Wayward Souls

by Devon Monk

  “Stop thinking about my ass,” I mumbled.

  “I’m not. I’m thinking about your ass.”

  I chuckled.

  Lu paused at the doorway to the room. Dot stood inside, all the way over by the window, staring at the chair in the corner. Stella, unsure of what to do with herself, was standing in front of the chair, clutching her knitting in one hand.

  They both looked a little wide-eyed and nervous.

  “Is she here?” Dot asked. “Right now?” She wrung her hands, squeezing each finger of her left in her right, rings flashing in the low light.

  Lu walked over to the bed and sat near the head, tucking her feet up under her. She glanced over at the chair, then back at Dot. “She’s here.”

  “And, how does she look?” Dot’s pale skin went rosy. “I mean, obviously she’s… um…not alive, but is she, is she okay?”

  “Are you okay, Stella?” Lu asked.

  Stella glanced at me.

  “I’ll make sure she hears it,” I said.

  “Tell her I’m peachy.” Stella smiled. “Just like that.”

  I leaned against the doorway. “She said she’s peachy.” I put focus and power into it, and Lu nodded.

  “Peachy,” Lu said.

  Dot’s mouth dropped open, then she pressed her fingertips over her lips and nodded and nodded.

  “Good,” she finally said around her fingers, emotion thick in her voice. “Oh, that’s so good. Tell her I miss her. Terribly. Every day. Tell her my daughter has her name as a middle name and she hates it.” Dot huffed out a laugh, and Stella did the same.

  “I never liked it either,” Stella admitted.

  “This is the hard part,” Lu said, pressing her shoulders against the headboard of the bed. “I’m going to let her step into me for about a minute. I know that’s short, very short, but any longer will be hard on me and on her.”

  “It won’t be hard on me,” Stella said.

  “It will,” I corrected. “Lu isn’t exactly human any more. She’s…Well, death and her aren’t on good terms, but they’re familiar. Stepping into her physical space and mind can be hard on someone like you.”

  Stella frowned. “Like me? A sister?”

  “A ghost,” I said.

  “What do I need to do?” Dot asked.

  Lu pointed at the side of the bed. “Why don’t you sit here while Brogan and Stella get things sorted out.”

  “Your husband’s here too?”

  “Always,” Lu said.

  “You’ve done this a lot, haven’t you?” Stella asked me.

  “Enough to know how it works best for Lu. You need to be calm. Her mind and the realm of the living are filled with sounds and emotions and textures and smells and colors that will feel like a car crash now that you’ve passed.”

  She cringed. I instantly regretted my choice of words. “Bad example,” I said. “My apologies. But it’s going to feel overly…everything. Loud, vivid, smelly. Life is chaos.”

  “Okay,” Stella said. “Stay calm and ignore her memories. Has life been bad for her?”

  “Very.”

  Oh, there were good times too. Those memories might be just as strong as the bad times. But I knew Lu. She’d lock the good times, the times of us being together, the awkward early days, that damn rodeo, the bakery, tea, the love, away as deeply as she could.

  That was all she had left of us. She wouldn’t want to share it with anyone else.

  “All right,” she said. “It’s going to be startling. Is there anything else I need to know?”

  “Think about exactly what you want to say to your sister and say it first. If it’s too hard for you, if it’s too much for Lu to bear, I’m going to yank you out of there by the hair.” I smiled to soften the words, but the threat was very, very real.

  Stella held my gaze for a moment, then everything about her steadied. No more wide eyes, no more nerves. This was her shot, her best chance to say whatever she wanted to say to her sister that had kept her from moving on from this world.

  “You won’t have to do that,” she said.

  I believed her.

  “Quick and focused,” I said. “Stay out of her memories. Don’t let the living world overwhelm you.”

  “Got it.”

  “Ready?”

  She shook her hands and bounced on her toes a little. I wondered if she had been a gymnast when she was younger.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  I stood next to the bed, my legs half in and half out of the little night table. The table was new, and I barely even noticed it. The only voice it carried was a very soft humming, maybe the worker who had assembled it, maybe just echoes from the old wall and floor it sat against.

