Lee and I were given the next day off from lessons. I slept as long as I could because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know if Lee would even want to see me. But in the late morning, when I went into the kitchen, he was there at the table. He’d been waiting for me. I filled the kettle and lit the stove. I spooned tea leaves into a strainer. I waited for the water to boil and for the tea to steep. Only then was I strong enough to face him.

I sat next to him at the table.

I looked at his face.

I took his hand in my hand.

“Lee,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I said it without crying. I said it for him and not for myself.

He rested his head against my shoulder, the best gift I had ever been given.

take me back

THERE WAS A TIME THEN, after what we all came to call “the accident,” when things went more or less back to normal. I returned to the schoolhouse to teach the twins. They were all cooperation, all compliments, but all I wanted was Lee. When he did come back for lessons, I had to keep myself from staring as he read aloud and wrote his numbers, as he moved with a limp to the closets and told us he was fine. We had survived, I reminded myself when I felt my chest tighten. We had been in trouble, but we were okay now.

Dr. Cole came by once in a while to check on Lee and rule out infection, and then, two weeks after the accident, he arrived to pull out the stitches. I sat with Lee and held his hand while Dr. Cole snipped and pulled and dabbed the drops of blood with alcohol. “I wish I’d had the dissolving stuff that night,” he said to Lee. “I’m sorry about that, young man.”

“It’s okay,” Lee told him, trying to sound strong. But he squeezed my hand hard and I wished that he would squeeze even harder. I wished for him to break my bones.

___

I had been haunting myself as punishment, I supposed. But it was difficult, when ghosts were everywhere, to figure out what was real and what was imagined. The glowing figures, the shadows, the ghost at the piano, the blood on my foot and my earlobes . . . they’d all been real. Proof that something was out there, even if it had never been Blake. Something was there, just not what I’d thought.