Andy bites his lip. His face looks more angular than ever from this close; I could count his freckles if I wanted to.
“But I’m here now,” he says with a hint of confusion. “You don’t have to be afraid to be around me anymore. Your Reaper friend can’t punish you, and you don’t have to worry about accidentally touching me. And…”
He trails off, but I know what he was about to say. I finish for
him, “And you look like yourself now. I know that’s important, but wouldn’t it feel better if you could be like this in real life? They’re gonna put you in a dress and bury you as a girl. Don’t you want to
live to prove them wrong?”
Something in Andy’s face lights up, his eyes sparkling. It’s like a weight has been heaved off of him. He smiles, and it actually looks real for once.
“I do,” he whispers, more to himself than to me.
“Listen,” I continue, pushing down my premature joy just in case he changes his mind again. “You have all the time in the world to die – Hell, it could happen next month, or next week, or even tomorrow for all you know. And you can still kill yourself if things get bad again, but you can never go back to being alive after this. This is your last chance.”
“I know.”
“Then what are you gonna do?” I know I shouldn’t push him, but his time is running out. Being in a coma without a soul to support his body… I don’t know how much longer he’s going to live for. I think he’s on borrowed time already.
“I…” His smile falters a bit, but doesn’t vanish completely. I take that as a good sign. “With an argument like that, how can I say no?”
I almost jump for joy, but my body settles on falling off of Sylvia’s headstone and face-planting on the grass. Andy’s laughter sounds like music.
♠♠♠
“Can’t you just – I don’t know – jump in or something?”
“Don’t ask me! I have no idea how these things work. Or if it even will work.”
“Nice optimism there, kid.”
Andy rolls his eyes. “Killed myself, remember?”
“Clearly you didn’t do a very good job,” I say, gesturing down at the body on the mattress below us. “Because you’re still alive.”
“Clearly.” He glances down, then back up at me. “Are you sure this is gonna work? What if I mess up?”
I don’t even want to think about what would happen if Andy couldn’t go back into his own body. He’d be stuck here for an indefinite amount of time, just like me – he might even become a Grim Reaper someday, which is the last thing I want for him.
“You won’t know until you try,” I say. Is it just my imagination, or have his heart rate and blood pressure gotten lower since last time we were here?
“Okay.”
He sets one hand down on his unconscious body’s shoulder, straining to push himself back inside, but nothing happens. He pushes harder, and his hand goes right through and he nearly unbalances himself. He stands up straighter and puts both hands on his body’s arm, concentrating harder than I’ve ever seen him do. Nothing.
“Terra, it’s not working, I – ”
“Maybe…” I interrupt him, thinking hard. “Maybe if I try too…? I pulled your soul out; maybe I can put it back in.”
Technically, I didn’t pull his soul out, I just helped it along, but it means the same thing to me. Either way, I was there when he ‘died;’ it’s only fitting that I help him back to life, too.
Before he can answer I grab ahold of his left hand, feeling tingles in my right hand where his palm meets mine. He shivers, and I can’t help but smile.
“This might be the last time we get to do this,” I tell him. “I know what Mellie said, but I don’t know if I completely trust myself not to, you know. And it wouldn’t be the same anyway. When you’re human I won’t feel anything.”
It’s a little sad, thinking about it that way. It’s like I only just got to meet Andy – the real Andy – and now I have to say goodbye. I know it’s for the best, but it still hurts. I’m going to miss this.
But I can’t be selfish about something this important. This is a human life I’m playing around with; my own feelings don’t matter as much as he does.
Andy guides our clasped hands to his chest, which is rising and falling slowly. He pushes down, and at first I think we’ve just phased right through him again, but then his soul flickers and I know it’s worked. A tinge of sadness pulls at my smile, but I force it away.
“See you on the other side?” he says as his soul is pulled back into his body, his form slowly fading. I nod and let go of his hand.
“Sure thing, kid.”
And then, just like that, he’s gone. His soul vanishes into thin air and his pulse speeds up to a normal pace, his blood pressure
stabilizing and his other vitals shifting on the monitor by his bed. He takes a deep breath that sounds more like a gasp, and I wait for him to open his eyes.
He blinks groggily and rubs at his eyes with the backs of his hands, trying to sit up; he falls back onto the pillow and his eyes flutter open slowly.
As soon as he’s adjusted to the bright lights in the room he cranes his head and looks around, eyes falling on me by the corner of his mattress. I smile broadly and offer him a quick wave.
And then he blinks, confusion on his face, and the illusion shatters.
“Terra?” he says, turning around on his bed and glancing around wildly. “Where are you?”
“I’m right here!” I say loudly, but he doesn’t even look at me, his eyes roving the opposite corner of the room desperately. “I’m here, Andy. I’m right here!”
But he obviously can’t hear me. My heart feels like it’s sinking down into my stomach and my head is spinning. There’s no way, I think. Not after everything we’ve been through. This can’t be happening right now.
