“Brendan?” her mother whispered.
Her father—the expression on his face one that Emma would never forget, said, “Mercy.” Just that.
She wanted to let go of her mother’s hands. She couldn’t.
Instead, watching Michael, she let go of her father’s.
The room collapsed; the lights went out. Emma felt a sudden, sharp tug, as if she’d been floating and gravity had finally deigned to notice her. She fell, screaming in silence, to earth—but earth, in this case, was a lot like cheap vinyl, and it didn’t hurt when she hit it. Much.
She opened her eyes, blinking in the harsh fluorescent lights of the emergency waiting room. Lack of feet caused a moment’s panic before she realized they were curled beneath her. She looked to her side and saw her mother’s profile, her slightly open jaw, her wide eyes circled by dark lack of sleep.
“Mom,” she croaked. “My hands.” Her fingers were tingling in that pins-and-needles way, and they looked gray. Or blue.
Her mother shook her head; Emma’s voice had pulled her back. “Oh, Em, I’m sorry,” she said. It was pretty clear she had to work to free her hands, or to free her daughter’s. Their hands shook, but Emma curled hers in her lap; her mother lifted hers to her face, and very slowly let her head drop into them.
“Mom—”
Mercy Hall shook her head. “I’m sorry, Em—I’m—I’ve had a long day.”
Emma looked away from her mother. “Michael?” she said, slowly and distinctly. Michael didn’t appear to hear her. He was staring straight ahead. “Allison?”
Allison, on the other hand, turned to meet Emma’s gaze.
Emma gestured in Michael’s direction, and after a second, Allison took a deep breath and nodded. She turned and walked over to Michael, calling his name. Michael was still staring. When Allison stepped in front of him, he didn’t stop; what he was seeing, Emma could only guess.
Allison knelt in front of Michael and picked up his hands, one in each of hers. “Michael,” she said again, voice softer.
He blinked, and his gaze slowly shifted in place, until he could see Allison. He was rigid. But he was quiet. Emma wished it didn’t resemble the quiet of a rabbit caught in headlights quite so much. He blinked.
Emma slowly pulled her feet out from under her. They were tingling as well, and she grimaced as she flattened them against the floor. But she tried to stand, and as she did, Eric moved. She had almost forgotten him, which was stupid.
He crossed the room and offered her his hand; she stared at his palm until he withdrew it. He was silent. She was silent as well, but her look said, We’re going to talk about this later.
His said nothing, loudly.
She walked over to Allison and Michael, and stood beside Allison; she would have crouched beside her, but she didn’t trust her knees or her feet yet. “Michael?”
He looked up. He was still seated, and that was probably for the best. “Emma,” he said. She smiled, and not because she was happy. It was meant to reassure.
“I’m here,” she told him, while Allison continued to hold his hands.
“Emma, that was your dad.” It wasn’t a question.
Had he been anyone else, she would have lied, and it would have come cleanly and naturally. Lies were something you told other people to make things easier, somehow—hopefully, for them, but often more selfishly for yourself. Lies, Emma realized, as her glance flicked briefly to her mother and back, were things you told yourself when your entire world was turned on its end for just a moment, and you needed to put it right side up again.
But Michael? Michael hadn’t even understood what a lie was supposed to do until he’d been nine years old. He hadn’t understood that what he knew and what other people knew were not, in fact, the exact same thing. Emma didn’t remember a time when she didn’t understand that. And she wasn’t certain why, at nine, Michael began to learn. But he had; he just didn’t bother lying because he could see the advantage of honesty and of being known for it.
Not lying, however, and not being lied to were different. Emma could have lied, but that—that would have pushed him over the edge he was clearly teetering on. Because he knew what he’d seen, and nothing she could say was going to change that.
She took a breath, steadied herself. “Yes,” she told him quietly, just as Eric said, “No.”
