Won't Let Go (11 page)

“Is this too close? Am I making you too cold?”

I don’t answer. I snuggle in even closer to my ice-cube ghostboy and force back the shivers that want to rake my body.

“I don’t know. If I think about being invisible—which I’m not right now—I disappear. If I think about wanting you to see me or wanting to touch things, I appear solid as if I’m still human. It’s like changing the color of my shirt, I had to kind of teach myself, force all the
energy
into believing it’s not impossible and then it
becomes
possible.”

“Wow,” I say. “But don’t you sleep? Or are you just constantly here? Where do you go when you disappear into my closet? I know you said you don’t know, but you must go somewhere, right?”

“No sleep. I’m always awake, seeing things. And I do go somewhere. If I let my mind wander, let myself become nothing, I’m in a place. I don’t know where it is, but I don’t think it’s heaven and I’m pretty sure it’s not hell—”

“What’s it like?” I’m eager to understand.

“Well, it’s nothing short of amazing. It always starts out the same, an endless sea of whiteness. A blank canvas until I imagine things filling up the space. Maybe I’ll picture a couch, and it’ll appear, or wish to read a book, and it’ll materialize in my hands. I can make it whatever I want.”

“Why don’t you just stay there? If you can imagine anything in the world, why come back? It sounds perfect.”

Embry shakes his head. “Because it never feels quite right. There’s always a pull, an unseen force that eventually pushes me back to this world. And what good is having everything if you can’t remember what you want, what you like?”

I take a deep breath, fascinated. “It’s like—it’s like you’re in the middle,” I say, thinking about the fact he’s a ghost. It must mean his body and his soul are separated because he’s not fully dead yet. A part of him still lies in that hospital bed. But machines force his heart to beat. So he’s not fully alive either. “I think you’re in a kind of purgatory. Not in heaven and not in hell, but stuck in the middle for some reason.”

He squeezes me tighter. “That actually makes sense...”

I realize two things now. One: I have to figure out how to stop Embry from being stuck in the in-between. And two: I wish I could tell someone about him. Embry could answer so many questions about what happens to people when they die, when they have some sort of unfinished business. Only, I realize I wouldn’t want people interrogating him, taking him away from me
.
I’m already unsure if I’ll ever actually be able to let him go.

We both lie silently, motionless. I force my body not to shiver, hiding the fact I’m cold. Only eventually I don’t have to. My eyes become heavy and the need for sleep takes over. But even then, in my last waking moment, I hug Embry tighter, not willing to let go for anything.

I dreamt of Embry all night. It wasn’t the ghostboy who had me wrapped up in his bone chilling arms. It was the other one, the
real
one. We were having a picnic on the beach. Waves lapped gently against sand and rocks. The sky overhead was so clear it was hard to tell where it ended and the water began. He fed strawberries to me, tickling my lips with their sweet taste. He held me close and whispered in my ear, nuzzling my neck. We talked for hours, of stuff I can’t even begin to remember, but it was magical all the same.

Until I woke up.

My dream was nothing like this moment, and the Embry standing before me isn’t kind and gentle.

He’s angry, furious even.

“How could you keep this from me?” he says through gritted teeth, the creased and crumpled papers from the library clutched in his hand. The ink is streaked from getting drenched in my pocket, but the words are apparently still readable.
At least the amnesia didn’t take that away from him.

I had forgotten all about those papers stuck in the back pocket of my jeans, heaped on the floor in the bathroom. And how they got into his hands, though I’m desperate to understand, seems like the last thing I should care about.

My body trembles at the fierceness in his eyes. “I—” I swallow down the lump in my throat, “—I needed to know more.”

It’s the truth. Today was planned out entirely. Wake up—hopefully still in the arms of Embry—go see Elliot—Embry’s brother—and understand.

God, I want to understand what happened.

Need
to understand.

“You needed to know what? It says it all here, doesn’t it?” He thrusts the papers into my chest.

“No it doesn’t Oakl—”

“Don’t call me that! Don’t ever call me that again.”

I look away, because the disdain in his voice slaps me, but it doesn’t stop me from saying, “Sorry,” in a breathless whisper.

I should have told him the truth.

I shouldn’t have kept this from him.

