Page 31 of A Heart So Haunted
I shivered and started to sweep the dust and sheetrock from the floor.
She couldn’t have been telling the truth.
Hauntings didn’t happen. They were stories, make believe, a figment of the imagination, and all I had to do was box it up and toss it away.
Once I’d gotten most of the pieces, I used the hammer Sayer left behind and removed the nails from where the transition strip had broken, and gathered everything into the dustpan. I ignored the tug behind my belly button when I turned to leave. Almost like a nudge—or a tether.
I started down the steps.
Don’t leave, the door seemed to whisper.Please come back.
Chapter Six
Ifell asleep on the couch sometime after ten o’clock to the sound of a cooking show. Emma had disappeared upstairs hours before, and I should have followed, but my body ached too much, and the thought of mustering anymore energy to crawl into my own bed felt almost sinister.
Down here, the dishwasher hummed with the murmur of the TV. I hadn’t bothered to shut the windows in the living room, so the symphony of frog chirps and owl hoots accompanied the far, far distant sound of cars whispering over paved roads. Every once in a while, the honk of a tractor trailer sidled in.
With the company of noise, the loneliness avoided me.
“Call now and receive a free gift …” a woman on the TV said.
I shifted under my blanket. The cushions didn’t feel all that lumpy or cramped. I never understood why anyone would complain about sleeping on the couch when it felt like this.
I wiggled my toes. Stretched a bit. If I focused, I could almost convince myself that I was young again, and after years of needling, Aunt Denny finally relented and let me sleep over.
“But only down here,” she might have said. “We can watch a movie.”
Sleep nudged me. Then it swallowed me.
Not just sleep—but a dream.
Stars peppered the sky, the air blanketed my shoulders heavily, the feel of a truck bed against the sharpness of my tailbone. A driveway?
No, the sunroom off the library. Not a truck bed. A wooden bench.
That familiar scent—musk, sand, and shampoo that I would recognize anywhere.
Not this—anything but this, I thought.
Dreams, I’d come to find out, weren’t always a happy figment of the imagination. Sometimes they were the ugliest moments, long shoved in a box and tucked away, brought back out for show and tell. A reminder of what could have happened. Of what didn’t happen.
Or, of what did.
A hand slipped up my shirt, the other in the waist of my shorts.
“Ivan, wait,” I whispered.
Ivan’s russet head looked almost golden in the moonlight. The glass ceiling to an open sky the only source of luminescence, the door to the main house shut tight. Just us. He curled over me in a partial crouch, his mouth against my neck.
“Ivan,” I urged. I pushed at his shoulders.
“What, Lan?” he whispered. He pulled back. My neck remained damp. I wanted to wipe it off. All of it, away, dirty,filthy—
“Someone might see—” I started.
“You always say that,” he said. He looked seventeen again, all prematurely broad shoulders that hadn’t filled in yet. I glanced to the ceiling.
Yes, there I was. My face looked angular, my collarbone gaunt, my legs awkwardly open to steady myself. And him, right there, everywhere in front of me.
