Ravenwood looked different than the last time I was here. It wasn’t really a surprise—Ravenwood was always changing—but even so, I could tell from the black sheets hanging over all the mirrors and windows that this time things had changed for the worse.
It wa
sn’t just the sheets. It was the way the snow fell from the ceiling, even though I was inside. The cold white drifts piled in the doorways and filled the fireplace, swirling into the air like ash. I looked up to see the ceiling crowded with storm clouds that wound all the way up the stairwell to the second floor. It was pretty cold even for a ghost, and I couldn’t stop shivering.
Ravenwood always had a story, and that story was Lena’s. She controlled the way the house looked with her every mood. And if Ravenwood looked like this…
Come on, L. Where are you?
I couldn’t help but listen for her to answer, even though all I heard was silence.
I made my way through the slick ice of the front hall until I reached the familiar sweep of the grand front stairwell. Then I climbed the white steps, one at a time, all the way to the top.
When I turned to look down, there were no footprints at all.
“L? You in there?”
Come on. I know you can feel me here.
But she didn’t say anything, and as I slipped through the cracked doorway into her bedroom, it was almost a relief to see she wasn’t inside. I even checked the ceiling, where I had once found her lying along the plaster.
Lena’s bedroom had changed again, like it always did. This time the viola wasn’t playing by itself, and there wasn’t writing everywhere, and the walls weren’t glass. It didn’t look like a prison, the plaster wasn’t cracked, and the bed wasn’t broken.
Everything was gone. Her bags were packed and neatly stacked in the center of the room. The walls and the ceiling were completely plain, like an ordinary room.
It looked like Lena was leaving.
I got out of there before I could think what that would mean for me. Before I tried to figure out how I would visit her in Barbados, or wherever she was going.
It was almost as hard to think about as leaving her the first time around.
I found my way out through the massive dining room where I had sat on so many other strange days and nights. A thick layer of frost covered the table, leaving a dark, wet rectangle on the carpet immediately below. I slipped through an open door and escaped out to the back veranda, the one that faced the sloping green hill leading to the river—where it wasn’t snowing at all, just overcast and gloomy. It was a relief to be back outside, and I followed the path behind the house until I came to the lemon trees and the crumbling stone wall that told me I was at Greenbrier.
I knew what I was looking for the second I saw it.
My grave.
There it was, among the bare branches of the lemon trees, a mound of fresh soil lined with stones and covered with a sprinkling of snow.
It didn’t have a headstone, only a plain old cross made of wood. The new dirt hill looked like something less than a final resting place, which actually made me feel better, rather than worse, about the whole thing.
The clouds overhead shifted, and a glimmer from the grave caught my eye. Someone had left a charm from Lena’s necklace on the top of the wooden cross. The sight of it made my stomach flip over.
It was the silver button that had fallen off her sweater the night we first met in the rain on Route 9. It had gotten caught in the cracked vinyl of the Beater’s front seat. In a way, it felt like we had come full circle now, from the first time I saw her to the last, at least in this world.
Full circle. The beginning and the end. Maybe I really had picked a hole in the sky and unraveled the universe. Maybe there was no kind of slipknot or half hitch or taut-line that could ever keep it all from coming undone. Something connected my first glimpse of the button to this one, even though it was just the same old button. Some small bit of universe had stretched from Lena to me to Macon to Amma to my dad and my mom—and even Marian and my Aunt Prue—back to me again. I guess Liv and John Breed were in there somewhere, and maybe Link and Ridley. Maybe all of Gatlin was.
Did it matter?
When I saw Lena for the very first time at school, how could I possibly have known where this was all headed? And if I had, would I have changed a single thing? I doubted it.
I picked up the silver button carefully. The second my fingers touched it they moved more slowly, as if I had plunged my hand to the bottom of the lake. I felt the weight of the worthless tin like it was a pile of bricks.
I put it back on the cross, but it rolled off the edge, falling onto the mounded dirt of the grave. I was too tired to try to move it again. If someone else was here, would they have seen the button move? Or did it only seem like that to me? Either way, that button was hard to look at. I hadn’t thought about what it would feel like to visit my own grave. And I wasn’t ready to rest, in peace or not.
I wasn’t ready for any of this.
I’d never really thought past the whole dying-for-the-sake-of-the-world part of things. When you’re alive, you don’t dwell on how you’re going to spend your time once you’re dead. You just figure you’re gone, and the rest will pretty much take care of itself.