I hesitated with my fist a centimeter away from meeting with the door. Was this too soon? But how could it be? Today was the day. I couldn’t wait this out, not with Frankie waiting for me. My heart thumped at a steady yet unsettlingly pace as I let my fist fall against the wooden surface of the door. Then a second more prominent knock. With my fist resting on the door, I peeked through the window to see Mrs. Foster walking to the door. Her head was tipped down, her long raven black hair curtaining the sides of her face. I took a step back as she forcibly pulled the door open. My breaths shook with every inhale and exhale.

Mrs. Foster looked too much like Frankie. Her bangs laid straight across her forehead, not being able to hide the pink outline of her tear-filled eyes. She sniffled and looked right through me, then side to side, and finally back at me. Her gaze was sorrowful yet as empty as endless, dark tunnels, where the light at the end had died.

I bit my lip; saying anything wouldn’t register to her ears. Instead I walked right through her and sucked in a long line of air. Her soul wasn’t stirring with life and everlasting passion as it had when in the earlier stages of my lifeless life on earth. It was still, almost fogged up and torn from the pain that Mrs. Foster had to endure this day. Being dead for so long had made me learn to not purposefully and noisily disturb someone; her soul was her own and not wandering around in between both Heaven and Hell like mine with no place to go.

Even though she couldn’t see me, I still tugged off my shoes and tucked them off into the corner and hung my coat on the hanger. After I shook my hair back into it’s normal position, I looked across the room to the opening of the kitchen to see Mr. Foster pacing maddeningly slow around a table. His hands were stuffed in his back pockets and his head was tipped down. He looked like he was sleepwalking in his rotation of unknown counts of loops. Then he stopped his pacing and looked up and through me as well.

His cheekbones had become very prominent and the circles under his eyes were a darker color than necessary. “Who was at the door, dear?”

The door clicked shut behind me. “No one. I must of just been hearing things.” Mrs. Foster walked up behind me and past through me, making every inch on me stir from the wind of her body passing through me. She walked straight into her husband’s arms.

I turned around to look down the hallway behind me. Down at the very end was a small single shelf where a mirror hung above it. I stared at myself and nodded, while self-consciously readjusting my posture. Somberly I walked a few steps until I heard the faint sounds of giggling coming from within Frankie’s room. I peered inside slowly.

Memories flooded in quickly. I saw how Frankie had taken up Jade’s old room. The wall paint was still the same evergreen color. But many pictures of handmade, time consuming paintings of animals and landscapes covered the walls. The vaguely familiar space where the bunk bed used to be was now filled with a tall white and black knobbed dresser. A twin sized bed that was covered in innocent white sheets was tucked into the far corner against the other wall. All of this left just enough space so that the middle of the room was strewed in blank sheets of papers and crayons. Frankie, who sat in her capris with her white and yellow sundress, looked up from her clothing. “Aiden!”

Leaving the door ajar, I weaved my way through her haphazard room to sit down next to her. I ruffled her hair gently. “Hey Frankie,” I leaned over to look between her hands on the floor. “what’cha making?”

She held up a picture of a smiling sun with clouds surrounding it in black crayon. I looked up slightly to see her staring at me from over the picture, flashing me a bright smile with two missing teeth. I gulped. “I love it.”

“I knew you would Aiden!” She let the picture fall from her hands to clap. When she stopped, her matching emerald eyes of her sister’s stared up at my muddy brown orbs, as that matching toothless grin did too.

“Frankie.” I stared back down at that picture. Even though it did warm me to see how she drew me something, it felt like the smiling sun was almost insulting me with it’s positive attitude.

Her gentle features went puzzled, her head slightly tilted.

I took in a shaky breath. The words fell out of my mouth like vomit. “Did you ever know a girl named Jade?”

What the hell was wrong with me? This little girl, who stared at me like her older brother, with so much attention and admiration for me, even as a ghost, shouldn’t have to be asked such a question like this. She was only nine, and already she had to deal with an adult asking her a personal question about her deceased sister. She was still too young to know what the difference of goodbye until tomorrow and goodbye until the next life was. My mind spun in tight circles. I could feel a nerve twitching below my eye. My forever wandering soul felt as if it didn’t have a soul itself. In that small pause in time of absolute silence, I really did feel dead.

