Chaps and Chance

by Evans, Jessie

“What?” He tried to relax, but he couldn’t seem to banish the anxiety her previous words had inspired. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was wrong, that something terrible lurked in the golden field, waiting to pounce and rip this idyllic moment to shreds.

  “You are constant.” She swept his hair from his forehead, her fingers cool against his skin. “You’re the northern star and the sun rising in the east and spring muscling through the cold every winter.”

  He leaned into her touch. “Is that a romantic way of saying I’m boring?”

  She laughed softly, but her grin didn’t stick around for long. “No, it’s a romantic way of saying that you’re dependable and that always made me feel so safe. I never had to doubt how much I was loved. I knew that I had your heart and that, no matter what life threw at us, you were going to be by my side, helping me fight through it.”

  “Will be by your side,” he corrected. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “No, you’re not,” she said, cupping his face in her too-cool hands. “You’re stuck John. And that was okay for a while, but now it’s time to start moving again.”

  His brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s time to start feeding the kids something other than macaroni and cheese and hot dogs.” She smiled. “And Peyton’s going to turn into a banana if you don’t stop letting him have three a day.”

  “It’s just…easier,” he said, pulse speeding as something swelled at the back of his thoughts, a dark pocket of knowing that he didn’t want to burst through to his conscious mind.

  “I know, babe,” Lily said. “But the boys need variety in their diet. And they need variety in their daddy, too.” Her thumb brushed across his lips. “They need to see you smile. They need to know that life goes on and losing someone isn’t a death sentence for the heart.”

  John’s chest clenched and it was suddenly impossible to draw in a breath.

  But he didn’t want to breathe. Breathing would lead to remembering and he didn’t want to remember. He didn’t care if the monster lurking in the wheat jumped out and tore his head from his body, he wasn’t going to turn and look it in the face.

  He wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

  “You need to hope again,” Lily whispered. “And love again, because there is no one in the world who deserves love as much as you do. You deserve it and you need it to soften all those hard, constant edges of yours.”

  His tongue turned to stone and emotion shoved up his throat like a fist. He wanted to tell her she was crazy, that he would be worthless without her, broken and frozen so solid on the inside he would never thaw out again, but he couldn’t speak. He could only shake his head, fighting the tears trying to bleed from his eyes. He wouldn’t cry.

  He hadn’t cried…

  Not even on the night…

  The memory was close now, rising to the surface no matter how hard he tried to keep it at bay.

  “A bird in a cage will forget how to sing.” Lily pressed a kiss to his cheek, sending a fissure cracking through the center of his heart. “Don’t forget, John. It’s okay to let love back into your life. It’s okay to let me go.”

  “No.” He choked the word out, wrapping his arm around Lily and crushing her to his chest. “No, Lily. Please. Don’t leave me.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said, her body growing less substantial in his arms. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Everything is going to be all right.”

  “No, it’s not.” He tightened his grip, but Lily was fading away, vanishing like smoke drifting from a dying fire. “No. No! Don’t go!”

  John woke to find himself sitting straight up in bed, his bare chest covered in sweat and his arms reaching for something that wasn’t there.

  Someone who wasn’t there. Who would never be there again because he’d buried Lily last spring.

  Gritting his teeth against the fresh misery washing through him, he bent his knees and dropped his head to rest on his crossed arms. He pulled in ragged breaths, fighting to regain control as he lost her all over again.

  He’d had dreams about Lily before, but nothing like that.

  It had been so real he could still taste her kiss on his lips, feel the way she’d fit against him, her softness molding to his hard angles like they’d been made for each other. He could still hear her voice echoing in his ears, whispering that it was time to let go.

  “I can’t, Freckles,” he whispered, his voice hoarse with emotion. “I can’t let you go. Not until I know the truth.”

  And maybe not even then.

  There were times when John cursed his obsession with proving that Lily’s accident hadn’t been an accident, hating the way it stole his focus from his family and the sons who needed him to be both mother and father to them now that their mama was gone.

