Touch

by Michelle Sagara

  “No. But he didn’t have to be.”

  The eyes shot open. “He did if he wanted to have any friends! He did if he wanted to be left alone instead of being bullied. If he could have fit in—” She exhaled sharply. “He was lonely. He felt isolated. You probably have no idea what that’s like.”

  “I understand lonely,” Emma replied.

  “No, you don’t. Don’t tell me you’ve ever lacked friends. I won’t believe it.”

  “My father died when I was eight,” Emma shot back. “My boyfriend died this past summer. I know lonely.”

  “You don’t know it the way someone like my son does, and you never will.”

  Emma started to speak; Michael interrupted. Mark looked up at Michael, too. “I’m not like other children—or other people. I’m like Mark.”

  Mark’s mother blinked.

  “I don’t know how to be like other people. I know how to be like me. But I have friends. I’m not always lonely.”

  “And people are never mean to you?” Mark’s mother demanded.

  Michael thought about this. “Some people are mean to me,” he told her. “Some people are mean to everyone. It’s impossible for me to like everyone,” he continued. “I don’t know anyone who likes everyone. So it’s impossible for everyone to like me. There will always be people who can’t.”

  Leslie opened her mouth, but Michael hadn’t finished.

  “If I learn to pretend—if I pretend to be someone else—the people who like me won’t like me. They’ll like what I pretend to be. That’s not the same as being liked. Those people wouldn’t be my friends because they wouldn’t know me at all.”

  Mark’s brow furrowed as he worked his way through Michael’s words.

  “Are you lonely?” Michael continued.

  Leslie blinked. After a long, confused pause, she nodded. She held out her hand for the empty glass in Phillip’s hand. Phillip kept it.

  “Are you normal?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re still lonely. Being normal hasn’t made you happier. If it hasn’t made you happier, and you’re the adult, why did you think it would make Mark happier?”

  “Because,” Phillip said, coming once again to stand between his mother and Michael, “she thought Mark would be happier if people liked him more. And he would have been.”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t be dead now, either.”

  Phillip’s jaw set. He couldn’t see the way his mother flinched—but he didn’t have to. Love was complicated. It was never all one thing or the other. But when he met Emma’s eyes, he flinched, his expression shifting into almost open pain. Phillip hadn’t killed his brother. Emma thought, if he’d known where Mark was, she wouldn’t even be here tonight; Mark would. And he would be alive.

  Phillip knelt, surprising Emma. He knelt in front of Mark to bring their eyes to the same level. “The day Mom took you for a walk, two things happened.”

  Mark nodded, waiting.

  “Jonas broke up with her.”

  Mark glanced at Susan, and Susan nodded.

  “And her boss sent her home from work with a warning.”

  “But—why?”

  “Because she had to leave work in the middle of the day twice that week. Do you remember?”

  Mark wilted. “To come get me.”

  Phillip nodded. “At school. The school called her. She had to leave. Her boss told her she wasn’t committed enough to work.”

  “But she—did she lose her job?” Clearly work meant something to Mark.

  “No,” Susan said, joining both of her brothers and their conversation. “Because you died. Her boss wasn’t very understanding about the school stuff, but she wasn’t a monster. I think she felt guilty, after.”

  Oh, the words. This is what her father had meant. Monsters—no. People were people. They were capable of monstrous actions, yes. But they were still people.

  “Did Jonas break up with her because of me?”

  Phillip and Susan exchanged a glance. “Not just because of you,” Mark’s brother said. But Susan said, “Yes.” When Phillip’s eyes narrowed in her direction, she folded her arms across her chest. “What? Mark’s different, but he’s not an idiot. He’s never been completely stupid.”

  “Mom?”

  Mark’s mother said nothing. Mark moved, dragging Emma with him.

  “Mom, was it because of me?”

