I sat there, listening with the unwanted tears starting to fill my eyes, and dropped the heart-shaped cookie onto the table. It broke in half upon hitting the plate, and I began to apologize for my clumsiness, as if that mattered.
“It’s nothing,” said Mrs. Hendrix. “You’re just feeling what I felt when Becca first came to me, that’s all. You’re shocked. That’s natural, Ellie.”
I wanted to tell her that wasn’t the case. My tears weren’t from shock or because of my own sadness at losing Becca. My tears were entirely for Becca, for her somehow being forced to haunt the person who had made her so unhappy in life.
She came around to my side of the table, swept the broken cookie into her palm, then deposited it in a waste bin. Afterward, she turned around with the gleeful expression back on her face and said, “Why don’t you try it, Ellie?”
I narrowed my eyes and said, “You mean…you mean try calling her?”
Mrs. Hendrix nodded excitedly. “Yes,” she said. “She comes to me at night, when Becca’s dad is asleep. Why don’t you try calling her now? You could go up to her room, if you think that would help. You know, to recall her. To feel how much you miss her. Think of all those nights you two spent up there, over the years, for sleepovers.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Was Mrs. Hendrix really offering to let me go into her dead daughter’s room so I could attempt to call her up from the beyond, as if she were some kind of genie in a bottle?
For a moment, we just stared at each other “Go on, Ellie,” she said finally, waving one hand in the air like it was no big thing. “Don’t be shy. I know how important Becca was to you.”
As she stood there, nodding her encouragement, I realized she wasn’t going to budge from the idea. So I slowly scraped my chair back from the table and looked hesitantly at Mrs. Hendrix once more before I passed by her and took the stairs up to the second floor.
* * *
It was strange going up those old steps, each one sounding out its own specific creak under my weight. When we were little, Becca and I used to pretend those stairs were a musical instrument, like a xylophone. She’d play the bottom half while I played the top, and we’d try to figure out how to make music out of them. It never worked. It always sounded like badly done horror-film sound effects, no matter what combination of creaks we tried. And in the end, Mrs. Hendrix usually yelled at us to stop within a few minutes.
Hearing the creaks beneath my steps now, though, I couldn’t help but find them more nostalgic than eerie. Which shouldn’t have been the case, I thought. I was going up to my best friend’s bedroom, where I would attempt to call her ghost to me on her mother’s insistence. That should have felt eerie. Somehow, though, I wasn’t afraid. In fact, I found myself hoping that Mrs. Hendrix’s story might even be true. Because right then what I wanted more than anything was to sit down next to Becca, the person I’d shared everything with since as long as I could remember. And just talk as if nothing horrible had happened. As if there hadn’t been an outbreak. As if she’d never been taken away.
When I got to the landing, I turned toward Becca’s door and reached out, placing my hand on the doorknob for a moment before finally pushing it open. It squealed a little, just like it always had, no matter how often Mr. Hendrix oiled it. And beyond it was Becca’s room. The room she hated because she’d been given no say in it. It was still bubble-gum pink, a garish, un-Becca-like stereotypical little girl’s room, on Mrs. Hendrix’s insistence, and where the walls met the ceiling, a white wallpaper border with curling roses sealed the room off like the lid of a Victorian hatbox.
I moved slowly into the room, closing the door behind me, taking careful steps across the white carpet, as if I might disturb something, even though the floor was clear and everything was in its place, just how Becca would have left it so that her mother wouldn’t yell at her for being messy. There were her Academic Challenge trophies from the past three years, lining the top of her desk. There was her collection of Andrew Lang’s fairy-tale books on a shelf above her bed’s headboard, probably the only things in the room that reflected who Becca was. I’d always thought those books could have set Mrs. Hendrix off, because they were filled with magical happenings. But they’d escaped her notice over the years, probably only because they seemed appropriate for a little girl. There was the handmade quilt Becca’s mom had paid an Amish woman to make, using the same pattern of roses on it that lined the walls.
It was awful to be in that room, Becca’s pink-and-white prison cell. I could almost smell the suffocating scent of roses coming from the images of them throughout the room, and wrinkled my nose, remembering the time Becca and I had secretly colored a wallpaper rose black with a marker. I’d suggested it. “To stake your claim,” I’d told her. Even if it was a secret claim. To make the room hers without her mother ever knowing. The rose was hidden behind the fairy-tale books above her bed. And when I reached up to pull several out, I smiled, seeing the black petals and thorny vine still growing there.
My smile was brief, though, because almost immediately I felt that ragged hole inside my chest start to throb around its edges, and then my breathing started to come quicker and quicker, as if I couldn’t take in enough air. Then I was crying, the tears running hot down my cheeks and over my lips, erasing the smile that had just formed a second before.
“Oh, Becca,” I said, and my voice came out like the tiny squeal of Mrs. Hendrix’s electric teakettle. “Why you? Why you?”