Allison turned to stare at Eric. She rose, still holding Michael’s hands. She passed them to Emma, who could now feel her feet properly. Michael looked at Eric and at Emma, and Emma said, quickly, “Eric doesn’t know, Michael. Remember, he never met my father. He’s new here.”
Eric opened his mouth to say something, and Allison stepped, very firmly, on his foot. She didn’t kick him, which Emma would have done. Allison hated to hurt anyone.
Michael, however, was nodding. It went on too long. Emma freed one of her hands and very gently stroked the back of Michael’s hand until he stopped.
“He’s dead, Emma.”
“Yes.”
“He used to fix my bike.”
“Yes.”
“Why was he here?”
She started to say I don’t know, because it was true. But she stopped herself from doing that as well. Things were always more complicated when Michael was around. But they were cleaner, too. “He was trying to help me,” she said, instead.
“How?”
“I think he knows what’s causing the—the headaches.”
“It’s not a concussion?”
“No.”
“Oh.” Pause. “Where did he go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will he come back?”
“I don’t know, Michael. But I hope so.”
“Why?”
“Because I miss him,” she said softly.
Michael nodded again, but this time, it was a normal nod. “I miss him, too. Was he a ghost?”
“I don’t think ghosts exist.”
“But I saw him.”
She nodded. “I saw him, too. But I don’t know what he was.”
“He looked the same,” Michael told her. “And you said he was the same.”
She had said that. She remembered. “I think ghosts are supposed to be scary,” she offered. “I think that’s why I don’t think he’s a ghost. Was he scary?”
“No. Well, yes. A little.”
Emma could accept that.
“He doesn’t want to take you away?” Michael continued. “You aren’t going to die, are you?”
“Everyone dies,” she told him.
“But not now.”
“No, Michael,” she managed to say. “He doesn’t want to take me away. And even if he did, I’m not leaving.” She knew, suddenly, where this would go, and she did not want to go there.
Michael closed his eyes. Emma braced herself as Michael opened them again and asked, “Will Nathan come back, too?”
And, after a moment, Emma managed to say, “I don’t know.”
Emma knew her mother was upset. But upset or not, Mercy Hall insisted on waiting for a CAT scan. Emma told Allison she should go home with Eric and Michael, but that fell flat as well. They huddled together in silence. Emma’s mother said almost nothing to anyone who wasn’t a doctor, and Michael sat quietly, thinking Michael thoughts. Allison was worried, but she didn’t say much, either; it was hard to find a place to put words in all the different silences in that waiting room.
The CAT scan was a four-hour wait. The results, they were told, would be sent to the Hall family doctor, which meant, as far as Emma was concerned, that they hadn’t found anything that constituted an emergency. To confirm this, the doctor filled out discharge papers, or whatever they were called, gave Emma’s mother a prescription for Tylenol, but stronger, and also gave her advice on headaches. Emma was tired, and her body still felt strangely light, as if part of her had gone missing. But she was no longer in any pain.
Not physical pain.
Eric said nothing. He waited. When Emma’s tests were done, he of
fered Allison and Michael a ride home. Emma would have preferred to have their company, but it was clear that her mother wouldn’t. Michael and Allison went home with Eric.
Emma went home with her mother in a car that was as silent as the grave. It was worse than awkward. It was painful. Mercy kept her eyes on the road, her hands on the steering wheel, and her words behind her lips, which were closed. Her expression was remote; the usual frantic worry about work and her daughter’s school were completely invisible.
Emma, who often found her mother’s prying questions difficult, would have welcomed them tonight, and because the universe was perverse, she didn’t get them. She got, instead, a woman who had seen her dead husband, and had no way of speaking about what it meant. Possibly no desire to know what it meant; it was hard to tell.
When they got home, it was 8:36.
Petal greeted them at the door with his happy-but-reproachful barking whine.
“Sorry, Petal,” Emma said, grabbing his neck and crouching to hug him. She knew this would get her a face full of dog-breath, but didn’t, at the moment, care.
