The Visitor(49)

Papa must have sensed my distress. He clung to my hand until we got to the end of the path, and then he opened the gate and we both stepped through onto hallowed ground. We walked in silence through the monuments and markers until we reached the stone angels. I dropped to the ground and Papa lowered himself more tentatively. Drawing my knees to my chest, I watched the statues come alive in the fiery glow of a Carolina sunset.

When the dance was over and the sun had dipped beneath the horizon, Papa finally turned to me, his grizzled features taut with worry. “What’s wrong? Why are you here?”

“Something’s happened,” I said.

“What is it, Amelia?”

I hugged my legs tightly, assembling my thoughts as the sky deepened and the bats came out.

“Tell me, child,” Papa urged gently. He looked old and tired, the stoop of his shoulders even more pronounced than when I’d last seen him. In that moment I realized how fragile he and Mama both were these days. Time was slipping away and I couldn’t bear to think of a future when they would no longer be with me in the living world.

I hadn’t allowed myself to imagine that time too often, but every once in a while, a thought crept in. Would they be able to move on or would they linger, drawn by the warmth and energy that had been lost to them in death?

I banished the unwelcome image with a shudder as I turned to Papa. “I’m being visited by the ghost of a woman named Rose Gray. She’s been coming to me in my dreams for months, but now she’s manifested.” I paused, wondering how best to proceed. I was desperate for answers, but I also knew that pressing Papa too hard might send him back into the dark sanctuary of his own thoughts. I had to tread carefully. “I’ve seen a photograph of her. She looked very much like me. She even had my name. It can’t be a coincidence. Who was she, Papa?”

“She was my mother.”

I drew a harsh breath, though not from shock. Rose and I shared the same name, the same face. It wasn’t a leap to assume we shared the same bloodline. But to have it confirmed was more emotional than I would have expected. “I asked you so many times about my family. Why did you never tell me about her? You must have noticed how much I looked like her. You even gave me her name.”

“Some things are best left in the past,” he said.

“That’s not true!” I said angrily, and then immediately regretted my outburst because he was my papa after all. “You’ve always remained silent to protect me. I know that. But you can’t keep secrets from me any longer. It’s too dangerous.” I ran my hand aimlessly over the ground between us, idly plucking at the blades of grass where we had once searched for the key necklace. “Something is happening to me, Papa. I don’t just see the dead anymore. I sense things. Thoughts and emotions of the living. Sometimes I can even glimpse memories. What I’m becoming...” I trailed off, hardly daring to voice what had been preying on me for a very long time. “I think whatever is happening to me was set in motion at my birth. Grandmother Tilly was able to save me for a reason.”

Papa stared straight ahead into the deepening twilight, refusing to look at me. Refusing to acknowledge my fear. But I wouldn’t be dissuaded so easily.

“I believe I have a purpose. A calling. And it has something to do with Rose. Somehow our destinies our intertwined. That’s why I’m here. I have to know about her. I have to find out what happened to her so that I can protect myself.”

He remained silent for the longest time, so motionless I was afraid he’d drifted off into his faraway place. But then he said wearily, “Much of her life remains a mystery to me. She left when I was just a boy.”

“Why?”

“To protect me from the ghosts.”

My pulse quickened. “She was like us? A caulbearer?”

“The Grays are caulbearers, but my mother was a Wysong and she had a special gift. A curse, some would call it. Like you, she had a light inside her that drew them.”

I put a hand over my heart as if I could somehow quell the beacon inside my own chest. “What was she?” I asked in a near whisper. “What am I?”

“I don’t know, child.”

But I knew. I was a perfect storm. A Gray and a Wysong on Papa’s side. An Asher and a Pattershaw from my birth parents. I was the culmination of all their dark gifts and, on top of it all, I’d been born dead to a dead mother, giving me an even stronger connection to the other side. No wonder Papa didn’t know what to call me.

A breeze blew through the trees, carrying the summer perfume of honeysuckle and rain. There was moisture in the air and the faintest crackle of electricity that foreshadowed a midnight storm. It was an odd, loaded moment. Dark and portentous. Where Papa had looked old and fragile before, now he seemed ageless as nightfall drew down upon us.

“Do you know what happened to Rose?” I asked him.

“She died. But she had been away for a long time by then.”

“How old were you when she left?”

“Nine or ten. I don’t rightly recall anymore.”

“Did you already know about the ghosts?”

“Yes. My first sighting was the ghost of a boy named Jimmy Tubbs. He’d been killed in a logging accident a week before I spotted him at the end of our lane.”

“What did you do?” I asked, remembering my first sighting and how Papa had sat me down in this very cemetery and told me what I had to do to remain safe.