Beautiful Redemption
Page 11

“I am.”
“No, you’re not.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if you were, you wouldn’t be standing here. You would be halfway home, with one foot back in Gatlin.”
Would I? It was hard to imagine.
“Close your eyes.”
I closed them obediently.
“Repeat what I say,” she whispered.
In the silence, I heard her words inside my mind, like she was speaking aloud to me.
We were Kelting, my mother and I. In death, from the grave, in a faraway world. It seemed familiar between us, something from long ago, something we had lost.
Carry me home.
Carry me home, I said.
Ducite me domum.
Ducite me domum, I said.
To remember.
Ut meminissem, I said.
And be remembered.
Ut in memoria tenear, I said.
You remember, my son.
I remember, I said.
You will remember.
I will always remember, I said.
I am the one, I said.
You will—
I will—
Remember…
CHAPTER 6
Silver Button
I opened my eyes.
I was standing in the front hallway of Lena’s house. It worked. I had crossed. I was back in Gatlin, in the world of the living. I was overwhelmed with relief; it was still here.
Gatlin remained. Which meant Lena remained. Which meant everything I’d lost—everything I’d done—hadn’t been for nothing.
I leaned against the wall behind me. The room stopped spinning, and I lifted my head and looked around at the old plaster walls.
The familiar flying staircase. The shining lacquered floors.
Ravenwood.
The real Ravenwood. Mortal, solid, and heavy beneath my feet. I was back.
Lena.
I closed my eyes and fought away the prickling tears.
I’m here, L. I did it.
I don’t know how long I stood frozen in place, waiting for a response, like I thought she was going to come running around the corner and into my arms.
She didn’t.
She didn’t even feel me Kelting.
I drew in a deep breath. The enormity of it all was still hitting me.
Ravenwood looked different than the last time I was here. It wasn’t really a surprise—Ravenwood was always changing—but even so, I could tell from the black sheets hanging over all the mirrors and windows that this time things had changed for the worse.
It wasn’t just the sheets. It was the way the snow fell from the ceiling, even though I was inside. The cold white drifts piled in the doorways and filled the fireplace, swirling into the air like ash. I looked up to see the ceiling crowded with storm clouds that wound all the way up the stairwell to the second floor. It was pretty cold even for a ghost, and I couldn’t stop shivering.
Ravenwood always had a story, and that story was Lena’s. She controlled the way the house looked with her every mood. And if Ravenwood looked like this…
Come on, L. Where are you?
I couldn’t help but listen for her to answer, even though all I heard was silence.
I made my way through the slick ice of the front hall until I reached the familiar sweep of the grand front stairwell. Then I climbed the white steps, one at a time, all the way to the top.
When I turned to look down, there were no footprints at all.
“L? You in there?”
Come on. I know you can feel me here.
But she didn’t say anything, and as I slipped through the cracked doorway into her bedroom, it was almost a relief to see she wasn’t inside. I even checked the ceiling, where I had once found her lying along the plaster.
Lena’s bedroom had changed again, like it always did. This time the viola wasn’t playing by itself, and there wasn’t writing everywhere, and the walls weren’t glass. It didn’t look like a prison, the plaster wasn’t cracked, and the bed wasn’t broken.
Everything was gone. Her bags were packed and neatly stacked in the center of the room. The walls and the ceiling were completely plain, like an ordinary room.
It looked like Lena was leaving.
I got out of there before I could think what that would mean for me. Before I tried to figure out how I would visit her in Barbados, or wherever she was going.
It was almost as hard to think about as leaving her the first time around.
I found my way out through the massive dining room where I had sat on so many other strange days and nights. A thick layer of frost covered the table, leaving a dark, wet rectangle on the carpet immediately below. I slipped through an open door and escaped out to the back veranda, the one that faced the sloping green hill leading to the river—where it wasn’t snowing at all, just overcast and gloomy. It was a relief to be back outside, and I followed the path behind the house until I came to the lemon trees and the crumbling stone wall that told me I was at Greenbrier.
I knew what I was looking for the second I saw it.
My grave.
There it was, among the bare branches of the lemon trees, a mound of fresh soil lined with stones and covered with a sprinkling of snow.
It didn’t have a headstone, only a plain old cross made of wood. The new dirt hill looked like something less than a final resting place, which actually made me feel better, rather than worse, about the whole thing.
The clouds overhead shifted, and a glimmer from the grave caught my eye. Someone had left a charm from Lena’s necklace on the top of the wooden cross. The sight of it made my stomach flip over.
It was the silver button that had fallen off her sweater the night we first met in the rain on Route 9. It had gotten caught in the cracked vinyl of the Beater’s front seat. In a way, it felt like we had come full circle now, from the first time I saw her to the last, at least in this world.