by Sarah Wynde
Apparently his hallucinations agreed with her aesthetic sense, or at least the Arabic woman’s voice did. Noah looked down at the phone again. It still said Purple. Then it dinged again as a new message showed up. Can you hear us?
Hallucinations.
Or some mysterious technology that had people commenting on his life as if they were present, as if they were watching him constantly.
Or ghosts.
He could ask her how her nephew died. Was it pills? Had her mother had a stroke? But he didn’t want to bring the look of pain back to her eyes. And if this was an elaborate con — begging the question, of course, of what possible reason she had to set him up this way — he needed to ask a question no one could have anticipated. It couldn’t be too obvious: no birthday or favorite food, nothing some stranger sitting on the other end of a transmitter might have on a list.
“Childhood pet?” he asked. It wasn’t the best question. She’d mentioned a dog in the restaurant. But it was the first thing that had come to mind. He’d have to try for something more obscure on his next question.
Grace clapped a hand to her heart and opened her mouth, then stopped herself. She opened her hand, indicated the phone he held and waited.
“Uh-oh,” the Dillon voice said. “This is a hard one.”
“You don’t know the name of your childhood pet?” the Rose voice asked.
“My gran was allergic, so we didn’t have any. But she only found that out after Grace got a puppy. It had some stupid name, Snuggles or something like that. Grace was really sad when they had to find it a new home. They gave it to a friend of hers so she could still visit it, but then the friend moved away. And I only know that because I’ve heard the story — it was before I was born.”
“Snuggles?” The laugh in Joe’s voice had Noah fighting to hold back his own smile.
“That wasn’t it, though. It was Sniffles or… I can’t remember.” The Dillon voice sighed.
“Can you text that to him?” the Rose voice asked.
“It’s too long, I’d run out of energy.”
“You’ll have to guess,” the little boy’s voice said. “Maybe it was Snuffles.”
“Sweetums, maybe. I think it had sweet in the name.”
“Come on, Dillon.” Grace closed her fingers and shook her head. “You’ve got to remember this.”
“I do remember,” the Dillon voice protested. “Just not the details.”
“My mom had allergies. We had a dog for a while, but it was before Dillon. I loved her, though.” Grace brought her hand back to her chest. “Broke my heart when we had to give her away.”
Noah had to ask. “What was her name?”
“Sparkle Sunshine Sweet Girl,” Grace replied without hesitation. “Yes, I named her myself. Yes, I was six years old. She was a great dog, though. Part Jack Russell terrier and part chihuahua, so small, but loads of personality.”
Sparkle Sunshine Sweet Girl was not Snuggles. But the stories were so much alike.
Noah had been listening to voices no one else could hear for ten years.
An entire decade of trying to hide his insanity from everyone around him, even from himself.
An entire decade of pretending his life had a soundtrack only he could hear.
An entire decade of believing that his injuries had damaged him so profoundly that he would never be normal again.
Maybe he’d been right about that last.
Hearing ghosts, after all, was not exactly normal.
But the crying girl was wrong: ghosts were better than insanity.
Except that if his voices were ghosts… His hand tightened around the cell phone. Then Joe was a ghost. His best friend had spent the past ten years stuck following him around, instead of moving on to wherever spirits were supposed to move on to.
That was not cool.
“One more question,” Noah said.
“As many more as you need,” Grace replied.
His eyes met hers and a shiver of awareness passed between them. Her gaze didn’t drop, but a hint of pink rose in her cheeks. A slew of questions sprang to mind: first kiss, first boyfriend, favorite position, most intriguing fantasy…
“Baby brother friendly,” Noah said, keeping it light.
She gave a breath of laughter. “Please.”
The label inspired him. “Best Disney movie.”
Her eyebrows rose.
“Oh, this is a good question,” the Rose voice said.
“Aladdin,” the little boy’s voice said, sounding jubilant. “It’s the best one!”
“Frozen!” The crying girl’s voice was closer, as if instead of calling from a distance, she’d joined the others around the kayak.
