The Dead Romantics (84)

33





The Last Goodbye


“AND NOW, ELVISTOO take it away,” I said, voice cracking, and handed the microphone back to the man dressed in white.

As soon as Bruno introduced himself again and starting to sing “Love Me Tender,” Alice and Carver and Mom embraced me, threading our arms together in a hug. I loved them so much, I started crying—or maybe I was already crying? I couldn’t remember when I started, and I couldn’t remember when they started crying, either, but we hugged each other as tightly as we could. Because there was a secret about all the Days—we cried whenever we saw someone else crying. So if one Day cried? All the others followed, and at that moment I wasn’t sure if I’d started it, or Carver, or Mom (definitely not Alice, never Alice), but it didn’t matter.

“You’re t-terrible at speeches,” Alice said after a while, wiping the tears out of her eyes. Her eyeliner smeared, and I cleaned it up with my thumb.

“I know,” I replied.

Carver took a breath. “I think I’m going to propose. To Nicki.”

Mom gasped, “Oh, darling! I’m so happy!”

“Here?” Alice asked, flabbergasted.

“No—course not! But soon.”

“Good, because I could imagine Alice doing it here, but not you,” I remarked, earning a pinch from Alice. “Ow! Hey! That was a compliment!”

Alice stuck out her tongue. “I don’t even have a partner.”

“Doesn’t mean you won’t forever,” Mom said sagely, dabbing her running mascara. “Love comes when you least expect it. Why, when your father and I first met . . .”

I glanced over to Ben, on the far side of the funeral, with the good mayor happily keeping him company, as Mom recounted when she first met Dad at a conference that was one-third furry con, one-third ballroom-dancing championships, and one-third mortuary seminar. It was a good story, but we’d heard it a thousand times.

We could hear it a thousand times more.

I couldn’t tell those kinds of stories about Ben. Half of the people wouldn’t believe me, and the other half would think it was a tragedy. Maybe it was. Dad said I wouldn’t keep ghosts as companions my whole life—but what if there was one I wanted to keep?

What if one was different?

Ben must have felt me staring, because he turned his dark eyes to me, and mouthed, “You did great.”

And I couldn’t help but smile.

“Oh, she sees her ghost boyfriend again,” Alice mock whispered to Carver.

My shoulders squared. “He’s not my boyfriend!”

“Mm-hmm,” Carver replied skeptically. “Oh, come on, you were basically over the moon for whoever helped you cheat last night.”

“I wish I could see him,” Mom mused.

“I still wish it’d been Dad—no offense to your ghost guy,” Alice added with a half-hearted shrug. “But I realized you probably wouldn’t have kept that a secret.”

“Yeah, no. I haven’t seen him,” I confirmed a little sadly. My siblings exchanged the same look—before I took them by their hands and squeezed them tightly. “He knew we’d have each other. He didn’t need to stick around.”

Alice tugged her hand out of mine. “Ugh, this is getting too mushy for me. Go get your ghost boyfriend or whatever.”

“He’s not my . . .” But just as I began to argue, my siblings split for opposite ends of the funeral to talk with other people, and Mom wiggled her eyebrows before she joined the small group of people moving back and forth to Elvistoo’s rousing rendition of “Build Me Up Buttercup.”

Ben stood and tilted his head toward the far side of the cemetery, where we sat a few nights ago, and as I thanked the people for coming and accepted their condolences, he patiently waited under the oak tree.

“The flowers are beautiful,” I told Heather, who agreed in that I told you so way of hers, and I found that I really didn’t care. She came through for me when I needed it most, and that counted for something. Not everything—I could forgive her, but I wasn’t going to forget how she made me feel in high school.

But she wasn’t worth any more of my time, either.

I didn’t manage to make my way over to the bench until Elvistoo was on his second glass of champagne and had devolved into singing anything the crowd shouted, so he was currently howling through “Welcome to the Black Parade.”

“I can honestly say I’ve never been to a funeral this fun,” Ben said when I finally sat down beside him. “People are literally dancing on graves.”

“Well, around graves. It’d be disrespectful to dance on them,” I corrected, and noticed that his hands were white-knuckled fists on his knees. “Are you still hearing them? The voices?”

He nodded. “They’re louder. And it’s—getting harder. To stay here.”

A chill crept over my skin. “But I haven’t worked at all on the book! You shouldn’t be going anywhere,” I replied in alarm.

To which he swallowed thickly. Pursed his lips. And admitted, “I don’t think it’s about the manuscript, darling.”

“It has to be. That’s the only reason you would be here, haunting me, and—”