Wraith (29 page)

"Does this
look
like a parking lot to
you? Can you not see the flowers growing right there? Do you have any idea how
much hand pruning it takes to get hibiscus like that? Huh? Do you? Do
you?"

I blinked, my vision still fuzzy with tears. The man
was positively irate, and would have been downright scary, if he hadn't weighed
less than me and looked about a hundred and ten years old. His skin was dark,
as if he had some Polynesian blood, but he was covered with age spots and
freckles as well. The fingers that pointed accusingly into my face were nothing
but waxy skin and bone, and a thin hospital gown hung loosely over his gaunt
frame. His head was topped off with a handful of wiry, snow-white hairs, and
his eyes were dark and burning with irritation. Despite his bluster, he looked
frail enough to collapse at any second—and given the state he had worked
himself into, I was not at all sure he wouldn't.

"I'm sorry," I stammered, opening the car
door and stepping out. I hadn't seen any flowers driving in, but I didn't doubt
his word. I had hardly been paying attention.

"Just look at this!" he continued, leading
me around the front bumper of the car, gesturing wildly toward the tires.
"Look at them! Crushed to death!"

I looked, and he was right. I had taken out an
entire bedful.

"I'm really sorry, sir," I said again.
"I'll move the car."

"Well, it's a little too late for that now,
wouldn't you say, Missy?" he fumed.

I started to apologize one more time. But the words
never made it to my lips. As I looked into his face, a palm frond waggled in
the wind through his right ear.

My body went rigid. I stared.

He was almost entirely solid. With a cursory glance
or two, I would never have noticed. But now I was sure of it. A ripple of
transparency flitted through one foot, even as his ear had become solid again.
He was as indistinguishable from a living person as Zane had been when I first
met him.

And like Zane, he could see
me
.

"You aren't alive," I murmured.
"You're a ghost."

The man's tirade ceased abruptly. It was his turn to
blink at me. "You can see me, can't you?" he asked suddenly, almost
with embarrassment. "I guess I forgot to notice. How come you can see me
and no one else can?"

The question of my life.

"I don't know," I answered, my voice still
scratchy from crying. "I just can."

"Oh," he stammered, now completely put off
guard. "I was so mad about the damn hibiscus, I didn't even think…"

"I'll move the car," I said agreeably,
seeing an opportunity to ask a question of my own. "But I want to know
something, if you don't mind.
Why
are you a ghost? Do you know? I mean,
why haven't you… moved on?"

His eyebrows rose. He stared at me, long and hard.
"Little lady," he said impatiently, though not without a hint of
sympathy, "I don't know what the hell mumbo-jumbo you're talking about.
All I know is, I'm ready and waiting to die, as is my right, and I'd have been
gone days ago if it weren't for those interfering brats of mine in there!"

He gestured toward a window on the ground floor of
the convalescent home. I looked back at him in confusion. "Who won't let
you die?"

"The kids!" He railed, gesticulating with
his bony, almost perfectly solid arms. "They’re all on and on about the
sanctity of life, and how if there's anything anybody can do to keep my heart
beating, they've got to do it. Never mind what I told them! Never mind how many
times I said, 'I don't want to live like a vegetable. Don't want no tubes, no
machines. When it's my time, just let me go.' That's what I told them. Told
them all!"

A quivering feeling arose in my legs. My feet froze
to the ground.

It couldn't be.

Could it?

"They won't let you die," I repeated, my
voice rough as gravel. "You mean, they won't let you cross over?"

Deep furrows knit his brow. "Don't you get it,
girl? I want to
die
, period. My body's shot. Kaput. Worn out. I'll never
walk or garden again, not after this last stroke—and they all know it. I've
lived a good life, I'm ready to go. Got my wife waiting for me in heaven—I know
that. Everybody else too. Why the bloody hell would I want to rot in that
nursing home bed another damn day?"

I looked from where he stood over to the window.

My feet began to run.

"Now what are you doing?" he complained,
floating awkwardly beside me.

I reached the window in seconds. I pressed my face
against the glass and peered in.

