Hereafter

  “Huh?” I frowned too, and tilted my head to one side.

  “Well, maybe you’re subconsciously blocking those memories. I mean, if other memories are coming back to you but not those.”

  I twisted my mouth, pondering this suggestion. After a few seconds I nodded. “It’s possible, yeah.”

  He glanced at me again, worry still in his eyes. When he spoke, he did so with hesitation. “So did you . . . um . . . kill yourself, you think?”

  I lowered my head. Of course he’d have to ask this question.

  Aloud I said, “You know, I kind of always thought I did. My death seemed pretty depressing, so it wasn’t too big a stretch to think my life must have been too. But lately, since I met you, I’m not so sure. I know I fell off the bridge. Now I’m just not sure I jumped.”

  Joshua surprised me by taking my hand from my lap and lacing his fingers through mine. “Maybe you didn’t. In fact . . . I’d bet you didn’t. That’s just not like you. Not at all.”

  My head flew up, and I gave him a small but widening smile. The ache in my chest radiated outward in deliciously warm arcs, mimicking the heat I now felt in my hand.

  So maybe Joshua was wrong. So what? Maybe I had killed myself, maybe I hadn’t. Likely, we would never know. But Joshua didn’t believe I had. He believed I was better than that, in life and now. His belief touched something inside me, something that insisted that maybe, just maybe, I hadn’t done anything to deserve this death.

  Before I could tell Joshua as much, he suddenly glanced out my window and frowned. He slowed down before turning the car onto a side road.

  Realizing what was happening, I stared at Joshua with a renewed sense of terror. I refused to look outside the car for even a second and kept my eyes locked on his grim expression. For the briefest moment I willed myself to go back into the fog. Just for some peace, some quiet preparation for what was about to follow. Joshua’s voice, however, forced me to focus.

  “We’re here.”

  To my surprise, his eyes mirrored my own panic. I gulped, clenching his hand even harder. He squeezed back to let me know that he didn’t mind if we sat like this for the entire afternoon, staring at each other instead of at the house behind us.

  But we couldn’t stay like this forever.

  With painful, near-creaking slowness, I let go of Joshua’s hand and turned in my seat until I faced out the passenger side window.

  Across a postage-stamp lawn was a tiny clapboard house, no more than a thousand square feet in size and no less than fifty years old. The exterior’s white paint had started to peel a long time ago, and the roof sagged under the remembered weight of a half century of snow. Behind the building, overgrown grass spread out until it met the thick woods that bordered the backyard.

  This was my parents’ house. My house.

  Two ruts cut parallel paths in the dirt next to the house. It was a not-quite driveway, which was now free of cars.

  “They aren’t home.”

  The words tumbled out of my mouth before I had time to think about their meaning.

  I blinked, shocked at the ease of that statement. I hadn’t seen this ramshackle little house in many years, much less seen my parents’ cars parked outside of it. Yet I suddenly remembered exactly what this house looked like when it was empty.

  Joshua’s voice nearly made me jump in my seat.

  “Do you want to go see it?”

  I nodded without looking at him. I didn’t even tear my eyes away from the house when Joshua got out of the car, opened my door, and helped me out onto the grass. Dazed, I walked hand in hand with him across the front lawn. It wasn’t until he took one step onto the front porch that I yanked on his hand, jerking him to a stop.

  “What are you going to say?” I asked. “If someone’s actually here?”

  “I was just thinking about that. What do you think? Vacuum salesman?”

  “You don’t have any vacuums!” I hissed.

  “Fund-raising for the baseball team?”

  “Better. Kind of.”

  Somewhat prepared, we walked up to the front door. As Joshua let go of my hand, he turned to me and gave me his most reassuring smile, which, unfortunately, twitched with almost as much fear as I felt. Then he raised his right hand and rapped on the door.

  The door immediately swung open under Joshua’s touch. We both gasped and stepped backward.

