“I’m sorry,” she said, sniffling. “I’m really sorry. I’ve just been thinking about this a lot lately, with the one-year anniversary coming up and everything…but for some reason it just feels worse today.”
“It’s okay, Krista,” I told her, rubbing her back. “Hey, what was your selfless act?” I asked, hoping that might cheer her up.
“Oh. That.” She laughed and looked down at her fingers in her lap. “It was so lame. Not like saving a life or ridding the world of an evil maniac, like some people.”
I smirked. “Tell me.”
“I saved a doll.”
“What?”
She rolled her eyes slightly, but smiled. “I’d been here for three days and I was down at the beach with a couple other people who moved on ages ago, and there was this family there. A mom, a dad, and two little kids. I found out later they died in a car accident.”
“Wow,” I said, the wind knocked out of me.
“Anyway, the little girl left her favorite doll near the shoreline and it got swept out to sea,” Krista continued. “She completely lost it, crying, screaming, and her dad was basically like, ‘Too bad.
You have to learn to take care of your things.’ I mean, the girl was, like, three years old.”
“Are you serious?” I asked.
“Yeah. Real nice,” Krista agreed. “All I could do was watch this soggy pink doll bobbing out on the ocean and the little girl crying, and it reminded me so much of me when I was little. I had this Raggedy Ann that I would take with me everywhere. By the time I gave it up in fourth grade it was falling apart and probably totally diseased.”
She smiled again, looking nostalgic. “So even though I was never a great swimmer, I dove into the ocean and swam out there and saved the doll for her. I thought I was gonna die by the time I got back to the beach. I was panting so hard I was seeing stars. But she got her doll back.”
“That’s awesome,” I said. “What did her dad do?”
“He basically grunted at me,” Krista replied. “But the little girl was so happy… They moved on that night.”
I swallowed hard, hoping that that family, even the grumpy dad, had made it into the Light. We both sighed at the same time, looking out at the sun glinting on the ocean.
“You know what this is, Krista?” I said finally. “It’s just a bad day.”
“What do you mean?” she asked. Her blue eyes were shot through with red.
“It’s something my mom used to say. One day everything can look okay, and the next day everything looks so grim, even though nothing has really changed,” I said. “On bad days you have to remember the okay days, and then you’ll know that things will be okay again, eventually.”
“But something has really changed,” Krista protested, sitting up straight, pulling away from me. The bench groaned as she shifted her weight. “I liked how I had this important job, ushering people to their eternal destiny. But if that’s getting all screwed up, then what else do I have? No one here even likes me.”
“That’s not true!” I replied emphatically. “Tristan loves you.”
“No, he doesn’t. He thinks I’m annoying,” Krista said, looking at her lap. Her pert nose was red, and a tear rolled slowly down her cheek. “Imagine how you’d feel being an only child for two hundred fifty years and then suddenly getting stuck with a sister.”
“Well, the girls adore you,” I said.
“Please,” she retorted, rolling her eyes.
“Um, two of them are inside right now, baking cupcakes for your anniversary party, while you’ve been MIA for at least fifteen minutes,” I reminded her. “If that’s not dedication, I don’t know what is.”
Krista bit her lip. “I bet Lauren is separating the sprinkles by color and driving Bea bonkers.”
“Probably.” I laughed. We both stared out over the ocean. “I think you just have to find your thing, your place, how you’re going to fit in for the long run,” I said, thinking of Tristan, of my odd new relationship with Joaquin, and of the very slowly blossoming friendship with Krista. “We all do. But it’s going to take time.”
“And we have nothing but that,” Krista muttered.
A soft knock sounded behind us, and I glanced back at the mayor’s office windows. Two clear blue eyes stared out at me through parted wooden slats. I caught my breath. The mayor held my gaze for a long, long moment before snapping the blinds shut.
I turned back to Krista, an awful feeling spreading through my gut that my time might be running out.