Hereafter

I knew the park. I suddenly knew it as well as I knew my first name, and I knew the direction of the park from where I stood now. I knew it from memory, a genuine one that hadn’t flashed into and out of my mind but just … was.

What was this boy doing to me?

“Okay, good. I’m going to sit at the emptiest park bench I can find. I’m going to be there at noon, because, unfortunately, I’m healthy enough to go back to school tomorrow. I think I can talk my parents into letting me skip fifth period—play the sympathy card with them—but noon’s the earliest I can get there. So I’m going to go to the park. And I’m going to wait for you.”

“And if I don’t show?”

He shrugged. “I’ll respect your privacy. Or I’ll pursue you all over the earth like I’ve been trying to do since they let me out of the hospital. Probably the latter.”

I should have been afraid. I should have run away again, hid until the years passed and Joshua became an old man and the fog wrapped around my dead brain again.

Instead, I smiled.

He gave me a slight nod, grinned, and walked past me back to his car.

“Till tomorrow,” he called out with one small, backward glance.

I watched him walk away, once more unsure of everything. But when he opened his car door, my incapacitating ache curled again. My impulses, it seemed, were still doing unfamiliar things to me, because the ache seemed to have incapacitated everything but my big mouth.

“Joshua?” I called out, a slight hitch in my voice.

“Yeah?” He spun around immediately. I could swear he looked expectant, maybe even eager.

“What do I look like to you?”

He tilted his head to the side, frowning.

“What do I look like to you?” I repeated urgently, afraid that if I didn’t talk fast enough, I would have time to realize how absolutely, mind-bogglingly stupid I sounded.

Joshua smiled. He answered me, so quietly I almost couldn’t hear him.

“Beautiful. Too beautiful for people not to have noticed you the other night.”

“Oh.” The little sound was all I could manage.

He stood up straight then and cleared his throat. “So … um … I’m going to leave before I say anything else that makes me sound like an idiot. Tomorrow?”

I nodded, stunned. “Tomorrow.”

Joshua, too, nodded. Then he got into his car and reversed it back off the bridge, giving wide berth to the gap in the railing. With one quick, final spin, the car pulled away, disappearing from sight around a curve.

Chapter

FIVE

Hours can pass like years when you wait impatiently for something, especially something you crave and dread in equal measure.

What I craved, in a manner so intensely I nearly ached from it, was to see Joshua’s face and to hear his voice. Wandering and dreaming of him, I’d never imagined Joshua would be able to see me and talk to me again, much less that he would want to. I hadn’t anticipated how much I would want it too. How much my longing to be seen, and specifically by him, would intensify each time I was.

But seeing him again meant telling him the truth.

Sitting on the riverbank after Joshua left, I felt certain I wouldn’t be able to lie to him the next day. Not if my completely ridiculous behavior on the bridge proved any indication of my ability to deceive him. If I saw him in the park, and we spoke, I would undoubtedly tell him everything: what I’d seen under the water, and what I really was. Which, in turn, would undoubtedly drive him away from me.

So even if I went to the park, I probably wouldn’t see him again afterward. Presuming this, I had to ask myself what would hurt worse: the numb loneliness of invisibility or the aching loneliness of an outright rejection from the living world? I knew the awful boundaries and depths of the former, but I had no idea how excruciating the latter could, and likely would, be.

Following this line of reasoning, I came to a decision about my course of action the next day. I wouldn’t go. I would hide. I would protect my dead heart from anything worse than numbness.

And I would probably feel miserable about it for years. I lay my arms across my knees in a posture of defeat.

That’s when something made my head jerk upward and then made me jump up into a crouch on the grass. At first I couldn’t be sure what made me react this way. When I tried to glean some clue from my surroundings, I noticed that the sun had nearly set while I sat feeling sorry for myself. It threw a fiery glow across the water and cast deep shadows into the woods.

Yet it wasn’t the dying sunlight that had frightened me. It was instead the thing that contrasted so sharply with the burning light of the sunset: a bitterly cold wind that now lashed across my bare legs and through my hair.

I’d been experiencing so many unexpected sensations lately that perhaps I shouldn’t have been so alarmed by the wind. But I was.

Late summer was not the season for a freezing wind. Worse, nothing around me had ruffled in the wind—not the tall grass on the bank or the needles of the nearby pines. The wind came from the wrong direction, too. It didn’t blow off the water behind me or down the wide alley that the river made through the woods. It came directly from the shadowed tree line in front of me.

Realizing all of this, I actually felt the hairs on my arms stand on end. I couldn’t help but raise my forearm to stare at the goose bumps there, marveling at the revival of my long-dead fight-or-flight response.

Without warning, the wind became a gale, whipping my hair across my face and obscuring my vision. I stumbled backward, knocked off balance by its force. It howled out from the trees, and my hands flew up to protect my ears from the sound. Then, just as suddenly as it had appeared, the wind stopped. The bank became deathly still.

My hands still covered my ears, and I’d unknowingly squeezed my eyes tightly shut. I’d curled almost completely over, clutching my bent knees together with my elbows.

“Hello, Amelia.”

A male voice floated silkily out from the tree line. I remained curled over and opened only one eye, refusing to believe I could actually hear someone speaking directly to me. Someone other than Joshua.

“Do you hear me, Amelia?”

I opened the other eye and straightened myself slowly, still keeping my hands over my ears as if they afforded me some protection from this stranger’s voice. I couldn’t seem to force my vocal cords to work. He sighed impatiently, obviously waiting for me to provide him with an answer.

“Really, Amelia, you’re being terribly rude.”

“E-excuse me?” I managed to stammer.

The owner of the voice clicked his tongue in admonishment. “Still rude.”

His tone broke through the terrified frost that had begun to creep over my skin. I felt myself flush with the warmth of anger, as though I were able to blush from fury.

“You can see me, but I can’t see you. Don’t you find that a little rude?” I demanded.

He laughed, a smooth sound that didn’t do much to dispel the skin-crawling feeling. “Oh, I suppose I could remedy that problem, if you wish.”

The tree branches directly in front of me stirred as something crept out from behind them. I could tell that, whoever the speaker was, he moved deliberately, possibly to put me at ease and keep me from bolting from this place. It wasn’t a very effective tactic, because I could feel the twitch of impending flight in my muscles.

Before I made the final decision to run, however, the owner of the voice stepped out of the gloom of the woods and into what little sunlight still filled the bank.

I knew instantly that he wasn’t a living being, although at first I wasn’t sure why. As I stared openmouthed at him—another action he would likely find rude—I noted all the details of his appearance. He looked about my age, or maybe just a few years older, but he wore strange, wild clothing: an unbuttoned black shirt, its sleeves rolled up to reveal metal cuffs on both his wrists; impossibly tight jeans slung low on his hips; and several necklaces bunched together on his bare chest. Beneath the ashy blond hair that fell in messy curls to his shoulders, he looked terribly pale. As if someone had scrubbed all the color from his face.