by R. A. Nelson
“I thought…” I stop myself.
She looks at me, beautiful eyes a scary, milky blue. “Please. Please tell me.”
Why can’t I keep my mouth shut?
“I thought… ghosts … I thought they were supposed to be cold.”
Lucy looks away. “Is that what I am?”
I breathe slowly in and out.
“You’re a girl. That’s what you are to me.”
Now the tears are starting up in my eyes for real—I growl low down in my throat and clench my jaw to stop them up.
“I did my best,” I say. “Please. I did the best I could. To heal you, I mean. Same thing I’ve done all these years. I always believed I could do it. There was never any doubt in my mind. Because it wasn’t me doing it, you know what I’m saying?”
“It’s all right.”
“But I know I’m nothing special. I never have been. The power wasn’t mine to begin with. The power to heal. It was just… like something I was borrowing … no, something I was given. It was a gift. I was supposed to …” I cover my eyes with my fingers. “I was supposed to give it away. To other folks. You know?”
She squeezes my arm tighter. The storm booms outside, a rolling, cracking sound drownding me out. But I have to keep going, have to spit it all out at once.
“But to think … I was the one … I let you …”
“What?”
“Die. I let you die, Lucy. I’m so … I’m so …”
“I know,” she says. “You don’t have to say it.”
She leans up against me, drapes her arms around my neck. I keep my hand over my eyes, crying into my fingers. My shoulders are shaking. I try not to make any noise. I try, but sometimes I do.
Sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
The words run over and over in my head. Neither of us says anything for a good while. She lets me get it out, all of it. Finally I raise my head up and look over. She’s looking straight into my eyes.
“You are not nothing,” she says, touching my chin. “You’ve never been nothing. Even before you ever became Little Texas. You understand me?”
I just look at her, her face blurry and smeared through the tears; Lucy takes up a corner of the blanket and rubs my cheeks dry.
“If that’s what happened, if a ghost is what I am … then it’s all right,” she says. “You have to know that. You were just doing what you … do. Right? It’s okay.”
“But… you’ll never grow up, or get married. Become a mother, you know, any of those things.”
I swipe at my eyes, feeling my throat crinkle.
“Yeah. That’s true. That’s true. But I figure it this way-it’s kind of a trade. Because they need me. They need me here, to help them. They need us. Besides, I still get to love you, right?”
I think about that little piece of brick. “I don’t see how … how you can say that, Lucy. Not after …”
She shakes her head, her eyes still locked on mine. “You don’t understand, do you? You believe so hard. Even when you’re wrong about something. You’re pure, Ronald Earl. Pure light. Everybody’s got some light, but yours … it’s so bright, they see it all around you. It sees your light. That’s what it wants, to take it away from you. It wants your light.”
“Tell me, please, what am I supposed to do?”
Lucy smiles. “Get your clothes on.”
I start putting them on, sniffing and feeling embarrassed. Nobody has ever seen me cry before. Not even Certain Certain.
“Are we going somewhere?” I say, still wiping my eyes.
“Outside. Get dressed. It’s a good time to show you.”
A shiver runs across my back. “What’s so important you want me to see it in the middle of a lightning—”
“Where it lives,” Lucy says.
Lucy kicks off the bed and glide-walks across the room.
“I wish I could do that,” I say.
“You can,” Lucy says. “You just don’t know that you can.”
“But—”
“Come on.”
As she moves up the hall, her dress ripples like she’s traveling underwater.
“Hey, you’re moving better,” I say.
“It’s the moisture in the air. It’s—it’s better for me when it’s raining.”
“Why?”
She turns to glare at me. “Just because a person can drive a car, it doesn’t make them a mechanic.”
“But you know way more than I will ever know.”
She smiles a wicked smile. “Ever? You’ll get there eventually. Who knows? Maybe tonight.”
“Real funny. Will it be … dangerous? Like in the cellar?”
“I won’t lie to you. It’s not the smartest thing in the world to do. But it’s safer when it’s wet. We need to go before the heavy rain stops. It probably won’t come in this kind of rain.”
“Probably?”
We stop in the kitchen.
“Can we at least get a flashlight this time?” I say.
“Hurry.”
I find an umbrella and a big, square flashlight on a shelf in the laundry room. The flashlight is the kind that runs on those heavy, square batteries. I click it on, but it’s persnickety; from time to time I have to beat it against my leg to keep it burning.
“Best we can do, I guess.”
I start for the front door, then swing the light around to see if Lucy is coming—
“Holy Jesus,” I say, stepping back.
The beam passes right through her. Just as if Lucy is built of glass, solid but somehow clear. When I pull the light away, she’s whole again.
“It’s the contrast,” Lucy says. “You can’t see it so much with the lights on.”
“But—you’re real, I know you’re real.”
Lucy looks at me hard. Her voice turns deeper, more faraway than ever.
“Don’t fool yourself, Ronald Earl. I have to slow down so much to be here. To be … solid. Don’t get too used to me. Don’t forget what I am. Do you think I can stay this way for good? I can’t. I’m holding myself here. For you. Because they need you. I need you. But I am what I am. And there’s nothing I can do about it. Don’t ever forget that.”
