A Gift of Ghosts

by Sarah Wynde

  ***

  “Earth to Akira.”

  “Hmm?” Akira responded absently, not looking up from her phone. She was trying to organize her past experiences with ghosts into categories, but it was proving much more challenging than she’d expected.

  She’d always thought that ghosts came in types. There were the faders, the confused, the free, the tied, and then the red-edged.

  Except in hospitals, the faders were the most common. Sometimes she thought they were more like memories than conscious beings. Like the boys in the backyard, who did nothing but run and play and laugh, faders seemed to be living and reliving important moments, as if they were an afterimage of a life, not an extension of the life itself. Akira called them faders because they were usually translucent, but the amount of translucency varied. She suspected that the older the ghosts, the more translucent they were.

  Then there were the confused. Most often, they seemed to be the recently dead. Hospitals were riddled with them, and they could far too easily start developing red edges. But they tended to disappear quickly. More than any other type of ghost, one minute they were there, and the next, they were gone.

  “Akira,” Zane’s voice was more insistent and she shook her head, as if coming out of a dream, and turned to him.

  “Yes?”

  “The plane’s landed. Lucas suggests we have dinner at the house?”

  “House?” Akira was still distracted, still lost in her thoughts. That one time at the hospital, the time with the broken ribs. Had that ghost said something about a door? She had, hadn’t she? What was it, exactly? She’d been nice for a ghost, worried about Akira. She’d asked if Akira wanted to come with her before she vanished. And she had mentioned a door. Okay, that meant at least one checkmark in the confused column.

  “The house where I live?” Zane repeated patiently. “Lucas stays with us when he’s in town. He’d like a chance to shower and change, and then have us meet him there. With Dillon?”

  “Um, right, yes.” Akira glanced down at her phone, tapping it to close the spreadsheet app she’d been using. Dillon. His dad. Dinner. Right. All of that made sense. Lucas was here to talk to Dillon and she was sure that Dillon would want to see him. She could do that.

  But if ghosts could go through doors, why were the tied spirits stuck? Like Dillon. If a door was available to him, why would he have spent years sitting in a car hoping something interesting would happen?

  “Akira.” A gentle finger was turning her chin until she was looking directly at Zane. “You good to talk to Dillon and Lucas?”

  Finally breaking out of her reverie, Akira smiled at Zane. “Yeah, I’m fine. Dinner at your house or whatever works is great. I’m sorry I’m so distracted. I’m still trying to figure out what happened today.”

  “A ghost told you where his dead body was?” Zane offered.

  “Also new,” Akira agreed as she unbuckled her seat belt and followed Zane out of the plane’s door, hopping down to the ground. “But no. It was the way he disappeared.”

  “That was weird?” Zane asked.

  Akira shrugged. “Different, anyway.”

  As they got in the car, she took out her phone again. She was careful about asking ghosts questions. Maybe too careful. Had Mr. Sato, her neighbor, been tied or free? She’d never seen him outside his yard, but she didn’t know whether he chose to be there or not. And after Mrs. Sato died, she’d never been back in the house. She assumed he’d disappeared, but she didn’t really know for sure.

  So many ghosts she’d seen only briefly. And her earliest memories were so confused. She barely remembered anything from before her mother died, and the few years after that—well, those memories were chaotic at best. She was trying to remember: that first time, the time with the broken arm, what had that ghost been like? But it was too long ago, the memories just wisps of vision and feeling. Her father had been yelling, trying to cast the demon out of her, and her mother crying, and then there was pain. If anything, the clearest part of that memory was the smell of the hospital, that almost acrid antiseptic flavor that hospital air so often had.

  “Christians—some of them anyway—think ghosts are actually Satanic,” Akira mused, not looking away from her phone. She felt, more than saw, Zane glance at her. They’d taken his car to the airport, so that Dillon could stay home with Rose and Henry, so they were on their way to get the Taurus before heading to his house. “I think it’s in Deuteronomy that the Bible expressly forbids communicating with the dead. People who talk to the dead are abominations or detestable, something like that.”

  “In some Buddhist monasteries, the monks leave offerings for ghosts before meals. Food or money or flowers,” Zane answered, stopping at the red light in town. They’d been silent through the drive, Akira lost in her memories, Zane not disturbing her concentration.

  Akira looked up, startled by his response. “How do you know that?”

  He looked her way again, and grinned. “What, you don’t think I’m a closet Buddhist?”

  She laughed. She knew some Buddhists in California, and it seemed unlikely. “Are you?”

  “Nah,” he shook his head. “But I’ve been doing some reading.”

  “About religion?” Akira asked, surprised again. That seemed even more unlikely than Zane being a burger-eating Buddhist.

  He shot her a tolerant look and said, “About ghosts. Now that I know they’re real, it seemed like a good idea to learn a little more about them.”

  Oh, of course. “Learn anything interesting?” Akira asked, curious. Years ago, she’d read ghost stories and traditions obsessively, trying to find anything that would help make her make sense of her world. But she’d given up: too many stories, too much conflicting information, and too little of it that fit with her experiences. Maybe nuggets of wisdom were buried in the myths, but most of them were from a time before modern science.