“The Jungle Book,” Joe said. “Best Disney song ever: I Wan’na Be Like You. Second best, Bare Necessities.” He started humming the latter.
“Piffle.” The Arabic woman sounded annoyed. “Finding Nemo.”
“Nemo’s Pixar, that doesn’t count. And before you say it, Dillon, neither does Toy Story. Best Disney movie has to be a musical,” Joe said firmly.
“Oh, my. Y’all have strong opinions about this, don’t you?” Rose said.
Softly, in a voice that sounded surprisingly determined, the clean freak said, “Beauty and the Beast. Be Our Guest.”
“Dancing dishes and an enormous library, yes, yes,” the Arabic woman said. “Those are good qualities. But Nemo has the turtles and they are the best. The dancing dishes do not compare.”
“The turtles don’t sing,” Joe said. “They can’t win.”
“Aladdin has a genie and a tiger and a monkey. And songs! It is the best.” The little boy sounded as if he was dancing around. Noah could almost picture him swinging off his mother’s hand and bouncing back and forth between the others.
What did they look like, he wondered. His ghosts. Were they transparent? Did they look like they had in life or in death? He hoped they weren’t creepy Sixth Sense style ghosts.
The memory of the blood streaming down Joe’s face had him swallowing hard for a second before he pushed the thought away, instead envisioning Joe grinning at him as they bonded over the proper making of a bed, Army-style. That was Joe, the real Joe. Not the other Joe, dying in his arms. That other Joe was a moment in time, not a presence.
“Aladdin is so problematic,” the crying girl said. “You should hate it.”
“I don’t, though,” the little boy said. “I love it.”
“It doesn’t matter what any of us think,” the Dillon voice said. “It only matters what Grace thinks.”
Not the Dillon voice, Noah realized. A teenager named Dillon. Dead six years. Was he still a teenager? But he still sounded like a teenager. And the kid was still a kid after all this time. So ghosts didn’t keep growing up. They were stuck.
Grace had a small smile playing around her lips but she was waiting, eyes on the phone.
“Do you know what she likes?” Joe asked.
“Yep,” Dillon responded, as the phone dinged.
“The Little Mermaid,” Grace said without waiting for Noah to look.
He looked. Her phone agreed with her. The Little Mermaid.
He made a face. “Really? It’s such a terrible message. Give up your voice for a guy? How can you like that?”
“No, no, no, that’s not the message.” Grace laughed. “Ariel wants to see the world before she ever sees Eric. She trades her voice for legs and freedom, plus the girl has confidence. She believes in herself. She knows she’s going to get her voice back. And she would have if Ursula hadn’t cheated. Kiss the Girl? He was totally gonna kiss her.”
“It’s a good movie, but it’s no Finding Nemo,” the Arabic woman said.
“Nemo doesn’t count. It’s not a musical,” Joe said.
“She must not have seen Frozen,” the crying girl said. “It’s way better than the mermaid movie.”
“Who said the only good movies were musicals?” the Arabic woman demanded.
“Aladdin is be
tter,” the little boy said, sounding sulky.
“Noah should kiss the girl,” Rose said. “He couldn’t possibly have a better cue. It would be so romantic.”
“No, he shouldn’t,” Dillon objected. “That’s my aunt. There should be no kissing.”
“Oh, don’t be so stodgy, Dillon. They like each other. How does the song go again?” Rose hummed a line.
Obediently, the little boy began to sing, complete with the full sha-la-la-la and Jamaican accent.
Long habit had Noah trying to hide his reaction, but Grace must have spotted some flicker of expression, because she raised her eyebrows. He could see the moment she made the connection when her eyes widened. She glanced around her at the water, the boat, the plants, the overhanging branches, and caught her lower lip in her teeth.
“All we’re missing is the chorus.” Her eyes were bright with laughter.
“All you’re missing is the chorus,” he corrected her.
It took her barely more than a breath to realize the implication. “You can hear them?”
