CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Akira didn’t know what she believed anymore. Pits of fire sounded implausible to her, but then so did ghosts. Still, eternal damnation seemed awfully extreme for anything Rose could or would have done.
Henry must have felt the same way, because he didn’t even pause before rejecting Rose’s words. “God wouldn’t damn you, Rose. Never. There’s nothing you could do that his love isn’t strong enough to forgive.”
She looked at him, and her mouth twisted, and for a moment, it seemed as if she would stay silent. And then she said, “Pennyroyal tea.”
The words meant nothing to Akira, but Henry looked taken aback. “Oh.” He paused, then, with a reluctant curiosity, asked, “Who?”
“Tommy Shaw.”
“Tommy!” Henry protested, almost recoiling. “He put a snake in your lunchbox!”
“I know that,” Rose said, crossing her arms over her chest and looking defensive. “It wasn’t even—I didn’t—it wasn’t—it had nothing to do with him, really.”
“Well, why, then?” Henry sounded perplexed, his wrinkled face creasing into worried lines.
Rose sighed, giving a one-shouldered shrug. “I was just mad at my parents. They’d said such mean things to me about seeing you, I guess I figured I’d show them.”
“Your pa would have made him marry you.” Henry tilted his head, trying to understand.
“And then I would have been married to Tommy Shaw!” Rose’s rejection of the suggestion brought her to her feet. “For the rest of my life? No, thank you!” She paced away, across the kitchen, skirt flaring around her from the strength of her movement.
Akira eyed her cautiously. There was no color change yet, just the chill in the air, and Rose still seemed in control. But emotional ghosts made her nervous. She looked at Henry. He was watching Rose, but he must have seen the movement of her head, for he looked back at her. Maybe he recognized her anxiety, because he changed the subject, saying to Rose, “I got him back for that snake.”
Rose turned, and her smile lit up her face. “I knew that was you. How did you do it?”
“I got the janitor to let me in,” Henry answered. “Old Mr. Jackson, he didn’t mind. He thought it was funny.”
“Mrs. Brown was so mad. She gave every boy in class detention. She knew it had to be one of them, but no one would own up to it.”
Henry grinned back at her, and for a moment, Akira could see the boy he must have been. “I kept it real quiet after that. Didn’t want to get beat up for getting them into hot water.” And then seeing Akira’s confused expression, he added. “Tommy Shaw put a garter snake in Rose’s lunchbox one time. We must have been about thirteen, fourteen years old.”
“Thirteen.” Rose shuddered. “It was my brand-new Hopalong Cassidy lunchbox, and I was so proud of it. When I opened it up and that snake slithered out, I cried.”
“I went down to the springs and caught some brown snakes. Nice big ones, a couple feet long. Harmless, but easy to mistake for cottonmouths. Stuck ‘em in Tommy’s desk. When he opened his desk, you could hear the screaming half a block away.” Henry chuckled at the memory.
Rose smiled, too. “I wish I’d been remembering that snake when he asked me out. I might have thought twice.”
A silence fell.
Akira gripped her glass tightly. She didn’t want to ask but she had to. Henry’s existence depended on it. “Pennyroyal tea?” she prompted cautiously.
“My parents would have sent me away. Everyone in town would have known. People always did.” Rose’s words were more sad than heated, and Akira took a deep breath, realizing for the first time that she’d been holding it. She understood now what the pennyroyal tea was for and what Rose had done, and she felt a pang of sympathy for the scared teenager Rose must have been.
“It doesn’t matter,” Henry said. “God can forgive anything.”
“Well, I didn’t ask to be forgiven,” Rose responded with a toss of the head. “I died before I could have.”
“First John 1:9 says ‘If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.’” Henry answered. “It doesn’t say anything about whether you have to be alive or dead when you confess.”
“‘The dead were judged according to what they had done,’ Revelations,” Rose snapped back. “I went to Sunday school every week, too, Henry Powell.”
As the two ghosts argued about the Bible, Akira thought. She was convinced that fading away was bad. Maybe she was wrong: maybe slowly fading was just a gradual transformation. But if Henry became like the boys in the back, repeating the same actions as if on an endless loop, she felt some essential part of him would be lost forever. No, Rose needed to convince him to go through the hole or door or whatever it was.
But burning in a pit of everlasting fire? It didn’t sound good. She could understand why Rose was reluctant to take the chance.
Still, if the Bible was literal truth, she’d be in that pit of fire, too, for the sin of communicating with ghosts. And yet what choice did she have? If there was a God and he didn’t want her to see ghosts, he shouldn’t have made so many of them. Asking her to stop meeting ghosts was like asking her to stop the tide: she just wasn’t that powerful. But, wait—if there was a God, wasn’t he all-powerful?
“No,” she interrupted the ghosts, turning to Rose. “You can’t be right, Rose. You won’t go to hell. It doesn’t make sense.”
“The Bible doesn’t have to make sense, it just is,” Rose replied, as Henry frowned.
“Not the Bible.” Akira waved that away. “Here’s the thing: if God wanted you to burn in a pit of fire, you’d be there already. You’ve got a lot of energy, but you can’t be more powerful than God, right?”
Rose looked doubtful, but Henry nodded eagerly. “That’s right,” he said. “There’s no loophole that lets souls escape damnation. If you were damned, you’d be in hell already.”
“Plus,” Akira added, “If you take Henry through the door, you’ll be saving his soul, and God would have to appreciate that. That has to outweigh anything bad you did while you were alive.”
Rose frowned, and crossed back to the table. Standing next to them, she looked down on Henry. “Can’t you go on your own, Henry?” she asked, her voice plaintive. “I like it here.”
Henry stood, reaching for her hand, and then sighed as his hand went straight through her. “Rose, I had to leave you in life. Wasn’t nothing I could do about it. But I loved you from the time I was a little boy, and I’m not leaving you behind now.”
Akira bit her lip. Poor Henry. He was so sweet, so earnest, and the thought of him loving Rose his whole life made her eyes prickle as if she wanted to cry. Rose had to see that she couldn’t just let him waste away.
“All right,” Rose sighed. She looked over her shoulder and her chin lifted. “But if I wind up burning for eternity, I’m going to be very, very angry at you.” She swallowed hard and Akira could see that she was mustering her courage. And then Rose turned, and with a sweep of her peach skirts, stepped away and was gone.
“Thank you, Akira.” Henry’s eyes sparkled and his shoulders straightened as if a huge weight had been lifted off his back. “Thank you so much. You take care now.” He dusted himself off, tugging at his clothes as if to make himself look a little neater, and then he, too, stepped forward and was gone.
Wow. Akira sat, stunned. There was a door. And spirits could go through it. And she’d just helped ghosts move on to another place. It was amazing.
And then she realized what she’d done, and her mouth dropped open, and she jumped to her feet, saying, “Wait, wait. Henry, come back! Rose!!”
Oh, shit, she thought frantically. What about Dillon?