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“Oh, Maddy, Maddy,” she said, her voice a bare whisper. “I wish it was a dream.”
Zia pulled back from her, but took hold of her hands.
“I am dead, Mama,” she said. “Aren’t I?”
The old woman nodded.
“But then why am I here?” Zia asked. “What keeps me here?”
“M-maybe I…I just can’t let you go…”
“But you don’t keep Donnie here. Why did you let him go and not me?’
“Oh, Maddy, sweetheart. Don’t talk about him.”
“I don’t understand. Why not? He’s my brother. I loved him. Didn’t you love him?”
The old woman looked down at her lap.
“Mama?” Zia asked.
The old woman finally lifted her head.
“I…I think I loved him too much,” she said.
The ghost boy had no physical presence, standing beside me, here in the closet, but I could feel his sudden tension as though he was flesh and blood—a prickling flood of interest and shock and pure confusion.
“I still don’t understand,” Zia said.
The old woman was quiet for so long I didn’t think she was going to explain. But she finally looked away from Zia, across the room, her gaze seeing into the past rather than what lay in front of her.
“Donnie was a good boy,” she said. “Too good for this world, I guess, because he was taken from it while he was still so young. I knew he’d grow up to make me proud—at least I thought I did. My eyesight’s bad now, sweetheart, but I think I was blinder back then, because I never saw that he wouldn’t get the chance to grow up at all.”
Her gaze returned to Zia before Zia could speak.
“But you,” the old woman said. “Oh, I could see trouble in you. You were too much like your father. Left to your own devices, I could see you turning into a little hellion. That you could be as bad as he was, if you were given half a chance. So I kept you busy—too busy to get into trouble, I thought—but I didn’t do any better of a job raising you than I did him.
“You were both taken so young and I can’t help but feel that the blame for that lay with me.”
She fell silent, but I knew Zia wasn’t going to let it go, even though we had what we needed.
The ghost boy’s mother did remember him.
She had loved him.
I’d fulfilled my part of the bargain and I wanted to tell Zia to stop. I almost pushed open the closet door. I’d already lifted my hand and laid my palm against the wood paneling, but Donald stopped me before I could actually give it a push.
“I need to hear this,” he said. “I…I just really do.”
I let my hand fall back to my side.
“But why don’t you ever talk about Donnie?” Zia asked. “Why is his room closed up and forgotten and mine’s like I just stepped out for a soda?”
“When I let him die,” the old woman said, after another long moment of silence, “all by himself, swelled up and choking from that bee sting…” She shook her head. “I was so ashamed. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about it…about him…but I keep it locked away inside. It’s my terrible secret. Better to let the world not know that I ever had a son, than that I let him die the way he did.”
“Except you didn’t kill him.”
“No. But I did neglect him. If I’d been here, instead of driving you to some piano class or gym meet or whatever it was that day, he’d still be alive.”
