The Afterlife of Holly Chase

  “And then?” Stephanie said gently.

  I opened my eyes and blinked away the image. “And then one day all of that stopped. His dad was gone, and everything changed. He changed. Anyway. I’m, like, ninety-eight percent certain that Ethan’s dad is the Fan. As for the rest, we’ll get there. Ethan might not want to mull over a bunch of sad memories, but it’ll happen eventually.”

  Because I knew: You can try to keep the worst things down inside you. You can shove them away, not think about them, not deal. But they bubble up to the surface. They always do.

  I was right. Of course I was. The Fan stuff did come, eventually. Every week I chipped away at the smaller, unobtrusive memories of Ethan with his dad, tiny moments like walking to his first day of school, or that time they tried to make a cake for his mom’s birthday but ended up almost burning the apartment down, or his dad teaching him how to tie a tie. I still hadn’t experienced anything directly related to his dad’s death, not the funeral or the moment when he’d heard the news or any of that—Ethan still kept that completely suppressed—but by August I’d settled on what I thought was the right moment to show him on Christmas Eve. It was this bit about Ethan losing at the school science fair and his dad helping him cope with the failure. It was good because it showed the unconditional love the Fan always has. It would do.

  Frankly, I was on a roll at work, a model employee, some might say, checking off those Scrooge boxes left and right. And finally, after a lot of trial and error, Ethan let me see a memory about his dad that he really felt something about, which I considered progress.

  It involved first grade and a boy at school. The kid (whose name Ethan didn’t even remember at this point) kept pushing Ethan—like literally pushing him. He did it every time they passed each other in the hall, in the line at lunch, waiting for their parents at the end of each afternoon. And then one day Ethan was in the cafeteria, and he was kind of sulking at the prospect of there not being any tator tots, which was Kid Ethan’s favorite thing, when the bully pushed him from behind.

  It made Ethan spill his chocolate milk, and he, like, snapped. I could feel the blood rush to his face, his little fists clenching, his lip curling up in a snarl, his vision clouding with fury. He turned around and pushed the kid back, and not just a little push. Ethan put his hands on the kid’s chest and shoved him out of the line and right to the end of the connecting tables that half of the school was sitting at, eating. Ethan hurled that troublesome kid against the edge of the table until the kid fell, and then Ethan heaved with the strength of a much bigger person and slid the kid down the entire length of the table, through all the plates and silverware and glasses, like a fight in an old Western movie where the hero slides the villain down the bar.

  Ethan ended up in the headmaster’s office. He was suspended for a week. Which he thought was super unfair, and I tended to agree. The kid had it coming.

  “That’s not the point,” his dad said that night when they talked about it.

  “But the kid pushed me!” Ethan said. “He’s been pushing me every day.”

  “So you tell somebody,” his dad said. “You don’t push back.”

  Ethan scoffed. “Who would I tell?”

  Ethan’s dad pressed his hands to his chest. “Me! You tell me! And then we figure out what to do together, okay?”

  “But you’re not at school,” Ethan argued. “You’re not there.”

  “So you tell me the second you get home. Or you ask to make a phone call.” Ethan’s dad slung his arm around Kid Ethan’s shoulder and hugged him. It felt good, being squeezed. Being loved. Being safe. It made him feel better.

  “I’m always going to be here for you, buddy,” his dad said then. “Always always. I promise.”

  Even asleep, Ethan’s body tensed when he remembered those words. Ethan knew now that if someone pushed you, you had to push back. Anything else was weak. His father, he thought, had been weak—soft, just as his grandfather had told him. And his dad had been a liar. I’m always going to be here for you, he’d said. But he wasn’t. Which was the biggest lie of all.

  I swallowed down the lump that had jumped up in my throat. My dad once said those words to me. It must be a parent thing. After Mom died, when I was slumped in an empty pew at the church waiting for her funeral to start, he’d sat down next to me, and put his arm around me that same way, and he’d said, “I’m always going to be here for you, Holly.”

  Which turned out to be a lie, too.

  People lie, the Inner Yvonne said matter-of-factly. It’s what they do.

  It’s what they do.

  “Are you okay?” Stephanie asked when I came back through the Portal.

  “Why wouldn’t I be okay?” I said tightly.

  “You seem upset,” she observed.

  I took my latte from her. “I’m fine. Just tired.” She looked tired herself. Her hair was piled up in a messy bun on the top of her head, random strands falling out. She was wearing a wrinkled NYU sweatshirt and jeans. It was the best outfit I’d ever seen her wear. Which, sadly, was saying something.

  “How’s school going?” I asked her as we walked back to my office.

  She glanced over at me, startled. She’d been working at PS for months, and this was the first time I’d ever asked her about her life.

  “School? Oh, it’s . . . fine.”

  “When do you even go to class?” I asked. “It seems like you’re always here.”

  I waited for her to start chattering, to tell me about her classes, her professors, her roommate, something, but she just handed me the folder to file my report into. Then she rubbed the back of her neck and sighed. “It does seem that way, doesn’t it?”

  It totally did.

