Hereafter

Death sentence

I tripped onto the sidewalk in front of my house, blinking back tears, and a few yellow leaves floated down from the magnolia tree in our yard before being caught up on the ocean breeze. As I shoved open the gate, I could feel him watching me from the gray house. Always, always watching me.

A wave of despair threatened to overtake me as I pictured the darkness of a forever without him.

Focus, Rory. Focus.

“Hey, beautiful.”

I flinched at the familiar voice. Joaquin. Fantastic. Just what I needed. He sidled up behind me and walked right through the gate as if invited.

“I’m not in the mood right now, Joaquin,” I said, speed-walking toward the porch.

“Not in the mood for what? I just came by to—” Joaquin suddenly stopped and slapped at his neck. “Ow!”

“What?” I said, whirling on him.

His hand trembled as he gazed at his palm. Curled up in the center was a small, very dead, hornet.

“Are you okay?” I asked dutifully.

Joaquin didn’t answer. He cupped the back of his neck for a second with his other hand and glanced around, as if waiting for the punch line. But there was no one but him, me, and the birds chirping in the boughs of the magnolia tree shading the walkway. When he looked down at the hornet again, his trembling grew violent.

“What? Is it bad?” I asked, alarmed now. “Are you allergic?”

“No,” Joaquin said. “I just—”

He shook his head, and instead of flicking the tiny corpse to the ground, he shoved it into his pocket.

Joaquin shifted his weight and squinted out of one eye. “Where were we?”

“I think I was about to go inside and slam the door in your face,” I said, stomping up the porch steps, which creaked and sagged beneath my feet.

“Okay, but just wait for one second,” he implored, coming after me.

I threw up my hands. “Why?”

Behind him, the curtains on the upstairs window across the street fluttered closed. My throat closed, and I crossed my arms tightly over my chest.

Joaquin took a step closer. “Look, I just wanted to check in and see how you’re doing today. Sometimes the second day is even harder than the first.”

“How do you think I’m doing?” I asked, glancing behind me at the door. I just wanted to get inside before Tristan came out. There was no way I could handle seeing him again just then.

Joaquin touched his sting and winced. “At the moment I’d say…livid?”

“Do you have any idea how hard this is?” I ranted, yanking a geranium bloom from the nearest window box. “I spent all yesterday listening to my sister talk about finding her next hookup, and all I could think was You’re dead and you have no idea. She’s never going to graduate from high school or get that tattoo she’s always wanted or save up for that damned leather jacket she’s been talking about since last Christmas. She’s never going to do anything, and I know it and I can’t tell her. Do you have any clue how awful this feels?”

“Wait a minute. Darcy wants to hook up with someone else?” Joaquin asked, screwing up his face in consternation. “Is it Fisher?”

My jaw dropped. “Are you kidding me? That’s all you took from what I just said?”

“All right, all right, calm down.” Joaquin reached for me. “You’ve crushed the poor flower.”

I looked down at the pink petals strewn all over my feet and released the head of the geranium from my sweaty grasp. Then I saw his fingers on my skin and yanked my arm back, angling myself away from him.

“Don’t even try that Lifer mind trick on me. I’m not letting you control me.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.” Joaquin crossed his arms over his chest and smiled in an amused way.

“What?” I said, tossing the flower to the ground. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“I like this attitude,” he said. “I thought you were a Goody Two-shoes, but I’m digging this whole defiant thing you’ve got going right now.”

Defiant? He thought I was being defiant? More like I was turning into an emotional basket case. Little did he know my current manic state stemmed from a broken heart, nothing more. I glanced back at the gray house, but it was quiet.

“Me, I full-on lost it for at least a week,” Joaquin said, leaning back against the porch railing. “When I first got here, they placed me with Ursula in that pink gingerbread house over on Sunset.”

“Wait.” I shook my head. “Placed you? And who’s Ursula?”

“Oh, you know Ursula. The waitress at the general store? The one with the white hair? She’s supposed to be my grandmother. We live together.”

I thought of the cheerful woman I’d seen behind the counter last week. “Supposed to be your grandmother?” I echoed.

Joaquin shrugged. “Yeah. All of us who died when we were young were placed with adults when we got here so our living situations would look normal to visitors,” he explained. “Like Tristan and Krista living with the mayor…”

“Huh?” I shook my head as I tried to keep up.

Joaquin sighed and sat back on the railing now, settling in. “The mayor isn’t their real mother. Krista and Tristan aren’t even related. You know that, right? She only got here last year, and he’s been here forever.”

I blinked. Krista and Tristan looked so much alike they were practically twins. How could they not be related? The sun suddenly felt much hotter than it had a moment ago.

“Anyway,” Joaquin continued, “when I first got here, I spent way too much time at Ursula’s huddled under a flowered bedspread that smelled like mothballs and gardenias, wailing like a baby. To this day, if I even walk past a gardenia bush, I dry-heave.”

“Can I ask you something?” I said, my heart fluttering nervously as I traced a groove in the side of the porch swing with my fingertip.

He looked me in the eye, crossing his arms over his stomach. “You want to know how I died.”

His gaze was unflinching. For the first time, I noticed the gold and green flecks peppering the deep brown in his eyes. I held my breath. “Is that a bad thing to ask?”

“No. Everyone asks eventually.” He leaned back. “I committed suicide. After I killed my mother and sister.”

I froze. “You…what?”

Joaquin nodded, his jaw set. “It was 1916. I was kind of a drunken asshole, and my dad had just gotten one of those newfangled automobiles,” he said sarcastically.

“Wait a minute, 1916?” I blurted out. “You’ve been here for—”

“Yeah, I know. I look good for my age,” he teased. “So anyway, me and my friends went out joyriding on far too much whiskey, and on the way home I was driving, if you could even call it that, and there was an overturned grocery cart in the road, and I didn’t see it till the last second. And when I swerved…I swerved right into my family. They were coming back from evening services, and I…killed them. I mean, not my dad. He wasn’t there, but…”

He looked away and briefly touched the side of his hand to his nose.

“Anyway, my father stopped talking to me after that, and I stopped doing pretty much anything,” Joaquin went on, his tone matter-of-fact. He leaned back and toyed with his leather bracelet, moving it up and down on his arm, though it only moved about an inch. “I couldn’t sleep without seeing their faces, without hearing my little sister scream.… So one night I went up to the attic with a length of rope and—”

He made a little hanging motion with his hand and stuck out his tongue. I grimaced and looked away, disgusted.

“Don’t do that,” I said.

“Don’t do what?” he asked.

“Make a joke of it. It’s not funny.”

“I know it’s not funny,” he said fiercely. “Believe me, I know. I thought by hanging myself I was escaping it, but instead, I landed myself here, and here I’ve been, for almost a hundred years, and every day I still see their faces. I can still hear her scream.”

I looked down at the floorboards beneath my feet, my bottom lip trembling. He’d just confirmed my worst nightmare. Being here forever meant never forgetting. It meant never escaping. It meant I was going to feel this stupid, this humiliated, this small, for all eternity.

I could feel a black hole start to open up within me. This was not good. This was very not good.

The door of the gray house creaked open, and Tristan stepped out. He ducked his head, being careful not to look in my direction, not to even acknowledge me, then turned and hurried off down the street.

My eyes welled with tears. “I have to go,” I told Joaquin, standing up and shoving open the door.

“Rory, wait,” Joaquin said, scrambling to his feet.

But I just slammed the door behind me and sank to the floor.

Yesterday, forever had felt like a possibility, like a promise. But now I knew it was the exact opposite. Forever was its own death sentence.