Emma’s mother went to the kitchen, and Emma, dropping her school backpack by the front door, followed, Petal in tow. They briefly, and silently, held council over the contents of the fridge, which had enough food to feed two people if you wanted to eat condiments and slightly moldy cheese. There were milk and eggs, which Emma looked at doubtfully; her mother often stopped by the grocery store on the way home from work.
Today, she had stopped by the hospital instead.
“Pizza?” Emma asked.
Her mother lifted the receiver off the cradle and handed it to her daughter. “Pizza,” she said, and headed out of the kitchen. It was a damn quiet kitchen in her absence, but Emma dialed and hit the button that meant “same order as previous order.” Then she hung up and stared at her dog. Her dog, the gray hairs on his muzzle clearer in the kitchen light than they were in the light cast by streetlamps, stared at her, his stub wagging.
She apologized again, which he probably thought meant “I’ll feed you now.” On the other hand, she did empty a can of moist food into his food dish, and she did fill his water bowl. She also took him out to the yard for a bit; she hadn’t walked him at all today, but she knew that tonight was so not the night to do it. From the backyard, she could see the light in her mother’s bedroom window; she could also see her mother’s silhouette against the curtains. Mercy was standing, just standing, in the room.
Emma wondered, briefly, if she was watching her or if she was watching Petal. She kind of doubted either.
When Emma was stressed, she often tidied, and god knew the kitchen could use it. She busied herself putting away the dishes whose second home was the drying rack on the counter. She had homework, but most of it was reading, and like procrastinators everywhere, she knew that tidying still counted as work, so she could both fail to do homework and feel that she’d accomplished something.
But when the doorbell rang, Mercy came down the stairs to answer, and she paid for the pizza and carried it into the kitchen. She looked tired but slightly determined, and she had that smile on her face. “I’m sorry, Em,” she said. “I’m not sure what got into me there. Things are stressful at work.”
Emma accepted this. She usually asked what was causing the stress, but she didn’t actually enjoy listening to her mother lie, so she kept the question to herself and nodded instead. She also got plates, napkins and cups, because her mother didn’t like drinking out of cans.
They took these to the living room, while Petal walked between them. The pizza box was suspended in the air above him, of course. He was too well trained to try to eat from the box when they put it down on the table in the den. He was not, however, too well trained to sit in front of it and beg, and he had the usual moist puppy eyes, even at the age of nine.
Emma fed him her crusts.
He jumped up on the couch beside her and wedged himself between the armrest and her arm, which meant, really, between the armrest and half her lap; she had to eat over his head.
Her mother didn’t like to eat while the television was on, but even she could take only so much awkward silence before she surrendered and picked up the remote. They channel surfed their way through dinner.
Eric stood in the graveyard, beneath the same dark willow that he’d leaned against for half of the previous night. He carried no obvious weapons, and he hadn’t bothered to wear any of the less obvious protections because he didn’t expect to need them. He wanted to need them. He wanted to need them right now, in this place, but what he wanted didn’t matter; almost never had.
The graveyard was silent. The distant sound of cars didn’t change that; they blurred into the background. His night vision was good; it had always been good. But he stared at nothing for long stretches. Once or twice he turned and punched the tree to bleed off his growing frustration.
Not Emma, he thought bitterly.
Emma.
He tensed.
I have never been mistaken before. I am not mistaken now. She approached, emerging from a forest of headstones.
She is powerful, Eric.
“You’ve got to be wrong,” he told her, grim and quiet. He expected an argument, was surprised when it failed to come.
I will…leave it up to you, she said at last. I will not call the others yet.
“Why?”
Because she is different, to my eyes, and I have reasons to doubt that feeling. You know why.
Eric swallowed and turned his attention back to a graveyard that remained empty for the rest of the night.
EMMA WOKE UP ON FRIDAY MORNING, which had the advantage of being formal day at school. This meant, among other things, that she didn’t really have to work out what she was going to wear; she was going to wear a plaid skirt, a blazer, and a white shirt. Ties were optional if you weren’t male, although most of the girls wore the non-stupid thin leather ones. They often wore makeup on Fridays as well, because, face it, there weren’t too many other things you could wear to set yourself apart.
