“Well, what are you doing in my room, then?” Liesl demanded, folding her arms. She was annoyed that the ghost had called her stupid, and had decided that if Po was going to be difficult, she would be too.
The truth was that Po wasn’t exactly sure why it had appeared in Liesl’s room. (Bundle was there, of course, because Bundle went everywhere Po went.) Over the past few months Po had seen a dim light appear at the edges of its consciousness at the same time every night, and next to that light was a living one, a girl; and in the glow of that light the living girl made drawings. And then for three nights the light had not appeared, nor had the glow, nor had the drawings, and Po had been wondering why when—pop!—Po had been ejected from the Other Side like a cork popping out of a bottle.
“Why did you stop drawing?” Po asked.
Liesl had been temporarily distracted from thinking about her father. But now she remembered, and a heavy feeling came over her, and she lay back down in her bed.
“Haven’t felt like it,” she answered.
Po was suddenly at her bedside, just another shadow skating across her room.
“Why?”
Liesl sighed. “My father is dead.”
Po didn’t say anything.
Liesl went on, “He was sick for a very long time. He was in the hospital.”
Po still didn’t say anything. Bundle raised itself up on two hind legs of shadow and seemed to look at Liesl with its moonlight eyes.
Liesl added, “My stepmother wouldn’t let me see him. She told me—she told me he did not want me to see him like that, sick. But I wouldn’t have minded. I just wanted to say good-bye. But I couldn’t, and I didn’t, and now I won’t ever see him again.” Liesl felt a tremendous pressure pushing at the back of her throat, so she squeezed her eyes shut and spelled the word ineffable three times in her head, as she always did when she was trying not to cry.
Ineffable was her favorite word. When Liesl was very small, her father had often liked to sit and read to her: real grown-up books, with real grown-up words. Whenever they encountered a word she did not know, he would explain to her what it meant. Her father was very smart; a scientist, an inventor, and a university professor.
Liesl very clearly remembered one time at the willow tree, when he turned to her and said, “Being here with you makes me ineffably happy, Lee-Lee.” And she had asked what ineffable meant, and he had told her.
She liked the word ineffable because it meant a feeling so big or vast that it could not be expressed in words.
And yet, because it could not be expressed in words, people had invented a word to express it, and that made Liesl feel hopeful, somehow.
“Why did you want to say good-bye to him?” Po asked at last.
Liesl opened her eyes and stared. “Because—because—that’s what you do when people are going away.”
Po went silent again. Bundle coiled itself around the place Po’s ankles had once been.
“People on the, um, Other Side don’t say good-bye?” Liesl asked incredulously.
Po shook its shadow-head. “They push. They mutter. Sometimes they sing. But they don’t say good-bye.” It seemed to consider this for a second. “They don’t say hello, either.”
“That seems very rude,” Liesl said. “People always say hello to one another here. I don’t think I would like the Other Side.”
The ghost in front of her flickered a bit around the shoulders, and Liesl assumed it was shrugging. “It’s not that bad,” Po said.
Suddenly Liesl sat up again excitedly, forgetting all about the tiny nightshirt she was wearing and the fact that Po was a maybe-boy. “My father’s on the Other Side!” she exclaimed. “He must be there, with you! You could take him a message for me.”
Po faded in and out uncertainly. “Not all of the dead come this way.”
Liesl’s heart dropped back into her stomach. “What do you mean?”
“I mean . . .” Po flipped slowly upside down, then righted itself. The ghost often did this when it thought. “That some of them go straight on.”
“On where?”
“On. To other places. To Beyond.” When it was irritated, the ghost became easier to see, as its silhouette flared somewhat along the edges. “How should I know?”
“But do you think you could find out?” Liesl sat up on her knees and stared at Po intently. “Please? Could you just—could you just ask?”
“Maybe.” Po did not want to get the girl’s hopes up. The Other Side was vast and filled with ghosts. Even on the Living Side, Po could still feel the Other Side expanding in all directions, had a sense of new people crossing over endlessly into its dark and twisting corridors. And people lost shapes quickly on the Other Side, and memories, too: They became blurry, as Po had said. They became a part of darkness, of the vast spaces between stars. They became like the invisible side of the moon.
But Po knew the girl wouldn’t understand any of this if it tried to explain, so it just said, “Maybe. I can try.”
“Thank you!”