It wasn’t any of my business, of course. Not anymore. He’d just seen to that, by hurling my necklace the equivalent of a football field away. Except that I had decided recently to begin making everyone’s business my business. It was part of the “new start” Mom wanted us to have on this island.
And his business had always been my business. He was the one who’d started all of this. He’d come up to me. The first time, anyway.
So I couldn’t go look for my necklace. I had to stay. I had no choice, really.
Which was why that night in the cemetery I stood my ground and asked, “What happened to your arm?”
Ah me! How hard a thing it is to say
What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,
Which in the very thought renews the fear.
DANTE ALIGHIERI, Inferno, Canto I
He stared down at me as if he suspected I was insane. Well, why would he be any different from anybody else?
“What?” He still seemed pretty mad. A good sign of this was when his chest started to rise and fall as if he’d been running, which it was doing now.
So I should have known better than to do what I did next, which was reach out and run a finger down the scar I’d just spied, snaking up the underside of his arm, then disappearing into his black sleeve.
I should never have said, “That one’s new.”
But I did anyway.
He jerked his arm away as if my finger were a live wire and I’d just tried to electrocute him.
“Stop that,” he said, glaring. “It’s nothing.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing to me,” I said worriedly. I’d started to add a few things together in my head and didn’t like what I was coming up with. “Is that a consequence?”
His eyes narrowed. I could feel the heat from his body, and smell the scent I remembered so well — a mix of wood smoke and something that reminded me of autumn.
“I am not a bird,” he said in a dangerous voice. “I don’t require aid, from you or anyone else. Does your mother know where you are right now?”
It was funny that he mentioned my mother. Because it was her voice I was hearing in my head just then, urging me to tell him that thing I hadn’t said the last time I’d seen him, that awful day at school…that thing he hadn’t given me a chance to say. He’d left before I could.
Well, he’d had to. The police were coming. Again.
Not that my mother knew anything about him, except what the psychiatrists (and now, I knew, Grandma) all believed: that he wasn’t real.
But if Mom had known what I knew about him, she’d have wanted me to say it. I obviously needed to say it, now more than ever, because it was clear that my initial assessment of him hadn’t been that far off:
He was a wild thing, like that dove I’d found, badly in need of someone’s aid, even if he didn’t agree.
And though by helping him, I might only be hurting him more, I had to at least try.
So I said what I probably should have said to him a long time ago: “I’m sorry.”
His eyes narrowed even more. “Pardon me?” he said.
“I’m sorry,” I repeated, more loudly this time. “For what I did to you the day I died. If there were…consequences. Especially for you.”
He didn’t respond, except to continue to stare down at me as if I were the one with the antisocial personality disorder. Who gives a girl a necklace — especially one with a stone that changed colors like the sky, sometimes gray as a February morning, other times, black as midnight — and then hurls it across a cemetery when she very politely tries to give it back because she suspects he might be enduring consequences on her behalf?
But why was I the only one apologizing? It would have been nice to hear a “sorry” or two out of him.
Because he had been horrible to me the day we’d met.
And, yes, he’d sort of made up for some of it by what he’d done for me at the jewelry store, and later, at school with Mr. Mueller.
But still. I’d lost so much. True, I’d gotten my life back. But what about all the things I hadn’t gotten back? Like my parents’ marriage, and Hannah, for instance. I hadn’t been back at school for even a full day after I got out of the hospital before my then best friend, Hannah Chang, dumped me for telling her that — among other things, like hanging out at the mall hoping to catch glimpses of her older brother’s friends, and neglecting Double Dare — the “Hold your breath when you go by the graveyard, or evil spirits will possess your soul” thing we used to like to play was stupid, and that I wasn’t doing it anymore.
True, at fifteen, we were too old for things like that, anyway.
But I hadn’t helped matters by cheerfully informing her, “Don’t worry about the evil, Hannah. I can see it now. And I’ll protect you from it.”
No wonder she called me crazy. It’s what everyone at school started calling me afterwards.
I guess I can’t blame them. Why wouldn’t you call someone who says she can see evil — and has the ability to protect people from it — crazy? Especially when she later failed so spectacularly to do so.
I know Hannah only called me crazy because she was worried about me. She must have thought I’d come back from the hospital after my accident acting…well, a little mentally unstable.
Hannah told me she was sorry later, and I could tell she really meant it. Friends sometimes drift apart, she said. Like she had with Double Dare. She just didn’t have time for horses anymore, she explained. She’d moved on to other things. Like basketball. And boys.