obsidian holes that saw everything and let nothing escape. “My love drowned in the river. It was after the new year. The ice was melting, and the current was swollen.”
He drew back the sleeve of his jacket, and then his shirt. “I used a razor. I couldn’t bear life without her.”
His voice, too, was no longer a powdery, echoey thing that bounced off the ceiling of the rooms below and scared the hell out of Jo when it whispered over her shoulder.
“That’s awful,” she said. Nicholas reached out, and a cold spot blossomed on her cheek.
“I’ve been alone for a long time. It wasn’t the escape I hoped it would be.”
“Are you like... stuck here?” Jo gestured around. “In Ash House? Or can you fly off anywhere you please?” It would be nice, she thought. No grades, no mother, no sleepless nights. No Ani asking her to read the latest text from Deirdre and analyze what it meant and no Drew sneering at her from across the parking lot where he sat on the hood of his stupid Nova.
“I’m bound to the place I died,” Nicholas said. “I think most of us are. The dead. I can only leave if...” He coughed, and looked away, to where an eighteen-wheeler rumbled past on Route 7.
“If what?” Jo said.
“It’s only a theory, you understand,” Nicholas said. “But if I were to have a living ... well, an escort. Someone who desired me to come home with them. I think I could go then. I could haunt a person and not a place.”
Haunt. Such an ugly word. A tombstone word. Jo shifted. Her feet were numb, and the rest of her was starting to freeze. The sun was an orange halo below the horizon.
“I have to go,” she said. “My mother has been getting on my ass about homework. And I have rehearsal tonight with the band. We’re playing in Lee at the end of the month. A real all-ages show. It’s a big deal.” For Ani, anyway. Lately, her bass felt like a rock in her fist, and her fingers could barely pluck the strings.
“Josephine.” Nicholas touched her again, closing his marble-ice fingers around her wrist. “Don’t go.”
“I should,” Jo sighed. “I’ll come by tomorrow, though. It’s Friday. I can stay later.” She could just lie to Ani, and her mother. She’d rather listen to Nicholas anyway. How many people had a person to tell them firsthand about life in 1902?
“Then let me give you a parting gift,” Nicholas said. He closed the space between them and pressed his lips against Jo’s. It was like kissing velvet and swallowing snowflakes caught on the tongue and it was her pulse throbbing in her ears and a million other things, until her lip pricked and she pulled away, feeling the crack and tasting the droplet of her own blood on her tongue. Her lips had gone chapped and numb.
Nicholas backed away. “I so wish it wasn’t this way, Josephine. For the first time in a really long time.”
“Me too,” Jo whispered. The sun was gone now, the sky silver as the tinge on Nicholas’s skin. She slipped through the trap door without saying anything else and started home. She crossed the bridge, listening to the water rush along under and over the cracks in the ice. River ice was rippled, in the shape of waves and current, and staring down in the twilight Jo could almost imagine a hundred faces staring back at her from under the ice. The burbling water turned to voices, the wind in the bare trees to screams.
She didn’t know why, but she was gripping the rail and leaning over, staring back at those frozen, open- mouthed ice women in the river. Trying to make out the voice that whispered,
A murder of crows landed in the snow-heavy wild rosebushes on the bank, seemingly impervious to the thorns, and started cawing. Their cries blended with the wind and the water, and Jo felt her foot press against the rickety rungs of the bridge rail.
Jo wanted to stop, already felt like she was drowning as her lungs sucked in great gulps of frigid New England air. But she couldn’t move, in any direction but forward. Over the rail. The weight of her body could crack the ice. She’d go below it. Down into the black water.
A tunnel of light swept over her, and the sound of a snarling eight-cylinder engine cut out all others. “Jo?” Drew got out of the car and jogged toward her. “Jo!”
His hand on the back of her jacket was big and solid, and he yanked her off the rail. “What the hell are you doing all the way out here?” Drew panted. Jo looked back at the ice and the river.
The light was gone. The faces were only ice floes.
On the bank, the crows took flight, disappearing into the last vestiges of the sun.
“Come on,” Drew said, hand firmly on her back, guiding her. “I’m gonna drive you home.”
His car was warm, so warm that Jo’s hands and cheeks stung at the change. She huddled against the passenger door. She wanted to go back to Ash House, climb to the cupola, listen to Nicholas tell her stories until she could erase that horrible voice from her mind.
Crackly old rock blared at her instead, a cigarette-voiced singer and glassy, plinking guitar.
“You’re a weird chick,” Drew said. “Don’t take that the wrong way. I always figured your friend Ani for the freak, but you take it to another level.”
“You wouldn’t understand,” Jo mumbled at him. Drew leaned over, in that businesslike way he did everything, and laid the back of his hand against her cheek. He smelled like cheap smokes and engine grease. Jo felt bile rise in her throat.
“Jesus,” Drew said. “You’re freezing.” He looked at the road, depressed the Nova’s lighter, lit a cigarette from a pack he’d shoved between the windshield and the dash, looked back at Jo. “Were you gonna off yourself?”
That pulled her out of her thoughts a little. “What?” Jo said.
“You were on the bridge,” Drew said. “This time of year, you’d be out in about thirty seconds in that water. Just sink right down. Like a stone. You gonna kill yourself, Jo?”
“Don’t be dramatic,” Jo sighed. “I thought I saw something under the ice.”
“Yeah?” Drew glanced at her, back at the tunnel before them that the Nova’s headlights cut along the wilderness at the edges of the road. “Like what?”
Jo leaned her head against the window. She could almost fall asleep with the radio and the close smell of Drew’s cigarette and the gentle vibration of the Nova beneath her. If it wasn’t for the dreams waiting for her when she did.
“Nothing you need to know about,” she said, and didn’t speak again until Drew dumped her at the foot of her driveway and unceremoniously peeled out again into the night, taillights winking out like small candles in a vast, black sky.
6. December
On Christmas Eve, Jo had the worst dream yet. Ani was on break visiting Deirdre, Drew had moved his work on his idiotmobile into the garage for the winter, and Jo had spent most of break at Ash House. She’d hidden a stash of granola bars, candles, and a Mylar running blanket in the kitchen, high up in a cabinet where animals couldn’t get at it.
Not that many animals came to Ash House. Nick said they didn’t like being around the dead. Jo had taken to looking up tidbits on microfiche at the library, or searching on Wikipedia, for things for them to talk about. Phonographs rather than radios, the elaborate yards-long dresses the girls wore, how Ash House had the first electric light in Coffin Hollow—anywhere in western Massachusetts, really, except the county seat.
When Nick wasn’t covering her hands, her neck, her arms, and every inch of skin she could stand to be exposed in slow, velvety kisses, that is.
He couldn’t be
Nick was well-read, as young men of his generation were supposed to be. He knew Yeats, Blake, all of the old magical, apocalyptic poetry that Jo could imagine scribbled on sheets of vellum, strewn across a room lit by gaslight.
