Spirits of Spring (The Haunting Ruby Series Book 4) (48 page)

“Everyone has a past. No matter what relationship you
are in, there will always be something that you don’t know
about the person you are with. That’s just how it goes. You
can’t let her past—
or
yours—stand in
the way
of your
happiness.”

“I know but—” I stopped there because I didn’t know
what else to say. What he said was the truth but that didn’t
make it any easier for me to accept it.

He paused long enough to pack his pipe and light it. He
blew a perfect
smoke
ring
into the
air and
asked me the
toughest question yet. “What do you like most about her?
Don’t analyze it or try to come up with the best answer. Give
me the first thing that entered your mind when I said that.”

The first thing. The first thing seemed stupid to me but
I said it anyway. “I love it when I can feel her smile while I’m
kissing her.” I felt like such a dork saying it but it was true.
“She’s a romantic kisser most of the time—all serious and
perfect. But near the end, I can always feel it. I can feel her
smiling and it makes me smile, too.”

“And have you ever felt that before? Do you think you
would ever feel that with anyone else?”

 

That was the easiest question yet. “Absolutely not.
That’s something that is so distinctly Ruby.”

 

“There’s your answer. If she’s that special to you, don’t
hold anything back.”

One more smoke circle floated toward the roof of the
barn and I watched until it dissipated completely. “But what
happens to me when I lose her?” I blurted out. “What happens
when she dies or gets tired of me and leaves?
What if I
disappoint her and she leaves me for somebody else?
Then
what?”

“Then you’ll go on without her. But you can’t let your
fear of what
might
happen ruin what
is
.”

Logically, I knew that he was right. But everything that
happened the night he
died changed me.
I was
sensitive
enough to start with but now—
now
—that sensitivity was more
like fear. I wanted to be more like my old self. I wanted to have
fun again. I wanted to play the drums again. I wanted to stop
punishing myself for what happened. I’d almost reached that
point when Dad brought it all up again.

“It’s all so much more complicated than that, Grandpa!
Dad keeps
bringing
up the past and
it only magnifies
my
insecurities. What if he’s right? What if I gave up football but
end up failing out of pre-vet my first year? Then what? I’ll end
up working some dead end job and have to listen to his “I told
you so’s” for the rest of my life.”

Grandpa sighed heavily and popped a peppermint into
his mouth. “I made mistakes with your old man—you aren’t
the only one with regrets in this family.
Football was
his
dream—the same way being a veterinarian is yours. But where
I failed with him was in not encouraging him to have a backup
plan. I didn’t punish him for bad grades or force him to do his
homework. I was too busy watching him be happy—too busy
watching him find his
own
place in this world. By the time he
got injured, it was too late.”

It was so strange to hear my grandfather admit to
making such a huge mistake—to hear that I wasn’t the only one
with
regrets.
Maybe life really
was
this
complicated for
everyone else but just like me, no one had the nerve to actually
show it.

“So what you need to do is think of something else that
you would want to do for the rest of your life just in case this
whole veterinarian thing doesn’t work out for you.
And that
isn’t limited to failing school, either. Who knows, maybe you’ll
change your mind for some other reason.”

I let his words sink in. What else would I want to do
with my life?
By giving up football in favor of school, I’d
actually done the opposite of what Dad did. Dad was right—if
I’d stuck with it, I could have at least played through college on
athletic scholarships and not have to worry about so many
student loans later.
But it was too late to go back now—
football season was long over and I was about to graduate. My
only other love was music and that wasn’t a good backup plan,
either. So the solution to my problem actually
created
another
problem. Now what?

“So, Squirt, is there anything else you want to
talk
about? You can’t stay here like this forever, you know. You’re
going to have to make a decision soon—the biggest one of your
life.”

Without hesitation, I replied, “Yes, I want to talk about
death.”

Before I chose which side of the fence I wanted to fall
over, I had to know what it was like to die. If it was easier than
living, my choice was already made.

35. The Ghost of You

I woke up the next morning
feeling
hollow inside.
There were no phone calls from Dad regarding Zach’s
condition. Whoever said that “no news is good news” was an
idiot who deserved a swift kick in the pants.
No news was
terrible news—the worst news ever. I wasn’t going to school
no matter what Dad or Shelly said. But I also wasn’t going to
the hospital to see Zach, either.

Instead, I decided to hole up in the attic as far away
from the outside world as I could possibly get.
There were
plenty of things I could spend the day doing that would get my
mind off of things.
My closet was begging for a change of
season upgrade so that’s where I started. I grabbed armload
after armload of clothes and dumped them on my bed.
I
scooped up every pair of shoes I owned and plopped them into
a gigantic pile in the corner of my bedroom. At the point where
I should have been leaving for school, there was a knock at the
door.

“Ruby, your Dad just got home from the hospital. He’s
been up for over twenty four hours and crashed the second his
head hit the pillow. He said to tell you that Zach’s vitals are still
the same as they were last night but that if you promise to
behave, I can take you over to see him now.” Shelly glanced
furtively around my room, from my bed to the shoe volcano
that was ready to blow and back again.

“No thanks,” I said as I began rooting through Mount
Veshoe-vius, sorting boots from flats from sandals. “I’m kind of
in the middle of something right now.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, staring at me as though I
were crazy or something. “I know how worried you must be
about him.”

“Nope, I’m not worried at all. Zach’s just mad at me. If I
stay away from him, he’ll be just fine. You know how he gets
when he’s mad—
really
mad. He’ll talk to me when he’s ready
to talk.”

“O-kay,” Shelly replied, drawing out the word as though
she were struggling for something else to say.

She stood quietly by the door for a minute and watched
me while I pondered out loud whether my red wedges qualified
as being heels or sandals.
Her scrutinizing gaze was irritating
me so finally, I spoke up.

