Lightbringer

by K. D. McEntire

  “My lay-ups suck now,” he admitted as Wendy flicked on the kitchen light in order to better see his wound. Mournfully he plucked at the fabric on his thigh. “Nana just bought me these jeans, too.”

  “Well, it's just a scrape,” Wendy replied, gingerly pulling the shredded jeans away from his knee when she was done, verifying that it was the only wound on him. “A nasty one, but it doesn't look like you need stitches.” Rising, she patted him on the shoulder. “Hang tight, there's some knockoff Neosporin and gauze in the bathroom.”

  When she returned to the kitchen, Jon held out his hands. “Give me that stuff and go stir the sauce, will you? I don't want the bottom to scorch.”

  “Aye-aye, Cap'n,” Wendy agreed. “Anything else?”

  “Turn the heat down to low. It needs to sit for fifteen or so.” While she did so, Jon thumbed the lid off the antibiotic ointment and slathered a largish dollop across his knee with fussy precision. “When you're done, can you hold the gauze while I tape it down?”

  “Gladly.” Wendy ended up applying the gauze for him and it reminded her so strongly of the prior times she'd done this very chore for Jon that she found herself growing misty eyed.

  “It's just a scrape, you big baby,” Jon admonished as Wendy applied the last stripe of tape and straightened, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I'm not gonna die.”

  “It's not that,” she sniffled, ripping a paper towel off the roll to use as a tissue. “It's just, I don't know, you haven't come to me with a scrape in, what, five years? Six?”

  Uncomfortably, Jon shrugged. “When he was here, Dad usually handled that stuff. You and Mom were always busy, you know, at the park and stuff.”

  At the park. Wendy sighed. “At the park” had been the code she and her mother used to mean “out reaping.” She hadn't had to use that excuse since their mother's accident. So long as Dad wasn't around, saying simply that she was going “out” usually sufficed, and these days the few times a month Dad was home he was generally at the hospital. Thanks to their sort of truce, Wendy felt little need to explain her whereabouts to him.

  “I guess you're right,” she agreed. “I was at the park a lot.”

  Jon shrugged. “Whatever. We got used to it. Mom and Dad didn't care, so what's the big deal, right?” He limped to the stove and dipped a long wooden spoon into the sauce, smacking his lips and smiling widely at the taste. “Momma mia, the sauce, she is perfecto!”

  “How are the calories?” Wendy asked and then kicked herself for asking. Jon had enough stress in his life as it was; the last thing he needed was for her to get on his case about his weight, especially since they hadn't yet talked about her bitchiness over the past few months.

  But Jon didn't seem to care. He rolled his eyes and licked the spoon elaborately, running his tongue far past the point where the sauce ended. “Ish's gweate,” he declared around his mouthful of spoon.

  “Sorry I asked,” Wendy cried, throwing up her hands and chuckling as her brother slobbered all over the spoon. In the living room, Chel stirred and sat up, her curls sticking up every which way and frizzy at the top.

  Wendy affected an outrageous accent. “My apologies, good sir!”

  Discarding the damp spoon in the sink, Jon wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Naw, no worries. It's got a skim milk base, I promise, and it's going over whole wheat pasta.” He patted his gut and grinned, waggling his eyebrows wildly. “This baby's goin' away slow, but yes, ma'am, she is a goin’.”

  “Smells tasty in here,” Chel yawned, staggering to the refrigerator and grabbing a plastic bottle filled with some thick, milky-looking liquid. Flush with sleep, Chel caught Wendy's eye and shook the bottle. “Protein shake,” she said coolly. “Want some?”

  “I'll pass,” Wendy said, waving her hand in front of her face. “Especially if it's from Dad's can. That stuff is foul.”

  Chel shrugged and took a deep gulp of the stuff. “Add some fruit, it's no big deal. It stays down, too.” She wiped her thumb against the corner of her mouth, checking for stray drops of shake. “I saw you go out with Eddie this morning. You done being a bitch yet?”

  Amused at how casually Chel asked, Wendy couldn't help but smile. “No guarantees, but I think I'm over my bitchy phase, yeah. You done puking after every other meal?”

