Chapter 17
Emma
Sunday morning, I tapped on my laptop waiting for the search results to tell me who Finn Carter really was. The first name that popped up was an actress. The second was some kid’s Facebook page in New Jersey. I glanced up at Cash still sleeping in my bed, the covers wrapped around him like a cocoon, and wondered where Finn was. Seriously, where did a dead guy go for a whole day and night? After scrolling through a few pages of search results, I finally reached a point in the list that caught my eye and frowned.
World War II Deaths: Find your ancestors now at Ancestry.com/military
I clicked on the link and scrolled down to Finn Carter, born 1924. Clicked on that. But it only led me to a reference to an old newspaper clipping that I didn’t have access to here. I frowned at the screen. The library. They had a record there of all kinds of old newspapers. I scribbled down the information in a notebook and ripped out the page. Cash groaned as I folded it into a neat little square and stuffed it into my back pocket.
“Are you going to sleep all day or what?”
Cash sat up and combed his fingers through his messy black hair. He squinted at the alarm clock and then at me. “Why? Do you have somewhere you need to be?”
“Actually, yeah.” I jerked the blankets off of him and grabbed his bag out from under my bed. “So move it. Besides, if Mom comes home and finds you in here, I’m dead.”
Cash stood up, pulled his T-shirt over his head and dug in his bag for a clean one. I couldn’t help but look. This must have been how Cash got the girls at school to fall for his crap. Make them laugh with a funny T-shirt, then peel it off and make them drool. His chest was a hard sheet smoothed out by tan skin. The muscles in his stomach stood out as he stretched the new T-shirt over his head. Most girls would have been entranced. All I could think about was what Finn might look like with his shirt off. My face felt warm, so I looked away and fumbled for one of the tubes of peppermint ChapStick that littered my vanity.
“Where are you going, anyway?” He mumbled through the fabric over his face. “I could go with you if you want. The only plan I had for today was sleeping in and since you’ve already screwed that up…” His head popped through the other side of the T-shirt and he grinned.
“I’m going to the library,” I said, sliding on the lip balm.
“The library?” Cash sat on my bed and dug through his bag. “It’s Sunday. Why in God’s name would you want to go there?”
When he pulled out a pair of jeans and grabbed the waistband of his sweats, I tossed the tube back onto the vanity and held my hand up. “Keep it in its cage, Casanova. And not everyone thinks the library is a waste of time. Some people actually like books.”
Cash rolled his eyes. “I always knew there was something wrong with you. Now turn around so I don’t ruin you for other men.”
I slapped my hands over my eyes and turned around, listening to him shimmy in and out of his clothes. When he was done, I grabbed my backpack and slid the window open for him. I hated sending Cash back home when his dad was there, but I didn’t really have a choice. If there was information about Finn out there, I was going to find it.
…
“Emma!” Ms. Godfrey, the librarian, said in a loud whisper as she opened the locked library doors. I don’t think I’d ever heard the woman speak louder than that. “It’s been so long.”
I smiled, thankful I could always count on Ms. Godfrey to be here on a Sunday and let me in outside of business hours, even though I’d avoided the place for the last two years. I followed her in and looked around at the stacks and shelves I used to hide in when I was a kid. There were so many memories of Dad here. “Yeah, it has.”
“You know, your father’s books are still one of our most popular series,” she said, correctly interpreting my silence. “I had to order extra copies because we couldn’t keep them on the shelf.”
My lips felt numb from the fake smile. My gaze drifted to the local author section, where they still had Dad’s picture up. He smiled back at me, his dark hair rumpled like he’d meant for it to look that way.
I looked away. “That’s really great, Ms. Godfrey. I’m sure he’d be happy to hear that.”
She pushed her glasses up her nose and touched my shoulder, giving me the sympathetic look that everyone around here had mastered over the last two years. “What brings you here on a Sunday, honey? Are you working on something for school?”
I pulled the folded paper out of my back pocket. “Yeah, actually. I need to find an old newspaper article for a report I’m doing for history.”
I handed her the paper and she gave it a quick once-over before handing it back. “You’ll have to check the archives by year.” She pointed me to the back of the library and patted my shoulder. “Let me know if you need any help.”
“I will.” I forced one more smile, then made my way to the tables where the newspaper viewers sat.
After two hours of searching and coming up empty, Finn Carter was starting to look like nothing more than figment of my imagination. I was about to give up, but then there it was. There he was. Finn Carter 1924-1942. I glanced around the empty library to make sure no one was looking, then clicked the highlighted name. An old South Carolina newspaper article lit up the screen. An obituary. Something in me sank, ached, but I read on anyway.
A fighter pilot, Second Lt. Finn S. Carter, has officially been reported dead as of early Monday morning, according to his father, John S. Carter of Charleston, SC. He had previously been missing since June 6, 1942 over the Pacific Ocean where he lost radio signal somewhere near the Midway Atoll.
Lt. Carter enlisted in May 1941 and won his wings in April 1942 in Dothan, Alabama. He had been overseas a little over a month when he died. He attended Charleston High School, and worked on his family’s peach farm. He is survived by a father, a mother, Susan Carter, and one younger brother, Henry Carter.