  But there were also times when his quest for the truth was the only thing keeping him going. It was his last tie to Lily, the last thread binding them together, and he didn’t know what would happen to him if it were severed.

  Maybe he would be able to let go and move on, the way he knew Lily would have wanted him to. Or maybe he would lie down and give up.

  He’d already reserved the plot next to Lily’s and there were times—dark moments at the end of a long day of struggling to provide his sons with a decent imitation of a happy home—when he couldn’t think of any reason why he shouldn’t join her.

  Maybe the boys would be better off without him. Maybe no parents was better than a father who was a walking cautionary tale, a miserable, haunted example of what happened when you dared to love someone with all your heart and the world took them away. At best, he was teaching Peyton and Carter to guard their hearts and keep love at arm’s length. At worst, he was teaching them that life was a cruel joke and death the sad, pointless punch line.

  Life can be cruel, but death isn’t an end. And love is never a mistake.

  The voice floating through his head sounded so much like Lily’s that it made the hairs on his arms stand on end. It felt like she was in the room, close enough to touch, close enough to hear him if he called out to her again.

  No matter how crazy he knew it was, his lips were parting to speak, when a small, pitiful voice sounded from the door to his bedroom.

  “Daddy, I’m sick.” Peyton sniffed and clutched a handful of his red and white striped pajama shirt. “I need tummy medicine.”

  “All right, buddy.” John pushed off the covers and stood, hitching his pajama pants higher on his hips. “Come into my bathroom and we’ll get you something.”

  Peyton lifted his arms to be picked up and John scooped his sleep-warm son into his arms. Peyton had just turned six, but when he was tired he still loved to be held. John hugged him close as he headed into the bathroom and flicked on the light.

  Peyton blinked sleepily and wrinkled his freckled nose. “I don’t like Halloween anymore, Daddy. I don’t want to do Halloween next year.”

  John set him on the counter beside the sink and reached into the medicine cabinet. “It’s not Halloween’s fault you were sneaky and ate half your candy stash on the way home. I told you to only have two pieces.”

  Peyton’s lips turned down hard at the edges. “Am I in trouble? Am I going to lose games tomorrow?”

  “No, you’re not going to lose games,” John said, shaking out an antacid onto his palm. “I don’t see any reason to punish you when you’re tummy is already doing that for me.”

  Peyton popped the antacid into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully for a moment, his little face pale and solemn in the harsh bathroom light. “I wish I could have a do-over. And only have two pieces of candy. Like you said.”

  “Do-overs would be nice,” John agreed, thinking of all the things he would do-over, all the steps he would take to make sure Lily was safe and here to help him tuck Peyton back into bed.

  But there were no do-overs and after he tucked his son into his bed with Peyton’s favorite stuffed dinosaur and a fresh cup of water on his bedside table, John r
eturned to his lonely room and lay back down on the right side of the bed. The left side was still Lily’s, even if she hadn’t slept there in seven months and would never sleep there again.

  It was still hers, the way his heart was hers, and he couldn’t imagine anything different.

  He couldn’t imagine letting her go, no matter how many songs his heart forgot how to sing.

  Percy

  It was Samhain, the night when the veil between the living and the dead was the thinnest, a time when even less psychically attuned people might receive a message from the beyond.

  For Persephone “Percy” Styles—a woman who had dedicated her life to communicating with souls that had passed on to the other side—it was practically a given that she would receive some sort of visitation in her dreams tonight.

  She’d gone to bed early, snuggling eagerly under her heavy down comforter, hoping she might have a visit from her mother or father. Or maybe Zeus, the big brother who had only lived to see his eighth birthday and remained a wild, giggle-inclined prankster who used to love nothing more than to play hide-and-seek with her in the spectral forests somewhere between this world and the next.

  She hadn’t had a visit from any of her family members since she was twelve years old, but she hoped this year would be different. She had turned thirty today, the same age her mother had been when she passed.

  Surely Sunshine would come back from wherever she had gone to visit her only daughter, perhaps with some words of wisdom for the future. Percy’s work was as fulfilling as ever, she had friends scattered like precious jewels across the world, and she had invested her inheritance wisely and would never want for anything as long as she lived. But still, there were times when she wondered if she was living right.

