Wide Open (9 page)

They memorized the board and played in the Humvee on convoy making moves in their head or with
x
’s on scrap paper until the rest of the team began offering feedback—like each piece was real. It’d been Hollowman, griping about grunts and weather and weapons, who’d inspired them to invent Soldier’s Chess, where the pawns got semiautomatic rifles and mortars because, by god, they were soldiers and were doing all the work, and why should they die so easy? All of it culminating in a glorious day when they’d scraped out a giant chessboard in the dirt and convinced a bunch of bored American, British, and Mongolian soldiers to be pawns and knights and bishops. For a moment or two that day, Hallie’d forgotten guns and war and the constant threat of death.

A week later, Eddie died.

And she’d killed him, hadn’t she? Because not only had she volunteered them for that detail, being pissed off at something she couldn’t even remember anymore, but she’d also convinced them to take the trail that got them killed. Because it was more direct and they needed to get there fast and no one had said not to take it, it had been cleared, after all.

Maybe that was why she was carrying him around with her now.

She pulled into the yard at the ranch. The yard light shaded everything in blue and white, chasing shadows back to the barn. There were no lights on in the house, not surprising, since it was almost two in the morning. Hallie turned off the truck and sat, listening to the engine tick over.

She didn’t think about it, didn’t think about what time it was or what she was going to say. She pulled Dell’s cell phone out of her back pocket and dialed the number from memory, because she’d been looking at it for days, looking at it and not calling.

The chaplain had given her the number. “It’s his fiancée,” he said. “Sometimes it’s good to hear from someone they served with. It helps a little. And as you’re going back…” Eddie’s ghost had stared at him when he’d said it, like he’d stared at Boyd at Big Dog’s Auto. But then, Eddie stared at a lot of things.

“Hello?” The voice at the other end of the phone was scratchy with sleep, worried because it was—hell—four in the morning in New York.

“I’m sorry,” Hallie said. She cleared her throat. “Is this Estelle? Estelle, uhm, Chase?”

“Who is this?” The voice suspicious now, about to hang up.

“I’m … Hallie. Hallie Michaels. I knew Eddie. Over there. In Afghanistan.”

There was silence. “Oh.”

“I thought … I don’t know.” This was stupid. What was she supposed to say? “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is—”

“No, no. It’s okay. Just … I don’t know either.” Hallie could hear tears in Estelle’s voice. “Just talk about him. It doesn’t have to be good. He wasn’t perfect. Just talk. Okay?”

Hallie gripped the cell phone hard enough that the edge bit into her fingers. What was she supposed to say? “He played chess.”

Stupid thing to say. He played chess? She was his fiancée; she knew that. But Estelle gave a watery laugh. “Yeah. Our first date, he dragged me to a chess club. Can you believe it? He … he loved it.”

“There was this soldier in our squad,” Hallie said. Eddie was right beside her. Right
there
. Cold along her elbow and the right side of her face. “Mark Swift. We called him Swiftie. Eddie asked him that question he asks—asked.”

“About math? He asked my mother that question! First time he met her, he—”

She stopped so abruptly that Hallie would have stumbled over the silence if they’d been walking somewhere. She rushed in with words, any words, just to fill the gap. “He—we played a lot. It was all— He was good.”

“Yeah,” Estelle said. “He was. He wanted to be a teacher, you know. Because he had this one teacher—” She started crying.

Hallie didn’t want to listen to this. She didn’t. Wanted to be someplace cold and frozen and alone, north of the arctic circle maybe, where the permafrost went down thirteen stories deep and the ocean froze in wintertime. Somewhere without ghosts or dead soldiers’ fiancées or anyone who would make her feel anything ever again. “He talked about you all the time,” she said.

“He did not,” Estelle said, like she wanted to believe it, but she wasn’t going to, because that was what people said at times like this, whether it was true or not. “He was the only guy I ever dated,” she said. “Because I’m not— No one ever— I’m not pretty,” she stated flatly. “It was a blind date that first time. My cousin fixed us up. And it was so embarrassing and kind of awful, but he was sweet about it, you know? I didn’t think he’d call, but he did—the next day, even. And I liked him. I—he was the best guy. But I never knew, I couldn’t ask him, because why? Why would he go out with me? I don’t understand.”

