A Gift of Ghosts (Tassamara)

by Sarah Wynde

  “He really does read minds, doesn’t he?” Akira said to Zane.

  He managed a smile. “How’d you guess?”

  “All right, what was that about Dillon?” Lucas asked, crossing to where they were standing.

  “Dillon?” Diane stood, also joining them by the door. “What’s going on? Who’s Dillon? Is there someone out there?”

  Akira looked at them, at Lucas’ frown, Diane’s worry, Zane’s concern for her.

  Great.

  Double the relatives, double the trouble. Then she took a deep breath and started to explain.

  Diane fainted. Then she cried. Then she got mad. Akira was impressed with the range of her vocabulary and secretly glad that her ex-husband was the ghost and not Diane. She didn’t want to know what Diane’s energy would look like, and Rob took the yelling without as much as a flicker of his own energy. Then Diane cried again.

  Lucas, though, got colder. The charm disappeared, leaving only the dangerous toughness in its place. If he’d been the brother interviewing her in Tassamara, Akira would never have taken the job, she knew. And while Diane cried and screamed, he disappeared to arrange the search for the bodies.

  Rob had lost his job several months ago, he told Akira. The house was headed into foreclosure, and he and Diane had split up. He’d bought the swing set when Diane was pregnant, and Diane had always said it was too big for the boy. When Daniel fell while Rob was at the house taking care of him, Rob broke. He’d taken Daniel’s body and driven the car to an old quarry that was filled with water, a place that he and Diane had gone diving in earlier, happier days. He’d headed straight into the water. He hadn’t been thinking about a next, about what happened after, he’d just despaired.

  “I couldn’t imagine telling her,” Rob said, watching Diane cry. “I didn’t know how much worse it would be not to be able to tell her.”

  She nodded. He wasn’t the first ghost she’d met who had been surprised and frustrated by his afterlife.

  “So what happens now?” he asked.

  Akira shrugged. Personally, she was hoping for a ride back to the airport and a smooth flight home. But he wouldn’t mean what would happen to her, he wanted to know what would happen to him and Daniel and she had no idea.

  “Aren’t you supposed to find us a white light?”

  Akira sighed. She’d warmed up to Rob’s ghost during the past half-hour and if he could handle Diane’s diatribes without losing control, he could probably handle what she had to say, too. “The 1970’s has a lot to answer for. Watergate, bellbottoms, disco. And that whole white light idea.”

  Zane was perched on the couch next to the sobbing Diane, patting her back helplessly and handing her tissues. At Akira’s words, he looked up. She could read the plea in his eyes, and she tucked her hands behind her back and sidled sideways, closer to the door. He was doing a fine job with the tissues, much better than she would in his place. His look changed to one of mild exasperation and she tried to look apologetic without implying that she would be helpful. Crying relatives were better than angry relatives but not by much. She never knew what to say or do.

  “I suppose that makes sense,” Rob said. “In the earliest afterlife myths, there’s no white light. In fact, in Plato’s Republic, in the story of Er, there’s a rainbow.”

  “The story of who?” Akira asked.

  “Er. Yes, Er. Not Um. I know the jokes.” He was looking around. “But there should be a passageway first. A door. A staircase. Something like that.”

  Abruptly, he disappeared. Startled, Akira looked around. Was he gone? But no, he’d just walked through the glass. He was outside, talking to the little boy. Now that Akira had absorbed some of his energy and he had calmed down, he could get close to the little ghost without hurting him. Akira slid open the door and stepped out onto the patio.

  “Do you see a door, Daniel?” the father was saying.

  “Dada, Dada,” the little boy chortled happily, hugging his father’s legs. “Dada.”

  “Oh, Daniel,” Rob scooped the ghost boy up, hugging him close, and burying his face in the boy’s blond head for a second. Then he said again, “Do you see a door, Daniel? Look around really carefully.”

  The boy obeyed, then shook his head. “Back door, Dada?” he asked, pointing at the house.

  “Not the door to the house, another door.”