  Emma saw the yes lurking in his mother’s eyes. And she saw the no his mother wanted to replace it with. They were in perfect balance for just a moment. “I came home from work. Jonas called. We had an—an argument. I couldn’t—I can’t—afford to lose my job.” She was crying now, but the tears trailed down her face like an afterthought. “He loved me. He said he loved me. But he needed to know that he was the most important thing in my life. That we had the same goals.

  “He asked me to send you to your father.”

  Mark flinched. “Just me? Not Phillip or Susan?”

  “He told me,” his mother continued, “that I’d done enough for you. I’d done all the hard work. I was going to lose my job if I didn’t turn things around. Ian had gotten off easy. It was Ian’s turn. And Ian has a new wife. He has someone else to help him around the house and to help with kids.”

  “She has kids,” Susan said.

  “Well, so does your father.”

  “I don’t have a father,” her daughter shot back. “And I don’t need one.” She turned and leaped onto the couch and put her arms around her mother. Emma wanted to cry, because Emma remembered almost being Susan. And saying the same things to her mother, to Mercy, in the early years. But her father had died. In no other way would he have left them. Susan’s father was still alive, somewhere. Alive and no part of his children’s lives.

  Emma looked across the room at her father; he was watching Leslie and her daughter as if—as if he wanted to step in and join them, to offer the comfort that an ex-husband and absentee father had probably never offered them.

  “Why didn’t you say yes?” Mark asked. Mark was probably the only person in the room who could.

  Michael opened his mouth, reminding Emma that her count was off by one. But he closed it without letting words escape.

  “What was I going to tell your brother and your sister?” his mother answered, putting an arm around that sister and drawing her close. “Jonas—wasn’t happy. He pointed out that I do earn more and that if we—if we were going to set up house, he needed me to be employed. He—” she laughed. It was not a happy sound. “He needed a sign of commitment. From me.

  “And I knew—I knew he was leaving. He was already gone.” She closed her eyes. Opened them. “I couldn’t—” she exhaled. “When you came home, I couldn’t deal with my life. I couldn’t look at you and not see the thousands of ways in which I’ve failed at everything. I just—I needed alone time. I needed the space.” She swallowed. “I took you out for a walk. And I left you there.

  “I didn’t mean to leave you there forever. I didn’t mean—” She pulled away from her daughter and rose for the first time since Emma had entered the room. But she didn’t walk away; she walked toward Mark. “I fell asleep, Mark. I—”

  “You were drinking.” It wasn’t a question and it wasn’t—quite—an accusation.

  “After my day? Yes. Baby—I’m so tired all the time. I’m so tired of doing it alone when I’m no good at life. I’m terrible at it. I never make the right choices. I never make the right decisions. I—” She came to stand beside her older son, rather than behind him. “You were my biggest failure. If I had been any good at being a mother, you’d’ve been happy. It killed me to see you cry. To see the way the world treated you. The way other mothers looked at you, as if you were stupid or alien. The way they looked at me.

  “I worried all the time. I w
as always worried. I never knew when the school would call, when something else would hurt you. I never knew how to make it stop. If I’d been a good mother, if I’d done the right things—” She lifted her hands, palm up, as if offering to take her dead child into her arms.

  And Emma saw the look on Phillip’s face.

  “But I didn’t. I didn’t. I tried to talk to your father.”

  Phillip said, “She didn’t ask him, Mark. She thought about sending you away, but in the end, she didn’t ask.”

  “Why?” Mark asked.

  Phillip rolled his eyes. “Because she loves you. She loves us all.”

  “But she took me—”

  “Yes,” his mother said, voice low. “All I could see that day was failure. Everywhere. I couldn’t . . . I wanted a few minutes of quiet. I wanted a few minutes when everything I saw didn’t remind me of how useless I really am. I thought—”

  “If I were different. If I hadn’t been born.” Mark had no mercy, but there was no anger in the words. His mother flinched anyway.

  But Phillip said, “Sometimes we just—we want a different life. We can’t have it,” he added. “And we don’t want it all the time. But sometimes we all feel that way. Even you.”

