THE CHANGE IS SLOW AT first: silence is broken by a rhythmic beep. Darkness gives way to light. Numbness bleeds into pain.
He’s somewhere between awake and asleep. Or, maybe, alive and dead.
Colin always thought that dying would be the hard part. But feeling life seep back into his body is pain unlike anything he’s ever known.
It burns. His fingertips feel capped with lead weights, red with heat. Every inch of his skin pricks and pulses; the pain is so intense he can hear it, as if he’s on fire and the flames lick and tick near his ears.
Is he dreaming? Only a dream could whisk you from heaven to hell in moments and leave you willing to give up anything to do it over again. Wasn’t it only seconds ago that he was somewhere else? Somewhere both too bright and too dark, a world made of prisms of color warping rhythmically, as if everything around him pulsed with energy. For a flash, he remembers his skin prickling all over with the most intense anticipation he’d ever felt.
A face floats in the hollow space between his memories. Cool lips grow warm against his, and color swirls in irises that tell a story he wants to remember. He finally got to touch her.
If he sleeps again, maybe he’ll go back. Maybe she’ll be there too.
Voices seep into the quiet, and he opens his eyes, blinking against the dim light. Stark walls surround him, and the nauseating traces of antiseptic and coffee hang in the stale air. Everything around him seems lifeless.
The infirmary.
He flexes his hands, but they move in jerks. His fingers are stiff and numb, like rusty cogs. Colin tries to sit but quickly realizes it’s a bad idea. The room shifts and bends in front of him, and he collapses back into a pillow that’s too soft, hitting his head on the bed frame. Tubes and wires wrap around his arms, and each breath hurts more than the last. It feels like he’s inhaling propane, exhaling fire, yet he’s shivering.
A girl outside the room is asking to see him. He recognizes his name and turns his head toward her familiar voice. His lips know the shape of her name, but when he tries to say it, there’s no sound.
“I promise I won’t stay more than a few minutes,” she says.
“I told you, I can’t let you in there.” The other woman’s voice is familiar, but where he’s used to hearing soft honey, he now hears only edge.
“I’m not leaving,” the girl says flatly. “Please, tell him Lucy is here.”
Lucy. Blond hair and swirling eyes. The lake. The ice. Cold like he’s never known. The fear that he would die and then those fleeting moments when he didn’t care.
“Do you think I don’t know what you are?” The voices are closer now, quieter. “No way am I letting you get to that sweet boy.”
The silence outside his room stretches, making the air around him feel even more stagnant and stale. He opens his mouth and exhales Lucy’s name, but it’s too quiet for anyone to hear.
“You know about the others? Where are they?” she asks.
“If there’s even one more here, that’s one too many. You’re going to break that boy’s heart. Or worse.”
Maggie. Colin remembers her name, and everything comes back in a cluster of images and sounds: How many times he’s been in this bed, how many times Maggie has set his dislocated shoulder, stitched his cheek, given him everything from aspirin to morphine.
“Please,” Lucy says. “Just one minute. I promise I won’t stay long. . . .”
“Listen,” Maggie says more gently. “There’s nothing good that can come out of this. Leave that boy alone. Go take your haunting somewhere else.”
Haunting.
The door swings open, and Maggie enters alone. Her tall shadow slants across the far wall as she moves to the bed. Behind her, Lucy lingers in the hallway, catching his eye.
“Hi.” She waves.
He lifts his arm a few inches off the bed to wave back. Lucy’s skin is pale and almost glows beneath the artificial light. She doesn’t look real. The monitor registers the blip in his heart rate when he realizes that for the first time ever, Lucy looks like exactly what she is.
With one more apologetic smile, she disappears down the hall.
“Well, look who’s awake.”
Colin turns his attention to Maggie as she begins adjusting his tubes, checking the monitors. He wants to ask her what happened with Lucy, how she knows that Lucy is a ghost, and what she meant by “haunting.” He wants to ask her if he hallucinated the world of light and shadow, silver fire from Lucy’s touch. His heart squeezes painfully at the thought that it wasn’t real. But when he meets Maggie’s eyes, he realizes she’s waiting for him to say something.
“Sorry, what?” he asks.
“I asked you how your pain is, honey.”
He stretches his arms. They hurt. His head hurts. His legs hurt. “I’m a little rough,” he manages.
“Can you give me a number?” She points to a series of cartoon faces on a poster, ranging from smiling to crying, with a score below each.
“Um . . . I’d say eight?” His skin screams ten. It feels like it’s peeling away, from his fingertips to his torso.
Nodding, she pushes the contents of a syringe into his IV. “That’s what I thought.”
