The Last Academy (17 page)

W
hen I met him at the ocean’s edge, I wasn’t scared. The sea was black as ink under the night sky, lapping and gurgling against the dock posts, taunting me. But the water wouldn’t end my life. He would. A smile flickered across his face, like he could read my thoughts.

Barnaby Charon was alone, standing in the darkness on the pier. There was a building out there, and he stood next to it. Inside, the lights were off and the glass of the windows reflected the ocean. I thought we were the only two people left on earth.

I took a deep breath.

“How long have I been dead?” I asked him.

“U
sually, by the time a person meets with me, they have completely passed,” he said. I thought back to the first time I had ever laid eyes on Barnaby Charon. I had been dead since before Denver, apparently.

“Usually passed,” I said. “But not always?”

He nodded. “If you will, recall the touch we shared on the airplane.”

I knew what he was talking about, but the way it went down in my memory was not so much a “touch we shared,” as him grabbing my neck. I had thought he was going to kiss me, but …

“You were checking my pulse,” I realized.

“You had none.” He smiled out to sea, like he was fond of the memory.

That’s right about when it sunk in. I mean, technically,
I had known since I had seen Nora’s books, but the knowing was on top of my brain, like a hat I was wearing. When he smiled, the knowing sunk down into me like syrup into a pancake. My knees got wobbly and I wanted to sit down, but the dock looked dank.
You’ll get your clothes dirty
, my head kept trying to tell me. Except that wasn’t true — ghosts, or dead people, or whatever — they didn’t need to worry about that stuff anymore. But that wasn’t exactly right, either, because here I was, dead, and I was still worried about it.

The light came on in the building next to us. Through a window, I saw it was a yachtsman’s clubhouse. It looked warm and inviting, with a polished wood bar, and twinkly glasses that hung from the ceiling, and comfy-looking yellow chairs with navy stripes.

“Let us go inside.” He walked ahead to get the door. In the moonlight, I saw the shine of his hair go white and smooth and skull-like.

Inside, I fell into a chair. Charon went to the bar and made himself a drink. The glasses behind him were etched with the names of poisons. His had “strychnine” on it. I was pretty sure that was a joke. Charon half sat on a bar stool and sipped his drink.

“What happens when you take me across the water?” I asked.

“It is my purpose to take you there. When you are ready.” He hadn’t exactly answered my question. “First, there is something you must do,” he added.

I tensed up. If I was already dead, what could he want from me? I could feel a pull inside my chest, like he had my heart on a leash and he could yank me wherever it was he meant for me to go.

I asked, “What is this place? How did I end up here?”

“The school is a way station. It is a place for you to process what has happened and a chance to get your affairs in order before you pass into the next realm. Those who die young or suddenly often have unfinished business. Every student must fulfill two requirements. One is understand that you have died. Receiving a coin is the mark of understanding.”

He leaned across the bar and reached for something. Then he walked over and placed a book in my lap as if it weighed nothing at all, even though it was as big as a dictionary. The cover was oiled by a million fingerprints.

I expected the thing in my lap to be like a baby book, a
This Is Your Life, Camden
. But the first page was an obituary
for Jake Diaz, a junior guy I hardly even knew. I flipped more pages. The whole book was full of newspaper clippings of my schoolmates. Sometimes it was a little blurb of an article, like with Jake, who’d been in a car accident. Or it was like the next article, which had a small paragraph under the headline
Family of Four Dead in Home: Carbon Monoxide Likely Culprit
. Sometimes they were big articles on old, yellowed, and crackly paper. Others looked new.

I saw my prank buddy, Rachel, smiling in an old holiday card. Next to her photo, the words:
House Fire Claims Victim
. Followed by,
Firefighters were called to the 1800 block of North Kingston Street Wednesday afternoon. There, they rescued sixteen-year-old Rachel Smith from the burning home. She later died at the hospital. Authorities suspect faulty wiring….
I studied it for a long time, trying to believe it and failing.

I turned the page.
Two Minors Perish in Rollover Accident.
It read,
Both victims were pronounced dead at the scene.
Next to the article was the photo I’d seen on Jessie’s desk, of her and her brother.

“She thought she lived through that crash with her brother.” I remembered what Jessie told me. “But she knew there was something wrong with her seat belt.”

