Skipping backwards toward the field, Wendy grinned and dropped a quick salute. “You got it, Coach!” Then she was off.
Under the patchy shade of the eucalyptus at the edge of school property, Wendy took a deep breath and glanced around. The flicker had faded while she was talking to the sub.
“Damn it, damn it, damn it,” Wendy muttered under her breath, angling her head to make sure the sub was paying more attention to the last group of gossiping girls finishing their first lap than to her. The instant the sub’s head dipped down to mark off the last stragglers, Wendy grabbed the edge of the fence and went up and over.
The dim flicker was gone. Wendy squinted and crouched down, pushing through the thick, thorny bushes until the sounds from the school grew muted. The canopy overhead was thicker here, the shadows denser. Her mother had been great in the woods; it was as if she were a ghost herself, flitting through the trees easily. She always knew where to step, how to navigate. She never got lost. Wendy wasn’t quite that good.
Resting against a nearby tree, Wendy hesitated; pushing on would take her out of the range of the sub’s whistle. There was a chance the sub might not notice Wendy missing at the end of the day, but she’d seemed like one of those teachers who actually cared. It might be better to just not risk getting in troub—
There!
Catching the flicker out of the corner of her eye, Wendy pushed through the underbrush, scouring her shins and calves against thorny wild blackberry bushes. Longingly she thought of her thick jeans, neatly tucked away in her cubby back in the girl’s locker room. Shoving through the dense patch, Wendy grimaced as her sneaker splooshed into a slurry of black rot and dank mud beside a rotted out trunk.
“So-so-so gross,” Wendy groaned, making sure to look up and eye the green-brown canopy overhead. Her mother had taught her well—she could see a tangle of dead and dying branches hanging above, remnants from the storms of the previous week. Every one of them was at least seven or eight inches across, minimum. Widow-maker branches. Wendy eased back, making sure she wasn’t beneath the heavy load. If the wind blew just right the whole mess would come crashing down, crushing anything unlucky enough to be directly beneath.
“Crap,” Wendy muttered. She thought now she might have an idea where the flicker was coming from. Skirting the edge of the clearing, keeping to the thorny sides, she shoved deeper and deeper in until, just as she’d suspected, she found a dim shape hovering around a heavy fall of deadwood.
“I was wondering if anyone’d find me,” muttered the ghost of the homeless man, clutching his tattered parka close. “Figures it’d be some kid playing hookey.”
He leaned in, waving a hand right in front of Wendy’s face and shouted, “Hey! You! Kiddo! You turn right around and you march up to your principal and you tell him what you found here! Do you understand me? You don’t just leave me here!”
“I can’t do that,” Wendy said and hid a smile when the ghost jumped back.
“You can hear me? Really?” He grabbed Wendy by the shoulders and yelped, yanking back. “Shit! You’re burning up, kid!”
“Yep,” Wendy said. “Side effect. Sorry.”
Waving his burnt palm in the air, the ghost eyed Wendy speculatively. “You ain’t gonna tell no one about me? Really?”
“I can’t draw attention to myself,” Wendy explained, sighing. She knelt down and examined the pile of dead brush and the crushed form beneath, grimacing. “You were asleep when it fell?”
“Yep. Didn’t feel a thing,” the ghost said. “I guess I ought to be thankful, huh? Went to sleep cold and hungry and woke up…well, still cold and hungry but at least the weather don’t bother me no more, huh?” He sighed. “So is this hell or something, kid?”
“Just the afterlife,” Wendy said, swiping her foot across the dirt to obscure the place where she’d knelt down. “I can help you with that if you want.” She stood back and eyed her handiwork. Her mom would’ve been proud. When the cops found the body, no one would know she’d been there. In theory, at least.
“Help me with what? You can’t bring me back to life, can ya?” Despite his ragged state, he couldn’t help the pitiful hope that crept into his voice.
“No.” Wendy refrained from patting him on the arm, lest she burn him further. “But I can send you on. You’re…where you are right now, the Never, it’s like a halfway point. Limbo, sort of. I can give you a push to go to the next place. If you want.” Eying the tree next to her, Wendy reached up and broke off a small, thin branch clustered with living leaves.
He cleared his throat. “You mean heaven?” His voice dropped. “Or, y’know, the other? Because if it’s the other, I’ll stay where I am, thank you very much.”
Wendy shrugged and started back toward the school, making sure to swipe the fresh branch across her path and staying to the places she’d walked before. The homeless man kept pace with her easily, passing through the dense brush without dispersing. “Not my jurisdiction. I have no clue. But you won’t be stuck in the Never until your soul rots. There’s that.”
“I’ll rot? If I stay here?”
“Most souls do, yeah.” Wendy glanced at her watch. “Look, I don’t mean to be a bitch, but class is almost over and my coach is going to wonder where I got to. I had to lie to her just to get out here and try and find you. I didn’t have to do that, I could’ve just ignored you.”
“So you’re some sort of angel or something? Helping souls move on?”
“Something like that.” Wendy stopped and tapped her wrist. They were almost at the first clearing and it seemed a safe place to drop her branch. “So what’ll it be? Stay or go?”
The ghost squared his shoulders and, cringing like a child about to get a shot, said, “Do it.”
Closing her eyes, Wendy opened the gates within and let the light pulse through her. It was over in a moment; the man cried out only once.
As the heat ebbed from Wendy’s fingertips she heard the distant whistle. Trudging back to the track, Wendy kept her eye out for the sub but, despite all her admonitions, she’d already left. Wendy was halfway across the field before she remembered the flowers at the fence. She debated turning around to retrieve a handful—what were the chances of the sub checking up on her alibi, after all?—but decided it was better to cover her bases. Forcing her tired legs into a lope, Wendy hurried back to the fence and gathered up two handfuls of the blossoms, nicking her fingers on thorns in the process.
Bright yellow buses trundled down the road toward the pickup point and Wendy could hear the distant shouts of other students slamming lockers and pouring out the side entrances toward the parking lot. The sub really had forgotten about her.
It had, thus far, been a truly shitty day. Glancing down at her handful of blooms, Wendy realized that she was dirty and scabbed, sweaty and clutching the flowers like a tired little girl. When the memory hit it was like a punch to the gut.
The unexpectedly icy highway had taken many drivers the night of her birthday; now, a week later, the afternoon roads to the cemetery were thick with headlights. Her father stayed home with the twins while her mother escorted Wendy to Mr. Barry’s funeral. When the wrapped coffin slid into the muddy hole at her feet Wendy dropped her armful of roses, turned, and buried her face in her mother’s shoulder, inhaling the deep scent of vanilla and wood-smoke to center herself, to calm her tears. Easing her away from the mound of bruised petals, her mother hummed a little tune, so softly Wendy felt the vibration more than heard the song, and a blessed cool descended over her, easing the hot knot in the pit of her stomach.
“Soon, soon,” her mother whispered for her ears alone. “Be strong, Wendy-girl. It’s almost over.” Her hand cupping Wendy’s elbow was warm, her breath mint-sweet. Wendy, calmer, took the time while the mourners were tossing spades of dirt onto the coffin to pray that Eddie would be okay. He refused to sit shiva with the rest of his family and wouldn’t leave his room, even for the funeral. Eddie was, simply put, a wreck.
Wendy and her mother drove home after—to collect more flowers and food for the
When they arrived Mrs. Barry hugged Wendy’s mother close in the foyer. She was a large woman and the black of mourning did little to slim her figure. Wendy’s mother was swallowed in Mrs. Barry’s voluminous embrace,
