Of Delicate Pieces (9 page)

Alex hugged her arms around her torso.

“You were given back to me. But a kid that young? Imagine how she felt. She couldn’t have understood what happened when she died and showed up here.”

Alex’s face crumbled, and he felt her distress in his own heart. “Will she speak?” he asked.

“No. I guess Lost Ones don’t talk.”

“You want her to stay here?”

She nodded. “If she wants to.”

The light around Rae glowed even more radiantly. She lifted herself to her knees and reached out to place a small hand on Chase’s shoulder, her expression mature. This child was not the baby in the room.

“Is it okay with you?” Alex asked.

“Whatever makes you happy.”

Rae scrambled off the bed and grabbed a book from the shelf. It levitated beside her as she toddled to the desk chair and climbed up. The gigantic book drifted down onto her legs. All that stuck out were her small, bare feet. The pages swished as she read. Chase did a double take as he glanced at the title:
Aerodynamics of the Afterlife.

Geez
, Chase thought,
get this kid a pop-up book or something.

“I guess you don’t have to take her with you to class today …?”

“Something tells me she’s pretty self-sufficient.” Alex gestured to the book.

Part of Chase was pleased that Rae wouldn’t need the time and care necessary for a normal toddler. Alex wouldn’t get so committed. At the same time, if Rae was so independent, so intelligent, and apparently so old, why did she want to stay on a newbury campus?

***

There was a blank note in Alex’s memory, taunting her. She was forgetting something, and spirits don’t forget. The note flapped and flew around in her head. She hated it. Fear seeped through her when she thought of the grandmother Forget-me tree and the gate, but she didn’t know why. She only accepted her forgetfulness because Rae distracted her.

Chase, on the other hand, never accepted anything right away. His brothers behaved similarly. They didn’t trust anyone. Kaleb’s initial reaction to Rae was:

“What is that?”

Followed by:

“Does it need a leash?”

“Cut it out,” Alex warned, watching Rae peer over the railing of the seventh-floor balcony. Alex tried to take her downstairs, but Rae refused, planting her feet at the landing and shaking her head.

“So what? It’s going to live in your room like a pet?”

“Kaleb, knock it off,” Gabe said. He tucked a book under his arm and unfolded the pamphlet he’d been using as a bookmark. “She’s a person. It will be interesting to have her around. Lost Ones are brilliant. They have to be to make it here so young. She died with a youthful mind, so she’s probably learned ten times as much as any other spirit who died the same year.”

Kaleb regarded Gabe with incredulity. “Sometimes, I wonder if we’re related.” He jabbed a thumb in Rae’s direction. “Does she do any tricks?”

“Chill out, Kaleb,” Chase whispered.

His baby brother never asked for much. Kaleb held up his hands and surrendered.

“You don’t have to stay up here with us,” Alex said. “Go ahead and hang out in the vestibule.”

Kaleb hooked his feet on the bottom railing, to stand taller and take in the scene. “I can’t go down there right now. I’m avoiding someone.”

“Whose heart did you break this time?”

He faked shock, slapping a hand over his chest. “It pains me that you think so lowly of me. I have a stalker. That new girl who sits with the Legacies.”

“Legacies.” Alex crinkled her nose.

“It’s not like I had anything to do with it! I can’t help how irresistibly handsome I am. She keeps popping up out of nowhere, and it’s starting to freak me out.”

Gabe folded the pamphlet and tucked it back into his book. It advertised something called a health center. “She’s actually really cute.”

“Skye doesn’t like her,” Kaleb said.

Alex laughed. “Skye doesn’t like any girls. And since when do you follow the crowd?”

“She’s jailbait. She’s a newbury, and I think she’s only sixteen or seventeen.”

Alex fought off a grin. She wasn’t used to seeing Kaleb so uncomfortable. It only increased when Rae moved closer to him, grasping the rungs of the railing and poking her head through it to look at the crowd. After a moment, she tugged at Kaleb’s jersey and pointed downward.

He followed the path of her gesture, and then he looked back at Rae in surprise. “Thank you.”

“What?”

“She found the girl I was talking about. How did she know?”

