First Grave on the Right

breath catching in her throat.

I whirled and ran away, hiding behind a trash bin as Mrs. Johnson crawled onto the park bench and cried. Bianca appeared beside her and ran a tiny hand over her hair.

I knew better. I knew not to say anything, knew the consequences, but I did it anyway. I sneaked up and hid in the bushes behind the bench. “She’s happy, Mrs. Johnson.”

The woman turned to me, bobbed and weaved her head, trying to see me through the leaves. “Charley?”

“Um, no. My name is Captain Kirk.” I wasn’t the most imaginative being on the worldly plane. “Bianca asked me to tell you not to forget to feed Rodney and that she is sorry for breaking your grandmother’s china cup. She had assumed Rodney would have had better table manners.”

Mrs. Johnson’s hands flew to her mouth. She stood and circled the bench, but I was not about to be slapped again. I tore out of there and headed for home, swearing never again to talk about the departed. But she chased me! She ran me down and jerked me off the ground like an eagle snatching his dinner from a lake.

I’d thought about screaming, but Mrs. Johnson hugged me to her. For, like, a really long time. Uncontrollable sobs racked her body as we sank to the ground. Bianca stood beside us, smiling and petting her mother’s hair again before she drifted into me. I figured she’d told her mom what she needed her to know — apparently it had been a really important cup — and she felt she could leave. She smelled like grape Kool-Aid and corn chips as she passed.

Mrs. Johnson continued to rock me for some time before my father came in his patrol car. She stopped and looked at me. “Where is she, darling? Did she tell you?”

I lowered my head. I didn’t want to say, but she seemed to need to know. “She’s by the windmill past the trees. The search party was looking in the wrong place.”

She cried some more, then discussed what’d happened with my dad as I watched Bad in the distance, his black robe undulating like a sail in the wind, spanning the width of three massive trees. He was magnificent, and he was the only thing I’d ever truly been afraid of my whole life. He dissipated before my eyes when Mrs. Johnson came to give me another hug, and Bianca’s body was found that afternoon. The next day, I received a huge bouquet of balloons and a new bike, which Denise wouldn’t let me keep. But every year on Bianca’s birthday, I got a bright bouquet of balloons with a card that simply read, Thank you.

I learned two things from that experience: that most people would never believe in my abilities, even those closest to me. And that most people would never understand the devastating need of those left behind, the need to know the truth.

Regardless of how things had turned out, I’d caused a lot of pain that day. And a lot since. I should have made sure Rosie Herschel boarded that plane. I should have escorted her to the security checkpoint and then slipped one of the personnel a twenty to make sure she stayed put. Zeke couldn’t have found her before the plane boarded. He was with me. Had she changed her mind? Surely not. She was like a kid in a candy shop, ridiculously excited about the new life awaiting her. The enormous burden of living under the constant threat of violence had already been lifted from her shoulders. No, she hadn’t changed her mind. And instead of protecting my client, I was playing dodge-the-right-hook with her scum-of-the-underworld husband.

But therein lay the rub: She’d trusted me. With her life. And once again, I had let someone down in the most severe way possible.

I felt Angel standing across the room and glanced up through my lashes. His head was down, his eyes darting occasionally to my right, where Reyes sat. In the dark, I realized he was there as well, sitting patiently beside me. Not touching or demanding. Heat drifted off him like sand off a dune.

Angel wouldn’t come closer. Not with Reyes so near. He was afraid of him. I was beginning to understand that Reyes wasn’t the average everyday entity. He even freaked out the dead people.

I curled back into my blanket, buried my face. “You could have told me,” I said to Angel, my voice muffled through the thick material.

“I knew it would upset you.”

“That’s why you took off for two days.”

I could almost feel him shrug. “I just figured you’d keep thinking she got away. You know, that nobody would ever find her.”

“On the bedroom floor in a pool of her own blood?”

“Yeah, I hadn’t figured that part out yet.”

“I wanted her to be happy,” I said by way of explanation. “I had it all planned. She was going to open a hotel, get to know her aunt all over again, and be happier than she’s ever been in her whole life.”

“She is happier than she’s ever been in her whole life. Just not in the way you wanted. If you could know what it’s like here, really like, you wouldn’t be so sad.”

I sighed. For some reason, that knowledge didn’t really help. “What happened?”

“She did everything right, just like you told her,” he said. “She left dinner simmering on the stove. She left her purse with her wallet in it on her nightstand. She left her shoes and coat in the entryway. He would never have suspected she’d just run away. He would have thought something had happened to her.”

“Then what? What went wrong?”

“Her baby’s blanket.”

My head whipped up. Angel was peeling paint off the side of the snack bar, doing his best not to look in Reyes’s direction.

“She went back for her baby’s blanket,” he explained.

“She didn’t have a baby,” I said, confused.

“She would have, if he hadn’t sucker punched her in the gut.”

I buried my head again, fought the sting of tears.

“She’d knitted it. Yellow because she didn’t know if it would be a boy or a girl yet. She lost the baby the night she mustered the courage to tell him she was pregnant.”

My lids squeezed shut, forcing the most useless tears I’d ever cried past my lashes. The blanket absorbed them, and I wished with all my heart it would absorb me as well. Just swallow me whole then spit out the bitter bones. Why was I even on Earth? To make a fool of myself and my family? To hurt people I’d never met?

“But Zeke Herschel was in jail,” I said, unable to fully accept what had happened.

“He made bail almost the minute they booked him; his cousin is a bail bondsman.”

I knew that, but I never expected her to go back.

“Herschel caught her as she was leaving the house a second time. And he knew from the look in her eyes what she was doing.” Angel chewed on his bottom lip a moment before continuing. “After he … did what he did, he found your card in her pocket and put two and two together.”

A long silence ensued as I tried desperately to figure out my role on this Earth. Clearly, I was going about the whole grim reaper thing wrong. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe there was no going about it. Maybe I was just supposed to live my life without trying to help people, without trying to fix their problems, living or otherwise.

“It wasn’t your fault, you know,” Angel said after a while.

“Yeah,” I said, my voice spent as fatigue and depression set in, “right. It was probably Rosie’s fault. We can blame her.”

“That’s not what I meant. I just know how you are. You take everything onto your shoulders like that guy who holds up the world, and you shouldn’t. You’re not nearly as muscular.”

“Why do you suppose I’m here?” I asked him. Angel. A thirteen-year-old departed gangbanger.

“Just ’cause you’re supposed to be, I guess.”

“Oh, right, I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Why do you think you’re here?”

“To wreak havoc and misery upon the masses,” I answered. “Duh.”

“Well, if you knew…” A glimmer of a smile lifted the corners of his mouth.

Reyes stirred beside me, and Angel’s gaze darted to him.

“Why do you suppose he’s here?” I asked Angel, indicating Reyes with a nod of my head.

Angel thought about it, then said, “To wreak havoc and misery upon the masses.” He left out the duh, and I realized he was serious.

I glanced at Reyes. His gaze was locked on to Angel, as if in warning.