Jesus
.

Hallie knew what she was supposed to say, not just what was expected, but what was true, but she hadn’t ever said it. And now she was saying it for a ghost who couldn’t say it for himself. Shit. She pressed the heel of her hand against her cheekbone just under her right eye, sucked in a breath, and said, “He loved you. He did. He told me that you read books all the time and he couldn’t get over that—how many books you read, that you talked about them like they were real—the characters in them and the things they did. He told me before he met you, he only cared about math, that he didn’t think anyone needed any of that other stuff—English and other languages and history. He said you made him see the world. He told me he didn’t even know he wanted someone until he met you.”

Estelle was crying hard now; Hallie rubbed a finger over her eye. “Look,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m—it was stupid to call. I shouldn’t have—”

“No! It’s all right! It’s—” She drew in a breath. “Thank you. Just for a minute, I could see him again, like he was here.”

Hallie felt cold like frozen iron down her arm, then a rush of air, warm and smelling faintly like pine. When she looked over, Eddie was gone.

10

Hallie finally got to bed around two thirty. She had meant, when she came inside, to sit down and list off the things she knew about Dell or her death one more time, but she didn’t manage to stay awake past lightning bolts and belt buckles. She woke once, shivering, and dug another blanket out of the hall closet like it was the middle of winter and the wind was rattling the windows in their frames.

When she woke again, it was morning. She spent half a second wishing she could stay in bed, then tossed the covers aside and got up. Dell’s funeral was going to be graveside at eleven o’clock, and the forecast had said it would be sunny and sixty degrees.

Hallie considered for about five seconds whether she should wear a dress and decided that since she didn’t have one, then no, she didn’t have to wear one. She did have a pair of black dress pants, a white button-down shirt, a black and silver belt, and polished boots. She added a hip-length leather jacket and stuffed a pair of gloves in her pocket because it was South Dakota and the weather could do anything at any time.

Though Dell followed her to the bathroom and back, there was no sign of Eddie. Hallie knew he was gone, had known since she finished talking to Estelle. She wasn’t sure how she knew, or what it meant that she knew, but she’d been certain from the moment she felt warm air like spring breezes on her arm.

Hallie’s father didn’t protest when she offered to drive to the funeral. He was wearing his only suit, which he’d had for as long as Hallie’d known him, dark gray, single button, still fit him pretty good. He wore a white shirt that had hung in his closet forever, a string tie with a silver pull, his best cowboy boots, and a black felt hat with a silver band.

They left the ranch at ten and drove down past Prairie City, turned off onto an old county road, past Cass’s ranch, and crossed the one-lane bridge over dried-up Thorsen’s Creek. Hallie took the next right, drove less than a quarter mile, right down close to Bear Creek, and pulled in next to a dozen pickup trucks and Suburbans.

The small cemetery just beyond the gravel parking area was filled mostly with Severaids and Andersens. It was less than a mile out of Thorsen, but since Thorsen now consisted of three people and a mule, it was pretty much the same as the middle of nowhere.

“Your mother was an Andersen,” her father had told Hallie yesterday. “She’d have been okay with it.”

She wouldn’t have been okay with Dell dying, Hallie’d thought, but she didn’t say that because who
was
okay with it? Not her father.

Not her either.

Hallie and her father got out of the pickup, her father tipping the brim of his hat to a couple of ranchers who owned land just south of them.

More trucks and Suburbans and a few sedans pulled in. The tiny graveled lot filled, and people parked along the side of the road, backed up nearly to the crossroads. Cattle grazed a quarter mile east, but close in there was just the cemetery, the narrow parking lot, the creek, and a vast stretch of knee-high grass that moved with the rhythm of the wind. People lingered by their vehicles, talking to neighbors they rarely saw before making their way across the cemetery.

Boyd was there, which surprised Hallie, in a dark suit with a bright white shirt and narrow tie. There were a bunch of people she recognized and others she almost recognized, couples she remembered from high school, teachers who’d gotten old while she’d been gone. Everything so familiar, except Dell was dead and someone, maybe right here in the parking lot talking to Hallie or her father, knew why and how it had happened.

