“I have to get out of here,” I muttered. Even as I lay there, Alona could be disappearing into nothingness.
“I can help you,” the little girl volunteered instantly. “I just need you to do me a favor. It’s real easy.”
I barely resisted rolling my eyes.
“I know you can do it, too. I heard some of the others talking about you. If you help me,” she gave a shrug of her thin shoulders, “maybe I can help you.”
In avoiding her gaze, I ended up staring at my jeans lying over the back of the visitor’s chair with all my other clothes. I’d picked up all the notes Alona had thrown down in frustration and put them in my pocket. Not that I’d had a chance to tell her that. In the last few minutes of seventh hour, just before the fire alarm had rung, I’d even written part of Grandpa Brewster’s letter. It had started more as a gesture, to show Alona I was listening (and that it wouldn’t really change Grandpa’s situation), but when I got going, it just seemed like the right thing to do. Maybe she had a point. It was time to stop running. But how? How would anyone believe me now?
“Come on, please?” the little girl wheedled, rolling her wheelchair closer to my bed.
Out in the hallway, I heard my mother’s voice, getting closer.
“—was completely inappropriate, and you expect me to trust you after that?” she asked.
“Julia, I swear to you, I never let my writing interfere with the treatment of your son.”
Miller. Alona was right.
“Don’t call me Julia,” she said with more command in her tone than I’d heard since before my dad died.
“Okay, okay,” Dr. Miller said in this annoyingly fake soothing voice. Didn’t this jerkoff know how to do anything right?
“We need to find out what’s wrong with him. Locking him away is not the answer,” she said.
“Don’t think of it that way, Julia. With the right medications and intensive therapy …” Miller paused. “You’d still be able to visit him on Sundays.”
Oh, hell, no. I tugged harder at the restraints, succeeding only in losing another layer of skin.
“Okay, suit yourself. I guess you don’t want out of here bad enough.” The ghost girl started to roll her chair backward.
“Getting out isn’t the problem,” I said wearily. “Staying out is. And she’s not a … chippie.”
“Ha, I knew it!” She squealed in delight.
I raised an eyebrow.
“That you could hear me, I mean,” she said.
“Honey, who are you talking to?” My mother pushed open the door to my room with a frown.
I hesitated, a million familiar lies tumbling to the tip of my tongue. It was the radio. I was talking to myself. I was singing… . rehearsing lines for a play … quoting my favorite line from Ghostbusters. Lie after lie after lie. I could have given her any of them, but the words just wouldn’t come.
“I don’t know,” I said finally. I looked to the little girl. “What’s your name?”
Miller’s eyes nearly bulged from his head, such was his joy. My mother just seemed … resigned, and a little scared.
“Honey, it’s me,” my mother said. “Dr. Miller came by for a visit, too.”
I ignored them and kept my gaze steady on the girl.
She shrugged finally. “Your funeral. My name is Sara, Sara Marie Hollingsford.”
I nodded. “Nice to meet you, Sara Marie Hollingsford.”
My mother sucked in a breath. “No.”
Miller approached. “He’s having another episode. Now, Will—”
“You stay away,” I told him. “Mom, I’m fine. I’ve always been fine. I really can see and talk to”—there was no easy way to soften the next part—“the dead.”
She shook her head. “Not again, William.” Her voice broke.
“Yes, again, the whole time. I just stopped trying to convince you because it seemed easier to let you believe what you wanted. That’s what Dad did and what he told me to do.”
She blanched. “Your father knew?”
“He was what I am. Grandma Killian, too, I think.” I’d never met her because she’d died before I was born and evidently had not stuck around. From what my father had said, though, on the rare occasions I could convince him to talk about it, he’d inherited his “gift” from his mother.
A strange look crossed my mother’s face. “Bridget?”
“What?” I asked, trying not to sound too eager.
She shook her head as if trying to talk herself out of something, but the words escaped anyway. “She told me once that my grandmother had left the necklace for me, not Charlotte. I had no idea what she was talking about. She’d only met my grandmother once, at our wedding. Then when Char got married a few years later, she wore the pearls that were my grandma’s favorite.”
Not surprising, Aunt Charlotte, who lived in California, and my mother had grown up the bitterest of rivals from the stories I’d heard.
“Don’t tell me you’re starting to believe this.” Miller sighed. “Julia, your husband committed suicide because of a deep depression and repeated schizophrenic episodes. Schizophrenia has a genetic component, which can be passed down to offspring.”
“So does this … gift, curse, whatever,” I shot back at him. Then I turned my full attention to my mother. “Dad killed himself because he was hiding.”
She took a step back. We never talked about what happened to my dad, ever. It was almost like she feared saying the words would make it happen again.
“The pressure to behave normally, to ignore dozens and dozens of voices around him, all the time … it just got to him, I think. But I’m done hiding.” The ferocity of that declaration startled even me, but it was genuine.
“I’ve heard enough of this. We’ll discuss this tomorrow after your tests are complete.” Miller started for the door.
“You want proof,” I said.
He stopped and turned around with a tight smile. “I suppose my great-aunt Mildred is waiting there for a message.”