Charon said, “The brain obscures the events of death. It is the last survival instinct.”

“What do you mean — what does that mean?” I demanded of Professor Death over there, with his fifty-cent college words.

“Jessie believed she survived the accident because she
had
worn her seat belt, but she did not. The argument with her brother distracted both from their tasks. The mind is cleverer than the person: It can both know the truth and obscure it until the person is prepared to face what has happened to them. Jessie suffered tremendous guilt, believing her speech impediment prevented her brother from fastening his seat belt. The only words she was able to say clearly were ‘I hate you.’ Seeking out her brother with the Ouija board, she was able to forgive herself. So absolved, she awoke to her true existence and then knew to call for me.”

“You took her.” I slumped down. I had known, of course. But I had thought he killed her.

He seemed the slightest bit offended. “I only supplied the vehicle. She drove herself.”

“Why …?” I started, but I knew. Just as I met Charon down by the water’s edge, Jessie had come here in a car like the one that had killed her.

In that moment, I understood that the spring fling cruise had been only for me, a sign telling me where I needed to go.

“Did Jessie really talk to her brother that night in the chapel?” I asked instead.

“Yes. The dead may speak across realms to other dead.”

A horrible idea crossed my mind — I’d called my father. “What about the living? Can you contact them?” My chest got tight. I thought I might die all over again if I found out my dad was dead.

“Your father dreams of you. He slept, aching with loss, when you called,” Charon said.

“He misses me?” I asked. Charon leaned over and handed me a soft linen handkerchief. His face suggested he was trying hard not to show it, but maybe, buried deep under the thousands of years of doing this job, he was still a little grossed out by human things like snot leakage. I wiped my nose.

“You are his daughter.”

“He said I couldn’t come home,” I whispered.

“Of course he did. You are dead. You cannot.” Charon smiled a little. “Haunting is a seductive and destructive force within every deceased. It has the great potential to
damage both you and the ones you attempt to contact. It distracts from the tasks that must be completed in this realm. Your father knew this. His was an act of great love to discourage your return.”

I thought about my dad telling me not to come home. Not because he didn’t want me, but because he loved me. Because he was still trying to do right by me, even though he probably thought I was a figment of his dreams. Charon had just told me that it was bad — a haunting — but all I wanted to do right then was call my dad again and tell him I loved him.
I’m not a figment
, I’d say, and he’d know it was me. I closed my eyes. I could call every day and tell him I loved him, and maybe after a while, it would be like I wasn’t even dead, and everything would be OK, and …

Except I knew what that looked like. I’d seen it firsthand at Mark’s house.

“Some kids get lost when they try to go back home, don’t they?” The book in my lap was warm, like a sleeping cat, and I turned the page without waiting for him to answer.

The obituary was only a small column. No bold headline or picture, just life and death news in a small town:
Mark Elliott, eight months, passed away in his home in Nueva
Vista of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). He is survived by his parents, Edward and Nancy, and his brother, John.

“Mark isn’t a baby,” I said.

“This is haunting,” Charon said. “Sometimes he stays with your kind, he grows and learns. Sometimes he gets caught up in contact with his past.” His face hardened the slightest bit. “He will not see me.”

“Was that his mother I saw? And his brother?” I got an icky feeling in my stomach. “Did
I
haunt them?”

“To them, if they felt you at all, you were an unwelcome presence. An eerie sensation.”

“A ghost?” I asked.

Charon shrugged. “As a mother whose heart is still broken for him, Nancy is able to recognize Mark. In her grief, she can neither hold on to her son nor let him go.”

“She wants him to come back to her,” I said. “Even though she says she doesn’t.”

“Who knows what a human heart wants?” His eyes burned, the color of the liquor in his strychnine glass.

“Will he ever …?” I thought about what Mark had said to me the last time I’d seen him: “I don’t want to know what you know.” I shut my mouth. I opened it again and asked before I could think it through: “Will he
ever get what he needs from his mom? You know, so he can pass?”

“Attend to what I have told you. He requires nothing from his mother. The one Mark must make peace with is his brother.”

Like I was right back in their spooky, haunted house, I heard Mark’s brother scream: “I’m the one who’s still here!” John wouldn’t have his mother back until Mark let her go. And maybe Mark had lost too much of her to let go of the shreds he still had.

