Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day(24)
But those people, those people who lived . . . they wouldn’t have been us. We needed Kentucky. It was in our blood and in our bones. Patty had sadness in her bones too, and she needed more than we knew how to give. When the world got to be too much, she left, and I don’t see how a change of scene could have saved her. New York didn’t save her. We needed Mill Hollow like Mill Hollow needed us, and every member of my family is buried there, going back to the land that loved us.
“You know things will have changed since you left,” says Brenda. Her voice is soft, but when I glance her way, her eyes are fixed on the horizon, as cold and inhuman as the rippling corn that calls her. “It’s still your home, but it won’t be the same.”
“That’s all right,” I say. “I’m not the same either.” When I left I was Jenna who runs, Jenna who buried her sister in the dark Kentucky soil, Jenna who knew hunger and weariness and fear, but who had never known how bad those things could get, even as she saw the sadness growing in her sister’s heart. That sadness swallowed Patty like a snake swallows a mouse, and that Jenna fled Kentucky on incorporeal feet, looking for a place where she’d be safe. She never quite managed to find it, and I buried her in the streets of New York, where I learned to be someone new. Someone stronger. Someone who doesn’t need to run.
Brenda nods, and we drive in silence for a while, the fields stretching out around us, and the black smudges of the mountains drawing themselves in charcoal and dream across the sky.
Eventually, I sleep. Even dead, that’s something I can’t help. And maybe it’s how close we’re coming to Kentucky—how close I am to home—but for the first time in years, my dreams are clear as crystal and so close that it feels like I can touch them. I dream about my apartment, about my cats, warm and soft and slipping away in comfort. I dream about Delia and Sophie sitting at Delia’s kitchen table, the shy rat witch holding a mug of tea, jewel-bright eyes twinkling through the tangles of her hair. Most of all, I dream of Patty walking just ahead of me, hands outstretched, beckoning me home.
When I wake, the car is parked on the soft shoulder of the road, and everything through the windshield is green, green spreading out as far as the eye can see. The sky is dark, but the green shows through. That shouldn’t be possible—and as I form the thought, I realize I’m still insubstantial from sleep, still wrapped in my winding shroud. The green is bleeding into the black-and-white world where the dead exist when we don’t walk among the living.
Opening the car door would require me to become solid. Passing through it requires nothing at all, and so I drift out into the night, where the air smells of loam and growing things, and the wind whistles softly across that star-studded sky.
Drifting through the corn is odd. It feels like it grabs and snatches at my substance, adding resistance where there should be none. I press onward, listening for signs that I’m not alone. I’m dead. I’ve been dead for decades. I shouldn’t be unnerved by this sort of thing anymore. The part of me in charge of making such decisions is willing to acknowledge the logic of that thought, but it’s not willing to stop drawing the skin on my arms into goosebumps, or stop making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. I don’t have a body anymore. Having physiological responses seems unfair.
Then I drift between the rows, and there’s Brenda, a black-and-white sketch of a woman sitting cross-legged in the green, her guitar in her lap, her fingers making silent chords. She looks up and smiles.
“Good,” she says. “I was wondering when you were going to wake up.”
I drift forward, until the last of the cornstalks leaves my body, and let my feet drop to the earth, weighted down by my sudden solidity. The sky takes on the faintest edge of midnight purple; Brenda becomes more difficult to see, washed out by the starlight, still virtually monochrome. The corn is the biggest surprise. The green vanishes, becoming gray in the moonlight, suddenly awash in shadows. The smell of it remains all around us.
“Where are we?”
“About ten miles from Mill Hollow. I wanted you to be awake when we crossed the county line. I’ve never driven a ghost all the way home before, and there’s no telling what sort of thing could happen when we get there.”
“Really?”
Brenda shrugs, fingers still moving on her guitar. “Stranger things have happened.” The corn rustles. Stranger things are happening right now.
I glance around. “Whose field is this?”
“All cornfields belong to themselves. Farmers are just their temporary caretakers, until the time comes for the harvest to turn everything around.” Brenda looks down at her guitar, at her fingers, like she’s never seen them before. “I haven’t been in a proper field since Bill died. I hadn’t realized how much of myself I’d left behind, in silk and stalk and kernel.”
“You’re sort of freaking me out here.”
Brenda’s laugh is a bell ringing in a church at midnight. “Aren’t you the dead one, while I’m the widow in the weeds? You’re supposed to be the monster in the back of the closet, not me.”
“When I was a little girl, we knew all about witches, and that you couldn’t keep them out of your house if they wanted to come in and steal you away,” I say. “We didn’t believe in them so much, but it was always fun to pretend. Fear’s nice, when it’s on purpose. Ghosts, though. We knew ghosts couldn’t hurt us if we covered the mirrors when somebody’d gone, and went to visit our dead in the graveyard proper every Easter Sunday.”