Page 68 of Ebbing Tides
It was impossible to work in a cemetery and not believe in wandering spirits, lingering souls …ghosts… whatever youwanted to call them. I’d experienced my fair share of strange, unexplainable happenings. A mysterious shadow moving from the corner of my eye. A bodyless whisper. Odd mementos left here and there. It didn’t bother me—these little minor nothings from beyond the veil—but then again, they were never meant forme.
Tipping my head, I peered into the shadowy dark and whispered, “Who’s there?” immediately feeling foolish and hoping they wouldn’t answer.
It could’ve been a myriad of people. I’d lost so many. Friends. My mother.
Laura.
A thought struck me then that maybe itwasLaura. Maybe this was her expressing her distaste for my abrupt forgetfulness on the ten-year anniversary of her death. Maybe she didn’t like this woman who’d returned to my life, just as she had once upon a time. Maybe she didn’t like that a part of my heart longed to move forward with Melanie instead of lingering in the past with her.
Fuck, I thought, staring into nothing and wiping my palm over my mouth and chin. What was I supposed to do with this? What if it truly was my late wife, expressing her unhappiness? Was it fair to expect me to just … stop my heart from longing at the request of a woman who wasn’t even here?
“I’m being stupid,” I whispered to myself, as if that alone could stop this stream of questions from pelting me one by one until my shoulders sagged with helplessness and defeat.
With a deep breath, I walked toward the office, knowing there wasn’t anything for me to accomplish out here, when a feathery plume of smoke wafted through the air before my eyes.It floated along, as if on a breeze I couldn’t feel, and when it hit my nostrils, I inhaled the unmistakable scent of cigarettes.
Melanie must be smoking in there, I thought, finding my smile, and I moved quicker, suddenly needing to light up myself and untangle my nerves.
But when I opened the door and found her sitting in my chair, Lido’s head on her lap, there wasn’t a cigarette to be found.
“Were you just smoking?” I asked, swinging my gaze around the office, like she might’ve hidden it away the very second before I came in.
“No,” she replied, confusion in her tone. “But look”—she swiveled in the chair and pointed at the screen—“it’s working again.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
FRIDAY
“Where’s your girlfriend?”
I turned to Dad with a start. He hadn’t spoken much at all today—not to me or his nurse—and he’d only eaten a few bites of applesauce for breakfast and soup at lunch. It left me with an unsettled feeling in my gut, like something big was lurking around the corner, and I wasn’t sure why I felt like that at all.
We’d known for months that he was dying, that his days were severely numbered. None of us had expected him to linger for this long, of course, and really, when I put it that way, he was likely well past his expiration date—as given by the doctors. Yet there was still that feeling of being so unprepared, despite having known this whole time, and no amount of self-given pep talks seemed to change that.
But still, the knowledge was there.Logicwas there. And I hadn’t expected him to speak to me at all, like my soul had just accepted with abrupt notice that my father was no longer speaking, just like that.
Guess I was wrong.
“You mean Melanie?”
He sucked in a restricted breath and nodded. “You get rid of her already?”
“She’s not my girlfriend, first of all,” I corrected. “And second of all, she’s spending time with her kids and brother-in-law today.”
He grumbled something unintelligible. His eyes were open but barely, aimed at the TV in the corner, though I wasn’t sure he was truly watching whatever was on.
“I wonder if Margaret will be waiting for me,” he muttered.
That brought me to tip my head to the side with question. Dad had never referred to Mom by her first name before, not in my presence.
“You mean after you die? In Heaven?” I guessed, taking a seat in the chair beside his bed.
His laugh was breathless, a smile never once gracing his face. “It’d be a cold day in Hell the moment I stepped foot past those pearly gates.” His gaze was slow to drift toward my face, recognition distant but there. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
I inhaled deeply and sat back in the chair, dropping my eyes from his stare. “I don’t know what I think, Dad. Honestly, I’m not really sure there is a Heaven or Hell or whatever or if there’s just … somewhere else to go. But”—I sighed and shifted my weight—“sure, I think that, wherever that is, Mom is waiting for you.”
“You don’t believe your wife is in Heaven?”
“I didn’t say I don’t believe in an afterlife,” I said, not wanting to fight with him in what could very well be his final days. Minutes even, for all I knew. “I just meant I don’t know that I think there are separate places or if good people, bad people … they all go to the same place. Like here, but for the dead.”