And I know I should be happy about this, because if he can’t see me, then he isn’t suicidal anymore. He isn’t going to die any time soon. But I’d always thought that Andy was somebody special – someone who could see ghosts without having to be on the Grim
Reaper’s list. Now I know that’s not the truth; he’s no different than
anybody else. Except, to me, he is.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” a voice says from behind me. Mellie. I should have known she would show up for this.
I nod, my eyes wet. I’ve always found it strange that ghosts can’t cry, but right now, I feel like that’s exactly what I’m doing.
“I would tell you that it’s for the best, but I know that’s not what you want to hear right now. He’ll move on, but he’ll never forget you. You just bought him an extra sixty years; that’s more than I can say I’ve ever done.”
I know she’s just trying to make me feel better, but it isn’t working. I don’t think she can say anything that will make me feel better right now.
But she’s right – I should be happy. I should be grateful that she gave me the opportunity to save him. I should be glad that he gets to live out a full life now; he might even fall in love with a beautiful girl and have kids and grandkids and be happy. He’s going to have a better future, and I should be thrilled – but right now, I can’t look past my own loss. It feels like he just died in front of me again.
I look down at him. He’s laying back down on his pillow, eyes closed, and there are silent tears streaming down his cheeks. He must have just realized the same thing I did – and it’s affecting him just as much.
“What’ll happen to him now?” I ask Mellie. She winks at me and presses her index finger to her lips.
“I can’t say. But it’ll be better than what’s already happened to him, I can promise you that.”
“And his parents?”
“They’re not as bad as you think. And after this, I don’t think they’ll give him such a hard time anymore.”
It sucks that Andy had to nearly die to get his parents’ approval, but at least he’s alive now. I should be happy
about that. I really should.
“Do you want to stick around to find out?” Mellie asks me. I pry my eyes away from Andy’s scrunched-up, sad-puppy face to look at her. It might just be the lighting, but Mellie’s hair looks brighter somehow; it looks like curls of fire surrounding her head, and it suits her so much I can barely believe that other people see her differently.
I shrug. “Do I have anything better to do?”
Mellie grins, her lips curling over her bright white teeth. I wonder why I picture her like this. She must remind me of someone I once knew, but I can’t quite remember who.
“Why don’t we find out?”
Mellie holds out one hand and I tentatively take it. Sparks shoot through my arm, but it doesn’t hurt. She pulls me away from Andy’s hospital bed, and I look at him one more time. For some reason, I get the feeling it might be the last.
Mellie leads me up through the ceiling and out the window of the room one floor above. We hover in the sky for a moment, hands clasped tightly, and she’s still smiling like she just won the lottery.
“Ready to see your mom, Terra?” she asks, and I look at her, dumbstruck, as a beam of white light falls out of the space between our entwined fingers.
It takes me a moment too long to realize exactly what’s happening, and by the time I do, it’s too late for me to thank her. I’m not even sure what to thank her for, but the light blurs my vision and pushes my thoughts back like they don’t really matter anymore. I blink my eyes and there’s no moisture, no tears; it’s like my sadness has evaporated into the clouds above.
And then the light swells and surrounds me until I can’t even see Mellie anymore. And that’s the last thing I remember about my time on Earth.
Epilogue
Mellie Maison walks to the grassy plot of land, a bundle of flowers in her hands. Tulips - Charlotte’s favorite. She sets them down in front of the grave and sits, reading the faded headstone that she’s already memorized.
Mellie’s life wasn’t that much different than her death – get up, go to work, come home and wait for the cycle to start over again. Reaping souls was never a dream occupation to her, but it was better than the alternative. Explaining death to a few people every other day, or burning in Hell for all of eternity? She got off easy compared to a lot of others.
She didn’t deserve it. After what happened to Charlotte Spade, she should have been destroyed. She had played God in a world that no such being touches; she had used her power for her own selfish gain. She had taken a life on purpose.
Charlotte had been like a best friend to her. Nobody who wasn’t dying had been able to see Mellie before, but Charlotte had been in near perfect health when they’d met. Mellie was still a
trainee under a Reaper named Benny – a tall, lanky man in his early
thirties with dark hair and a scraggly goatee. She had been dead for five years, and had all but given up hope on finding the closure she needed to move on. And then she met Charlotte.
Charlotte had two daughters – a tiny ten-year-old with a big mouth and pigtails in her hair, and a reserved teen who was rarely home; Olivia was older by two-and-a-half years, and Terra was just a child. Neither of them could see Mellie, but she kept an eye on them anyway, at Charlotte’s request. She should have realized at the time that Charlotte knew she was dying, but Mellie was too excited about her new friend to notice her slowly deteriorating health.
And then she died. She got sick, keeled over in the living room one day, and Mellie tugged her soul out without thinking about the consequences. All she knew was that her friend was in pain, and she needed to end it. There was nothing on her mind but Charlotte, the beautiful, resilient woman who had captured her attention months ago.
