“Florence?” I heard Ben, and suddenly he was walking beside me.
“It’s going to rain soon.”
“Shouldn’t you be heading home?”
“I already am.”
I passed the inn and kept walking toward the town square. It was empty with the night and the coming storm. And then the rain came with a soft, low hum. First a droplet, then another, and then the air broke and the humidity rushed away to cool, sharp pinpricks of water. I tilted my head back, face toward the thunderous sky.
In Lee’s book, when it rained, Mairmont smelled like mud and pines, but standing in the middle of town, my flats flooding with water, the world smelled sharp from the oaks that lined the greens and the sweetness of the grass. He said that when it rained the town was quiet.
But my ears were full of noise.
I was soaked in a matter of moments. The rain passed right through Ben. He looked as dry as he had been before because he wasn’t real anymore. He was a ghost.
But he was here. Now. In the moment. Nevertheless.
“You’ll catch a cold if you stay out here much longer,” said Ben.
“I know,” I replied.
“And you’re getting wet.”
“I already am.”
“And—”
“I don’t have an umbrella, or a coat, and it’s cold and it’s storming and what if I get struck by lightning?” I finished for him, and tilted my head back, and let the rain wash my face. “Don’t you ever do things you aren’t supposed to?”
He didn’t respond, so I guessed he never did.
My entire life was built on those kinds of things that I wasn’t supposed to do. I wasn’t supposed to move away, and I wasn’t supposed to ghostwrite for a romance author, and I wasn’t supposed to fail in turning the last book in, and I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Lee Marlow, and I wasn’t supposed to come back here.
Not like this. Not for Dad’s funeral.
“It probably worked out better for you,” I said to him. “Thinking everything through, following the rules, being who you’re supposed to.”
To that Ben replied, “Well, I’m dead and I have nothing to show for it. Nothing to exist after me. I was just here and now I’m . . . I’m gone.” He sounded frustrated and sad. “I had so many plans—so many. And now I will never be able to do any of them, and I just—I want—”
“You want to scream,” I filled in.
He looked at me in surprise. “Yeah. I do.”
“Then do it.”
He paused. “Do it?” he repeated. And suddenly—Ben screamed. Just a loud, vicious yell that echoed off the storefront windows and the town hall.
I stared at him, startled.
He said, “Like that?”
A smile curved my mouth. I didn’t think he’d actually do it, but . . . “Do you feel any better?”
“Not yet,” he replied.
And he screamed again. In his voice there was aggravation, and heartache, and sadness, because he was a ghost, and he had left his life behind, and he had died in the prime of it—and I hadn’t even thought about what he must’ve been feeling. To be dead. To be ignored. Invisible.
I was the only one who could hear him screaming.
But he didn’t do it for other people. He didn’t do it to be heard.
So I took a deep breath, and I screamed with him. I screamed into the howling storm, and my voice was carried off in the wind, it was struck down by thunder, it was dampened by the rain. I screamed again. And again.