“That’s only two jobs and three sleepers.”
“Persephone and I disagree slightly on the existence of a third job or not.”
Blue asked, “What kind of job are we talking about here anyway? Like, a job where we pull a salary and at the end we get our faces put up on the wall of a magical forest with Most Valuable Employee of the Epoch?”
“A job like, at the end of it, everything settles into balance and we all live happily the damn ever after.”
“Well, that sounds great, except a, what about that sleeper in the middle and b, you can’t actually complete a negative job ever, i.e., when does Mom know she’s successfully not woken someone, and three, does this still involve Gansey dying? Because f, that is not my idea of a happy ending.”
“I regret this conversation,” Calla said, and began stacking receipts.
“Also g, I don’t want to do school anymore.”
“Well, you’re not quitting, so I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I didn’t say I was quitting. I just have a very low level of job satisfaction right now. Morale is low. The troops don’t want to go to community college.”
Calla punched another button on the calculator. Her mouth was making a very unimpressed shape. “The troops shouldn’t whine to someone who worked her ass off to be able to go to community college, then.”
“Is this going to be one of those ‘I hiked uphill both ways to school’ thing? Because if so —”
“This is a you-should-go-contemplate-your-entitlement-Blue-Sargent-thing.”
Blue, shamed, huffed and stood up. “Whatever. Where is the list from the church watch?”
“That won’t make Gansey less dead.”
“Calla.”
“It’s in the box over the fridge, I think.”
Blue stormed from the room, deeply unsatisfied, and dragged a chair through hordes of soap-making children to the fridge. Sure enough, she found the church watch notebooks in the box on top. Taking the entire collection, she pushed back through the industrious children and then out the sliding door into the dark backyard.
It was instantly quieter. The yard was empty except for some mums waiting to be planted, the massive beech tree with its great yellow canopy, and the Gray Man.
He sat so quietly in one of the lawn chairs that Blue didn’t notice him until she turned to sit in the other.
“Oh! Sorry. Are you having a moment? I can go back inside.”
His expression was pensive. He tipped his mostly full beer toward the other chair. “No, I’m the intruder. I should be asking you if you want this space to yourself.”
She flapped a diffident hand toward him as she sat. The night smelled foxy and damp, all rain and failed leaf fires. For a moment they sat in quiet as Blue shuffled through the papers and the Gray Man nursed his beer in a contemplative way. The breeze was cool, and the Gray Man doffed his jacket without any particular ceremony and handed it to Blue.
As she draped it over her shoulders, he asked, “So what do you have there? Sonnets, I hope.”
Blue drummed her fingers on the pages, thinking how to sum it up. “Every May, we hold a vigil and we see the spirits of people who are going to die within a year. We ask their names, and if they’re clients, we let the living people know we saw their spirits so they can get their things in order. This is the list of names.”
“Are you all right?”
“Oh, yeah, I just have, this, eyelid in my eye or something,” Blue said, wiping her right eye. “What’s that face for?”
“The ethical and spiritual ramifications dazzle.”
“Don’t they?” Blue held the most recent list up over her head so the kitchen light illuminated her handwriting. “Oh, well.”
“What?”
She had just found what she was looking for: JESSIE DITTLEY.
Spelled wrong, but there nonetheless.
Blue sat back. “Gansey and I met someone and I thought I remembered his name.”
“And he’s there.”
“Yeah. The thing is that I don’t know if he’ll die because we’re in his life, or die because we’re not, or if he’ll die either way.”
The Gray Man rested his neck on the back of his chair and gazed up at the low clouds reflecting light from Henrietta. “Fate versus mere prognostication? I suppose you know more about how the psychic business works.”
Blue shrank further into his jacket as the breeze ruffled the beech leaves. “I only know what they’ve told me.”
“And what have they told you?”
She liked the way he asked. It was less that he needed the information and more that he was enjoying her company. It seemed strange that she felt the least lonesome and uneasy sitting here with him, instead of with Calla or Persephone.
She felt more eyelids prickling in her eye.
“Mom says it’s like a memory,” Blue said. “Instead of looking backward, you’re looking forward. Remembering the future. Because time isn’t like this —” She drew a line. “It’s like this —” She drew a circle. “So I guess, if you think about it that way, it’s not that we can’t change the future. It’s that if you see the future, it already reflects the changes you might have made based upon seeing the future. I don’t know. I don’t know! Because Mom is always telling people that her readings are a promise, not a guarantee. So you can break a promise.”
“Some guarantees, too,” the Gray Man observed, voice wry. Then, suddenly, “Is Maura on the list?”
Blue shook her head. “She was born in West Virginia. The church watch only seems to show us people who were born in the area.”
Or, in the case of Richard Gansey III: reborn.
Mr. Gray asked, “May I see it?”
She handed it over and watched the slowly moving leaves overhead as he made his way through the names. How she loved this beech tree. So often as a little girl she’d come out to rest her hands against its cool, smooth bark, or sat herself down in its twisted, exposed roots. She had written a letter to it, once, she remembered, and put it in a pencil case that she’d wedged in the roots. They had long since grown around the box, hiding it completely. Now she wished she could read the letter again, as she remembered only its existence and not its content.
Mr. Gray had gone still. Voice careful, he said, “Gansey?”
The very last name on the last of the pages.
She just chewed on her lower lip.