Touch

by Michelle Sagara

  “Even then, you would not take the power available in order to fight him.”

  “But I did.”

  “No, Emma. We gave. There is a difference. Even when you showed us the way by lighting the lamp, you asked and we gave. I believe, were you to hold that lamp, that any of the dead—no matter how weak or unaware—would see you and know you.”

  “Margaret,” Ernest began.

  Her look, in theory much milder than Amy’s glare of death, did what Amy’s couldn’t: It silenced him.

  “Longland is, of course, capable of killing without the power he defined himself by in life. But he is not of the living the way you now are. You must decide what you’re willing to risk.” She glanced at the rest of Emma’s friends and added. “All of you. I’m sorry.”

  CHAPTER

  ELEVEN

  EMMA DISCOVERED SOMETHING over the next uncomfortable half an hour: She was the only person present who was comfortable talking about a parent’s death as if it were a reality. Amy was practical enough to consider it a serious risk, but she was arrogant enough to assume it happened to other people. Allison was subdued, probably because Chase was a whole lot of angry, even if he kept actual words to himself.

  Michael was pale.

  Eric offered strategies for essentially lying to their parents; he offered help if they wanted to disappear for the foreseeable future. He didn’t offer advice, for which Emma was grateful.

  Forty-five minutes later, there was still no solution that somehow made everything normal and safe again, and Amy decided she’d had enough for the day, which meant the discussion—and the visit—was officially over. School, however, was not. She left Eric and Chase to Eric’s car, and gathered Michael, Emma, and Allison in her own.

  “Do you want to keep having this discussion without Ernest?” Amy asked, as she pulled into the school lot.

  “Any night but tonight,” Emma replied.

  “What’s tonight?”

  “I’m having dinner with my mother and her new boyfriend. I can’t miss it. I can’t be late for it. If something happens during dinner, my dad will be there to help me.”

  “With your mother’s new boyfriend?”

  “I know. It’s awkward.” But it felt less awkward, now. Emma and her mother had their differences—but Emma knew her mother was there for her. She was loved, had been loved, for as much of her life as she could remember. She didn’t want to repay that with secrecy, lies, and death.

  But she didn’t want to leave home, either. Her mother would be beyond terrified—and she’d probably blame herself. The timing couldn’t be worse. Maybe she’d assume Emma was running away from home because of the boyfriend. Her mother didn’t deserve that. She didn’t deserve that fear.

  But she didn’t deserve the fear the truth would give her either.

  “Sometimes you get what you don’t deserve,” Amy said sharply.

  “Did I say that out loud?”

  “No. But it’s all over your face.”

  Emma grimaced and got out of the car, wondering if this kind of worry plagued her mother. Probably, given the Halls.

  “Let’s see how long we can avoid Merrick Longland,” Allison said quietly.

  Emma didn’t answer.

  There were two ghosts in the parking lot, and both of them were familiar. Her father was standing beside Mark, who stood slightly behind and to one side, his shoulders hunched and stiff. Emma exhaled. “You guys go in; I’ll catch up later.”

  * * *

  She waited until they started to move; Allison lingered, and Emma mouthed a silent “it’s my dad,” which was as much comfort as she could offer.

  “Mark,” she said, defaulting to the Hall smile.

  Mark looked up—he had to. “I went home,” he said, in a quiet voice.

  She swallowed.

  “I tried to talk to my mom. She couldn’t see me. My brother and my sister couldn’t see me either. You can see me.”

  Emma nodded.

  “Your friends could see me because you wanted them to see me.”

  She knew where this was going; she could see it yawning, like a sudden chasm, inches from her feet. She looked over Mark’s head to her father’s drawn face.

  “I want you to take me home.”

  “My father took you home and—”

  “I want to ask her if she forgot about me.”

  Her father closed his eyes; Emma, however, slid her hands behind her back; they were bunched in fists. Did she pity him? Yes.

  It was a tricky thing, to pity someone. There was a difference between sympathy, empathy, and pity. Pity was what you gave to injured animals, not people. Not even dead boys who looked like they were six years old.

  “You already know the answer,” she said, her voice calm and matter-of-fact.

  Mark’s gaze slid off Emma’s left cheek. He wouldn’t meet her eyes for a long, awkward moment.

  “Mark.”

  He swiveled. “I want to go home,” he whispered. She heard anger in the softly spoken words—and behind that wall of anger, nothing but pain and loss. Emma seldom hated anyone as much as she hated Mark’s mother at the moment. And she knew it wouldn’t help Mark now—but she couldn’t think of a single thing that would.

  Had she never known Michael, she might have tried lying. Lies—lies a person wanted to believe—could be comforting; they could be an act of kindness. But they could also be an act of weakness. There was no way to minimize the wrong, no way to minimize the pain. Telling him that his mother wasn’t worth this pain was the truth, but sometimes truth didn’t change things, either. Not quickly.

  Not at all.

  The worst truth Emma had ever faced in her life was Nathan’s death. For the first time that she could remember, she felt, viscerally, that Mark’s truth was worse. There had been whole days when Emma had raged—in perfect Hall silence—against the pain of loss; hours when she had wished—and, oh, the guilt she felt—that she had never loved at all if all it amounted to was emptiness and endless pain.

