Will bush's Arc

Chapter 13 of 26

Kate set the bucket down at the edge of the yard and reached for the pump handle. She had not looked up. Will crossed the last twenty feet of pine needles with his solid boots making real sound, and he stopped at the fence rail. His hands on the wood were his hands. She turned at the noise. She did not scream. She did not move. She looked at him the way she had looked at the window that night, hand halfway to her mouth, and then she said, "You're not him." Her voice was flat. "He would be older." "I stopped," Will said. "Three years ago. On the hill." He held out the empty glass flask. "A girl in the reeds carried me down. She said to show you this." Kate looked at the flask and did not take it. Behind her, the collie came out from under the porch and stood between them, ears forward, tail low. It knew him. It had known him for weeks. It did not help. "Anyone could hold a bottle," Kate said. "Anyone could learn a face." She wiped her hands on her skirt. "Tell me something he knew." He tried the dandelion in her palm. He tried the soup on the stove the day he left. She listened without moving. She said, "You could have watched us. Ghosts watch." Her mouth went tight. "Say something only he did." Will's hands were already thinner at the knuckles. He had hours, not a day. He thought of every shared meal, every road, every argument, and each one felt like something a watcher could steal. Then he remembered the swallow. Not the porcelain one. The real one. The night he was ten and she was seven and a swallow had come down the chimney and beat itself against the kitchen window until he caught it in a dish towel and let it out the back door. They had never told their mother. They had swept the soot themselves. "The swallow," he said. "In the chimney. You held the door. I used the blue towel. We told Mom the soot was from the wind." Kate's face did not change for a long second. Then it broke, all at once, the way ice breaks. She came through the gate and put her hands on his arms and her hands went through nothing. He was still solid. She held on. The black cat slid out from the woodpile and sat on the step. The small ghost girl watched from the tree line and then turned back into the pines. Kate did not let go. "How long," she said, already knowing it was a short answer. Will looked at his fading knuckles. "Today," he said. "Maybe tomorrow." Kate nodded once, the way she nodded when a subject was closed, and pulled him toward the house.