“Lost.” The twain leaned against the inside of the bookcase. “That is love, though, isn’t it? Sacrifice.”
“No,” I said, after a pause. “All due respect to Romeo and Juliet, but I don’t think love is sacrifice at all. Real love is when you let another person make you better. You don’t lose yourself in love—you find yourself there.”
The twain lifted his head.
“Charlie made me feel like a better me,” I continued. “And he made the world better, day by day. It was his gift. And now he’s gone. I can let that gift die with him, or I can make it my gift. I can keep making the world better, day by day. That feels more like love to me.” I wiped my eyes. “Charlie’s gone, and I’m not all right. Not yet. But I intend to keep making myself better, day by day, too.”
I looked up again. The twain had vanished. The sky was already warming to a rich plum outside the window. The sun was rising.
Supplemental Material
The funeral was held at Rosemary’s Green. There were more caskets than I had expected, and some of them were very large. A heady glamour hung over the crowd, although no one else seemed to notice it. Human beings, I realized, made up only half of the mourners at the event. In my eyes, the various otherworlders’ true faces were coupled with the human masks they were presenting and were underscored by their unique auras, as well as wave after wave of heavy emotions. The sensory overload was beginning to make me nauseated.
Marlowe stood at the front and said something, but I was having trouble focusing on his voice. Everybody began to sit down. I felt a hand on my arm, and Jackaby led me to an open chair. Someone else was talking now—something about many faiths and noble sacrifices. I think the sermon had begun.
Suddenly, a tiny figure materialized in the aisle ahead of me. The twain. I wiped my eyes, trying to catch a clear breath through the fog of glamour. I looked at the faces in the crowd, but nobody else appeared to see him. The twain gave me a solemn nod, then he turned away and began walking toward the front of the crowd.
I stood up. Faces all around me turned to look, and a medley of concern and irritation bubbled up from the crowd. The twain reached the front, and then, in the next moment, he was standing on a casket—on Charlie’s casket. I pushed my way past several sets of knees until I was in the aisle. Somewhere in the back of my mind I realized that the speaker had halted his sermon. I was disrupting the ceremony, but I could not have been less concerned about how it looked to any of them. They could not see what I was seeing.
The twain turned to face me one last time. “Make the world better for being in it,” he said. “And make each other better for being in it together.” And then he sank down into the wood.
There was a blinding light within the coffin. The twain’s greatest gift. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t move. The sun was rising inside my chest. In my pounding heart, a door that had been locked was opening.