  “Lu,” I said, placing my hand on her shoulder. “We’re ready.”

  “Ready?” Lu asked Dot.

  Dot nodded.

  “Brogan’s going to help Stella step into me. It’s not…easy. So give us a few minutes to sort everything out.”

  “I will.”

  “Do you know what you want to say to her?”

  Dot nodded. “That I love her. And miss her. And I’m so sorry for what I did.”

  “Okay, that’s okay,” Lu said. “Give me a minute.” Lu turned her hand up on her knee, palm waiting for mine.

  I held out my hand for Stella, who quickly took it in hers.

  “I’m the connection,” I said. “I am here to close the circuit between life and death and all the ways a soul can be caught between them. I’ll hold this space so you can come back to it. So you’re not lost to Lu’s memories. So you don’t burn to ash when you’re exposed to the raging fire of life.”

  Stella licked her lips, a little startled at my description, but she nodded.

  Tough, this one. Made of unbreakable determination.

  I liked that about her.

  I took two seconds, maybe three, finding my center. There was a cost for all of us in this. Lu carried the highest risk. Not only would she have to endure the physical pain, ghosts were not very stable entities.

  It was easy for a ghost to lose focus in the chaos of being part of the living world again. If the host wasn’t strong enough, if the will of the ghost wasn’t strong enough, if the connection wavered, even a fraction, the entire thing could go to hell in seconds.

  A spirit could be torn to shreds, a bloody, ragged mess of a thing that either blew apart into dust specks—deader than dead—or shattered and stuck inside the host.

  Most living people wouldn’t survive having fractured bits of the dead inside them, and the ones who did, eventually went mad.

  I started humming the Little Bird song, urging the bird to fly through the window because there was molasses candy on the other side.

  Stella raised her eyebrows as I went on to the chickadee verse. I ignored her. The song helped me focus. I’d used others in the past, but once I’d heard this one, it had stuck and was now my go-to ghost-hosting focus.

  “All right. This is gonna be easy,” I said. “Nothing but duck soup. One, two…” I reached down and finally pressed my hand into Lu’s palm, my long, strong fingers wrapping around hers, “…three.”

  The hot jolt of energy flashed through me so hard, I shook like a tin house in a desert wind. It was—

  —black powder, lightning, fire—

  —it was—

  —storm through a forest, raging rivers carving earth, stone, mountains—

  —it was—

  —screech of joy, wail of loss, and voices, voices, voices, wanting, needing, loving, living, howling, begging, singing—

  —it was—

  —lu, Lu, LU—

  “There,” I whispered, as the connection between worlds latched and held, snicking together in the center of me, like a zipper from my head to my feet. “We’re clear. You’re clear, Stella.” I wasn’t looking at her, couldn’t look at Dot. All I could see was Lu.

  Lu, right there in her world, one set of zipper teeth sticking out into my world, Stella�
�s world.

  And where those two worlds met in me? Oh, the collision of color, heat, scents, life, that pummeled and shook me. I wanted to open my mouth and yell. I wanted to open my mouth and drink it down until it tore me apart. Blissful agony.

  Instead I inhaled slowly, breath catching and smoothing. Then I widened my stance and set my shoulders, as if I were holding up the ceiling, the house, the world.

  And exhaled.

  “What do I do?” Stella sounded lost and small. Wanting what was right there: an open doorway, a (mostly) living breathing body, a wonderful woman inviting her to step into her space, offering her a voice she hadn’t had in years.

  “Just walk through me and then to Lu. Don’t stop. You’ll fall into her. And when I tell you it’s time to leave, you walk back through me. Got it?”

  “Yes. I think so. Yes.”

  I was still watching Lu, and only Lu, but I felt Stella moments before she strode through me—

  —anger, jealousy, hope, the horrifying collision, metal groaning, glass shattering, then, pain and blood, so much blood and the blackness before the light—

  Stella passed through me, her stride steady, homed in on Lu like a heat-seeking missile.

