There are No Stars in the Afterlife
Originally Published in The Passed Note
My brother was crazy. I had told him that even when I was alive. I planned to tell him now that I was dead too. Seeing ghosts is crazy – even we think so. The only mediums I had ever seen were the ones with stalls on the boardwalk. These little old women cornered tourists as they ravaged their funnel cake, up to their eyeballs in powdered sugar. The boardwalk mediums knew how to look the part: frizzy gray hair tucked underneath a purple head scarves, and skirts with little fake coins that jingled when they walked, purchased cheap from the belly dancing stall a few yards down. Even their noses fit the role – wide and porous, bent at unnaturally sharp angles at the bridge. My brother was not an eighty-year-old woman with gnarled hands and a knowing smile. But he was crazy, and unfortunately, the only person I could go to for help. I had one night to make the biggest decision of my afterlife: stay or go.
I hadn’t expected to walk the boardwalk again after I died, not that I knew what to expect any way. But the pleasant warmth of the white light had become boring. Apparently I was too bitter and cynical. Spirits are unnecessarily tranquil.
They sent me back to the place I was killed to try to find my inner peace. If not, they’d let me stay forever among salt water taffy and the tanning-oil-greased bodies of the Guidos who slipped right through me on the Seaside Boardwalk. Seaside always had a carnival air to it: the lights of the games and music of the rides. After dark, it seemed to turn into a freak show full of drunken college kids reveling in their summer.
It must have been summer. I had no sense of time passing in the white world, the place after death. It wasn’t heaven or hell as I had been taught about them – no fluffy clouds and choirs of angels, no fire and brimstone. Everything was just white – a lack of color and existence. But the crowded boardwalk told me that here it was still summer. It had been summer when I died, riding home from this boardwalk. Someone ran me down and I became mangled with my bike. That was the last thing I remembered. Being punctured like a balloon. Then white.
As I drifted down the boardwalk, a couple in tears ploughed through me. Their arms were wrapped around each other so they formed an amorphous, snotty blob. Turning around to see what could have possibly caused such a disgusting display of public emotion, a storefront stood out to me. Above it was a sign, swinging in the sea breeze that read “P.M. Psychics”.
I backtracked, and stood in front of the stall. The entrance was covered with black curtains, embroidered with silver stars. It couldn’t be him, could it? I shrugged, shaking my head at myself before stepping inside.
The room behind the curtain made me claustrophobic. The walls were draped in the same black starry fabric as the door. A small, solitary chandelier with one light bulb missing cast a dim glow around the room and made the metallic thread in the curtains glitter. The twenty-one-year-old mystic man sat on the far side of a table. His dark hair had a cowlick in front, the bane of my mother’s existence on school picture day. Even though his face was down, shadowed in the poor light, I knew that when he looked up I would see the scar under his right eyebrow where I had hit him in the face with a baseball when we were little.
I sat down in the folding chair across the table from him, pleasantly surprised to find that I didn’t fall through to the floor. Only once I was seated did he look up. My brother jerked back in surprise so quickly, I thought he was going to fall out of his chair.
“I’d like a reading, please.” I placed my elbows on the table and grinned. My brother continued to stare at me. “Paul Michael, when did you start this little business?”
He was silent. His dark eyes searched my blue ones. Two bushy eyebrows scrunched together as he studied me. His nose wrinkled, the tell-tale sign he was confused.
“You always said you didn’t believe me,” he said.
“I said I hoped you didn’t see ghosts because I was afraid they’d tell you to kill your family. But I never said I didn’t believe you.” I had him stumped. So I grinned again.
“So what are you doing back here, Sadie? They kick you out of heaven?”
“Sort of. Apparently, I’ve got a chip on my shoulder.”
“Nah. It’s probably because you’ve sinned.” He always took his namesakes – an apostle and an archangel – very seriously.
“Paul Michael, you are the most uptight spiritualist I know.”
“I’m the only spiritualist you know.” Paul Michael looked down at me with his scarred eyebrow raised and I could see his smirk in the dim light of the chandelier. Not having a witty retort, I settled for a scathing glare. I stuck out my hand.
“My reading, please.”
My brother cupped my palm in his calloused hands. I pulled back.
“How can you do that?” I asked.
“When two souls have a particularly strong bond, they can make physical contact across the spiritual realm.” He took my hand back in his.
The warmth of his fingers on my hand was more unsettling than people walking through me. He didn’t look up at me, just studied my palm with his forehead furrowed in concentration.
“It’s been over a year since you passed.” He hadn’t needed my palm to tell me that. “You left great suffering behind you, but the people you care about are starting to heal.”
I clenched my hand closed. He stared at the fist in his hands.
“It’s almost eleven. I’m about to close up.” He stood, his body stretching out from his chair and towering over me with the long, lean build of a runner. “Let’s talk outside.”
Without waiting for my answer, he ushered me out, pulled the grate down in front of the curtains, and locked up. Sighing, he tossed his keys in the air twice before sticking them in his pocket. The light above his stall flickered over us.
“Sadie, could you float up there and turn that thing off for me?”
“I don’t know how to float.”
“Jeez, you’re a pathetic excuse for a ghost. Can you shorten out lights or have you not done that yet either?”
I blinked at him.
Paul Michael pulled his keys back out of his pocket, turning on the mini flashlight on the key ring. He tossed them to me. The keys and flashlight fell through my hands, and the flashlight turned off as it passed through my outstretched palm. I gaped as it lay on the ground.
“You are the most oblivious spirit I have ever met.” Paul Michael grinned as he picked up his keys from the boardwalk.
“I’m a horrible ghost. That’s why they sent me back. They even told me that they would let me stay here if I really wanted. They’re giving me tonight to decide.”
“Wow, you must really suck. I’ve never heard of the spirits offering anyone that before.”
“Yup, an eternity in the spirit world with them or an eternity out here with people. I think the choice is pretty obvious.”
“That’s because you haven’t thought it through,” he said. “It’s going to be strange for you to be back. You’re going to feel like you’re alive. You can taste, you can cry, you can sweat. It will seem just like before. Everything will feel the same except your heart won’t be beating and your lungs won’t be breathing. You have to remember that you are dead, Sadie. Only a medium can hear you, and it will be like that even if you decide to stay.”
We were silent for a moment as I tried to hold back saying something particularly biting to my brother. I looked up, beyond the boardwalk lights. In the countless stars above my head, I was able to pick out Cygnus, the swan constellation. When I was little, my dad had used the massive telescope on the back deck to point it out to me.
I always thought Cygnus looked more like a plane crash than a swan: nose pointed downward with two crooked wings. But tonight I didn’t mind. There are no stars in the afterlife.
“How can I help you?” Paul Michael asked. I jolted out of my thoughts, startled by his soft voice.
“I don’t need help, Paul Michael. I have my mind made up.” Just because he was the oldest and had special gifts he always thought that the world needed him. Well, sometimes he needed a reminder that he was as insignificant as the rest of us.
“Really? You’ve decided that you want to hang out with me for the rest of my life since I’m the only one who can see you?”
“Well, you don’t have to say it like that.” I crossed my arms against my chest. Farther down the boardwalk someone shouted about cotton candy and popcorn. I could smell the butter and salt but for once there wasn’t the pang of hunger that came with it. “How are Mom and Dad?”