  On the other side of the door, a dark, shotgun-style hallway led to the back of the house. It took us a few seconds to realize that the hallway was empty and that no one had opened the door from the inside. The door must have already been ajar. Joshua’s knocking had merely pushed it open.

  I had the briefest flash—an image of that door swinging open beneath a woman’s hand.

  “My mom always did that,” I whispered, nodding. “She’d forget to close the door when she went out somewhere.”

  “What should we do?” Joshua whispered back.

  “Let’s go in.”

  I pushed past him, squeezing myself between the doorjamb and the door until it was too late for either Joshua or me to argue with this plan. After he closed the door behind us, I let my eyes adjust to the dimness inside.

  We were standing in the only hallway, off of which were several rooms. To my immediate right was a living room, crammed with secondhand furniture and an old TV. The entrance to another room was just visible in the back, to the right. Across from it I could see a tiny kitchen, next to what appeared to be an even tinier bathroom. I turned slightly to my left and stared at the door beside me, which was shut tight against the hallway.

  However cool I was trying to play it, I had to stifle a gasp of shock at the flood of familiarity in this house: the sound of the creaking hardwood floors under Joshua’s feet; the tap-tap-tap of the leaky kitchen faucet in the back of the house; the sight of the faded, pink paper A taped in the middle of the closed door to my left.

  I couldn’t help it. A whimper escaped my mouth just as I clutched my hand to my heart. The ache that now gripped my chest was new, and not even a fraction as pleasant as the one I felt with Joshua. This ache was terrible. It tightened against my lungs until I could hear myself begin to hyperventilate.

  In an instant Joshua had wrapped his hands around my waist and pulled me to his chest. It was the closest we’d ever been, but I couldn’t seem to spare a fraction of my concentration to enjoy that fact.

  “We can leave,” Joshua murmured into my hair. “We can leave right now.”

  I shook my head.

  “No.” The word was low and rough. “I can’t leave yet.”

  I could feel Joshua nodding as he pulled me even closer. We stayed that way until I stopped gasping. Once my breath had steadied, Joshua released me. He looked me up and down, saving his longest look for my face.

  “You know,” I said with a shaky laugh, “I think I might have been an asthmatic when I was alive. With all the gasping and stuff.”

  Joshua just shook his head at my failed attempt at levity. “Do you really want to stay?”

  I pressed my lips together into a tense line and nodded.

  “Well . . . what do you want to see first then?” he asked.

  I thought about that for a moment and then flicked my head at the door to my left.

  “Could we go into my old bedroom?”

  “O-kay.”

  Like he always did when approaching something with caution, Joshua drew out his long O. He still sounded worried, still sounded as if he wasn’t sure I was ready for all of this. I kept my expression impassive and tried to look ready for anything. Seeing this (but obviously not believing it entirely), Joshua reached across me to turn the handle of my old bedroom door.

  The door opened, and when it did, it released something I hadn’t anticipated.

  A slight gust of warm air brushed my skin. I could feel it—feel its movement and its warmth. I could smell the air, stale from being trapped in the room for God knows how long, but with a faint hint of old perfume. It smelled
vaguely of fruit . . . maybe peaches, or nectarines.

  As quickly as the sensations had come, they were gone again, leaving me numb. But the sensations had come, that was the point. I closed my eyes briefly and savored the thought.

  When I opened my eyes, I was surprised to find that I’d already crossed the threshold. I turned back to see Joshua hovering uncertainly in the doorframe. I smiled at him and gestured him into the room with one hand.

  The room was tiny, with barely enough space for both Joshua and me to stand in it. Shoved against one wall was an old dresser and shoved against another was a twin-sized bed, which overflowed with purple and green pillows. Above the bed, a handful of gold paper stars hung from the ceiling by threads. They matched the curtains, which someone had closed against the light, rendering useless the small telescope propped against the window.

  Even in the gloom I could see the only collection of items I’d ever owned: my books. Stacks of books, rising from the ground to almost waist height and running along every free inch of the tiny room. I’d found these books in used bookstores, thrift store bins, library sales. Each book had been read, reread, and then loving placed on top of a stack.

