“You can’t keep doing this,” I said. “You’re going to give me a heart attack.”
Lucia didn’t reply. She just stood there at the side of the bed, a soft aura glowing all around her, looking at me with those huge dark eyes. She wore the same somber expression she always wore, her mouth the same pink rosebud of disapproval.
What had I done wrong now? Maybe she didn’t like that I slept in the same room as a rat, or in an old black tank top and yoga shorts.
Or maybe she didn’t like that I hadn’t tried very hard to keep her murderer from offing himself. He was never going to get his day in court. At least, no court on planet Earth.
“How did you even get in here?” I looked around. She shouldn’t have been able to enter my apartment, the place was so barricaded against evil spirits, between the salt and the house blessings and the crosses and the mezuzahs.
On the other hand, Lucia wasn’t exactly evil.
“What can I do for you, Lucia?” I asked her. Talking to this kid was like talking to the stuffed animal she clutched in her hands, she was so unresponsive. “Is it about Jimmy? Er . . .”
I realized, belatedly, that only Becca had ever called Lucia’s killer by his name, and even she didn’t like to. Lucia herself had been too traumatized by what he’d done to her ever to mention him by anything other than “he.”
“Is it about the, um, bad man?”
I sat up in bed, careful to move slowly so as not to alarm her. There was no sound in the room except my voice, and the gentle grunts of Romeo, who’d woken and immediately begun cleaning himself in his cage.
“Because he’s gone, Lucia.” This seemed a fitting euphemism for what had happened to Delgado. Gone. He was gone. “I found him and made sure that he’ll never hurt you, or Becca, or anyone else ever again.”
Lucia only continued to stare at me in silence, her eyes gleaming as luminously as the rest of her. I couldn’t read her expression. Was she apprehensive, or reproachful?
“Tomorrow I plan on taking care of the priest who hurt Becca, too. Okay?” My voice broke a little. “Not in the same way as Jimmy, but . . . he’ll never be able to hurt anyone either. I’m sorry things got so messed up, and that they took such a long time to fix. Not that they’ll ever really be fixed, but . . . well, you know. This was a tough one, Lucia. This one was really hard.”
I reached up to move some hair from my eyes and found, when my fingers came away wet, that I was crying. Me, who never cried.
All the signs were there. My cheeks were damp. My throat had closed up. My eyes stung.
This wasn’t allergies. I was crying. Crying for Lucia.
For Lucia, or for Becca, or for me? Maybe for the triplets, too, and a little bit for Jesse. Crying for all of us.
Lucia only continued to stare at me owlishly.
I reached for my cell phone, which I kept on the nightstand, and scrolled through the photos I’d stored on there.
“Look, Lucia. I found your family. They’ve moved away from here, but not too far. They have a vineyard north of San Francisco. It looks really nice. They don’t have horses, but they have llamas. See, here’s a picture.” I held the screen on my phone toward her so that she could see. The glow lit up her face even more brightly than her own spectral radiance. “There’s your mother, and your father, and your brothers. And look, see here? After you died, they adopted two little girls.” This caused her to lean in closer. I finally had her attention.
“I’ve been wondering about it,” I went on. “Why did they adopt two girls? And I think the reason they had to adopt two is that one little girl wouldn’t have been enough to replace the hole in their hearts that you left behind. That’s how much they loved you.”
Lucia glanced from me to the photo then back again, her eyes wider than ever.
But I still couldn’t tell if she understood. I could hardly see anything myself, because of my tears.
How could I get through to her?
“Please, Lucia,” I said. “You just have to be patient a little bit longer, and then everything will be all right, I swear. Well, maybe not all right. Nothing will ever be all right for you, I know that. But I swear I’ll make things right for Becca. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
She did something then that shocked me, and I’ve been working with the souls of the dead for a long time. I didn’t know I could be shocked anymore.
But Lucia managed, by climbing onto the bed and crawling toward me, her arms stretched to reach around my neck.
Not to strangle me this time, though.
To hug me.
Even more shocking, I put down my phone and hugged her back, a dead seven-year-old who shouldn’t have even been in my room in the first place.