Page 31

THIRTY-ONE

Once my clothes came back, I spirited off. Light and shadow rippled over me, tumbling down through tree branches. Dying grass and dead leaves lifted beneath my feet, whispering together in the wind. I rubbed my arms, shivering with the memory of a breeze. I’d really begun to feel at home in graveyards. I’d always found them pretty welcoming, my dad’s plot in particular. I used to visit as if it were court mandated.

I tried to brush off his headstone, even if I had nothing to clean it with, like I usually brought, along with the offerings. I pretended to prop myself up against it, as usual.

Funny how I’d never stopped missing him—rather, stopped regretting his absence from my life—even if he’d left me on purpose. I hoped Cris would one day feel the same.

Movement on the edge of my vision made me tense up, wary of geists. When I turned to look, it appeared to be a big family gathering, their voices clear and alive. Some kids ran weaving around the headstones, not heeding the shouts from grownups telling them to slow down, be respectful. They looked like they’d just come from a festival, their faces painted up like skulls, still munching on candy. Following them through the cemetery, the adults hauled coolers, tubs of food, and a stereo.

Soon enough they were settling into what must’ve been their family plot, like they were at a tailgate, blasting Tejano music while the grownups cleaned up the graves, draped them in marigolds, set up the pictures and saints and personal belongings. Even the kids had settled down, looking more somber now with the photos out, reminding them of family they might’ve met, or at least heard about. After making their sweet bread and tequila offerings, the grownups settled in fold-up chairs with beer and tamales, leaning back to shoot the shit for the dead who hadn’t gotten to hear it. After their inevitable sugar crash, the kids listened quietly, hardly understanding why their parents and aunts and uncles were laughing one moment and crying the next. They would get it in a couple of years, when they looked back.

I could imagine it would make it easier—whether lying on a hospital bed, or in the street after a crash, or however many other ways there are to die—knowing your grave would host a party.

It would be too early for my own ofrenda. They weren’t traditionally put up until after the first year. But Cris wouldn’t know, from the one and only time I’d brought her along. I’d wound up babysitting that day, but I didn’t want to miss my yearly visit. She’d tagged along for the chance to see a cemetery, making up for another missed Halloween.

I’d filled her in on what we were doing, but I’d had a hell of a time explaining to her how a ghost could come back, if he was supposed to be in heaven. I’d ended up admitting that I didn’t really believe any of them came back. I hadn’t mentioned I’d begun to doubt heaven, as well. She moved on to the next line of questioning: how I’d scored smokes and booze. I told her they were purely ceremonial, like wine during the sacrament.

Sure enough, when I spirited there, I found Cris kneeling at my grave, still marked with a temporary sign rather than a headstone. She hadn’t changed, her clothes from last night rumpled, though she’d taken off the wings. The grass hadn’t yet grown back after my burial, dirt staining her white pantyhose and shoes. Streaks of mascara had dried on her face, bags under her eyes.

I nearly panicked and disappeared again, but I didn’t know where to go. Not in the daytime. The party wouldn’t start for hours. And suddenly, I didn’t know if I still had it in me to dance. Above us, the dying leaves still clinging to branches rustled violently, some falling to tangle in her hair. The sunlight brightened so suddenly, I raised my hands to shade my eyes—until I realized the bright white came from the hospital walls closing in.

Then I caught the whiskey and cigarettes nestled on the grass. She’d remembered. The walls melted away.

A sudden hand on my shoulder nearly scared me to death, again. Alastair, of course. I huffed at him.

“Don’t start,” I said. “We’re supposed to be visiting family today.”

For once, he wasn’t stern, his glance and voice both soft. “Not alone—and certainly not sober.”

I couldn’t believe that got me to smile. His hand slid down my arm to twine with my fingers.

Cris still kneeled there in silence. I wished, for once, she would try talking to me. She probably didn’t believe I could still be around to hear it. These offerings were more for herself than for me, just like the ones I used to leave on my dad’s grave, for my own sake.

“Did you ever give her that message?” Alastair asked.

His touch steadied me. “We tried.”

“What did you want to tell her?”

I closed my eyes, trying to raise my walls. But it didn’t really matter. He’d likely seen flashes of the rooftop in my memory. Or he’d suspected from the moment he read my obit.

“Lies,” I said.

He squeezed my hand. “There’s no need. Trust me, she’s already lying to herself, whatever she needs to believe about you.”

Maybe it would be better if she never got answers. Just like I would never know for sure whether my dad had truly meant to leave me behind. I still came to visit him anyway.

And even if she did suspect the worst, she couldn’t be that mad at me. After all, she’d brought along some of my favorite vices.

Alastair tugged at my hand. “I think that’s long enough for a visit, don’t you?”

It made my skin flush with shame to be sniffling in front of him again, as if that were worse than everything I’d already shared through our touch.

“I told you there’s a natural cycle,” he said. “Listen to all that laughter out there. In another year, she’ll be joining in. She doesn’t need you interfering with the normal, healthy stages of grief. In fact, it goes both ways.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have to cope differently on this side,” he said. “Our own preternatural cycle, abnormal stages.”

