Page 202 of Haunt Me

During the kissing scenes, I don’t act. I kiss. But Walter is watching, so I try to keep it PG. The audience is Faith, Manuela, Noah, Walter and Pooh. Lou is the only one of us who is taking her role very seriously and does her best to act without breaking character, even though she, too, ends up laughing uncontrollably.

Walter, on the other hand, cries pretty much through the whole thing. Even though everyone around him is laughing so hard they can’t breathe. The poor man tries to hide it, but Pooh keeps licking his face—and the dog is not the only one who can tell what’s going on.

“Dad, you’re doing it right now,” Faith hisses to him. Walter mouths ‘sorry’, and tries to put on a smile, but it’s too late.

I saw Eden looking at him earlier, as we were butchering the play she wrote; she has barely looked at anyone else. The whole time, her eyes are on her dad.

As soon as the rehearsal ends, she disappears into her room. I give her two minutes, and then I’m running up the stairs. I knock on her door. She’s crying, as I thought.

“Do you want to go somewhere with me?” I ask her.

“What?” she turns away to hide her tears from me, but I won’t allow that to happen. I kneel on the bed and tip her face to mine. I wipe her cheeks with my hands. “Why?”

“Because we’ve had enough crying for one Christmas.”

She smiles. “Sorry. I can’t seem to stop.”

“Well, grab your coat,” I reply, trying to keep my voice steady. “We’ll go to a place where you won’t have to.”

She looks out the window. “Is that place outside?” she asks. It’s back to raining again, the kind of icy rain that hurts when it falls on your skin.

“Yep.”

We drive to the pier, and the rain gets louder.

“It’s pouring,” Eden almost has to yell to be heard over the water’s clamor.

She is buried underneath layers and layers of coats and sweaters, but my blood is boiling just by sitting this close to her in the car.

It’s honestly hard to breathe, just being next to her without touching her. And I can’t touch her, not now, because I won’t be able to stop, and she is crying. I need to get out. The icy conditions might cool me down. The minute I step foot outside the car, freezing wind blasts on my face. Still, even my bones are burning. I’m in way over my head.

“It’s raining and snowing at the same time!” Eden screams. It’s getting harder and harder to hear over the intensity of the rain.

“I know,” I shout back, opening her door. “I thought you’d like it. A walk in the rain sounds perfect right now. AnotherPersuasionmoment—no, wait. Or is it a Bronte one? Ah, I have my rain heroines all mixed.”

“You do not,” she laughs, but she’s looking at me strangely.

Of course I don’t have my rain heroines mixed.

I wrote a freaking song about them.

I know exactly which one I am referring to, but I don’t want to mention reading and rereading her old phone’s messages to herself. Instead, I want her to know that I remember reading what she’d written in the margins of herJane Eyrecopy back then: that the idea of an aimless walk in the rain is romantic to her. It’s something she’d never done.

She’s wearing rain boots and I, having been raised in Massachusetts as well, have my thick snow boots on, so we walk in the rain for a while. The road is white with snow, quickly turning gray and black; it’s deserted. We are completely alone. It’s just us and the water. I pretend we are in our woods. Eden holds a transparent umbrella against the wind. I take it from her gloved hands, and lift it high above both our heads.

“So, here’s the thing,” I say—well, shout. “I know all the movies have scenes where they fight in the rain, and don’t get me wrong, it’s fun and all, but this…” I spread my arms to the sky and open my mouth to taste the rain. Icy raindrops land on my tongue and nearly slash it in two. “This is paradise.”

“It is?” Eden asks, smiling. She’s forgotten all about crying.

“It is! Eden, this is my paradise.”

At this point, we have to scream to each other to be heard over the rain.

“This is so going in a song,” she shouts after a while.

“What?”

“Our sore throats from shouting in the rain.” She’s beginning to laugh. Oh, I like this.

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