Eddie took a deep breath and stared straight ahead, frowning at the swirling red and blue lights. “What’s your standard operating procedure? For car wrecks, I mean?”
“Reap any souls that don’t go into the Light on their own. But…kids…” Wendy plucked at Eddie’s sleeve, trying to convey her terror at the potential job before her. Her mother was nowhere to be seen. Eddie, still staring at the chaos in front of them, didn’t move. “Okay, Wendy,” she muttered under her breath, “you can do this. Mom’s obviously got her hands full or she would’ve been done here by now. Just…just do this.”
“Wendy,” Eddie said, voice flat and dull as he examined the site of the accident, ignoring her loosening hold and low pep talk. “Did you reap my dad?”
“Now’s not the time, Eds.” Wendy reached for the handle but before she could pull it the locks snapped down.
“Tell me, and I’ll let you do your thing.” Eddie wasn’t looking at her, simply staring out past the windshield, hectic color in his cheeks. He reached out and grabbed her wrist, fingers digging in. “Did you? Did you reap my dad?”
Despite her worry for her mother, despite the steady pulse of the emergency lights and the throng of child- ghosts stumbling about right before her eyes, Wendy felt a tug of sympathy. Mr. Barry had been Eddie’s world, she remembered, he had been Eddie’s everything.
“No, Eddie,” she said, her voice almost drowned out by the rapid swish of windshield wipers, the punishing rat-tat-tat of rain on the roof of the car. She remembered the scarred boy holding her hand, the way the two of them had looked out at the wreckage before Eddie had passed out. There’d been no ghost there but the boy who’d held her hand and comforted her, no other souls around.
“Your dad went into the Light,” Wendy soothed. “He made me promise to watch over you and when he knew you were gonna be okay he just…let go. I never saw a ghost before that night; I couldn’t have reaped him even if I’d known I needed to. But he didn’t need it.”
Eddie nodded, released her, and the locks snapped open. Wendy fled the car and his tortured expression, welcoming the familiar burn in her gut as the heat of the Light washed through her.
It was as if her arrival opened some small riptide in the hole of the Never. Rays of Light began spilling from the storm-shot sky, brilliant shoots of blinding warmth that drew the dead and dying toward them with near mindless yearning. Wendy had to do nothing for those that could find their own way; she stepped aside and let them travel on. Soon only a handful remained, a dozen or so ghosts, huddled together and crying. A woman, pale white and flickering, hung at the far edge of the accident, wiping her hands over and over again on her white slacks. From the look of her, Wendy guessed that she had been the driver of the U-Haul. The side of her face had been ripped apart.
“A deer,” she moaned over and over again, the gaping maw that was her face flexing with her cries. “It was a deer! The streets were wet and I couldn’t stop!” She grabbed one of the little ghosts and shook him. “You saw the deer, didn’t you? Didn’t you? It wasn’t my fault!”
As Wendy approached, the woman in the white slacks backed away. “I’ve got to find the deer. I’ve got to! I’ll prove it was an accident. Just wait here. You wait right there!” She turned on her heel and pushed past the little boy, hurrying over the edge of the highway and into the ditch where she quickly vanished from view. Wendy could have gone after her, but she knew that her mother would be able to capture the ghost far faster than she ever could. Her mom could get the driver; Wendy just had to find her and let her know what happened.
In this form Wendy walked the space between life and death. Paramedics were offloading bodies from the bus and the semi and the two cars at the back of the wreck but here, at the edge of the accident, she was a whisper of a being, a flickering creature made of shadow to the living and light to the dead. In the downpour and chaos of the accident, no one noticed her…except the ghosts.
“We didn’t mean to,” sobbed one ponytailed girl as Wendy brushed her with the ribbons of Light, “it was an accident.”
Wendy, assuming the child meant the car wreck, kissed the girl’s cheek and sent her on. There was a deep tug inside when she did so, a tidal pull like menstrual cramps, but fiercer, darker. Wendy, thinking that this was what her mother meant when she said that child-spirits were dangerous, relished the tug of pain. Her mother must be busy elsewhere, she thought to herself, sending a second child on, or perhaps she missed this group?