Mildred? “Uh, no, it’s just me and Sara for the moment. Unlike the movies or TV, I can only talk to whoever’s here, and she doesn’t have a message for either of you.” I looked to Sara for confirmation and she nodded. “But I’m wondering if she’d be willing to play a little game.”
She shrugged. “Why not?”
“Okay, Dr. Miller over there.” I gestured to him with my chin—I could have asked them to release the restraints, but I didn’t want them to think this was a trick to help me escape. “He’s going to step out into the hallway, close the door, and write a word on his prescription pad. The only rules are that it has to be clearly written, and the pad stays where he can see what he’s written at all times.”
“This is ridiculous,” he muttered, but he went into the hall and pulled the door shut behind him. He was probably already writing it up as a new chapter in his book.
Sara followed. A second later, she said, “He’s holding it too high.”
“You’ll need to lower it a little,” I called to Miller. “Sara’s in a wheelchair.”
My mother gave a soft gasp.
“Um, I don’t know this word.” Sara sounded uncertain.
Shit, I hadn’t thought about that. Maybe I should have gone the number route instead. “Can you spell it?”
“A-N-A-B-O-L-I-C.”
“Anabolic,” I called out.
No response.
“What’s he doing?” I asked.
“He looks kind of mad. Wait, he’s writing another word.”
“Mom,” I whispered. “Do you believe me? That’s all that matters.”
She hesitated, brushing a strand of hair off her weary face, and only then did I realize she was still in her diner uniform. Someone must have called her at work. The number was in my wallet. “William, I want more than anything for you to be well, but—”
“Um, vest-ig-all?” Sara tried.
I frowned. “Spell this one, too.”
She did.
&
nbsp; “Vestigial,” I shouted out. Thank God for the SAT vocab section.
“He’s writing another one and … I’m not saying that!”
I laughed.
My mother looked at me sharply.
I shook my head. “He wrote some kind of swearword. Will you spell it, Sara?”
“No!” she said.
“Please?”
“First four letters spell ‘bull,’” she said huffily.
“I do believe the good doctor is questioning my authenticity. It’s not bullshit, Dr. Miller. I promise you that.”
“Now he’s just scribbling a bunch of letters. X, Y, Q …”
I repeated them after her, and the door burst open again, Miller with his pad in hand, looking wild-eyed. Sara rolled in after him. “How are you doing that? You’ve got spies in the hall,” he accused.
“You’re right,” I said. “Her name is Sara, and she died in …” I looked at her.
“1942,” she supplied.
“1942,” I finished.
Miller’s mouth worked, but no sound came out.
My mother plucked the top sheet off his pad and glanced at it. She paled, and her mouth tightened.
I held my breath.
Then she told Miller, “Make your name with someone else’s son. We’re done here.” She frowned at me. “William, stay put, I’m going to get you checked out of here. Don’t think you’re off the hook, though, young man. You have a lot of explaining to do.”
I’d never been so happy to have my mother angry with me. “Okay.”
She turned on her heel and marched off down the hall.
Miller trailed after her. “But, Julia …”
“Thanks,” I said to Sara. “What can I help you with?”
“My brother gave me his St. Michael medal when I went into the hospital. It’s still in my file. They took it off when they did X-rays. I want him to have it back.”
I nodded. “I think I can do that.” Getting into the file room might be tricky, but I’d have help. “I have to do something else first, and then I’ll be back.”
She cocked her head to one side and gave me an evaluating look. “You’re going after the blonde.”
I nodded.
She shook her head. “Good luck with that. She seems like a pain.”
It was only after Sara rolled through the door that I realized everyone had left me still in restraints. Damnit, I could have been up getting dressed. I had no idea how much time Alona might have left.
“Sara?” I called. “Mom? Hello?”
Fortunately, the door to my room opened again right away.
“Oh, good,” I said. “I thought you might have been too far away to—”
It took my brain just those extra few seconds to process what I was seeing—someone, not my mother, backing into the room with a wheelchair. An already occupied, modern wheelchair, its passenger slumped to the side at an odd and unnatural angle.
“Will!” Joonie cried, her voice all high-pitched and kind of crazy sounding. She spun the chair around to face me, and Lily, her eyes as dull and empty as they’d been for the last eight months, stared blankly in my general direction. A Ouija board rested in her lap. “We’re so glad you’re awake.”
It took me forty-five minutes, twelve cars, and one tow truck to get home, using a convoluted system of sliding into one vehicle and riding until they veered off my desired course. Then I’d jump out—or better yet, wait until they reached a red light—and try to find another car going in the right direction.
There had to be a better way for spirits to travel, but I was not going to be around to find it. The strange pressure I’d felt in Killian’s hospital room was only getting stronger.
I walked the last three blocks home, watching grown-ups pull into their driveways after a long day of work, kids playing one last game of tag before being called into dinner. Summer, my favorite time of year, was coming. Mornings to sleep in late and still get out of the house before my mother was awake. The whole day free to do whatever and go wherever I wanted. The ability to spend almost every night over at Misty’s house without anyone suspecting it was because, more than anything, I didn’t want to go home.
