The Everafter (14 page)

R
ETURNING TO THE NIGHT
of the Ouija board is completely different from my last spiritual expedition. For one thing, we’re in a basement. The humidity makes the air heavier, and it’s harder for me to move around with this not-exactly-corporeal body.

But the big difference? That would be sharing space with another ghost. I mean, a real ghost. Tammy’s ghost.

I’m watching things from a distance when she startles me by more or less saying, “Thought you were never gonna show up. I was starting to wonder if you were avoiding me.”

I say “more or less” because it turns out that ghosts don’t actually
talk
to each other in the same sense that living
humans do. I’m not sure what you’d call it. Certainly it’s some form of communication. And clear enough communication that I know what she’s telling me. It’s just that there aren’t any, well, words. There’re just…
ideas.
I’m not sure how to respond to her, because how can you talk to someone when you aren’t really talking?

Turns out I don’t have to worry about it. I’m confused by her “Thought you were never gonna show up” statement (since I’ve been here what seems like a million times) and think,
What’s she talking about?
She immediately tells me, “You. Coming here. As a spirit. So I could actually have a conversation with you.”

It’s like…whatchamacallit—telepathic communication.

We’re communicating telepathically, and whoa…not such a good thing. I mean, what if somehow she reads my mind and I’m thinking something that I don’t really want her to know?

“Oh, in time you’ll learn how to keep some ideas back from other spirits. It’s just that you have to learn all over again how to communicate…both the truth and lies.”

Great. Like learning to communicate the first time wasn’t hard enough?

“Doesn’t take all that long. You’ll catch on quickly. This must be your first attempt at communicating with another spirit.”

“Well, yeah. It’s not like I’ve experienced many moments where I lost something at the same time some other dead person I know did. In fact, I’ve only discovered two other moments like that, and one of them I can’t get to anymore. I found the stupid keys that would take me there.”

“Oh. Don’t worry,” Tammy reassures me. “You’ll find more moments like that. You have eternity to do it.”

Not exactly reassuring.

“And the more experience you get hanging out with other spirits, the better you’ll communicate with us.”

“Well, my only practice so far has been when I was thirteen and talking to you through the Ouija board.”

“Oh, yeah, sorry about that.”

“That reminds me. The whole thing where you used the Ouija board to apologize? Do you think you could be a little clearer about that? I mean, what are you sorry for?”

Neither of us has a body. I know this misty whiteness next to me is Tammy because…well, I just do. The same way I know what she’s saying to me. When I ask her that question, it’s like all her whiteness becomes brighter, and I know this is a form of laughter. I don’t find anything here particularly funny.

“Did you kill me? Is that why you’re sorry?”

The glow of laughter disappears. She darkens with what seems like…regret. Just when I’m thinking I have the answer to my question, she surprises me.

“Of course I have regrets. But they aren’t about
killing
you. I mean, how could you even think it? I would
never
kill someone who had once been my friend.”

I don’t know if I’m more stunned by the loyalty she’s expressing or the way she’s kind of left open the possibility that she might kill someone who wasn’t once her friend.

She interrupts my thoughts: “
Don’t
even go there. Of course I wouldn’t kill anyone. I might have made my mistakes, but murder was never one of them.”

“Then what
are
you sorry for?”

“Thinking you ratted me out. I found out later who did it, but before that I thought it was you. And I should have realized you’d never do that to me.”

“You’re right. You had enough trouble in your life without me adding to it. Not that I ever knew
what
exactly that trouble was.”

“And you never will.”

I can deal with that. I mean, not that I have much choice…not having all these mind-reading skills yet that Tammy has. Still, I have to admit that being dead has given me something of an appreciation for mystery. I kind of like that there are things I
don’t
understand.

Well…except for the whole how-I-died thing.

“Wait, you mean you don’t know how you died?” Tammy asks me. She glows again. Surprise this time.

“You mean you
do
know how
you
died?”

“Of course. I remember it well. Had a car accident.”