  I pressed my hand to my heart again. This time I didn’t feel the need to gasp or sob. I felt . . . sad, yes. Deeply, deeply sad. But also glad to see all of this again. To know I had existed. That I still existed, at least in some form.

  I smiled slightly and turned to Joshua. I flicked my head back to the hallway, indicating that it was time to leave the room. He picked up on my cue and turned around quickly—ready, I think, to be away from these images. I know the feeling, I thought as I moved to follow him.

  Before I left the room, though, I peeked back over my shoulder. Just to memorize the tiny space one last time.

  That’s when I noticed the thick layer of dust over everything. A transparent brown film covered the gold stars, the dresser, the books. I paused, frowning at the dust.

  Though my parents hadn’t changed a thing in this room, they certainly hadn’t entered it in a long time, either.

  For some reason that saddened me even more. Not because my mother didn’t trudge each day into some room-sized shrine to me, dust rag in hand. But because my parents had kept the room this way and sealed it up, as though it were some tomb, filled with things too painful to come near.

  Which it likely was.

  I shook my head, stepping out of the room and into the hallway without another backward glance.

  “Close it, please,” I asked Joshua, my voice hoarse. He did so without a word, pulling the door shut behind me and sealing the tomb once again. I shuddered at the sound.

  Joshua came and stood beside me. I looked up at him grimly, too spent to even attempt a smile.

  “Was that hard?” he asked.

  I just nodded.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I think you have almost as many books as I do.”

  “Had,” I said. “I had almost as many books as you do.”

  He frowned. “Amelia, you can have all my books.”

  “Which would be awesome, if I could ever turn the pages.”

  Joshua ducked his head, and I felt instantly ashamed of myself.

  I ducked down too, met his eyes, and gave him a slight smile. “But you know, Joshua, no matter how I feel right now, that’s still very good to know.”

  “Hope so,” he said with a timid, answering smile.

  I took a huge breath, drawing my shoulders up and then letting them fall back into place. I felt raw, and oddly bruised. Yet there were still more things I wanted to see.

  “Mind if we check out the living room real quick? I think . . . my mom used to keep a bunch of pictures in there.”

  “Not at all.” Joshua swept his arm toward the living room, so I crossed in front of him and into the room. I scanned the walls until I found it: the little shelf my mother had nailed to the far wall in place of a mantel.

  Joshua and I wove our way through a maze of chairs and ottomans until we stood directly in front of the shelf. It was still cluttered with the same pictures, each framed in cheap plastic or wood. A few new items also decorated this area, most noticeably the two large photos now hanging above the shelf.

  I recognized the photo on the left immediately. It was my senior picture, the very one Joshua and I had found in the yearbook this afternoon. My living face stared out at us, surrounded by an expensive-looking wooden frame. To my horror, someone had draped wide black ribbons around the perimeter of the frame. The ribbon on the left side had been printed with my name in silver, metallic ink; the ribbon on the right proclaimed the dates of my birth and death. The otherwise pretty picture was thus transformed into the kind of macabre memento you might leave on someone’s grave.

  The embarrassing display, however, wasn’t the thing that horrified me most. Instead, it was the other picture hanging over the shelf, the one directly to the right of mine.

  The photo itself didn’t scare me. Under any other circumstances, it would have made me smile. The photo was of my father, taken around the time he and my mother had married. Back then my father still had a thick mop of hair. His tan skin was less lined than I remembered, but his green eyes still creased at the corners as a result of his huge grin.

  Yet, despite the happy tone of my father’s photo, I began to shiver uncontrollably.

  Because, like my senior portrait beside it, my father’s photo was draped in black ribbons.

  The ribbon to the left of my father’s picture bore the name Todd Allen Ashley. It glinted out at me in the same embossed silver that surrounded my own portrait. I couldn’t quite read the ribbon on the right, nor did I want to. No matter what the dates printed on the ribbon read, I knew what they symbolized: a birth date . . . and a death date.

