in a photo booth. He’d never pick me up in a car. I’d never make him a birthday cake.
A random cloud muted the light and I felt the heaviness of my old life pushing down on me, a lead coat I wanted to shrug off.
“If we’re dreaming,” I asked him, “do you think one of us might wake up by accident?”
“What are you talking about?” He smiled.
“One day I saw a baby napping and its spirit was three feet away from its body, but then it woke up and the baby ghost disappeared.”
“The spirit disappeared?”
“No, I mean, its spirit went back into the body. But if I’d been looking at just the spirit, you know, it would have seemed like it vanished.”
“Are you worried I’ll disappear?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I felt embarrassed to have brought it up. “I felt like I almost got sucked back to my old life a couple of times, but you’re probably not going anywhere. I mean, you could be in a coma.”
He sat up. “Why did you say that?”
He was angry again. It stung tears into my eyes. “I didn’t mean anything bad.” He still looked so dark—I’d damaged him somehow. “I don’t know what I’m talking about,” I said. “Don’t listen to me.”
“I can’t stay here.” He stood up.
“I take it back,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “What did I do?”
He seemed far away—I couldn’t quite reach him.
“Aw, shit,” he sighed.
“Where are you going?” I reached for him. “I’ll go with you!” My fingers gripped his shirt.
For one moment we were both on a city bus. He was staring at a boy and girl sitting across the aisle. I wanted to look at them too, but a man was standing between us. Was that boy him? Or his body?
Everything was blurry. My hand slipped off his sleeve and I was in the field again, fallen in the grass. He came back, but it was as if he was a faded picture of himself.
“You can’t come with me.” He knelt beside me—his voice wavered like a blowing leaf twisting in and out of the light. I tried to take his hand but I couldn’t seem to.
“Why do you have to leave?” I asked.
His face, like his voice, was getting lost in waves of shadow and sunshine. “Listen,” he said, and then he told me his name aloud. The words, though, curled and evaporated in the air before I could catch them. Then he was telling me a street name. And a list of numbers so I could find him.
I threw myself toward him, stretching out to try to put my arms around him, but there was nothing to hold on to. He was there and then not and there again. His mouth was moving. I couldn’t read lips, but I thought he said someone was crying.
“Who is crying?” I asked him. But my words were coming apart. My voice turned to colors and tastes and scents instead of sounds. Blue and salty tears and fresh grass. I tried to tell him my name, the street where I lived, but my words and the numerals of my phone number turned into dust and flew off on the wind. What I thought were his eyes in the fluttering light were just flashes of sun reflecting off the blowing specks of my voice.
The breeze calmed and the face of the sun was clear again. I was alone. I tried to remember every detail I could about his face and the tone of his voice. I tried to remember everything he’d said to me. I was sure there were clues there that would help me find him.
A sound vibrated through me like a note played on a cello, low and sad, and then the bow lifted off the string and there was silence.
I had just been trying to remember something about a field.
Now someone was pounding on the door.
PART 2
CHAPTER 7
Helen
STRANGE HOW MANY THINGS CAN frighten a ghost. Staring down at a body I had so recently possessed, for one. Knowing that the choices I had made while I occupied it would take a heavy toll on its rightful owner—that was another.
I felt that I had lived for many days in heaven, but it looked to me as if on earth the Quick had been suspended in time. Apparently for Jenny, less than a minute had passed since I left her. She was still in the bathtub where I’d stepped out of her body and she had