Will bush's Arc

Chapter 10 of 26

Marrow found Will at first light and half-dragged him under a stand of pines above the field. His leg was worse. The chalet's window was dark now. Kate had gone to sleep with his message, but Will knew a message was not a rope. Winter was long. Grief had already sent her up the hill once. A whisper from three fields away would not hold her through four months of snow. "She'll climb again," Will said. "By February. That's when I left. She'll go up to look for me." Marrow chewed the inside of her cheek. "Then give her something to keep. Something that stays." Will thought. He had spent his last big memory already, the crushed dandelion in Kate's palm. He had nothing left of his own to send. But he had Ollie, and the little girl in the white dress who had followed Ollie out of the reeds. He had the collie somewhere in the trees, and the black cat that had walked the ridge with them two nights back. He had a broken porcelain swallow in pieces in his pocket from the night he'd used it as noise. He laid the shards out on the moss. Six of them. One for each week until spring, near enough. "Take these to her," he told Ollie. "One at a time. Not all at once. Put one on her sill every seven nights. Let the cat carry them. Let the dog watch the door. When she wakes up and finds a piece, she'll know I'm still here. When they stop coming, spring is close and I'll try to reach her myself." He looked at the little ghost girl. She was holding Ollie's sleeve the way she had all night. "You go with him. You keep him company between trips. He can't do six alone." She nodded, slow, and did not let go of Ollie. Ollie gathered the shards into his shirt. The cat came out of the ferns like it had been called and sat waiting. The collie was farther off, but Will felt it turn toward them through the trees. He gave the cat the first shard in its mouth. He told the dog to walk the fence line every seventh night and bark once at Kate's window before the cat came up. Small sounds. Small enough to slip past the pale woman. Big enough to wake his sister. They went. Will watched the cat cross the field with the piece of swallow between its teeth, the two ghost children drifting behind at a distance no living eye would catch. His chest hurt in a way his leg did not. "Six weeks," Marrow said. "Then what?" "Then I walk down this hill," Will said, "or I don't." He lay back in the moss. The plan was set. Kate would have something in her hand every seventh morning until the thaw. It was the most rope he could throw her. He would have to be worth the wait.