Emma, for instance, didn’t wear earrings. Watching a toddler grab a dangling hoop and rip through the earlobe—literally—of a friend in grade seven had cured her of the growing desire to ever have her ears pierced. Admittedly, this was viewed as a bit strange, but they were her ears, and she wanted to keep them attached to the rest of her face.
She did spend more time in the bathroom on Fridays, which was worked into what passed for an early morning schedule in the Hall household, partly because her mother did everything she could to stay in bed until the last minute.
Emma finished dressing and went downstairs. She expected the kitchen to be quiet, and it was; Petal was hyper but not yappy. Her mother was not yet in the kitchen. Emma glanced at the clock and winced. She put the coffee on, because if her mother was still not here, she was going to need it, and she took milk, blueberries and cereal to the table, which she also set.
She stopped on the way to get napkins and hollered up the steps, waited for five seconds to hear something like a reply, failed to hear the wrong words—of which there were several—and continued on her way. When her mother came thundering down the stairs in a rush, she handed her mother the coffee and ushered her to a chair. This would have been awkward had Mercy actually been awake.
Then again, given the last few days? Being awake was highly overrated. They ate in relative silence, because Petal had emptied the dry food dish and was trying to mooch. He didn’t actually like any of the food his two keepers were eating this morning, but that never stopped him.
Emma, who had marshaled her arguments, waited, with fading patience, for her mother to tell her that she was not going to school today. When it was dangerously close to 8:00, she gave up on that, and instead said, “Don’t forget, I’m going to Amy’s party tonight.”
“Amy’s? Oh, that’s right. You mentioned it yesterday. You’re going straight from school?”
“What, dressed like this?”
&
nbsp; Mercy seemed to focus for a minute. “You look fine to me,” she said, but it was noise; Emma would have bet money that she hadn’t actually noticed what her daughter was wearing. “Are you going to be home for dinner?”
“Why, are you working late?”
Mercy nodded slowly.
“I’ll grab a sandwich or something if you’re not here.” Emma pushed her chair back from the table and gathered up her empty dishes. “I won’t be too late,” she added.
“When is not too late?”
Emma shrugged. “Midnightish. Maybe 1:00.” She waited for any questions, any comments. “Mom?”
Her mother looked up.
“Are you feeling all right?”
“I’m fine,” her mother replied. Emma thought dying people probably sounded more convincing. They certainly did on television.
“You’re sure?”
Mercy looked at her daughter and shook her head. “Of course I’m sure. I’m always fine the morning after I’ve seen my dead husband in a hospital.”
The silence that followed was profoundly awkward. It was worse than first-kiss awkward. “Mom—”
Her mother lifted a hand. It should have been a familiar gesture; Emma used it all the time. But coming from her mom, it looked wrong. “You can mother Michael,” Mercy Hall said firmly, and with a trace of annoyance, “and any of the rest of your friends. I already have a mother, three bosses, and any number of other helpful advice-givers in the office. I don’t need mothering.”
Emma, stung, managed to stop herself from saying something she’d probably only feel guilty about later. Guilt, in the Hall household, was like the second child of the family. The secret one that you tried to lock in the attic when respectable people were visiting.
Instead, she turned and walked into the hall, where she gave herself the once over in the mirror, frowned at both her eyes and her lips, which were slowly returning to normal, and then picked up her backpack to wait.
Michael rescued her at 8:10.
The walk to school would have been the same type of awkward that breakfast had been, but it was made easier by Michael, because Michael didn’t worry that someone would think he was crazy. Michael, by dint of understanding his own condition, also understood that he saw the world in entirely different ways than the rest of the students in his grade did; he was used to this. Because he was, he didn’t really question what he saw, and he didn’t second-guess himself; he second-guessed (and third, fourth, and fifth for good measure) everyone else.