  Mark looked confused. “You think that?” he asked his brother.

  Phillip shook his head. “Of course I do. So does everyone in the world. Except maybe Susan. When Mom woke up she ran out of the house. She barely put on a coat. It was dark. We didn’t know where you were.” Phillip’s gaze hit the carpet. “Susan woke her up. Susan said, ‘Mark’s not home.’ And, Mark? If I’d woken her up—if I’d woken her up earlier—you wouldn’t be dead.

  “But I knew about Jonas. I heard her talk about work, and what her boss said. I knew—I knew she needed to sleep. And I let her. So it’s not just Mom’s fault. It’s mine, too.”

  Susan got up off the couch and came to stand on Phillip’s other side. “Are you mad at us?” she asked Mark.

  Mark looked confused.

  “Are you mad at Mom?”

  “I think I was. I think, before Emma brought me home, I was angry. But I was more afraid.”

  “Of what? You’re already dead.”

  Phillip and Leslie flinched. Mark, of course, didn’t.

  “I don’t know. I thought it was my fault. It was my fault I was dead. I thought I had finally done something so bad I deserved to be dead. If I were normal—”

  “We agreed we’re not using that word,” Emma told him.

  “I didn’t.” He turned to his family. “But now I know Mom was having a really, really bad day. The worst day ever.”

  Leslie began to weep. Mark reached out to touch her, the movement awkward and hesitant, as if he seldom offered comfort to anyone. His hand passed through her, of course.

  “And it was my fault,” Mark continued. “I didn’t do anything on purpose. But—it was my fault.”

  His mother was shaking her head. “It wasn’t—it was me. It’s always been me. I’m not strong enough—”

  “But it will be better now,” he continued, and Emma realized he was still trying to offer comfort. “Because now I’m not here all the time. Jonas could come back.”

  “Jonas,” Susan said, in a voice that was both ice and fire, “is never coming back. I’ll stab him in his sleep. Through his eyes.”

  “Susan—” Phillip began.

  She turned an unquelled murderous gaze on her brother, who thought better of the correction and fell silent.

  “And your boss—”

  “Mark,” Emma said gently. “Your mother was having the worst day ever. If she could take it all back, if you could be here and be alive, it would suddenly be the best day ever.” And she realized, murder or no, accident or no, it was the truth. It wasn’t what she’d expected to find when she’d knocked on Mark’s door. But it was true.

  “Yes, but then she would have bad days again. The same bad days.”

  And that, Emma thought, was the truth as well.

  “You lied to the police,” Mark continued, his voice dropping as if lying to the police were the larger crime.

  His mother nodded. “I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t tell them that I—that I killed you.”

  “But you didn’t mean to kill me.”

  “Baby, sometimes what you mean to do doesn’t matter. If telling the truth would have brought you back, I would’ve told them the truth. Telling the truth would’ve landed me in jail. I would have lost the job, possibly the house, and Phillip and Susan would have had nowhere to go.” She blew her nose and straightened her shoulders. “I’m sorry, Mark.”

  Mark smiled. It was genuine, and even peaceful. “Then it’s okay,” he told his mother. As if he were a child. As if apologies somehow made everything better. Emma only vaguely remembered being that child; it seemed so far away. He turned to Emma. “I would like to stay here.”

  “Can he?” his mother asked.

  Emma nodded. She couldn’t tell his mother there was nowhere else for him to go. She didn’t want to explain the complications the dead faced to someone for whom life was probably not a whole lot better. “He won’t be able to talk to you. You won’t be able to actually see him unless I’m here.”

  “Yes, we will,” Susan said. “He can play Tetris!” she shoved her hands through her brother’s chest, laughed, wiggled her fingers and then said, “Come on. Phillip!”

  Phillip rose. He turned, hugged his mother that little bit too tightly, and then allowed himself to be dragged off by his sister and the once again invisible ghost of the brother whose absence had haunted this house since his death.