“I don’t really need any help with this project, so—”
How could I tell her to leave me alone without having Dad jump
down my throat for it later? “If I change my mind, I’ll let you
know.”
There.
That should
have been
polite
enough
yet
obvious enough.

And it was. Shelly nodded her head and left, closing the
door behind her. Now, where was I?
Oh right, were wedges
heels or sandals? My red wedges. Maybe I was a bit odd, but I
could always associate each article of clothing and pair of shoes
to some particular moment in my life when I was wearing
them. Those shoes were the ones I was wearing the day I made
a decision about how to use some of the money I got from
almost being killed by a serial killer. I was wearing those shoes
the day I decided to buy Zach a new car to replace the one he
wrecked because of me.

The day he and I went to pick out a new vehicle, he did
everything in his power to try to sway me into buying a car
instead of an SUV. But of course I was being a total dominatrix
that day and wouldn’t budge an inch. What would have
happened if I’d given in to his suggestion instead of forcing him
to see things my way? Maybe if he’d gotten a car instead, he
wouldn’t have been able to get to Silver Lake as fast as he did.
Maybe he wouldn’t have gotten shot. Clay still would have
softened the blow for me—I would have survived the impact.
And I wouldn’t have been selfish enough to stay unconscious
and make him worry about me. That’s what
would
have
happened.

For every pair of shoes I sorted, I remembered Zach in
some way. The flats I wore on our first date. The heels I wore
to the shelter fundraiser.
Even the flip flops I was wearing the
day we met somehow never found their way back into Shelly’s
closet.
Seeing everything that reminded me of him reminded
me of where he was and what was wrong with him. And whose
fault it was. I grabbed my phone and slumped down beside the
pile of shoes, heartbroken.

My phone was so silent without his texts. He wasn’t the
only person I texted with but he was the one I communicated
with the most by far.
As a matter of fact, I rarely checked my
phone for messages when I knew that he wouldn’t be the one
sending them. Except for now. Now, I sat there willing him to
wake up and text me even though I knew it wasn’t going to
happen. I thought about all of the times we fought and didn’t
talk to each other for weeks on end. Those times were terrible
but paled in comparison to what I was facing now.
And I
couldn’t seem to stop looking at the ring on my finger and how
close I came to losing him after the whole Lucas thing.

I began to scroll through the messages that I had saved.
With every “mwah” that I read came a smile but also another
tear. When was he going to wake up? As I was looking through
his past texts, my phone rang. My heart skipped a beat until I
saw that it was a call from Rachel then another tiny piece of it
withered and died.

I kept the conversation brief by telling her that I was
driving.
Was I on my way over to the hospital now?
No, I
wasn’t but I didn’t want to talk about it right now.
With a
rushed goodbye, I ended the call and returned back to my
messages. Or at least I tried to.

I’d gotten incoming calls while reading a text before
without any problems but something weird happened.
My
entire conversation with Zach was erased from my phone.
Unwilling to believe that every last word from him was wiped
out, I turned my phone off and
then back on again.
The
messages were still missing. My contacts were all still there but
all saved conversations were gone—Zach’s and Rachel’s both.
My
phone fell from
my hands
and
into Veshoe-vius
in
an
instinctive display of disbelief.

Why now? I’d never had a single problem with that
phone before—why did it have to malfunction now when it was
my one link to Zach?
I crawled into the pile of clothes on my
bed as though it were a cocoon.
My heart hurt worse than it
ever had before. His last written words to me were lost forever
to a technological glitch. I cried until I fell asleep.

When I woke up a few hours later tangled in various
bits of my wardrobe, I didn’t feel any better. In fact, I think I
actually felt worse.
But I dragged myself
up anyway and
proceeded to pretend that everything was okay.
I made it
through shoe sorting
without any
more breakdowns
then
moved to my clothes. That’s when things really started to get
rough.

The sweater I was wearing the night he took me ice
skating. The shirt I was wearing the night I tried to seduce him
in
the
backseat
of
his
Neon.
The
costume I
wore to
the
Halloween masquerade ball that he came very close to taking
off of me that night. As I went to hang it back up in the closet, I
felt something hard inside the pocket.
I dug my hand inside
and knew exactly what it was without having to look at.

The stone. The pink stone I found in the oak grove last
summer—the day he first uttered those prophetic words to me.

 

“I would take a bullet for you.”

He said that same thing to me on Halloween night.
I
saw that stone again that night and placed it into my pocket
because it reminded me of him. Now, it was making me think
of something else I’d forgotten about.

Ghost
Stone, the short story
I wrote that won
me
accolades on many different levels. It looked exactly the way I
pictured the ghost stone to look—the stone that had the power
to bring the dead back to life.
Excitement ran through me like
never before? Could it be? Was it possible that a stone like that
actually existed and
was
resting
in
my
palm
at this
very
second?

My brain started to swim as I considered the likelihood
that I was correct.
Was it mere coincidence that I found an
exact replica of a fictional object that I’d created or was there
deeper meaning in all of this?
When I wrote that story, could I
have been writing my own future somehow?
Sure it was a
farfetched theory but in the past year I’d come to accept that
the impossible really
was
possible.

I turned the shiny pink stone around in my hands,
trying to see if I felt any kind of energy emanating from it. I felt
nothing but stone—cold hard stone. If that story were real, this
hunk of pretty quartz would have the power to bring the dead
back to life. But Zach wasn’t dead. Yet. But in that story, the
dead came back as something foul, nothing like they were in
life.
So even if this
was
the ghost stone, I wouldn’t want to use
it on Zach.
Would I?
I stared at the rock contemplating
whether or not it had magical powers and whether or not I
would use them if it did.