Colin watches the clear fluid disappear into his arm. He remembers the burning cold, the colors, the girl. “What did you give me?” he asks. Whatever it was, he wants more.
“Don’t worry, sweetness. It’s fentanyl. You were screaming when you came in. Should have taken you to the hospital.”
“Can you let me see her? Lucy?”
Colin wonders if he’s imagining the way she seems to stiffen. “You need to rest now, sweet boy. Joe went to get some dinner and will be back soon.”
He doesn’t stay awake long enough to see Maggie leave the room.
- •
Opening his eyes feels more challenging than lifting a car. The weight of sleep is unbelievable, and it’s only the sound of Joe walking into the room with Maggie that convinces Colin to struggle against the pull to return to sleep and memories of Lucy and her luminous world.
Joe tells him what Colin has already remembered: He fell into the lake, and the low temperature caused his heart to slow. Luckily, the exposure was minimal, and being young and fit enough means there should be no lasting effects.
Apparently, word of the accident has spread across campus, and some of the braver students have begun venturing out on the ice to see the scene of the crime for themselves. Joe’s rambling fades out when Dot walks in, all business, and she wordlessly takes in the scene: Colin in bed with cuts and bruises that cover pretty much everything not hidden by the cotton gown. Joe trying to avoid yelling by chatting incessantly. The beeping monitors on a cart near the bed.
“Colin,” is all she says.
“Hey, boss.”
“Dot’s going to stay until you’re asleep for the night. All right?” Joe’s forehead pinches into about a hundred wrinkles, and for the first time ever, it occurs to Colin that the man who took his first sick day when he fell through his porch might actually be done in by a punk kid giving him a heart attack. “I need to go back and make sure the students are off the lake.”
Colin’s stomach cramps with guilt. “Okay,” he mumbles.
In an uncharacteristic gesture of physical affection, Joe bends and kisses his forehead. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
He turns and leaves, his old blue coat folded neatly over his arm. Colin looks to Dot the second Joe’s out the door. “Where’s my bike?” he asks, but his voice turns to air on the last two words.
“Lost in the lake is my guess,” she answers, patting his arm gently. Anyone else might be full of I told you so’s, but instead, he can see the apology all over her face. He’s in the infirmary, suffering from the effects of hypothermia because he was horsing around on a lake in December—somewhere he shouldn’t have even been. He won’t be able to work for who knows how long. And Dot gets that it kills him that his favorite bike is gone.
“I know we haven’t talked in a couple weeks, but you’d tell me if something was going on, right? Something driving you to do crazy stunts on a frozen lake?”
He can tell that she’s barely suppressing the need to chew him out, and he nods, smile tight.
Her face registers that he hasn’t really answered. “Think you’re up for another visitor?”
Almost as soon as Colin nods, Jay walks in, stands at the foot of the bed, and looks at Colin like he’s seen a ghost. “You scared the crap out of me, Col. I didn’t think you were going to make it.”
“Thanks for pulling me out.”
“Lucy pulled you out,” he says, and Colin feels his eyes go wide. Lucy? The girl who can barely handle his kiss pulled his unconscious body from a lake? Jay’s already nodding, a grin pulling at the edge of his mouth as if they’re both imagining Lucy opening that beer bottle with her teeth. “Right? It was awesome. I basically punched the hell out of your chest to get you breathing.” His eyes narrow, and Colin can see the traces of another smile. It’s a struggle for Jay to stay serious for long, but for Dot’s sake, he works to keep it somber.
Colin knows Dot is probably putting the pieces together, but he can’t think about that right now. She’s unable to look at either of them, her wide eyes trained on the shape of Colin’s legs under the pile of blankets.
“That explains the bruises on my sternum,” Colin says.
“Really?” Jay sounds kind of impressed.
Colin pulls open the top of his hospital gown to show him the blue fist marks blooming across his chest. Jay laughs and turns it into a cough when Dot shoots him a sharp look. There are some Dot moods even Jay’s charm can’t penetrate, and one of those is Protective Dot. “Hey, do you know where Lucy is?”
Jay’s eyes slide to Dot again, probably sensing the tense set to her shoulders, and then back to Colin before mouthing the word, “Here.”
She stayed.
- • •
When the moon fills the window and spills across the floor, Colin actually starts to feel awake. Dot has left, and the far side of the room is empty but for the vaguely geometric shadows of medical equipment. Everything around him looks oddly . . . plain. Even the shadows here lack the dimension of those hovering alongside the strange trail.
Maggie pads into the room for another check of his vitals. “Feeling okay?”
He shrugs and gives her a pain score when she points to the faces on the wall. “It’s about a six.”
