Touch

by Michelle Sagara

  And Nathan, as always, knew.

  NATHAN

  EMMA LOOKS LOST AND A LITTLE FORLORN. It’s an expression that’s not at home on her face, but it’s also a gift: it gives Nathan something to do. He slides an arm around her shoulder, but it passes through her jacket, stopping at nothing solid in between.

  But she can see him; she can hear him. She was never big on public displays of affection. He can pretend—if he tries hard, and he does—that things are almost normal.

  “What happened?” he asks, falling in to her left, on the road side of the walk.

  “Mr. Taylor was in a car accident. They say it’s lucky he survived.”

  He steers by walking ever so slightly ahead; he can tell by the flush in her cheeks that she’s cold. They used to spend time at the local Starbucks, and it’s close enough to dinner that it won’t be crowded. He doesn’t ask her why she’s not at home; he knows.

  He doesn’t go home either. The reasons are different, but the end result is the same.

  He passes through the door; he tries to open it and fails. It’s frustrating. On a normal day—for a dead person—he’s now used to the idea that everything is permeable. When he’s with Emma, he regresses. He hates being dead.

  Emma doesn’t seem to mind that he can’t open doors anymore. He can’t buy her coffee. He can’t do anything but pretend to sit in the seat across from hers and watch her while she drinks. The latte cupped between her palms steams, curls of white between their faces.

  She starts to talk, but she realizes that while he’s listening, so is half the cafe. Nothing about their conversation would be forbidden or embarrassing in public—but having one half of a conversation, no matter how innocuous, would be. She drinks her latte while it’s still on the edge of too hot and then smiles at him. The smile is shadowed by death—his.

  He often wanted to be alone with Emma, but he’s sharply aware that there’s a difference. The only time she can respond to him without causing concerns for her sanity is when they’re alone. But most of her life isn’t spent in isolation. She’s isolating herself now.

  She’s doing it because of him.

  If he were a stronger person, he’d leave. He knows Eric’s right. He’s seen enough of the Queen of the Dead to know his presence here can’t be a good thing, not for Emma. But she’s his entire world right now. There’s no school. There’s no worrying about college. There’s no parental disapproval. There aren’t even other friends. The friends he did have, he can’t reach without Emma. She’s the gate that stands between Nathan and the pain of eternity, and she is incandescent.

  Even in her pain or her fear.

  He wants to touch her. He wants to take her in his arms. He wants to kiss her. You’d think being dead would get rid of all that; it doesn’t. It hones it, makes it sharper. When he was alive, Nathan thought Emma was the most important person in the world. Now he knows it.

  But he also knows that if her touch warms him and makes him feel alive, it has the opposite effect on her; it chills her. It’s like he’s frostbite. What Eric said bothers Nathan, and it’s hard not to drown in the worry; there’s not much he can do to distract himself.

  He can read over someone’s shoulder. He can slide into a movie theater and watch. He can’t talk while he’s watching it, which is probably a good thing—but he can’t talk to anyone about it afterward. He can’t drink, not that he did that much drinking while alive; he can’t drive. Driving was one of his refuges.

  But mostly he drove to get Emma or to take her home. Now he can only walk beside her as she leaves Starbucks.

  “Em,” Nathan says. “It’s cold. You should go home.”

  She’s silent for half a block, but she doesn’t change direction.

  “Em—”

  “Do you want me to go?” she asks.

  The truth is he never wants her to leave. He never did. But he had homework and parents, and so did she.

  “I don’t want you to freeze to death,” is his compromise.

  “Then I’m staying. I don’t mind the cold.” Her teeth are chattering. “I know I’m being unfair. But I don’t want to see a stranger’s car in the driveway. I just need a couple of days to get used to the idea. Is that too much to ask?”

  “No.” He watches the wind shuffle strands of her hair. He sees her breath in the white mist that dissipates. He’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans. “No, it’s not. But—”

  “But not more than a couple of days?” Her smile is rueful.

  “Not many more. Your mom’s not an idiot. If you give Jon a chance, he might surprise you.”

  “He’s like olives?”

  Nathan laughs. He hates olives.

  * * *

  Emma returns home sooner than she’d planned, but it’s not an act of kindness, not that way. She doesn’t want to go home, and starts walking in that aimless way they often had. Nathan follows. He knows he should tell her to go home, but he doesn’t want her to leave, not yet. Instead, they walk down roads where houses and lots get larger, and from there, they walk down sloped streets toward the ravine that occupies a large chunk of city real estate.

  Emma’s breath comes out in mist, adding visual weight to the sound of her breathing. Even though they’re alone on the stretch of street that girds the ravine, it’s not the only sound they can hear.

  “Nathan?”

  He frowns. “You’re not imagining things. Someone’s crying. I think whoever it is isn’t very old.”

  “I don’t suppose you have a flashlight?” she asks, with a grimace.

  He smiles and shoves his hands into his pockets. “Next time, I’ll try to die prepared.”

  She is silent for one frozen moment, and then she spins around to punch his shoulder. “That’s not funny!”

  “You’re laughing.” So is he.

  “Because I have to laugh or I’ll cry.”

