My Death, 8

That next morning was Saturday and pretty. There was something to be said about the flowers and bees and tiny rainbows in dew droplets, but no one said it. Robin, was too busy balancing her laptop on top of Thanatos in one hand while she pushed the screen door open with the other. She didn’t worry about the bang it made when it swung shut behind her. It would take more than that to wake up Tom.
He usually slept late right after finishing a house, but Robin had poked her head into his room just to be sure. The stench made her withdraw immediately and slam the door shut. Either he was sick or drunk—neither of which happened very often, so Robin couldn’t be sure.
“Alright,” she muttered from behind his shut door, “Be a louse, for all I care.”
Pretty that day may have been, but it was also unwelcomingly hot. Robin pulled her thick brown hair over her shoulder to get it off her neck. Phew! She walked around the house, toting her scribbled notes, book, and computer with her. She didn’t stop until she hit the northern most spot, which was deliciously sun-free for most of the day, and set up shop.
Facing the hedges (South, as prescribed by Thanatos), she dropped into a cross-legged sit. Her computer lay propped on her left knee, Thanatos on the right, and ripped-out notebook pages in the middle. Let’s work some magic, she told herself.
She’d gone outside because she was afraid of Tom discovering Death inside his house. If he was drunk, she could later convince him it was a hallucination, but he might not be—Robin wasn’t exactly an expert on the smell of drink. Besides, Tom was sort of a black hole when it came to romance. Just ask Hilda, she thought bitterly and leaned over Thanatos.
It was the same spell as when Robin first met Isaac. Remembering that day, she sort of felt stupid for not realizing who he was right off: the Horse, the robe, the scythe. Or even after that, on the Other Side, didn’t the Hounds give him away? Yes, the Hell Hounds—she sort of cheated, actually. She had to look those up online, searching demon dogs.
Robin shut her eyes in preparation for the incantations as Thanatos instructed. However, every time she attempted to speak the Greek words, Isaac kept popping into her head. His wide, mischievous grin when he brought her back in time, his patient way of answering not-questions, his raised eyebrow. He’s just a dork, Robin told herself. Then smiled. Never mind! she yelled in her head. Just say the words.

The wind came first. It pushed the dead leaves past and made her hair dance about her head. Then it brought crows. Five landed on the tall picket fence behind her, ten on the roof, and one on the ground by Robin’s knee, which picked at her loose-leaf notes. They were followed by drifting clouds, thin wispy ones: the kind that drift in front of full moons. The first thing Robin noticed, however, was his voice.
“Ah,” he said with mild surprise, “Here we go again.”
Her eyes flipped open. “Oh!” she stuttered. She wasn’t aware she had spoken the spell already. “I didn’t know, I mean…”
Isaac was standing over her, impatiently twisting his scythe with his fingers back and forth so it appeared to shake its head at Robin. She noticed with relieved curiosity the absence of a doleful white horse.
Robin bumbled for a second as she pushed her computer and book onto the ground and stood up in a flutter of notebook paper. The nearby crow startled and joined its brothers on the roof. Isaac watched with a smirk.
“I’m just…” she stared at his face and fumbled through Stacey’s repertoire. All the cute, flirtatious one-liners crumbled to ash inside his great brown eyes. Finally, she huffed, “I wanted to see if it would work again.”
The brown eyes blinked at her. “If what would work?”
It was her turn to blink. Didn’t he know? “The spell,” she stated. “You know, like when I accidentally summoned you last week. At the cemetery…”
“Spell?” he said, furrowing his brow. “Summon? I rode here.”
This was going nowhere fast. “Yes, spell,” she said, talking as if to a three-year-old. “Magic. I summoned you using the spell in a book.”
He scowled at Robin, who couldn’t help fidgeting while she waited for understanding to dawn on him.
At length, he said slowly, “You do know magic doesn’t exist, right?”
Robin was thrown off guard, but struggled to not show it. “What? Well, of course I know that! But don’t you… how…” But Isaac was laughing at her. “Well?” she said finally. “You use magic! You sent me back in time yesterday.”
“Oh that,” he gloated, putting a fist on his hip and craning his neck higher. Robin knew he was glad she had brought that up. He thought she was impressed. It only made her angrier that she very much was. Unwilling to let him know it, she sniffed at him.
“I wouldn’t call that magic, exactly.” He continued loftily. “Time only exists to silly mortals so you can count the seconds until you die. It’s so you can say whether someone died young or old. Not that it makes much of a difference. In the end.”
“Then how do you get between Worlds? Hm?” She quipped, craning her head in turn. It wasn’t until he smiled, condescendingly silent, for a few moments that she realized it was a question. “I mean,” she added hastily, “You should have to use it when you…do whatever it is you do.”
“Right,” he returned. “And you’re a witch, so you must eat children and ride a broomstick. Same logic!” Robin could only gape as the blood rushed to her face. Huffing, he continued, “You mortals are all the same.”
Isaac turned, and to Robin’s sudden dismay, began to walk away from her into a tunnel that ripped open as he stepped. The air around it wrinkled like fabric to let Isaac through. It didn’t stretch across the grass, through the bushes, and into the house, like Robin thought it ought. Isaac merely shrunk as he walked in place—as if he were going a long distance very fast—into the 2-dimensional hole. Robin blinked her watering eyes at the wavy, not-there-ness and caught a glimpse of gray dust on the other side.
“Wait!” Robin called, shaking herself out of bewilderment. His tiny figure paused and with his back to her. His voice softly echoed back to her, saying, “Why should I?”
“I—” Robin swallowed her breath and tried to take her pride with it. Do it! She screamed at herself. Do it for Gordon.
“I’m. Sor-ry.” She sighed with relief when he turned around.
“Are you really?”
Robin jumped at his mocking voice behind her. The void she had been staring into disappeared and her eyes crossed from focusing on nothing. She whipped around. Isaac was leaning against her wooden fence with his arms folded, his scythe next to him as usual. He always needs something to lean on, Robin thought.
“How’d you get—” she started, but caught herself. “Um, I didn’t, er, call you here just to insult you.”
“Surprising,” he interjected, but she ignored the harshness.
“I wanted,” she said with slow deliberateness to give herself time to think, “to apologize. For, you know, wandering around your house.” She was glad to hear real awkwardness in the words. But he didn’t look convinced. “And,” she pressed on, “Thank you. For taking me home.”
“Don’t,” he said sharply. “I didn’t have any choice. Where would I be if I let young girls strut about my Domain for eternity?”
“I do not strut.”
He gave her a look.
“You’re the one who sent me there with your dogs in the first place!” Robin shouted, losing the battle against her own frustration. I have to be friendly, I thought desperately. Don’t make him leave again. Just like Stacey said: make a connection.
Robin waited for his sarcastic answer, but he was silent for a minute.
“Actually,” he started, “I had to deal with something first. Before I took you back here.” He added, scowling at his bare feet, “Although I don’t know how you got there in the first place.”
Robin sighed, “I don’t know, either. I thought I used another spell.”
He shook his head and laughed: a warm breathy laugh different from his patronizing chuckle. Robin laughed, too.
“Usually,” he said at length, “only bodiless spirits and immortals can pass through to the Other Side. Yet, there you were, body and all.”
“It’s a mystery.”
“That you are.”

