“Why are you here, Sam?” I ask. “What do you want?”
He makes a small noise in the back of his throat. He has one hand in the pocket of his long leather coat, and I wonder if he’s fingering the bracelet I gave him, my mother’s bracelet, the only thing he has left of her.
“Why did you give it to me?” he asks after a long moment. “Did she ask you to?”
“She told me to wear it to the cemetery.”
He bows his head. “The first time was in France,” he says. “Did she ever tell you?” He smiles and glances up, something alive in his eyes. “She was working at a hospital. The moment I saw her, I knew she was something special. She had the divine handprint all over her.”
So that’s it, I think. He wants to tell me about my mother. I should stop him, tell him I’m not interested, but I don’t. I’m curious to know what happened.
He moves closer to the fence, and I hear the faint crackle of his gray electricity running through the metal. “One day she and the other nurses went to a pond at the edge of the town to swim in their undergarments. She was laughing at something one of the other girls said, and then she felt my eyes on her and looked up. The other girls saw me too, and made a dash for their clothing on the shore, but she stayed where she was. Her hair was brown then, because she dyed it, and short for a woman’s, just at the chin, but I loved the way it curled against her neck. She walked up to me. She smelled like cloud and roses, I remember. I was frozen there, staring, feeling so strange, and she smirked and reached into my front pocket, where I always kept a packet of cigarettes for the look of it more than anything, and she took one and put the package back and said, ‘Hey, Mister, make yourself useful and give me a light, will you?’ It took me a moment to realize that she wanted me to light her a cigarette, but of course I didn’t have a lighter, and I said so, and she said, ‘Well, a fat lot of good you are then, aren’t you?’ and turned and left me.”
He seems charmed by the memory, but I don’t like it. That isn’t the mother I know, this saucy cigarette-smoking brunette that he seems so enthralled with.
“It was a while before I could get her to talk to me again. And longer still before she let me kiss her—”
“Why do you think I would want to hear this?” I interrupt.
The corner of his mouth quirks up in a sly smile. “You’re very much like her, I find.”
A cold draft of air slips up my sleeves and along my arms, and I pull my coat tighter around me. I’m safe for the moment, on this side of the fence. Hallowed ground. But I will have to leave it sometime.
“Tell me a story about her,” he says. “Something small.” He gazes at me calmly with his gold eyes. “Something new.”
I take a nervous breath. “This is why you’re stalking me? For stories?”
“Tell me,” he says.
My thoughts scramble for something to offer him. Of course I have so many memories of my mother, random ones and stupid ones, times I was mad at her because she’d suddenly stopped being my best friend and turned into my mother, set boundaries for me, punished me when I crossed them, tender moments when I knew she loved me more than anything else in the world. But I don’t want to share any of these stories with him. Our stories don’t belong to him.
I shake my head. “I can’t think of anything.”
His gaze darkens.
He can’t hurt me here, I tell myself. He can’t get me. But I’m still trembling.
“All right,” he says, like I’m being selfish but it can’t be helped; I’m partially human, after all. His tone changes, becomes casual. “Maybe you’ll feel like it on another occasion.”
I seriously doubt it.
“Did you ever find out the secret? Whatever it was your mother was keeping from you?” he asks, like we’re talking about the weather.