the frayed edges of his sweater. “I heard that wrong, didn’t I? You can’t possibly be talking about the same Mellie I know. The one who hates me right now.”
“She doesn’t hate you,” he says. I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “She’s just upset about Jeremy – and me too, I guess. But I think you guys are even now.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Andy holds his hands up defensively. “Her words, not mine! She’s not that bad, you know.”
Great, now Andy gets to scold me for being rude to the person who killed my mom. Although, truth be told, I’m really not that mad at Mellie anymore; I understand how she feels now because I’m in the same boat. I can empathize with her, but that doesn’t mean that what she did was right, or that it wasn’t wrong of her to lie to me about it.
Everything is just so confusing right now - how I feel about Andy, what I really think of Mellie, where I’m going to go and what’s going to happen next. I don’t know what to think anymore.
“You don’t really know her.” The room feels colder all of a sudden, but it has nothing to do with the temperature. “She wanted you to die, did she tell you that? She threatened me about it. She never wanted me to talk to you in the first place, and for all I know, she had something to do with you dying. She’s given me no reason to think otherwise.”
Andy is silent for a moment, his head down. He doesn’t look up as he says, “She did.”
I uncross my arms and step closer. Andy’s back hits the wall and he closes his eyes. He looks like he expects me to take a swing at him. Why?
“She did what?”
He shakes his head, his face a shade paler than before; if ghosts could blush, his cheeks would be bright pink right now.
All of a sudden, his entire body flickers out and back in like a bad television connection, his arms and legs fading for a split second before returning in a burst of static. He doesn’t seem to have noticed, because his expression doesn’t change and his body stays still the entire time. I wonder if this is what he saw when I ‘disappeared’ in front of him. He’s going to vanish completely once he finally wakes up, I’m guessing. If he ever wakes up.
I turn away, stick my head through the wall, and yell “Mellie!” at the top of my lungs. No response, as usual; either she’s busy dealing with another death, or she’s still ignoring me. “Ugh. Reece!”
I don’t know if Reece can even hear me from this far away, but somehow ghosts seem able to communicate from a distance. I
think it works the same as the ‘pull’ thing – if one of us calls out to the other, we automatically zone in on wherever we’re needed. I know Mellie can hear me, but I’m not sure about Reece. He’s not a Reaper, so his power is a lot more limited; he’s starting to get stronger than me, though, and I’m more than a little peeved about that.
It takes a few minutes of awkward silence, but Reece does eventually show up. He flies through the wall behind Andy’s bed and lands gracefully on the mattress, crossing his legs and giving me a small smile. He nods in Andy’s direction, but doesn’t greet him – clearly he’s been caught up on recent events, then.
Reece always seems to know more than me. I initially thought it was because he was special to Mellie in some way, but now I know it’s because I’m not. Mellie saved my life twice, got sick of dealing with me, and let me die the third time I tried. But I think my fixation on Andy is what finally sealed the deal.
“Mass murder,” Reece says by way of greeting. “Two towns over. At least five dead, but the hospital’s pretty full right now too. Mellie’s busy working on damage control.”
Yeah, I think. And what’s her excuse for the last few times she’s ignored my call?
“Sounds fun,” I say. “Shame I had to miss it.”
Reece shrugs. “You can’t leave the city anyway. Only Mellie can. I guess there are some special privileges she gets because of her status. She won’t tell me what, though.”
“I’m shocked she’d keep anything from you.”
“Not her lap dog, remember?”
Andy looks between the two of us like we’re about to start throwing punches, but what I’m really trying to do is break up some of the tension in the room. What I called Reece here for will cause more than enough of it to snuff out any fun we might be having right now.
“Could’ve fooled me.” I grin, and Reece returns the smile with bright teeth and cheek crinkles. “I need to talk to Mellie. Is there any way you can get her here?”
The sudden change in subject wipes the smile off of Reece’s face completely. Andy slides down into a sitting position on the floor
, his legs straight out in front of him; I’m the only one standing now, and it gives me a bit of leverage that makes me feel braver.
“She knows you’re mad. She’s not going to want to see you right now.”
“And why does she think I’m mad? Did I say I was?”
“Hey,” Reece says, holding up his hands in mock surrender. “That’s between you and her. Again, I’m not her lap dog. She barely even talks to me about anything.”
“But she told you about Andy.” I jerk one thumb in Andy’s direction and he flinches. “And she told you I was upset. You know why, right?”
Reece hesitates, biting his lower lip. The light from the lamp on the nightstand by Andy’s bed casts shadows along the mattress, right through Reece’s body.
“Because,” he begins, slowly at first, “she convinced him to take the pills” He turns to Andy. “Right?”
Andy, silent up until now, nods and lightly says “Yes.” My throat feels like it’s closed up, and I can’t seem to find the words I want to say. I don’t know if there’s anything I can say to make this better right now.
I sputter, rounding on Andy with my eyes narrowed. He shrinks back against the wall and I feel a small pang of guilt, but not enough to deter me.
“You!” I say, my voice louder than I intend. “You told me you didn’t remember anything about that! Not only did you lie to me, but you’ve been sneaking around my back with Mellie, of all people?”
“It’s not what you think,” he says after a moment.
“Then what is it?”
“…I can’t tell you.”
I roll my eyes, sweeping one hand through my hair. A breeze rolls through the open window and blows the billowy yellow curtains around Andy’s head.
“Of course you can’t. Nobody can tell me anything, can they? It’s like ever since I died, everybody’s been keeping secrets from me. And now you! I thought I could trust you.”
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