Two middle-aged women and a man sat beside a bed,
looking glum and miserable. Lights flashed on a IV machine. A single tube led
from it to the motionless, closed-eyed man on the bed. The same man whose
spitting image stood beside me.

My eyes fixed on the blankets that lay over the
bedridden man's chest. I stared at the spot. I stared as hard as I had ever
stared at anything in my entire life.

The blankets moved.

He was breathing.

He was alive.

My heart pounded. My breath flowed in and out with
great, heaving gulps. "You're alive!" I shouted, turning to the
ghost—or whatever he was—beside me. "You're ALIVE!"

The old man looked irked enough to strangle me.
"I
told
you that!" He shouted back. "I'm not dead yet
,
but I will be soon; I can feel it. Their begging can't keep me around
forever."

"If that's what you want, I'm sure it will
happen," I answered, the words forming and coming out of my mouth of their
own accord. The majority of my brain was somewhere else.

Somewhere that the sun was shining again.

He was ALIVE!

"I'll move the car right now," I continued
to babble. "I'm sorry to bother you. Good luck with everything—"

I was running again. I have no idea how I got to my
car, much less how I drove it back onto the Kamehameha Highway and all the way
back to the condo without wrapping the both of us around a palm tree. The
thoughts, the images, consumed my brain so fully it was miracle I remembered to
breathe.

They could
talk
to me. Both of them. None of
the other shadows could. The old man was alive…

I had seen both the old man's body and his spirit.
But I could see nothing, anymore, of Zane. If
he
had… if he was…

I pulled the car into the condo lot. My arms shook
visibly on the steering wheel. I turned off the engine and sat quaking in my
seat.

But
where?

Zane couldn’t be in Oahu—he said he had never even
made it to California. He must still be wherever the accident happened. On the
mainland.

I jumped out of the car.

Images flashed before me. Zane's physical body, the
body I had never seen. Chest moving, lungs breathing… yet horribly, dreadfully
broken. Bruised and bleeding, struggling with the specter of death…

The thought chilled me to the marrow. How would Zane
feel to see himself like that? No way was
he
ready to die. But unlike
the old man, Zane had no one to sit beside him. No one to hold his hand, to
whisper encouragement. No one to tell him they loved him.

No one to wish him back.

I flew up the stairs and into the condo.

My parents were waiting for me in the kitchen, looking
perturbed. "About time," my father snapped, wresting the car keys
from my trembling hand. "Two days in a row, Kali? I don't know what's
gotten into you!" He turned toward the door. "Come on, Diane. We're
late enough as it is. Kali—we'll discuss this later."

My mother stood still, studying me. I had no chance
in a million of convincing her I was all right, even I wanted to, which I did
not. My eyes were  puffy as grapefruits. My every limb shook. There was no
telling what my facial expression was conveying. My father might be capable of
missing all those clues, but my mother took in every pathetic inch of me
without missing  a beat.

"You'll have to go without me, Mitch," she
said calmly.

"What?" he whirled around.
"Why?"

"Tell them that Kali isn't feeling well."

My father did look at me, then. And when he did, his
expression changed instantly from exasperation to concern. "Well, I
guess—. I mean, should I—"

"You go," my mother said authoritatively.
"We'll be all right."

My father looked hesitantly from my mother to me.
Then he gave us both a quick kiss on the cheek and departed.

I swallowed. My mother merely stood and looked at
me, waiting for me to begin.

I couldn't imagine how.

"Let's sit down," she suggested, gesturing
toward the sofa.

My legs wouldn't move. "I can't," I
protested, my voice little more than a  squeak. "I don't have time."

My mother's eyebrows rose. "Time?"

I nodded.

They'll believe you, Kali,
Zane's words
echoed in my mind.
And they can help you.

"You were right, Mom," I began in a rush,
hardly censoring the words as they spilled out. I didn't think I could tell her
everything—not yet. But I could do a whole lot better than I had been.

"I met someone here on the beach. We've been
spending a lot of time together, and I know it hasn't been long, but I—I've
come to really care about him."

