I See You So Close (The Last Ghost #2) - M Dressler Page 0,1
it okay for me to ask your name?”
I don’t say: I’m Emma Rose Finnis. Irish born and Irish stubborn, raised to be staunch in the face of wounds. I don’t tell her I came into this world in 1896 and died in 1915, drowned unfairly against cold, black-rocked shoals. Nor that I haunted a mansion beside the sea for more than a hundred years, until a hunter came along and thought he was strong enough to put me down. He wasn’t.
“My name is Rose,” I say. “And you’re Sheila.”
“That’s right, how did you know?”
“Your luggage, in the back seat.”
“You read that tiny tag? You must have twenty-twenty vision.”
Yes, these eyes and ears are as keen and quick as mine once were. I might draw no real breath, but this nose, it scents the powder clinging to the soft, sagging cheek beside me, and the weary sweat at the heavy neck. I may have no heartbeat, yet my soul still pounds in furious answer to what’s right and what’s wrong, and knows light and dark; which is how I know this woman laughing beside me is only laughing on the outside, and that under the powder and the hands rubbed with lotion to make them feel softer, she’s hard, she’s worn. She’s a servant in someone else’s mansion, just as I once was. It can make you feel beaten down.
I say, “I noticed your luggage because I like to get away, too.”
“Where’d you come from, Rose?”
“The ocean.”
“Nice. I always wanted to live on the coast. It’s hot down in the valley where I’m from. I could use more rain, fog, mist in my life. You come from the north coast or the south? The north? Did you mind the cold?”
“No. I’m used to it.” Also, it helps disguise me. If the temperature is freezing, and someone living accidentally brushes against my skin and feels how icy I am, then they aren’t startled and I’m not given away. There’s a risk I face, taking on this body so that I can take in the world. Someone might touch me and wonder. Even I wonder at it, how my icy soul lifted and keeps this body fresh. It’s because I willed it, I think, when I saw this flesh fall, remembering all my anger at being felled myself.
My friend Sheila says, “I guess you know, Rose, it gets pretty brisk up here, this time of year. Ever been this high before? There’s no snow yet, but it’ll come. Later than it used to. When I was a kid, we used to drive this pass and by now everything would already be blanketed. But nothing’s like it was, anymore, anywhere. I tell myself it’s still pretty, though.”
It is. The aspen trees, the higher we’ve climbed, have soaked in the distant gold of the setting sun, lighting up the dark places between the towering pines. Stony peaks shrug all around in deep grays and blues, half-skirted with boulders and flounces of deadfall.
When I was a little girl, growing up along the seashore, I imagined such mountains rising from the long valley. At school we studied a map on the wall to learn about the great ranges of California. The Sierras were so high, our teacher excitedly told us, that droves of pioneers died trying to cross them. She was a dramatic one, Miss Camber. The great Sierra Nevada in winter could be so deep in bitter snow, she said, that even the tallest man would be buried by it. She’d paced and shivered and clasped her arms as she moaned: A mountain blizzard, why, it could be so cruel, it could take your hands and feet, and even your eyes.
I’d raised my hand and stood beside my desk, politely, as children—especially poor children—are supposed to do.
I asked her, “How can snow take your hands and your feet and even your eyes?”
She’d flashed an impatient look at me and said of course it froze and then rotted your flesh. All of it. And the cold, it was terrible, like all the pangs of hell.
“But Miss, is hell a fire, then, or ice?”
“You will sit down, Emma Finnis, for asking such a foolish question! You should know there is earthly pain and there is the pain of damnation, and of course they are different, as I do know.”
Yet it seemed to me that all pain must be the same—or else how could you recognize it, from one place to the next?