  Lu hissed and jerked, her head snapping back, exposing her long bare throat, her body bowed out away from the headboard. She swallowed and swallowed, a trickle of tears trailing from the corners of her eyes. Then she gritted her teeth and tipped her face forward again, the movement full of stops and starts, as if the person running her body wasn’t used to the controls yet.

  She sat straighter, smaller jerking motions as she pressed her back against the headboard again. Every line of her showed the pain she contained. The struggle.

  She opened her eyes.

  And that was not Lu.

  I had forgotten. Forgotten how hard it was to see her like that, a passenger in her own body. Forgotten how angry it made me. How I wanted to rage and destroy and tear that invading spirit out of her with my bare hands.

  “Steady,” I said to myself, needing someone to say it, needing to hear it. We had all agreed to this. Agreed the price of Stella talking to Dot was worth the book she’d led us to. “Steady, man.”

  Lu opened her mouth, stopped, closed it again and cleared her throat. She nodded, one jerky little move, and tried again.

  “Heya, Dotty.”

  Dot made a small sound, her hand flying to her mouth, fingers pressing her lips. Just as quickly, she pulled her hand away and settled, remembering that she had very little time.

  “Stell? I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to make you mad. I never meant what I said. I was just angry about you dating Paul. I was such a selfish child.”

  “No, that’s why I’m here,” Stella said. Her intonation was wrong, slightly longer in the vowel than Lu. It was unsettling. “Stop blaming yourself. I wasn’t all that mad when I drove off.”

  “You were,” Dot insisted. “You were so angry at me.”

  “All right, yes. I was angry when I left. But I was halfway to Chicago and having a good time. A good drive. I was going to come home and tell you I was going to marry Paul, just to make you squirm at every family get-together.”

  “Oh,” Dot said, nodding. “That would have been fine. Really, it would have been wonderful.”

  Stella smiled and leaned forward, a smoother motion than all the others. “Oh, don’t buckle after all these years. Paul was a jerk.”

  Dot choked on a laugh. “He really was. You deserved so much better than him.”

  “I know that now. I think I knew it then. But he wasn’t on my mind when I…when I crashed the car. I wasn’t mad. I wasn’t angry at you.”

  “You should have been. I was horrible to you. I can’t believe the last thing I said to you was in anger.”

  “You were worried. You had good reason to be. But you weren’t the reason for my accident. Or for my death.” She smiled, and I sucked air in through my teeth. She had a nice enough smile, loving and forgiving and a little sad, but it was not Lu.

  I wanted to slap that look off her face. Wanted to pull her out of Lu and throw her into the next county.

  Instead, I clenched my hands into fists, tight enough my knuckles cracked.

  “If I could take it back, everything I said, all those awful things, I would,” Dot said. “I love you. I miss you. I gave my daughter your name because I wanted her to carry a part of someone who is so special to me. My only sister.”

  “Poor girl,” Stella said, “I’ve always hated my name.”

  Dot absently wiped the tears off her cheeks with the backs of her hands and laughed. “She doesn’t like it either.”

  Stella chuckled. Then she held out her hands, Lu’s arms raising, the wrists bent, fingers dangling like a marionette before Stella corrected and straightened her hands.

  Dot scooted closer, crossing her legs so her knees touched Lu’s, and grabbed her hands eagerly.

  “I don’t have a lot of time, but I need to tell you a few things. So just listen, okay?” Stella said.

  Dot nodded.

  “I love you. I love Mat and am so glad you married him. I love your kids. I’ve seen them as they grew up here, watched them move away. I love that you raised them here in our house, in our home. And I think renting the place out is perfect. Plus, whoever you put in this room I can spy on—so make sure you book all the hot guys in my room.”

  Dot snorted, it was a little wet and sniffly, but it was still a laugh. “Promise.”

  “I can’t do ghost things, like move objects or make sounds, so if you were thinking you could use that in advertising, don’t.”

  “I’d never do that to you.”

  “Unless I asked?”

  “Of course. If you wanted, I’d take out front page ads in every paper in Illinois.”

  Stella tittered. It was high and delicate, and not Lu.