He dipped his chin in a minimalist nod. So many years of keeping his secret: it felt wrong to let go of it so easily. And yet, how could he deny the evidence? Sure, ghosts were implausible, but apparently less so than any of the crazy theories he’d come up with. And the sensible, logical explanation — that he was insane — just didn’t fit the facts, not anymore.
“He can hear us?”
“Did he say yes?”
“What did he say? Did he do something?”
“Did you see him? He nodded, didn’t he? Did you see?”
Deliberately, Noah turned his head so that his gaze was directed toward the sound of Joe’s voice. He couldn’t see anything except water and wilderness, the tangled branches of trees, spiky water grasses and weeds, but he said, “Hey, Joe,” just as if he truly believed his old friend was standing in the water next to him.
He did believe it. Mostly.
But the tiny skeptical inner voice that expected his hallucinations to respond with nonsense, with a spew of disconnected phrases and random sentences, was silenced when Joe laughed, and sounding delighted, said, “Noah, my man!”
The other ghosts burst into a cacophony of conversation and exclamations. Noah could even hear the angry man in the mix, saying, “It’s not right, it’s not right,” in a tone of wonder.
“You believe me?” Grace said. Of all of them, she seemed the most surprised.
Noah nodded. “Yeah.”
“Wow. I thought convincing you would be much harder,” she said. “Akira says it’s really difficult to persuade people that ghosts are real.”
“The cell phone helped. Plus, well…” The words felt trapped in Noah’s throat, but he forced them out. “I’m not just taking your word for it. I’ve been listening to them for a long time.”
“How long has it been?”
“Ten years.”
“And — how many?” she asked tentatively. “Dillon told his mom that you were collecting ghosts, but I wasn’t sure what that meant.”
He gave a chuckle without humor. “No idea. There’s a buddy of mine, Joe, my best friend from Basic. An Arabic woman and a kid. Another woman — she likes to clean things. A girl.” He paused. Maybe he wouldn’t mention that the girl cried a lot. He didn’t want to set her off again. “A dude that’s allergic to peanuts. A lady that sings. A guy who’s kind of pissed off all the time. A woman who wants some guy named Tom to stop driving so fast.” He tried to remember some of the others, but her mouth had already fallen open.
“Wow.” She mouthed the word, rather than saying it aloud.
He shrugged and forced a smile. “I tried to ignore them. Until recently, most of them didn’t stick around. Joe and the woman and the kid did, but apart from them… I heard things, words here and there, bits of conversations. They didn’t usually make sense. Hallucinations, I thought.”
“That must have been difficult,” Grace replied.
“I can’t say I got used to it, but I got used to ignoring them. Most of the time, anyway.”
“Really difficult.”
The sympathy in Grace’s expression nearly undid him. Keeping his voice light, he quickly changed the subject. “But you have lousy taste in movies. The Lion King is clearly the best Disney movie of all time.”
It was like pointing out a squirrel to a dog. All his voices — his ghosts, he corrected himself — immediately took up the argument again as Grace’s eyes widened indignantly.
“So wrong.” She held up a hand, ticking off songs on her fingers. “Part of Your World, Under the Sea, the fish song. Not to mention Ursula’s song, the one about the poor unfortunate souls. How can you not love that? And she is such a great villain, way better than what’s his name, the evil uncle. Evil uncles are such a cliché.”
Noah grinned at her. “I’ll have to watch it again sometime. It’s been long enough that I’ve forgotten the details.”
“Please tell Grace I’m sorry I couldn’t answer her before. I was a little busy,” Dillon said in his ear as the others continued to argue.
Noah stopped smiling. “Yeah. About that…” He had so many questions he didn’t know where to begin, but he relayed Dillon’s message to Grace.
She nodded. “Vortex, he said. Like the one he survived before? That’s not good.”
“What do you know about them?” Noah asked.
“I’ve talked to Akira about her theories. She believes we — meaning spirits or souls or whatever you want to call our essential energy, the part of us that lasts after our material selves are gone — that we exist in at least two dimensions beyond this one. A vortex is an opening into one of those dimensions. Not a pleasant place, as I understand it.”
