"What a sensitive child she must be," a stout lady observed, adjusting the angle of her large straw hat.
Her companion nodded. "You'd think she knew the poor souls personally."
"She's probably too young to be exposed to something as tragic as a funeral," the woman in the straw hat said. "I've never thought little children should be told about death. Why frighten them? Let them keep their innocence as long as they can."
The two of them walked to their car and drove off, leaving us alone, except for Mr. Simmons. "Glad to see this settled," he said, heaping the earth over the graves. "She'll rest in peace now, like them." He waved the shovel toward the Berry Patch. "She's with her own."
Heather gazed at the marble angel poised on his pedestal above the Berrys, his wings uplifted. "Daddy should make Helen one of those," she said to me. "I think she'd like to have one, don't you?"
"It would look very pretty," I said, watching Mr. Simmons pat the freshly-turned earth with his shovel.
By September, a small marble angel guarded Helen's grave, and two stones flanked hers. Her own name, not just her initials, marked her burial place, and English ivy softened the mounds of earth over her parents' graves. The cemetery had lost its gloom, and I no longer feared it.
One afternoon in early October, Michael, Heather, and I were sitting in a sunny spot not far from Helen's grave. It was a warm, sweet-smelling day, more like spring than fall. Michael was watching a huge wood beetle crawling around in its glass-jar prison, and I was reading The Borrowers to Heather.
"Do you want me to read the next chapter?" I was sure she wouldn't want me to leave poor Stainless facing certain capture, but when I looked at her I realized she hadn't been paying much attention to the story.
She was lying on her back, chewing on a blade of grass and staring up at the clouds drifting slowly across the incredibly blue sky. "Do you think she can see us from where she is?" she asked dreamily, her mind apparently far from Stainless' plight.
"I don't know," I said, guessing that she was thinking of Helen. It was the first time in weeks that she had mentioned her. "Wherever she is, though, she's happy," I added. "I'm sure of it."
"Me too," Heather agreed. She sat up and gazed at the angel under the oak tree. He gazed back serenely, seeming to return her smile. Suddenly she grasped my arm, her nails biting through the sleeve of my shirt. "Molly," she whispered. "Look."
She got to her feet and ran toward the angel, and I ran after her, seeing what she saw. Something shiny dangled from the angel's outstretched hand: a silver locket turning slightly in the breeze.
Before I could stop her, Heather snatched the chain from the angel's stiff fingers. As I watched, it seemed to pop open by itself in her outstretched palm. On one side was a picture of Helen. On the other was a folded piece of paper. With trembling fingers, Heather slipped it out of the frame and spread it flat. We both read the message, written in the same hand I had once seen scrawled on my bedroom wall: "With love from Helen," it said. "Do not forget me."
Heather and I looked at each other. The sun warmed our backs as it shone down through the oak's reddening leaves. Bees buzzed in the goldenrod and a grasshopper bounded away from Michael as he approached us.
"Where did you get that old thing?" he asked, looking at the locket. "I thought you lost it last summer."
"Helen gave it back to me," Heather told him solemnly. "It's all right for me to wear it now," she added, looking at me. "Isn't it?"
I nodded, but Michael rolled his eyes skyward. "Not Helen again. I thought we'd heard the last of that ghost stuff."
"I think we have," I said. "Now."
Silently Heather fastened the chain around her neck, smiling at me as she did so. Together we walked out of the graveyard. Behind us, Michael kicked at the grass.
"I still don't believe it," I heard him yell at our backs, but it seemed to me that his voice quavered a tiny bit.
Mary Downing Hahn, Wait Till Helen Comes: A Ghost Story
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