  Daniel shook his head again, then frowned, and kicked to be let down. “Dis way?” He sounded almost curious, as he walked past the swing set. Rob watched him, eyes searching as if he was trying to see what Daniel was seeing. “Come, Dada,” the boy ordered, holding out his hand. “Come wit me.”

  “I don’t see it, Daniel.” Rob sounded sad. “But you go ahead.”

  “No, Dada.” The little boy shook his head, and waved at his father imperiously. “You come. Come me. Dis way. You see?”

  The grief on Rob’s face was so intense that Akira could hardly bear to look at him, and his voice was choked, as he repeated, “I don’t see it, Daniel. You go ahead and I’ll—and I’ll catch up to you someday.”

  “No, Dada.” Returning to his father’s side, Daniel took Rob’s hand. “Dis way,” he insisted.

  Rob looked down and smiled sadly, letting himself be tugged along, as he said, “I’ll come with you as far as I can, Daniel, but then you have to go on your own, all right? You won’t know her but Grandma will be waiting for you and you’ll like . . . oh.”

  On that final word—a startled but at the same time almost calm exclamation—Rob and Daniel disappeared.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Ghosts disappeared.

  They’d be there one day, and then the next, they weren’t. Nothing about that surprised Akira.

  But they didn’t disappear because they went somewhere.

  Where was there to go? They disappeared because they were energy, and the energy changed forms or dissipated, right?

  Right?

  Akira sighed. She was staring out the window of the plane, waiting for everyone else to take their seats, and trying to think through what had happened today. Oh, not the drama of it all. Not the emotions, the people, the dynamics, the complicated stuff. She just wanted to understand the science.

  Damn it, ghosts were energy. They didn’t go places. Of course, theoretically, other dimensions could exist. The cosmological multiverse theories postulated a potentially vast number of universes. In fact, there was a cosmologist—at MIT, maybe?—who was working on a taxonomy of universes beyond the observable one that people experienced every day. She wondered what he would have to say if she could tell him what she saw.

  “You okay?” Zane was buckling himself into the seat next to her, pulling the long shoulder strap across his body and snapping it into the clasp, but his worried eyes were locked on her face.

  She ignored his question. “I’ve wasted a decade of my life,” she said, as the realization hit her.

  He didn’t smile, just tilted his head as if encouraging her to go on.

  “Energy research. I should have been studying quantum physics all this time.” She shook her head. She’d gone into physics to try to understand the way the universe worked, and she’d focused on energy because her father had always insisted that the ghosts she saw were just energy.

  She frowned. Well, not always. In her earliest memories, it had been different. But from the time they’d settled in Santa Marita, he’d told her that what she saw was a form of energy.

  Zane picked up her hand and she let him take it, watching as he laced their fingers together, still thinking about her father, until, dropping his voice, Zane asked her, “Do quantum physicists study resonant frequencies?”

  She couldn’t not smile at him. “Not really, no.”

  “Not wasted then,” he murmured, leaning forward to take her lips. She opened to him, feeling his tongue trace its way into her mouth and a surge of desire sparking in her stomach and spreading warmth through her veins. God, it felt like days since he had touched her, but it was just ho
urs since they’d woken up together. What a weird day it had been.

  She pulled away, but let her hand slide up to cup his cheek. “Do you do that often?” She was thinking of the woman they’d left behind, currently lost in a fog of grief. The strength of Diane’s anger had made Akira think that she was tough enough to be okay someday, but someday wasn’t going to be soon. They’d left while the news media filled the street, FBI agents the house, but tomorrow, or maybe the next day, Diane would wake up to emptiness. Akira remembered what that felt like. And the loss of a child must be even worse: she hoped Diane had someone who could be there for her.

  “Kiss you? Not often enough.”

  This time, her smile wasn’t even reluctant. “No. I mean look for missing people.”

  Zane grimaced. “I prefer insurance cases.”

  “To finding kids?”

  “Or not finding them.”

  “A good shrink could help you with that problem,” Lucas drawled, snapping himself into the seat across from Akira.