“But … wait,” I said, stumbling in my head over it. “How can Mark be haunting his mom — and that’s bad — but he’s still supposed to talk to John to do whatever it is he’s supposed to do? Wouldn’t that be haunting his brother?”

“Ah.” Charon sipped his drink. “There is haunting and there is visitation. The former involves your neediness and desire to be healed, and as I said, it damages. The latter involves your ability to deliver healing to the one you contact. A visitation is a gift to another that may damage you.”

Charon set his drink down, and I watched a blue flame skate across the surface of the liquid inside. It snuffed out and the drink was just a drink again.

I sat there with my mouth hanging half open, until
all the big words he’d used kind of filtered through and I thought I knew what he meant. But also, another part of me was back at school, by the telephone with Mark. “He had my coin,” I whispered.

“Some students are charged with holding the coin of another, when the lessons are intertwined. You were able to show Mark that it is possible to love someone and also let them go, without being destroyed by the process. Before you, he was unable to contemplate it, but it is the skill he must gain to free himself of Lethe.”

“What about me? What was my lesson?” I swallowed back tears.

“That you are capable of both loving someone and knowingly hurting them. As all people are. Mark will ache from your decision, and you knew this, and you chose your coin, anyway.”

I nodded, my heart heavy. I closed my eyes and went back to that moment at the pay phone. Except this time, somehow I did something differently, which changed things. I would take that coin, pinch it between my fingers, and push it right back in the coin slot. I would hear it chink down into the belly of the pay phone, and then I’d grab Mark’s hand and …

“What if …” Trying to explain that you love someone is no easy thing. The best I could get out after a while was “Please.”

The boatman’s jaw set. “You cannot save him from pain. You cannot even save yourself.”

I couldn’t have stayed at Lethe, knowing what I did. But part of me wanted to. When no words showed up to explain how it felt, all these tears came out instead.

Charon studied the ocean.

I turned the page of the book in my lap. It occurred to me that each obituary got me closer to my own page. I tried to get lost in the little articles and updates, understanding these secrets about the people I had known on campus. There was Thatch, who was riding a bike when he got hit by a car. In a way, it was overwhelmingly sad to see death everywhere. But in another way, it made me smile. I mean, I knew how Thatch turned out — he’d gotten to kiss a girl like Nora. Death wasn’t the end of him.

A few pages later, I saw Troy had died during a frat initiation party, of alcohol poisoning. I bet he knew all about peer pressure. Then I thought about what he’d said to me after Brynn’s egging. I didn’t have to ask — I knew he must’ve spied a gold coin swimming in the yolk of his last
broken egg. It gave me chills to know I’d been so close to someone else’s crossing over, and I hadn’t even known it.

Next I saw:
Two Men Found Dead, One Missing.
The first paragraph read,
The bodies of Alan Wentz and Shane Stanton, both twenty-five, were found Monday in Los Padres National Forest, at the bottom of a ravine. Forensics suggests horseplay was likely a contributing factor in their deaths.

“They were older in their … article … than they were at school,” I said.

Shrug. “Sometimes you go backward to learn what you need to go forward,” he answered. I thought about what bullies they were, what they’d done to Brynn.

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“Does it matter to you?” Charon answered. It was not a question. It felt good to let them go.
Good-bye, jerks
, I thought.

Brynn was next.
Teen Tennis Champ Missing
, the first headline announced in bold font.
The missing girl was last seen leaving Feather Point Country Club with her mother’s former boyfriend, Ned Dillinger….
Then:
Jenni Laurent Alibis Ned Dillinger in Daughter’s Disappearance.
Followed by:
No Body? No Trial? No
Justice for Brynn.
And the last one:
FOUND!
It was next to a grainy photo of Brynn smiling in her tennis whites.

The mystery of Brynn Laurent’s disappearance ended last month, when cold-case detectives found her remains buried on the property of oil executive Ned Dillinger. Authorities had long suspected Dillinger, the on-again, off-again boyfriend of Brynn’s mother, Jenni Laurent. Several witnesses claimed Dillinger had a “creepy” interest in the teenager. Laurent alibied Dillinger, but suspicions were raised when Dillinger later purchased several luxury items for Laurent, including a house on Wedgewood Drive and a Lexus convertible.