  But Nathan had loved her. She had been loved.

  Mark’s mother couldn’t have loved him and done what she did. What kind of life had Mark known? What kind of death?

  “Em,” her father said softly. She looked up. “It’s not that simple. Nothing ever is.”

  She wanted to argue; she would have. But Mark was standing between them, and she couldn’t. The urge to somehow protect this child was so strong, he might have been alive.

  “Pain and fear make us do hideous, ugly things. Love and joy make us do beautiful things. At base, we’re all human.”

  “Dad, don’t. Just don’t.” Mark was watching her intently. It didn’t mean that he couldn’t hear every word her father was saying.

  “I know it’s difficult, but it never helps in the end to make monsters out of people; it prevents you from seeing them as they are.”

  “I’m not making a monster out of her. She—”

  “Em.”

  “You would never have done this!”

  “No.” He was silent for a moment. Had he been alive, he would have gone for his pipe; he had that expression. “Do you remember, when you were five, a friend of your mother’s died?”

  Emma frowned. Five was so far in the past it existed in fragmented memories. “Aunt Carol?” she finally asked.

  “Yes. She wasn’t an aunt; you called her that because you saw her so often. She died eight months after the birth of her first child.”

  “A boy. I remember.”

  “Do you remember that her son died as well?”

  Emma nodded. “There was an accident,” she began. She stopped, considering her father’s expression. “It wasn’t an accident.”

  “No.”

  “Her husband?” she asked.r />
  “No, Em. She shut herself in her car in the garage with her baby. She turned on the engine. Paul was at work. She didn’t call him. She didn’t leave a note. When he came home, the garage door was locked; the remote didn’t work.”

  Emma froze, arrested.

  “He went into the house to find the key. His wife wasn’t home. He assumed she’d taken the baby and gone out somewhere. He didn’t understand why the garage door was locked. He found the key when he found her; he had to enter the garage through the house. He was too late for either of them. Too late for himself. He didn’t kill them, but he did blame himself for what happened.

  “Carol committed suicide. The doctor—after the fact—thought she must have been suffering from severe post-partum depression. It happens. You don’t consider Aunt Carol a monster.”

  “. . . No.”

  “But she killed her son.”

  “She killed herself, Dad.”

  “Yes. She was probably afraid of the pain her son would feel in future if she abandoned him by dying. She took him with her. But he was an infant, he was helpless, he had no choice, and he died.” Her father slid his hands into his pockets.

  Emma watched him.

  “You don’t think of Carol as a monster. In the worst case, you pity her. You don’t think of what she did to her own son as murder. But her son could have had a life, much like yours, with his father.”

  “You can’t possibly be defending someone who could do something like this!”

  “No. I’m not. But I am profoundly grateful that I was never compelled to make such an ugly choice. I tried for most of my adult life to be what passes for a good man. But there were days when it was nothing but struggle. It’s not something we talk to our children about—we want our children to live as happily and worry-free as they can. We don’t talk about money. We don’t talk about marital difficulties. We don’t talk about struggles on the job front.

  “And I wonder, sometimes, if the choice to remain silent serves anyone well. We want you to grow up in a safe space. We make it as safe as possible. But—if something breaks, it’s one more thing to lose.”

  “What is?”

  “The faith and belief your children have in you. There’s a fair bit of ego in being a superhero in the eyes of your children,” he added, with a wry grin. “Because god knows we’re no superheroes in anyone else’s. I’m not trying to excuse what Mark’s mother did. But it’s the act that was monstrous—and it was the act of a moment, a day. Pity her.”

  “Pity her?” Emma tried to remember that Mark was watching her. “What does she need pity for? She got away with—”

  “It will haunt her for the rest of her life. Life is a test, Emma. A constant test. We want to believe certain things about ourselves, but as we see more and more of the world, we realize how small we are and how short our reach actually is. Things we swore we would never do, we find ourselves doing. It’s easy to judge from the outside.”

  “Mom wouldn’t agree with you.”

  He grimaced. “No. Had she been faced with the same choice Mark’s mother faced, she would have killed herself, first.” He turned to Mark, as if he’d never forgotten that Mark was part of the conversation. And maybe he hadn’t. “Would that have been better?”

  Mark stared, unblinking, at her father’s face. When he finally answered, his voice sounded even younger. “I don’t want my mother to die,” he whispered.

  No, of course not. What he wanted—even now, dead at her hands—was his mother’s love and acceptance. He didn’t even want to be alive again—he just wanted something he’d never had.

  “Do you love your mother, Mark?” Her father asked. Emma felt her lower jaw drop in outrage and shock.

  Mark looked down at his feet. “Yes,” he said, voice very small. “I try to be what she wants. I always try. But I forget, and it hurts her.”

  “Dad—stop it. Stop it now.”

  “We all love our parents,” he told his angry daughter. “Even when they don’t deserve it. Sometimes especially then.”

  “She has other children,” Emma said, voice low. “If she did this once, she could do it again.”