Neither of them spoke for while. Robin hadn’t really thought the conversation through this far; it hardly fit in with her plan. This was getting her nowhere closer to Gordon, and the silence was awkward, besides. Nothing Stacey had said had helped so far. Robin was left to her own devices and feminine wiles. She was doomed.
“Ahem,” Isaac broke into her thoughts, “Not that this hasn’t been fun, but you can imagine how busy I am.” He said, though not entirely unkindly, “So stop making up excuses. You don’t seem like the generally grateful type anyway—no offense. So why did you want me?”
Robin, who had been all square shoulders and folded arms the whole time, sort of deflated, inside and out. She dropped her hands to her sides and drooped her shoulders. She didn’t care if he noticed the long pause while she thought of what to say: Hey, Death, do you think you could take me to see my dead brother? Mind letting him out of your book? He’d never buy it, she thought, while he still thinks I’m a strutting, ungrateful brat. She shook her head with exasperation. He probably saw that, too, she thought. He tapped an impatient foot.
“I guess I just wanted to see you again,” she blurted. He jerked his head back and looked like he had choked on air. He then eyed her face from one end to the other. He thinks I’m lying, she told herself. Am I? Wow, is he actually sweating?
Robin watched him watch her for an age. Finally he smiled the familiar mischievous, narrow-eye smile. Meanwhile, she heard his voice in her ear whisper, “I’m glad.”

Robin looked over her shoulder. He was still by the fence when she turned. When she looked back, his voice was back inside his body. “Next time,” he grinned, “Don’t call me. I’ll call you.”

Robin stood in the shade of the house, staring at the fence. It was like yesterday, when Isaac vanished into smoke, only this time, there was no white smoke, since his horse wasn’t here. It had been faster, too. The crows, many of which had been perched placated on the fence or roof, took off at once and were gone in a flutter of black feathers. Robin was squinting in the sun, which had reemerged from behind the retreating clouds when Tom called to her from behind the door. She turned around. Instead of looking at her father, she stared at something on the ground.
“What’s the matter?”
“Huh?”
“Why did you shout?”
“Saw a bug,” she mumbled, still fixated by the grass.
“Well, yeah, Robin,” said Tom, seeing Robin’s open computer where she had pushed it to the ground. “They live outside. That’s what happens when you do homework outside. Come inside and have lunch.”
“Sure, Dad.”
She picked up her computer from where she had abandoned it and started to follow her father indoors. When he shut the door behind him, however, she looked back to the spot near the bushes where the grass lay trampled by a large hoof print.