Free The Vanishing Season by Jodi Lynn Anderson Page B

can’t help feeling how I feel. I’m kind of a one-girl guy. I can’t help it; it’s like a curse, really. My dad was the same way, even though my mom didn’t stick around.”
    There was a strange pause, and he moved closer to her. Reflexively Maggie stepped on the stair to open the cellar door and reached her arms overhead, pushing upward. Sunlight flooded in. In front of her, Liam was kneeling. He’d found something on the ground. He held it up to her. A delicate bracelet, grimy from dirt, with a tiny, cherry-shaped charm.
    “I felt it with my foot,” he said, and smiled, friendly. “Here, for you.” In the light she could see his face was glistening with sweat from all the effort carrying the planters.
    Maggie took the bracelet but didn’t say anything. Turning it over in her hands, she wondered how old it was and who’d left it, how it had fallen off. But she’d never know, she guessed. Liam was watching her curiously. There were too many things to like about him. Maggie could feel her affection being bound to him like roots, and she didn’t like it but didn’t know how to stop it from happening. Because it came with a desire to stand closer to him, the way he smelled affecting her pulse.
    Out on the grass, Liam helped her bundle up the potting-mix bags, and Maggie took hold of them in a giant armful. “Well, thanks. See you.”
    “Yeah.” Liam turned and started walking away.
    She looked at the ground just to give her eyes something to do besides watch him walk, but just before he disappeared into the pines, she turned them on him until he’d disappeared, studying the form of his back, the outline of his arms. “Maggie, you’re an idiot,” she said to herself. As she walked inside, she stroked the bracelet in her palm.

Maggie’s heart is a darkening red; it’s slowly turning a different shade. I watch her lie awake and wait for something to plug up the hole that’s opened inside her, and it makes me wish that I could tell her what I’ve learned, being a ghost. I’ve seen enough of people stretching the years to know the things we want are bigger than what we get and as deep as outer space. Looking up at the cold, empty sky beyond the cellar door, I know that our longing can stretch at least that far.
    It’s the bracelet that disconcerts me. It looks familiar—I already know it, where it’s shiny and where it’s dull. I know already that some letters are more faded than others. In other words the bracelet rings a bell , and that’s a feeling I can’t remember having. As Maggie holds it up to study it, I try to make out the faded name. Maybe it’s my name. But I have no more luck than she does.
    Through the window I can smell the air coming down from Canada, breezes full of the Arctic. If you fill your lungs deeply enough, you’ll breathe the ice caps, moose breath, Eskimo campfires. A ghost town comes to mind, north of here, that was abandoned in the late 1800s—I don’t know when I saw it or why. It’s not the kind of ghost town you picture in the West, with tumbleweeds and shoddy, clapboard houses. It’s polished and sophisticated, with an avenue of clean, white houses and a courthouse, a dry goods shop, a mayor’s house, a capitol. It’s so impeccably clean that it looks like all the people left just the day before. Every time I think of it, I get a lonely feeling.
    I drift out of my window, to go see where they’re digging the new grave of the latest victim; she’ll be buried in White Stone. I float out to the old cemetery, wander among the bones I can see under the dirt—some curled in balls in their tombs, some long and stretched out like they’re standing on a stage. I can hear their souls whispering in the trees sometimes. I’ve begun to suspect they’re here after all, and closer than they’ve let on. My empty, invisible, nonexistent heart picks up speed. Maybe it turns a darker shade of red too—I don’t know, because it isn’t there.
    A late, last warm-weather