  “Lots,” he drawled. “Anything that’s true? I’ve got no idea.”

  “Probably not much,” she told him. “Although maybe I know less than I used to think I knew.”

  “How so?”

  On the plane, Lucas and Zane had quickly settled in to talking about business, which had been fine with Akira. She hadn’t really wanted to talk to Zane about ghosts. She wanted waffles. She wanted to go kayaking. She wanted to see her first real alligator in the wild. She—maybe—wanted to go swimming, if the day was warm enough and the water not too incredibly cold. What she did not want was to scare Zane off by seeming obsessed with death, a phrase that lingered in her memory like a bitter aftertaste from an otherwise utterly forgettable past lover.

  Now she shook her head, looking down at her phone again. “The little boy today? He took his father somewhere. The father, Rob, was saying that he couldn’t go and then they disappeared. Together. That has to mean something, but I have no idea what.”

  “Hmm, that’s interesting,” Zane answered. “Not a—?”

  “Don’t even go there,” Akira interrupted him, as he pulled up in front of the house. “It was not a white light. Or at least Rob didn’t see a white light. And Daniel . . .” She tried to remember his exact words but failed, and, mystified, added, “I don’t know what he saw. He said something like, ‘come this way,’ and then they disappeared together.”

  “So you’re thinking?”

  Akira shook her head again. “Let me get Dillon,” she said. “Would you mind driving?” She wanted to keep adding observations to her spreadsheet.

  Ten minutes later, they were on the road again, and Akira and Dillon were having a friendly argument accompanied by Zane’s interested silence.

  “But maybe if you helped me resolve my lingering issues . . .”

  “Psychobabble,” Akira interrupted Dillon. “I’ve tried that, really I have. And it doesn’t work. Unless ghosts are completely oblivious to their real issues and the ones I’ve tried to help were sending me off on wild goose chases.”

  “Okay, I’m not aski
ng for a white light, but a door would be awesome.” Dillon was leaning forward from his usual spot in the middle of the backseat, cheeks flushed with ghostly excitement.

  “Dude, you’ve talked to your relatives. What exactly do you think you could say that would make a difference?” Akira wished she hadn’t given Dillon this glimpse of hope.

  “Maybe I need to talk to my Dad?” Dillon offered. “Or, you know, let my Dad talk to me? He’s probably pretty pissed off.”

  Akira sighed. “There was this one ghost. When I was in college?” she told him. “I returned her library books. I transcribed a paper for a class on English romantic poets for her. Seriously, I did everything she could think of that she hadn’t finished. It wasn’t fun. And nothing worked. It didn’t make a difference. She was still haunting the café down the street from the library when I graduated.”

  Dillon flopped back with a sigh.

  “No ghostly roads, huh?” Zane asked, turning onto a narrow road.

  “A road?” Akira asked, looking at him. Where had he come up with that idea? Daniel hadn’t said anything about a road, but then he’d been very vague.

  “Native American tradition,” Zane replied. “Ghosts stick around for a year, then take the ghost road in the sky. Maybe Dillon needs to look up at night?”

  “Ha,” Dillon replied from the backseat. “He forgets how much time I’ve spent in a parking lot. Not much to look at except the sky. No, I’d know if there was a road. It’s okay, Akira. My life—well, or whatever you want to call it—is good these days. I don’t need a door or a road.”

  Akira looked over her shoulder, and smiled to acknowledge what he’d said, then glanced at Zane as he pulled the car to a halt. “No roads in the sky either.”

  Zane grinned at her. “I’ll keep reading.”

  “You do that.” Akira unbuckled her seat belt and turned, reaching for the door, a smile tugging at her lips. Maybe in a different mood, at a different time, she would have been worried that he was researching ghosts, anxious about what he might be thinking, but right now, today? Today, it felt sweet.

  And then she stopped, hand on the door, smile gone as if it had never been.

  The house.

  Oh, shit.

  The house.

  She’d been half expecting it to be ostentatious, but it wasn’t: a big white farmhouse, it was two stories with shutters on the windows and a wide porch extending half the length and then bending around the side, and lovely landscaping, with plenty of the bright flowers that made Florida so colorful.

  It should have been beautiful.

  And it would have been, if it hadn’t been so very, very haunted.

  The house in North Carolina had shimmered with energy; this house roiled with it, a crackling, snapping power as if it was trapped amidst a storm cloud that only she could see.

  Fear surged within her. She felt her heart racing, her throat closing, a fuzzy feeling in her legs that let her know her knees wouldn’t hold her . . . and then it doubled, trebled.

  “Dillon,” she gasped, but the name was nothing but a puff of air he could never have heard, even if he wasn’t already out of the car, strolling toward the porch, unconcerned about the deadly vortex that would rip him apart when he got too close.

  “Dillon,” she tried again, louder this time, but he was too far away, farther every second, and the door was closed. She looked at him, looked at the house, and then she turned to Zane.

  “Drive,” she ordered. “Drive!”