Page 47 of Haunt Me

We reach the cemetery at the back of the chapel; it’s ancient. It’s enclosed by a slender, black fence, which I jump, carrying Eden over. There are no marks on the snow—nobody visits here anymore, not to clean or to pay their respects. The dead are completely alone. All the tombstone inscriptions are all but erased with time—nothing left of them but small marks on the black marble slabs that used to be names, dates, words. Eden still tries to decipher them, in true ‘Anne of Green Gables’ fashion. We walk around a little, trying to warm ourselves. The sky is gray and empty, and it’s already getting dark even though it’s not even four yet.

“So does your dad allow you to books like that?” I ask her.

“Anne of Windy Poplars?”

“No, books about graveyards and kissing.”

“He doesn’t know the book includes k-kissing. It has a girl with red hair on the cover, so he thinks it’s a children’s book.”

She shivers, and I fold her into me to keep her warm. A crow croaks overhead, hidden somewhere among the tangle of bare branches.

“Red hair, you say?”

“It’s the prettiest hair color, don’t you think?”

I look at her shivering against my chest, wearing my coat that comes down to her toes.

“I don’t,” I reply and she goes all quiet and sullen.

I don’t know what I did here, why she went silent on me. (It will take me six years to find out).

“Tell me more about the books you read.” I need to get her talking again.

“I’m not allowed to watch too much TV or movies, but books… I can read anything I want. Dad buys me boxes and boxes of them. I make a list weekly. Well, I’m not allowed to read what he calls ‘racy’ books, but as long as the covers look innocent enough, he doesn’t check all the pages. He hates reading, and there are too many.”

“Pages?”

“Books,” she replies.

“He doesn’t know then,” I say.

“Doesn’t know what?”

“That book are the most dangerous thing there is,” I reply, watching her.

She quickly moves on to a different tombstone. We squint at the rarity of a half-legible epigraph. It says:‘Until we meet again on resurrection day.’

I hate it.

“I love it,” Eden says. “The idea of the ones who are gone coming back to life… it gives me hope.”

“It gives me the creeps,” I retort. “Also, it sounds stupid.”

“How does it sound stupid? Some people of faith believe in the day of resurrection.”

“Well, those people are naïve at best and idiots at worst,” I say, sounding a little too bitter. But I can’t help it. Dad is not coming back. He is dead, and he’s staying dead.

“I think you have lost your faith,” Eden observes quietly.

“You think?”

“If you ever had any,” she adds.

“Oh, I did. At least my mom and dad did.” I consider her words carefully.‘If you ever had any.’It’s truer than she thinks. “I thought I had faith, too, by default. I lost it the day my dad died. As for hope… I think hope is evil.”

“I think hope is a saint,” Eden says dreamily.

My eyes snap to her face. I think that is the most beautiful sentence I have heard in my life.

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