“Told you the Lost Ones are smart,” Gabe said.

“She could come in handy.” Kaleb patted her shoulder. “Gabe, I told you that my stalker would be waiting down there.”

Alex wanted to get a glimpse. The girl’s light brown hair matched her skin, and when she spoke to the person seated across from her, her bright white teeth rivaled Skye’s. “Wow, she’s hideous,” Alex joked. “How exactly does she stalk you worse than the other girls around here?”

“That’s the thing. She’s not like the other girls. She shows up in every one of my workshops and sits next to me,
smiling
, and asking me to show her around.”

“Sounds like a monster.”

“It’s annoying.” Kaleb bolted upright before spinning around to crash to the ground. “She saw me.”

Alex caught Chase’s eye, and they both began to laugh.

Kaleb scowled. “Don’t you guys have a workshop to go to?”

“Yep.” Chase tried to stop smiling, biting his lips together, but it only made the humor more contagious.

Alex squatted down to Rae’s level. ”What do you want to do?”

Rae took one last look at the vestibule and turned to head back down the hall.

“Guess she’s going to the room.”

“This place gets stranger every day,” Kaleb noted.

Alex couldn’t agree more. Her brain was beginning to feel like an iPod shuffling after only playing five seconds of a song. Each time she wanted to focus on one thing, her mind would shift to the next before she felt ready. Additional workshops didn’t help. If she considered one word, her unbound mind would keep sorting and sorting through the remnants of knowledge it contained, and then it would shift over to Chase’s mind. From definitions to root words to Latin derivatives to movies, songs, and books; it was enough to drive her mad. Struggling to manage the reins of her thoughts exhausted her, but she worried if she let it go, her mind would take off and never come back to her again.

Today, through each of her workshops, her brain kept reverting back to one word. Legacy. It was like typing the term into Google; her brain would erupt with connections to the word like her own personal search engine.

A page with highlighted words: “A gift of property”

A Webster’s Dictionary

The Lasalles discussing college sports recruiting

Keys

Another page with highlighted words: “Anything handed down”

And trees. There were thousands of images flashing through Alex’s mind, but trees appeared with each one.

The clock ticked slowly leading up to the midday recess, but it was time to see what this legacy fuss was all about. Tess’s directions led her to a room nestled deep in the west corner of the learning center. When she found the green door shaped like a keyhole, it swung open before she could reach for the tree-shaped handle.

It was like stepping into the forest. Or a coloring book. Large trees, bonsai trees, painted trees, scribbled drawings of life-size trees—they all inhabited one strange room. Some existed as artwork on the walls or freestanding paper while others were rooted to the ground. The room couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.

It felt like being stuck in the children’s book,
Where the Wild Things Are
. For a moment, Alex pictured the monsters hiding in the trees, and an image of Jonas flashed across her mind. Sitting crisscross in the Lasalles’ old living room, he crawled toward her with his mischievous grin, cackling, “I’ll eat you up I love you so.”

His words had new meaning now, and she missed him in spite of herself.

But this wasn’t a children’s book. It was real life. So, how in the “real” world could a scrawled, crayoned tree stand taller than a ten-foot pine?

Newburies rested among the undergrowth, waiting for the meeting to begin. Some talked, some read, others sprawled on the ground with their arms draped over their faces as though they were relaxing outside, not cooped up inside a meeting room. Others lounged in office chairs, their feet propped on a conference table sprouting from the shrubbery. She guessed with so many spirits depicting their own thoughts of this reality, the images were bound to be differentiated. Even if every person in the room thought “tree,” it didn’t mean they would picture the same thing. This was the result.

Ellington would be proud of her. Last year, she wouldn’t have been willing to see half of this. She reminded herself to tell him later.

Tess Darwin sidestepped away from her two brothers, who stood at the head of the table, deep in conversation. As she made her way to Alex, her smug expression clearly stated,
I knew you’d come.

“This is different.” Alex’s interest swooped around the room perfumed with cedar and emotion. The feelings here existed as living, breathing entities— kind of like Ellington’s classroom.

Tess spun her finger in a circle. “Look closely.”