My mother's face remained expressionless. "Go
on."

"He's the one I was hanging out with at Turtle
Bay, the only other tourist I've met. He's not dangerous—there's nothing wrong
with him at all. In fact, I think you and dad would both really like him."

"Kali," my mother broke in, her calm
demeanor breaking at last. "
Why
were you keeping him a
secret?"

Another image flashed suddenly through my mind. On
the way back from Turtle Bay yesterday, when his mind was idle, Zane had been
wearing a hospital gown…

"Mom," I said, my voice choking.
"He's gone now. He left, but… he's been in a car accident—back on the
mainland."

Her eyes widened. "
Already
?"

"I know it doesn't make sense!" I blurted,
tears spurting from my eyes again. "You couldn't possibly understand
unless I told you the whole story, and I will; I promise I will. He
wanted
me to tell you. But I can't tell you everything now, because I have to get back
home. As soon as I can. I have to be with him. He's dying, Mom!"

My mother's face contorted with a series of
emotions, not least of which was annoyance. "Kali," she said finally,
her voice poorly controlled. "You can't possibly go back to Cheyenne now,
all by yourself. I thought you were enjoying Oahu!"

"I love everything about Oahu!" I nearly
shouted. "Because of him! And if I don't get back to the mainland soon,
and help him, he may never see it again himself!"

She exhaled. Long and slow. "You are telling me
that you met a guy… wait, how old is he?"

"Eighteen," I answered quickly.

"A teenager," she continued, "and you
kept him a secret from us, for reasons you still can't explain, but in a few
short days you've come to care about him so much that you're willing to give up
the rest of your time in Oahu so you can fly back home and hold his hand in the
hospital?"

"
Yes
," I said heavily. "I'm
not making this up, Mom. I swear. For a while I thought he had died in the
accident—that's why I've been falling apart. But he didn't… he's still alive.
At least he was. I mean… I don't know! Don't you see, he could die at any
moment! That's why I have to fly back now!"

I flung out my last words, exhausted. There was
nothing left to say. If I tried to explain the shadows to her now, in the state
I was in, I knew I would never make it back to him. She wouldn't put me on a
plane—she would probably drug me and put me to bed. Getting a grasp on that
whole realm of surreality was something that would take time I simply didn't
have. And I couldn't do without my parents' help; it wasn't possible. I had no
money for a plane ticket; I didn't even have a credit card.

"Please, mom," I begged. "I'm telling
you the truth. Just help me switch my ticket to today—I'll take the first
flight out."

My next words were barely audible. They came out as
a breathy rasp. "He
needs
me."

Looking in my mother's eyes then, I knew what odds I
was facing. She had little reason to believe me, and a hundred thousand
good-parenting reasons for forbidding me to fly across an ocean by myself.

"What’s his name?" she said flatly,
unexpectedly.

"Zane," I answered, enjoying the sound of
the word even as it reached my ears, reveling in how nice it felt to voice it
to someone real, out loud.

Her eyes searched mine again, and I knew that she
was looking far deeper than the past few days. Covering up the shadows was an
unfortunate art form I'd been forced to adopt, but other than that, I had
always been honest with her. Lying was not in my nature. And as I stood there,
awaiting her verdict, I realized how very much that mattered. When every other
girl in the ninth grade had told her parents she was going to a sleepover, I
had admitted we had tickets to a concert in Denver. When I was ten and spilled
root beer on my best friend's father's laptop, I had confessed—even though he
had blamed their cat. And when I had promised my dad last New Years that I
would leave a friend's party if any booze or drugs showed up, and both did, I
had left.

Miserable experiences, all. The concert didn't
happen; my friends were furious. I lost my allowance for months. My New Years
sucked. I wasn't so sure I had made the right calls then, but I did not regret
my honesty now.

What mattered to me most in the world was riding on
it. 

My mother's gaze didn't waver. I held my breath.

She let out a long, resigned sounding sigh.

"All right, Kali. I'll change your ticket. You
can fly back home."