  “Working on it,” Chel said mildly and took another sip. “It's a little harder than I thought it'd be.” Her head dipped down and she scowled, fingers tapping in rapid rhythm against the plastic sides of her bottle. “Okay, a lot harder.”

  “She quit the squad,” Jon explained. Chel scowled and shot him a dark look. Jon returned her scowl with a calm smile, shrugging as if to say she had to find out sometime.

  “But you love cheering!” Wendy protested. The idea that her bright and vivacious sister would quit cheerleading was as foreign to her as the idea of ceasing the search for their mother's soul. “What about Dad? Does he know?”

  “Nana does,” Chel said, belligerent. “She said she'd pay Dad back for all my gear for this year as a Christmas gift. You know, in case he flips about the money.” Nervous now, Chel gnawed her lower lip and lifted the drink up once again. Looking at her trembling hand, Wendy realized that Chel's perfect nails, always manicured and glossed to a high shine, were now ragged and blunt, ground down nearly to the quick.

  She's chewing on them, Wendy realized, examining her sister closely for the first time in months. Chel's nails were now too short, her hair starting to show glossy red at the roots, and even her makeup was barely there, only a one-two swipe of lip-gloss and eye shadow, leaving her forehead shiny and cheeks pale.

  “You're a mess,” Wendy breathed, hardly able to get the words past lips gone numb with shock. Guilt clawed at her chest, making breathing tough. “Did I do this? Make you a mess by picking on you over the diet pills?”

  “I did this to me,” Chel retorted, draining the last of the protein shake and throwing the bottle in the sink for Jon to rinse out. “You just gave me a wake up call.” She snorted. “But don't congratulate yourself just yet; you've still been a mega bitch and if I were smart, I ought to tell you to go to hell.”

  “But you're not smart?”

  She shrugged. “No one's smart when it comes to family. Blood is thicker than smart.”

  “Before we all break down and group hug like the bunch of sissies we are,” Jon interrupted, “Eddie stopped by earlier, Wendy. He's going out of town for the holidays after all. He said you'd better text him back later and he dropped off a box. It's on your bed.”

  “A box?” Wendy straightened up from the counter and started toward the stairs. Though she'd seen Eddie just that morning, the idea that he'd taken the time to stop by her house made her a little nervous. They may have made up, but things were still tense between them and she wasn't sure what to expect.

  “Probably a Christmas gift,” Jon called. “Food's almost ready, though. You coming down for dinner?”

  “Yeah,” she called back, mounting the stairs two at a time. “I'll be right down.”

  The box was compact and papered in old national geographic pages. Wendy lifted it and shook. There was a small rattling noise within, albeit muffled.

  Careful of her fingers, Wendy used the nail file rattling around her pen cup to slice through the scotch tape layered around each edge of the box. The lid lifted off and fluffy cotton balls puffed over the edge of the box in a white cloud. Wendy set these aside.

  “What the hell?” she murmured, shaking a seatbelt buckle and a piece of folded black construction paper out of the box. Holding the buckle up to the light, Wendy depressed the bright orange button on the front but the buckle appeared stuck in its clasp. The strap it had once been connected to was gone but a tough, thick beige thread was pinned within a crack in the clasp. The end of the thread was darker, rust colored, and stiff.

  Blood, Wendy thought, and thumped to the floor. Dried blood.

  Running her fingers over the buckle, Wendy wished that she'd bee
n there to greet Eddie when he'd brought this gift. She didn't need to be told what it meant to him, or what lengths he'd probably gone to in order to get his hands on it after the accident. Instead Wendy turned the buckle over in her hands and tried to recall Mr. Barry's face, the face she must have seen hundreds—if not thousands—of times before the accident.

  “Oh Eddie,” Wendy sighed, squeezing the buckle tightly. “I'm so sorry.”

  Eddie's note was written in his familiar looping cursive—silver ink shone bright against the black paper:

  Wendy,

  I know you think it's a joke, all the times I've said that I love you or that I'd do anything for you. But the thing is…it isn't. I am in love with you. I have been for years. What's not to love? You're smart and funny and fun to hang out with. More importantly, you're my best friend, my amigo, the only person who gets me and doesn't think I'm some weird freak.

