Touch (13 page)

Michael nodded.

“Oh.” He looked down at his hands, one of which was still wrapped in Emma’s. “It doesn’t
hurt,” he said. He sounded surprised. “Am I a ghost?”

Michael nodded again. “We can’t see you if Emma’s not holding your hand.”

“Oh.” Pause. “Why?”

“I don’t know. Emma,” he added, “can see dead people. But most of us can’t.”

“Why can Emma see dead people?”

“I don’t know.”

He turned to Emma. “Why can you see dead people?”

“I’m sorry, Mark, but I don’t know, either. I can’t—I can’t always tell they’re dead.
They don’t really
look
like ghosts look in stories or on television. I didn’t know you were—”

“Dead?”

She nodded. “I could hear you—but I couldn’t tell until I saw you.”

“But you said—”

“When I could see your eyes, I knew.”

“My eyes look dead?”

She shook her head. “It’s their color.” She paused, and then said, “My dad’s dead,
as well.”

“Did you find him, too?”

“No.” She hesitated, then looked at her father, who had been standing in the room
the whole time. “No, he found me.”

Mark’s blank expression probably meant confusion; it’s what it often meant on Michael’s
face.

“My father wasn’t lost. He was dead, but he knew where he was.”

“Oh. How did he know?”

“You’ll have to ask him. You can see him, right?”

Mark nodded.

“Michael and Allison can’t. They know he’s there because I’ve told them, but they
won’t be able to speak with him until I hold his hand. I’m like a—like a window.”

Allison shook her head. “Emma is alive, but Emma can see the dead, and when she touches
the dead, she makes them visible for the rest of us.”

Mark was silent for a full minute. Emma’s father was watching him, hands in his pockets,
his brow creased in concern.

“I want,” Mark finally said, “to go home.”

* * *

The silence was awkward, but there was no way to avoid that. Allison didn’t exactly
break it, but she did move toward Emma’s computer. “Mark, what is the last date you
remember?”

He frowned.

She tried again. “What was the date yesterday?” When he failed to answer, she said,
“The day before yesterday?” She waited for another minute before she sat in the chair.

Ally moved to occupy the space in front of Emma’s computer. The resultant sound of
keys and mouse-clicks were audible.

Emma’s hand was numb. Her lower arm was heading that way as well, but at the moment,
the cold was painful. Eric was painful in a different way. Throughout the entire discussion
he’d said nothing; he’d watched Mark and Michael in a stiff silence. Petal was agitating
for Milk-Bones, and slathering Michael’s hand in dog germs; Michael didn’t appear
to notice—hard, when a rottweiler was sitting
on
your feet.

“Three years ago,” Allison finally said, into a lot of silence.

Emma, hand in Mark’s, looked over her shoulder. She wasn’t certain how much she could
or should ask, given that Mark was in the room. But if Mark was like Michael, it wouldn’t
matter. “Exactly three years?”

“Three years in two months. He was eight years old, but on the small side for his
age. He went out for a walk during the day and failed to come home. They mobilized
most of a police division searching for him, but they didn’t find him for two and
a half weeks.”

“Hypothermia?”

“Yes.”

And he’d been there ever since.

* * *

“Are you cold?” Emma asked.

Mark frowned. He was wearing a simple ski jacket and equally simple shoes, neither
of which he’d tried to remove on arrival. The shoes were in no way appropriate for
tonight’s weather—and it wasn’t January yet, which was usually colder. “I’m not cold,”
he finally said. “But I’m not warm, either. My hand doesn’t hurt,” he added, looking
at hers. “And the lights are quiet.” He let go of Emma’s hand, or tried; when he pulled
her hand followed.

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “My hands—they get really, really cold when I’m touching
a ghost, and my fingers get numb enough I can’t really feel them.”

“That’s not good,” he replied, as she pried her fingers free. He walked toward where
Allison was still reading the computer screen, and stood to the left of her, reading
as well. “I wasn’t alone,” he told them. Only Emma could hear.

Emma stiffened. “When, Mark?”

“I didn’t go out alone. That part’s wrong.”

Emma turned; so did her father and Eric. She reached out and caught Mark’s hand, and
he allowed it, now that he was beside the computer.

“Mark didn’t—didn’t go out alone,” Emma told Allison.

Allison’s hands froze for a second. She turned to look at Mark, who was standing beside
her. “You went to the ravine with friends?”