  “Laughter’s better. Do you want me to go down there and take a look?”

  “You can come down with me.”

  “I’m not likely to slip, fall, and break anything on a tree I can’t see. You might have noticed the snow in the ravine.” Most of the snow on the roads has turned to salty slush, but in the ravine there’s a thin blanket of white. It’s the type of snow that often covers patches of ice.

  “Neither am I.” She laughs at his expression. He loves the sound of her laughter; he doesn’t hear it so much anymore. “Okay, maybe. But you can’t talk to the child if you do find him—or her; you can’t help if he’s lost or stuck.”

  “I could at least tell you whether or not he’s there.”

  She shakes her head. “Come with me,” she tells him, in a final-offer tone of voice.

  “Em,” he says, shaking his head in a way that once made his hair fly, “Don’t change, okay? And be careful—I don’t want to be with you so badly I want you to—”

  She touches his lips. It sends a shock through his body, and he leans into the tip of her finger.

  * * *

  It’s the dark gray that means night, but the moon is still silver. Emma begins to navigate her way through the snow, heading in the direction of the voice.

  She freezes when the crying stops. She fumbles in her pocket for her phone. “I don’t know where he is, but he can’t stay out here. Not at this time of night.”

  “He might be with his parents—”

  She gives him a look and turns back to the phone. The crying starts again, and she snaps the phone shut. “That way,” she tells Nathan.

  * * *

  The trees don’t so much open up as follow the line of a small stream that sometimes floods in the spring; Emma finds it easiest to follow the twisting line of the buried brook.

  Cupping her hands over her mouth, she takes the risk of shouting. “Hello!”

  Silen
ce. The crying stops.

  “I’m here to help you. Stay where you are, and I should be able to find you. I’m Emma,” she adds. “Emma Hall.”

  Silence again. Emma bites her lip. “I know you’re not supposed to talk to strangers,” she says, in her loud, clear voice. “But it’s very, very cold outside, and I think tonight, just this once, it would be okay.”

  It’s a good guess. It’s not a guess Nathan would have made.

  More silence. Emma swears under her breath. “I should have gone home for Petal,” she says, forgetting Jon Madding and her mother. “He could have found the child.” She inhales and exhales a cloud, squaring her shoulders as she tries again.

  Emma never gives up. Not when it’s important.

  “I was walking home from a friend’s house when I heard you,” she tells the invisible child. “I can just go home, if you want.” She’s lying. She isn’t leaving until she finds this child, one way or the other. “I have a phone if you want to call your mom. You don’t have to talk to me at all if you don’t want.”

  Silence.

  “But I’m freezing out here. It’s really cold. I need to go home.”

  More silence.

  “My mom won’t let me talk to strangers either. I got lost on the subway once, and I was really afraid. I thought I’d never, ever get home again. I started to cry. But a woman noticed I was crying, and she stopped and asked me if I was lost. I answered her, even though she was a stranger and my mom had told me not to speak to strangers, because my mom had also taught me I should be polite to strangers.

  “I never understood how you could be polite if you weren’t allowed to talk at all. But that woman? She helped me get home. She was going home, too, and she was going to the same station I was supposed to go to.

  “When I got home, I was very late, and I thought I’d be in a lot of trouble when I told my mom what happened. But my mom wasn’t mad at me. My mom was grateful that someone was there who could help me.

  “Your mom would be grateful, too. I’m sure she would.”

  Silence.

  “Emma,” Nathan says softly, nodding toward the trees on the far, far left. “Keep talking. I think I saw movement. I think he’s following your voice.”

  Which is technically not breaking any rules about strangers. Children have the oddest notions; they take things so literally. Emma is sort of used to that, because Michael does it as well.

  “My mom told me, afterward, that not all strangers are dangerous. In fact, she told me that most strangers are just like me—they want to help. They’re nice people. The lady who helped me was a very kind person.” Emma looks helplessly at the trees that Nathan indicated; she can’t see what he saw. There is no movement of branches, no definitive crunch of icy snow—just the silence. The silence has become almost unbearable. She’s stopped talking.

  She picks it up, kneeling in the snow, trying instinctively to make herself seem smaller and less threatening. Her coat is long enough to cover her knees as she does.

  “Because I remember that lady and how much she helped me, I try to help other children if I see them crying. I try to help them if I think they’re lost. I think you’re lost,” she adds. “And I want to help.”

  She holds her breath as she finally sees what Nathan has seen: a flash of movement, a small change in the darkness to the left. She still can’t hear much—the child must be really light or really small—but the glimpse gives her hope. She holds out both of her arms, and as she does, the child begins to cry again. The crying is different this time; the child is still frightened, but the fear has shifted from hopeless despair to something less heartbreaking.

  “I’m lost,” the small voice finally says. “You can take me home?”

  But Emma, arms out, freezes completely as the child finally peers out from behind the trunk of a leafless tree. She finally understands why she’d heard the child so clearly from so far away: It is far too late to take him home. He is already dead.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  “THIS IS WHERE I LIVE,” Emma said quietly. There was no strange car in the drive, which meant no stranger in the house. It should have been more of a relief than it was.