She didn’t even think about the children, or how losing their mother would affect them. She was selfish; she couldn’t stand to see Charlotte suffering, so she took her life to stop the tears and the screaming and the pain. She led her friend’s soul to Heaven and stayed behind to watch the aftermath – Charlotte’s youngest daughter finding her mother’s body, the ambulance, the autopsy. She attended the funeral and listened to the words of people who knew less of Charlotte than she did, and she watched Terra’s downward spiral without any clue how to stop it.
The first time it happened, Mellie had enough common sense to see the signs and hide the pills. Terra ended up taking a handful of baby aspirin and falling asleep on the couch, and Mellie thought for a moment that things would get better. She’s a kid, she told herself. She just lost her mother. In a few months she’ll get over it and by this time next year it’ll be like it never even happened.
But two years later it happened again. This time, Mellie had just enough time to throw a fistful of pills under Terra’s bed before she swallowed half the bottle of some prescription antidepressant a shrink gave her to numb her feelings after her mother’s death. Terra coped with things differently than Olivia did. Where Olivia hid herself behind makeup and the arms of boys, Terra put her emotions on full display. She looked like a walking funeral nearly every day, and honestly, Mellie was a little surprised that it took three more years for her to finally succeed in ending her own life.
And that’s when everything finally fell apart.
Terra Elizabeth Spade, the young girl that Mellie had spent the past five years trying to save, took a knife to her wrists and there was nothing Mellie could do to stop her. She realized, in an instant, that she had to let Terra go, just as she had done for her mother. She needed to end their pain, their suffering, in the only way that she knew how.
And so she played God again, and her consequences doubled.
Mellie doesn’t remember much of her past life, the time when she was alive. She tries not to think about it, because there’s nothing she can do to change what happened. She doesn’t remember
what her job was when she was alive, where she lived or how she
died, or even what she used to look like. She remembers her name, and that’s all – the rest was taken from her when she became a Reaper. Reapers appear as different people depending on the circumstances. She has to become whatever other people want her to be; there’s no room for her actual self in that scenario.
The wind picks up, and she looks across the blowing grass to the grave three plots down from Charlotte’s. The headstone is simple – a name and two dates, with no epitaph in between. She remembers Terra’s reaction to it and wonders what her own grave looks like.
Terra was different as a spirit than Mellie had seen her as a human being. Maybe she felt freer to express herself without her own death looming over her head, or maybe her regret hadn’t sunk in yet. Either way, Terra was both a joy and a curse to know. Part of Mellie wishes she had gotten to know her better, that maybe they could have had more time to spend as friends rather than enemies.
Mellie had established a single rule during her time as a Grim Reaper: don’t get too close to humans. She had learned the hard way that letting go is twice as painful when you’re attached to the person that’s dying. It was her love for Charlotte that had forced her hand, and she didn’t want any other trainees to have their fates sealed the same way she did. When Terra met Andy Nolan, a small, quiet boy trapped in a girl’s body, Mellie knew that Terra would eventually get too close to him. She could see it in the way Terra looked at him, how much time she spent with him and how happy she seemed. Mellie didn’t want to ruin that, but she also knew how Andy’s story was meant to end. She wanted to spare Terra that heartache.
But Terra was persistent. Mellie should have known better than to assume she could keep them apart; if someone had told her, six years before, that she needed to stop seeing Charlotte, she would have either refused or still done it in secret.
Charlotte told her once that Mellie looked like her older sister Ann – tall and slim, with curly blonde hair and long eyelashes. She told Mellie about the car accident that had taken her life years before Mellie died. Terra hadn’t even been born yet when it happened.
The better she does her job, the less time she has to spend on it. Maybe she can move on someday, if she keeps the deaths she’s in charge of in order. But she let Andy Nolan slip through the cracks, and she knows what her punishment will be.
It was hard to see him like that – bruised all over and covered in his own blood. Mellie didn’t even know the boy, but she kept her eye on him after he missed his first death date. Terra had saved him – of course she had – and Mellie should have just left well enough alone after that.
If she just stepped back and let things happen the way they’re meant to, she wouldn’t be here right now, sitting on the end of the grave of her best friend and wishing she could join her in Heaven. Mellie still sees Charlotte sometimes, when she brings lost souls to Heaven, but she can never speak to her. It’s part of her punishment, and it hurts more every time. But now, at least, Charlotte has one of her daughters to keep her company – Terra Spade, the last soul Mellie touched.
And then Andy had found himself back on Mellie’s list, flickering in the back of her mind, and she knew she had to do something to either stop him or convince him. She wanted so badly to just leave him alone and let him make his own decision, but she knew that he would eventually choose to die and that Terra would be devastated. She couldn’t let that happen – not after killing Charlotte and causing Terra so much pain. She couldn’t just stand by and watch her get hurt again.
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