The Year of Shadows (34 page)

T
HERE WAS ONLY
one nursery close enough to bring Tillie and Jax to, on the south side of town, at Wichita and 1st Avenue. It stayed open until ten on Friday nights, so even after taking the bus, we had about a half hour to search.

“There are approximately one billion trees here,” Henry said.

We stood at the end of the tree section—aisles upon aisles of tiny saplings all the way up to decent-size oaks.

“How are we ever supposed to find the right one? And how are we supposed to pay for it? Do you
see
how expensive these are? And how are we gonna even get it back on the bus?”

I frowned. “I hadn’t thought about all that.”

“Obviously, when it’s the right tree, we’ll
know
it,” said Joan. “Isn’t that how it was for Frederick’s music?”

“Well, yeah,” said Henry, “that, and it said ‘Frederick van der Burg’ on the top.”

“Don’t worry,” said Jax, “I’ll know the tree. Both of us will.”

So we started looking, each of us taking an aisle and touching each tree one by one. By the end of it, scratches covered my cheeks and arms.

Then I found it.

I couldn’t even see it at first, it was so far back. Joan had hold of my shirt, keeping me upright as I balanced on bags of dirt to stretch as far back as I could into the stacked trees.

When my fingers brushed the trunk, I knew.

A jolt of memory shocked me, as white-hot as a lightning strike.

In a flash, I saw the gray war camp in the bones of the Hall. The gray skies and the black planes. That shriveled, exhausted-looking tree with some of its bark freshly scraped off.

“I found it,” I gasped. “Guys! Over here!”

The next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground, my head spinning, my palms sweating. My head was in someone’s lap. Two blue eyes stared down at me.

Henry.

I closed my eyes. If Henry was there, everything would be okay.

“What happened?” I said.

“You passed out a little,” Henry said. “Memory overdose.”

“Great. Did we get the tree?”

“You’re the Stellatella girl,” someone was saying, leaning over me.

“Yeah. And who’re you?”

Henry helped me up. “Olivia, be nice. This is the tree guy.”

“Tree
specialist
is the term,” said a man with a rumpled red cap. “But you
are
the Stellatella girl, right? The ghost girl?”

Ghost girl? That was a new one. “Yeah, I guess that’s me. Why?”

The man thrust out his hand. “Name’s Gary. Boy, I gotta tell ya—I got tickets to tomorrow night’s concert, and I kind of can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Really?”

“Well, yeah! The ghosts of Emerson Hall. Everybody’s talking about it. My sister, Linda, she went to the show couple weeks ago. Said it was phenomenal. She couldn’t see the ghosts herself, but other people could, she said, and she got this awful, cold feeling. She said things were
movin’
by themselves.”

Gary winked at me. “It’s a hoax, right? If you tell me how they’re doing it, I won’t tell anyone, I swear.”

I looked at Henry, who nodded. I took a deep breath. “It’s not a hoax. It’s all real. In fact, the ghosts are with us right now.”

And then Jax held his nose and swan-dove into Gary’s chest. Tillie wrapped herself around his back like for a piggyback ride, giggling into his ear.

Gary began to shiver uncontrollably. Gary’s arms turned white and crackly.

Then Gary gave us a free tree.

He gave us shovels, too, and even sent along one of his employees to help us get the tree back to the Hall.

Gary wouldn’t come himself. Too spooked. Too fascinated by the coldness of his skin. Too wrapped up in the ghost story book he’d just been inspired to write.

Oh, brother.

So his employee, Nancy, helped us dig the hole, even though it was almost eleven at night. By the time the tree was in the hole, covered with mulch, and watered, it was midnight, and Nancy bolted out of there while we had our backs turned.

Igor watched everything from the low branch of a nearby tree.
She didn’t last long, did she?

“So much for Nancy,” Henry said.

“Guys?” Tillie whispered.

“Can you blame her?” I said. “We basically made her boss go crazy.”

“What if his ghost book turns out to be a bestseller?” Joan pointed out. “He’d better dedicate it to us.”

“Guys!”

“
What
, Tillie?”

Tillie pointed right at where Jax stood.

“Is that . . . I see . . .” Tillie slapped herself across the face, knocking her nose sideways. “Come on, Till. Pull it together. Is that Jax?”

“Tillie?” Jax whispered. “You’re just a blur. Is that really you? Why can’t I hear her?”

“What can you see?” I said.

“I see . . . gray. Gray, like the color’s been sucked out of that spot. But it hasn’t, has it? It’s because Tillie is there.”

“What’s he saying?” Tillie burst out, shrilly.

“He says he can see a gray blur where you’re standing, but that’s it,” Henry said. “He can’t hear you, though.”

“We have to hurry, then.” Tillie rushed at me, grabbed my shoulders. “Find us knives. Hurry, oh, I can’t stand it!”

I didn’t get it. “Knives?”

Tillie started punching her fists through my chest, sobbing. “Knives,
knives
, hurry up . . .”

Henry shoved his hands in his pockets, looking tired all of a sudden. “For cutting the bark.”

“For making our anchors.” Tillie sniffled.

“For our bracelets, Olivia,” Jax said, smiling at me.

Joan gasped.

I stared at him. “Already? Right now?”

“I guess now that the tree’s planted, it’s gotten the anchor started, so they can see each other,” Henry said. “Well, barely. We can’t make them wait anymore; that’s like torture.”

“Torture,”
Tillie cried.

“Okay,” I said. I felt numb, like I was watching myself go through the motions of talking. It was happening again. I was going to have to say good-bye, just like I had to Ferderick, and this time was worse. Tillie and Jax . . . we’d gone through so much together.

I blinked, hard. Clenched my fists, hard. “Fine. I’ll get knives.”

I found two dull kitchen knives and raced back outside. The second I got close enough, Tillie and Jax blasted toward me and grabbed them away. They didn’t even stop to think about the fact that they could
hold
things now.

Not even a
thank you
, huh, guys? Not even a
see ya
?

I guess they had more important things to worry about.

Like how, once they started scraping away at the bark of the tree, they turned brighter, more solid. They were starting to see. They were starting to hear.

“Tillie! Are you there?” Jax’s face squinted in Tillie’s direction.

“I’m right here! I’m right here!” Tillie screamed. She could barely hold the knife straight.

Joan said, “Oh, you poor thing,” and reached for them, but Henry held her back.

“This is private,” he said. “Let them figure it out.”

I just stood there. I couldn’t think anything but
They’re leaving me
. I felt Mr. Worthington’s eyes on me, but I ignored him. I couldn’t deal with his staring right now.

Igor wound around my ankles.
Pay attention. Soon they’ll be gone. You won’t want to miss anything.

So I forced my eyes open, and Joan whispered, “Oh, Olivia, it’s going to be all right. Don’t cry,” and I couldn’t even tell her to shut up.

“Tillie,” I tried to say. “Jax?”

But they weren’t listening to me. They were each braiding three strips of bark together. They were starting to look like real people, like the memories we had seen. You could almost believe they were real kids when they lunged at each other, when they tied their new bracelets around each other’s wrists.

“I can see you!” Tillie was laughing and crying at the same time. She yanked Jax into a hug, and their heads knocked together. “Jax, can you see me?”

“Clear as day,” Jax said, grinning. He pulled Tillie’s braids, and then, over Tillie’s shoulder as he hugged her, Jax caught my eye. And he said, “Good-bye.”

Two silent pops of light, and they were gone.

Two crude bracelets made of birch bark plopped to the grass.

Mr. Worthington drifted toward the tree and wrapped himself sadly around it.

“Bye,” he said, his voice croaky. “Bye-bye.”

Joan clapped her hands to her mouth. “Did Mr. Worthington just
talk
?”

But Henry and I couldn’t answer her. There was too much to say, too many fists squeezing my chest. So we listened to the leaves rustle instead, and after Mr. Dawson picked up Joan in his shining black car, Henry brought one of the bracelets to me.

“We should wear them.”

I snatched the bracelet away, the bark digging into my palm. “I don’t want to wear it.”

“You want to just let them sit here and rot?”

“I don’t know, Henry.” I kicked the dirt. It didn’t make me feel better.

“They would have wanted us to wear them, I bet.”

He was right, of course. Especially Tillie. Tillie would have just
loved
me and Henry exchanging bracelets.

I rolled my eyes. “Fine.”

Henry tied his bracelet onto my wrist, over my glove, and I tied mine onto his. Overhead, the tree’s leaves rustled.

“There.” I turned away, kicking the dirt some more. “You happy now?”

“Yeah, actually. Are you—?”

I flung my arms around him, cutting him off. I didn’t know what to say, so this would have to be good enough.

“Oof. That was your elbow.”

“Sorry.” His shirt smelled like gym and mulch and freckles. This was mortifying. But I didn’t want to let go. “Henry?”

“Yeah?”

I pulled back and punched him in the arm. “You’d better not take that off.”

“Ow! Jerk. Of course I’m not gonna take it off.” He held up his wrist. “For life?”

“Well, through eighth grade, anyway. Okay?”

Henry grinned. “Okay.”

We thumped wrists.

“Thump,” Mr. Worthington said happily, nodding at us. “Thump.”

That night, right before I went to bed, I took out my school planner, doodles covering it in a charcoal wonderland.

Three down, one to go.

My ghost countdown was almost over. And in a week and a half, it’d be March.

In a week and a half, we’d know the Hall’s fate.

No, not its fate. Its
destiny
.

I liked that word better. It sounded softer, like something Mom would say. It sounded like stars.

T
HE MONDAY AFTER
Tillie and Jax moved on, I sat next to Mrs. Barsky while she wiped down the counters. She wore a new collection of yellow beads. The Ghost Room was doing good business.

“Hello, Olivia. Long time, no see.”

“Yeah.” Suddenly I couldn’t look her in the eye. “Sorry about that.”

“Oh, that’s all right. You’ve been busy, I’ve noticed.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s really quite fantastic, Olivia. You know that, don’t you? I know this year has been tough, but what you kids have done—”

“Am I gonna see ghosts my whole life?” I twisted my umbrella around and around in my hands. “Because I don’t know if I can stand that. They’re gone, Mrs. B, and now there’s only one left, and—will I just keep meeting them and helping them and then having to say good-bye?”

Mrs. Barsky set down her rag and leaned forward on her elbows. “Olivia. Look at me.”

I did, and she wiped my cheeks.

“I don’t know if you’ll keep seeing ghosts, if they’ll keep coming to you. But you can always decide whether or not to help them. You can always tell them to go away. This is your life.
Yours
.” She smoothed my hair. It made my chest ache. “And no one else’s. You’re a strong girl, Olivia.”

I made a noise like
phbtchya
.

“I’m serious. You’ve endured things a lot of grown-ups never have to.” Mrs. Barsky tipped up my chin. “And yes, it gets easier every time, to say good-bye. And that’s not just true for ghosts. That’s for everything.”

I kicked the counter wall. “Maybe it’d be better if I’d never met them.”