Read Online Everafter (Kissed by an Angel) by Elizabeth Chandler - Free Book Online Page B

the nose, and no one will recognize you.”
    Beth laughed. Her own pencil had been moving fast since they’d spread their towels on the beach. From whereIvy sat, it looked like poems rather than stories, but Beth framed her notebook with her body, making it hard for someone else to read.
    Ivy’s mother, stepfather, and Philip had arrived at noon, and Ivy had joined them after work. They had set up camp behind the dunes, on the long spit of land that was the end of Nauset Beach, facing Nauset Harbor rather than the ocean. It was low tide, with the mud flats exposed, their wet surface shimmering with blue sky and clouds, reflecting the perfect summer day. Aunt Cindy had armed Philip with sand rakes and a wire basket for clamming, with the promise to show him how to make “chowda.”
    “Ready, champ?” Andrew asked, picking up the rakes.
    Ivy’s mother and stepfather had just returned from a walk—holding hands—which made Ivy smile. Beth gazed at them for a moment, then scribbled madly, perhaps something about love after forty.
    “Don’t forget the basket, Philip,” Andrew said.
    Ivy watched her stepfather and brother stroll side by side toward the flats. “Philip walks like Andrew.”
    Her mother, after much arranging, settled into her sand chair. “I know.”
    “How does that happen? They don’t have the same body structure.”
    Her mother smiled. “It’s love, not birth, that makes a child.”
    An hour later, Ivy tried her hand at clamming, and Philip was eager to teach her how. She heard in his instructions an echo of Andrew.
    “Go easy. Feel the ridge? Spread your fingers like this. That’s the way.”
    Ivy smiled at the little-boy version of the soft huskiness of Andrew’s voice.
    “Dig with your fingers on each side. Ease it out,” Philip told her.
    Hands coated with black sand, Ivy held up her trophy.
    Philip raised a triumphant fist, something Andrew didn’t do.
    When the basket was full of clams, Andrew and her mother carried it back to the inn. Ivy and Philip paddled about in the tandem kayak. Philip, rowing in the front, sang like a drunken pirate, then scrunched down and laid his head back, staring straight up at the sky. “It’s so deep,” he said.
    Ivy glanced upward and smiled. She had always thought of the sky as high, but she liked imagining it as deep, another ocean.
    Philip dropped his arm over the side of the kayak. Sunlight, reflecting off the water, danced on his smooth cheek. “I wish I knew how far away heaven really is.”
    “Why?”
    “So I’d know how long it takes for Tristan to go back and forth.”
    Ivy stopped paddling. “What?”
    “So I can be home the next time he visits.”
    She caught her oar just before it slipped into the water. “What do you mean, ‘the next time’?”
    “I think—I’m pretty sure—he came to our house while we were away.”
    “Because?” Ivy asked.
    “He missed me.”
    She laughed lightly, but her heart was beating fast. “He can’t help but miss you, Philip. I meant, what makes you think he was at our house? Tristan went on to the Light, remember?”
    “Well, that’s what we said ,” her brother replied. “But it’s likely we were wrong.”
    It’s likely —another Andrewism.
    “Mark Teixeira was moved,” Philip went on. “On my baseball rug, the bases were loaded, and Mark Teixeira was up at bat.”
    Philip was talking about his baseball cards. Ivy had watched Tristan move the cards around the bases and had told him that Philip never forgot where he left his players.
    “Someone made Mark hit a grand slam. Tristan would do that.”
    Ivy let the boat drift. Should she tell Philip the truth?For herself, knowing that Tristan was here with them outweighed all the risks created by that knowledge. But what was better for her brother?
    “Couldn’t Lacey have done it?”
    “No, she thinks baseball’s boring. I wish that Tristan had waited till I got back.” Philip sighed. “Sometimes I talk to him, even though he