The Loveliest Dead by Ray Garton Read Free Book Online

 
    “Yes, I guess that’s possible.” She glanced at the bedroom’s open door.
    “You’re a worrier, Jenna,” Dr. Reasor said with a smile in his voice. “Have you made an appointment with Dr. Wenders?”
    “Yes.”
    “Okay, take her to see Dr. Wenders, but make an appointment with an eye doctor as well, okay? Just in case. Tell Dr. Wenders what you told me and see what she has to say. If there’s any reason to be concerned, I’m confident she’ll pick up on it. She’s a very good doctor.”  
    “Thank you so much, Dr. Reasor. I feel kind of silly now. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”
    “No bother. Give your mom my best.”
    After replacing the cordless phone on its base, Jenna hurried to the bedroom door. The hallway was still empty. No one stood at the other end. She leaned her shoulder against the doorjamb and began to cry again.  
    Jenna had never been a believer in the supernatural and was not even a religious person. Her mother had never once taken her to church or Sunday school when she was little, and on the few occasions when friends had asked Jenna to attend with them, her mother had always said no. Although she never expressed any dislike toward them, Martha did not trust churchgoing people. She sometimes said, “Anybody who smiles that much is up to something.” For Jenna, God had always been something other people believed in.  
    When Josh died, she had been irritated whenever someone told her that he had gone to a better place, that he was in Heaven, even though she knew they had the best of intentions. To Jenna, dead was dead, and her baby had died, had ceased to be—that was bad enough without believing he’d gone to some faraway place where she could not reach him without dying herself. Had she believed that, Jenna would not have hesitated to end her own life to get to Josh’s side as soon as possible. She had not given an afterlife so much as a moment’s consideration when Josh died. To do so would have been to go insane.  
    Jenna went to the two boxes on the hallway floor and knelt beside them. She picked up the picture of Josh on the pony at the fair. He grinned from behind a web of cracks in the glass, where Jenna’s tears shattered as they dropped from her eyes. She was frightened by the thoughts she was having so suddenly, thoughts foreign to her. She did not have the strength to resist them, though, and that was even worse.  
    Helpless against it, Jenna surrendered to the possibility that her dead son had tried to communicate with her just minutes ago.  
     
    By one o’clock, the rain had stopped, and so had the roller coaster of thoughts in Jenna’s mind. For about half an hour as she hung pictures, she had driven herself nearly crazy thinking about what she had seen. But her heartbeat gradually calmed as she reminded herself of her state of mind at that moment, and the fact that she’d been crying and had tears in her eyes, and of the bad light in the hallway. By the time she put a frozen pizza in the oven for lunch, she had calmed herself down. It helped that she’d sneaked one of Martha’s Xanaxes.  
    Although the possibility lingered in her mind that some essence of her dead son had reached out to her for a moment, she decided to keep it to herself for the time being. It was not because she was afraid of how David would react—she knew exactly how he would react. There had been silence between them for months after Josh’s death. They had been afraid to speak, unable to trust their own voices. The silence finally ended one night while Jenna and David were in bed, staring into the darkness instead of sleeping. David had suddenly released an agonizing wail and curled up in a ball beside her. They’d spent most of that night holding each other and crying. But even once they were talking again, their wounds remained open just beneath the surface, raw and ready to bleed again. They had not healed. Jenna knew they never would, not entirely. She knew if she