“How old were you?”

“Thirty-five.”

Whoa…she lived to be thirty-five? Something here doesn’t seem fair. The drug dealer lives to thirty-five, and the good girl dies at seventeen? “Hold on…. That means you…you know things that I don’t, things that happened after I died.”

“Well, yeah. Of course. What do you want to know?”

Starting with something safe seems like a good idea. “Did Amber and Lacey actually go to prom with Doug Preston and Scott Turner?”

“Why would I know
that?
I’m not omniscient. I only know what I noticed when I was alive. I couldn’t have cared less who they went to prom with senior year. Didn’t pay any attention.”

“But you said…I mean, the Ouija board said that they went to prom with those two.”

Bright white laughter. “Yeah. I was just playing a trick on them.”

“A trick?!”

“You have to admit their reactions were kind of funny. Gotta entertain myself somehow. But senior prom isn’t really what you want to know about, is it?”

“No,” I admit. Here goes…“Do you know how
I
died?”

Inside the mist, some kind of strange whirling takes place. Indecision.

“This isn’t a tough question. I mean, you either know or you don’t.”

“I know.”

This is the moment when she’s supposed to tell me the answer I’ve been searching for…isn’t it? I wait patiently, but she doesn’t reveal anything.

“Well? Tell me!”

“I don’t think so. Seems like if you were ready to know, you’d know.”

“Oh, I’m ready. Trust me.”

“There are some things you have to find out for yourself. Other people can’t tell them to you.”

Wonderful. Now she sounds like one of our parents or something. How did that happen?

“I became one.”

“Became what?” I ask.

“A parent.”

Okay, this whole mind-reading business is irritating. “Get out of here. You? A parent?”

“Four kids. Three boys and a girl. The youngest was less than a year when I died.”

In life, this is one of those moments where you have to fall into the nearest chair because you’re so shocked. As a spirit, you just do this weird kind of separating thing. This
is truly the first time I’ve understood what it meant that life went on without me. Even though I
knew
it would, a part of me didn’t accept that. I was the center of all the stories I knew. It was even kind of hard to believe, in a way, that anyone existed when they weren’t with me…even though I knew they did. But this…this whole life I don’t even know about? How much of the world changed without me knowing it?

I realize that Tammy hasn’t interrupted any of my thoughts. This is the longest she’s let me have a conversation with myself since I arrived here. Very parentlike, very let-the-kid-make-her-own-discovery and all that. She isn’t the girl I knew in my life.

“Not true,” she argues. “I might be radically different, but I’m still me.”

I remember Tammy’s first comment…that she thought I was avoiding her and would never get here. “Have you been waiting here for me all this time?”

“Kind of.”

“I don’t get it. How can you ‘kind of’ wait for me?”

“It’s like this: if you don’t attach yourself when you come back to visit your life, if you stand back here and watch, then you exist in a separate time frame from the life events. It’s the same time frame that exists in the space where your lost objects are.”

Right. Makes perfect sense. Almost. “Then how are you
only ‘kind of’ here? Don’t you either wait or
not
wait?”

“No…not really. Eventually you’ll learn you can be in more than one place when you’re a spirit. Part of me can hang out here waiting for you, but other parts of me can go somewhere else for a while. I’ve just been keeping part of me here while also wandering off to do other things, too.”

“Are you…
all
here now?”

“Yep.”

A blanket of longing for the Tammy I knew in life encompasses me. I can’t help being touched that our friendship meant so much to her that she’s been trying this hard to reach me. “Why did you…why have you been waiting so long for me?”

“I wanted to make sure we cleared the air about things. I feel terrible about blaming you for my getting caught selling drugs. After you died, I still thought for a few weeks that it was you who ratted on me. I hated you. Wouldn’t even go to your funeral. Was glad you were dead, in fact. Until I found out the truth. I felt incredibly guilty after that. Especially for hating you even after you were dead. That’s what I was trying to apologize for. Well, that and the way our friendship ended on the night of the slumber party.”

