“Look here at this.”

I reached across the aisle of the school bus and took what Cletus was handing me.

It was an old photograph, fading away like a dawn that leaves you little by little, and it was of a child. A baby in a flowing white gown, arranged on a tall chair out in the middle of a field. The baby’s gown was draped so that the chair was practically invisible, and the only thing you saw was this child hovering in midair, looking at the camera.

“Weird,” I said, handing it back.

“I think something like this ought to be in a museum,” Cletus said, pushing a greasy strand of hair back from his eyes. Cletus’s black hair is long, straight, and, from my point of view, slimy. I don’t think Cletus bathes much, though he never exactly stinks. He just seems to me the type who’d layer on the Right Guard for days before he’d finally break down and take a shower.

“It’s what they call surreal,” he went on. “Taking something real and sort of stretching it out like a piece of taffy into a thing that’s true but distorted. You know. Like old lady Henley’s face-lift.”

I smiled. Mrs. Henley was our seventh grade art teacher who just couldn’t handle getting old. She was the only person in Deep Water who’d ever had a face-lift — went off to Charleston to get it — and anybody from out of town could have guessed it. She just had this look on her, like she was going to spring loose all of a sudden and snap clear across to the other side of town.

“Where’d you get it?” I asked, leaning over to take another look at the photograph.

“I was up at Mrs. Davis’s house, seeing if she needed anything from the store. I showed her my suitcase, and she brought me in and pulled a great big box off the top shelf of her closet. It was crammed full of stuff like this. I thought I’d struck gold.”

“She gave you that picture?”

Cletus nodded. “I was dying to take home every one of them, but I didn’t say nothing. Just picked through the lot like I was sampling chocolates from a box.

“I stayed on for hours in her living room, going through all those pictures. I don’t think she planned on giving me any, but finally I guess she figured it was the only way to get rid of me. So she let me take this one.”

I stared at the floating baby.

“Did she choose it, or you?”

“I did. It was just too surreal to pass up.”

I shook my head.

“I can’t believe you planted yourself in that old lady’s house like some fungus mold till you got a picture out of her.”

Cletus took one last look at the photograph, then stuck it inside his math book.

“Aw, she had a good time. She don’t ever get any company.”

I shook my head again in disapproval. I’m always shaking my head at Cletus. As if I have some need to keep reminding him that his presence in my life is something I neither intended nor arranged.

“So how’s Ob?” Cletus asked.

I thought of Ob, this particular cold morning, not even bothering to fix his usual cup of cocoa when he got out of bed. He made sure I was up, and had my lunch fixed, and was out the door on time. But he didn’t have his cocoa.

“Fair,” I answered.

Cletus looked longer at me, maybe hoping he could fathom Ob by seeing him inside my eyes. But I didn’t have any deep truths to tell Cletus about Ob. Well … none except that visit from May, and Cletus wasn’t about to get that out of me.

Which didn’t matter anyway because he got it straight from the horse’s mouth that very night after supper.

“You believe in an afterlife, Cletus?” Ob asked, handing Cletus a cup of black coffee. Cletus had dropped by on his way home from prayer meeting. Cletus told us he didn’t go there for prayer. He went there for the doughnuts they always had after the service.

I looked up from the paper on women suffragettes I was writing for history and held my breath.

“Sure, I do,” Cletus answered, sipping at the coffee, a strand of his stringy hair nearly dunking itself. “Even been there once.”

Ob’s face lit up just as mine went dark.

“You don’t say,” Ob answered.

“I was maybe seven years old,” Cletus began to explain as he settled himself back into the La-Z-Boy. “My grandpa had been real sick and he’d finally died the night before. Next day people were preparing for the funeral and ignoring me in their bereavement, so I just decided to go on down to the river by myself, thinking I’d skip some stones till everything had passed over.

“Well, I’m standing there on the riverbank skipping rocks when next thing I know I’m drowning. I mean drowning. My foot must have slipped or something, and in I went. And I never was able to swim a lick.

“And here’s the God’s truth, Ob….”

Ob set down his coffee cup and straightened up to listen.

“I passed on. I did. I remember this light ahead of me and reaching out to it. I went after it, and suddenly everything was brilliant white and, I swear to God, my grandpa was there smiling at me and — you won’t believe this part — my little dog Cicero who’d been dead three years, he was with me, too.”

Cletus stopped talking long enough to take a few gulps of his coffee, and while he drank, Ob and me had our eyes glued to him like a bomb set to explode. Nobody said a word, waiting.

“So I’m there hugging Grandpa and petting little Cicero and feeling just fantastic when I hear this voice say, ‘Cletus, go on home now.’ I swear that’s what it said. Told me to go on home.

“And Grandpa and Cicero started fading away and this awful coldness and heaviness come over me, like I was wrapped in sopping wet rugs, and next thing I know I’m there throwing up like crazy and my uncle Willy is threatening to beat me to death for nearly drowning.”

Cletus grinned at us both.

Hell, I thought miserably.

“Heaven!” Ob said out loud. “You went to heaven and back, Cletus!”

Cletus nodded his head.

“No doubt in my mind,” he answered.

“Then maybe it’s you who can talk to May for me. She’s been trying to reach me, but I ain’t too good at communicating on her new wavelength. I need me an interpreter.”

Cletus gaped at Ob.

“You heard from May?”

“Couple of times,” Ob said.

A couple of times? I had known only about the one time, the first time, when I was there, making bird feeders. It suddenly hurt me that Ob hadn’t told me about the second — and that now he was revealing everything to Cletus instead of me. I felt more than ever cut apart from him, sent off on my own while he took off on his, while he made plans to set aside this life we both knew so purely to try to make it to another one he knew nothing about except that somewhere in it he might find May. I didn’t know how to keep him tied to me. Already he was starting to live among the dead.

“Well, I’m no psychic or nothing,” Cletus told Ob. “I feel a connection to the spirit world because I’ve been there — sort of like remembering a place where you once went on vacation. But I never get any supernatural messages or anything. I don’t know any ghosts — personally, I mean.”

Ob shook this off.

“Don’t matter. You must have something special about you, if you’ve been over to the other side. Maybe just having you in the house’ll help.”

Holy crap, I thought. The last thing I wanted was for Cletus to have an excuse to hang out at the trailer any more than he already did. Now Ob wanted to keep Cletus here like he was installing some afterlife antenna on the place.

“But May didn’t even know Cletus,” I said lamely, making a puny attempt at party pooping.

Ob smiled at Cletus and patted him on the knee.

“She don’t have to meet him in the flesh to know this boy, Summer,” he said, looking at Cletus’s interested face. “May’s been looking at them pictures over our shoulders all along. She knows Cletus, and I’ll betcha she even knows his little dog.”

Ob’s smile then slowly disappeared, and he wiped a hand across his eyes. In an instant he looked more tired than I’d ever seen him, and my heart sank.

Cletus and I just looked at each other.