CHAPTER 52
Portraits

Picture this:

A farm in west Texas. It’s night. Animals in the barnyard are on edge. Something has them spooked and the farmer doesn’t know why. He double-checks the pens, but loses concentration for a moment, then goes inside, never realizing that in that moment of disorientation, his hands, under someone else’s control, had unlocked the pen of his prize breeding sow.

In the pen, the sow awakes. Not the sow, but the girl within the sow, who is beginning to forget that she is a girl. She does not want to consider the misery that she has been put through these many, many weeks. The slop she has been served to eat, the stench of the pen, and the massive immobile weight of her own bloated, porcine body.

Then she hears the gate of her pen slowly creak open. She is hit by a new sharp smell, and adrenaline fills her, for the instinctive mind of the pig knows the smell means grave danger. She turns her head enough to see bright eyes looking at her, reflecting the distant porch light like yellow marbles.

A snow leopard.

The leopard’s white, spotted fur seems to glow in the waning gibbous moon. The cat is hungry, but it does not attack. Instead, it reaches with its paw, grabs the gate of the pen and pulls it closed until it latches, making sure it couldn’t get out if it tried. Only then does the leopard bare its fangs at the sow.

The sow doesn’t move. It couldn’t if it wanted to, so instead, it stares into the leopard’s eyes as the leopard slowly moves forward, opens its mouth wide, and digs its powerful fangs deep into the sow’s neck. . . .

A few minutes later, at the sound of a strange roar, the farmer grabs his shotgun and heads out toward the pigpens, where his worst fear is realized. A wild animal has gotten into the pen. The strangest animal he’s ever seen in these parts. His prize sow is dead, and somehow locked in the pen with its body is a huge white cat, furiously bouncing around the pen, unable to escape.

“Now I’ve seen everything,” he says.

. . . But in truth, he hasn’t seen everything. Because he doesn’t see the two invisible spirits embracing right beside him, then racing off into the Everlost night.

Picture this:

A hospital on Valentine’s Day in Memphis, Tennessee. A sparse gathering of families have remembered their silent loved ones today, including the parents of the girl in room 509, who arrive shortly after work and tape a Valentine’s Day card up on the wall. It storms outside, icy rain hitting the window, making it rattle. Not the most inviting of Valentine’s Days; not the most inviting of settings.

Still, the couple do their best to make the most of it. The mother paints the girl’s nails, for her sister is in college and can’t be there to do it. The father goes through his ritual of massaging her muscles to keep them soft and supple, for there’s still a faint and far-off chance that she’ll need them again someday. The mother reads yet another chapter from Sense and Sensibility, and then when melancholy sets in, the father goes to pull up the car, for he doesn’t want to make his wife walk in the storm.

The woman gets up to look out of the window, her heart sinking at the sight of quivering branches on winter-bare trees. She wishes that Valentine’s Day—that every holiday—could be different for them, but she knows that it probably never will be. Resigned to that fact, she turns to look at her silent daughter in the bed, only to see her daughter looking right back at her.

“Hi, Mom,” the girl says, her voice weak and raspy.

“Allie?” The woman hurries to her daughter, sitting in the chair beside her, taking her curled hand, and holding it—and for the first time in a very, very long time, that hand squeezes back.

“Sorry I’ve been gone for so long,” Allie rasps.

“It’s okay, honey,” the mother says. “Oh my God, it’s okay.” Tears burst from the woman’s eyes, falling more powerfully than the rain outside. They are tears of joy, because finally, after all these years, she’s been given permission to cry.

Picture this:

A skateboarder in New York City awakes to find himself on a street corner in the middle of the day. He looks around, and the world seems strange. Sounds are hollow, people pass by as blurs, and the colors all seem muted except for him, his skateboard, and the spot that he’s on. He turns to see a boy sitting on the curb across the street, also in perfect focus, watching him. As he goes over to the boy, he notices that there’s something wrong with the ground. It feels as if it’s melting beneath his feet.

The boy who’s been watching him smiles and stands up. He wears pressed pants and a leather jacket over a white shirt and a dark tie.

“What’s going on here? Am I dreaming? Am I drugged?” the skateboarder asks.

“Neither,” says the smiling boy. “You’ll want to tell me your name now. I’ll write it down in case you forget it.”

“Very funny,” says the skateboarder, and yet as he tries to say his name, it takes him a moment to pull it up. “Kyle.”

“Nice to meet you, Kyle. I’m Nick.” He shakes Kyle’s hand, writes his name on a piece of paper, then sticks it in Kyle’s shirt pocket. “Do you remember what happened?”

“Yeah,” says Kyle, scratching his head. “I came out of that alley, and almost got hit by a garbage truck.”

Nick shakes his head. “Hate to tell you this, Kyle. But it wasn’t ‘almost.’”

“No way, man. That’s not even funny”

The smile never leaves Nick’s face. “Check your pockets,” he says.

“What for?”

“You’ll see.”

Kyle reaches into his pocket and pulls out a bunch of spare change, and out of the change, Nick retrieves a funny-looking coin with a faded face.

“You’ll want to keep this,” Nick says, and puts it in Kyle’s shirt pocket as well. “Be careful not to lose it.”

Now as Kyle looks at the people around him—how they don’t see him, how they actually walk past him, and some walk right through him, he realizes the truth.

“I’m . . . dead?”

“I’m sorry, Kyle. I’m also sorry that you didn’t make it into the light, but you will. In the meantime, I know a place you can stay for free right here in New York. You can even have your own apartment there. The only rules are that you have to do something different every day, and you can only ‘rent’ for one month at a time.”

“Why? What happens at the end of the month?”

“At the end of each month, you check with the coin,” Nick says. “It will tell you if you’re ready to move ‘uptown.’”

And although it doesn’t make much sense to Kyle yet, he follows Nick. Something inside Kyle tells him he can trust this kid—that Nick truly has his best interests at heart.

“So this place I’m staying . . . ,” asks Kyle. “Am I gonna like it?”

“I think you’ll love it,” says Nick, with a smile that’s just a little bit mischievous. “And you won’t believe the view!”