“I can understand you,” she answered.
He stepped closer, bemused disbelief in his face. He stroked the heavy heads of the grass, seeming surprised to feel the bristles against his palm. Then his hand drifted upward and came to rest, pale-palmed, on Ade’s cheekbone. Both of them flinched away, as if neither had believed the other might be solid.
Something about the gentleness of him, the innocence of his surprise, the delicacy of his long-fingered hands, made Ade suddenly less cautious. “Who are you? And where exactly do you come from?” If he was a ghost, he was a lost, hesitant member of the species.
He seemed to be searching in some disused closet of his memory for the right words. “I come from… elsewhere. Not here. Through a door in the wall.” He pointed back toward the dilapidated house, at the sagging front door, which had been stuck in its frame since before Ade was born, obliging her to climb through the window instead. Now the door was wedged open the width of a thin boy’s chest.
Ade was a rational enough girl to know that strange boys who wandered onto your property dressed in sheets claiming to be from elsewhere ought to be treated with suspicion. He was either mad or lying, and neither one was worth her time. But she felt something shudder in her breast as he spoke, something dangerously like hope. That it might be true.
“Here.” She stepped back and unrolled her flannel blanket in a red-and-white circus tent over the stiff grasses. She stomped it flat and sat, gesturing beside herself.
He looked at her with that charming surprise again, rubbing his bare arms in the autumn chill.
“Looks like the weather is warmer in elsewhere, huh? Take this.” She took off her rough canvas coat, a garment handed down so many times it had lost all color and shape, and handed it to him.
He pulled the sleeves over his arms the way an animal might if he were asked to wear a second skin. Ade was certain he had never worn a coat in his life, and equally certain this was impossible.
“Well, c’mon, sit down and tell me all about it, ghost boy. About elsewhere.” He stared.
If you will permit the indulgence, allow me to pause here and reintroduce the scene from the boy’s perspective: he had stepped out of someplace very different from the old hayfield and, while still blinking beneath the foreign sun, seen a young woman unlike anything he had ever seen before. She came toward him in wide strides, dark-buttoned dress shushing against the grasses, winter-wheat hair snarled beneath a wide hat. Now she sat below him, her upturned face clear-eyed and perhaps a little fey, and if she had asked him for anything in the world he would have given it to her.
So the boy sat, and told her about elsewhere.
Elsewhere was a place of sea salt and wind. It was a city, or perhaps a country, or perhaps a world (his nouns were imprecise on this point) where people lived in stone houses and wore long white robes. It was a peaceful city, made prosperous by trade up the coast and made famous by their skillful study of words.
“You got lots of authors, in your town?” He was unfamiliar with the word. “People who write books. You know—long, boring things, all about people who don’t exist.”
A look of deepest consternation. “No, no. Words.” He tried to explain further, with lots of stuttering sentences about the nature of the written word and the shape of the universe, the relative thickness of ink and blood, the significance of languages and their careful study—but between his limited verbs and her tendency to laugh they made little progress. He surrendered, and asked her questions about her own world instead.
She answered as well as she could but found herself limited by her shuttered life. She knew little about the nearby town, and only as much about the wider world as could be taught in two grades of education at the one-room schoolhouse. “It’s not as exciting as yours, I bet. Tell me about the ocean. Do you know how to sail? How far have you been?”
He spoke and she listened, and dusk swept over the two of them like a great dove’s wing. Ade noticed the settling quiet of the day and the rhythmic whip-poor-will-ing of the night birds and knew it was past time to be home but couldn’t make herself turn away. She felt suspended, hovering weightless in some place where she could believe in ghosts and magic and other worlds, in this strange black boy and his hands flashing through the dimness.
“And no one in my home is like you. Did something happen, to take away your skin? Did it—what—” The boy’s English devolved into a series of guttural exclamations Ade felt could be translated universally to What the hell is that? He whipped left and right, staring into the shadowed field.
“Those are fireflies, ghost boy. Last of the year. Don’t you have those on the other side of your door?”
“Fireflies? No, we do not have these. What are they for?”
“They aren’t for anything. Except telling you it’s dark, and you’re in twenty heaps of trouble if you don’t get home soon.” Ade sighed. “I have to go.”
The boy was looking up now at the evening stars shining with disapproving brightness above them. Another string of words that Ade had no difficulty translating. “I must go also.” His eyes found hers, dark and shining. “But you will return?”
“Shit, on a Sunday? After staying out late? I’ll be lucky if they don’t lock me in the hay barn till Christmas.” It was clear the boy missed several important nouns in this statement, but he pressed her and they agreed: in three days, both would return.
“And I will take you back with me, and you will believe me.”
“All right, ghost boy.”
He smiled. It was such a giddy, starstruck expression, as if the boy could imagine nothing better than meeting her in this field in three days, that Ade saw no other recourse than to kiss him. It was a clumsy kiss, a dry brush that almost missed his mouth entirely, but afterward their hearts racketed strangely in their chests and their limbs tingled and shook, so perhaps it was not such a poor effort after all.
Ade left then in a whirl of skirt and red blanket, and it was several minutes before the boy could recall precisely where he was and where he ought to go next.
At home Mama Larson greeted her with a wailing diatribe on the fates of girls who stayed out alone late at night, the fear and anxiety she’d caused her dear aunts (Aunt Lizzie interrupted to say she’d been mad as a hare, not fearful, and Mama Larson could just speak for herself), and the inevitability of the decline of womanhood in this country. “And where is your coat, fool child?”
Ade considered. “Elsewhere,” she answered, and wafted up the stairs.
The weekly trial of Sunday church was somewhat easier to bear, Ade found, when one harbored a delicious and impossible secret burning like a lantern in the center of oneself. The townspeople—who weren’t really townspeople at all, but more a collection of feral persons who lived on farms just as isolated and distant as the Larson family’s, who congregated only for auctions, funerals, and God—shuffled into the pews with the same dulled expressions they wore every week, and Ade felt herself separate from them in a new and quite agreeable fashion. Preacher McDowell’s sermon warbled around her like a river breaking around a stone.