“But I can touch you….”
“And I can touch you.”
The way she says it makes my heart wrench. “Let’s go,” Lucy says.
I follow shaky-legged, half expecting her to flow right through the big oak front door, but she waits for me to open it. Outside the eaves are gushing rain. I pop the umbrella open and hold it over our heads.
But Lucy scoots away down the steps and out into the yard, so fast it’s hard to keep up. I can see slashes of rain splattering her arms and shoulders, the blue dress turning dark. The umbrella strains like a dog on a leash.
The sky blazes with fire, and thunder cracks overhead like a mountain sliding into the lake. I hunch my shoulders as Lucy drifts on ahead. She stops at the edge of the dock, skinny arms at her sides, waiting.
“You know how to run this thing?” she says, pointing at Tee Barlow’s Chris-Craft.
“No way. Besides, I don’t have the key.”
A big push of wind nearly carries the umbrella off, and me with it. Instead of walking out on the dock, Lucy glides down to the bank.
“Help me find it.”
“What are we looking for?” I say, watching her cut her head left and right.
Then I see what she’s looking at, Faye Barlow’s little canoe nosed up into the milfoil.
I look at the canoe, then out at the black, churning lake, hearing the rain fall. “I’ve only been in a canoe one time. What if we tump over? Or the canoe fills up with rain? We’re liable to drown!”
“Get in. There isn’t time. The storm will slack off soon.” She gets up so close, I can smell the water on her skin. She puts her hands on my arm, drawing me to her.
“Please, Ronald Earl. I need you.”
“Lord.” I stand there a few more seconds watching her drip, then step in
and start furiously untying the tether.
“Come on, then,” I say. “Get in.”
Lucy looks at me, eyes glowing, face wet. She’s so close, it nearly stops my heart. She’s got her hand on the edge of the canoe.
“No,” she says. “I’d rather walk.”
And she gives the canoe a big heave, shoving me backward, and I’m spinning out into the current, alone.
“Lucy!”
The sight is something I will remember the rest of my life: Lucy’s thin, pale legs, the wet material of her dress snapping in the wind, matchstick arms pumping, hair ’lectrified, as she crosses the lake. She’s so brave. The most brave thing I have ever seen. But it’s more than that.
Certain Certain says there is such a thing as something being bigger than big—it’s nothing to do with physical size. For the first time I understand what he has been talking about. I can see it right there in Lucy’s body, balancing all the beautiful strangeness of who she is in the way she steps.
I wish so much Certain Certain could be here to see this. I can’t help but think of our Lord walking on water.
I throw the umbrella down and dig in with my paddle, stroking the way Faye Barlow showed me. Lightning slaps the world again, making the trees on Devil Hill look like burning skeletons. Rain starts to run in my eyes.
I can’t see Lucy anymore.
Another flash hits and I can see the trestle—so big and strange and surprising I bang the canoe with the paddle. I pull through the pillowy black, thinking about that sunken town below me. Cracked roads, ramshackly houses sprouting river weeds. Maybe a dog. Some dog nobody remembered, scared to pieces, running through the overgrown yards, whimpering just before he got thrown under a million tons of dark water.
Shut up. Just paddle. Shut up. Shut up.
“Lucy!”
“Here,” she calls out suddenly. “Over here!”
I swing the flashlight around and see a flash of blue further upstream than I figured. I stroke hard for it. Lucy is standing there with a pole in her hands, a metal pole, floating just above the wood of the dock, rain jumping around her small feet. She looks like an angel.
Lucy drops the pole and gives me a hand up. It feels so good to touch her again. My hair and clothes are sopping. I look at the umbrella, feeling ridiculous.
“Come on,” Lucy says.
We climb Devil Hill to the clearing. Even with the flashlight, it’s hard to see where we’re going. There are the pillars of the old house, pale and colorless. The stage is draped in tarpaulins that show up blue in the flashlight. A leaf glues itself to my cheek.
“We need to hurry!” Lucy yells over the storm.
She heads for the trees, with me chasing behind. Lucy is taking me to the trail where Faye Barlow showed me the pitcher plants. It curls off into a black so deep, it eats the flashlight beam whole.
The footing is slick, and Lucy gets further and further ahead, till I lose sight of her around the bend. But finally I come to a place I recognize—there’s the fallen sycamore where the fox left me, right at the edge of that deep yellow and green clearing Faye Barlow didn’t want me to see.
Is this where it lives?
Lucy’s standing in what looks to be a room carved entirely out of leaves and branches.
“This is where it is holding them,” she says. “After you see it, don’t hang around too long. We don’t know when the rain might stop.”
“What am I looking for?” I say.
“You’ll know,” Lucy says. “Hurry. It won’t be safe if you don’t.”
I take a couple of nervous steps deeper into the clearing, spraying the flashlight beam around. I aim the light up. The branches are so thick overhead, it’s almost like a roof.
A snaky little cold dances over my shoulders. This place feels like something has marked it for its own. Claimed it.