  Times when she wondered if she was living at all.

  No matter how many good friends she had, there was no one on this side of the veil who understood her the way her mother and father had. It made Percy wonder if her years of service to the dead had made her unfit company for the living, the kind of person who would never find a place in the waking world where she fit just right.

  On the first sleep of her thirtieth year, she craved counsel from someone she trusted. Even more, she longed to feel her mother’s arms wrapped around her, holding her close, making her feel loved, even if it was just for a moment.

  So when she opened her eyes in her dreamscape to see flaxen wheat waving softly above her head and a golden sun beaming down from the sky, she didn’t hesitate to stand up and search the field for her mother’s long, red ponytail.

  Sunshine had died at thirty, but in Percy’s childhood dreams she had often looked younger, perpetually twenty-something and lovely and full of questions, happiness, and hope. Above all else, her mother had been a curious person, someone determined to discover all of life’s mysteries. Not to solve them but to discover them and to hold them in her heart and head until they began to make sense.

  Or not. At the end of the day, Sunshine hadn’t cared too much for sense. She had preferred experience, exploration, and wonder. She had relished the challenges of being human and had made the most of her brief adventure on earth.

  More than anything, Percy wanted to be just like her. She didn’t want to waste a day. She didn’t want any regrets.

  Until recently, she hadn’t thought she would have any. But then loneliness had begun to creep into her life, narrowing her world until it felt like a smaller, less wonder-filled place to be. Her table for two in the alcove of her kitchen had started to look less cozy and more sad and she had begun to feel mocked by the phone that sat silent for weeks on end, as her far-flung friends became so wrapped up in living they forgot the spooky woman with the big green eyes.

  But maybe Sunshine would have some advice, a way to come to peace with her life spent straddling two worlds.

  “Mom?” she called out, turning in a slow circle, scanning the tops of the waist-high wheat. But there was no sign of her mother and no sound except the drone of insects and a faint whistling as the wind whipped across the field.

  Percy’s hopes were falling fast when she heard a deep voice murmuring from not too far away. Thinking maybe it was her father, she started toward the sound but had only made it a few steps when the murmur became an agonizing cry.

  The man shouted, “No. No! Don’t go!” his pained words echoing across the field before the sunny afternoon fell silent once more.

  Percy knew immediately that he was gone. It wasn’t just the silence; it was the aching feeling of loss he’d left behind as he’d returned to the living world. It was like a black hole, sucking every bit of hope from the sunny afternoon.

  She had never encountered another person from her side of the veil during this kind of dream. She had only ever spent time with the dead. Until this moment, she’d assumed it would be impossible to cross paths with the living. She wasn’t sure where the spectral worlds existed—in the afterlife or someplace in between this world and the next—but she sensed it was a place one wandered alone and experienced in snapshots, unable to see the entirety of what lay beyond until the day you went home for good.

  But now she’d heard another living voice, shared a psychic space with someone who still lived and breathed and hurt so profoundly her heart ached for him.

  She didn’t know his name, hadn’t even seen his face, but the man from the dream stayed in her thoughts long after she woke in her bed and rolled over to watch the full moon set behind the trees outside her window.

  He was in her thoughts as she booked her flight to Texas and contacted the curator of the ghost town she intended to visit during her stay in Lonesome Point. And when she arrived at the Lawson ranch at nine a.m. on a Friday morning to meet Laura Mae Lawson—the woman kind enough to offer to give her a guided tour of the haunted pool on her property—she was thinking of that man more than ever.

  It felt like a sign, guidance as sure as anything her mother might have told her.

  Maybe it was time to turn more of her attention toward the living. Maybe the living needed peace just as much—if not more so—than the dead. And maybe helping her fellow living, breathing man would help her learn to be more fully alive herself.

  Because she wanted to feel alive, and she sensed she was losing her chance.

  Her psychic’s intuition insisted that if she spent too many more years walking the edge between life and death, it wouldn’t be too long until she passed through the veil, never to return.

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