Brett found her. She was wearing a navy blue skirt, dark brown cowboy boots polished like she used them for a mirror, a dark red shirt, and a denim jacket. She took Hallie’s arm like it was a lifeline.

“I hate this,” she said.

“You hate that Dell is dead,” Hallie said.

“Yeah.” Brett grimaced. “I keep thinking there was something I could have or should have done.”

“Yeah,” Hallie said, “oh, yeah.”

There was no wind, but it was damp, tiny wisps of fog, like haze along the edges of the cemetery. Hallie let half a dozen people go on ahead of them; then she and Brett started down the central drive.

They were halfway across the cemetery when she stopped cold. Ghosts rose from their graves—dozens of them. They rose straight through the ground fog, so that at first she’d thought the fog was thickening. Then she could see them, the curve of a skull, the suggestion of an arm, a body—far, far less substantial than Dell or Eddie. Dell looked practically alive in comparison, but they were distinctly and definitely there, all the same.

Shit
.

“Hallie?” Brett tugged on her jacket sleeve.

The ghosts rose higher. Did they expect something from her, as Eddie had? Clear up loose ends they’d left behind? Because she couldn’t do it, not all of them.

Then, the ghosts stopped. They floated in the air for a long frigid moment until, like a held breath slowly released, they slipped back into their graves and were gone.

“Hallie!” Brett’s face creased in a worried frown. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yeah, come on, let’s go,” Hallie said, because these ghosts weren’t like Eddie and Dell after all, right? They were more like the memory of ghosts, though cold like winter, all the same. “We’ll be late,” she said to Brett, like she hadn’t just been standing in the middle of a cemetery staring at things no one else could see.

Dell’s grave had been dug under a tree, separated by the trunk of that tree from their mother’s grave. Hallie’s father had wanted to bury their mother on the ranch, somewhere quiet where he could sit and talk to her and no one would see him or know. Cass had talked him out of it, though Hallie and Dell both thought he should have done it because she’d loved the ranch as much as he did, because she’d died there or close enough. But maybe this had been better. Hallie knew he came to visit her, on his way back from town or Rapid City. Probably got him off the ranch more than anything else.

When they finally reached the grave site, Hallie couldn’t stop looking at the casket. It was beautiful—she’d picked it out, of course … or Dell had, because she wanted to pretend that the ghost and Dell were the same. And yet, she didn’t want that, didn’t want them to be the same. She wanted Dell not to be trapped, wanted her not to be dead, wanted … She wanted this not to be happening, is what she wanted—Dell and ghosts and cemeteries—nothing good from any of it, that was the bottom line.

Dell’s ghost drifted past her, frosting Hallie’s right elbow, staring at her own casket—at least, Hallie thought she was staring at her casket. Cemetery ghosts ranged behind her, most of them simply rising from the grave and falling back, but at least a dozen of them right there, right behind her. It made her feel slightly sick—dizzy and a little nauseated. She licked her lips.

The service was short. The minister, who served three tiny prairie churches spread out over fifty miles, spoke for less than five minutes—how he’d known Dell when she was three and when she was fifteen and when she was twenty, how she’d always been the same, like lightning in a bottle. “Burned too fast,” he said, which made Hallie sad and angry at the same time.

Another minister from one of the four churches right in West Prairie City, though Hallie couldn’t remember which one, said a prayer. Some guy she didn’t know stood up and talked for five minutes about something, though she couldn’t have said afterwards anything he’d said. The ground mist thickened, climbing up her legs, up everyone’s legs, though none of them knew it. She tried not to look as if she was freezing—tried not to shiver, tried to keep her teeth from chattering—but she was
cold
.

She was afraid when her turn came, she wouldn’t be able to talk, afraid she’d just stand there, hunched into herself, chattering. Someone put their hand on her elbow, and it was so … warm, even through her jacket, that she almost fell, pushing herself toward that warmth, clinging to it, holding the ghosts at bay.

“You look cold,” a voice said quietly in her ear. It was the Boy Deputy. Boyd. She pulled away from his touch and hoped he didn’t notice how reluctantly she did it. “I’m fine,” she said.