I sat down on the edge of her bed and put my face in my hands, crying harder with each passing moment, unable to stop the memories flickering through my head. Becca flashing a satisfied, wicked grin as she filled in the last wallpaper rose petal with black ink. Becca rocking back and forth on this bed, laughing hysterically, as we invented purr jokes and puns about her mother’s cleaning apron. Becca’s arm around my shoulder as I cried through my first heartbreak, her warm cheek pressed against mine as she whispered to me that everything would be all right. Now I was crying so hard, I could hear myself moan, and I rocked back and forth until the only words that came out of me were “Not you. Not you.”
“Yes, me,” a voice said quietly, and I looked up, my crying interrupted, to see her kneeling right in front of me. Becca Hendrix. My best friend. The girl who gave me one half of a heart-shaped charm when we were eleven.
“Yes, me,” she said again, now that I was looking at her and had gone silent out of shock. “It happened, Ellie. You have to accept that. You have to be okay with it.”
I bit my bottom lip and nodded, even though I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing, and wiped tears away from my face as I looked at hers, taking in every detail of her because I’d wished so hard after she was gone that I had done that. Just looked at her. Studied her. Not taken anything about her for granted. Not her coils of coppery hair, not her brown eyes or her pale skin patterned with tiny freckles. “I’m trying, Becca,” I said. “It’s just so hard.”
“I know,” Becca said. “But you can’t just stop like you’ve been doing, Ellie. You can’t freeze up and stop living. You have to keep moving.”
“You…you’ve seen me?” I said, blinking, surprised, yet not at all afraid of that idea, either.
Becca put her arms on my legs and took my hands in hers, nodding.
“When?” I asked, still finding it hard to somehow believe her.
“Over the past few weeks,” she said. “Some of the others have, too.”
I looked up and away from her for a moment, taking in a few quick, deep breaths to stop myself from hyperventilating. When I got myself under control again, I looked back to Becca and whispered, “What do you mean, some of the others?”
“Adrienne,” she said, softly, as if the name were sacred and shouldn’t be spoken too loudly. “And Rose.”
Adrienne and Rose and…I could feel my lips trembling with the question I wanted to ask,
but I was afraid of the answer. Becca knew what I wanted, though. She could see the truth in my eyes, like always, like I could always see the truth in hers.
“I don’t know about Noah,” she said gently now, “if that’s what you’re wondering. I haven’t seen him for a while. But I can’t help but think that if Rose and I have looked in on you, so has he.”
Becca got up and sat next to me on the bed. Knowing that she’d been watching me had turned me into a mess.
Impossibly, I felt her weight beside me. “I don’t understand,” I said. “How can I feel you sit down like that? How can I feel your hand on my back?”
“I’m in a…gray area right now,” Becca said.
“A gray area?”
“This whole place. Newfoundland. The area around it. It’s thin right now. It’s like the boundaries between the living and the dead aren’t as strong as they usually would be.”
“I don’t understand any of this.”
“I don’t understand much of it, either,” confessed Becca. “I’ve learned some things in the last few weeks, though. Things I can do. Things the dead can do, or things that the living can make the dead do. This—us being together like this—is just one of them.”
“There’s more?”
“Yes,” she said, nodding.
And then Becca began to tell me what she’d learned about life after dying.
* * *
“There’s a lot I don’t know,” Becca said, curling up beside me on her bed, our hands resting on each other’s hips, foreheads almost touching. Just like how we used to do when I’d spend the night, telling stories and sharing secrets in the dark for hours. It almost felt as if Becca hadn’t really died. Because here she was, telling me what she’d learned so far about what the dead can do, saying, “It’s all really confusing. But I’ll tell you what I’ve learned since I woke up outside of my body.”
There was rubble strewn around her, Becca said. And smoke everywhere, thicker than the thickest fog. She didn’t know where she was, but she could hear voices around her at different distances. People moaning. People crying. Names being shouted, and the grind of engines, or something that sounded like engines. Her head hurt, as if she had a migraine, and she remembered looking down and being able to see her hands and forearms through the smoke when she lifted them up. Otherwise, though, it was like she was packed away in a cloud.
“I started to climb out of the wreckage,” she said, “and bumped into someone. It was Rose. I knew because I could smell her perfume, the kind that smells like rose blossoms that her grandmother always sends from Japan for her birthday.”
“Hamanasu,” I said, remembering. For years, Rose had tried to teach us little bits of Japanese. We used it to speak to each other in code when we were kids, and that seemed cool. And later, after we were in junior high and high school, we tried to learn more because we knew some of the other kids made Rose feel out of place as one of the only Asian American girls in our school of pale midwestern faces.
“That’s it,” Becca said, nodding. “Hamanasu. Wild rose.” Becca chuckled then, because Rose was anything but wild. While Becca had to toe a pretty strict line at home, she always found ways to quietly flout her mother’s controlling measures. Rose, though? Rose was always the one of our group who wouldn’t break any rules, wouldn’t test any boundaries. “Anyway,” Becca said as her laughter faded.
She told me that they’d been kneeling in front of a wall of lockers, their fingers laced and clasped behind their heads. “All I can remember is kneeling there and people crying, and wondering when it was all going to stop, and then there was this momentary burst of light and heat before everything went dark. A part of me could sense the school collapsing on top of us, and Adrienne and Noah were right there beside us, too. But later, no matter how much Rose and I called for them, we couldn’t find them.”
