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“Uh, Grin. He’s calling me in a sec.”
“Okay, well. I won’t keep you, then.” He paused. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah, sorry, yes.”
“Okay,” Rhys drawled. I knew I was supposed to say something, supposed to stay on the line. But all I could think of was Sid and whether it was true. And I didn’t want the darkness I felt to touch Rhys. “I guess I’ll let you go, then. Home stretch.”
“Is it?” Somehow, after weeks of checking his schedule every day—twice a day—and keeping up with every detail, I’d lost track of the days, lost track of the tour. Now, every day without Rhys stretched on, bleeding into the next in an endless wash that my brain cringed away from.
“Uh. Yeah, one more week.”
One more week. One more week. Week, week, week. A period of time measurable in a single word. Relief slammed through me. How could I have lost such track.
“Really, only one more week?”
“You forgot?” He sounded hurt.
“I—no, I . . . I just lost track of time.” Silence. “I . . . it’s hard to . . . I miss you a lot and maybe it was easier to lose track,” I choked out.
I could feel the tension ease through the phone.
“I miss you too, babe. So much. I can’t wait to be home, honestly. Matty . . . I’m worried about you. You seem . . . The last few times we’ve talked, it feels like . . .”
Panic streaked through me. “Like what?”
“It feels like I’m talking to the Matt I first met in Huey’s bar. The Matt who didn’t trust me. Didn’t let me in.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
I’m not him anymore. I’m not, I’m not.
“Don’t be sorry, baby. I just want to make sure you’re okay. That you’re . . . I just miss you, I guess. Miss being with you.”
Another call beeped. Grin.
“Oh shit, that’s Grin. Can I call you back?”
“Yeah, I . . . okay, sure. I love you, Matt.”
“Love you, bye.”
I clicked over to answer Grin’s call and hung up by mistake. “Fuck, fuck, dammit.” I mashed the button to call him back and got the immediate voicemail that said he was still calling me. I forced myself to wait. To take a deep breath and let it out, to count to ten. My fingers slipped on the phone. Finally, the call connected.
“Grin? Is she—”
“Matt.”
“Huh? What?”
“Why’d you think she was dead?” His voice was thin and scared.
“I just . . . I just did, man, what the hell. Did you find out?”
“But why?”
“I don’t know, dude, I just woke up this morning and I . . . I felt it, I dunno! Fucking is she?”
Grin’s voice trembled. “Yeah.”
I felt like I was going to throw up. Even though I’d thought I was sure, up until the moment he said it I hadn’t realized how much I didn’t believe myself. I leaned on a grave jutting up in front of me, the stone so old the name was blasted to nothing. Erased.
“I finally got ahold of that cat Carl she used to live with. Got his number from that Jill girl, remember? They, uh, said she had an aneurysm that burst. Last night. Funeral’s on Thursday. You gonna go?”
My heart was pounding. Sid, dead. It was ridiculous.
“Yeah, I guess. I should, right?”
“I guess. I was gonna say if you want to, but I guess no one ever wants to go to a funeral. Man. I can’t believe Sid’s fucking gone. I can’t believe you went all freaky psychic about it either. Seriously, bro, what the fuck is that shit?”
“I swear I have no fucking clue how I knew.”
My heart pounded and the vision that dropped into my head was of myself, sitting on the front stoop the day my mother hadn’t come home, and feeling a vague sense of foreboding. Had I known? But it slipped away the second I grasped after it.
From somewhere on the path off to my left, I swore I heard the clip-clop of pounding hooves drawing closer through the graves, then retreating just as the horse should have drawn into view. I looked around wildly, but the early morning fog just slipped through tree branches and wisped around the tallest mausoleums.
“—pulled a Shawn or something,” Grin was saying as the pounding hooves faded away.
Shawn was a kid in St. Jerome’s with us. He seemed to know how everything worked and could explain anything. He was also completely rational. Didn’t believe in God or ghosts or psychics or anything.
The paranormal was big business at St. Jerome’s. Better to think you were cursed than to believe no family wanted you. Nicer to imagine that God had a plan for all the wack shit that happened to you than acknowledge the cruel randomness of the universe. Easier to say you didn’t go into small dark places because there were ghosts there than to think about what happened to you the last time you got shoved into one.
