10. MEGHAN

Oquirrh Mountains, Utah

1 year before

My clothes were changing.

I realized it when I saw the shoe on the side of the road. When I looked down at my feet, I was no longer wearing the coral shoes I'd worn to Gracie's. Instead, I had on my old gray-striped slip-on flats. The comfy ones I wore while padding around the apartment before bed.

I wasn't sporting the gray culottes or the navy crop hoodie that were a dirty mess beside my bones anymore, either.

They had been swapped for sweats and my John Lennon t-shirt. The clothes I wore when it was just me, bumming around the house.

I couldn't say why. Only that I didn't really want to be wearing the coral shoes or the outfit I'd carefully chosen for my date at Gracie's anymore.

When I imagined myself in my fuzzy bathrobe, I could suddenly see it.

Changing clothes was fun for a few minutes. I tried on my old prom dress from high school. The high heels I'd bought but never worn last year. Even my swimming suit. But without a mirror or anyone else to see my outfit, I kept the sweats and the Lennon shirt.

I thought about going fully nude for a hot second. But even dead, I wasn't quite comfortable with the idea of being a nudist ghost. Not to mention, my actual body had been stripped bare in a way I'd never in my wildest dreams imagined I'd see. So the idea of clothes was comforting, and I kept them.

While I might not have been wearing the coral shoes anymore, they did become the new epicenter of my existence.

I spent most of my time on the dirt road, where the fading side of the shoe could be seen sticking out behind a small collection of pebbles and sticks on the dusty shoulder.

I drifted in and out of memories while I kept vigil, listening for any sound that might be an approaching car.

At first, I worried I would reach the end of the memories. That I would run out. But the more I drifted the more I realized that the memories I had at my fingertips were like an enormous library had been unlocked. The book of my life, every word and image perfectly clear. It felt like the one beautiful gift I still had left.

On day two of my vigil, a flurry of movement nearby took me out of a memory I'd been savoring from when I was two and saw my first caterpillar. I hadn't known I could go back that far. I quickly learned that even those memories were available in crystal clarity if I reached for them. I watched the little black speckles on the caterpillar's back and the way its sucker-cup feet moved rhythmically across the twig in the grass. I could still feel the perfect awe I'd felt then, as clearly as anything. My chubby little fingers, dirty from the crackers I'd just shoved into my mouth, eagerly reached for the caterpillar. "Gentle, Meghan," my mom said beside me. The sunlight that filtered through our big catalpa tree leaves turned her hair into ribbons of gold as she picked up the twig that the caterpillar was climbing and carefully placed it in my outstretched fingers.

Back on the dirt road with the coral shoe, a shiny black raven landed right beside me with a little gray rock in her beak. I tucked the memory of the caterpillar aside as the raven hopped closer to the pile of pebbles and sticks, then set it down on top of the shoe.

"Thank you," I told her. She cocked her head and studied her treasures, then spread her wings with a little mutter of satisfaction. She landed in one of the taller pines a few yards away, in what appeared to be a sizable tangle of sticks but must have been a nest.

Three days later, the same raven visited her treasure box again with a shiny red berry. If I hadn't seen her gently lay her treasures down near one another, I wouldn't have seen anything other than debris. But knowing it had all been carefully arranged by the bright-eyed, glossy black bird made me feel good.

At first, I was worried that she might move my shoe again. Each time she visited, she fussed over her little collection, moving a twig a few inches or taking one of the pebbles into her beak again before carefully placing it atop the little mound. But more days passed and more pebbles, and then what appeared to be part of a dried fish tail appeared, I accepted that this was simply where she had chosen to keep her treasure box.

I started to look forward to what she would bring next while I waited and drifted.

* * *

On the seventh day of waiting, I heard the sound of a car in the distance.

When it passed me—and my shoe—I mustered all the emotion I could, hoping it would be like the coyotes and the eagle. That the driver—a hunter, by his faded tan-and-olive camo—would sense something and at least stop.

He didn't even slow down.

The tailgate of his beat-up tan Suburban hit the ruts hard, and I watched as he popped a piece of gum into his mouth during the few seconds I could see his face, peppered with black-and-white stubble and etched with craggy lines.