Frankie’s small hand gripped the other tightly and I could see her hair bouncing from her weight slightly jumping up and down. Hesitantly I looked up and was quickly pale. She was smiling. “You can see her too, Aiden?”

The silence carried on into an other moment of noiselessness.

You can see her too? “What do you mean, Frankie?” I decided to play along. Her instant reaction to my question was unbelievable. Why would her parents tell her of such a thing at her? That her older sister was dead because of me? My undead heart pulsed feverishly and boomed in my ears.

She dramatically slapped her hands on her knees and leaned in closer. “Well,” her expression turned modest. “Jade is my imaginary friend. She will come to me every day and night wanting to play with me. She says we look alike but I don’t think so. She says we’re sisters, which I can believe because we are SO close.”

“Can you bring me to her?” The words tumbled out of my mouth again. I had to spit them out; everything that I had to wander around with on my shoulders: the pain, guilt, frustration, and burden to continue to walk as a lost dead soul with no place to go, it would finally let me lay to rest. My best friend, who I had foolishly let cross that certain road by herself, who had died, with me trying to save her, was still here too.

Frankie nodded and ran through me and out her bedroom door. I ran at inhuman speed, floating quickly with just the tips of my feet scrapping against the floor. Her parents didn’t stir when Frankie ran by; Mrs. Foster had begun to cry again, and her husband was cooing her softly while squeezing his eyes shut to keep his tears blocked up.

I almost came to a screeching halt when I saw the door coming close up on my face. But I slid through it as easy as breathing and was soon standing at the bottom of the steps of the porch, Frankie smiling beside me and pointing across the street. “There she is!”

I looked and the noise of nature had silenced. Only the wind rippling through Frankie’s sundress made an almost entirely mute ruffle. She pointed across the street. The street where Jade had been hit by that car, and I had failed to push her out of the way in time. I would have been a peaceful, wandering soul knowing I could’ve been her Guardian Angel, while she still lived in the house behind me. But I was stuck between two worlds on this planet, forced to live with the burden that I wasn’t there in time to help her cross over to the other side of the street.

“I see her,” I lied. “can you take me to her?” I looked to see Frankie was gone from beside me.

She whimpered from behind me instead, as if to shield herself from something so ruthless and terrible. “I’m scared to cross over there though.”

Aiden, come with me! I want someone to hold my hand while I cross!

Jade’s voice of her saying her last words replayed in my head. I turned my body and placed my hand just over her back. “I’m right here Frankie. I will not let anything happen to you.”

Frankie stared up at me, her lip quivering, but she nodded and started to walk forward, hiding half her face away into my hip.

We took that first step off the curb and started walking.

It had been more than thirty years since I had last stepped foot on this familiar blacktop. Such a distance from my past couldn’t fully make me see such a future. When I knew the moment I took my last breath as a living being, I wouldn’t have one anymore.

Leaves brushed and rolled across the street, almost circling around in certain spots on the road. The cool breeze of the Autumn season had suddenly started to turn warmer. A sudden moment of peace, serenity, and long-awaited wave of calmness had made it easier for me to breathe after all these years. The fog in my mind started to clear away a path and soon I started to see light instead of darkness.

“Aiden.”

I gasped and looked down beside my hip.

Her emerald eyes, black raven hair, a smile full of teeth, and the softness yet more mature voice sang to me. Jade’s body was transparent; as see through as a light fog that had settled over the mists of an early morning. Her small fingers laced through mine and squeezed gently. “Jade,” I sighed, still experiencing this new feel of peace and internal calmness. “what is this?” I gestured to the feeling in the air.

She gave a small laugh and blinked up at me. “You had finished what you had started, Aiden. It’s okay now. You’ve crossed over,” she looked behind me and smiled through her sudden river of tears. “you can come home now Aiden.”

I looked too, also feeling the splash of tears streaming down my face.

Frankie had her eyes wide open, her hands shaking beside her. Mr. and Mrs. Foster were behind her as well, their expression matching their daughter’s.

Soon they and the scene of the house and street and everything that was the environment and world, had closed behind me. A growing beam of light made me turn my head back forward and I squinted from the brightness. I felt Jade squeeze my hand tighter, as if to make me believe that this was really happening.

“I’m home now.”