“We weren’t exactly companions,” Nick told her. “Allie and I were total strangers-until the car accident.”
“I had an accident, too, but my companion wasn’t a stranger. He was my brother.
The accident was entirely our fault. Mikey and I were walking home from school.
It was a cool spring day, but sunny. The hills were already turning green. I can still remember the smell of the wild-flowers that filled the fields-it’s one of the only smells I can still remember from the living world. Isn’t that odd?”
“So it happened in a field?” Nick asked.
“No. There were two train tracks side by side that crossed the dirt path that led home. Those tracks were mostly for freight trains. Every once in a while, for no good reason, a freight train would stop on the tracks and sit there for hours on end. It was a terrible nuisance-going around the train sometimes meant a half-mile walk in either direction.”
“Oh no,” said Nick. “You went under the train?”
“No, we weren’t stupid enough to do that, but quite often there was an empty boxcar open on both sides, so we could climb through the train. There was one on that day. Mikey and I had been fighting, I don’t remember what about, but it must have seemed important at the time because I was just furious and was chasing him. He was laughing and running ahead of me, and there was that boxcar, right in the middle of the dirt path, the doors on both sides pulled open, like a doorway to the other side. Mikey climbed up and into the boxcar. I climbed up right behind him, reaching for the back of his shirt as he ran across. I just missed him. He was still laughing and it just made me even more angry. He leaped out of the boxcar on the opposite side, and turned back to me.”
Mary closed her eyes, the image so strong she could just about see it playing on the inside of her eyelids like a cinema show. A movie, as the living now called it.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Nick said gently, but Mary had come too far to stop.
“If I hadn’t been so angry, I might have seen the sudden terror in Mikey’s eyes, but I didn’t see that; I was too dead set on catching him. I jumped down from the box car and slugged him in the arm-but instead of fighting back, he grabbed me and that’s when I realized something I had forgotten. There were two railroad tracks side by side. One track held the freight car that hadn’t moved for hours, and on the second track was another train traveling at full speed. We had both just jumped right into the path of a speeding train that we hadn’t been able to see from the other side of the boxcar. When I finally saw it, it was too late. I never felt it hit me. Instead there was the sudden darkness of a tunnel and a light far, far away but moving closer. I was flying down that tunnel, but I wasn’t flying alone.”
“I remember that tunnel,” Nick said.
“Before I got to the light I felt Mikey tugging on me. ‘No, no!’ he was yelling, and he pulled me and spun me around and I was still so mad at him I started fighting. I hit him and he hit me, he tugged my hair, I pushed him, and before I knew it, I felt myself crashing through the walls of that tunnel and losing consciousness even before I hit the ground.”
“That’s just like what happened with Allie and me!” Nick said. “We slept for nine months!”
“Nine months,” Mary repeated. “Mikey and I woke up in the middle of winter. The trees were bare, the tracks were covered with snow, and of course like so many Greensouls, we couldn’t understand what happened. We didn’t realize that we were dead, but we knew something was terribly wrong. Not knowing what else to do, we did the worst thing that an Afterlight can do. We went home.”
“But didn’t you notice yourselves sinking into the ground as you walked?”
“The ground was covered with snow,” Mary said. “We simply thought our feet were sinking into the snow. I suppose if we turned around we would have noticed that we left no footprints, but I didn’t think to look. It wasn’t until we got home that I realized how wrong things were. First of all, the house had been painted, not the light blue it had always been, but a dark shade of green. All our lives, we had lived with our father and our housekeeper since our mom had died giving birth to Mikey. Father never found himself another bride, but all that had changed. Father was there, yes, but with some woman I didn’t know and her two kids. They were in my house, sitting at my table, with my father. Mikey and I just stood there, and that’s when we first noticed our feet sinking into the ground, and it hit us both at once what had happened. Dad was talking to this woman, she gave him a kiss on the cheek, and Mikey started yelling at them.
‘Father, what are you doing? Can’t you hear me? I’m right here!’ But he heard nothing-saw nothing. And then gravity-the gravity of the Earth, the gravity of the situation-it all wrapped up into one single force pulling us down. You see, Nick, when you go home, the very weight of your own absence is so unbearably heavy that you start to sink like a stone in water. Nothing can stop you then.
Mikey went first. One second he was there, the next second he was up to his neck, and then, the next, he was gone. Gone completely. He sank right through the floor.”
“But you didn’t?”
“I would have,” said Mary, “but I got to the bed. You see, when I started to sink, my reflex was just like anyone else’s; to grab on to something. I was already at the doorway to my parents’ room. I stumbled in, already up to my waist. Everything I tried to reach for, my hand just passed through and then I grabbed the post of my parents’ bed. Solid brass. Everlost solid. I held on to it and pulled myself up until I climbed onto the bed and tumbled into it, curled up and began to cry.”
“But how – “
“My mother,” Mary answered without even letting Nick finish the question.
“Remember, she had died giving birth. She died in that bed.”
“A dead-spot!”
Mary nodded. “I stayed there for a long time until my father, not even knowing I was there, climbed into the bed with his new wife. I couldn’t bear to see them together, so I left. By then I had recovered enough so that the weight of being home wasn’t so overwhelming anymore. I raced out of the house and although I sank quickly, I didn’t sink entirely, and the farther away from home I got the easier it was to walk.”
“What about your brother?” Nick gently asked.
“I never saw him again,” Mary answered. “He sank to the center of the Earth.”
Mary didn’t say anything for a very long time. There was an unpleasant heaviness where her stomach had once been, but everywhere else there was a strange, ethereal sense of weightlessness. Everlost spirits did not float through the air as the living imagined, but right then, she felt like she might. “I’ve never told anyone that before, not even Vari.”
Nick put his hand gently on her shoulder. “I know it must be horrible to lose your brother like that,” he said, “but maybe, maybe, I could be like a brother to you.” Then he moved a little closer. “Or…well…what I mean to say is, maybe not like a brother but something else.” Then he leaned toward her, and he kissed her.
Mary did not know how to deal with this. In the many years that she had been in Everlost there were boys who would try to force kisses on her. She wasn’t interested in those boys, and she always had more than enough strength to fight them off. But here was a boy whose kiss she didn’t want to fight off. On the other hand, neither did she want to have her judgment clouded by unfamiliar emotions. So she didn’t respond to him at all.
“I’m sorry,” he said sheepishly, taking her lack of response as disinterest.
“Don’t be,” was all Mary said, but kept all of her feelings wrapped up tightly inside, just as she was wrapped up inside her lacy velvet dress.
Rejection was every bit as humiliating in death as it was in life.
It’s because of the chocolate, Nick thought. No, it’s because I’m a year younger than her. No, I’m a hundred years younger than her. Nick didn’t wait for an elevator, he climbed up the stairs two steps at a time, and returned to his apartment, closing the door. Sure, Nick had been lovesick before. There was that girl in science-or was it history-he wasn’t sure anymore-but the point was it had passed. Here in Everlost, though, it would never pass, and he wondered if he tried hard enough if he would be able to simply disappear, because how could he ever face Mary again, much less face her for eternity.
Mary, Mary, Mary. Her face and name were locked in his mind…And suddenly he realized that there was no room for the name that truly should have been in his mind. The name that that brat Vari was so sure he would forget. Hershey is what the other kids called him now, but that wasn’t his name, was it? His name started with an N. Nate. Noel. Norman. He was certain that it started with an N!
Mary found her moods were always soothed by Vari’s masterful playing. He could coax the sweetest sounds from the Stradivarius violin – the same violin from which Vari had taken his Everlost name. Today he played Vivaldi’s