When I looked at my house, I saw it differently. I don’t remember much from the first twelve or thirteen years of relative happiness, mostly because now it felt like everything had just been building toward these last few years of misery.
That’s where my mother knelt on the driveway and begged my father not to leave. There’s where he drove over the then-carefully sculpted flower beds, nearly taking out a concrete birdbath, to keep from hitting her, not that it stopped him from leaving. That boarded-up window on the second story, that’s right next to the shower where she “slipped” on wet tile, fell, and broke the window, slicing open her arm. When I found her, the shower was bone dry. Mother, however, was not. She reeked more of alcohol than blood, and considering the massive amounts of the latter on the floor, that was really saying something. And the garage door … don’t even get me started on that. How hard is it to remember to look behind you to make sure the door’s open before you start to back the car out?
Just walking up to the house, I could feel a familiar tension making my jaw ache and my shoulders tight. She’d never hit me, no matter how drunk she’d gotten. Oh, no, not Cheryl Dare. Instead, she’d just suffocated me with her neediness. Cherie was a victim of an adulterous and inattentive husband. None of this was her fault.
The saddest and most pathetic part of all of it is she did it all for my dad. Like, if she showed him how vulnerable and messed up she was without him, he’d have to come back. Where is the logic in that? I’d have pretended that I didn’t need him, that I’d never needed him. Actually, it wouldn’t have been pretending. I would never let anyone turn me upside down and inside out the way she let my dad.
That was the problem with my mother. She was beautiful, and she didn’t know how to be anything else. Not like me, she was nothing like me. I got her looks, but Dad’s brains. When he chose it, he could be a very cold and calculating son of a bitch. The only thing my dad did, whenever word of Mom’s problems and escapades eventually reached him (some of the neighbors were still friends with him and the new wife), was call me.
Everyone wanted to know what I was doing that day, the day I died. What made me cross the street without looking? What took me from college-bound cheerleader to black-and-white memorial material for the yearbook?
God, I wish it was something cool. Interesting, at the very least. The truth is, it was just another day.
My cell phone rang right before I slammed my gym locker shut. If my dad had waited another couple seconds to call, or if I’d ignored the ringing, my life would have changed dramatically. He was scheduled to meet with my mom at Eickleberg and Feinstein’s at 7:30 a.m., before he went to work. They were discussing changes to alimony, child support, and how to handle my college tuition. It had already been decided, mostly by my father, that I would be attending school within easy driving distance, obviously. Someone had to stick around and keep tabs on my mother. Hence, my graduation present, the Eos.
Anyway, it was now 7:00, and my father wanted to know, could I please go make sure she was up and on her way?
I could have explained I was already at school. Details are so not my dad’s thing, so he probably didn’t remember my schedule or, more specifically, that I’d signed up for zero-hour gym. But I didn’t bother. I knew he wouldn’t call the house or go over there, just as I knew that my mother was probably at home waiting for him to do just that. If she missed this meeting, Gigi, the new wife, wouldn’t hesitate to pressure my dad to scale back his payments to us even further. She wanted kids. He said they couldn’t afford it.
It should have been a simple thing, something I’ve done dozens of times before. Make up an excuse, slip out of school or cheerleading practice or a party to go home, clean up whatever mess my mother had made in the hopes of attracting my father’s attention, and send her back to bed o
r the hospital or whatever, depending. Then go back to my normal life, pretending nothing was wrong.
But on this day, a cool and beautiful first morning in May, something inside me snapped. She ruins everything.
I hate her. That’s what I was thinking when I stepped off that curb on Henderson. If karma came in bus-size servings, some people would probably say I got what I deserved for thinking that. After all, logically speaking, all of it was as much my father’s fault as it was hers. He was the one who’d cheated and left, the one who used me as a shield against her. But she was the only one with the power to stop it, to pull herself back into something vaguely resembling a parent instead of a giant black hole of neediness. She just refused to do it.
Now, standing outside my house, her house alone as of Monday morning, I felt a familiar surge of resentment. I’d died, and she was still controlling my life, holding me hostage as my “unresolved issue” as Killian liked to put it.
I swallowed back my frustration, lifted my chin, and stepped onto the porch. I would forgive her for being her:flawed, imperfect, human. I could do that, right? Looking down at my feet, now flickering in and out of existence again, I guessed I’d have to.
Just get in, say you’re sorry and you forgive her, and then get out. If I hurried, maybe I could make it back to Killian. I was worried about him trapped in that hospital with no one to help him. Plus, if I was leaving, really leaving for good, I didn’t want to be alone. He’d kissed me. Maybe he would wait with me while it happened. I coached myself across the threshold of the front door into the foyer … and stopped. Something was different.
I turned in a circle, looking into the living room, down the hall to the kitchen, into the now-empty and dusty room that had once been my dad’s study. It took me a second to realize what was wrong. All the blinds were up, the curtains drawn back. The last blaze of light at sunset poured in through naked windows, landing on the polished floor in long rectangles. Never in the last few years had she even allowed me to open the blinds, let alone opened them herself. All-day hangovers were a bitch, one that she usually medicated against. Keeping the house dim was a required precautionary measure. At times, it had been like living with a vodka-saturated vampire.