The Dead Romantics (63)

We might’ve been a family in black, but our lives were filled with light and hope and joy. And that was something that Lee Marlow never understood, never wrote in his cold, technical prose.

It was a kind of magic, a kind of love story, I didn’t think he’d ever understand.

From the oak tree in our yard, a crow cawed in the branches, and a few of his friends echoed. My chest tightened.

Ben.

“And someday,” Mom added surely, as certain as sunrises and spring thunderstorms and wind through creaky old funeral homes, “I know you’ll write our story the way it was meant to be told.”

“I—I don’t think I could—”

“Of course you can,” she replied. “It might not be in one book. It might be in five or ten. It might be little bits of all of us scattered throughout your stories. But I know you’ll write us, however messy we are, and it’ll be good.”

“You have a lot more faith in me than I have in myself.”

Mom tapped me gently on the nose and smiled. “That’s how I know I’m a good mother. Now, these old bones need some rest,” she sighed, and stood. She kissed me on the forehead. In the porch light, she looked older than she ever had. Weighed down by sadness—but held together, still, by hope. “I’ll see you at the Waffle House in the morning. Sweet dreams, dearest.”

Then she went into the house, and closed the door behind her.

I sat there for a while longer as the wind began to howl through the trees as the storm grew closer. A flash of lightning streaked across the sky.

In my memories, I could see Dad sitting on the steps of the house, smoking a stinking cigar as he watched the storm roll in, a beer in one hand and a smile on his face, Mom leaning her head against his shoulder, a glass of merlot in her hand, her eyes closed as she listened to the rumble of thunder.

“There’s nothing like the sound of the sky rattling your bones, you know?” he once told me when I asked why he loved thunderstorms so much. “Makes you feel alive. Reminds you that there’s more to you than just skin and blood, but bones underneath. Stronger stuff. Just listen to that sky sing, buttercup.”

Another streak of lightning crawled across the sky, and I finally stepped out into the night.

The air was heavy and human. Alice said she couldn’t smell the rain, but I never understood how she couldn’t. It was so distinct, so full, so alive, like I wasn’t only breathing air, but the movement of electrons sparking together, igniting the sky.

As I started back toward the inn, thunder rolled across the town in a booming, house-shaking rattle that left my ears ringing. I hoped that when they eased Dad into the ground, the dirt would part for the thunder. I hoped the sound would rattle his bones still, make them dance, like they did mine. I hoped that, when the wind was high, blown from some far-off shore, I could hear him singing in the storm, as loud and high and alive as all the dead I’d ever heard singing.

“Florence?” I heard Ben, and suddenly he was walking beside me.

“It’s going to rain soon.”

“Shouldn’t you be heading home?”

“I already am.”

I passed the inn and kept walking toward the town square. It was empty with the night and the coming storm. And then the rain came with a soft, low hum. First a droplet, then another, and then the air broke and the humidity rushed away to cool, sharp pinpricks of water. I tilted my head back, face toward the thunderous sky.

In Lee’s book, when it rained, Mairmont smelled like mud and pines, but standing in the middle of town, my flats flooding with water, the world smelled sharp from the oaks that lined the greens and the sweetness of the grass. He said that when it rained the town was quiet.

But my ears were full of noise.

I was soaked in a matter of moments. The rain passed right through Ben. He looked as dry as he had been before because he wasn’t real anymore. He was a ghost.

But he was here. Now. In the moment. Nevertheless.

“You’ll catch a cold if you stay out here much longer,” said Ben.

“I know,” I replied.

“And you’re getting wet.”

“I already am.”

“And—”

“I don’t have an umbrella, or a coat, and it’s cold and it’s storming and what if I get struck by lightning?” I finished for him, and tilted my head back, and let the rain wash my face. “Don’t you ever do things you aren’t supposed to?”

He didn’t respond, so I guessed he never did.

My entire life was built on those kinds of things that I wasn’t supposed to do. I wasn’t supposed to move away, and I wasn’t supposed to ghostwrite for a romance author, and I wasn’t supposed to fail in turning the last book in, and I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Lee Marlow, and I wasn’t supposed to come back here.

Not like this. Not for Dad’s funeral.

“It probably worked out better for you,” I said to him. “Thinking everything through, following the rules, being who you’re supposed to.”

To that Ben replied, “Well, I’m dead and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing to exist after me. I was just here and now I’m . . . I’m gone.” He sounded frustrated and sad. “I had so many plans—so many. And now I will never be able to do any of them, and I just—I want—”