  I know that Miss Manners would probably frown on a missive of undying affection added alongside a Christmas gift. It's probably rude or something. But I've been wanting to say this stuff to you for years. And I have been. I've been saying it all along but you always blow me of for think I'm joking and the one time I got you to even halfway consider it, back at the start of school when I kissed you, you thought I was just blowing off steam cuz of the crap I said about your mom or the crap you said about my dad. Either way, you forgave me for the kiss. But the thing is…I didn't want your forgiveness Wendy; I wanted you to kiss me back.

  Because I love you.

  So a few months ago I made this deal with myself. I said, “Self, if she doesn't take you up on the next offer, say goodbye. Do your own thing for a while. See how she likes life without Eddie the Great hanging around, slobbering after her affection like a dog waiting for scraps.”

  Well…you know the rest. I started dating Gina and you started falling apart. At first a big part of me was sort of thrilled—you loved me back, you just didn't know it yet!—but then I realized that it wasn't about me. Something else was going on. But by then it was too late. You weren't answering my calls or texts and you were avoiding me at school.

  I was a shitty friend, Wendy. I am so sorry about that. I decided to make up for it. I talked with the twins and we decided an intervention was in order. Obviously my declared love for you would heal you! This time I wasn't going to take no for an answer. This time I was going to honestly figure out what was going on in your head without projecting all my hopes and wants onto you. This time I'd be a friend first and a wanna-be-boyfriend second.

  It worked, sort of. You'd just started to open up and then WHAM, you had to go. So I waited. And waited. And waited. I expected you to be like normal when you came back to the car—tired, cranky, maybe angry, the way you normally are after a reap—but you weren't. You were glowing, Wendy. And just like that, I knew.

  You were in love…but not with me.

  So all during that talk we had this morning at the diner, I knew. Every single time you said his name—Peter, all gooshy like—it was like you were stabbing me in the leg with your fork. Before, when you talked about your new “ghost friend” I figured you'd picked up a human equivalent of Jabberwocky, except not so grouchy, and probably around our age. But I had no idea you'd fallen in love.

  Suddenly everything made sense. And I hated him. I don't even know the guy but I wished him dead…again!

  I'll admit, Wendy, I love you but the idea of you being head over heels for some dead guy grosses me out a lot. I know, I know, it's not like that, ghosts aren't like their bodies, they're not rotted or anything unless they've let themselves go bad, but still…honestly, Wendy, what do you know about this guy? I mean, you couldn't even tell me when he freaking DIED. “He's Russian,” that's all you could say about who he was before. Is that a good basis for a relationship? He could be, like, Rasputin's bastard stepson or something! He could have been some peasant farmer that beat his wife daily! He could have been a vodka-obsessed alcoholic…or worse!

  I'm getting emotional. I'm sorry. Anyway, the point of all this is…hell, if you want to be with this Peter dude, I'm not going to stop you. I'm going to caution against it, I'm not going to like it, I might even tease you for it, but I'm not going to bother you about being with me anymore. You are my best friend. You are the most important person in my life. You were the only person who really got how tore up I was when my dad died, and you were the only person who knew exactly how much I loved Dad when he was around.

  He was my hero, Wendy. And even though I'm still a little pissed at you…what I'm trying to say is that you're my hero too. What you do, going out and helping the dead, it's dangerous and it's crazy and it's not safe and part of me really, really wishes you wouldn't do it anymore because you're right, you could get hurt…but I'm also proud of you.

  The world would be a sadder place without you in it, that's all I'm trying to say. You're amazing and wonderful and I'm always going to be deeply in love with you, but other than this note I'll never mention it again.

  I hope you can find happiness with this Peter dude. And if you ever doubt what you're doing, if you ever think, “Huh, maybe I should stop,” I want you to hold that buckle. Because I know that if Dad were around he'd be proud of you. And I know that it was Dad's death that started you down this path.

  I love you, Wendy. Be happy. Merry Christmas.

  Eddie

  Dropping the note, Wendy wiped away the tears coursing down her cheeks.

