“Good-bye,” Miles said at last. It almost looked as if he wanted her to shake his hand, but when she sent out a length of her hair, he turned and ran. It was a little disappointing. And the dead girl couldn’t help but notice that he’d left his shoes and his bike behind.
The dead girl walked around the cabin, picking things up and putting them down again. She kicked the Monopoly box, which was a game that she’d always hated. That was one of the okay things about being dead, that nobody ever wanted to play Monopoly.
At last she came to the statue of St. Francis, whose head had been knocked right off during an indoor game of croquet a long time ago. Bethany Baldwin had made St. Francis a lumpy substitute Ganesh head out of modeling clay. You could lift that clay elephant head off, and there was a hollow space where Miles and Bethany had left secret things for each other. The dead girl reached down her shirt and into the cavity where her more interesting and useful organs had once been (she had been an organ donor). She’d put Miles’s poetry in there for safekeeping.
She folded up the poetry, wedged it inside St. Francis, and fixed the Ganesh head back on. Maybe Miles would find it someday. She would have liked to see the look on his face.
We don’t often get a chance to see our dead. Still less often do we know them when we see them. Mrs. Baldwin’s eyes opened. She looked up and saw the dead girl and smiled. She said, “Bethany.”
Bethany sat down on her mother’s bed. She took her mother’s hand. If Mrs. Baldwin thought Bethany’s hand was cold, she didn’t say so. She held on tightly. “I was dreaming about you,” she told Bethany. “You were in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.”
“It was just a dream,” Bethany said.
Mrs. Baldwin reached up and touched a piece of Bethany’s hair with her other hand. “You’ve changed your hair,” she said. “I like it.”
They were both silent. Bethany’s hair stayed very still. Perhaps it felt flattered.
“Thank you for coming back,” Mrs. Baldwin said at last.
“I can’t stay,” Bethany said.
Mrs. Baldwin held her daughter’s hand tighter. “I’ll go with you. That’s why you’ve come, isn’t it? Because I’m dead too?”
Bethany shook her head. “No. Sorry. You’re not dead. It’s Miles’s fault. He dug me up.”
“He did what?” Mrs. Baldwin said. She forgot the small, lowering unhappiness of discovering that she was not dead after all.
“He wanted his poetry back,” Bethany said. “The poems he gave me.”
“That idiot,” Mrs. Baldwin said. It was exactly the sort of thing she expected of Miles, but only with the advantage of hindsight, because how could you really expect such a thing. “What did you do to him?”
“I played a good joke on him,” Bethany said. She’d never really tried to explain her relationship with Miles to her mother. It seemed especially pointless now. She wriggled her fingers, and her mother instantly let go of Bethany’s hand.
Being a former Buddhist, Mrs. Baldwin had always understood that when you hold onto your children too tightly, you end up pushing them away instead. Except that after Bethany had died, she wished she’d held on a little tighter. She drank up Bethany with her eyes. She noted the tattoo on Bethany’s arm with both disapproval and delight. Disapproval, because one day Bethany might regret getting a tattoo of a cobra that wrapped all the way around her bicep. Delight, because something about the tattoo suggested Bethany was really here. That this wasn’t just a dream. Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals were one thing. But she would never have dreamed that her daughter was alive again and tattooed and wearing long, writhing, midnight tails of hair.
“I have to go,” Bethany said. She had turned her head a little, towards the window, as if she were listening for something far away.
“Oh,” her mother said, trying to sound as if she didn’t mind. She didn’t want to ask: Will you come back? She was a lapsed Buddhist, but not so very lapsed, after all. She was still working to relinquish all desire, all hope, all self. When a person like Mrs. Baldwin suddenly finds that her life has been dismantled by a great catastrophe, she may then hold on to her belief as if to a life raft, even if the belief is this: that one should hold on to nothing. Mrs. Baldwin had taken her Buddhism very seriously, once, before substitute teaching had knocked it out of her.