“They’re okay. Hanging in there. It’s been a long year.”
“Do you think it would help them if I talked through you, I guess?”
“I don’t know,” Paul Michael shrugged. “They’ll ask me if I’ve seen you sometimes. Dad jokes about whether you know winning lottery numbers. Mom asks whether you ask about her. They would sense you if you tried to talk to them. I don’t think they’d see you, but they could probably feel you. They really want to, anyway.”
“And Laura?”
“Laura’s angry.”
I was too afraid to ask Paul Michael any more about my sister. Instead, I asked about a few friends from high school who I wanted to visit, but Paul Michael told me they were all back at school.
“And Greg?” I asked, after a moment of quiet between us.
“He’s still single.”
I nodded to myself, unsure of the socially acceptable way to react. Should I want him to move on, or mourn me for the rest of his life? I mean, I knew what I wanted but it wasn’t exactly fair or reasonable.
“We can go see him if you want, if you think it would help you make up your mind.” His voice was sincere.
I tried not to agree too quickly.
As we turned north on the boardwalk, Paul Michael walked directly in front of me so I didn’t have to deal with people slipping through me. It was the kind of considerate thing that only he would ever think of doing for someone. I reached out, putting my hand on his shoulder as he led me off the boardwalk and out onto Hancock Street, leaving the carnival music behind us. The soft worn cotton of his T-shirt made me smile.
“Hey Sadie, don’t get your hopes up with Greg. Really think about whether staying because of him will be worth it. You probably wouldn’t want to stay if I’m the only person you can talk to. It’s been a whole year – that bond that you had with Greg when you were alive, it might be gone now.” He shuffled along the sandy sidewalk, looking at his feet.
“If I can make contact with you, I can make contact with Greg. I won’t be hanging out with you all the time. I can stay for him.” Sheepishly I added, “I love him.” I imagined us laying side by side on a beach blanket like we used to do before, lazily telling each other stories about our day. At least now he wouldn’t be able to tease me about being sunburnt.
“Sadie, what are you going to do when he gets married?” Paul Michael’s words interrupted my happy thoughts.
“He won’t. If I’m there, it will be like it was before.”
“You’re right, I’m certain a long-term relationship with a ghost won’t do anything to disturb his sanity.”
“Stop making this sound so messed up.” Had I been audible to the rest of the world, my voice would have echoed down the street, bouncing off the shore houses until people looked out their windows.
But thick silence followed and I wanted to be sucked up into the blackness of the night.
“I don’t want you to make the wrong choice.” Paul Michael cleared his throat. “Eternity is a long time – I don’t want you to spend it in the wrong place.” He waited. I refused to say a word. “If you can make it through a visit with Laura, I won’t make another argument against you staying,” Paul Michael told me finally.
“Fine.”
“Okay.”
We walked the rest of the way to Greg’s house in silence.
The best part about the Jersey shore is that more than half the people in Jersey – a rough estimation – have a shore house, which means that your school friends end up only a couple blocks over from you in the summer. But more importantly, it gives your summer romances a chance to continue when you get back to school. And that’s what Greg and I did three years ago – well, four, now I guess. What started as a couple late nights on the boardwalk going into our sophomore year of high school, lasted through senior prom and graduation.
It could have lasted forever if I hadn’t gone to the boardwalk on my last night.
Greg’s house was too tropical for the shore. The siding was a bright Turks and Caicos turquoise, with the scalloped shutters of a doll house. It stood starkly out of place with the reserved houses, but felt more welcoming than the rest. Paul Michael stood on the sea-glass mosaic stepping stones leading up to Greg’s house, with a look of concentration on his face.
“What are you doing?”
“Shhh,” Paul Michael hissed. I continued to stare at him until he cracked one eyelid in my direction. “I’m using the law of attraction. By putting out energy, I can get Greg to come outside.”
“You’re kidding me.”
The front door opened.
“Paul Michael?” Greg asked. His voice made my chest tighten, and I let out an audible gasp, much to the amusement of my brother. “What are you doing here?”
After a year in the afterlife, seeing Greg was like coming home. I was filled with relief at the sight of his curly hair, unruly as always, sticking up from all angles. The instinct to smooth it down was itching inside me. For a fleeting second, I felt alive again. Until, of course, I remembered that Greg couldn’t see me.
“It’s good to see you Greg,” Paul Michael said. He had been close with Greg before I died; I liked to imagine Paul Michael looked at Greg like the younger brother he never had. I didn’t know how much they had seen each other after I left. “There’s someone who wants to talk to you.”
I had told Greg about Paul Michael’s abilities; they were stories told as jokes as I tried to make sense of my brother’s oddness. Greg had laughed with me, so I wasn’t surprised when his response was a monosyllabic sound of confusion.
Paul Michael wasn’t surprised by his doubt either. He explained to Greg so clearly how he could see me and talk to me, that I knew he had rehearsed this speech beforehand. A thought fluttered through my head as I watched my boyfriend and my brother interact.
Paul Michael knew that I would come back.
Finally, Paul Michael got Greg to play along. Greg told him that he would love to hear whatever I had to say.
Greg observed my brother with those long-lashed brown eyes I could have spent the rest of my life looking at. Watching his eyes closely now, a jolt of panic rushed through me. I would never have the satisfaction of him looking back at me.
“Well, what do you want me to say to him?” Paul Michael asked me.
As I stared at Greg, I knew that if I opened my mouth to speak, it would come as a blubbery garble of words. Instead, I walked silently to Greg to rest my head on his chest.
I passed right through him.
A shrill shriek pierced my ears and it took me a moment to realize that the sound was coming out of my own mouth. Even then I didn’t stop. I screamed until my throat was raw and it felt like my soul was disintegrating from the inside out. I hoped it was.
“Well, what does she want to say?” Greg asked. He spoke over my scream. He couldn’t hear me. He couldn’t feel me. I had thought I could come back to him, to stay with him, be his shadow. But he didn’t even know I was here. I wasn’t real to him.
“She’s…at a loss for words right now,” Paul Michael said. He watched me closely, looking at me instead of Greg. I fell silent, listening to Paul Michael speak. “She’s really overwhelmed by seeing you again. It’s very different from what she was expecting.”
“Yeah, this wasn’t how I was expecting my night to go either,” Greg said with a nervous laugh. His laugh was so familiar that I wanted to wrap myself in it to see if it would take me back to a time when I could been seen and heard and felt.
Now, I was nothing. I was a figment of my brother’s imagination for all Greg knew.
I wanted to shout, “I’m here. I’m right here!” but I knew that when he didn’t hear me, I would start to cry.
Instead, I stiffened my shoulders. I stood in the exact same spot as Greg in my attempt to make contact with him. I briefly wondered how this looked to Paul Michael as I occupied the same space as Greg. Even with Greg all around me, I couldn’t feel him and he made no signs that he could feel me. The boy I had loved so desperately when I was alive couldn’t reach me once I was dead. I did not exist.
“Tell him that when I told him I hoped I went before him, this wasn’t what I meant.” For the first time in my afterlife, I felt truly numb.
