Free 44: Book Six by Jools Sinclair Page B

That’s all I can say. That’s my advice.”
    “Thanks, Jesse.”
    We stopped, watching the sunset, listening to the silence of the late afternoon.
    “One more thing,” I said. “Do you still see my mom sometimes? I really miss her, Jesse. And it seems really unfair that I see all these ghosts and not her. I don’t even dream about her much. And she’s never in a vision. She’s nowhere.”
    “That’s not true,” he said. “She’s with you. I see her light. I don’t see her, but her energy is in your house. You really don’t feel her?”
    I thought I felt her sometimes. But I wanted more.
    “At least a dream,” I said. “Something.”
    “I don’t know, Craigers,” he said. “There’s a lot I don’t understand about where I am. Just like there’s a lot you don’t understand about your world. But, like I say, she’s around you. I’m sure of that. And me sometimes too. I don’t see her either, but I feel her. She has this warm glow, this feeling that everything is going to be okay or something. It’s like the way she made me feel when I walked into your house after school when we were kids and she was making those chocolate chip cookies. Remember?”
    I nodded and closed my eyes. I could almost smell them. I missed those cookies.
    “So think of that feeling. That’s her.”
    “Okay,” I said.
    But it left me feeling sad. I always seemed to find myself separated from the people I loved most. My mom. Jesse. And now Ty.
    I squeezed his hand, and we stood quietly at the edge of the Deschutes, watching the last of the daylight as it gave way to the briefest of twilights.

CHAPTER 25
     
    I pulled out another box from under our old canoe.
    “It has to be in here,” Kate said. “I remember packing your snow gear up after the accident.”
    She was opening the plastic bin at her feet. We were both in the garage, trying to find my old ski equipment.
    “Are you sure you didn’t give it away to Goodwill or something?”
    “No, Abby, I didn’t get rid of it. See that row back there? Have you gone through those?”
    “Now who’s seeing things? I don’t see any rows in here,” I said. “I’m going to make it one of my New Year’s resolutions to get this place in shape.”
    “That should pretty much take you through Labor Day I would think.”
    I was always suspicious of people with tidy, well-organized garages. Sometimes I thought they bordered on being terrorists.
    Kate and I were clearly not terrorists.
    “The problem is we’ve let this garage go over the years,” she said. “It’s a mess, filled with tons of crap we don’t need.  Look at the wall back there. I still have all my old college books in those boxes that are outdated and useless. I also came across broken snowshoes that I had planned to have fixed, not too far from the new ones that I finally bought. We are total hoarders.”
    “Just in the garage,” I said. “The rest of the house looks great.”
    “Well, maybe so. But I’m in on your resolution. We are going through this crap and getting rid of at least half of it. This is ridiculous.”
    “Oh, here,” Kate said five minutes later. “Found it.”
    She lifted the bin over the bikes and handed it to me.
    “Thanks.”
    I opened it up, a flood of memories rushing back. My goggles were in there along with my long underwear, three pairs of old ski pants, an old parka I wore all the time in high school that was bright blue as I recalled, and five pairs of ski gloves. Ski hats. A bunch of thick wool socks. Two pairs of boots.
    “Perfect,” I said. “Thanks for helping.”
    “I still can’t believe he’s going skiing,” Kate said. “Not in a million years would I have thought of that.”
    A giant spider suddenly crawled out of the box. I jumped back, but then smashed it with the boot I was still holding.
    “It’s what love is all about,” I said. “That’s what he keeps telling me anyway. When you love somebody, you reach out to them. Try and do some of the