Saundra Mitchell - Mistwalker

But an alley still opened in it, and the boat with my name drifted to shore. I stepped inside and didn’t look back.

I meet her when she lands.

This time, I felt the walk open from shore to shore. This time, I see the boat she thinks I sent for her. It bears her name, just as she claimed. A bit of unexpected magic; the curse working in my favor for once.

Offering her my hand, I say, “You’re in time for dinner.”

The shade where her eyes should be is brown. Now, there are shades of gold in there, hints of black, but mostly, brown. She’s still no more than a smear of colors. When she looks at me, I wonder what she sees.

When I set eyes on Susannah, I was wrecked. Every ethereal thing about her enchanted me. Nonetheless, feminine beauty is hardly the same as masculine appeal. I could be unnerving, to Willa. Perhaps terrifying. I squeeze her hand and tuck it in the crook of my elbow.

“I’m glad you came back.”

“I don’t even know if you’re real,” she says.

“In what sense?” I look to her as I lead her through the darkened forest. The leaves have started falling, promising the end of the season. They whisper as they flutter, and their bared trees arch above us, a skeletal canopy.

Willa digs her fingers into my arm. How could she doubt my existence? She’s touching me. And then I draw a half-hitched breath, because she’s touching me. It’s been a hundred years since anyone’s touched me.

There’s no chance she realizes the import of her hand on my arm. She doesn’t consider me, not even with a sideward glance. Her light wavers as she speaks. I wonder if she’s rolling her lips. If they’re full or chapped . . . if they’re in need of a kiss.

“In the sense of, you’re a ghost. You’re a story people tell. If you can get to the Grey Man, he’ll give you the best fishing you’ve had in your life.”

“You want me to help you fish?”

She barks with laughter. “I’m saying that’s what you’re supposed to do.”

It sounds vaguely familiar. But there are constraints to the wonders I can work. I wish for things to appear on my plate at breakfast; I call and dismiss the fog. I collect the souls of those few who die beneath the reach of my lamp. It is a limited palette, I admit. Mostly shadows and shade. Still, I’ve read her life, every bit that’s been recorded.

Covering her hand with mine, I say, “Let us agree to always tell each other the truth.”

“I’m sorry,” she says, frowning. “What?”

I move in front of her, stopping her just at the edge of the woods. There’s no moonlight to play on me here. I am as ghostly or as real as she wishes me to be, I suppose. “I won’t lie to you. From my lips, to your ears, I swear—it will always be the truth.” Perhaps it was too ardent a promise. She takes a step back, wary. I must do something to keep her. I must entice her, and she’s not so simple as I was. She wants more than a pretty siren on a cliff, promising her love.

“I know you’re suffering,” I say. More truthfully, I can guess that she is. She has to be; I read all the newspapers with her name in them. Until this summer, she was entirely ordinary. But this year, this summer, is a tapestry, and I alone see the threads in its weave. I understand more about her than she can possibly know. “I’m sorry about your brother.”

Her light hardens, the shades ceding to white as she becomes steel. “I don’t wanna talk about Levi.”

“Is that strictly true?”

The fog fills around us, capturing strange lights in its depth. It glows, draping the forest in its ephemeral shape. Willa turns, staring at the path behind her. It’s still clear. If she wishes to take to the boat again, to steer herself home, I won’t stop her.

I think it’s plain by now. If she’s a romantic, it’s the secret sort. I won’t win her by force or insistence. Instead, I ask again, an intimate murmur made for her alone.

“Is it, Willa?”

“I killed him, you know.”

Reaching out, I brush my fingers against her light, where her shoulders should be. My words I select with care—the sentiment she wants to hear, not the truth she may need to. That’s what her family and friends are for. It’s hardly my fault they’re failing.

I slip closer and say, “I know you did.”

Like frost, she melts.

Grey listened.

That’s what he had going for him; he listened and didn’t argue with me. I followed him to the lighthouse, and we sat in chairs that weren’t there last time. The music boxes quivered around us. I was afraid they might start playing on their own.

It felt like confession, telling him everything in my head. Every place where I could have stopped. Changed my mind. Every bad decision that added up to Levi breathing his last on the wharf. Right then, nothing else mattered, not the stuff that happened before or everything that came after.

I said everything out loud. Finally, all of it, even down to wishing Dad hadn’t quit smoking. I didn’t know how much that bothered me, until I said it out loud. My lips burned, and I looked up at Grey.

“You think I coulda said something useful,” I told him. “I froze up. In all the ways that count, Levi was alone. He died alone.”

“I suppose he did,” Grey said. He sat quietly, watching me. Waiting.

It unnerved me when nothing else came out. He didn’t try to comfort me, and I had nothing else to say. Silence spread inside me. I was tired of myself, hashing it all out. Standing, I looked for the staircase—I knew I’d seen one. It was a lighthouse; it had to have one. “So you live here?”

Rising, Grey touched my shoulder, turning me like he knew exactly what I wanted to see. And he did, because when I came all the way around, the staircase was there, spiraling up and away.

My breath sputtered; it was impossible. But it didn’t feel like a hallucination anymore. Not a dream or a break from reality. It was another place, for sure. But not an imaginary one.

“Let me give you the tour.”

He took the rail and started upstairs. He was something to look at from the front or the back. But from behind I saw the marble smoothness of his neck. It was stone white, his silvery hair restrained with a ribbon just a shade darker. His clothes were crisp, that collar looking starched as anything.

And I had touched him. He had shape, and weight—not warmth, not really. But he felt real enough. Just cut out of translucent silk.

“This is my library,” he said.

It was smaller than the room below, but rich. Lamps with stained-glass shades glowed, casting two circles of light that met in the middle. A leather chair gleamed, but it was the chaise that looked like somebody used it. The upholstery was shiny in places, covered by a crumpled blanket.

Books filled the walls, just like music boxes did in the room below. Some—a lot—were the old-fashioned, leather kind. The ones with thick spines and gold bands. But underneath the railed ladder, a whole section was paperbacks. Cheap and battered, they smelled sharp when I touched one.

Casually, Grey trailed his fingers along the hardcovers. “I have a fondness for dime novels.”

A Princess of Mars and Tarzan of the Apes and Motor Girls on the Coast. Yeah, he did. When Grandpa Washburn passed, I’d carried four or five boxes of books just like these to the donation pile. It was a weird connection to make. I had to stop, pushing The Liberty Boys of ’76 back onto the shelf. “How old are you?”