Ever since Kasey Lavoe gifted me with her warmth, I have been waiting for her to come back. I lost her once more, but I won’t despair over it just yet. Now that I’ve got it in my head that she’s looking for me, I feel as if there’s a chance she will find me again. She did the first time. I pace up and down the street where she got away, absorbed in my cogitations but constantly scanning the road and sidewalks for her. I have much to think about.

The memories she awoke within me, for one. Flashes of warm moments from my living years. Sunshine pouring down over the worksite, all the men pausing in their tasks to tip their faces up to greet it. A piece of bacon grabbed too quickly from the cookfire. The press of a slender palm against mine, and the subsequent heat in my cheeks. I remember the sensations more than the visuals, but that scarcely bothers me. Sensation is what has been taken from me.

Find me again, Miss Lavoe. I know you can. You did before, somehow.

It may have taken everything I had to return her warmth to her, but I know she felt it: she told her companion so. She must know that she was looking in the right place. So I will wait here, however long it takes. Days pass, and life moves along on Benton Street. I watch a family come in and out of the house that stands where I once used to live. Shouting children kick a ball across the street while the sun fades over the horizon. A tabby cat pokes its white nose out from a porch and dashes across the pavement, vanishing into a cluster of bushes. I don’t know where to look for the other ghost, where she might appear from, so I pay close attention to everyone who wanders down the sidewalk or steps out on their lawn.

I don’t notice her right away, because she’s stretched out on her back directly in the middle of the road. If it weren’t for her ever-present colorful glow, I may not have spotted her at all. It’s late in the evening, and the traffic has thinned, but it never fully stops. Every time a car approaches, her hands ball up, and her chest swells like she’s holding her breath. She closes her eyes so tightly that her forehead wrinkles. Cars fly over her and move along, cutting through her body and the legs of her red pants, but they can no longer harm her. Each time she reappears from under the tires, she lets out her breath slowly. Her hair is a raven-black pool around her neck.

I stand there and watch this happen four or five times.

“I would think a woman killed in a car accident would be more hesitant to lie down in the street this way, Miss Lavoe.” Her eyes remain closed, unknowing. “Are you not afraid of anything?”

“I am trying,” she says, startling me. “To feel scared.”

I rotate on the spot, checking for Jamie, but he has not come with her tonight. She cannot be talking to me, which means she is talking to herself.

“I mean, I can still feel scared. I’m trying to feel scared.”

Maybe I’m the only other one in the world who knows what she means without explanation. She’s not talking about the fear that exists in the mind. She’s speaking of physical fear - sweaty palms, an inadvertent trembling of the fingers, goosebumps. All things we cannot experience.

I lower myself onto the pavement next to her. I stretch out on my back, the same way she is. I leave a foot or so of space between us. Though I’m desperate to step inside the colorful halo of lights that surrounds her, and though I know she can’t detect me, I don’t want to be disrespectful.

We lay there together in silence. I am watching her, so I don’t notice the next car coming. I hear it just before it rushes over us: a smoky rattling, the yawning roar of an engine, a flash of glinting metal. I gasp as the sound swells and crests, and then the car is past us, hurtling along down the street.

After two hundred years in Ketterbridge, I thought I’d seen the town from every angle. A small, incredulous laugh escapes me.

“Let’s waste time,” Kasey half-hums to herself, “Chasing cars, around our heads… If I lay here, if I just lay here…”

As I listen to her little song, her warmth begins to seep into me. I feel it first in slow increments, washing over my invisible hands like the first rays of a sunrise. It feels so good to feel at all. I make an involuntary noise that I’m quite glad she cannot hear.

Was she a songwriter, in life? Her outfit gives me little indication of what she did.

“When no one can hear you,” she says, her eyes still closed, “You start to talk to yourself more often.”

“Tell me about it,” I answer, reveling in her gentle warmth. “I used to, all the time, but at some point I stopped. People would say things and I’d imagine they were answering me. It gave me hope and then snatched it away so quickly.”

