to be with you here in the spring.
I take a walk that evening, a pair of skates held tight in one hand, Hall’s unfinished book of poems in the other. The sky is already darkening, church bells reverberating with five gongs. There is no difference between today and Christmas, aesthetically—the fountain in the town square still spits up diamond-bright water, illumined by the Victorian lampposts. The gazebo still glimmers with white string lights, benches empty. The ice rink remains an impossible miracle on the corner of Pools and Old Homestead, where an empty car lot ought to be. I’m so deeply glad that all of Hall’s tangible fingerprints on the town didn’t disappear along with him, like Cinderella’s coach turning back into a pumpkin. If I couldn’t cast around and find traces of Hall ineverything, everywhere, that would make my heartache all the more unbearable.
Directly across the street from the skating rink, holiday music still curls from Gold Rush Bookshop’s speakers.Do you see what I see?Each ghostly syllable hits with a sharp pang.
Flurries tumble down, pressing me in the direction of the ice. It’s snowing because of weather, because it’s winter, because it’s cold and there’s precipitation. There’s no magic here anymore.
And yet.
It doesn’t feel like thereisn’tmagic here, either. I dither at the edge, surveying the glinting blue-white surface. I don’t have anyone to hold me up this time, to help me along. I set my book of poems on the bench, lacing up my skates.
This day has not unspooled like I thought it would.
Instead of wallowing, I began job hunting. I need to get better at taking care of myself. I want to prove to myself that I can hold down a job, that I can build my savings, that I’m going to be okay without relying on wishes. I went door to door in town, asking businesses if they had jobs available, and the experience wasn’t anything like how it used to be, when I lived in big cities where people recognized me from tabloids. Here, they recognize me as the granddaughter of the formidable woman who leers down at them from her nightmare gargoyle house, and they are allverynice to that woman’s granddaughter.
The Blue Moose Café needs a dishwasher, a job I’m confident I could perform. North Park Realty said they’ll hire me if I obtain a real estate license. Last Dollar Lanes has a job opening, but I’d be the only staff on third shift and I’d have to deal with the rowdy Late Night League—I don’t know what the Late Night League isaside from it being for old people, but the teenager who explained the job to me sounded scared. I’ve gotten a couple other offers, too. I’m not sure what I want to do yet; I’m giving myself another day to mull it over.
I position one skate in front of the other, wobbly at first. I hear music, laughter, as doors open and close, businesses locking up, flipping their signs fromgood to see youtomeet again soon.
I skate through the darkness, on and on, surroundings shrinking down to the circumference of this rink, the blazing lanterns. My legs grow accustomed to the exercise, calves and thighs burning as I push myself to go faster. I am successfully skating without any help. I candothis, which is a pleasant shock. I can do this on my own.
The wind in my hair, biting cold or not, gets the endorphins pumping, and it’s as if the ice isn’t here at all, as if I’m soaring through sky. My reflection in the silver mirror below ripples as if I’m burning, smoke trailing off my fingers and hair. I gain confidence, trying out a twirl. I sway, but before I can fall, I feel a pressure, a presence. A force without weight. It coils around me, easing me back up.
I don’t fall.
Phantom hands lightly stroke my jaw, as if there is something alive in the wind that has taken a shine to me, that wants me to know I am precious. I gaze up at the place where Hall’s face should be, his secret freckles and lopsided smile, springy locks of brown hair that gleam mahogany when he turns just so, and a hot tear slides down my cheek, freezing into a star.
An invisible thumb wipes it away.
All I can think isplease, please, but it’s stuck down low inside myribs. I am stock-still, the blood racing to my heart, pulse so clamorous in my ears it’s like a relentless fist pounding on a door. As each snowflake drifts onto my collar, it melts instantaneously, as though flickering out from the warmth of another person’s breath.
I can’t pinpoint the moment those hands leave me. It happens so slowly, so fuzzily, that I wonder if time has been manipulated. If he pressed pause on it for a few minutes. Or, I think, as doubt begins to seep in along with how perfectly ordinary my surroundings seem, maybe I imagined the whole experience.
“Come back,” I whisper hoarsely, pleading with the stars winking over the mountains. “Please. Make my wish come true.”
He doesn’t come back.
My breaths escape me in shuddering plumes. My limbs are shaking, teeth chattering against each other. It was him. He was here. Iknowit.
I scour the sky for any hint of him, but all is as it was. Nothing else is out there.
He was here, he was here.
But where did hego?
I swallow, throat burning, and walk on trembling legs back to the bench. I wrench off my skates, noticing that a breeze has fluttered the poetry book open as I yank on my boots.
Tucking windblown hair behind my ear, I flip the book right side up. The fifth page, which had been obstinately stuck to the back of the fourth one, contains a poem I haven’t yet read. It smells of spilled peppermint hot chocolate, the paper crinkled and warped, rough at its rises and soft in the valleys. My eyes dance from left to right, at this new fragment of Hall that’s taken form right when I thought I’d gotten the very last of him.
What I See
Some of your mischief is disguise
All the granite is for show
I’ve seen the way it leaves you
when