He doesn’t hear me, or maybe doesn’t want to, because he goes on, “My name’s Embry, Embry Winston. It says it here in black and white.”

It’s the way he says it, the tone his voice takes on. He’s still full of anger and yet in the undertone—so slight I think I’m making it up—there’s frustration.

I take a step closer, pushing aside his outstretched hand, still clutching the paper. “You’re not mad at me.”

He shakes his head vehemently. I reach my hand towards him but he pulls back so quickly his body blurs. “You kept this from me. You—lied.”

“I know. I just wanted to have answers...But that’s not what’s really bothering you. I know it’s not.”

Embry takes another step back and falls into the office chair, defeated. “I can read these words, understand them and yet...I—”

I close the distance between us again and kneel on the floor in front of him. Because, if this is the only thing I understand today, at least I get it. Had there not been Embry’s eleventh-grade picture in the inset of the article, I never would have believed it was about him.

“This is me, isn’t it?” He laughs in a mocking tone. “Of course it is, I can recognize my own face and yet—”

“You still don’t remember,” I whisper.

Was it really all going to come back just by reading an article, especially one that points all the blame of his
accident
at his brother? I didn’t think so, but that doesn’t mean I’m not upset. I had hope and now that’s been crushed. The sheer amount of devastation in Embry is enough to make my heart clench, my stomach turn, and my eyes fill with tears.

Embry’s sunken head rises to meet my eyes. His own are no longer full of anger, but pain and hurt. It’s something I’ve sadly seen a lot of in those blue orbs. “How can I not remember? This article—” He tightens his fist around the papers, and a loud scrunching noise fills the air, “—how could my own brother do this to me? What horrible thing did I do to him, Alexia, that would make him do this to me?”

“I don’t know.” I rub my hands up and down his thighs, hoping the action calms and soothes him. “But we’re going to find out, Embry.” The sound of his name rolling off my tongue catches me off guard. Since I learned it, in my head he was Embry, in my heart he was Embry, but this is the first time I’ve spoken it to him. I search his eyes for some glimmer of recognition, but they’re hollow.

“Is it going to matter? So what if we track him down, get the answers we need. Is it really going to make a difference? How can I begin to remember anything if my—” his eyes look down, sweeping over his clothes “—if my brain is dead?”

There’s no answer to his question.

He’s right.

Totally right.

How is he ever supposed to remember something if his real brain is locked? Not able to open its door to let something in
or
out except the Embry I see before me.

“We just have to try harder,” I say. And then like in the movies, when someone gets an ingenious idea, the imaginary light bulb over my head flickers on, as if I’ve pulled the string. “You should come with me today.” Maybe Embry can’t learn who he is, or remember from a stupid newspaper article.

But...if he actually saw, heard and felt something that was real, something that was a part of him—like his brother—maybe that would get those memories back.

“Come with you? Outside?” he replies reluctantly. The corners of his perfect lips turn into a frown.

Maybe his brother can give him the answers he needs, the ones that will set his body and soul free. “Yes.” I pull his hands from his lap, taking them into mine. They’re solid and cold. “I’m going to see your brother, Elliot. Maybe if you see him too, it would help.”

“
Elliot
,” he says as though it’s a foreign word he can’t pronounce or understand. “But he’s in prison. He—did this to me.”

“Embry, it’s the only option I’ve got right now. So—” Gripping his hands tighter, I stand and yank him to his feet “—lets go.”

Reluctantly he follows, one foot after the other until we reach the doorway. I’m on the other side of the threshold when I realize Embry isn’t following me anymore. I turn to see him stopped inches from me, hands pressed on either side of the door-jam. “What’s wrong?” I ask.

Embry takes a hand from the doorway and scrapes it through his blond hair, pulling the strands straight up for a brief second, then letting them fall this way and that and into his eyes. “In all these years, I’ve never left this room.” He sighs.

I’m quick to shoot back, “Sure you have. You leave all the time.”

His head slowly moves back and forth. “No, I haven’t. I’m either here—” his head flicks, motioning behind him and the room,“—or
there
.” The “
there”
referring to the in-between.

I grin. “Huh. Well there’s a first time for everything.” I quickly lunge towards Embry, grab his hands, and pull. He’s made it through the threshold just as his voice cracks.

