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I see Marie’s head hitting the wooden floor in the living room, blood pooling around her like a cape of death. If the rug had been a few inches longer, she would have lived, it would have softened the blow.
But it hadn’t been longer, and Marie died.
I see Marie’s eyes staring up at the ceiling and watch as the light goes out of them.
I was screaming then, and I’m screaming now.
The girl lying on the stones, the blood slowly pooling out of the back of her head, the way her limbs are broken and splayed at unnatural angles—the girl blinks at the grey sky.
She isn’t dead, not yet.
It’s enough to make me move, stumble to my knees beside her.
“Lotte,” I say to her, my voice a quiver, placing my hand at her cheek.
Her eyes look at me, a light green, and though I don’t know this girl, I feel like I do. She is hovering in that space between here and the veil, about to leave, but still present. The light is going out of her eyes like they did with Marie, but it’s leaving slower. She wants to stay.
May you find peace, I say to her using the voice, and I’m surprised to find my magic comes back to me.
She stares right into my eyes, and I think she hears me.
I reach down and I grab her hand, her cold, frail hand, letting her know she’s not alone when she goes. It’s what I wish I could have done with Marie instead of what actually happened. All around us I hear crying and screaming and yelling and more and more people rushing to the scene, but right now it’s just this girl and me on the damp stone and a spreading lake of blood.
It would be selfish to ask this dying girl what she meant. It would be selfish to ask her what happened to her. It would be selfish to ask her what caused her to take her life.
But I am a selfish man.
Who did this to you? I ask, because someone has done this to her. Someone has led her here, to jump off the roof, to end her short life surrounded by strangers such as myself.
Someone has thrown her into a misery from which this is the only escape.
The girl stares at me, her mouth moving slightly.
Everything here is built on bones, she says inside my head. Save yourself.
Then I see the life leave her.
It moves out of her like strands of gold, out of the crown of her head and twisting toward the sky until it’s carried away in the breeze, pushed toward the lake.
In a second, she is gone, and her eyes don’t see me anymore.
“No,” I cry out in desperation, in that wild, panicked feeling of trying to hang on to life when it’s already left. “No. No. No.”
Tears rush to my eyes, and I keep squeezing this girl’s hand as if it will bring her back.
“No,” I whisper.
I feel hands on my shoulders, pulling me back while someone else brushes past me, the school nurse, as if a bandage would fix anything, and then I’m pulled away from the dead girl, from the crowd, and I realize it’s Brom who has me. I rest my forehead against his chest, trying to breathe.
“Crane,” he says, his voice low. “I’m here.”
Such simple words, and yet they mean everything to me.
He keeps his hands on my shoulders, massaging me gently.
“Okay,” I say through a faint gasp. “Okay.”
Because I just saw a girl die in front of me, and it’s the second time someone has died right in front of me. And maybe that means nothing, but it feels like something.
At least I knew enough this time around to not make the same mistake again.
At least I didn’t try to bring her back to life.
No one should ever be brought back to life.
“What a strange thing it is to cry,” I mutter, watching as a teardrop falls from my face and down to the ground between us. “What a strange thing to have our hearts bleed in this way that it comes out from our eyes.”
I lift up my head and meet Brom’s gaze.
It holds me in place, and for once I let him be my strength.
I put my hand at the back of his head and hold him there for a moment.
“Thank you,” I whisper, hoping my eyes tell him more than my words ever could. “Thank you.”
His face remains impassive, a rock, so unlike the usual Brom who shows everything with the tilt of his eyes, the shift of his brows, the angle of his mouth. But now he’s being what he thinks I need, someone who can whether the storm, not be the storm.
And yet, in the depths of those black-brown eyes I see him soften for me.
