If Only Tonight

by Elsa Jade

  He points. “There. Do you see it?”

  I look. “Palm trees like severed heads. Gray sky. Gray fog. No stars.” My voice is starting to rise with something like panic, so I chomp down on my lip.

  His finger never wavers. “Farther. On the very edge of the horizon, as far as you can see.”

  “There’s nothing…” I realize with a chill that I’m repeating him. There’s nothing. But for all the nihilistic songs I’ve sung along with, if there is breath vibrating between vocal cords to make the notes that hang in the silence, then there is something. Suddenly, I think I see a faint shine. “What is that?”

  “I think it’s the ocean.” He shakes his head, a thick blond lock falling across his eyes. “No, that’s not true. I don’t think that, I just wish it was.”

  It’s just a sliver of light, thinner than the trail of a shooting star. Considering I spent my life—what there was of it—courting shadows, that elusive glimmer fills me with a ridiculous joy.

  And a tidal wave of regret. I’d played at darkness before. Is it to be my existence now?

  My eyes burn with the threat of tears. I never cry, not since I realized crying only works for pretty princesses. Ugly girls can only get mad. But I’ve welled up twice since I came back here. What is happening to me?

  …Oh. Right. Dead.

  I fix my gaze on that teasing splinter of light until the tears dry. “Have you ever tried to get there?”

  “Once. Just after I… came here. I don’t know how long I walked. A long time, but I never got anywhere.”

  There’s a lot he’s not saying in that pause. I use the lingering burn in my eyes to try to laser my way into his shuttered gaze. “How did you die?”

  Despite my insistent focus, he looks away. “The same way we all did. By killing myself.”

  I choke on a hard breath. “I did not kill myself.”

  “That’s what I said too. At first. Sure, I knew the storm surge was heavy, and the advisory said the riptides were gnarly, but it was my last day before I went back to med school and I wanted to surf.”

  Surprise rips me out of my anger. “Med school? You?”

  He rubs his forehead and sighs. “See, this is why I told everyone I didn’t want to be a doctor, even though it was a long, proud family tradition. Being a doctor obviously wasn’t for me.”

  My cheeks are hot. How much do I hate when people make assumptions—even true ones—about me? And I just did it to him. “Sorry,” I mumble.

  “Why are you sorry?” The mocking note in his voice reminds me how I’d snarked at him earlier about whether he’d been the one to hit me. “You didn’t force me to do something I didn’t want to do. I did that to myself.” His upper lip curls, a rogue wave with a rough break. “I said something epic, like, ‘Surf or die!’ and… A surfer who drowned. How sad is that?”

  I think of how I stepped off the curb without looking, thinking of death. “You made a mistake,” I tell him. “A bad decision is not suicide.”

  He finally looks back at me. “I guess that depends on what was in your heart when you decided.”

  I had most assuredly not decided to die! After visiting Aba’s grave, I’d left the cemetery and decided to walk back to my busline because I needed some time, when I realized there was nothing and no one left for me…

  When I hear the echo of my words in my head, it sounds pretty damning.

  Wyatt must see the dawning horror on my face. “All of us here had a moment where we thought, for whatever reason, life wasn’t worth it. And then we ended up here.” He reaches toward my hand clutching the wall where we sit, though he doesn’t touch me. “Honestly, when I first saw you, all in black and white, I thought maybe you’d been dead longer than I have.”

  I jerk back, furious just at his proximity that feels too much like the last time I tried to touch the light… and failed. “Right, because even a dead golden boy is worth more than a goth girl.”

  He withdraws his hand and snorts. “That’s not what I meant, but you already had enough clouds hanging over your head to put these shadows to shame.”

  I. Will. Not. Cry. I stare at the distant crack of daylight. If she was still alive, my Aba would laugh. I’ve worked so hard to guard myself against the stingers of life’s bees, built up layers of armor no one can breach, and now I want that tiny honey-gold glimmer like I’ve never wanted anything before. “Wherever that light is, I’ll get there.”

  Wyatt pushes to his feet as if he’s going to block my way. “I told you, it’s impossible.” He paces one step then back. “I shouldn’t have shown you. I just wanted…”

  “What?” I ask acidly. “Wanted to get my false hopes up?”

