Life According to the Dead

Peter

He was deep into the woods – so deep, in fact, that, had there been any cars on the highway that day, he wouldn't even have heard them. He liked it this way. It was where he went to think – far away from the road (somewhere to his right) and the high school (somewhere behind him). Far from that shed, too, wherever it was. He didn't want to know.

He liked getting lost out here. It was nice to be alone in the woods with nothing but trees in every direction, as far as the eye could see. He could have been any number of miles from civilization and it all would have looked the same. Of course, if he so desired – which he rarely did – he could always get back to Jim, no matter how lost he was. The strange force that seemed to pull him toward Jim had gradually diminished in intensity over the past twenty years, but it was still there, like a trail of invisible bread crumbs that moved between the two of them so that he could always find his way back.

Sometimes it was convenient – like in a few hours' time, when he would get bored of the woods and need to figure out where the hell he was and how to get back to Meadford. But sometimes it made him just plain miserable.

Of all the people in the world to try to help him, for God's sake, it had had to be Jim.

The same thoughts seemed to cross his mind every single day. It had been so for twenty long years now. Why Jim?

But – more pressingly, and infinitely more torturously – why Peter?

The fact that Zachariah Searcy had chosen to kill him had been completely random. Everybody knew it; it was simply undeniable. They hadn't known each other, had never even crossed paths until Searcy had kidnapped him that night.

Imagine. If he had been inside the pizza parlor, or really any of the various buildings and shops downtown, it would have been fine. But no, he'd had to be standing right there behind the pizza parlor, in that stupid little back alley.

He kicked at a tree. His leg sailed through it.

Peter didn't look like a ghost. He didn't like to think of himself as one, either. That was one thing to Jim's credit – he had never, not once, referred to Peter as a ghost or a spirit. Dead, yes, but a person nonetheless. There was nothing at all mystical or mythical about it. It had become, ironically, much like a fact of life for the two of them.

He said it aloud. "I wouldn't know Jim if–"

Stopped. Soaked in the silence. Started again.

"We would never even have met if–"

Still silence. Not even the silence knew he was there.

For what must have been the billionth time, he cursed himself for having been there. For standing there in that place, at that time.

If any one thing could have been different, everything might have been changed.

He stopped in front of the door, fixed his collar, and adjusted the cuffs of his jacket sleeves. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. He raised his fist to the wood, then lowered it, and then raised it again.

"What are you waiting for?"

Meghan stepped out of the car and strolled toward him, her stiletto heels clipping the neatly paved sidewalk. With her silky brunette hair, smooth, olive-colored skin, and tall, slender frame, she was flawless. She wore boots, skinny jeans, a sequin-dazzled yellow top, and a leather jacket – an almost daringly casual outfit for the purpose of meeting Peter's parents. Peter himself was wearing clean, pressed clothes that probably fit into the category of what most people called "dressy-casual" – apart from his lucky blue sneakers, of course.