Paul Michael told Greg, and he laughed again for a moment. His laugh broke into a cry. He buried his face in his hands.
“Tell her that I gave her a corsage for her funeral – her favorite,” he said. I whispered the name along with him. “Blue orchids.” He had gotten me the same ones for prom. I had told him once that I loved blue orchids because with light blue in the center and dark purple on the outer petals, I thought the flowers looked like hyperspace. He got them for me for every dance after that, whether I was wearing a blue dress or not.
“Tell him that he was the last person I thought of before I died,” I said. He wasn’t. But it seemed like what he needed to hear.
The night I died, my sister was the only person on my mind. In fact, I concentrated on her so entirely that I had imagined I saw her looking up at me as I was pulled into the sky, before I was enveloped in the whiteness of the afterlife.
Paul Michael relayed the message and Greg took a long, rattling breath.
“I’ve missed you. You were…you were…” His voice broke, the way it only does when using past tense for a loved one.
“You are…you are…” I whispered back to the hollow boy.
If I still had a heart, it would have been racing. I wondered if I would dissolve right here, fade back into the white world. Disappointment would be the cause of my second death. I waited, and listened to the sound of Greg crying around me. The spirits didn’t seem ready to take me yet.
“Paul Michael, I can’t do this,” I whispered finally. “Please, I need to get out of here. Can we go home?”
“Greg, Sadie is having a pretty tough time…” Paul Michael began. Greg didn’t seem to hear.
“Sadie, I love you,” Greg said.
“I love you!” I shouted back, as though it would make him hear. Paul Michael repeated the words and Greg nodded sadly. I stared at the asphalt under my feet.
“Thank you for letting us stop by, Greg,” Paul Michael said. I walked towards him without turning to look back at Greg.
“Can’t you stay for a little longer?” Greg asked. “Does she have to go right now?” His voice was manic. He couldn’t see me. He couldn’t hear me. He had no way of knowing I was there without my brother telling him so. But he wanted me to stay.
Paul Michael looked down at me. I shook my head.
“I’m sorry. She’s being called back to the spirit world,” Paul Michael lied.
I hadn’t known he was capable of lying.
As Paul Michael and I walked away, I heard Greg’s rough tenor singing Springsteen’s “Sandy.” Greg had always said that Sandy and Sadie were close enough for the song to be about me. As he sang to the stars, I hummed along, hoping that some notes would make their way back to him.
“Please don’t say I told you so,” I whispered to Paul Michael as Greg’s voice grew quiet behind us.
“I won’t,” he said. And he didn’t say anything else the rest of the way home.
Above me, I thought I could see the flames around Cygnus as the broken airplane constellation fell from the heavens in a crash landing.
I tried to calm my clenching stomach as we approached our house, right down the street from the American Legion. Something about having the American Legion so close had convinced my father that this was the iconic, classic, all-American part of Seaside unlike the trash The Jersey Shore had turned our boardwalk into. He did his best to be patriotic – the only decorations on the front of our slate gray house were two large American flags. They were posted proudly on either side of the tall front deck with blinding white pine railings that had yet to be turned gray from the salt air.
While Paul Michael fiddled with his keys, I drifted right in.
The scent of Lemon Pledge and salt air mingled in my dead nose to create a smell only found in this house. My mother, also known as dirt’s arch nemesis, was known for scrubbing the house top to bottom after every trip to the beach, trying to vanquish every last speck of sand that found its way into her home. I almost considered taking off my flip-flops before going further into our house. When I remembered that I was dead, I found some twisted delight in walking through the house with shoes on. The afterlife makes you appreciate the little things.
I tried not to look at the living room, afraid I would see too many pictures of myself or worse – none at all. Instead, I bee-lined for the stairs and sprinted up them as fast as my legs could carry me, again too anxious to look at the row of pictures hanging there. I noticed a light from under the door of the room I used to share with my sister. My upper lip began to sweat. After all that had happened, I wasn’t ready to face her yet. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be ready.
“Would seeing Mom and Dad first be easier?” Paul Michael asked behind me.
“I don’t know if I want to see anyone right now.” I pictured Greg, always looking at my brother and never at me. I couldn’t go through that once more tonight.
“Does that mean you’ve decided to go back?”
An eternity of numbness or an eternity of disappointment. The white world was sounding pretty promising for once. But the thought of making a decision so permanent made me ill – if ghosts could be ill.
“Let me see Mom and Dad first.”
Paul Michael checked his watch. “It’s after one so they’re definitely asleep. Want me to wake them up for you?”
I shook my head. “This is easier.” I walked down the hall and through their bedroom door. Paul Michael waited respectfully outside.
My parents hadn’t been in the best place when I left. They were starting to notice the severe differences in personality that only come out after twenty-three years of marriage. There was no romance left; any comradery they shared was in the joint-task of getting Laura to go to bed. They weren’t at the point of sleeping in separate rooms, but they were about as far away from each other in bed as possible.
I climbed in at the foot of the bed the way I did through my brief stint as an insomniac in high school. I was able to lie flat on my back without bumping either one of them. Too much space between them.
I longed to feel the sheets beneath me, extra soft because Mom used two capfuls of fabric softener instead of one. Unable to feel, I stared at the circling of the ceiling fan and listened to their breath. My mom’s slight nose whistle. My dad’s occasional jolting snore.
“Keep hanging in there guys.” My voice caught in my throat, as the emptiness between them hollowed out a pit in my stomach. “Keep hanging in there.” I should have had something better to say after more than a year in the afterlife. But there weren’t words for it.
I took a few minutes to lay there and attempt to give off some kind of spiritual presence, unable to summon the courage to reach out and touch them. Mom whistled. Dad snored.
“Well,” I sighed, “I guess that’s all. It was nice seeing you guys.” I got up quickly, trying to get out of there before I had the chance to get too emotional. There was a slight rustling behind me.
When I turned to look back at them from the doorway, they both had rolled on their side to face each other and their fingertips were touching over the place I had just been.
It was enough for now.
“Feeling better?” Paul Michael asked when I joined him outside. The taste in my mouth had turned sickly sweet.
“No, actually, I feel like hell.” My eyes were watery, my face was splotchy, and the worst part was that Paul Michael could see it all. He knew better than to try and comfort me. The track record had shown him that it only made me angrier.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to wake them up so you can talk to them?” His constant desire to help people always amazed me; even when insulted, he still wanted what was best for me. I shook my head quickly, whipping the tears from my eyes as I did so. Paul Michael puffed out his lips the way he always did when he was right. “So you want to stay here for eternity, but you don’t want to talk to our parents?”
“And what if they can’t feel me, like Greg didn’t? Why would I want to talk to them only to learn that I wasn’t connected to them at all? That in the grand scheme of things all of my relationships were worthless?” I shouted. I didn’t give a damn about yelling this late at night – Paul Michael was the only one who could hear me anyway.
“I can feel you.” He reached out; his hand weighed heavily on my shoulder. I pulled away.
“Well, you’re the only one.”
“Because you won’t see if there’s anyone else.”
I turned and stomped down the stairs, making as much noise as I could to annoy Paul Michael. “I’m done. I’m going back to the white world. Let the spirits take me.”
