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“Maya, shh. I made sure they were all asleep before I came.” A hand slipped over my waist, solid and real against the gauzy fabric of my nightgown. I could smell him, the scent of ink, the bar of generic soap from the drugstore, the smell of his body that couldn’t come packaged in a bottle.
It’s not real. It’s not. Don’t go there, Maya. And then his hand glides over my calf and up my thigh. I shiver at his touch, and I want nothing more than to sink back into the pillows and allow myself one solitary moment of happiness before I return to Grieving.
My grief appears with a capital-G. It is as much of a physical being as the grim reaper, who comes with his scythe to steal what belongs to him. It chokes me and smothers me and plants its foot against my chest to keep me in the coffin that Lochan chose.
And yet, when that hand touches me, Grief leaves. No, it doesn’t leave. It slinks back to the corner and watches for the moment it can come wrap its fingers around my throat again. Grief doesn’t know its place. And yet, Grief leaves me be for those few moments. They are so few and far between that I don’t let my mind remind me of the wooden lid over my head.
“Don’t tease me,” I whisper, the words hanging in my bedroom air. When was the last time I spoke in that space? When Lochan died, I was always alone in there. I wasn’t sure that words belonged in such a dead place.
“You know we can’t,” he murmured. I feel the ends of his hair brush against my cheek, but I’m too gripped by fear to risk looking. What they say is true: each day, I feel more capable of facing life than the day I left behind. But I also know that I am not strong enough to look, not strong enough to find out how he did it.
I spent hours at a library combing through every book I could get my hands on about prison death. He could’ve hoarded medicine and dry swallowed the pills as soon as the guards left. He could’ve snatched a bottle of cleaner on some abandoned cart and downed it like a bottle of Cola. Maybe they forgot to take his shoe laces and he strangled himself. Maybe he just banged his own head against the wall until his body gave up, that beautiful hair of his stained gory red and unrecognizable. How much pain does a person have to be in to choose to leave the world this way?
There’s a chance he was killed by other prisoners because of his vile crimes. Raping his little sister. It certainly sounds like a good enough reason to kill someone, right? And of course, it’s easier to make it look like a suicide. That boy had to be sick in the head in the first place, right?
But ninety-three percent of prison suicides occur by hanging. I can’t turn to my brother, chance seeing a mottled throat, and know that he has become nothing more than a statistic for desperate girls to look up in the hopes of finding answers.
“We already have,” I whispered, the words coming out sticky and wounded. “That’s what started all of this.”
That hand lifts my nightgown as gently as if it was a second layer of skin. Those fingers dance over my inner thigh, and I despised the way my body craved their touch. If that arrest didn’t make me realize the consequence of my sins, what would? Was I damned forever to a life of loving this ghost in my bed?
“I love you,” he whispered as he brushed a feather-light kiss against my cheek.
This may be the last time you see him. Look. Look. When I finally worked up the courage to turn my head, the space beside me in the bed was empty. The pillow wasn’t even dented by his presence.
“Maya?” I jumped at the sound of my name, but recoiled when I saw that it was only Willa. Her nightgown was far too short and her hair was wild from sleep. Her blanked was tucked over her elbow like a small child. Those blinking blue eyes in the moonlight held more condemnation than any prison sentence.
“Why are you crying?” She asked. My hand fluttered up to my cheek and came away wet. “Maya, please don’t lie.”
I could be honest with her. She didn’t know any better, even if she would someday. That just made it all the more important that I told her the truth. “I miss Lochie,” I whispered as I opened my arms for her.
She curled her body back against mine, eyelashes brushing her plump cheeks as she drifted off again. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to escape to sweet sleep’s embrace at a moment’s notice.
When I closed my own eyes, I felt a faint touch drift over the top of my head and heard a ghostly whisper say, “Maya, love you forever.” When I opened my eyes, there was no one there.