  It had been so long since Wendy had thought of Mr. Barry as anything more than the man who she'd seen die, the one whose death had unlocked something deep inside her and allowed her to see the dead. But before that he'd been a special man, her best friend's father, and one of the few fun neighborhood dads. He'd had gentle eyes, she remembered, and a slow, kind smile. Eddie didn't resemble him much, he took after his mother, but the eyes were the same, especially when something tickled him. Mr. Barry, like Eddie, had loved a good laugh.

  She wondered what Mr. Barry would have done if she'd had to send him into the Light. Would he have fought it the way that girl's grandmother had?

  Wendy had a sneaking suspicion that, if Eddie were in trouble, he might have.

  Learning that Piotr and his kind thought of her as a monster, well, that had been a rude awakening. Once upon a time her mother had claimed that all ghosts were glad to see her coming, that they welcomed the embrace of the Light. But her own experiences these past few months with the Walkers and the White Lady had taught Wendy differently. At the end, when they were bathed in the fiery Light, the Walkers struggled and cursed and it was only the sweep of siren song that kept them at her side as she went about the deadly business of tearing their essence apart.

  The Shades though, and Specs, the ones who saw it coming…the few who knew their death in the Never was at hand, they saw the Light as a blessing. So which was it?

  Now that she'd taken the time to think about it, to get to know Piotr, reaping without consent felt wrong. It was as if she were forcing herself on the ghosts, sneaking up on them unawares and sending them on without their blessing, but until now Wendy had never really considered stopping. Staying out late, roaming around town in a ceaseless hunt for the dead—until now Wendy had done as her mother had always instructed her to do, ambushing most of the Shades in the dark, never really considering that maybe her mother had been the one who was mistaken, that perhaps her mother had been the one taught improperly. Maybe there could be another way.

  If not, Wendy could certainly try to make another way herself.

  The thought itself was sobering. After Piotr had left she'd swung from one extreme to the other, gone from reaping only in the most dire of circumstances to reaping because she felt like it. She'd done everything but the thing that felt most natural, most right.

  Did Wendy have to reap every single ghost she came across? Just because her mother had done so, as well as the countless other Lightbringers before her, didn't mean that Wendy had to follow in their footsteps. This wasn'
t a job she'd taken, after all; it wasn't as if she'd applied for it. It had been thrust upon her without her consent, a duty and a burden dropped in her lap by Mr. Barry's death.

  Wendy held the buckle to the light.

  “I have a choice,” she said aloud. “I don't have to be her kind of Lightbringer anymore. Not unless I want to.” It was freeing, admitting that fact out loud, and the stress began to drain from her shoulders, her neck, leaving Wendy feeling lightened for the first time in ages, possibly since her mother's accident. Wendy was giddy with the realization that all the horror of her daily drudgery could end as she saw fit. Once the White Lady had been taken care of, once the Lost had been freed, then she could finally relax. She could be the right kind of reaper, the volunteer kind.

  She almost sobbed with relief.

  “Wendy!” Jon called from downstairs. “Are you coming down to eat?”

  “Go ahead without me,” she called back. “I'm kinda worn out.”

  “Ok! I'll set some aside for you!”

  Hugging the buckle close, Wendy flopped on the floor, her hair spread in a halo and her eyes drifting closed. Sleep had been a rare commodity and the subtle sounds of the house around her—the twins downstairs eating, the distant hum of the TV—soothed her to sleep. Grateful for the respite, Wendy drifted into slumber. As she slept, she dreamed.

  In her dreams Wendy walked and walked. The familiar stretch of beach wavered before her, bathed in glaring sunlight and hazy from the heat. The sea murmured to her left, the craggy hillside loomed to her right. Seashell doors marched in a ragged line on the sand.

  Over the past months, when Wendy visited the beach, she had learned to glimpse the names of the dream doors out of the corner of her eyes, to read them with a swift glance but never look at them straight on. Sometimes the doors opened easily at her hand, leading out of terrible nightmares and into kinder climates. Other times the shells scattered with a touch, trapping her in terrible hellscapes that she had to endure until morning came and brought the buzz of her alarm clock.