Page 11 of Ghost Ribbon

“Thank you, Alexei.”

My name sounded different in his mouth.

I wanted him to say it forever.

We sat there a little longer.

Marco told me about a stray cat behind the hospital. He told me his father could whistle with two fingers loud enough to make birds fly out of trees. “He taught me but I can’t do it yet. My mouth is too small. But when I am bigger and my mouth is bigger, I will whistle so loud the whole town will hear.”

He looked up through the leaves at the sky, at the hope star, at the thousands of other lights scattered across the dark.

Then he told me something that rattled me to my core. Something that would forever be engraved in my heart.

“If I don’t get better, I will become a star.”

My heart skipped a beat. “What?”

“Grandmother told me. When people we love go to sleep forever, they become stars. So they can watch over us. So they can poke holes in the dark and let the light through.” He smiled, his eyes fixed on the sky. “If I don’t get better, Mama and Papa will be very sad. So I will have to become a very bright star. The brightest one. So that every time they look up, they will see me. And they will know I am okay. They will know the dark is not so scary, because I am making holes in it.”

The void inside me fractured.

“You will get better,” I said, and the words came out harder than I intended, like a command to the universe.

Marco turned to look at me, surprised by the intensity.

“Maybe,” he muttered gently. “Or maybe I will become a star. Either way, I will be okay.”

He reached over and touched my hand, the one holding the ribbon.

Something burned behind my eyes, an unfamiliar sensation, like pressure and heat, like something trying to escape.

I had never cried.

Not once in my life.

But something in my chest hurt in a way I had never experienced, something that might have been the first tentative stirring of something human.

“You talk too much,” I said, my voice rougher than I had ever heard it.

Marco laughed brightly.

“I know. Mama says my mouth never stops. Papa says I will talk to God when I get to heaven and God will say, ‘Please, Marco, let me speak,’ but I will keep going.”

He leaned his head against the stone bench, still wrapped in my jacket, his eyes drifting closed.

“I am a little tired,” he admitted.

“You should go back.”

“In a minute.” His voice was growing softer. So I sat with him while he looked at the stars through half-closed eyes, his breathing evening out, his body slowly relaxing inside the too-large jacket.

Eventually, voices called from somewhere beyond the garden wall.

Italian. Urgent. Marco stiffened, suddenly awake.

Then another voice came, a woman’s voice this time, shaking around his name.

“Marco!”