  Reluctantly, she pulled her gaze off Zane and looked at his older brother. She didn’t like him. She might not be being fair, she acknowledged to herself: her perceptions were undoubtedly colored by the gauntlet of reporters she and Zane had had to push their way through to get into the house, and the fear she still had that her image was going to wind up on some evening news show as a helpful psychic. Diane had promised not to tell anyone what had happened, but who knew how trustworthy the distraught and bereaved mother was?

  “I didn’t know you were with him,” Lucas said gently.

  That didn’t make it better. He was still taking advantage of his brother. Why should Zane have to follow Lucas’s every whim?

  “Dragging Diane out to the airport seemed cruel, especially when Zane didn’t think he could help. Why give her false hope? Plus, every reporter and cameraman in North Carolina would have been right behind her.”

  Yeah, and then there was the mind-reading thing. It just seemed so rude.

  “Well, then, don’t think so loudly.” A smile was playing around Lucas’s lips. Akira glared at him.

  “He doesn’t usually do that,” Zane interjected, squeezing the hand he was still holding. “Ignore him.”

  “Except for the part about the shrink,” Lucas corrected him. “Your inability to find dead bodies is just a mental block. If you can find a diamond, you can find a dead body.”

  Akira frowned.

  “Well, I can’t,” Zane said flatly.

  But it didn’t make sense that he couldn’t. “If you can find a mineral that’s measurably indistinguishable from another lump of the same mineral, then finding a specific mass of DNA, living or dead, shouldn’t be hard,” Akira said.

  “It doesn’t work that way.” Zane shook his head. “If it was that simple, I wouldn’t be able to find anything. Everything would all blend together.”

  “Not finding dead bodies is a defense mechanism.” Lucas leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes, as if to say that the old argument was at an end, as the plane’s engines roared to life.

  A defense mechanism? Akira tried to imagine what Zane’s life would be like if he could find dead bodies. How many people went missing every day? How many of them wound up dead? How many hours would he spend just like this, sitting in a plane, waiting to fly to or from a scene like the one they’d just left?

  It wasn’t that she was unsympathetic to Diane, but it seemed to her that Zane’s gift was more like hers than she’d realized: once it was revealed, his life would no longer belong to him. It would be an endless stream of desperate people, tragic situations, grief and pain.

  “Or a coping strategy,” Akira suggested. Her words were almost drowned out by the noise of the engines as they accelerated down the runway, but Lucas opened his eyes and looked at her. She met his gaze evenly. Maybe she’d reserve judgment on Zane’s brother. He was Dillon’s father, after all.

  Zane squeezed her hand again and she looked back at him, at his wry smile, the affection in his eyes. She should tell him about ghosts. She needed to tell him about ghosts, about their violent energy, about what they could do, both to her and to other ghosts. But if she did . . .

  Maybe she should think about what she’d learned today a little more first. It didn’t change the risk: angry ghosts weren’t like people, it wasn’t possible to have conversations with them. They were much too dangerous for that. But if ghosts actually went somewhere when they disappeared? She needed to consider what that meant, see how it might change her ideas about past events.

  “Think we can make tomorrow a do-over on today?” Zane asked her, voice low, just for her ears. She raised her brows in question. “Start the day the same way, but stay in bed a whole lot longer? Then maybe brunch at Maggie’s? She makes incredible waffles. And then I’ll take you to the springs. We can kayak, maybe see an alligator? Go for a swim if you like really cold water?”

  Okay, yeah, she was definitely not telling him about the ghosts. Possession, convulsions, broken bones, possible death—they were so decidedly unromantic. She’d have to tell him eventually, but the fun would be over then, and she really wanted just a little while to enjoy this—to enjoy him—first.

  She smiled. “Sounds perfect.”

  ***

  “Earth to Akira.”

  “Hmm?” Akira responded absently, not looking up from her phone. She was trying to organize her past experiences with ghosts into categories, but it was proving much more challenging than she’d expected.