“What if I can’t get back in?”

For like the next five minutes Embry is a kid, silently hopping from the hallway, through the door and back into my room.

Back and forth.

Back and forth.

 Just to make sure he’s not stuck and can get back inside the room. He even smiles, this bright toothy gleaming smile that is infectious, making me grin just as wide.

“I can’t believe I never even tried,” he says, as I pop into the bathroom to throw some clothes on. During his game of hop-from-one-space-to-another he took the time to mention my attire or lack thereof.

“How come you didn’t?” I raise my voice so he can hear.

“Fear,” he says, and when I emerge from the bathroom his smoldering eyes tell me not to question it further. He’s leaning against the doorframe, arms folded across his chest and feet crossed at the ankles. The sight nearly knocks the breath right out of me. Embry’s like the most valuable painting, framed perfectly as I sear his image into my mind and lock it away.

Today he’s wearing slightly baggy dark wash jeans—they hang loose around his hips in an almost seductive way. His shirt is a simple gray button down, the top two buttons open and the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. With the buttons open on his shirt, I can see enough chest, pale and hard, to make me blush at the idea of wanting to see more.

I push past him and walk down the hallway, afraid he can hear the intense pounding of my heart or quick gasps of air I breathe in. Because that’s just how beautiful he is.

As I trudge down the stairs, I don’t hear Embry’s footfalls, but the crisp chilly air lets me know he’s still close—it’s so neat how he can make himself be heard or not heard. However, at the bottom of the landing, I skid to a stop. An extra push—Embry—against my back, forces me to grip the banister for support.

“Going out, again?” Mom says with disappointment. It’s like déjà vu, only I know, I was here in this exact spot yesterday. Mom in her bathrobe, steaming cup of coffee clutched in her hands with the same saddened expression on her face.

“Uh, yeah. I’m meeting—Allison,” I say quickly.
Maybe too quickly?
Then suddenly I remember Embry and his presence that almost pushed me to the ground as he bumped into me.

I’m afraid to look behind me to check if he’s still there.

Her eyes stay trained on mine, “Oh...Well you should have some breakfast.”

I realize then that she can’t see him. Maybe because he’s not there anymore. Or maybe I’m the only wacko in the Stone family who can see and talk to ghostboys.

And as if just to remind me I’m slightly crazy, “You shouldn’t miss breakfast,” is whispered into my ear as Embry’s cool breath tickles my neck.

A giggle escapes my lips.

Mom raises her eyebrows, then turns on her heels, her long rope of brown hair whipping through the air as she walks away. Silently I count to five, heave a sigh and trace her steps to the kitchen, leaving Embry’s arctic presence behind.

Once in the kitchen, box of Apple O's in hand, I flounce onto the stool and pour out my cereal. Mom wordlessly watches from the corner of her eye, lips twitching ever so slightly into a smile. It’s nice to see even if it’s simply because I did as she asked.

One bowl of Apple O's, slurped up milk and a cup of coffee—no cream, no sugar. Later, I make my escape through the front door. Mom’s obvious interrogation wasn’t so bad. She seems to like this “Mysterious Allison” and wishes I’d bring her home to “hang out.”

Until that moment, it never really occurred to me that maybe my being gone all the time, and Dad—who rises with the birds and works his head off—leaves the house all to herself but makes her lonely.

As a kid, I was always happy to have Mom home. I didn’t have one of those families with two hard working parents. Dad made enough that shortly after they found out I was on the way, Mom quit her job as an insurance broker and never looked back. But now I see how lonely she’s really become. She doesn’t need to help me get dressed, or do my laundry, make sure my lunch is made, or clean up my toys.

I’m all grown up now.

Of course, I still need Mom—just not in the same ways I used to.
Maybe I should suggest she go back to work? Or join a Bridge Club or something.

I promise myself that tomorrow, or the next day, I’ll sit down and actually spend time with her. This move has probably been just as hard, or harder on her than it is me. I have to remember that, and I have to make that change I keep promising myself I’ll make. I have to be better and do better, especially when it comes to Mom. But Embry’s important too, and he needs my attention just as much, or more. I’ll have to figure out a way to juggle both.