I clutched the edge of the desk and leaned in close when I saw the picture. A very alive Second Lt. Finn Carter stared back at me in black and white. His uniform was pressed. His smile was wide and bright and young. Way too young to be dead. He looked like he was ready to take on the world. I reached up and touched the screen. For once, I wasn’t shaking. For once, I had the proof that what I thought was reality and not a hallucination.
A laugh slipped from between my lips and I slapped my hand over my mouth to stop it. This was real. He was real. And if he was real… My giddiness over finding the article faded. If he was real, he was really dead. The sweet, funny, beautiful ghost of a boy who had been in my house less than twenty-four hours ago had really rotted at the bottom of the ocean somewhere. I shoved myself away from the desk feeling nauseated.
The feeling stayed with me all the way to my Jeep. I wrapped my hands around the steering wheel and stared out the windshield. How long could Finn keep this protecting thing up? It was obvious he was supposed to be somewhere else or he wouldn’t keep disappearing. He said he was breaking rules to be here with me. How long before whoever made those rules stopped him?
I needed my journals. Needed to go over Maeve’s attacks. Now that I knew what they were, maybe if I could figure out a pattern. Then I could be better prepared. Predict her moves before she made them, and have the sage and incantations ready for when she did. It was a long shot, but it was all I had.
By the time I made it into my room, my brain was humming with all of the information I needed to gather. I climbed into bed and stared at the pile of journals I’d dumped onto the comforter. There were so many. So many dreams. So many memories. I picked up the first one and peeled back the cover, running my fingers over the page. This was the first book. The one they’d given me at Brookhaven that documented what they had called delusional paranoia. I felt sick just looking at it, but I shook off the feeling and read.
I told Mom I went running because it was the first sunny day we’d had in a week. I really went running because I didn’t want to think about Dad. The faster I ran, the farther away the accident felt, so I ran until I hit Church Street. I would have gone farther but that’s where it happened. I remember the whisper.
“Move.”
And then the power line was flying at me and I was running across the road as fast as my legs would go to get out of the way. Everything felt cold and I didn’t understand why because a few minutes earlier I’d been sweating. Once I reached the grass, I just watched the power line squirm across the road. It was right where I’d been standing. All I could think was that I should have been dead.
Knowing now that Maeve had caused it, knowing that whisper had been Finn and not just a broken part of my brain, it was like I was seeing it in a different light. I placed my palm over the words, hating the memory. It had happened two months after the car accident, and was the first of many accidents. I read over a few more entries that the doctors had made me record. There wasn’t any pattern, no regular time frame. The only thing they had in common was the fact that I knew they weren’t accidents.
I opened another journal and stopped when I reached the first entry I’d made about the car accident. The one I’d survived. The one Dad hadn’t. Why had they made me write this down? Was having this all recorded for eternity really supposed to help me?
I could still hear Dad. I could still remember the moment right before it happened.
“I want to quit,” I said, staring out the window. Raindrops splattered against the windshield so hard you could barely hear the Journey song on the radio.
“Why?” Dad asked.
“Because I don’t…” I thought about the other cheerleaders. They lived for it. I lived for the moment practice was over. “I don’t feel like me.”
Dad sighed and patted my hand on the console. “Then you don’t have to do it.”
I looked at him, hopeful. “I don’t?”
Dad laughed. It was the last one. The last smile. “No, you don’t have to do anything that doesn’t make you hap—”
He never got to finish because the world shattered and went black after that. The next thing I remembered was lying in the back of the ambulance and wondering why my dad wasn’t there.
“What’s wrong?”
I jumped at the sound of Finn’s voice and slammed my journal shut. “You came back,” I breathed.
He stepped closer to the bed, eying the leather-bound journal half-covered in my sheets. “What were you doing? You look sick.”
“Homework.” I pulled my hair over my shoulder. “Where have you been? You just disappeared yesterday.”
Finn walked over to the wall and ran a shimmering finger over a glass-framed print on my wall. “I was at work.”
I took a breath and exhaled slowly, pushing the memory of Dad as far away as I could, trying to focus on Finn.
“Work? Dead people have jobs?”
He smiled. “Yeah. Some of us do.”
I watched him as he made a point not to watch me. “What’s your job?”
“I…just a messenger. I deliver things to where they are supposed to go.”
“What kinds of things?”
“What kind of homework are you working on?”
I chose to ignore his question the same way he’d ignored mine and chewed nervously on my bottom lip as Finn examined the black-and-white prints on my wall. He was completely engrossed, his gaze sweeping across the landscapes that I’d captured at their most beautiful moments before trapping them behind glass for as long as the frames would hold. These pictures were the only good things to come out of Mom’s insistence that I take yearbook.
“Where were you from?” I asked, inching to the edge of the bed. I’d seen it, but I needed to hear it from him. “You know, when you were alive.”
“Charleston.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “South Carolina.”
“Did you have family there? A job?”
He paused. “Why do you want to know all of this?”
“I just feel like I should know something about you,” I said. “I mean, two years of following me around? You probably know everything about me. Probably even know what color my underwear are right now.”
