“Is Ruth there?”
“Ruth is doing spoken word, but she’ll come back.”
“Can you see yourself there?”
“I’m here right now,” I said.
“But you’ll be gone soon.”
I would not lie. I bowed my head. “I think so, Ray. Yes.”
We made love then. We made love in the shower and in the bedroom and under the lights and fake glow-in-the-dark stars. While he rested, I kissed him across the line of his backbone and blessed each knot of muscle, each mole and blemish.
“Don’t go,” he said, and his eyes, those shining gems, shut and I could feel the shallow breath of sleep from him.
“My name is Susie,” I whispered, “last name Salmon, like the fish.” I leaned my head down to rest on his chest and sleep beside him.
When I opened my eyes, the window across from us was dark red and I could feel that there was not much time left. Outside, the world I had watched for so long was living and breathing on the same earth I now was. But I knew I would not go out. I had taken this time to fall in love instead – in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death – the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human – feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light – all of it part of navigating the unknown.
Ruth’s body was weakening. I leaned on one arm and watched Ray sleeping. I knew that I was going soon.
When his eyes opened a short while later, I looked at him and traced the edge of his face with my fingers.
“Do you ever think about the dead, Ray?”
He blinked his eyes and looked at me.
“I’m in med school.”
“I don’t mean cadavers, or diseases, or collapsed organs, I mean what Ruth talks about. I mean us.”
“Sometimes I do,” he said. “I’ve always wondered.”
“We’re here, you know,” I said. “All the time. You can talk to us and think about us. It doesn’t have to be sad or scary.”
“Can I touch you again?” He shook the sheets from his legs to sit up.
It was then that I saw something at the end of Hal’s bed. It was cloudy and still. I tried to convince myself that it was an odd trick of light, a mass of dust motes trapped in the setting sun. But when Ray reached out to touch me, I didn’t feel anything.
Ray leaned close to me and kissed me lightly on the shoulder. I didn’t feel it. I pinched myself under the blanket. Nothing.
The cloudy mass at the end of the bed began to take shape now. As Ray slipped out of the bed and stood, I saw men and women filling the room.
“Ray,” I said, just before he reached the bathroom. I wanted to say “I’ll miss you,” or “don’t go,” or “thank you.”
“Yes.”
“You have to read Ruth’s journals.”
“You couldn’t pay me not to,” he said.
I looked through the shadowy figures of the spirits forming a mass at the end of the bed and saw him smile at me. Saw his lovely fragile body turn and walk through the doorway. A tenuous and sudden memory.
As the steam began to billow out from the bathroom, I made my way, slowly, to the small child’s desk where Hal stacked bills and records. I began to think of Ruth again, how I hadn’t seen any of it coming – the marvelous possibility that Ruth had dreamed of since our meeting in the parking lot. Instead, I saw how hope was what I had traded on in heaven and on Earth. Dreams of being a wildlife photographer, dreams of winning an Oscar in junior year, dreams of kissing Ray Singh once more. Look what happens when you dream.
In front of me I saw a phone and picked it up. Without thinking, I punched in the number to my house, like a lock whose combination you know only when you spin the dial in your hand.
On the third ring, someone picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Buckley,” I said.
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, Susie.”
“Who’s there?”
“Susie, honey, your big sister.”
“I can’t hear you,” he said.
I stared at the phone for a minute, and then I felt them. The room was full now of these silent spirits. Among them were children as well as adults. “Who are you? Where did you all come from?” I asked, but what had been my voice made no noise in the room. It was then that I noticed it. I was sitting up and watching the others, but Ruth was lying sprawled across the desk.
“Can you throw me a towel?” Ray yelled after shutting off the water. When I did not answer he pulled back the curtain. I heard him get out of the tub and come to the doorway. He saw Ruth and ran toward her. He touched her shoulder and, sleepily, she roused. They looked at each other. She did not have to say anything. He knew that I was gone.
I remembered once, with my parents and Lindsey and Buckley, riding backward on a train into a dark tunnel. That was how it felt to leave Earth the second time. The destination somehow inevitable, the sights seen in passing so many times. But this time I was accompanied, not ripped away, and I knew we were taking a long trip to a place very far away.
Leaving Earth again was easier than coming back had been. I got to see two old friends silently holding each other in the back of Hal’s bike shop, neither of them ready to say aloud what had happened to them. Ruth was both more tired and more happy than she had ever been. For Ray, what he had been through and the possibilities this opened up for him were just starting to sink in.
Twenty-Three
The next morning the smell of his mother’s baking had sneaked up the stairs and into Ray’s room where he and Ruth lay together. Overnight, their world had changed. It was that simple.
After leaving Hal’s bike shop, being careful to cover any trace that they had ever been there, Ray and Ruth drove in silence back to Ray’s house. Later that night, when Ruana found the two of them curled up together asleep and fully clothed, she was glad that Ray had at least this one weird friend.
Around three A.M., Ray had stirred. He sat up and looked at Ruth, at her long gangly limbs, at the beautiful body to which he had made love, and felt a sudden warmth infuse him. He reached out to touch her, and just then a bit of moonlight fell across the floor from the window where I had watched him sit and study for so many years. He followed it. There on the floor was Ruth’s bag.
Careful not to wake her, he slid off the bed and walked over to it. Inside was her journal. He lifted it out and began to read:
“At the tips of feathers there is air and at their base: blood. I hold up bones; I wish like broken glass they could court light… still I try to place these pieces back together, to set them firm, to make murdered girls live again.”
He skipped ahead:
“Penn Station, bathroom stall, struggle which led to the sink. Older woman.
“Domestic. Ave. C. Husband and wife.
“Roof on Mott Street, a teenage girl, gunshot.
“Time? Little girl in C.P. strays toward bushes. White lace collar, fancy.”
He grew incredibly cold in the room but kept reading, looking up only when he heard Ruth stir.
“I have so much to tell you,” she said.
Nurse Eliot helped my father lower himself into the wheelchair while my mother and sister fussed about the room, collecting the daffodils to take home.
“Nurse Eliot,” he said, “I’ll remember your kindness but I hope it will be a long time before I see you again.”
“I hope so too,” she said. She looked at my family gathered in the room, standing awkwardly about. “Buckley, your mother’s and sister’s hands are full. It’s up to you.”
“Steer her easy, Buck,” my father said.
I watched the four of them begin to trail down the hall to the elevator, Buckley and my father first while Lindsey and my mother followed behind, their arms full of dripping daffodils.