able to relax and let my mind wander. I thought of Noah in the next room, stuck with my dad and Shane and the endless news broadcast, which trumped the reruns of sitcoms that normally aired during weekend dinnertime. I worried about Avery and hoped that her house would be safe from severe water damage. And, as it had happened so often over the past few weeks, I thought about Charleston and the girl in the pink dress.
It had been only three weeks since I had stepped into the afterlife. Three weeks, and already a part of me was doubting the details of the experience. Had I really spoken to a dead girl? If so, I had achieved more contact with the paranormal in a moment than my parents had throughout their decades-long career. I hadn’t told anyone about it, not even my parents, mainly because I was trying to make sense of it.
The logical side of me reasoned that it had been a stress-induced hallucination, brought on by lack of sleep and weeks of feeling watched. After all, no one had witnessed anything other than me placing my hand on an old tree. In that half second, minutes seemed to fold away as I tried to help a girl reconnect with her deceased parents.
At the time, it had felt so real. But later, as I tried to replay the incident in my mind, only a few details remained. The pink dress. The tree. The girl’s voice, so similar to my own, telling me that there was no end to life, no end to anything at all. I did not trust my own mind. What if I had somehow manufactured a memory using the details I was already familiar with? I had eaten lunch by that tree and viewed a faded photograph of the girl. My tired brain could have pieced elements together to form something resembling reality, something to which I could relate. The bizarre vision had given me the mental strength to continue on with a ceremony intended to bring about closure to restless spirits. But as my dad always wondered, why would the dead need the limited powers of the living? Anything we did to help the deceased was merely a guess, nothing more. We possessed no true knowledge of what it meant to be dead; therefore, we possessed no true knowledge of how to help them—or if they even needed help.
That was Dad’s other concern. He loved to debunk the psychics and charlatans who claimed that they assisted tortured sprits with the process of moving on. These people possessed no wisdom, Dad claimed. They had no idea what it meant to die, much less whether the dead needed assistance. No place was haunted by souls desperate to find the light that would lead them to eternal peace. Places were simply occupied by residual energy that was triggered by human action. The solution? Stop the action.
It was the driving principle behind my parents’ careers. But after Charleston, I’d noticed a shift in how my mother and my father approached their work.
While Dad continued his no-nonsense, scientific approach to all things paranormal, Mom seemed to take a step back. The first time I’d noticed the change was the day we returned from Charleston. Our house was a wreck, the result of two angry spirits. Furniture lay on its side and the hundreds of sheets of paper scattered throughout the downstairs made me think a tiny tornado had touched down in the center of our dining room. Immediately, Dad went about fixing the big things, such as returning chairs to their rightful place and inspecting the ceiling for cracks.
Mom took a different approach. She knelt on the floor, examining each piece of paper for clues and running her hands over every jagged line streaking the walls. She was searching for a pattern, I realized, some common thread that tied everything together. While Dad assumed it was all a random mess, Mom thought it represented something deeper and more complex. When she asked Dad to slow down, he laughed. “The sooner we put all of this behind us, the better,” he declared.
Mom tried to explain her ideas to him, that maybe they should catalog exactly what had happened, but Dad dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “It means nothing,” he said. “Nothing a couple hours of hard work can’t fix.”
Mom pursed her lips and looked like she wanted to debate the issue, but even I knew that when Dad decided upon something, it was final. Mom picked her battles, and this was one she couldn’t win. Yet.
“Ranch or Italian?” Mom asked Trisha, bringing me back to the present.
“Definitely Italian.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.”
I watched the way Mom talked with Trisha, the way she smiled and went out of her way to make Trisha comfortable. We rarely met Shane’s girlfriends. He only introduced us to women he had dated for more than a month, a population I could count on one hand. Trisha was special, and everyone in my family knew it.
While the pizza cooked we converged in the dining room, eager for new flood updates. The same footage aired on the news, though, an endless loop of water licking the bottom of stop signs and cars gliding along on dark waves.
“I haven’t seen a storm this bad since Noah was in diapers,” Trisha announced.
Noah winced. He’d endured a full 24 hours of discomfort, beginning with having to dress in my dad’s old sweatpants after we made it home, to sleeping on our sofa with a snoring Shane sprawled out on the floor, to watching his mom feed chunks of grapefruit to Shane at breakfast. Noah looked miserable, and I wanted to do something about it. While the adults stared at the TV, flipping between the weather channel and the local news, I invited him up to my bedroom.
“I think you need a break from all of this,” I told him.
“Anything’s better than staring at the TV,” he agreed.
As soon as Noah stepped into my room, I felt nervous and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. It wasn’t that I thought something would happen, but maybe being alone together would inspire him to make a move. I was suddenly aware of everything my room held and what those things might say about me. Would he laugh at the small pink teddy bear perched on top of my dresser? Would he dare open my closet? Normally my clothes were strewn in heaps across the floor, but when it became apparent that no one would be leaving the house Friday night, I had shoved everything into my closet. An avalanche of clothes waited behind the double doors, ready to tumble down on the unlucky person who turned the handle.
Thankfully, Noah did not venture near my closet. Instead, he went straight to my bookshelf while I sat on the edge of my neatly made bed. “These are all required reading,” he said as he examined my small assortment of books.
“Not all of them.” I was immediately defensive. I’d had no idea he would be drawn to my bookshelf, of all things. My desk was much more impressive, with a powder-blue laptop, a ceramic mug filled with pens in every color imaginable, and a framed picture of all of my friends—including him—at homecoming.
Noah held up a paperback copy of A Tale of Two Cities. “You bought this for recreational purposes?”
“It’s a classic.” It was also an assignment at one of the many high schools I had attended. We’d moved before I had finished the semester—or the book.
“Hmm.” Noah looked unconvinced. He ran his fingers over the spines of my collection, stopping when he came to a red paperback. “I like this one.” He held up a well-worn copy of Fahrenheit 451.
“That’s my dad’s,” I told him. “But it’s one of my favorites.”
“Mine too.”
This minor revelation made me majorly happy. Sharing the same taste in books, despite the fact that those books had been part of a school assignment, was a positive sign.
I wasn’t sure what to do after Noah finished examining my pathetic bookshelf. Invite him to sit with me on the bed? Offer him a peek into my dresser? Fortunately, he made the decision for me.
“I was thinking about the coffins,” he said as he sat down on the floor. “What happens after the rain stops? Whose job is it to go out and collect them all?”
“The police? Or the county coroner, maybe?”
“Yeah, but they’re going to be crazy busy with everything else going on. Retrieving old caskets might not make the list.”
“Maybe not.”
“Think your parents will get involved?”
I