A few more steps into the clearing, and I feel it. I’ve become a trespasser.
I shine the light around, angle it out further.
There it is—right in the center of all that space—the biggest, most scabbedy old tree I’ve ever seen.
The base is at least six foot across and probably twenty foot around or more. The trunk is covered with curly rolls of bark like silvery paper and burls the size of punkins. The whole tree looks twisted, as if some giant hands have wrung it out like a dish towel. Long roots as big around as a man’s waist shoot out from the base of the tree in all directions.
I turn and look back; Lucy is still there, standing in the same spot, arms at her sides, head cocked a little. The light passes through her again—I can see the flashlight beam clear up the trail.
The wind pushes through the giant tree, making the limbs move, heavy and creaky. I can hear the leaves beating against each other, and branches rubbing against branches.
Then I hear it. Metal knocking against metal in the wind. “There’s something hanging up there,” I say. I move a little closer.
“Far enough!” Lucy calls. “Hey! That’s far enough. Come back. If you stay too long, it will know you are here.”
But I have to see the tree up close. I have to.
The woods glisten and whisper. I shine the flashlight beam in front of me and creep forward.
“Please!” Lucy cries out. “Come back—it’s not safe!”
When it happens, I don’t know what to call it.
The closest thing I can compare it to is when you nearly fall out of a high tree—the way your lungs puff out and everything inside you comes rushing up under your heart. Because you know how close you came to dying. Right then, right there.
That’s what comes over me—if you could multiply it times a hundred. Like the bottom has dropped out. Not just the bottom under my feet, but the bottom under my life. There is nothing supporting me. I’m hanging in midair, fixing to plummet straight down into everlasting fire and damnation.
“Let not the waterflood overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.”
I drop the flashlight and double over in the leaves, clutching at my stomach. A wave of sickness barrels up my throat; I have to fight to keep from puking. And then I do puke, and it keeps coming and coming till there’s nothing left inside me. Then my body keeps trying to puke, but nothing is there, and it hurts so much, but I can’t make it stop.
Finally it does stop, and I fall over on my side in the wet leaves. I’m going to die. Right here. Right now. I’m not even sure that I care. Something grabs hold of my arm.
“Come on!”
But I’m still so sick, I can’t move. I mumble something to her. Then she’s hauling me up. Dragging me to my feet, pulling me away from the tree.
I swear two or three times, but Lucy just jerks me toward the trail like I weigh no more than a sack full of leaves. I stumble after her, not able to think about anything but the pain.
Without the flashlight, I have to trust her to know where we are running. I’m getting whipsawed by branches, tripped by roots, then a branch catches me in the forehead. I put my hand to my face, and it comes back slick and warm.
“Keep going!” Lucy says. “Hurry!”
We stumble into the plantation clearing, then slip down the hill to the water.
“Get in,” Lucy says. “Get in! Get in!”
She shoves me into the canoe and piles in behind me. Takes up a paddle and starts to stroke. “I’ll help.”
We slide away from the dock. I pick up a paddle and stroke hard as I can. Then it’s all black, and I don’t remember another thing till I’m back at the house.
I’m up in my bedroom. Alone.
Am I in shock? My stomach feels like it’s been turned inside out. My head is sloshing like a yolk in an egg. But my clothes are draped across a chair to dry, and I’m laying in bed holding a damp rag to the gash in my forehead.
Faye Barlow, she is right. There is something evil on that island. Something so evil it makes me sick about the world. Just like I get sick watching the news. Knowing
we are sharing the Lord’s earth with people who murder little girls at gas stations. Chop heads off in Iraq. Lock folks up in their basement to torture them. Evil you can’t talk to, can’t work your way around. It makes me sick and afraid.
The evil on the island is an evil that can come inside your mind anytime you get close enough to it.
And I don’t know how to keep it out.
And I don’t know what Lucy is. I might not ever know. But I know what she is to me. Whatever she is, it is good.
I pick up my little Bible computer and start punching buttons.
Turns out the word love appears 640 times. Nearly three times more than the word hate. It’s in there more often than salvation. More than redemption, more than resurrection or Savior or even Christ.
Love is in the Bible nearly ten times as often as hell.
It’s maybe the most important word. Is it the strongest? The one word that will truly last forever?
I lay there with the light on, watching the ceiling, feeling the old house breathing around me, hearing boards popping in the floors. I’ve got the door to the hallway open.
Am I in love with a ghost?
The Sunday service is tomorrow.
When I wake up, my mouth tastes like I’ve been using it to clean sidewalks. The cut on my forehead is throbbing and raw. Somebody raps on my door.
It’s Certain Certain. “What happened to your head, boy?” he says. “Witches been snatching at you all night? Looks nasty.”
I reach up and touch it. “Ran into something in the dark.”
“You ain’t been down in that cellar again, have you?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, breakfast is ready, only you look a little green around the gills.”
“I’m all right. Hey, I want to go with you to the island today,” I say as we head downstairs. “There’s something I want to show you.”
“What you getting at, boy?”
“She’s real,” I say.
“The little blue dress gal? You still fussing with her?”