—VIRGINIA WOOLF, “Street Haunting”

CONTENTS

Prologue

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

A Conversation with Rebecca Kauffman

Reading Group Guide Questions for Discussion

PROLOGUE

Two decades have passed since the summer my family drove through many miles of remote marshland to reach Fripp Island. Land that smelled of wet dog and wet duffel bag, air as thick and hot as wool. Pro-life billboards with magnified ultrasounds and 1-800 numbers in blood-spatter red. Spanish moss that hung in oversized shrouds from every limb of every giant Southern live oak and bald cypress and swayed in the breeze like gangling drunken dancers. Silent and forsaken land. We went twenty miles without seeing another car on the highway.

We crossed a bridge to enter Fripp Island, a luscious, jungled little thumbprint of land that contains every shade of green you could imagine, from almost-yellow to almost-black. We had to stop the car because an alligator was in the road before us. It was the first alligator I had ever seen and much uglier than I would have expected, its hide dull, dark, and textured, as warty as a toad. Fat thighs. It sauntered across the road like it owned the island. The birds there didn’t really sing, I noticed. They clicked and buzzed and occasionally they screamed.

Several days later, I was dead.

My body was recovered by a young surfer named Blade Caldwell and two of his friends. The coroner officially ruled it Death by Accidental Drowning. My family acknowledged that I was not a strong swimmer and there was a powerful riptide, so no one had reason to suspect that the coroner was wrong. Everyone cried and spoke loving sentiments about me.

In the moment before I passed through the screen that separates the living from the dead, I can recall that something like giddy, euphoric laughter fluttered briefly within me, because the idea of being killed—being murdered, that is—struck me as so bizarre that it was downright comical. Then water entered my lungs as hard and fast as a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball to the chest, and I was enraged by the circumstances that had brought me to this place. But before I could linger on that, oopsie-daisy now, here I go. My mind loosened and skittered across a few beautiful memories that touched me and surprised me, and then it was over. No bright white light. Just a painless little snap as I penetrated the screen.

Twenty years later, I’m still skimming through and around and around the same old places, sniffing about, watching from behind the screen that separates the living from the dead. The dead don’t care much for one another, I can assure you of that, we’re just a sort of sleazy and unappealing reflection of each other; no fun to be had between us, no comfort to be shared. And to the living, of course, we are formless and imperceptible. Our touch has no imprint and our presence cannot be detected, no matter how relentlessly or lovingly we might stalk a living person and attempt to foist our dead self upon them. We can actually slip into a living body, did you know that?, be swept up by its movements and carry along with it, feel the banging of that heart as though it were our own. But even still, even then, the living will carry on, oblivious to our habitation. So around and around I go, taking up temporary residence within the people I once knew and attempting to recall the facts and feelings of life.