Dust to Dust Read Free

wonder if he’s getting emotional, but then he clears his throat. “Yes,” he says. “Believe me. I know I missed that time.”
    He’s not wrong to have regrets about the way he walled off his grief and stopped connecting with the world, including me, after Mama died when I was six years old. He did miss a lot.
    â€œWell . . . good night,” he says. And it’s just a word, but the way he says it is softer than usual, like he’s trying to convey something deeper. I smile at him in the doorway, hoping he can tell that I appreciate his efforts to show me his affection.
    As my father’s footsteps echo down the hallway, though, loneliness creeps in. Looking around my room, at the wide window seat, the soft yellow curtains, the photos on my antique-looking desk, something is . . . out of place. A flash, a memory, races through my brain—I’m in this room, but it’s not real. It shimmers, just out of reach. I can’t touch anything; there’s nothing solid. I’m not solid.
    But he was. Thatcher . He moved at my side like an opposing magnet, never quite touching me but always close, always watching, always protecting me from . . . what?
    I’ve been having nightmares since the accident. Just this morning I woke up with a jolt, and a lingering image of my bedroom—this very room—ransacked and destroyed, its contents scattered and broken as if a tornado had ripped through it. And I remember a voice, his voice, telling me to be careful, to stay alert. In the journal next to my bed, I wrote down Thatcher’s words so I wouldn’t forget them. I’m almost afraid to look at them now, but when I open the page, I see my own shaky handwriting and I can hear him saying, “I’ll find them. I’ll protect you.”
    I grab a pen quickly and scribble out the words. They’re nonsense. They’re the fog my dad was talking about, the haze of the pillsand the misfired synapses in my post-coma brain. But it’s strange to me that it’s only in the early morning, when my pill is wearing off, that these visions and voices—these nightmares—come.
    A small bead of dread settles into my stomach, so I close the journal and put it back in its place underneath the books in my nightstand’s top drawer. Then I quietly lift up my comforter to step onto the floor. The feeling of the soft tufted rug under my feet does a little to ease my worries and ground me back in my world. This is real. I am here.
    So why, for a moment, did it seem like I was somewhere far away?
    I hear the leaves on the oak tree outside rustling. I walk to the window, carefully moving the dangling glass prism that Nick gave to me in the hospital aside before I slide it open.
    In one motion, Nick moves from the thick branch that reaches toward my house into my room, stepping onto the window seat and then softly to the floor.
    â€œWhat are you doing out of bed, young lady?” he asks me.
    â€œI wanted to greet you right,” I say, taking his hand and leaning into his chest—strong, sturdy, tangible.
    How silly of me to think there’s nothing solid here. Nick is the most solid thing of all.
    It’s the other boy who invades my thoughts, Thatcher . Who isn’t here. Who doesn’t exist. And when Nick is around, Thatcher doesn’t invade my dreams.
    I shake my head to knock away the crazy, and Nick steps back, putting his hand under my chin. A trickling sensation of near-painblurs the edges of my body and I break away from his touch, sitting back on my bed as I swallow my last pill of the day.
    Nick perches beside me. I watch him reach into his pocket.
    â€œI’ve been meaning to return this to you,” he says, and he hands me a heart-shaped amber pendant on a silver chain. I take it into my palm and finger its smooth edges. Nick had given it to me as a gift last year, a replacement for a heart-shaped jade charm that my