  The dead child was a young boy. Emma thought him six at most, but he calmly told her he was eight years old. He was skinny and short for his age, and he had the same kind of calm vulnerability of—of Michael at that age. His hand was firmly in hers; if she could have, she would have carried him. Her hand had passed beyond pain three blocks ago; it was numb. Her upper arm was tingling from the cold of both winter and a dead child’s hand.

  The boy nodded as he looked at Emma’s house. His name was Mark Rayner. He had one brother and one sister. He lived with his mother; his father mostly lived somewhere in America.

  “Will we go to my house after this?” he asked.

  Emma’s careful smile faltered. She had asked Mark where he lived, and with whom. She had explained that her own mother might be worried if she was out so late in the cold. And she hoped that Mark knew he was dead. If he did, he wasn’t sharing.

  She managed to get the front door open with one hand, which took effort; she was afraid to let Mark go. Why, she didn’t know; she didn’t cling to Nathan in the same way, and she certainly didn’t need to touch her father. But the boy seemed to take some comfort from the contact—and it might be the only comfort she could offer him. For her troubles, she got a face full of Petal as he ran full tilt at the door, his tongue wagging almost as much as his stubby little tail.

  Mark’s eyes widened, and he tried—still holding Emma’s hand—to hide behind her.

  “It’s okay, he doesn’t bite. He’s a really friendly old dog. You can—” pat him? She was irritated at herself for speaking without thinking. “He won’t hurt you. I don’t think he’s ever hurt anyone but himself; he’s a bit of a klutz.”

  “Emma?”

  This was so not what Emma needed. Mercy Hall walked out of the kitchen and into the front hall as Emma tried, very hard, to disentangle her hand. She didn’t quite manage in time. Her mother blinked. Emma could still see Mark; Mercy Hall couldn’t. But she’d probably seen something.

  “Who were you talking to?” she asked, in exactly the wrong tone of voice.

  Emma was too tired to lie; lying was a lot of work. She said nothing instead, removing her coat and her boots and putting them in the closet, her back—and her face—turned away from her mother. Composing her expression, she finished and turned around. “No visitors tonight?”

  “No. I have a lot of work. You’re alone?”

  “I’m alone.”

  Nathan had left her, not at her house but in the ravine. I don’t want to scare him, he’d said. And he’s already taken the risk of talking to one stranger. I think there’s a chance he’ll run if there are two of us.

  Mark was watching both Emma and her mother with a faint air of confusion.

  “Emma, I wanted to speak with you about Jon.”

  So not the conversation she needed to be having right now. “You said you have a lot of work?”

  “It doesn’t have to be a long conversation.”

  “I have a lot of homework. Unless you’re going to tell me you want him to move in, can we try this tomorrow when we both have more time?”

  Mercy opened her mouth, shut it, and stood very still, as if she were counting. Then she nodded. “You’d like him if you gave him half a chance.”

  “I didn’t hate him,” Emma replied. “He seemed like a perfectly nice guy.”

  “He is.”

  The silence was awkward. The smiles that filled it were brittle, and not much better. Emma kept hers on her face until her mother slid back into the dining room. The dining table was once again a mess of scattered paper piles, which was all Emma saw of it before she turned to Mark.

&nbs
p; “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.

  “That was your mom?”

  She nodded. “She has a lot of work to do, and when she brings it home, I’m always careful not to disturb her too much.”

  “Mine, too.”

  “Come upstairs? My dad’s not busy right now; I’ll introduce you.”

  He clearly had no desire to meet strange men. Emma wondered how he had died. She couldn’t ask, not yet. But she held out a hand, braced herself for the rush of cold as he took it, and led him upstairs to her room. Petal followed, whining.

  * * *

  Her dad was, in fact, in her room. He had a pipe in his hands and appeared to be inspecting the bowl. It wasn’t lit, or if it was, ghost smoke had no scent. But he turned to face her as she entered the room with her visitor and set the pipe on the windowsill, where it vanished instantly without, oh, setting the curtains on fire.

  “Emma,” he said, smiling, his gaze on the stranger.

  “Dad.”

  “You’re late, tonight.”

  “I’m sorry. I—I heard someone crying in the ravine, and I climbed down to find him. This is Mark; he got lost there.”

  Mark was, once again, peering out from behind Emma. “Mark, this is my dad, Brendan Hall.”

  Mark said nothing, which wasn’t a big surprise.

  “This is my room. That’s my computer—”

  “You have your own computer?”

  She nodded. “Do you want to see it?” Crouching, she hit the power button. She knew her dad could do something to make the computer respond and hoped it was a natural ability of ghosts, because Mark was going to be pretty disappointed, otherwise.

  As it powered up, she glanced at her father and mouthed the word “help.” Mark slid into Emma’s chair, his hands hovering above the keyboard, his gaze riveted to the monitor. Brendan Hall gestured, and she quietly stepped away.

  * * *

  “What happened?” her father asked, his voice very soft.

  She told him exactly what had happened, because at the moment, that wasn’t her concern. “I don’t think he knows he’s dead, Dad. And I’m not sure what to tell him.”