  “No. I wanted you to not feel so alone.”

  There’s another crack, like that bit of light, somewhere inside of me, and I don’t know what to do with it. “Come with me,” I tell him.

  The words are out before I can decide if they are a good idea or another damning one. I suck in my breath—as if I can recall my offer before he rejects it. Everyone gets rejected, I don’t know why I take it so personally, but I always have.

  “Alma…” He rakes his fingers through his hair, leaving harried furrows. The gesture makes his sleeves roll back, exposing the tattoo on his bicep. I shouldn’t be surprised, it’s a stylized sun and standing wave. No color, though, just bold, black lines: the simple, clear, everlasting expression of his love, nailed into his skin. The hiked-up T-shirt also exposes deliciously tight abs from pulling himself up onto a surf board over and over.

  I shake my head. “How can someone willing to walk on water be afraid now?”

  He drops his arms, hiding his belly and the tattoo. His expression is blank. “When I tried to walk out, the mistress came after me.”

  “Is Bianca a ghost too?”

  He shrugs and shakes his head at the same time. “The others say bruja.”

  I translate flatly, “Witch.”

  “I don’t know what she is. I told you when we touch—the ones who killed ourselves—it hurts us. With her, it’s different.”

  But it hadn’t hurt when he touched me. I feel heat in my cheeks and elsewhere at the memory. Isn’t that proof I didn’t want to die? But if my touch hurts him, does that mean he did? I refuse to believe one bad moment deserves this entrapment in nothingness. I guess it’s true a golden boy can hurt too, but no matter what was in his heart, he should be free to make his choices, whether to catch another wave or walk away. How can I try to convince him, though, when I’ve gone through life thinking the world is fucked and I was already half gone? So I don’t interrupt him when he continues.

  “Our mistress keeps us here, the suicides who can’t move on, and she takes something from us.” The muscles in his arms are clenched tight where he wraps them around his own body.

  I want to reach out and soothe the taut pressure, but I won’t risk hurting him. “What does she take?”

  He lifts one shoulder in a stiff shrug. “Jewel says it’s our life force, but we’re dead. Maybe if I’d finished med school I’d know more, but I think it’s something else. Our… our souls, I guess. When the mistress comes for me, I look into her black eyes and I see forever.” He shudders. “That sounds like something from a love song, but it’s my forever she is eating.”

  “Eating?” A surge of queasiness makes me swallow. “She eats ghosts?”

  “Until there is nothing left of us. Even then, we can’t leave.” He gestures out into the unchanging gloam. “That fog drifting around the house? After she finishes with them, it’s all that remains of the ones who came before us. Sometimes you can hear them screaming, but it’s only whispers now.”

  I sag back into the tower arch, dizzy with vertigo. It’s a long way down, but I suppose it’s silly to even dream of jumping. Without my big boots, though, I feel like I’m floating away from everything I knew.

  Or maybe that’s just because I’m a ghost.

  “I didn’t want this,” I whisper. “All the black was jus
t to keep anyone from seeing too much.”

  “I know,” he whispers back. “But I see you.”

  His words rip me open like I’m the sheerest, rotten silk. “I think you are the only one, ever.” I keep my voice low, but I still hear the wet waver of emotion in my throat. I want to stop myself, be silent again, but I feel I owe him an explanation.

  Or maybe I owe it to myself.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t believe in you,” I say.

  He gives me a wry smile. “You didn’t believe I was a ghost? That seems reasonable, actually.”

  “No. Well, yes, but I mean, I didn’t believe you were a good guy. I’m sorry I called you Golden Boy like it was a bad thing.”

  “Who hurt you, Alma? Before tonight?”

  “No one.” I hesitate, hearing the lie. “Everyone. I don’t know. I didn’t have it any worse than anyone else. But when my parents divorced—I know, everyone’s parents get divorced—there was just something about the way Dad left.”

  “He didn’t look back?” Wyatt guesses. He stares out into the darkness. “I wish I’d looked back before I lost everything I loved.”