  At first the individual pieces of what I saw didn’t make sense. But the longer I stared at the photo, the more the details came into horrifying clarity. The moment they all clicked into place, the bottom dropped out from my world.

  But I wasn’t scared. I wanted it. I wanted darkness, nothingness. I wanted a nightmare right now. I wanted to let the river suck me down, to make me drown or trap me in Eli’s horrible netherworld.

  I wanted anything but this.

  No matter what I wanted, I didn’t fall into darkness. I stood motionless in the cramped living room in which my mother probably sat alone, night after night. No daughter to fight with, no husband to talk to.

  Because I was dead.

  And my father was dead.

  I placed my hand over my mouth to stifle a sob. Joshua reached for me, but I pulled away and shook my head.

  As if he had just read my thoughts, Joshua whispered, “It’s not your fault, Amelia.”

  “It is. I know it is.”

  “How?” he urged.

  “Look at this place!” I gestured around me, to the ramshackle contents of the room and the entombed bedroom just outside of it. “It all fell apart when I died. It’s all fallen apart.”

  “I know, and it’s horrible.” Joshua’s voice was softer, but still insistent. “Terrible. And I’m sorry, Amelia. But—sometimes it happens. And the important part is, you didn’t make it happen.”

  It didn’t seem to matter what Joshua said—I couldn’t stop shaking. “I wasn’t there, Joshua. I wasn’t there when . . . when . . .”

  I choked on the thought. Joshua rushed over, reaching out for me; but I forced the words out of my mouth before he could touch me. In fact, I nearly spat the words at the floor.

  “I wasn’t there when my dad died. Now my mom’s all alone, and my dad could be anywhere. He could be lost, like I was. Or he could be . . . someplace worse.” I shuddered, thinking about Eli’s dark world and the poor, trapped souls there. “And I can’t do a damn thing about it.”

  My eyes prickled. I wasn’t surprised when one tear managed to course its way down my cheek. But I was stunned when an entire flood of tears followed.

  I looked up at Joshua, my mouth open, my face
probably the picture of miserable shock. I wiped furiously at my cheeks and stared down at my hands, which were quickly becoming soaked.

  “I . . . I’ve never cried,” I stuttered, staring back up at him. “Not like this.”

  He grabbed my arms and practically yanked me to him.

  “Whatever you do, Amelia, it’s all right with me.” His voice was rough, deepened by emotion.

  I was shocked yet again by what the sound of his voice did to my body, no matter how desolate my mind might be. Suddenly, my arms were wrapped fiercely around Joshua’s neck. Just as fiercely, he wrapped his arms around my waist and pulled me to him faster than I could pull myself. Now there was no space between us. We were curved against each other; and when he shifted closer, I thought I might actually stop breathing.

  I could feel it all: the pressure of his arms around me, the grip of his fingers at my waist, the warmth of his breath on my skin. Everything I knew about myself and my relationship to the living world told me this was impossible. But that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that I felt alive. I felt everything.

  Joshua stared down at me, and I could feel the heat of his midnight blue eyes on every inch of my body. When I curled my fingers in the hair at the nape of his neck, he moaned. Once the sound escaped his lips, we didn’t even give it a second thought. We leaned into each other and pressed our lips together.

  The kiss crashed over me, wave upon wave of fire. The ache exploded across my chest like an atom bomb, incinerating everything in its path. I let it burn me; I let it consume me.

  As Joshua parted his lips and moved them against mine, I felt his lips—felt the soft, warm skin of them.

  At that moment I was the atom bomb. I was the orange, brightly glowing ball of fire. The exact spot where a lit match touches a pool of kerosene.

  Then I was cold. Terribly cold.

  I opened my eyes and gasped. I began choking and clutching around me, futilely trying to find something to anchor me. Something to help me claw my way out of here.

  Because I was suddenly in the black water of the river. And I was drowning again.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE