Page 44 of Backpacking through Bedlam

“Yes, but if I died, you have far too many routes by which to access the afterlife.”

I snorted. “Mary wouldn’t help me before, what makes you think she’d help me now?”

“She’s right, I wouldn’t,” said Mary, from the other side of the room. I grimaced. She must have seen it, because I could hear the smirk in her voice as she continued. “You really thought you could tell a long-ass story, mention me by name a dozen times, and not have me hear you eventually?”

“No.” I reclaimed my hands and leaned back, using them to prop myself up as I shot a smile at my former babysitter and permanent personal haunting. “Hi, Mary.”

“Hi,” she said, barely looking at me at all. Her eyes—as always, the color of a winter sky above a hundred miles of empty highway, impossible and sepulchral—stayed fixed on Thomas. The ghost looked like she was seeing a ghost, and the irony of that was almost enough to distract me from how disconcertingly modern her clothing was, jeans and a T-shirt with the logo of a band I’d never heard of splashed across the front. She wasn’t my babysitter anymore. She hadn’t been for a long, long time.

Even the dead will grow and change, if you give them enough time.

Thomas twisted around and stared back for several seconds, before a slow grin split his features and he stood, taking a step toward her. “Mary Dunlavy,” he said. “It’s been too damn long.”

“Tommy,” she said, with a little hiccup. “You actually . . . I mean, she actually . . . You didn’t die.” She blinked, and her eyes were very bright. Could the dead cry? I couldn’t remember ever having seen it happen, but maybe it was possible. I no longer put anything past our resident ghosts. “You didn’t die.”

“No, Mary, I didn’t.” Thomas kept smiling at her. “Sometimes I wished I had, but I didn’t, and Alice found me, because she’s still the most stubborn creature in creation, and that’s partly down to you. So thank you.”

“That girl was stubborn from the moment she was born,” said Mary. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.” Then she stepped forward, very quickly, and threw her arms around his chest, hugging him hard.

I barely heard her whisper, “I thought I’d killed you.”

Thomas didn’t miss it either. He wrapped his arms around her in return, smile fading into an expression of regretful understanding, and just held her.

I slid off the bed, moving to stand beside them, and didn’t say anything. Mary had been carrying her guilt for a long time, and I hadn’t exactly helped with that, since I’d blamed her with everything I had in the immediate wake of his disappearance. Sure, she’d been doing her job, and sure, I’d always known the crossroads came first where she was concerned. It was her tie to them that allowed her to emulate the living so well, with none of the rules about how and when she could appear that controlled Rose, and without them, she would have faded into whatever came for ghosts when their hauntings ended.

And none of that had mattered to me, because when she’d come to collect him, she’d done it in the middle of the night. She hadn’t given me the chance to say goodbye. And so I’d blamed her, and kept on blaming her even as she’d moved away from me to take care of my children, and my grandchildren, and all the sprawling offshoots of a family that had been doing perfectly well without me.

I’d almost forgotten she’d been his friend almost as long as I had. I’d introduced them when Thomas was worried his new house might be haunted—and if I was being honest, I’d introduced him because I was already developing a crush on the man, and Mary had been the only authority figure in my world who I’d trusted to give him a halfway fair shake. She didn’t care that he was Covenant. She only cared that he was too old for me, and that my father hated him, which would have been a problem even if she hadn’t been reasonably sure it was at the root of my attraction.

But they’d been friends even without me, forming their own strange sort of fellowship, one that centered around surviving the strangeness of Buckley, even if “surviving” wasn’t quite the word where Mary was concerned, and trying to make sure I did the same. There had even been a time, which I wasn’t particularly proud of now, when I’d been afraid the two of them were going to fall in love and leave me behind.

Instead, we’d all left each other, Thomas by being thrown into another dimension against his will, me by running away, Mary by continuing to be the person she’d always been and taking care of the children when their parents couldn’t.

Thomas held her tightly until she started trying to disengage, and then he let her go, watching as she stepped back to a reasonable distance.

“I want to know everything,” she said. “Not right now, but . . . everything.”

“I can say the same to you,” he said. “The crossroads are gone. How are you still here?”

“Alice,” said Mary, rolling her shoulders in an easy shrug. “And the kids. I mean, really, I should be blaming Fran for being willing to hand her daughter to a dead girl, but I think the blame is shared.”

Thomas and I both looked at her blankly. Mary smiled.

“I had two jobs, where most crossroads ghosts only get one,” she said. “I served the crossroads, and I took care of the Healys. Fran got in early enough and wrapped me tight enough in Alice’s life that the metaphysics shifted somewhere along the way, and when Annie got rid of the crossroads, I still had a job to do. I’m a Phantom Babysitter now. I haunt the family. That’s what my afterlife looks like. Just you assholes, from here until eternity.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Mary eyed me.

“Something funny?”

“We get to keep you,” I said. “Forever. That’s amazing.”

Her smile grew slowly. “Yeah. It kinda is. Now, do you two want to tell me what the hell is going on here?”

“I found him,” I said. “Alive.”

“That much is pretty obvious, Alice.”

“Yeah, but everyone told me it wasn’t possible, so I’m going to be smug about it for a while,” I said. “I found him, I brought him home, and now we’re going to live happily ever after. With a little stop-off in New York to deal with the Covenant incursion Rose says is going on.”