I spread my arms wide in our living room, waiting for white fog to creep through the windows and consume me.
Nothing happened.
Paul Michael leaned against the wall of the stairwell. “Is the temper tantrum over?”
I let obscenities fly at him.
“The spirits won’t let you back in if you’re this angry. You’ll be stuck here if you can’t calm down. They sent you here to find peace, remember?”
All of my energy drained out of me. I would be stuck here forever. I slumped down to the floor.
I heard Paul Michael’s sweaty feet come towards me as they peeled themselves off the hard wood floor of the living room with each sticky step. Two arms slipped underneath mine. I was dragged back up to my feet. He gripped me by the shoulders. My head hung low, looking at the ground between us. He refused to let me go until I looked up. When I met his gaze, his eyes crinkled in the corners. “Talking to Laura will help.”
The mention of Laura’s name should have terrified me. It should have filled me with such panic and dread that I became paralyzed. But I was so numb now that I nodded limply, my head falling back down to my chest. Paul Michael took my hand and led me upstairs to have the conversation that had occupied my thoughts for the entirety of my afterlife.
Laura wasn’t in our room, much to my relief. Her window was open, a sign that she was on the roof. I took a moment to wander around, ignoring the mess she had made since I left. If I hadn’t been a ghost I would have feared for the safety of my feet with Laura’s shell and rock collection strewn across the floor. While Paul Michael waited by the open window, I climbed up to my top bunk to see if that everything was in its proper place: it wasn’t. Laura had completely taken over my bunk, with books and movie cases strewn across my PB Teen Surfer Girl quilt. She had erased all traces of me from the room besides the glow-in-the dark stars on the ceiling. They gave me no comfort now.
Paul Michael nodded toward the window. It was time to face Laura.
I climbed down from the top bunk as slowly as my arms would allow. My hands shook so badly that I could barely hold onto the rungs of the ladder. He climbed out on the roof first and slid over to the right. I climbed out after him and swallowed hard as I saw my little sister sitting to the left.
It was the first time I had seen her since the night I died, when I rode in front of her to push her out of the way.
I watched Laura carefully as I sat next to her, searching her for any signs of lasting damage from the night on the boardwalk. Besides the purple crescents under her eyes, there were none. Laura looked like me, long brown hair and abnormally small facial features, but with Paul Michael’s dark eyes.
“What are you staring at?” She looked directly at me as she spoke.
“You can see me?” I asked, jerking back.
“No shit I can see you.”
“Laura, you’re thirteen,” I reprimanded. Out of the corner of my eye, Paul Michael shook his head. “Fourteen?” I asked. He nodded. I continued. “Why do you think you can start swearing?”
“Because I watched you die.” She ground her teeth as she spoke, revealing two rows of new braces. “I’m not some innocent, helpless child.”
Solely to prove her point, she swore like me: a whole string of beautifully chosen four letter words, listed in ascending order from least to most offensive. I was so shocked by being yelled at by her that I had to contain laughter. Paul Michael stared in awe and horror as though he would have to go repent for merely hearing those words. For the oldest child, he was also the most innocent.
“Listen, kid,” I began but she interrupted.
“No, you listen. What gives you the right to think you can come back here after all this time and make me face you again?”
“You don’t want to see me?” My stomach plummeted down through my body, through the roof, through the house below us, until it buried itself in the earth.
She ignored my question. “Why a whole year Sadie? You die and don’t come back for more than a year.”
“They didn’t let me out until now,” I whispered. Laura’s bitterness made my ears ring. I looked at Paul Michael for help, but he only looked at me with calm eyes and his mouth in a thin line. He had a plan that he wanted seen through until the end.
“You cannot imagine what it was like to watch that accident,” Laura said. Her glare stabbed me. “Do you know what it was like to hear it? It was like the whole world was screaming. I still hear it.”
Laura raked her fingers through her hair. “And then, to watch you rise above it all – all the glass, all the blood – and just disappear.”
“You did see me.” I hadn’t imagined it, then, Laura looking up at me with wide eyes.
“And you saw me,” Laura repeated back at me. “You saw me and you still left. You just vanished. And every day I have to live, knowing that I should be dead. I should be the ghost here, not you. You just had to ride ahead and be the hero and –”
I threw my arms around her and pulled her against my chest. I was not surprised to feel the impact of her body against mine.
I rested my chin on the top of her head as she shouted into my skin: “I killed you! You let me kill you! I hate you, you bitch. You left me alone with all the goddamn guilt.” She pounded one hand against my chest as though she was trying to restart my long dead heart.
Stroking her hair I whispered, “I don’t want you to feel guilty. I want you to be happy. I want you to have a long happy life. It’s not your fault, Laura. It’s not your fault.”
“I don’t believe you! Liar! You fucking liar! You – you – you,” Sadie’s voice broke in a sob. Her body went limp in my arms as she wailed. I felt her chest expand with every shaky breath she took. I felt her heart pounding against me. She was so alive.
My shirt was damp as she cried. She gripped my soaked shirt in her fists. “I’m here now. I’m here. Don’t worry,” I told her.
She started hiccupping in an attempt to catch her breath. Each hiccup sent her body into spasms against mine.
My eyes watered as she tried to regain control. I held her closer and rubbed her back.
“Hey, you can see ghosts now. That’s pretty cool right. How did that happen?” I fought to keep the stickiness of tears out of my voice.
She took a deep, wheezing breath. “Paul Michael thinks it runs in the family. He thinks dramatic events can trigger it.” She untangled herself from me and dried her eyes.
I looked at my brother who had a small, smug smile on his face. Both angry sisters were neutralized at once. Of course that was his plan.
“Am I a medium too?” I asked her. I nudged her with my elbow. The corner of her mouth turned up in a half smile.
“Probably, but you’re already dead so it doesn’t count, because you can see ghosts anyway.” Laura’s laugh was soft and uncertain as she wiped her nose on the back of her hand. She pulled her legs in and wrapped her arms around them. I did the same. Paul Michael mirrored us.
We were silent for a moment, the three of us sitting in age order out on the roof, with our heads tilted toward the stars.
I felt one hand on my back, wide and tough, and another, small with skinny fingers.
I felt real. I mattered to Paul Michael and Laura. They would remember me.
I leaned my head against Laura’s shoulder. A thought floated into my head, something so obvious I wondered why I hadn’t realized it sooner. Maybe, I wasn’t sent back because of that chip on my shoulder. Maybe, it was to make sure Laura was alright. To help her move on. To make sure I didn’t save her life in vain.
I smiled at my sister. And she smiled back, braces and all. Laura was so young. She had her entire future in front of her. Her life was worth it.
Relief washed over my body, and my soul felt still. I had done what I needed to do: saved her once when I was alive and once when I was dead.
“I would do it again.” The world around me grew fuzzy as I said it, as though I were on the brink of sleep. “Given the choice, I would always do it again.”
And I began to float.
Up, out of the arms of my siblings, over the roofs. They waved.
I could feel myself starting to fade. I flew past the street lamps. Drifting through them, I shorted them out with brief explosions of electricity before the street settled into blackness. In the aching darkness, the sky was full of pinholes of light.