My throat closed around the words. “How could I leave her again? Wouldn’t it make me a monster?”

He tilted his head at me, mouth agape for a moment. Then he cupped his hands to my face.

“My dear…” His brow furrowed with melancholy, even as he smiled. “We’re ghosts.”

I choked on a strangled laugh, or a sob.

“Besides—”He gestured down at the booze and smokes. “It seems to me she’s given you her blessing.”

I couldn’t drink and smoke her offerings, but it felt like permission to indulge myself.

This time, only a few tears escaped. Not the flood I’d once dreaded. It might have done me some good, letting it out last night.

I turned to her for one last look. “Thanks, sis.”

I rested my brow on his chest, closing my eyes and letting him spirit us away.

***

When night fell, for once, we didn’t stay in the Haunt.

As I came back together from mist, the pulse slipped into my veins, all the way down to my marrow. Around us glowed an orange haze, cast by flame. Candles, dozens of them, floating amidst marigolds and bowed heads and crosses of stone. They lit the cemetery, more crowded with people than I’d ever seen. More tailgaters, most of them made up like sugar skulls, though some of the painted grins were wearing off from eating and drinking and crying. I picked up on a shot of tequila from someone’s raucously laughing tío.

For a moment, I thought we’d spirited someplace I’d never been, the country where my great-great-somebody-or-others came from, so long ago and so far away I’d never considered it home. But there were a few faces unlike the others in the crowd. Like some families with no Latine heritage had come to pay respects and were invited to stay for the food. I couldn’t be far from where I’d started.

But where did the pulse come from?

Alastair led me by the hand, following it. My feet fell in time with the beat. Somewhere nearby a mariachi band played, but the pulse drowned them out in my ears. All around me the living played at being dead, laughing and drinking beer and kissing each other. Little did they know the afterlife they acted out wasn’t far from the truth. And now, I wanted to live up to it—so to speak.

Amongst the oldest of the graves on the edge of the yard, the ones with no family and no names, we found the band. They’d conjured their ghostly instruments like gossamer in their hands. Around them the dancers circled, like the shadows the living once feared on their cave walls. They whirled further and further out amongst the stones as more and more dancers swept in, like fog blown by the wind.

Goosebumps prickled my skin, seeing everyone close enough to be together, living and dead, celebrating the afterlife. Could any of them feel our presence? Would they be scared, or comforted?

“Ready to shuffle off your mortal coil?” asked Alastair.

I shrugged, as if I wasn’t trembling. “No matter what I did, I would’ve ended up here, wouldn’t I?”

“It’s time to let go.” He didn’t gloat, no smirk, just a serene smile. “Look around—does anyone here look sorrowful to you?”

I couldn’t agree with him. All around, I saw sorrow along with joy. But I’d had enough of the former, blaming myself for being here, not permitting myself to enjoy it. Time to let loose like the calaveras around me, laughing in the face of la muerte.

He offered his hand. “Come and dance.”

As the band crept into another song, I recognized the voice starting to sing. Evie’s usually sweet voice suddenly dove low and raw, in a growl that grabbed me roughly and wouldn’t let go. Even she was extending an invitation to join.

I didn’t take Alastair’s hand—not just yet.

He knew why. Pulling back, he rolled his shoulders, tapped his feet, waiting. In my own limbs rippled an echo of his movement. I let my waist loosen. Our bodies whispered to each other, carried along by the pulse. His arms told mine to snake up, let palms meet without touching. We each swung to the side, away from each other, rolling briefly away in our own dances before circling back to meet again. My skirt whirled around my legs, fanning out.

We tumbled through the gravestones as we circled around and around. I couldn’t tell who chased who as we wove together and apart. Our hands finally met. He swung me into a bonfire, and we danced black and red in the white light, like we were going down in flames.

Suddenly, he pulled me close, and the music died. I cried out loud to have the pulse ripped from me. Around us bloomed the empty ballroom of the Haunt.

“Shh,” he told me, face close in the dark. He held his fingers to my lips. “Shh. Listen.”

He stroked my hair. I closed my eyes.

My ears pounded, as if with an echo. It grew, like over the years the pulse had been embedded in the very walls. Or it carried all the way from the cemetery, our souls in tune with it no matter where we were on earth, a beacon calling us home.

“You hear it?” he asked.

His love for this place, down to every dead leaf and cobweb, flooded my chest with warmth. Evie’s voice flowed in my veins, pounded in my head, drummed in my bones. My own heartbeat had never thundered so hard.

“I hear it.”

I opened my eyes, tapping my feet. He grinned, shuffling backward, beckoning.

“Welcome home.”

He vanished, and I followed.

We danced through shafts of moonlight. He kept spiriting out of reach, all over the mansion. I followed, shimmying forward, spiriting. At the stairs he mock-grabbed the rail and swung, and I did the same. He spirited higher, and higher, over the stairs, until our feet forgot the ground. I couldn’t deny the roller-coaster thrill in my stomach and drumroll in my chest—the same I’d felt looking down from the roof in my last moments—as he and I did a two-step in the air. He looked as good to me as the oblivion that had waited below.

This time, I fell on purpose.