Will bush's Arc

Chapter 16 of 26

Will stayed on the step until the sun slid behind the roof. The cat left. The collie stayed. He could see the boards through his knees now. He had said goodbye and Kate had said it back, but a jar of seeds was not enough. In February she would open it and the seeds would drift and be gone. After that she would have nothing to hold. She would begin to doubt. She would climb the hill again. He needed a sign that would last. Something she could set on a shelf and touch in ten years and know he had stood in her yard. He had no hands to carve, no breath to shape wax. He had one thing left. Marrow had mentioned it once on the slope, quick, like a rumor she did not want to test. A blue serum her uncle kept for the almost-dead. Not for ghosts. For bodies. But it held a person to the world, she had said, longer than the green. He called the collie. He whispered the name into the dog's ear the way he had done before, and the collie ran for the tree line. Will followed as far as his form would carry him. At the edge of the pines the old medicine woman was waiting with Marrow, a small metal pail of fire between them. The little ghost girl stood behind Marrow's shoulder, barefoot in the moss. "He told the dog," Marrow said. "So he wants it." Elara Rootwhisper set a stoppered flask on a flat stone. The liquid inside was blue and lit from within, like a lamp behind glass. "One left," she said. "It won't bring you back. It will hold your hand steady for the time it takes to write your name. Then it is done. Then you are done." She looked at Will where she could not quite see him. "Choose." "Write," Will said. Marrow uncorked the flask and poured it into a shallow cup and Will bent and drank. His fingers came back. The pain in his leg came back. The medicine woman put a stub of charcoal in his hand and a square of pale wood on the stone. He walked to Kate's step. He did not knock. He wrote on the wood in the plain letters she had taught him when he was six and she was four, reversed: For Kate. Will was here. He set the wood on the step where the jar had sat. He pressed his thumb into the char at the corner so the print would stay. His fingers went gray. He sat down on the boards. He did not get up again. Inside, the door lock turned. The collie lifted its head. Will's hand rested on the wood as the last of him thinned to nothing. The board stayed. The thumbprint stayed. In February, when Kate opened the jar, the sign on her shelf would be there to answer it.