I floated on my back and look up at the stars before I left. There had been billions of stars that I had never seen with those streetlights on.
I relished in them.
I was an insignificant, deceased piece of the universe. But I had people who loved me. That was enough.
I traced the outline of Cygnus with my vanishing finger. Tonight I understood: it was not the constellation of failed flight. I spread my arms wide like Cygnus’s wings, and drifted on my back like the sky swan as the white began to surround me. In the last few seconds, it felt like I was soaring.
I hadn’t expected to walk the boardwalk again after I died, not that I knew what to expect any way. But the pleasant warmth of the white light had become boring. Apparently I was too bitter and cynical. Spirits are unnecessarily tranquil.
They sent me back to the place I was killed to try to find my inner peace. If not, they’d let me stay forever among salt water taffy and the tanning-oil-greased bodies of the Guidos who slipped right through me on the Seaside Boardwalk. Seaside always had a carnival air to it: the lights of the games and music of the rides. After dark, it seemed to turn into a freak show full of drunken college kids reveling in their summer.
It must have been summer. I had no sense of time passing in the white world, the place after death. It wasn’t heaven or hell as I had been taught about them – no fluffy clouds and choirs of angels, no fire and brimstone. Everything was just white – a lack of color and existence. But the crowded boardwalk told me that here it was still summer. It had been summer when I died, riding home from this boardwalk. Someone ran me down and I became mangled with my bike. That was the last thing I remembered. Being punctured like a balloon. Then white.
As I drifted down the boardwalk, a couple in tears ploughed through me. Their arms were wrapped around each other so they formed an amorphous, snotty blob. Turning around to see what could have possibly caused such a disgusting display of public emotion, a storefront stood out to me. Above it was a sign, swinging in the sea breeze that read “P.M. Psychics”.
I backtracked, and stood in front of the stall. The entrance was covered with black curtains, embroidered with silver stars. It couldn’t be him, could it? I shrugged, shaking my head at myself before stepping inside.
The room behind the curtain made me claustrophobic. The walls were draped in the same black starry fabric as the door. A small, solitary chandelier with one light bulb missing cast a dim glow around the room and made the metallic thread in the curtains glitter. The twenty-one-year-old mystic man sat on the far side of a table. His dark hair had a cowlick in front, the bane of my mother’s existence on school picture day. Even though his face was down, shadowed in the poor light, I knew that when he looked up I would see the scar under his right eyebrow where I had hit him in the face with a baseball when we were little.
I sat down in the folding chair across the table from him, pleasantly surprised to find that I didn’t fall through to the floor. Only once I was seated did he look up. My brother jerked back in surprise so quickly, I thought he was going to fall out of his chair.
“I’d like a reading, please.” I placed my elbows on the table and grinned. My brother continued to stare at me. “Paul Michael, when did you start this little business?”
He was silent. His dark eyes searched my blue ones. Two bushy eyebrows scrunched together as he studied me. His nose wrinkled, the tell-tale sign he was confused.
“You always said you didn’t believe me,” he said.
“I said I hoped you didn’t see ghosts because I was afraid they’d tell you to kill your family. But I never said I didn’t believe you.” I had him stumped. So I grinned again.
“So what are you doing back here, Sadie? They kick you out of heaven?”
“Sort of. Apparently, I’ve got a chip on my shoulder.”
“Nah. It’s probably because you’ve sinned.” He always took his namesakes – an apostle and an archangel – very seriously.
“Paul Michael, you are the most uptight spiritualist I know.”
“I’m the only spiritualist you know.” Paul Michael looked down at me with his scarred eyebrow raised and I could see his smirk in the dim light of the chandelier. Not having a witty retort, I settled for a scathing glare. I stuck out my hand.
“My reading, please.”
My brother cupped my palm in his calloused hands. I pulled back.
“How can you do that?” I asked.
“When two souls have a particularly strong bond, they can make physical contact across the spiritual realm.” He took my hand back in his.
The warmth of his fingers on my hand was more unsettling than people walking through me. He didn’t look up at me, just studied my palm with his forehead furrowed in concentration.
“It’s been over a year since you passed.” He hadn’t needed my palm to tell me that. “You left great suffering behind you, but the people you care about are starting to heal.”
I clenched my hand closed. He stared at the fist in his hands.
“It’s almost eleven. I’m about to close up.” He stood, his body stretching out from his chair and towering over me with the long, lean build of a runner. “Let’s talk outside.”
Without waiting for my answer, he ushered me out, pulled the grate down in front of the curtains, and locked up. Sighing, he tossed his keys in the air twice before sticking them in his pocket. The light above his stall flickered over us.
“Sadie, could you float up there and turn that thing off for me?”
“I don’t know how to float.”
“Jeez, you’re a pathetic excuse for a ghost. Can you shorten out lights or have you not done that yet either?”
I blinked at him.
Paul Michael pulled his keys back out of his pocket, turning on the mini flashlight on the key ring. He tossed them to me. The keys and flashlight fell through my hands, and the flashlight turned off as it passed through my outstretched palm. I gaped as it lay on the ground.
“You are the most oblivious spirit I have ever met.” Paul Michael grinned as he picked up his keys from the boardwalk.
“I’m a horrible ghost. That’s why they sent me back. They even told me that they would let me stay here if I really wanted. They’re giving me tonight to decide.”
“Wow, you must really suck. I’ve never heard of the spirits offering anyone that before.”
“Yup, an eternity in the spirit world with them or an eternity out here with people. I think the choice is pretty obvious.”
“That’s because you haven’t thought it through,” he said. “It’s going to be strange for you to be back. You’re going to feel like you’re alive. You can taste, you can cry, you can sweat. It will seem just like before. Everything will feel the same except your heart won’t be beating and your lungs won’t be breathing. You have to remember that you are dead, Sadie. Only a medium can hear you, and it will be like that even if you decide to stay.”
We were silent for a moment as I tried to hold back saying something particularly biting to my brother. I looked up, beyond the boardwalk lights. In the countless stars above my head, I was able to pick out Cygnus, the swan constellation. When I was little, my dad had used the massive telescope on the back deck to point it out to me.
I always thought Cygnus looked more like a plane crash than a swan: nose pointed downward with two crooked wings. But tonight I didn’t mind. There are no stars in the afterlife.
“How can I help you?” Paul Michael asked. I jolted out of my thoughts, startled by his soft voice.
“I don’t need help, Paul Michael. I have my mind made up.” Just because he was the oldest and had special gifts he always thought that the world needed him. Well, sometimes he needed a reminder that he was as insignificant as the rest of us.
“Really? You’ve decided that you want to hang out with me for the rest of my life since I’m the only one who can see you?”
“Well, you don’t have to say it like that.” I crossed my arms against my chest. Farther down the boardwalk someone shouted about cotton candy and popcorn. I could smell the butter and salt but for once there wasn’t the pang of hunger that came with it. “How are Mom and Dad?”
“They’re okay. Hanging in there. It’s been a long year.”
“Do you think it would help them if I talked through you, I guess?”
“I don’t know,” Paul Michael shrugged. “They’ll ask me if I’ve seen you sometimes. Dad jokes about whether you know winning lottery numbers. Mom asks whether you ask about her. They would sense you if you tried to talk to them. I don’t think they’d see you, but they could probably feel you. They really want to, anyway.”
