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Zia and I looked at each other.
“We were here at the beginning of things,” she said, turning back to him, “before Raven pulled the world out of that old pot of his. We’ve been in the great beyond that lies on the other side of the long ago. It’s…”
She looked at me.
“It’s very peaceful there,” I finished for her.
“I don’t want to go to Hell,” he said. “What if I go to Hell?”
His voice was very faint now and I could hardly make him out in the gloom of the room.
“You won’t go to Hell,” I said.
I didn’t know if there was a Heaven or a Hell or what lay on the other side of living. Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. But there was no reason to tell him that. He wanted certainty.
“Hell’s for bad people,” I told him, “and you’re just a poor kid who got stung by a bee.”
I saw the fading remnants of his mouth moving, but I couldn’t make out the words. And then he was gone.
I looked at Zia.
“I don’t feel any better,” I said. “Did we help him?”
“I don’t know. We must have. We did what he wanted.”
“I suppose.”
“And he’s gone on now.”
She linked her arm in mine and walked me into the between.
“I had this idea for a store,” she said.
“I know. Where you don’t sell anything. Instead people just bring you stuff.”
She nodded. “It was a pretty dumb idea.”
“It wasn’t that bad. I’ve had worse.”
“I know you have.”
We stepped out of the between onto the fire escape outside the apartment. I looked across the city. Dawn was still a long way off, but everywhere I could see the lights of the city, the headlights of cars moving between the tall canyons of the buildings.
“I think we need to go somewhere and make a big happy noise,” Zia said. “We have to go mad and dance and sing and do cartwheels along the telephone wires like we’re famous trapeze artists.”
“Because…?”
“Because it’s better than feeling sad.”
So we did.
And later we returned to the Rookery and woke up all the cousins until every blackbird in every tree was part of our loud croaking and raspy chorus. I saw Lucius open the window of his library and look out. When he saw Zia and I, leading the cacophony from our high perch in one of the old oak trees in the backyard, he just shook his head and closed the window again.
But not before I saw him smile to himself.
I went back to the old woman’s apartment a few weeks later to see if the ghost boy was really gone. I meant to go sooner, but something distracting always seemed to come up before I could actually get going.
Zia might tell me about a hoard of Mardi Gras beads she’d found in a dumpster and then off we’d have to go to collect them all, bringing them back to the Rookery where we festooned the trees with them until Lucius finally asked us to take them down, his voice polite, but firm, the way it always got when he felt we’d gone the step too far.