“All right. So we avoid vortexes. No more diner.” The food was great, but Noah wasn’t going to risk Joe’s existence for a good meal.
“It’s not so easy.” Grace looked troubled.
“The vortex opens when there’s too much spirit energy in one place. We’re not safe anywhere,” Dillon said.
“We’re dead,” the crying girl said bitterly. “Dead ought to be safe. This is so wrong.”
“It’s not right,” the angry man piped in, in seeming agreement.
The air around Noah suddenly seemed colder. He shivered, glancing at the sky. Had a cloud covered the sun? It was getting later, the sun dropping toward the horizon, but the sky was clear.
“I do not like this,” the Arabic woman muttered.
“Oh, dear,” the clean freak said. “I should be scrubbing. What am I doing?”
“It’s water, Mona. It’s as clean as it’s going to get,” Joe said, but even he sounded worried.
“We don’t know why ghosts exist,” Grace said. “Some of them, like Dillon, seem to be trapped. Whatever’s supposed to happen after you die just didn’t happen for them. Others apparently choose to stay. My mom…” She gestured as if erasing a chalkboard. “Long story. But eventually, after Akira helped her, my mom left. Moved on.”
“Is that what I’m supposed to do? Help them so they can move on?” Noah asked skeptically. He felt like a character in a bad Lifetime movie. He didn’t want to be an asshole about it, but believing in ghosts was hard enough. If they were going to try to convince him that heaven and hell were real, he was going back to bed until he woke up from this weird dream.
“Maybe. If you can figure out how,” Grace said, her wry smile not reaching her eyes. “It’s not as easy as you might expect.”
“How tough can it be? They’re supposed to look for a white light, right?”
Grace’s smile turned real. “Akira would roll her eyes at you and start ranting about the 1970s. She says some guy made up the whole white light thing back then and it wasn’t even a white light. It was gold. But no, they don’t need a white light. They don’t even need to move on. We just have to discover why you’re attracting them and make it stop. Simple enough.”
“Simple?” She made it sound easy, but Noah wasn�
�t convinced.
“When Akira gets back, we’ll ask her. She’ll run some experiments.” Grace waved her hand, fluttering her fingers up through the air as if playing a scale. “She’ll figure it out.”
“She never figured out how to get me free from my car,” Dillon said. “Or Rose from her house.”
“And a vortex is as bad for her as it is for y’all,” Rose said. “The last time she found one, it killed her.”
What? Noah frowned, turning his head toward Rose’s voice and trying to hear what she was saying through the chaos of his other voices all asking questions at once.
22
Grace
He believed her.
And damn it, Grace wished he’d kissed her. She wanted to feel his lips against hers again, wanted to touch him. Wanted to see if the magic of the morning had been a fluke, a one-time thing, or whether they really fit together as perfectly as it seemed.
But the moment was long gone.
Noah was scowling, not looking at her, his brows drawn down.
Why had he decided to trust her? She’d been so prepared for a long, arduous attempt at persuasion that her success left her feeling off-balance.
Or maybe that was just Noah.
A snowy egret spread its wings and took flight, its ungainly legs tucking back against its body. Grace watched it, following its path up into the air, and realized the sun was brushing the tops of the trees. Her kayak had reflective tape, but no lights, so they needed to start back before it got much darker. She gestured toward Noah’s paddle. “We should get moving. It’ll be getting dark soon.”
He nodded, still frowning and clearly listening to the ghosts, but leaned forward, passing her the cell phone he’d been holding. She picked up the dry bag from the floor of the kayak and put the phone away, then grabbed her own paddle. She held it out to him. “Can you hang on to this while I turn around?”
He answered with a seemingly unrelated question: “Akira died?”
Grace drew the paddle back. Why was he asking that? “Technically, I guess so. Yeah. But my sister resuscitated her. It wasn’t, you know, fatal. It was a very temporary death.”