  I inhaled. Exhaled. Started the countdown from one hundred.

  “I’ll be waiting for you. When you pass, I’ll be right here for you. We’ll step into that light together. And if anyone else passes before you, I’ll be there for them. You let them know that, okay? That Stella is here, knitting, happy, and waiting to help them through the light.”

  “I’ll tell them.” Dot wasn’t even trying to stop the tears now. They rolled in a constant stream, blotching her face with red, turning her nose pink.

  “And I want you to know I had a book once. It was magic. Real magic. I hid it in the shed. I tried to give it to Lu and Brogan in exchange for this conversation. That man stole it from Lu. She’s the rightful owner now. But I don’t want you to get mixed up in all that. I do want you to know that magic is real. And dangerous. And sometimes wonderful.

  “But you should stay away from it, okay?”

  “Sure,” Dot said. “I never even thought it was real, and I stayed away from it. It won’t be hard to stay away from it now.”

  “We owe a big thank you to Lu and Brogan.”

  “Yes,” she agreed.

  “Maybe give her a few bucks off her bill?”

  Dot huffed a laugh again. “Oh, she’s staying for free. Anytime. As long as I own the house. And I’ll book her in this room so you can talk to…Brogan.”

  “Unless there’s a hot guy who wants to stay. Then you book the hot guy.”

  “Hot guy gets the room, then Lu, then everyone else. Promise.”

  Lu jerked, and her eyes fluttered shut before opening again.

  “That’s it,” I said. “Time to leave, Stella.”

  “What? No,” she said. “It can’t be so soon. Just a minute. Just a little more, please.”

  Lu shuddered again, and Dot clenched her hands tighter steadying her through the tremor.

  “What is it?” Dot asked. “Are you okay?”

  “Stella,” I warned.

  “I love you, Dotty. I’m proud of you. I’m waiting for you. But don’t come see me for a long, long time, okay? I want to see you become a great-great-great grandma at least.”
r />   “I’ll do my best. I think Summer Stella might be thinking about kids in the next couple years.”

  “Oh, she’s been doing more than thinking about them.”

  “Is she pregnant?” Dot asked, then she shook her head. “No. Don’t tell me. If she wants me to know, when she wants me to know, she’ll tell me. I love you, Stella. I wish we’d had forever together.”

  “We will,” Stella said, as another hard tremor shook Lu. “Just not yet.”

  “Now, Stella,” I said. “Or I’m reaching in there and pulling you out by your teeth.”

  “I need to go. But remember, I’ll be right here. If you want to talk, or just want someone to listen, I’ll be here.”

  Dot nodded and nodded, her voice too choked up for words. “I miss you, little sister. I love you,” she squeezed out.

  Lu was shaking and shaking, as if she were buried in a snow bank, freezing to death. “S-same here, big s-sister.”

  “Out,” I demanded.

  Stella turned Lu’s face to me. I held my hand for her. If she’d take it, I could help pull her into this reality. If she didn’t take it, I was going to shove my hand in there and yank.

  Stella managed to lift Lu’s hand. Even though I had dulled senses when it came to the living world, when Stella dropped Lu’s hand into mine, even I could tell it was cold, cold, cold.

  Too cold.

  “Walk to me, right now, Stella. Right the hell now.”

  Lu’s eyes closed, her teeth chattering, body trembling. Dot held on to her other hand, crying silently, watching, but not understanding. Not fully.

  “Three,” I said, “two, one.”

  Stella hesitated, and I knew in that moment she’d lost herself. That seeing her sister had broken her concentration. That she had seen some of Lu’s memories, some of her life. Sorrow and then horror twisted her features. Her mouth dropped open in a hollow “O” as if she were hurting so much, she didn’t have the air to scream.

  If Stella didn’t step forward, if she didn’t disentangle from Lu and enter the ghostly realm again, those memories, Lu’s brilliant, hard, horrifying life would tear her apart.

  “Fuck it.” I gripped Lu’s hand tighter, and then allowed my hand to sink into hers.

  Stella was there. Cold and slippery like frozen silk. And Lu was there too.