“Why is Jamie the only one who can hear me?” she murmurs. “Or see me? I’m happy it’s him, but why did it happen like that? Why not my grandma, or…” She fades off.

“I don’t know, but I’m glad for you. No one could ever discern me, not even my sweetheart.”

Hence why I’m here speaking to someone who can’t hear me, but this - this is the closest thing to a real conversation I’ve had since my death. Another car races over us, sparking on the pavement. The rush of wind does not so much as rustle a hair on her head.

“I can’t feel him,” she says. “Jamie, I mean. He holds my hand and we snuggle like we always did before, but I don’t feel him.”

I hold my breath. The trees around us whisper and dance in the breeze.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I wouldn’t have wished this upon you, or anyone, but - I cannot be sad that you’re here.”

“I miss everything.” She gazes up at the stars overhead. “I miss burgers. I want to eat a burger and taste it and I want my hands to get all messy and covered in ketchup.”

“I never got to try a burger,” I tell her, though she can’t hear a word. “They came along after I died. I’ve watched people eat them for years. Always wondered how they taste.”

“I miss my watch. I wish I’d died with it on. I never know what time it is.”

I can’t help but laugh.

“I have a watch, but I can’t see it, because I can’t see anything about myself. It was my father’s old pocket watch. I don’t even know if it’s ticking. The real thing is probably still at the bottom of the river.”

“I miss changing my outfit,” she says.

“You look very nice in what you’re wearing, though. If you don’t mind my saying.”

“I miss having sex.”

“Oh, I-” My cheeks flare with heat, another feeling I haven’t experienced in a long while. I’m not sure it would even be possible without her warmth enveloping me. There are a lot of things I didn’t get the chance to try while I was alive, but in this case, I had thought it might be for the better. It seems easier to deal with that loss by not knowing what I’m missing out on.

“I just miss feeling.” She sits up slowly, her hair spilling down around her ears. She stares at the sidewalk, her cheeks dimpled with her frown.“That,” she says, pointing, “Is where I felt it. I swear I felt warm. Right there.”

“That was me,” I groan, desperately wishing with my whole heart that she could hear.

She rocks up onto her feet and crosses to the spot on the sidewalk where we met last. I scurry after her like a lost puppy. Her warmth travels with her, and to lose it again feels like it would be the second death of me. She stops at that spot, our spot.

“I’m just going to walk the line again,” she says. “Like Johnny Cash.”

“I know who that is!” I feel strangely proud of myself. “People used to play that song all the time. Recently, recent enough that I remember. I know that one!”

She begins walking down Benton Street. I walk alongside her, just close enough to stay in the shelter of her warmth. The colorful glow around her pulls and pushes like an oceanic tide, rippling and wild and entrancing. Her red pants should billow in the breeze, but they don’t. She hums the first few bars of the Johnny Cash song she mentioned.

“I find it very, very easy to be true,” she sings to herself. “I find myself alone when each day is through…”

It occurs to me that because I know this one, I can sing along with her, if I wanted to. Singing is definitely something I haven’t tried in years. But she can’t hear me, anyway. It’s fine if it sounds bad, no? I clear my throat, sing the next line with her:

“Yes, I'll admit that I'm a fool for you… Because you're mine, I walk the line.”

My voice sounds like a handful of nails rattling around in a bucket. So rusted with disuse, especially when I try to sing. I stop, embarrassed, but she can’t hear me. No one can. Why should I be embarrassed? She’s still singing, and I join back in:

“You've got a way to keep me on your side, you give me cause for love that I can't hide…”

She cuts off suddenly, drawing to a stop.

“Please,” she whispers. “I know I  felt warm here. I just want to feel it again.”

The last time I grabbed her fingers in mine and reflected her warmth back at her, it took me days to return to myself. It’s as if I have to completely undo whatever threads hold me together, let myself melt apart into nothing. It took every shred of effort I am capable of in this form. I thought it was going to kill me all over again.

But I did see how she smiled, before I fell apart. I would fall apart for her over and over again, to keep her smiling like that.

I reach out and take her hand.