I took her hand. Two streaks ran down her cheeks, aglow in the moonlight. With my other hand, as tenderly as I could, I wiped them away.

“And then,” she said quietly, “I turned eighteen.”

I ached with recognition. “It would have been easier to be hopeless,” I said.

“Yes.” She took in a breath. Let it out. “No one should suffer from that kind of hope.”

___

By the time I crossed the field back to my cabin, I’d said good night to Ruby and Diamond and Billy and Julia. Liz had gone to bed and I thought all the ghosts had, too. I took off my shoes and turned on Billie Holiday. I built my fire and sat in front of it, letting it warm me. And then I went to shut the curtain and turn out the light.

Something was on the field, glowing in the dark. The fog was thick, so I couldn’t see her clearly, but the way she moved was enough for me to know it was her.

My ghost, waiting for me.

I knew it was time, finally, to greet her.

I slipped on my shoes and opened my door and then I was out in the misty cold.

She was in the middle of the field, dancing, just as she had been on my first night. But as I neared her, there was more. I heard music. A piano. Something light and fast. And then that song ended and the ghost closed her eyes and waited for a new song to begin. I knew it from its first few notes. I knew it from my Billie Holiday record, and I knew it from my piano playing, and I knew it from farther back. And when she began to dance again, I found that I remembered every motion before she made it. When her arms were going to rise, when she was going to spin and leap. I remembered the dance because I had been taught the same one and had practiced for hours, less out of duty than for the joy it brought me. When she was finished, the music stopped, too, and she walked toward me.

Here it was—what I had been trying for so long not to see.

She had my face. My body. Not as it was as I stood there, but as it had been before I left my grandparents’ house. She was me, at thirteen years old, suspended in time at the moment when I had last been whole.

We stepped closer. I even recognized her dress—white with pale blue lace trim. My grandmother had sewn it for my recital. We were face-to-face now. Here she was, the girl who I had been.

She was so lovely.

She didn’t know what was to come.

“You recognize me,” she said, and her voice was sweet as birdsong, her smile bright.

“Yes,” I told her. “I do.”

“Took you long enough.”