Each spirit sent into the Light made her weaker, set the pain in her gut a little higher until her lungs were burning and her eyes were watering. Every breath was torture. It was the worst pain she’d ever felt, the worst stitch in her side multiplied tenfold. Wendy, struggling to finish the job, sent the last of the children on and sank to the ground. Her Light flickered and dimmed, leaving her wholly human again.
At first Wendy thought she was inadvertently touching one of the corpses; perhaps a driver thrown free of the wreckage only to break their neck at the edge of the accident. But then her eyes spied the dark blue jacket of her mother’s EMT uniform and the coppery wash of sodden hair. “Mom?” Wendy whispered, horrified. “MOM?”
Her mother did not answer and Wendy began to scream.
Now, seven months later, Wendy was still screaming…only now the scream was on the inside. She’d stopped reaping Shades in the days following her mother’s accident. It hadn’t been a conscious decision at first, merely a matter of convenience. Her father was a wreck and the twins needed someone to pick up the slack in the mothering department. Wendy had been doing most of the chores for years now so she had that part of the routine down, but she had to hide how adept she was at laundry and cooking from her father. Dad had no idea that Mom had been depending on Wendy for as long as she had.
She needn’t have bothered. Now her father took Wendy’s efficiency around the house for granted and only noticed when she slacked off. Sure, there was less reaping, since Wendy only took the souls that got in her way while she was on patrol, but covering the city section by section on foot was time consuming and tedious.
At first the lack of reaping had been a convenience thing, but it had stealthily grown into something more. The few times she’d tried to reap a Shade that summer, she’d failed. Her palms would grow sweaty and her vision would double; it felt like a vise had wrapped around her chest and was pushing the air out of her very pores until she backed away from the ghost and fled home. Her mother would have said she’d lost her nerve, if she’d ever had it in the first place.
Piotr’s words had shaken her up, though. She couldn’t stop turning the numbers over in her head. Before her mother’s accident Wendy had sent (on average) three or four souls a week on to the afterlife. It was something she hardly had to think about. Do the dishes, reap a Shade, go grocery shopping. It was rote. Over the course of the five years she’d been helping her mother send souls on, she must have reaped at least a thousand souls—or more!—all by herself.
How many souls had she left in the Never over the past seven months? And with her mother gone, how many of the day-to-day souls that she’d encountered at the hospital, at accident sites, even in people’s homes…how many of those were left there, weeping into the stillness of a world that didn’t even know they existed anymore?
Chel and Jon went their separate ways as soon as Eddie dropped them off. Wendy waved goodbye from the front porch and drifted upstairs, hardly noticing Jon puttering in the kitchen or the lights spilling out from the shared upstairs bathroom. Chel shut the door with her hip as Wendy passed, Wendy’s makeup bag clutched in her left hand and her cell phone pressed to her ear in the right.
Wendy didn’t bother turning on her lights. The rumpled bed looked too comfortable to resist. Pausing only long enough to toe off her boots, Wendy crawled under her covers and hugged her pillow against her chest. Her eyes drifted closed. She dreamed.
In her dreams, Wendy walked and walked, an endless beach stretching out before her, with foamy waves licking her toes and shells crunching beneath her bare heels. A person walked beside her—sometimes her father, sometimes Eddie, but most often Piotr—and when she grew tired of walking Wendy held out her hand for her companion to grasp. The hand in hers was warm and firm, the grip strong and reassuring. Holding this hand, Wendy felt safe, secure. His hand in hers, she was afraid of nothing. Fingers intertwined, they continued walking down the beach until they reached a door in the sand.
The door was made of millions of shells sunk into the firm, hard-packed sand at their feet. No two shells were the same, though each shimmered with a radiant and subtle rainbow. When Wendy looked on the door long enough, she realized that there were words written in the reflected light. Squinting, she concentrated, but could only make out a word here, a word there. Wendy turned to ask if he could make out the words, but the hand holding hers was gone.