“What?”

“At the trees. Then you’ll understand.”

Tess’s kindness clashed with her stiff and robotic persona, and Alex wondered if the trees leaked a relaxant into the air. She wandered off through the “woods” but didn’t see anything that would explain the purpose of the scenery or why this multigenerational group needed to meet here. It seemed like a waste of time she could be using to check on the three-year-old holed up in her room, but if she left now, she’d never know why she’d been invited. She recognized all the newburies, after all, it only took a glimpse for her mind to memorize a face, but she didn’t call any of them friends. She wondered if their lineage was documented here.

Like a light bulb, she knew what she should be looking for. Her head whipped around to study the nearest tree, and there on the trunk a name was etched. Ondine.

Family trees. Oh, how clever.

The one marked Ondine stood proud as one of the largest. Beautiful and elegant, its large shell-like leaves sprang from branches and dripped with rain despite the dry ceiling. Names covered every inch of the bark. The thick boughs claimed larger names, and alongside them, smaller names etched the wood to indicate a marriage. More limbs stemmed from each couple, with more names. This family was huge.

“This is an Alder tree,” said a smooth voice beside her.

Alex had never heard Xavier Darwin speak before. She didn’t expect a boy with such hardened features to have a soft tone.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

She waited for him to swallow his congeniality and shove her into the wall.

“The older families, they have the grandest trees.”

Alex took in his jagged features. Sharp chin, sharp nose, which, for once, was not angled upward. “Why are some of the names brighter than others?”

“The brighter names are souls who made it here.”

Against the contrast of the bark, those names shimmered. “There are so many.”

He nodded. “It’s hereditary. My relatives say we evolve like anything else, and this family has been around since the documented beginning.”

Alex measured the crowd gathered in the room. “Everyone here has a name on one of these trees?” Xavier nodded, and Alex ran her fingertips along the etchings. “Why aren’t the Bonds here, then?”

Xavier’s stare cut the air between them. The mention of the Bonds acted as a grindstone, and his sharpness returned. “After everything they put you through, you’re still concerned with them?” He didn’t wait for her response. “They’ve wronged a good many people here. Generation after generation, they do nothing but make mistakes to the detriment of our society. Apples don’t fall far from the tree.”

“The
detriment
of our society.” Alex scoffed. “That’s extreme, don’t you think?”

Xavier shook his head. He grabbed Alex’s hand, and she gasped as a surge erupted up her arm, like an injection of winter itself. “Follow me,” he ordered.

They zigzagged through the forest of names. Xavier stopped when they came upon a giant pine. Alex squinted at the names, but they were impossible to make out through the snow.

“Colorado Blue Spruce,” Xavier announced proudly. “The Darwin family tree.” He pushed aside a branch of thick needles, and there, like holiday lights, twinkled the letters of his name. Tess’s and Linton’s names clung to his.

When Alex stepped close enough, she heard crying. She ran her finger over their branch, names with identical death dates.

“You three died on the same day?”

Xavier nodded.

“An accident?”

He shook his head. “It isn’t a pretty story.”

“Death usually isn’t,” she said, watching Xavier pinch the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry.”

Xavier shooed off her apology. “It’s fine. My father, he drank a lot.”

“We have something in common.”

He nodded with his jaw set tight but bowed his head in this moment of camaraderie. “I was the oldest. I should have protected my brother and sister.”

“From what?”

He jutted his angular chin toward the tree. “Him.” He showed her a toothed name over his own. Jesper Darwin, his father. A name that didn’t glow. “I don’t know how, but he knew about the afterworld. On the last night of my life, he staggered around our shoebox of a house, drunk and screaming about how he couldn’t find something. He kept saying we would be better off if we went to a different place, a place he hadn’t screwed up, a place where we would be royalty. I thought he was just drunk as usual, looking for a hidden bottle. He was a screwup, my dad. The rest of our family wasn’t too proud of him. He realized that, though, because he said this was the greatest thing he ever did for us.” Xavier’s voice trembled. “Turns out, he wasn’t looking for another drink, he was looking for his gun.”

Alex raised a hand to cover her mouth.