“And Laura?”
“Laura’s angry.”
I was too afraid to ask Paul Michael any more about my sister. Instead, I asked about a few friends from high school who I wanted to visit, but Paul Michael told me they were all back at school.
“And Greg?” I asked, after a moment of quiet between us.
“He’s still single.”
I nodded to myself, unsure of the socially acceptable way to react. Should I want him to move on, or mourn me for the rest of his life? I mean, I knew what I wanted but it wasn’t exactly fair or reasonable.
“We can go see him if you want, if you think it would help you make up your mind.” His voice was sincere.
I tried not to agree too quickly.
As we turned north on the boardwalk, Paul Michael walked directly in front of me so I didn’t have to deal with people slipping through me. It was the kind of considerate thing that only he would ever think of doing for someone. I reached out, putting my hand on his shoulder as he led me off the boardwalk and out onto Hancock Street, leaving the carnival music behind us. The soft worn cotton of his T-shirt made me smile.
“Hey Sadie, don’t get your hopes up with Greg. Really think about whether staying because of him will be worth it. You probably wouldn’t want to stay if I’m the only person you can talk to. It’s been a whole year – that bond that you had with Greg when you were alive, it might be gone now.” He shuffled along the sandy sidewalk, looking at his feet.
“If I can make contact with you, I can make contact with Greg. I won’t be hanging out with you all the time. I can stay for him.” Sheepishly I added, “I love him.” I imagined us laying side by side on a beach blanket like we used to do before, lazily telling each other stories about our day. At least now he wouldn’t be able to tease me about being sunburnt.
“Sadie, what are you going to do when he gets married?” Paul Michael’s words interrupted my happy thoughts.
“He won’t. If I’m there, it will be like it was before.”
“You’re right, I’m certain a long-term relationship with a ghost won’t do anything to disturb his sanity.”
“Stop making this sound so messed up.” Had I been audible to the rest of the world, my voice would have echoed down the street, bouncing off the shore houses until people looked out their windows.
But thick silence followed and I wanted to be sucked up into the blackness of the night.
“I don’t want you to make the wrong choice.” Paul Michael cleared his throat. “Eternity is a long time – I don’t want you to spend it in the wrong place.” He waited. I refused to say a word. “If you can make it through a visit with Laura, I won’t make another argument against you staying,” Paul Michael told me finally.
“Fine.”
“Okay.”
We walked the rest of the way to Greg’s house in silence.
The best part about the Jersey shore is that more than half the people in Jersey – a rough estimation – have a shore house, which means that your school friends end up only a couple blocks over from you in the summer. But more importantly, it gives your summer romances a chance to continue when you get back to school. And that’s what Greg and I did three years ago – well, four, now I guess. What started as a couple late nights on the boardwalk going into our sophomore year of high school, lasted through senior prom and graduation.
It could have lasted forever if I hadn’t gone to the boardwalk on my last night.
Greg’s house was too tropical for the shore. The siding was a bright Turks and Caicos turquoise, with the scalloped shutters of a doll house. It stood starkly out of place with the reserved houses, but felt more welcoming than the rest. Paul Michael stood on the sea-glass mosaic stepping stones leading up to Greg’s house, with a look of concentration on his face.
“What are you doing?”
“Shhh,” Paul Michael hissed. I continued to stare at him until he cracked one eyelid in my direction. “I’m using the law of attraction. By putting out energy, I can get Greg to come outside.”
“You’re kidding me.”
The front door opened.
“Paul Michael?” Greg asked. His voice made my chest tighten, and I let out an audible gasp, much to the amusement of my brother. “What are you doing here?”
After a year in the afterlife, seeing Greg was like coming home. I was filled with relief at the sight of his curly hair, unruly as always, sticking up from all angles. The instinct to smooth it down was itching inside me. For a fleeting second, I felt alive again. Until, of course, I remembered that Greg couldn’t see me.
“It’s good to see you Greg,” Paul Michael said. He had been close with Greg before I died; I liked to imagine Paul Michael looked at Greg like the younger brother he never had. I didn’t know how much they had seen each other after I left. “There’s someone who wants to talk to you.”
I had told Greg about Paul Michael’s abilities; they were stories told as jokes as I tried to make sense of my brother’s oddness. Greg had laughed with me, so I wasn’t surprised when his response was a monosyllabic sound of confusion.
Paul Michael wasn’t surprised by his doubt either. He explained to Greg so clearly how he could see me and talk to me, that I knew he had rehearsed this speech beforehand. A thought fluttered through my head as I watched my boyfriend and my brother interact.
Paul Michael knew that I would come back.
Finally, Paul Michael got Greg to play along. Greg told him that he would love to hear whatever I had to say.
Greg observed my brother with those long-lashed brown eyes I could have spent the rest of my life looking at. Watching his eyes closely now, a jolt of panic rushed through me. I would never have the satisfaction of him looking back at me.
“Well, what do you want me to say to him?” Paul Michael asked me.
As I stared at Greg, I knew that if I opened my mouth to speak, it would come as a blubbery garble of words. Instead, I walked silently to Greg to rest my head on his chest.
I passed right through him.
A shrill shriek pierced my ears and it took me a moment to realize that the sound was coming out of my own mouth. Even then I didn’t stop. I screamed until my throat was raw and it felt like my soul was disintegrating from the inside out. I hoped it was.
“Well, what does she want to say?” Greg asked. He spoke over my scream. He couldn’t hear me. He couldn’t feel me. I had thought I could come back to him, to stay with him, be his shadow. But he didn’t even know I was here. I wasn’t real to him.
“She’s…at a loss for words right now,” Paul Michael said. He watched me closely, looking at me instead of Greg. I fell silent, listening to Paul Michael speak. “She’s really overwhelmed by seeing you again. It’s very different from what she was expecting.”
“Yeah, this wasn’t how I was expecting my night to go either,” Greg said with a nervous laugh. His laugh was so familiar that I wanted to wrap myself in it to see if it would take me back to a time when I could been seen and heard and felt.
Now, I was nothing. I was a figment of my brother’s imagination for all Greg knew.
I wanted to shout, “I’m here. I’m right here!” but I knew that when he didn’t hear me, I would start to cry.
Instead, I stiffened my shoulders. I stood in the exact same spot as Greg in my attempt to make contact with him. I briefly wondered how this looked to Paul Michael as I occupied the same space as Greg. Even with Greg all around me, I couldn’t feel him and he made no signs that he could feel me. The boy I had loved so desperately when I was alive couldn’t reach me once I was dead. I did not exist.
“Tell him that when I told him I hoped I went before him, this wasn’t what I meant.” For the first time in my afterlife, I felt truly numb.
Paul Michael told Greg, and he laughed again for a moment. His laugh broke into a cry. He buried his face in his hands.
“Tell her that I gave her a corsage for her funeral – her favorite,” he said. I whispered the name along with him. “Blue orchids.” He had gotten me the same ones for prom. I had told him once that I loved blue orchids because with light blue in the center and dark purple on the outer petals, I thought the flowers looked like hyperspace. He got them for me for every dance after that, whether I was wearing a blue dress or not.