Mark seemed to shrink at that. “. . . I don’t have any friends.”

Allison’s lips compressed. Emma started to say
everyone has friends
, but managed to stop those words as well. It didn’t matter what she thought, after
all; it was the truth as Mark saw it. It was just
so
hard to hear from the mouth of a child, especially a dead one; the urge to comfort
him was visceral. But . . . when had meaningless, hopeful words been much of a comfort
in her own life? Even with the best of intentions behind them?

Michael said, in all the wrong tone of voice for Michael, “Who took you to the ravine?”

Mark hesitated, and then said, “My mom.”

E
MMA HAD SUFFERED AWKWARD SILENCES BEFORE; this one was charged. She took refuge, for
a moment, in confusion. She wanted to cling to it. She might have even managed, but
Michael was there, and Michael now walked to the computer. He was almost twitching,
which was never a good sign. He looked over Allison’s shoulder as if she weren’t there,
and didn’t appear to notice when she moved, surrendering both mouse and keyboard.

He knew—they all knew—that not everything reported in the papers was exact; editors
changed little things—like, for instance, dialogue—in the name of saving space. Why
they did this for articles that were on the web, no one understood. Space wasn’t an
issue—maybe attention span was. But almost every article Allison had managed to find
contained a quote from the grieving mother, and in each, she clearly stated that she
had come home to find Mark had gone out.

Emma wanted to speak with her father, but she had Mark by the hand, and she couldn’t
think of a way to detach herself. She sent her father an imploring look and froze
at his expression; he wasn’t looking at her. He was, like the rest of the people in
the room, looking at the computer.

“Mark,” Emma finally said, “I don’t think going home is a good idea.”

He looked up at her. “You promised.”

“I—” She swallowed. What was she going to say? She hadn’t known he was dead? Her father
approached Mark as she struggled to find useful words, and crouched—in much the same
way Emma had when she’d coaxed Mark out of the ravine.

“Mark, why don’t you come for a walk with me? You can show me where your house is.”

Mark hesitated.

“He won’t hurt you,” Emma told the young boy.

“He can’t,” Michael added.

“My father lives in America,” Mark told them. “Because of me.”

Emma wanted to scream. “Sometimes my dad thought I was frustrating. We used to argue
about Petal—that’s my dog’s name.”

Brendan Hall chuckled. He didn’t hold out a hand; he did rise. “I haven’t been outside
in a while. Let’s take a walk.” Glancing at Emma, he added, “Emma’s not very good
at reading maps. If she tried to find your house without help, she’d probably get
lost for hours.”

It was true. Emma didn’t even mind that he’d said it. She wanted Mark to go with her
father because she didn’t want him to hear anything she had to say.
What will you be protecting him
from
?
she thought.
He’s already dead.

But dead, he was an eight-year-old boy who looked like he was six and spoke as if
he were four. Dead, he’d been crying in the ravine for—for how long? He didn’t have
a body; he couldn’t be murdered. He could no longer freeze to death, because according
to Google, he’d already done that. But he could be afraid. He could be lonely.

He could definitely be hurt in all the ways that didn’t actually kill you. Some of
those, Emma thought, death was
supposed
to end. Clearly, it hadn’t.

Mark still hesitated, and her father said, “I need to be able to find your house so
I can tell Emma exactly how to get there from here. You don’t want to be lost for
hours, do you?”

Mark shook his head. “I want to go home,” he whispered.

Emma knew her father would have picked Mark up if he could; he would have hugged him,
or put him on his shoulders, or any of the things he used to do with Emma’s friends
when he was alive. He didn’t try that with this one; she wasn’t even certain he could.
He couldn’t touch the living—were there rules that governed the way the dead interacted?

Probably, she thought grimly. She had a good idea of who’d made those rules. She headed
to the door and opened it, although it wasn’t, strictly speaking, necessary. “He’ll
bring you back,” she told Mark, “if you want to come back. He won’t leave you, and
he won’t lose you.”

Mark nodded. Brendan Hall walked through the open door. Staring at the floor—or at
his feet, Emma wasn’t certain which—Mark followed him out. She closed the door behind
them and leaned back against it, thinking that bashing it a few times with the back
of her head would actually feel
good
at this point.

Eric said, “You don’t want to do this.”

Emma and Allison both swiveled heads to look at him; Michael was in Michael-land.
Allison gently pushed him into the chair she’d vacated. He sat without really paying
attention, adjusting his posture in the same way.

