The fact that there’s nothing buried under Jesse’s grave—since he happens to be alive and well—is something I don’t see any reason to let the fifth graders know. Kids benefit from being outdoors. Too much time playing video games has been shown to slow their social skills.
“So tearing down the place where he died isn’t going to hurt him,” I went on. “I’m not personally a fan of subdivisions, but hey, if that’s what floats your boat, go for it. Anything else? I really do have to go now, I’ve got a ton of things to do to get ready for the wedding.”
Paul laughed. Apparently my officious tone hadn’t fooled him.
“Oh, Suze. I love how so much in the world has changed, but not you. That boyfriend of yours haunted that crummy old house forever, waiting around for . . . just what was he waiting for, anyway? Murder victims are the most stubborn of all spooks to get rid of.” He said the word spooks the way someone in a detergent commercial would say the word stains. “All they want is justice—or, as in Jesse’s case, revenge.”
“That isn’t true,” I made the mistake of interrupting, and got rewarded by more of Paul’s derisive laughter.
“Oh, isn’t it? What was it you think he was waiting around for all those years, then, Suze? You?”
I felt my cheeks heat up again. “No.”
“Of course you do. But that love story of yours may not have such a happy ending after all.”
“Really, Paul? And why is that? Because of something written on a two-thousand-year-old papyrus scroll? I think you’ve been watching too many episodes of Ghost Mediator.”
His voice went cold. “I’m just telling you what the curse says—that restoring a soul to the body it once inhabited is a practice best left to the gods.”
“What are you even talking about? You’re the one who—”
“Suze, I only did what people like you and me are supposed to—attempt to help an unhappy soul pass on to his just rewards.”
“By sneaking back through time to keep him from dying in the first place so I’d never meet him?”
“Never mind what I did. Let’s talk about what you did. The curse goes on to say that any human who attempts to resurrect a corpse will be the first to suffer its wrath when the demon inside it is woken.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous, since there’s no demon inside Jesse, and I didn’t resurrect him. It was a miracle. Ask Father Dom.”
“Really, Suze? Since when did you start believing in miracles?” I hated that he knew me so well. “And when did you start believing that you could tinker around with space and time—and life and death—without having to pay the consequences? If you help to create a monster, you should be prepared for that monster to come back and bite you in the ass. Or are you completely unfamiliar with the entire Hollywood horror movie industry?”
“Fiction,” I said, my mouth dry. “Horror movies are fiction.”
“And the concept of good and evil? Is that fiction? Think about it, Simon. You can’t have one without the other. There has to be a balance. You got your good. Ghost Boy’s alive now, and giving back to the community with his healing hands . . . which makes me want to puke, by the way. But where’s the bad? Have you not noticed there’s something missing from this little miracle of yours?”
“Um,” I said, struggling to come up with a flippant reply.
Because he was right. As any Californian worth his flip-flops could tell you, you can’t have yin without yang, surf without sand, a latte without soy (because no one in California drinks full dairy, except for me, but I was born in New York City).
“I assume the bad is . . . you.” This was weak, but it was the best I could come up with, given the feeling of foreboding slowly creeping up my spine.
“Very funny, Suze. But you’re going to have to come up with something better. Humor doesn’t work as a defense against the forces of evil. Which are dwelling, as you very well know, inside your so-called miracle boy, just waiting for the chance to lash out and kill you and everyone you love for what you did.”
Now he’d gone too far. “I do not know that. How do you know that? You haven’t even seen him in six years. You don’t know anything about us. You can’t just come here and—”
“I don’t have to have seen him to know that he didn’t escape from having lived as a spook for a century and a half without having brushed up against some pretty malevolent shit. De Silva didn’t just walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Simon. He set up camp and toasted marshmallows there. No one can come out of something like that unscathed, however many kids he’s curing of cancer now, or however many wedding-gift registries his girlfriend’s signing up for in order to assure herself that everything’s just fine and dandy.”
“That’s not fair,” I protested. “And that’s not fair. You might as well be saying that anyone who’s ever suffered from any trauma is destined never to overcome it, no matter how hard they try.”