She pulls a packet of pills from her pocket and offers a cup with water. “Will she try to come back?”
He looks up at her. Maggie’s eyes are shadowed in the dark room, and she’s making a note on his chart, but he knows she’s not asking about Dot.
“Probably. Why wouldn’t you let her in?”
She sighs and straightens the blankets over his legs. “I’ll tell you the same thing I told her: Nothing good can come of this.”
“How did you know what she is?”
“How did you?”
“She told me,” he says. “But she didn’t have to tell you. You just knew.”
Maggie nods and meets his eyes. “She was killed just after I started here. I never knew her, but her face was plastered all over the news.” She pauses, studying him as her eyes fill with pain. “But that’s not what you’re asking, is it? Yes, I’ve seen her kind before around here.”
Colin swallows, but the question he wants to ask isn’t forming quickly enough.
“Tell me,” Maggie says. “When she told you she was dead, did you decide it didn’t matter how strange she was, didn’t matter that when you kiss her she doesn’t feel like any other girl?” She leans closer, resting her hand on the side of the bed. “Did she feel like she was put back on this planet just for you?”
It feels too intimate, what she’s saying. It feels like she’s looking underneath his skin. And he hates the echo of her words: You’re going to break that boy’s heart. Or worse. He tugs the blankets up around his shoulders.
“Well.” Maggie sighs, picking up her clipboard and tucking it under her arm. “I’ve been in your shoes, Colin. That girl needs something, and nothin’s gonna stop her from taking it. You think about that.” She turns to leave, stopping in front of the door. “And maybe she was put here just for you. You’ll give and give until you hollow yourself out. But when that girl disappears without warning, without a trace, you ask yourself how long she can be gone before you break.”
- • •
The shift change at work is silent outside his door, and the only indication that time has passed is the appearance of an unfamiliar gray-haired nurse materializing at his side and recording his vitals.
She runs her hand along the IV tubing, checking for kinks. “I’m Linda. I do hospice in town, and came in to give Maggie a break. How’s your pain?”
“Better. Around a three.” Colin stretches, reaching to push the button at the side of the bed that helps him sit up.
“That your girlfriend in the hallway? The brunette? Tall as a tree, but skinny?”
Colin’s monitor picks up, and the nurse glances at it. Brunette. “Yes,” he says. “Can I see her?”
She smiles over the top of her clipboard. “I was told you were to rest.”
He stares at her, trying as hard as he can to silently communicate that she should let Lucy in. That he won’t tell anyone.
She starts to leave and then pauses at the door, looking back over her shoulder. “Thirty minutes.”
“Thirty,” he repeats in a burst. “I promise. Thank you.”
Pale yellow light bleeds into the room as she slips out, and he counts to eighty-three before the door opens again and Lucy steps in.
“Colin?” she whispers.
He scoots over to make room for her on the bed. “I’m awake.”
The air stirs as she moves next to him, and the mattress dips surprisingly under her added weight. They sit side by side, stiff and silent. Colin has no idea where to start asking about the world he saw, what he felt, whether any of it was real.
“Are you okay?” she asks finally.
“I think so. Are you?”
She nods. “Do you want to talk about what happened?”
“Was it real?”
She studies him, but doesn’t seem to need him to explain more. “I think so.”
Colin can feel his fingers grow clammy. It would be so much easier to explain if it happened only in his mind. “The world didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before. It was bright, and . . . like there were more layers to everything. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I’d never seen color like that. And you . . .” He glances up to her quickly. “I felt you, Luce. I mean, we were the same.”
The memories fill his thoughts slowly, slithering in: icicles hanging from silvery branches, leaves greener than a December day has ever seen, a shimmering crystal-blue sky wrapping through it all. It’s a world worthy of a dream.
Her eyes darken, mocha swirling into burgundy. “What was it like to go in?” she asks hesitantly.
Only a few fragments before he fell in are clear. “I noticed a puddle of water on the ice right before it cracked,” he says. “But it was already too late. How is any of it possible, Lucy? Did I die?”
She reaches for his hand, and it surprises him how strong she feels. “I don’t know.”
She doesn’t say anything else, and he leans back, closing his eyes. Colin feels tired and sore, but mostly he feels like he does after a really long ride with a couple hard falls. The idea of falling in a frozen lake used to seem so extreme; it makes him wonder why he’s not in rougher shape.
They don’t talk about what it was like to finally feel each other for the first time. He doesn’t tell her about Maggie’s warning, and he doesn’t tell her that even when he realized what was happening, it never occurred to him to worry he might die.
He certainly doesn’t tell her how badly he wants to go back under.