  NATHAN

  NECROMANCERS CAN SEE THE DEAD, but they have to be looking. Emma hasn’t been looking. She hasn’t seen Nathan once tonight at Mark Rayner’s house. Nathan has done nothing to make himself visible, though. It’s a trick he’s learned, and he didn’t learn it the hard way—which would be the way Emma’s father did.

  The dead don’t always see each other, either. Mark would never have seen Emma’s father without some prompting on Emma’s part. Mark doesn’t see Nathan.

  Emma’s father does. He says nothing, does nothing, makes no sign. He’s never interfered in their relationship, not when Nathan was alive and not now. But he’s worried.

  And he should be.

  Emma brought Mark home. Nathan didn’t want her to do it; neither did her father. Eric was practically spitting bullets. People don’t think of Emma as strong. No, that’s not true—Allison does. But mostly, they think of Emma as nice, as if nice implied weakness. Truth is, Emma is kind. She hates to cause pain. All that Hall guilt works like a tunnel; she can’t climb the walls and doesn’t even see them most days.

  She saw them tonight. She saw them, but she’d made a promise to a child. The fact that he was dead didn’t matter. Or maybe, Nathan thinks, it mattered more. She was terrified, but the promise was more important than the dread. Emma doesn’t generally make promises. But it won’t stop her from making promises like this one. Emma sees the dead as people. She sees the living as people. The dividing line is so thin, Nathan wonders if she’s consciously aware it exists.

  He doesn’t have the right to be proud of her; he didn’t raise her, he didn’t guide her, he didn’t shape her. He spent the happiest months of his life by her side—but she was already herself.

  Emma was afraid. She came anyway.

  Nathan knows how angry she was when she arrived. He understands how much she hated Mark’s mother before she’d even approached his front door. He felt the same way.

  But what happened in the living room of Mark’s home wasn’t about anger or hate. It was about fear, and failure, and love; it was about loss, about the way pain can cause the losses people most fear.

  Nathan goes upstairs to where Phillip and Sus
an are bunched around Mark’s computer, watching the screen come to life as if it were a bridge between the living and the dead. Nathan can see Mark; his siblings can’t, but they know he’s there.

  Mark, however, isn’t aware of Nathan.

  Emma isn’t, either. Nathan knows when to leave her alone. It’s harder, though. She was his world while he was with her—but there were always things to do when she needed space for thought. Now there’s almost nothing.

  “You shouldn’t be here.”

  Nathan turns. He doesn’t recognize the voice. He doesn’t recognize the woman it belongs to. But something about her tone and the texture of her words makes it feel like the heart of winter in this small room.

  Mark looks up, frowning. He looks through Nathan. He doesn’t look past the old woman.

  To Nathan’s surprise, she smiles at Mark, the many lines around her lips and eyes transforming her expression. She doesn’t look terrifying when she smiles.

  “I live here,” Mark says.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Nathan adds.

  “And this is my room,” Mark continues, soldiering on.

  “Yes, of course it is. But I wasn’t speaking to you.”

  Mark’s frown deepens. “They can’t hear you.”

  The old woman pins Nathan down with a wordless glare that manages to make clear exactly what she wants him to do. He steps through the bedroom door as Mark begins an explanation of Tetris to a woman who was probably chiseling stone tablets when she was his age.

  It’s no surprise that it takes her a while to finally join him in the hall.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she says again, as the smile falls away from her face, leaving only the ancient behind.

  “I don’t have anywhere else I need to be.”

  If she has a sense of humor, she’s not sharing it. “She sent you.”

  Nathan says nothing.

  “She sent you to Emma.”

  “Does—does Emma know?”

  “I don’t know. Young girls in love are often blind and willful.”

  It’s a typical thing for the old and bitter to say, but there’s an edge to her voice that implies personal experience. “Were you?”