  For a second, I’m so grateful that Wyatt thinks I was something valuable enough to actually lose. But I shake my head and say, “He did look back, but… it’s like he didn’t see us. At all.” Or maybe he had, and it—we—just didn’t mean anything to him. I’m not sure which is worse. “It wasn’t even really a surprise. Mom had been sick for awhile, and they’d been fighting even before that. I’d tried to be such a good girl, so I was never the thing they’d fight about, but after he left, my mom died, as if she just couldn’t take it anymore. And I was done with being a good girl.”

  Wyatt snorts softly. “Somehow this doesn’t strain my imagination at all.”

  My face heats a little, but I find myself smiling. “Yeah. I thought of the worst thing I could do in a good Catholic family.”

  He quirks one eyebrow. “Convert?”

  “Get pregnant.” At his gasp, I look down at my hands, ashamed. “There was a girl in school who’d had a baby, and she talked about how she looked down into its eyes and she saw…” I shrug awkwardly. “She said she saw what love was, a love that would never leave her. So I went to the biggest man-whore I knew: the captain of the football team.”

  “A golden boy,” Wyatt said with an exaggerated sigh. “Just so you know, I surfed because I’ve never been able to catch anything ball-like.”

  I raise my eyes to his. “Why couldn’t I have met you before?”

  His clear blue gaze is soft. “Would we have even bothered with a second glance?”

  I know he’s right. And I realize most of the blame would have been mine. “I went to a pool party after a game. He’d been drinking and gone into the bushes to piss. I followed him and… and I took off my bikini top. And he…”

  Wyatt’s hands clench into fists. “Did he hurt you? I wish I wasn’t dead so I could kill him.”

  “No! No, it wasn’t like that. He didn’t even touch me. I might as well have been invisible.”

  Letting out a shaky breath, Wyatt lets his fingers unfurl as if there’s nothing left to hold onto, not even his anger. “You wanted a golden boy, and I would’ve given anything to be brave enough not to give a fuck. And yet we both ended up here.”

  “I’ve always hated irony,” I growl.

  He reaches out again as if to cup my cheek, not touching, but leaving not even enough space for the drifting vapor to come between us, so close this time I feel the almost-touch like a luminous glitter in my veins. No pain at all, only something beautiful, something enchanting. Something… I’ve never felt before.

  His blue eyes widen, and his lips part as if he is about to speak.

  Or kiss me.

  Burn

  A scream rips through the mist, leaving streaks of nothingness through the gray. I flinch, thinking the lost ones are protesting this moment trembling between Wyatt and me. Maybe they know nothing good can come of it, like everything else in my life.

  But the fog parts to reveal a jaundiced yellow glow through the arch on the other side of the bell tower. Wyatt rushes over and looks down toward the back of the house.

  “Oh no,” he says. “Not yet.” He whirls to me, his hands raised like a wall. “Stay here.”

  I want to grab him, to show him our touch doesn’t have to be pain, but now is not the time. “What’s happening?”

  “Bianca. She shouldn’t need to feed again so soon. Snaring new souls drains her power, and bringing you here must have exhausted her. She’s been taking Jewel lately, but if she does it now, Jewel will fade.”

  I remember the hopelessness in his eyes when he told me about Bianca. But what I see now is the wild fury that must have been in him when he charged that last wave. And I’m afraid. Afraid of death in a way that would have made me scoff before and should be impossible now. “What are you going to do?”

  “I can distract the mistress. I’ve done it before.”

  “You mean she’ll feed off you instead.” I clench my hands into fists because I can’t grab him. I wonder how many times he’s done this, saving others when he couldn’t even save himself. I bet he would’ve been a great doctor. “What if she drains you?”

  For once, I want the pretty lie, blowing sunshine up my ass, but he only closes his eyes for a moment. “I’ll whisper sweet nothings in your ear,” he promises.

  Then he’s gone, the trap door left yawning behind him like a dark, silent cry.

  I race to the arch where Wyatt had looked down.