  “She won’t hurt them,” Mark told her. “They’re normal.”

  Emma didn’t swear in front of her parents. Her mother hated it—although she wasn’t above dropping a few choice words herself when she was angry. She was fairly certain her father would have disapproved as well—but at eight years of age, she hadn’t developed the habit. It saved her from saying exactly what she was thinking.

  “She told me to wait for her,” Mark continued, oblivious to the anger that rested beneath Emma’s silence. “And I waited. It was cold. I was cold. I’m still cold.”

  “Does it hurt?” her father asked quietly.

  Mark shook his head. “Not any more. But I want to talk to my mom.”

  “I have to finish school,” Emma told Mark quietly. “I’ve already had to miss two classes.” She hesitated, then added, “I have to be home for dinner as well. My mom’s invited someone over, and I promised I’d be there.”

  “After dinner?”

  She had homework. She meant to say she had homework. But excuses like homework seemed so pathetic and minor in comparison that she couldn’t force them out of her mouth. She didn’t want to take Mark to his mother’s house. She couldn’t see how it could bring anything but more pain to a child who had had enough of it. She didn’t trust herself near Mark’s mother.

  And what could she do to Mark’s mother? Call the police? Accuse the mother of murder—of abandonment—when the only evidence she had was the ghost of the dead child himself?

  It wouldn’t be the first time she’d proved her words with the help of dead children. But that had been different, and she knew it. Andrew Copis’ mother had been forced to leave her oldest son in a house on fire because she’d been carrying an infant and a barely mobile toddler and Andrew could walk. His death haunted her; it had almost destroyed her.

  But Mark’s mother?

  “Emma?”

  She exhaled. “After dinner. We have a guest. It might be late.”

  Mark said, in an uncomfortably familiar tone, “I don’t need to sleep, now.”

  * * *

  The Halls of Emery Collegiate hadn’t changed. They were the same paint-over-concrete; the floors were the same faux marble. The lockers, some dented by the boisterous set over the past decade, framed the occasional door and glass display cabinet; the teachers served as informal patrol as they headed between classes. Since the halls weren’t carpeted, noise bounced; no conversation was muted—you had to raise your voice just to be heard.

  The noise was a comfort today. It was normal. It didn’t matter that snatches of unavoidable conversation were about television, boyfriends, and unreasonable parents. Emma wanted to hear them, even if she could no longer join them. She wanted a world in which her mother was annoying, motherly, and safe. Even if that mother brought a new—and unwanted—boyfriend into the house. There was nothing Mercy Hall could do that deserved death by Necromancer. Or death by anything, really.

  But she didn’t deserve to have her daughter disappear without warning—or forwarding address—either. She watched the doors to offices and classes closely, approaching them with caution; she didn’t want to run into Merrick Longland. She caught up with Allison in social studies, just in time to avoid the late slip that should have been coming her way.

  Allison’s single glance held a question; Emma smiled in response. It was the silent version of “I’m fine,” and caused Ally to frown. More than that wasn’t possible. Michael sat at the front of this class, in part to avoid the chatting that often went on in the back. Emma wondered if he was absorbing anything the teacher said. She was having a hard time concentrating herself.

  Boredom was highly underrated. She could
n’t get Mark’s expression out of her head, and when she tried, she was left with dinner, her mother, and her mother’s new boyfriend. There was no resentment left in her, just a mouth-drying fear.

  She’d accept the new boyfriend. She’d work hard to accept him. Just let everything else be okay. Let the Necromancers ignore her mother. Let Mark change his mind. Let her friends’ families be safe.

  This is why Chase hates me, Emma thought. She thought it without the usual sting. If it weren’t for her, no one would be in any danger. She shook herself, took notes, and tried to find the discussion about willpower and its finite qualities interesting.

  * * *

  “Mark?” Allison asked Emma as quietly as she could in a very crowded stretch of hallway after the last class had ended.

  Emma nodded. She headed straight for the front doors, without the usual social lingering. Allison was right behind her, and Michael was already outside. He’d chosen to wait in the usual place, but he watched the doors open and close with a twitchy nervousness. No one wanted to accidentally bump into Merrick Longland, and the minute Allison and Emma reached Michael, they began a hurried walk to put as much distance between Emery Collegiate and themselves as they could without breaking into an out and out run.

  “Amy wants to meet at her house tomorrow after school,” Allison said.

  This surprised Emma. As a general rule, Allison and Amy didn’t talk much.

  Michael nodded, but Emma touched his shoulder anyway. When Michael was stressed out—and they were all stressed out at the moment—nodding came naturally; it didn’t mean he agreed or even understood what had been said.

  “I have track practice tomorrow,” Michael told them.

  “I’ll talk to Amy. If it’s okay with you, we can pick you up when you’re finished.” She steered him in the direction of his house. He was thinking, and sometimes Michael’s thoughts became the whole of his geography; he could literally look up blocks from now in confusion, because he had no memory of walking them.

  Today, Emma understood why. Walking down streets she’d seen all her life felt unreal. So much had changed in the past few months. She felt, on a visceral level, that the rest of the world should reflect those changes. It didn’t.