  She’d always thought that ghosts came in types. There were the faders, the confused, the free, the tied, and then the red-edged.

  Except in hospitals, the faders were the most common. Sometimes she thought they were more like memories than conscious beings. Like the boys in the backyard, who did nothing but run and play and laugh, faders seemed to be living and reliving important moments, as if they were an afterimage of a life, not an extension of the life itself. Akira called them faders because they were usually translucent, but the amount of translucency varied. She suspected that the older the ghosts, the more translucent they were.

  Then there were the confused. Most often, they seemed to be the recently dead. Hospitals were riddled with them, and they could far too easily start developing red edges. But they tended to disappear quickly. More than any other type of ghost, one minute they were there, and the next, they were gone.

  “Akira,” Zane’s voice was more insistent and she shook her head, as if coming out of a dream, and turned to him.

  “Yes?”

  “The plane’s landed. Lucas suggests we have dinner at the house?”

  “House?” Akira was still distracted, still lost in her thoughts. That one time at the hospital, the time with the broken ribs. Had that ghost said something about a door? She had, hadn’t she? What was it, exactly? She’d been nice for a ghost, worried about Akira. She’d asked if Akira wanted to come with her before she vanished. And she had mentioned a door. Okay, that meant at least one checkmark in the confused column.

  “The house where I live?” Zane repeated patiently. “Lucas stays with us when he’s in town. He’d like a chance to shower and change, and then have us meet him there. With Dillon?”

  “Um, right, yes.” Akira glanced down at her phone, tapping it to close the spreadsheet app she’d been using. Dillon. His dad. Dinner. Right. All of that made sense. Lucas was here to talk to Dillon and she was sure that Dillon would want to see him. She could do that.

  But if ghosts could go through doors, why were the tied spirits stuck? Like Dillon. If a door was available to him, why would he have spent years sitting in a car hoping something interesting would happen?

  “Akira.” A gentle finger was turning her chin until she was looking directly at Zane. “You good to talk to Dillon and Lucas?”

  Finally breaking out of her reverie, Akira smiled at Zane. “Yeah, I’m fine. Dinner at your house or whatever works is great. I’m sorry I’m so distracted. I’m still trying to figure
out what happened today.”

  “A ghost told you where his dead body was?” Zane offered.

  “Also new,” Akira agreed as she unbuckled her seat belt and followed Zane out of the plane’s door, hopping down to the ground. “But no. It was the way he disappeared.”

  “That was weird?” Zane asked.

  Akira shrugged. “Different, anyway.”

  As they got in the car, she took out her phone again. She was careful about asking ghosts questions. Maybe too careful. Had Mr. Sato, her neighbor, been tied or free? She’d never seen him outside his yard, but she didn’t know whether he chose to be there or not. And after Mrs. Sato died, she’d never been back in the house. She assumed he’d disappeared, but she didn’t really know for sure.

  So many ghosts she’d seen only briefly. And her earliest memories were so confused. She barely remembered anything from before her mother died, and the few years after that—well, those memories were chaotic at best. She was trying to remember: that first time, the time with the broken arm, what had that ghost been like? But it was too long ago, the memories just wisps of vision and feeling. Her father had been yelling, trying to cast the demon out of her, and her mother crying, and then there was pain. If anything, the clearest part of that memory was the smell of the hospital, that almost acrid antiseptic flavor that hospital air so often had.

  “Christians—some of them anyway—think ghosts are actually Satanic,” Akira mused, not looking away from her phone. She felt, more than saw, Zane glance at her. They’d taken his car to the airport, so that Dillon could stay home with Rose and Henry, so they were on their way to get the Taurus before heading to his house. “I think it’s in Deuteronomy that the Bible expressly forbids communicating with the dead. People who talk to the dead are abominations or detestable, something like that.”

  “In some Buddhist monasteries, the monks leave offerings for ghosts before meals. Food or money or flowers,” Zane answered, stopping at the red light in town. They’d been silent through the drive, Akira lost in her memories, Zane not disturbing her concentration.