I start walking toward the end, heading off my own accident. All the while, time shudders around me. It pulls against me, like a river current trying to drag me back to my own time. I find a stone in the road, and I take it in my hand. There’s not much time until I’ll be whisked away from all this, certainly not enough time to redo this if it doesn’t work. I have one chance to make any sort of change, and so I dig my heels in with every step and keep moving. In a way, I become the dark and mysterious mass from my dreams, moving toward myself.
I think of the blueness the girl fell into in Grandmother’s story, endless possibility. Even that can be terrifying. I have to believe in whatever lies within the blue, that within its primordial goop there’s another Beau, another Natalie, another summer containing all time, when we’ll stop asking who we are and let ourselves be savored fiercely by the world. And if there is no other Natalie on the other side of this, I have to believe there’s at least a long and exceptional life for the person I love. The tears start to fall; my speed increases.
Goodbye, Sun. Goodnight, Moon. Thank you, Thunder. I love you, Fire. Goodbye, Rainbow.
And Mom, who stroked my hair when I woke from nightmares drenched in sweat.
And Dad, who squeezed my neck on the deck overlooking the mist, as he told me he’d always listen.
And Matt, who loved me first.
And Megan, who loved me best.
And Rachel, who loved me fiercely.
And my Bridget, who loved me selflessly.
And Beau—Beau Wilkes, who loved me until the end.
I stop walking as the lights bear down on me. They swell. Brighter and brighter and brighter still, until they’re a pool of clear blue. A beautiful, perfectly broken new world I would die to see. For a moment, I imagine the dark outline of a hunched woman, her smile and her wrinkly hand lifting. She was there. The Grandmother I know said she never saw Beau’s and my future, but she was there. She stood on our porch and looked through our window. And maybe she’d come there to look at the past with the Beau she’d already lost, while I stood there looking toward his future without me, with someone else. But maybe, just maybe, she—that old, crooked version of me—had just come home from the grocery store. Maybe she was standing on the porch her husband had built for her, weighed down by bags of beer and cereal, when she thought she saw something familiar in the window. Maybe she stopped and felt her insides shiver because, for an instant, she could’ve sworn she saw herself, sixty years younger, standing in the living room with arms coiled around the love of her life. Maybe she lifted up her hand to say, I’m here. I’m still here after all this time.
I had meant to throw the stone in my hand at the hood of the car, but it’s becoming hard to see. Time is whipping against me, every breath a fight to stay.
Now, now is the moment I have in life—no future, no past. Now is the moment I have to choose how I live, and now is quickly collapsing. I let the stone fall out of my hand as I lift my arms up over my head. I’m here, I think. Maybe that will be enough to undo everything, but if not . . . if not, I’m still a happy kind of sad. “I’M HERE.”
The headlights grow. And then they consume me, fold me in their endless arms, and I feel nothing.
Nothing but warmth.
Though I see a dark orb swelling behind the car, beyond the light, trying to catch me and tear me back into place before time falls shut.
Though I hear the screech and thud, even the sharp intake of breath from behind the glass.
Though I hear the door swing open and the desperate breathing.
And very last, the last thing I’ll ever hear, my mother’s words: “There’s no one there. I swear I saw a girl. There’s no one there. She’s—”
And that’s when I’m lost, and in my place, the world gets born.
33
There once was a girl who fell in love with a ghost. When she looked through him, she saw the world as it was made to be: warm, lush, aching with growth and quaking with tenderness. Through the boy, she saw the web of time, and how every moment—past, future, good, and bad—had conspired to tell their love story.
She loved the ghost boy so much that she thought the feeling alone might be enough to fix everything that had ever broken. In her. In him. In the whole world.
And because she loved him like this, she finally understood how deeply she was loved.
She knew she would do anything for the ghost boy. She would fold herself around him to protect him. She would drink out all the darkness from him and pour out all her light on him. She would rebuild the whole world for him.
One day, a voice spoke to her from above. Perhaps it came as a quiet whisper, carried on a gentle wind. Some say it was in the rumble of thunder or the crunch of stiff summer grass. Still others describe it as the delicate flutter of moth wings.
“My child,” the voice said. “It is I, Love, the maker of worlds. If you want the ghost boy to live again, bring him out beneath the moon tonight, and I will send Death down to trade your life for his.”