Page 61 of Installment Immortality

“I wasn’t always dead and rootless,” I said. “Once upon a time, I was a teenage girl from Buckley Township, just the same as yourgrandmother. Well, notjustthe same. I raised her, but I don’t think we’d have been friends if we’d been alive at the same time. She was too busy for me. She never liked to sit still. I was very good at sitting still. It was one of my best skills. And I wasn’t big on playing with dead stuff, unlike Alice, no matter how cool or interesting or whatever it looked. I was just a girl. I went to class, I did my homework and my chores, and I loved my mother very much.”

“I never thought…”

“Why would you? She died decades ago. Cancer. I sat with her in the hospital almost every day, and I prayed and I prayed and nobody answered me. She didn’t get a miracle. She got a headstone, and my father withered into nothing without her. I buried him, too. Technically I died before he did, but since no one noticed, I don’t really know how to measure that specific tragedy. But I was alive when my mother died, and it took all the air out of the room. Every room I walked into, for months, the air would just whisk away, like it had never been there to begin with. Naughty little girls with dead mothers don’t deserve to breathe.”

Elsie nodded, expression telling me that she understood exactly what I was saying.

“I blamed myself right up until I died. If I’d just prayed a little harder, or believed a little more, or hadn’t been late getting to the hospital so many times. If I hadn’t resented her for getting sick when I was trying to have a social life. If I’d agreed to go out with that boy she tried to hook me up with.” I didn’t even remember his name anymore. Somewhere in the gulf between my mother’s death and the moment, so many things had fallen away. “And then I died, and she wasn’t there to welcome me to the afterlife. I learned the rules of being a ghost, and more, I learned that spirits linger when they have unfinished business. When they want something so badly that death isn’t enough to make them stop reaching for it. So what did it say that my mother died andcouldn’t even stay for me? How much was I worth if I was so easy to walk away from?”

Elsie didn’t move or speak, but her eyes were too bright, and I knew that she was listening.

“And then, after I’d been dead a while—it wasn’t overnight; I think Alice was your age when it happened—I realized that moving on hadn’t been about me. It was about her. She was at peace, she knew she’d done everything she needed to do, and she didn’t want to make my life about her death. She didn’t linger because it wouldn’t have fixed anything. It would just have meantInever got the chance to move on. She would have become my unfinished business by holding on too tightly to her own.”

Elsie sniffled, tears starting to roll down her cheeks.

“My mom lived a good life, and it ended too soon, and she never got to see me grow up. I never got the chance to disappoint her, and I guess that means she never got the chance to show me she wasn’t perfect. But she moved on rather than burden me with everything that might have been and didn’t get the chance to be, and thatwasperfect of her.” I turned my focus more fully on Elsie. “Your mom wasn’t perfect. She was petty and mean and she held a grudge like she was going to win a cash prize for keeping it the longest. She was also smart and quick and funny—fuck, she was so funny that sometimes she made me grateful I didn’t need to breathe. I loved her from the day she was born until the day she died, and I know she didn’t stick around because she didn’t have any unfinished business, and she didn’t want to burden you with all the things her death was going to mean. She moved on so you could be free, just like she was going to be. She loved you so, so much, Elsie. Watching her fight not to hurt you the way her mother hurt her was hard and painful and inspiring. She made me believe we could be better than our upbringings. It’s okay to mourn her. She was yourmom.I grieved mine for decades. But you can’t stop living while you do it. You have to breathe and planand eat and flirt and fuck around and fuck up and get on with things. That’s the way you show her she was right to trust you to carry on while she was gone. You live. That’s all you need to do.”

“I don’t knowhow,” said Elsie, voice gone thick with snot and tears and grief. “She never told me how I was supposed to live in a world without her. She just told me how much she’d always hated living in a world without her own mother, and she didn’t want me to eventhinkabout doing it. So I don’t know how.”

“One day at a time,” I said. “One hour, one minute, one second at a time. You keep moving forward, because standing still isn’t even for the dead. You go to parties and laugh until beer comes out of your nose. You meet someone who makes your heart beat faster and you kiss them until your lips hurt. You dance and you sing and you scream and you keep moving. And then one day, something wonderful will happen, and your first thought won’t be about how you should call her. And you’ll probably feel guilty when that happens, and that’s okay, because you’ll keep moving forward. You live. That’s all you have to do.”

Elsie wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand, phone forgotten on the bed. “You were always there. No matter what happened, you were always there. So I guess I just assumed that if any of us died, it would be the same. And it isn’t. It isn’t the same at all.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I lost my mother and my brother and I hate everything about this. I’m supposed to have them forever. They’re not supposed to leave me.” She looked at me defiantly. “I don’t want anyone else to leave me.”

“Then you’re going to be disappointed,” I said. “People in this family may come back sometimes, one way or another, but people will always leave you. That’s what it means to be a person.”

“Don’t you mean ‘to be alive’?”

“No,” I said. “Don’t be vitalist. I’m not alive, and people leave me all the time.”

Elsie mustered a chuckle.

“Now, can we get back to the less-depressing reason I came in here? I told you I found the Covenant team. Two of them are siblings of the man who killed your mother. They’re here because their mother died in the collapse at Penton Hall, they know a ghost was involved, and they’re taking out their aggressions on the entire phantom population of the East Coast.”

A sick idea was starting to grow in my mind, telling me what they might be doing here. Every enraged, unsettled phantom they had jarred up was essentially the equivalent of a small bomb, getting steadily stronger and less controlled. Take as many as they had in that moving Mesmer cage, and you were looking at a spiritual explosive easily the size of the one we’d set off in their basement. Enough of those ghosts had poltergeist powers manifesting that I had no doubt they could—and would—tear a building down around themselves, and even if they didn’t do that, they could possess and confuse, they could scream their dead misery into the ears of the living and cause riots, or worse. They had so many potential targets that it was almost dizzying.

This wasn’t just about saving the dead from the living. It was also about saving the living from the dead, and always had been.

“Mary?” Elsie snapped her fingers in front of my face.

I blinked, snapping back into the moment. “Sorry. Just… thinking.”

“Cool. Did you know that when you’re thinking about somethingreallyunpleasant, the graveyard comes back to your eyes? They went all unfocused, and then they started getting gray and spooky like they used to be.”

“I did not know that.”

“These Covenant jerks. You said their last name was Cunningham. Did you get a first name at all?”

“Nathaniel and Chloe. Why?”

Elsie grabbed her phone, beginning to type. “How old would you say they are?”

“Your age. Maybe a little older, for him, and a little younger, for her.”

“Cool.” All her focus was on the screen now. She stopped typing and began to scroll again.

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