“Tell him that he was the last person I thought of before I died,” I said. He wasn’t. But it seemed like what he needed to hear.
The night I died, my sister was the only person on my mind. In fact, I concentrated on her so entirely that I had imagined I saw her looking up at me as I was pulled into the sky, before I was enveloped in the whiteness of the afterlife.
Paul Michael relayed the message and Greg took a long, rattling breath.
“I’ve missed you. You were…you were…” His voice broke, the way it only does when using past tense for a loved one.
“You are…you are…” I whispered back to the hollow boy.
If I still had a heart, it would have been racing. I wondered if I would dissolve right here, fade back into the white world. Disappointment would be the cause of my second death. I waited, and listened to the sound of Greg crying around me. The spirits didn’t seem ready to take me yet.
“Paul Michael, I can’t do this,” I whispered finally. “Please, I need to get out of here. Can we go home?”
“Greg, Sadie is having a pretty tough time…” Paul Michael began. Greg didn’t seem to hear.
“Sadie, I love you,” Greg said.
“I love you!” I shouted back, as though it would make him hear. Paul Michael repeated the words and Greg nodded sadly. I stared at the asphalt under my feet.
“Thank you for letting us stop by, Greg,” Paul Michael said. I walked towards him without turning to look back at Greg.
“Can’t you stay for a little longer?” Greg asked. “Does she have to go right now?” His voice was manic. He couldn’t see me. He couldn’t hear me. He had no way of knowing I was there without my brother telling him so. But he wanted me to stay.
Paul Michael looked down at me. I shook my head.
“I’m sorry. She’s being called back to the spirit world,” Paul Michael lied.
I hadn’t known he was capable of lying.
As Paul Michael and I walked away, I heard Greg’s rough tenor singing Springsteen’s “Sandy.” Greg had always said that Sandy and Sadie were close enough for the song to be about me. As he sang to the stars, I hummed along, hoping that some notes would make their way back to him.
“Please don’t say I told you so,” I whispered to Paul Michael as Greg’s voice grew quiet behind us.
“I won’t,” he said. And he didn’t say anything else the rest of the way home.
Above me, I thought I could see the flames around Cygnus as the broken airplane constellation fell from the heavens in a crash landing.
I tried to calm my clenching stomach as we approached our house, right down the street from the American Legion. Something about having the American Legion so close had convinced my father that this was the iconic, classic, all-American part of Seaside unlike the trash The Jersey Shore had turned our boardwalk into. He did his best to be patriotic – the only decorations on the front of our slate gray house were two large American flags. They were posted proudly on either side of the tall front deck with blinding white pine railings that had yet to be turned gray from the salt air.
While Paul Michael fiddled with his keys, I drifted right in.
The scent of Lemon Pledge and salt air mingled in my dead nose to create a smell only found in this house. My mother, also known as dirt’s arch nemesis, was known for scrubbing the house top to bottom after every trip to the beach, trying to vanquish every last speck of sand that found its way into her home. I almost considered taking off my flip-flops before going further into our house. When I remembered that I was dead, I found some twisted delight in walking through the house with shoes on. The afterlife makes you appreciate the little things.
I tried not to look at the living room, afraid I would see too many pictures of myself or worse – none at all. Instead, I bee-lined for the stairs and sprinted up them as fast as my legs could carry me, again too anxious to look at the row of pictures hanging there. I noticed a light from under the door of the room I used to share with my sister. My upper lip began to sweat. After all that had happened, I wasn’t ready to face her yet. I wasn’t sure that I would ever be ready.
“Would seeing Mom and Dad first be easier?” Paul Michael asked behind me.
“I don’t know if I want to see anyone right now.” I pictured Greg, always looking at my brother and never at me. I couldn’t go through that once more tonight.
“Does that mean you’ve decided to go back?”
An eternity of numbness or an eternity of disappointment. The white world was sounding pretty promising for once. But the thought of making a decision so permanent made me ill – if ghosts could be ill.
“Let me see Mom and Dad first.”
Paul Michael checked his watch. “It’s after one so they’re definitely asleep. Want me to wake them up for you?”
I shook my head. “This is easier.” I walked down the hall and through their bedroom door. Paul Michael waited respectfully outside.
My parents hadn’t been in the best place when I left. They were starting to notice the severe differences in personality that only come out after twenty-three years of marriage. There was no romance left; any comradery they shared was in the joint-task of getting Laura to go to bed. They weren’t at the point of sleeping in separate rooms, but they were about as far away from each other in bed as possible.
I climbed in at the foot of the bed the way I did through my brief stint as an insomniac in high school. I was able to lie flat on my back without bumping either one of them. Too much space between them.
I longed to feel the sheets beneath me, extra soft because Mom used two capfuls of fabric softener instead of one. Unable to feel, I stared at the circling of the ceiling fan and listened to their breath. My mom’s slight nose whistle. My dad’s occasional jolting snore.
“Keep hanging in there guys.” My voice caught in my throat, as the emptiness between them hollowed out a pit in my stomach. “Keep hanging in there.” I should have had something better to say after more than a year in the afterlife. But there weren’t words for it.
I took a few minutes to lay there and attempt to give off some kind of spiritual presence, unable to summon the courage to reach out and touch them. Mom whistled. Dad snored.
“Well,” I sighed, “I guess that’s all. It was nice seeing you guys.” I got up quickly, trying to get out of there before I had the chance to get too emotional. There was a slight rustling behind me.
When I turned to look back at them from the doorway, they both had rolled on their side to face each other and their fingertips were touching over the place I had just been.
It was enough for now.
“Feeling better?” Paul Michael asked when I joined him outside. The taste in my mouth had turned sickly sweet.
“No, actually, I feel like hell.” My eyes were watery, my face was splotchy, and the worst part was that Paul Michael could see it all. He knew better than to try and comfort me. The track record had shown him that it only made me angrier.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to wake them up so you can talk to them?” His constant desire to help people always amazed me; even when insulted, he still wanted what was best for me. I shook my head quickly, whipping the tears from my eyes as I did so. Paul Michael puffed out his lips the way he always did when he was right. “So you want to stay here for eternity, but you don’t want to talk to our parents?”
“And what if they can’t feel me, like Greg didn’t? Why would I want to talk to them only to learn that I wasn’t connected to them at all? That in the grand scheme of things all of my relationships were worthless?” I shouted. I didn’t give a damn about yelling this late at night – Paul Michael was the only one who could hear me anyway.
“I can feel you.” He reached out; his hand weighed heavily on my shoulder. I pulled away.
“Well, you’re the only one.”
“Because you won’t see if there’s anyone else.”
I turned and stomped down the stairs, making as much noise as I could to annoy Paul Michael. “I’m done. I’m going back to the white world. Let the spirits take me.”
I spread my arms wide in our living room, waiting for white fog to creep through the windows and consume me.
Nothing happened.
Paul Michael leaned against the wall of the stairwell. “Is the temper tantrum over?”
I let obscenities fly at him.
“The spirits won’t let you back in if you’re this angry. You’ll be stuck here if you can’t calm down. They sent you here to find peace, remember?”
All of my energy drained out of me. I would be stuck here forever. I slumped down to the floor.