He rolled his eyes and grinned. “I have no clue what color your underwear are.”
“I still want to know.” I didn’t just want to know. I needed to know more about him than the fact that he was dead. I needed to put a name to this feeling eating me from the inside out. I needed to understand how someone who wasn’t even alive could make me feel like this.
“I worked on my dad’s farm,” he finally said, so quiet I could barely hear him. “He taught me to fly. To dust the crops.” He laughed to himself and stared at a blank spot on the wall. “My brother was always so jealous of that. He’d hide my boots, so I couldn’t leave him behind.”
“So are you my guardian angel?” I finally asked the question that had been eating at me all day. He didn’t turn around. Instead he moved on to the next print, the one I’d taken at Lone Pine Lake a couple months ago.
“No. I’m not an angel. I already told you. I’m a soul. I used to be person. And now I’m just…lost.” He trailed off. “Lost and terribly invested in a human that I couldn’t leave now, even if I wanted to.”
“Do you ever want to? Leave, I mean?”
Finn finally turned around to face me, his outline shimmering with a silvery dust. It was like he was wrapped in the Milky Way, cloaked in a translucent blanket of stars. “No. I have never thought of leaving you for even a second.”
I didn’t say anything. Instead I leaned forward and traced the jagged outline of Mount Whitney with my fingertip.
“This one’s my favorite,” I whispered. “I’d forgotten I set the timer. I didn’t even realize till later that I’d taken it. I’m usually not in my photos.” I looked at myself staring across the horizon, the lake reflecting a mirrored image of the setting sun behind the pine-dotted crags that etched the rocky terrain. Beside me was a shimmery light, a spectacular sunburst of color against the plain gray horizon. I’d always thought it was just a reflection of the sun off the camera lens. Now I knew better.
“I remember.” Finn touched the shimmery shape beside me and smiled.
I looked back and forth from the picture to Finn, trying to fit the two images together, until my fingers found their way to the glass. At least I could touch this.
“Tell me something about you,” he said.
“You already know everything about me.”
“No, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t know what goes on inside your head. I don’t even know what you want to do after high school.”
I glanced at Finn, at the floor, at the pictures. I felt like he was asking me to crack myself open and show him my insides with that one simple question. “I’d like to own a bakery someday. The kind where people can come in and sit at little iron tables and soak in the smell of bread when it’s cold outside.”
The second I allowed myself to think it, the pain started. Dull. Achy. The kind that always accompanies something you want but can never have.
“Why do you say that like you’ll never have it?” he asked.
“Because I won’t,” I admitted, twisting my toe into the floor. “I’ve barely made it though the past two years alive. Why should I expect to have a future to plan for?”
“Hey.” Finn moved so close to me I could feel his warmth on my skin. “You’ll have those things. You’ll have everything you’ve ever dreamed about wanting. Do you hear me? I’m not going to let anything happen to you. Haven’t I proved that to you by now?”
I shook my head. “No. I can’t keep relying on you. What happens when you can’t be there? I need to know how to protect myself.”
“I…” He looked tortured. Guilty. And for a moment I hated myself for making him feel that way. “This is all my fault. I’m sorry. You have no idea how sorry I am.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just tell me what to do.”
“I wish I knew. Now that you know…maybe you’d have some kind of chance even if I wasn’t here.”
He didn’t sound like he believed the words coming out of his own mouth.
I held my breath as he reached his hand up to my face. I leaned in, expecting to feel the cold, breathy vapor of his touch, but the sensation never came. By the time I let myself breathe again, he’d already dropped his hand and backed away.
“What’s wrong?” I stepped into him, wanting, needing him to touch me. I was so raw inside from that memory of Dad that I needed this more than I wanted to admit.
“Emma…don’t.”
He said it but he didn’t back away. He just stared at my lips and his chest started to move with unneeded breaths. I stepped closer. So close I could feel his warmth crackling between us like static electricity. “Please?”
The silence between us seemed unending, an ocean of unspoken words stretching on for miles between us. I stared up into bottomless green eyes that seemed to be searching my face. Ever so slowly, I reached for his cheek. Silvery blue sparks ignited in the paper-thin space between my fingertips and his skin.
Before I could touch him, he tripped over his own feet trying to back away from me. “I-I can’t touch you,” he stuttered. “I’m sorry.”
“I know you can touch me.” I didn’t mean for it to sound like an accusation but it did. “You’ve done it before. At the school. I felt you that day. You felt…real. Why not now?”
Finn stabbed his fingers through his hair. “You think I don’t want to touch you? Do you think I wouldn’t give anything…”
“Then do it!” A lump swelled in my throat and I pressed my lips together. Why did I need this so badly? I felt like I was going to break apart if he didn’t give me this. “You don’t get to say you want to touch me, then run away. If you can’t, then you have to tell me why. Why—”
“Because he’ll know!”
“Who?”
He groaned and touched his hip. “I have to go.”
My heart lurched in my chest. “You can’t! Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
I didn’t finish. It wouldn’t have done any good. Finn had disappeared. Again.