  The back of the house is a courtyard. Ranks of concrete planters holding spiky desert plants that always look half dead march around an empty pool. If the pool had been blue under the hot sun, surrounded by bronzed goddesses, it would have been a perfect fever dream of 1950s Southern California. But from my angle, I see wraith-like figures hiding behind the concrete urns, pale and hunted. The flagstones look like huge shards of broken glass, shining slightly, and at first I think water is seeping across the stones into the pool. But no, it’s the ever-present fog, slinking into the low spot and swirling like dry ice.

  Bianca is the star here. A dark star, for all her flowing white gown. Jewel is on her knees in front of her mistress, her head bowed so her blond hair makes a shroud around her face. Bianca grasps her hair, tilting the girl’s head back. A stream of light—translucent gold—flows like honey from Jewel. My eyes, grown accustomed to the gray, are too stunned to see if the light comes from Jewel’s mouth or eyes, or maybe her breast centered over her heart. But even I, from up here, can feel the warmth, the energy.

  The life.

  Jewel’s golden light begins to fade, taking on the jaundiced hue of the lanterns. Then even that begins to turn gray. The outline of her body is getting wispy, as if she’s leaking into the shadows to become another wraith, one step away from joining the drifting fog.

  “Stop!”

  Wyatt appears from a doorway below me, striding barefoot across the broken-glass pavement. The mist sends dreary fingers to lap at his ankles. If their touch hurts, he doesn’t pause to show it.

  “Let her go, Bianca. She can’t satisfy you.”

  I swallow at the grim determination in his voice and the strong set of his shoulders. This is no easy-going beach bum; this is the man who might have one day challenged death itself with a scalpel and science to back him up. Here, he has none of that, but he seems to glow with the light that faded from Jewel.

  Bianca faces him. Her eyes are black pits, bottomless with a hunger no light can fill.

  She spreads out her hands toward Wyatt, letting Jewel crumple to the flagstones.

  Can a dead girl die again? Her head is angled awkwardly toward me, as if her empty eyes still see. My breath is stoppered in my throat, silent, and so I swear I hear her whisper, “You are not one of us.”

  And I don’t want to be.

  I rush down from the tower, whirling down the spiral staircase, grateful for once I have no tight-cinched cors
et or heavy boots or chains of any sort to slow me.

  I burst into the courtyard, leaving streamers of mist to spin like dust devils in my wake.

  Bianca holds Wyatt in her embrace, her arms sunk halfway through his body. She is already stealing from him—stealing the life he lost too soon—and he is fading before my eyes. His head is canted to one side, his blue eyes closed, and her mouth is poised above his neck.

  She startles when she sees me, and her lips draw back in an ugly hiss. My heart stutters, as if it’s tripping over every point of her serrated yellow teeth.

  Without even thinking, without breaking stride, I snatch one of the lanterns hanging beside the door and charge.

  I’m on the bruja in another three steps, the lantern swung hard behind me. I unwind with dervish intensity, putting all my fear and fury into the mighty blow.

  The lantern passes through Wyatt in his translucent state. It slams full force into Bianca like a fiery wrecking ball.

  Glass shatters. The wrought iron shrieks as it bends. And the power inside explodes with arrows of golden light in all directions.

  Not candlelight. The same light as came from Jewel.

  Oh god, is every flickering light in the place an imprisoned soul? How many have been lost here, and for how long?

  I try to duck but I’m off balance and the arrows pierce me… and speed onward. The lurking wraiths I’d seen from the bell tower leap from their hiding places with wordless cries like a hundred doves, their arms outstretched to receive. The arrows find their homes, spirits given shape.

  More lanterns explode and more arrows are released until the courtyard is aglow with golden shooting stars. The hollow ghosts fill with light until they begin to float upward, rising out of reach, each one a small glowing sun, bright and warm as honey lit from within.

  I’m dazzled with the energy, the life.

  The love.

  “Alma.”

  Wyatt’s whisper in my ear brings me back to earth just as Bianca tosses him aside and rushes at me, her fingers curled into talons tipped in poisonous yellow.

  “You want to let them all go?” Her hiss is like palm trees rattling in the Santa Ana. Like a thousand killer bees. “Then you’ll be alone here and you can take their place!”