I heard Paul Michael’s sweaty feet come towards me as they peeled themselves off the hard wood floor of the living room with each sticky step. Two arms slipped underneath mine. I was dragged back up to my feet. He gripped me by the shoulders. My head hung low, looking at the ground between us. He refused to let me go until I looked up. When I met his gaze, his eyes crinkled in the corners. “Talking to Laura will help.”
The mention of Laura’s name should have terrified me. It should have filled me with such panic and dread that I became paralyzed. But I was so numb now that I nodded limply, my head falling back down to my chest. Paul Michael took my hand and led me upstairs to have the conversation that had occupied my thoughts for the entirety of my afterlife.
Laura wasn’t in our room, much to my relief. Her window was open, a sign that she was on the roof. I took a moment to wander around, ignoring the mess she had made since I left. If I hadn’t been a ghost I would have feared for the safety of my feet with Laura’s shell and rock collection strewn across the floor. While Paul Michael waited by the open window, I climbed up to my top bunk to see if that everything was in its proper place: it wasn’t. Laura had completely taken over my bunk, with books and movie cases strewn across my PB Teen Surfer Girl quilt. She had erased all traces of me from the room besides the glow-in-the dark stars on the ceiling. They gave me no comfort now.
Paul Michael nodded toward the window. It was time to face Laura.
I climbed down from the top bunk as slowly as my arms would allow. My hands shook so badly that I could barely hold onto the rungs of the ladder. He climbed out on the roof first and slid over to the right. I climbed out after him and swallowed hard as I saw my little sister sitting to the left.
It was the first time I had seen her since the night I died, when I rode in front of her to push her out of the way.
I watched Laura carefully as I sat next to her, searching her for any signs of lasting damage from the night on the boardwalk. Besides the purple crescents under her eyes, there were none. Laura looked like me, long brown hair and abnormally small facial features, but with Paul Michael’s dark eyes.
“What are you staring at?” She looked directly at me as she spoke.
“You can see me?” I asked, jerking back.
“No shit I can see you.”
“Laura, you’re thirteen,” I reprimanded. Out of the corner of my eye, Paul Michael shook his head. “Fourteen?” I asked. He nodded. I continued. “Why do you think you can start swearing?”
“Because I watched you die.” She ground her teeth as she spoke, revealing two rows of new braces. “I’m not some innocent, helpless child.”
Solely to prove her point, she swore like me: a whole string of beautifully chosen four letter words, listed in ascending order from least to most offensive. I was so shocked by being yelled at by her that I had to contain laughter. Paul Michael stared in awe and horror as though he would have to go repent for merely hearing those words. For the oldest child, he was also the most innocent.
“Listen, kid,” I began but she interrupted.
“No, you listen. What gives you the right to think you can come back here after all this time and make me face you again?”
“You don’t want to see me?” My stomach plummeted down through my body, through the roof, through the house below us, until it buried itself in the earth.
She ignored my question. “Why a whole year Sadie? You die and don’t come back for more than a year.”
“They didn’t let me out until now,” I whispered. Laura’s bitterness made my ears ring. I looked at Paul Michael for help, but he only looked at me with calm eyes and his mouth in a thin line. He had a plan that he wanted seen through until the end.
“You cannot imagine what it was like to watch that accident,” Laura said. Her glare stabbed me. “Do you know what it was like to hear it? It was like the whole world was screaming. I still hear it.”
Laura raked her fingers through her hair. “And then, to watch you rise above it all – all the glass, all the blood – and just disappear.”
“You did see me.” I hadn’t imagined it, then, Laura looking up at me with wide eyes.
“And you saw me,” Laura repeated back at me. “You saw me and you still left. You just vanished. And every day I have to live, knowing that I should be dead. I should be the ghost here, not you. You just had to ride ahead and be the hero and –”
I threw my arms around her and pulled her against my chest. I was not surprised to feel the impact of her body against mine.
I rested my chin on the top of her head as she shouted into my skin: “I killed you! You let me kill you! I hate you, you bitch. You left me alone with all the goddamn guilt.” She pounded one hand against my chest as though she was trying to restart my long dead heart.
Stroking her hair I whispered, “I don’t want you to feel guilty. I want you to be happy. I want you to have a long happy life. It’s not your fault, Laura. It’s not your fault.”
“I don’t believe you! Liar! You fucking liar! You – you – you,” Sadie’s voice broke in a sob. Her body went limp in my arms as she wailed. I felt her chest expand with every shaky breath she took. I felt her heart pounding against me. She was so alive.
My shirt was damp as she cried. She gripped my soaked shirt in her fists. “I’m here now. I’m here. Don’t worry,” I told her.
She started hiccupping in an attempt to catch her breath. Each hiccup sent her body into spasms against mine.
My eyes watered as she tried to regain control. I held her closer and rubbed her back.
“Hey, you can see ghosts now. That’s pretty cool right. How did that happen?” I fought to keep the stickiness of tears out of my voice.
She took a deep, wheezing breath. “Paul Michael thinks it runs in the family. He thinks dramatic events can trigger it.” She untangled herself from me and dried her eyes.
I looked at my brother who had a small, smug smile on his face. Both angry sisters were neutralized at once. Of course that was his plan.
“Am I a medium too?” I asked her. I nudged her with my elbow. The corner of her mouth turned up in a half smile.
“Probably, but you’re already dead so it doesn’t count, because you can see ghosts anyway.” Laura’s laugh was soft and uncertain as she wiped her nose on the back of her hand. She pulled her legs in and wrapped her arms around them. I did the same. Paul Michael mirrored us.
We were silent for a moment, the three of us sitting in age order out on the roof, with our heads tilted toward the stars.
I felt one hand on my back, wide and tough, and another, small with skinny fingers.
I felt real. I mattered to Paul Michael and Laura. They would remember me.
I leaned my head against Laura’s shoulder. A thought floated into my head, something so obvious I wondered why I hadn’t realized it sooner. Maybe, I wasn’t sent back because of that chip on my shoulder. Maybe, it was to make sure Laura was alright. To help her move on. To make sure I didn’t save her life in vain.
I smiled at my sister. And she smiled back, braces and all. Laura was so young. She had her entire future in front of her. Her life was worth it.
Relief washed over my body, and my soul felt still. I had done what I needed to do: saved her once when I was alive and once when I was dead.
“I would do it again.” The world around me grew fuzzy as I said it, as though I were on the brink of sleep. “Given the choice, I would always do it again.”
And I began to float.
Up, out of the arms of my siblings, over the roofs. They waved.
I could feel myself starting to fade. I flew past the street lamps. Drifting through them, I shorted them out with brief explosions of electricity before the street settled into blackness. In the aching darkness, the sky was full of pinholes of light.
I floated on my back and look up at the stars before I left. There had been billions of stars that I had never seen with those streetlights on.
I relished in them.
I was an insignificant, deceased piece of the universe. But I had people who loved me. That was enough.
I traced the outline of Cygnus with my vanishing finger. Tonight I understood: it was not the constellation of failed flight. I spread my arms wide like Cygnus’s wings, and drifted on my back like the sky swan as the white began to surround me. In the last few seconds, it felt like I was soaring.