They then moved toward the wall farthest away from Michael. Petal joined them for
a bit, sniffing at their hands and whining like loud background noise. Emma scratched
behind his ears because she could do that in her sleep; it didn’t require a lot of
attention.

She wasn’t sleeping now.

“I told him I would,” she said, keeping her voice low. “He’s not wrong about that.
I didn’t—I didn’t realize he was dead when I heard him the first time. He was crying;
he sounded—” she bit her lip. “I didn’t want to leave him in the damn ravine in this
weather at this time of night. I almost called 911—” She stopped, aware of how badly
that
would have ended. “But I told him I would take him home.”

Eric folded arms across his chest in silence.

“Don’t even think of telling me it’s not my business.”

“I won’t. I understand how you’ve made it your problem—” He held up a hand as Allison
opened her mouth. “—And I sympathize. I don’t fault you for trying to rescue a lost
child. You didn’t know he was dead, but Emma? Even if you’d known, you wouldn’t have
done things differently.”

“I wouldn’t have promised to take him home.”

One dark brow rose. “Chase tells me I look stupid at least three times a day—but not
even Chase would accuse me of being
that
stupid. If there was no other way to get him to come to you, you’d’ve done exactly
what you did.”

“Not if I knew—”

“Knew what?”

Her hands were shaking. This time it wasn’t because of the cold, although the fact
they weren’t both bunched in fists was. She didn’t want to say the words that were
stuck in her throat.

Eric once again folded his arms across his chest.

Allison came to her rescue. “She wouldn’t have promised to take him home to a mother
who’d left him there in the first place.” She now dropped her hands to her hips, the
Allison equivalent of Eric’s crossed arms. “No child needs to know—” she stopped speaking.

“If you can’t even say it, how are you going to handle him while you’re there?” He
let his arms drop. “Emma—this is not a good idea.”

“I
know
that. But I told him—”

“I know what you told him. I understand that you don’t want to be the person who breaks
her word—I don’t usually consider that a bad thing. But in this case, what good will
it do? This isn’t about Mark—or not only about him. It’s also about Emma Hall.”

“He knows what we know. Or suspects what we suspect. It’s already hard for him—if
he
wants
to go home, how can I say no?”

“It’s a single syllable. I think you can manage it.”

“I don’t think—”

“Tell him that you didn’t know he was dead. He can’t live at home, anymore. He can’t
live anywhere, period.”

The breadth and depth of Eric’s callousness robbed Emma of words for a long, long
moment. The words that did come rushing in were words she was pretty sure she’d regret—sometime.
At the moment, she was having a hard time seeing it. “Why do you think it’s a bad
idea?” she managed to get out.

“He’s dead.”

“My dad is dead—but he’s here.”

“Yes. But your mother can’t see him. Only you can. He’s had to come to terms with
his near invisibility and his death, and he’s had time to do that. Mark—from what
I can tell—hasn’t. He’s had enough time to figure it out, but he didn’t
take
that time; I don’t think he was aware of the passage of time at all. What will home
give him?”

“I don’t know—what does it give my dad?”

Eric closed his eyes. When he opened them, he’d smoothed the edges off his jaw and
out of his voice. “Comfort. He wanted to know you—and your mother—were doing all right.
You both are.”

“Maybe Mark—” But she couldn’t say it. “We don’t know what she said to him. We don’t
know how it happened. We know nothing, Eric. All we really know is we have a very
young eight year old who’s only just discovering he’s dead. He wants to see the world
he knew. And I—I promised I would take him home.”

Eric slowly lowered his arms. “Emma—he’s not alive.”

“I
know
that—if he were, we wouldn’t be having this problem.”

“You’d have an entirely different problem.”

It was true, but Emma was too tired for what-ifs and theory. She was too tired to
argue with Eric. “Maybe my dad will have some luck talking to Mark. Maybe Mark will
decide he can’t—can’t go home.”

Silence. It wasn’t Nathan’s silence; it was built on accusation, anger, even guilt.
Emma didn’t want it; she wanted—briefly, ferociously—to see Nathan.

“Where will he stay, if he doesn’t go home?” Allison finally asked.

Eric just shook his head. “Emma—I know you see the dead as people; you see them as
more than dead. I understand that. But there’s no orphanage for dead children. There’s
no place they gather—” he stopped.

