Hereafter

Perspective

I stood in the doorway of Aaron’s room, a small, square chamber at a one-storied bayside motel called, in a very dead-on way, the Bayside Motel. Tristan hovered a few feet behind me, keeping a respectful distance while the fog continued to thicken around us. I waited for some sort of epiphany to strike me—a deep thought to occur that would put everything in perspective—but all I could think was this: Aaron was a minimalist.

There wasn’t a shred of clothing in sight. No soda cups or candy-bar wrappers or magazines. No razors or cookie crumbs or crumpled tissues. The only personal items were his canvas beach bag, which was slung over the back of a desk chair, and a hardcover copy of Tales of the City, which lay on his nightstand next to the motel’s old-school telephone, its spine perfectly aligned with the edge of the table.

“So…what do I do?” I said quietly.

“Find his suitcase, pack everything inside, and—”

“And then we take it back to the relic room,” I finished, turning to look over my shoulder.

Tristan cleared his throat. “Yes.”

“So everyone can go through it and take what they want,” I said bitterly.

“It’s not like that,” Tristan replied, shoving his hands in his pockets. “People don’t just raid the place every time someone moves on. We just leave it there, and it may or may not eventually get used.”

I nodded as the hissing fog swirled around us. “However you want to say it, it still doesn’t seem right to me.”

Tristan’s blue eyes looked pained. He glanced down, dragging his toe across the wood-plank walkway that stretched the length of the building, serving as a sort of front porch. “Rory, about last night—”

My heart thumped. I wasn’t ready to talk about this with him. Not yet. “I should get started.”

I took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold. The gray carpet inside the motel had been worn paper-thin, just like in a real motel in the real world. I wondered why they couldn’t fix up the place a little bit, considering it was the last stop before eternity. Would visitors really get that suspicious if the rooms in the motel happened to have new carpet?

“Do you want me to—?”

“No,” I told Tristan. “I’m fine.”

I looked in the small closet and found Aaron’s newish tweed suitcase, which I placed on the bed. The opening of the zipper sounded like a bomb going off in all the fog-induced silence. When I opened the top drawer of the dresser, a chill went through me that was so fierce I had to stop and force myself to breathe. There was Aaron’s rugby shirt, the one he’d worn to the Thirsty Swan with Darcy and me just a few days ago. His folded beach towel. His plain white T-shirts. I lifted them out and got a whiff of Aaron’s cologne. The scent brought tears to my eyes.

Suddenly, all I could think about was getting this over with. I placed his things in the suitcase and moved on to the next drawer, trying to ignore the pang in my heart when I touched the wetsuit from our windsurfing lessons last week. When I found the sneakers he’d worn on the beach my first night on the island—the ones that had made me feel like less of a loser for having worn mine—I had to bite back a sob. I tossed them in the bag and closed it.

There were no drugs, no alcohol, not even a pack of cigarettes. I didn’t uncover a journal filled with maniacal, violent drawings illuminating the inner workings of Aaron’s mind. No serial killer–style magazine tear-outs with faces x-ed out in red. No lists of names of the people who’d wronged him and deserved revenge. No beheaded dolls or dead puppies or bags of hair. I did, however, find a folded picture of David Beckham in his underwear drawer.

Yep. This guy was a real threat to society.

I emptied Aaron’s bathroom of its perfectly aligned bottles of shampoo, conditioner, gel, and body wash, checked under the bed, then opened the drawer on his bedside table. Something slid out from the back and knocked against the front stop of the drawer. My heart caught in my throat. It was his cell phone.

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw nothing but the open doorway; Tristan was giving me my space. Shakily, I turned the phone on, and it let out a loud, jaunty bing as it powered to life. There were, of course, no new messages, but when I scrolled to Aaron’s outgoing calls, a tear slid down my face.

There were twenty-three calls to his father over the past three days with a few to his brother and sister mixed in. Next to each of them was the awful message: CALL FAILED.

I sat down on the bed, clutching the phone in both hands, silent tears pouring down my face. Aaron had been a good son who wanted to make up with his father. I knew it. I had felt it last night when I’d held him. He was sorry for what he’d done, and all he wanted in the world was to have his apology heard. There wasn’t a bad bone in Aaron’s body, and this room proved it. He was just a person, a good person who had befriended me and my sister, all while suffering with his guilt.

The light in the room shifted, and I looked up at the four-paned window. The fog was starting to roll out, revealing the empty parking lot, the manicured hedge across the street, a seagull-shaped windmill stuck in the center of the front lawn across the street.

Tristan stepped into the doorway, his expression pained. “Are you all right?”

“No,” I replied bluntly. I turned the phone screen toward him. “Look at this. Just look. All he tried to do the entire time he was here was call his father so he could apologize. That was all that mattered to him. How can he deserve to be in the Shadowlands?”

Tristan blew out a sigh. He sat down next to me on the bed, the weak mattress buckling beneath our weight.

“I’m sorry, Rory,” he said, putting his arm around me. “I’m sorry you have to go through this on top of everything else.”

Anger flashed through me, so hot and sudden it made me spring to my feet. “Stop it!” I demanded. “Just stop! I don’t want you to tell me how sorry you are. I want you to fix it!”

“I can’t,” Tristan said, shaking his head. “I can’t fix it.”

“You’re telling me that you guys sent all those poor people off to the Shadowlands over a hundred years ago and you haven’t even tried, in all that time, to figure out a way to get them back?” I demanded.

An awful jolt of pain crossed Tristan’s face. “How can you say that to me?” he demanded, rising from the bed. “I told you how awful it’s been for me to live with that. You don’t think I would have brought them back if I could have?”

“There must be a way, Tristan,” I said. “There has to be.”

“Rory, look, I know that you’re a problem solver,” he said, irritated. “That you’re a questioner and a scientist, but I can tell you that this is one problem you’ll never find an answer to.”

“I can’t believe you,” I said, turning toward the door. “It’s like you don’t even care. Like you want him to rot in hell.”

Tristan just stood there, glowering at me, his jaw working under his skin.

“How can you be so complacent?” I ranted.

“You know what, Rory?” Tristan said, his eyes on fire. “I think we both need to cool off a little. I’m going to head out.” He slipped right past me out the door and into the bright sunlight.

“But what about Aaron’s stuff?” I shouted at his retreating back.

“Leave it!” he yelled without looking back at me. “I’ll get it later.”

He got to the end of the sidewalk, turned the corner, and was gone. At that moment, the phone on the nightstand rang, its old-fashioned bell pealing so loudly I jumped. A moment later, it rang again. Slowly, I walked over to the table and picked up the receiver, my hand shaking as I brought it to my ear.

“Hello?”

Outside the window, four crows landed on the fence across the street, watching me with their glassy black eyes. On the other end of the line, there was the faint sound of slow, rhythmic breathing. My heart hammered against my rib cage.

“Hello?” I said again, clutching the phone.

Laughter echoed through the line. Quiet at first, but growing rapidly louder. I banged the phone down and bolted from the room, leaving the door wide open behind me.