“I was always sorry about that, too. But…what happened originally at the slumber party that broke up our friendship? I mean, before you came back to this moment as a ghost and tried to apologize.”

“I guess neither of us is ever going to know much about that, are we? I remember that before I messed with things, we
were
playing with a Ouija board. And something
did
happen with it that caused us to have a fight. But now the only reality we can remember is the one where I apologize to you through the Ouija board. Unless, of course, we want a new reality and decide to go back and change this whole experience again.”

“Probably not a good idea,” I say.

“Agreed.”

I can’t help having second thoughts. “Even though it might save our friendship if we did…?”

“It also might not, Maddy. I think the end of our living friendship was all part of the experience we were meant to have.”

“
Meant
to have?” I ask. “Is there a God somewhere orchestrating our lives? Because if there is, I haven’t met Him…Her…yet.”

“God…well, I guess you could call it that if you want. There’s something beautiful and powerful beyond us, and that’s enough for me. But it doesn’t really orchestrate our lives. We’re just meant to be us. So we are. And we’re meant to make the best choices we can. So I do. Apologizing to you through the Ouija board was one of those choices. What took you so long to finally decide to communicate with me here in this moment?”

“I didn’t know how,” I admitted.

“What do you mean?”

I confess, “I’ve kind of only had one other experience where I just watched what was happening when I went back to my life. All the other times I’ve used a lost item, I’ve always
become
me in the experience.”

“Wow. You’ve really had a major case of separation anxiety, haven’t you? Really wanted to keep living?”

“Didn’t you?”

“Not so much. What I wanted was to know how my kids and husband were. How they changed over the years. What became of them. And when I realized I couldn’t, I just stopped caring about living. I almost never do it anymore. Life gets boring after a while, you know?”

Unfortunately, I do. Reliving something over and over just isn’t the same thing as…well,
living
it.

Tammy continues, “I prefer to leave life alone and spend time in the Everafter.”

“What’s that?”

The glowing flares up again. “What’s attaching you so strongly to life?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Even as I ask it, I know it’s a stupid question.
I’m
the only one who
would
know. “Can you get back here from the Everafter anytime you want?”

“Of course. Once you get to the Everafter, though, you
won’t care so much about being here.”

“What’s it like there?”

“You’ll just be a part of everything. All at once. You’ll finally feel as if you belong somewhere…at least, I did. You’ll like it. Once you get there. Just go there.”

“How?”

“Find out how you died. Maybe that’s what’s keeping you here.”

“I’m trying. Can you at least give me a hint?”

“Find Gabe. I think he has the answers you want. I don’t know if he’ll give them to you, but he might help you find them.”

Gabe.

Of course.

“How do I get out of here?” I ask. “Do I have to wait until my real body gets too far away from that hair clip I lost? I mean, that’s how I’ve always done it before…either that or I’ve found the object.”

I can tell that if she had a head, Tammy would be shaking it at me in despair. “Stop thinking so much. Just be. That’s enough. Let yourself be what you want, when you want, where you want. Just decide you want to do something, and you’ll end up doing it.”

Sounds easy. Yeah, right….

Except it is. It works the first time I try it.

I
AM
…I
AM
…I
AM
…
floating. This isn’t
Is.
It’s
Am.
I’m not located here, the way I first thought I was.

I
am
here. And I’m not trapped here.

For the first time, I realize how beautiful this space is, how it brims with vital energy.

I’m relieved to discover that my conversation with Tammy hasn’t changed anything about our original moments of life in that basement. Standing outside an event and watching it—as long as I don’t try to change anything by knocking over silly plates and stuff like that—seems to have no effect on my original life.

I don’t have to be alone anymore. I can communicate
with other spirits when I meet them in moments where we both lost objects. And I don’t have to sacrifice who I am—and what I was—in order to do it.

Tammy’s right. I need to find Gabe. It’s time.

I start looking for my physics homework.