Emma said, in a very soft voice, “The City of the Dead.”

“They don’t gather there by choice,” was his cold reply. “They don’t need food, clothing
or shelter; they don’t need school. They don’t even need to take up space. Yes, they’re
part of the world you now see—but you’re not trying to find a home for wind or rain.”

“They’re not forces of nature, Eric. They’re
people
. They have feelings, and they’re the same feelings
we
have. I don’t know where he’s going to stay,” she added, looking around her room.
“But there are worse places than this one.”

Eric said nothing.

“My dad’s here. My dad’s great with kids. If Mark’s parents are alive, why can’t he
stay with my dad?”

“You don’t even know where your dad is, most of the time.”

“I don’t need to know—Mark does. But my dad would do that, for him.”

“Or for you?”

It was her turn to cross her arms. “For him.”

“Fine. Maybe it’s genetic. I hope your dad can talk him into staying here, for your
sake.”

* * *

Michael rose, leaving the computer and the keyboard behind.

Emma glanced at the time; it was already past late. “Michael and Allison have to get
home.”

“I’ll drive them. But Emma? Don’t take him tonight. You’re exhausted. It’s late. If
you have to go, go during the day, and take me with you.”

Given his attitude tonight, she was absolutely certain she didn’t want him there.

“. . . Or take Allison and Michael if you won’t have me.”

“I highly doubt his mother is a Necromancer.”

“So do I. If I thought she was, I’d approach it differently. Michael?”

Michael stood in the open door, one foot over the threshold, as if stuck there. He
swiveled. “Emma promised,” he said quietly.

“You heard that?”

Michael looked confused, but he nodded. “It’s important. To keep your promises.” But
he looked at Emma and Allison and said, “I don’t understand what happened.”

They exchanged a glance. “Neither do we,” Emma told him.

“Why did she take him to the ravine? Why did she lie to the police?”

“Michael—we don’t know. We don’t know what happened.”

“We can ask Mark.”

Emma felt a little like the floor had suddenly dropped out from under her. She swallowed.
“Sometimes it’s upsetting to be asked—”

“It’s not more upsetting than being left in the ravine in January,” he pointed out.
His eyes were starting to rapid-blink. Allison walked over to him, put an arm around
his shoulders. He leaned back into it.

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow, we can ask him. But, Michael—if he doesn’t want to talk about
it, we can’t force him.”

Since this seemed self-evident to Michael, he ignored it. Allison pulled him out the
door. Eric watched them leave, and then turned to Emma with an expression she couldn’t
interpret on his face. “I’m sorry, Emma,” he said. It didn’t sound like he was apologizing
for their argument.

“Send Chase to Siberia and we’ll talk,” she replied.

He laughed. Laughter, as Nathan had said, was better than pain.

* * *

“I went home.”

Emma turned as Nathan appeared in her room. He was leaning against the back wall,
his hands in his pockets, his head tilted up in a way that exposed his neck. She wanted
to hold him. Or to be held by him.

“I went home,” he repeated, “and I saw my mom. My dad. It was a totally different
house. Do you know what she’s done to my room?”

“She hasn’t turned it into a guest room.”

“No—it’s like a small shrine. There’s a picture of me on my pillow. The bed is made.
All of my stuff is still on my shelves—but it’s really, really tidy, now.” He laughed.
It wasn’t a happy laugh. “She goes to my grave every day. She gets up in the morning
before work. She stops by after work. If work was closer, she’d be there at lunch.”
He took his hands out of his pockets, lifting them in something that was like a shrug,
but heavier. “She marks my
calendar
, Em.

“I can’t talk to her. I can’t touch her. I can’t tell her I’m not in pain, I’m all
right. She cries,” he added, looking at the ceiling again. “I think she’s driving
Dad nuts.”

“She did that anyway,” Emma pointed out, and Nathan did laugh.

“True.” The laughter faded. “It’s not home. It’s not home the way it is—everything
in it is a reminder that I’m dead.”

“That’s not what she’s trying to do—”

“I know. I know she wants to remember that I did live, I was there. But—I can’t make
her laugh, anymore. I can’t stop the tears.” He shoved his hands back into his pockets
and looked directly at Emma. “But I don’t know how I’d feel if there was no sign of
her grief. I don’t know how I’d feel if she was happy all the time. I don’t know what
I’d want if I—”