I opened my mouth to interrupt Becca then, got one guttural sound out, but failed to form any actual words. Just hearing her say his name, hearing her say he was right there with them, sank a hook into me and pulled at me. Pulled at the jagged, empty space inside me.
Becca touched her forehead against mine, not saying anything at first. And when I didn’t manage to say anything after all, she continued with her story.
“After a while we gave up looking,” she said. And then they decided they should just walk in one direction, hoping that if they walked long enough, they’d find the end of the cloud of smoke surrounding them. That acrid fog that, for some reason, didn’t burn their eyes or make them cough and choke. And that did the trick. Eventually, the smoke thinned and, to their surprise, they found themselves not on a nearby street during the afternoon, but on a hillside with the stars spread out above them, pinpricks sparkling across a clear black night, not too far from the Newfoundland Lighthouse.
They wandered for a while, and saw others from school emerging from the smoky cloud at various places. Timothy Barlow was one of the first people Becca recognized. He came stumbling out of the smoke, landing on his hands and knees, looking up and all around like a lost child.
“I still don’t know why he came to me,” I interrupted.
“You saw Timothy?” Becca asked. When I nodded, she said, “Probably his mom or dad was calling to him without realizing it—or maybe both of them were—and you were just near enough to tune in to his…frequency.”
“He seemed really confused,” I said, thinking back to my encounters with him. “Like he didn’t know that he was dead.”
“I think some people are still like that,” Becca said. “They’re just wandering. Or they’re returning to the places that were familiar to them without realizing that’s what they’re doing.” Becca paused for a moment, as if she didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and then a change passed over her face. It seemed almost deliberate, like she was changing the subject, because then she grinned. “Ellie, you do know that Timothy had a huge crush on you, right?”
“Stop,” I said, shaking my head. Then I felt bad, because I actually did know that he’d had a crush on me. I’d always thought it was cute, but had never taken it seriously. He was just my neighbor, two years younger, the kid I’d babysit when he was still too young to stay home alone. “No, you’re right,” I said a moment later, feeling like I should at least acknowledge the truth of it, especially now that Timothy would never be able to have a crush on anyone ever again. “I knew that. I did know that.”
“Thought so,” said Becca, still grinning. “It might also have been why he was appearing to you, confused as he was. You were nearby. That makes it easier.”
“What about you?” I asked finally, hoping the question wouldn’t make Becca close up. “Why are you coming to see your mother every night? I don’t get it.”
“It’s not because I want to,” Becca said, looking down and away a little, as if she were ashamed. “It’s because…it’s because of…I don’t even know how to describe it.”
“What?”
“This…thing,” she said. “This feeling, like there’s this rope or something anchored in my gut, and it pulls on me whenever she calls.”
“A rope?” I asked.
She looked back up and shrugged. “Something like it. A rope or a line,” she said. “I’m not sure, but it feels that way. I think it might be whatever it is that connects people, even after death. All of us. When my mom calls, it’s like she pulls so hard on that rope, I have no choice but to come to her. She’s so strong, I can’t fight her. That’s what I meant when I said maybe Timothy’s mom and dad were doing that, and that’s why you saw him.”
“So do you think other people are seeing ghosts,” I said, “not just your mom and me?”
Becca looked hesitant at first, but eventually she said, “I’m pretty sure of it, Ellie. They just might not be talking about it. Even your dad has seen a ghost.”
“My dad?” I said, shak
ing my head in disbelief. Dan Frame wasn’t the sort of guy who believed in such things. “Are you sure?”
Becca nodded, looking down a little again. When she looked up, she said, “I’m sure. Because the ghosts he saw were Rose and me.”
“What?” I said, and pulled back a little in shock. I shook my head once, then looked hard at Becca and said, “How?”
“It was by chance,” Becca said. “It was a few days after the storms, and Rose and I were still getting our bearings. Trying to find our way back to her house. It’s not like how it works in the movies, you know. It’s not like we can just disappear and reappear anywhere we want to. Well, not like that, at least. And right then we didn’t know how to fly yet.”
“Fly?” I said, blinking and blinking.
Becca nodded, like this was no big deal.
“Something like that,” she continued. “I’m not sure how else to describe it. Once you’ve been somewhere, you can go there fast, and it feels like flying. And I’m sure, to the living, it does feel like we’re just appearing and disappearing out of nowhere. But anyway, we were on foot, and we were trying to find our way back to Rose’s house. Which is how we ended up passing your dad’s work crew on the road. The line between here and there was almost nonexistent, so…he saw us. In fact, I’m pretty sure his whole crew did.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. How could my dad have seen my friends and not tell me? Was it because he was embarrassed or worried that Mom and I would think he’d lost his senses? Or was he being typical Dan Frame, husband and father, protector of his family? Did he think he was somehow shielding us from this by not talking about it? As I sat there, trying to absorb all of it, Becca continued.