So I waited and drifted further, through slumber parties I'd attended and books I had read. Conversations I'd had. The feeling of being tucked into bed and even the dreams I'd had while I slept at night. My first kiss. Learning to tie my shoes. Journal entries. Breaking my arm at summer camp in the sixth grade. Sneaking out of my second-story bedroom to meet up with Nolan, my first boyfriend, in tenth grade. The week my grandma Rosie—or "Bubbie Rosie"—had come to stay for a week when my mom was in the hospital for back surgery.

She'd taught me how to make braided challah bread one day while we listened to the radio and she told me stories about my mother as a child that I'd half-listened to at the time but now I hung on every word.

It was the last time I'd seen her alive. Grandma Rosie had died three months later when an aneurism she'd known about since she was in her twenties burst.

"When your mama was a little girl, she begged me not to kill the spiders even though she was terrified of them," Grandma Rosie was saying. There was a thin streak of flour powdered along her jawline. Her eyes were just like mine, only set deeper in lines that nearly hid them from view when she laughed. "She'd stand there with a cup in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other, just shaking like a leaf as she gently, gently scooted that spider onto the paper and into the cup."

I watched myself laugh, finally listening fully to this story. I hated spiders too. My mom still scooped them up instead of smashing them into a wad of tissue, and I loved her for it.

Grandma Rosie chuckled louder. "One time, she'd trapped this big old wolf. Big as a quarter. It was too heavy for the paper, and as she was carrying it to the door it fell right off onto the front of her shirt. I'd never heard a child make a noise like that before. She stayed there frozen and screaming her head off until I managed to get it off her."

I watched myself fidget on the barstool while Grandma turned the dough out of the bowl and started to tell me about the importance of putting the flour on your hands instead of the dough. I saw her smile falter a little as I asked if I could watch TV while she kneaded the dough. But then the corners of her eyes crinkled and she nodded. "Yes of course, Bubbelah." Little doll. "Go and watch your show. We'll finish later."

As ten-year-old me hurried upstairs to watch Sabrina the Teenage Witch, I wondered where Grandma Rosie was. She had died more than ten years ago. If death for her had been like death for me. "I miss you, Bubbie," I whispered.

I heard her reply as my ten-year-old self reached the top of the stairs.

"I'll be right here when you're ready."

I abruptly stopped drifting and blinked at the quiet, dusty road in front of me. Had that always been part of the memory? Something I hadn't paid attention to when I was ten? There were plenty of details I'd missed in the moment.

Still, it sounded as if she was speaking to me.

Not the ten-year-old me.

Me, Meghan on the side of the road by a dusty, bloodstained shoe.

A jolt of excitement—followed by a wave of terror—ran through me.

What would it mean if she was?

Part of me wanted to drift back then and there. To find out. To see if I could talk to Bubbie. To know whether she would talk back.

But the part that had been sitting by the side of the road in the middle of the woods wasn't ready to find out. Because the part of me that thought just maybe she was speaking to me couldn't quite process the disappointment if she wasn't.

I wanted to hug the possibility for a while before I tested it.

And that was when I heard the sound of another car.

Distantly droning. Smacking the potholes with muted, faraway thunks.

As the sound got closer, I reached deep for the emotions bubbling at the surface. The surprise and hope at hearing Bubbie and wondering if maybe she wasn't gone, just like I wasn't gone. The terror that had brought me here. The rage I felt when I remembered falling asleep in his car and waking up to his black eyes above me in the darkness.

The mix of happy and sad and anger and terror felt effervescent and tight. Like a pop bottle that's been shaken up.

I couldn't feel the dead brown pine needles and dirt along the bank where I stood anymore.

I couldn't feel the temperature drop as the sun set in the hills around me.

But I could feel this, and as the soda bottle burst I watched the car come around the curve in the road, toward me.

The driver was a woman in her twenties. Hair was piled on top of her head in a messy bun. A "coexist" bumper sticker was peeling off the front of her beat-up Jeep. Her lips were moving, like she was singing. But her eyes were sad.

"Stop," I screamed as I watched her eyes flick to the barely noticeable fork in the road ahead, where the shoulder of the road dipped then branched into the sorry excuse for a road. Where my bones were slowly becoming part of the earth.

The girl with the messy bun drove through me and my tidal wave of feelings, crashing invisibly around us both.

"Please stop," I whispered as the despair crashed harder.

And then, even though I couldn't quite believe it was happening, she did.