  That night I had another one of those annoying dreams about my past. It was a side effect of the memory sifts, I thought. I delved into someone else’s past, which got my subconscious working on my own. Another reason why this job was a form of punishment.

  This dream was about my dad. Our last real conversation.

  “Come with me to New Zealand” was how it started. “It’ll be fun.”

  “No, thanks.” I was sixteen, just weeks from my death, tweezing my eyebrows at my vanity mirror. I stopped to look at him in the mirror. His face was so hopeful. “New Zealand’s cold.”

  “December is summer in New Zealand,” he said. “It’s practically tropical.”

  “There are sheep in New Zealand,” I said, wrinkling up my nose.

  “Sheep are cute,” he argued.

  “They’re smelly.”

  He changed tactics. “There are hobbits there, too. I have it on good authority.”

  This was one of my best memories—going to see The Hobbit with my dad when I was younger. He was so excited. Like he wasn’t some big, famous director. Like he was just a kid, and I was a kid, and the movie was the coolest thing ever. But I was sixteen—almost seventeen—now. I wasn’t a kid anymore.

  “Dad,” I sighed. “There’s a runway show for Calvin Klein on the twenty-fourth that I want to go to.”

  He didn’t give up. “Afterward I have to go to New York for a bit. You could come. New Year’s in Times Square.”

  I hated New York. It was a well-established fact. “I have stuff.”

  “Bummer,” he said. “But, hey, I miss you, Hol. I want to spend some time together. I feel like since Yvonne died, we’ve been . . .”

  “. . . since Mom died, actually,” I corrected him. “But whatevs. It’s no big deal. You’re busy. I’m busy. It’s fine. We’re good.”

  “It’s not fine. Come hang out with me,” he urged, almost pleading with me now.

  “I can’t.”

  “You can.”

  “I—”

  “You totally can. You’re a high school student. You don’t have any real obligations. You can do anything. Especially go to New Zealand with your father.”

  Adults always loved to tell you that your life wasn’t actually real. I threw the tweezers down and turne
d to look at him. “Dad, I’m not going to New Zealand, okay? Or New York. Or anywhere. I don’t want to go.”

  “All right. So in March—”

  “I’m not interested in your movies,” I burst out. “I don’t even like them.”

  He stepped back. “Okay, ouch.”

  “It’s just . . . they’re not my thing,” I murmured. I knew I’d gone too far. I’d hurt him. But part of hurting him felt good, because it was a little taste of how I’d felt when he just kind of abandoned me after Mom died. How he wasn’t there for me.

  Even though he was trying to be, right now.

  He tried to smile. “I could make a movie about robots. Would you like that kind of movie? Killer robots. I had a robot screenplay on my desk yesterday.”

  “Dad . . .”

  “How about aliens?” His eyes widened like this was the best idea ever. “I’ve been dying to make a movie about aliens. We could shoot it in London. There are no sheep there. We could hang out with the queen.”

  “Why can’t you ever be serious?” I glared at him. “I said no. Leave me alone. I have my life, and you have your life, and we should just keep it that way.”

  He nodded stiffly. “Okay. Okay. I hear you.”

  “Okay. Can you . . . ?” I gestured toward the door.

  “Sure.” And he was gone.

  It was the last time I ever saw him.

  “Dad, wait,” I said, realizing all of a sudden that this had been it—more than the night with the Ghosts and the travels through time—this moment right here had been my last chance. If I’d gone with him I would never have been standing on Wilshire Boulevard that morning after yoga. Maybe I wouldn’t even have been picked as the Scrooge. If I’d just said yes to that simple little request, I’d be alive right now. But I hadn’t known that. I couldn’t have known. “Dad, wait!” I called again. But it was too late. I was waking up.

  I opened my eyes. My heart was beating fast. I was back in the crappy walk-up, it was still crappy, and the air conditioner was apparently not working, either, because it was sweltering in there, even at ten o’clock in the morning. I threw off the covers. I’d never gotten used to summer in New York. The heat. The humidity. In California I’d never been hot like this. I was sweating, like literally damp with sweat. I smelled lavender and realized I was wearing my Hoodie. I must have gone to sleep in it.

  I fiddled with the air-conditioning unit in the window, which was blowing air, but not cold air. I called the super. Voice mail. I stripped down to a tank top and shorts. I drank ice water. Stuck a damp washcloth on the back of my neck. Nothing helped. Then I did the only other thing I could think to do: I stole neighbor lady’s newspaper. I fanned myself for a minute and then scanned the movie section, not finding anything good, not really expecting to see anything, but theaters typically have AC, I was thinking, and that’s when one of the titles totally jumped out at me.

  There it was. Like it was waiting for me. Like it was destiny.

  Evangeline’s Well.

  A new film, it read. From acclaimed director Gideon Chase.

  EIGHT

  I SAW DAD’S MOVIE THREE times in a row. It was Friday, and since I’d just done a sift I had the night off. The film was playing at the Angelika, which just happened to be my favorite movie theater in all of Manhattan, and, not so coincidentally, it was super close to my apartment, and it had an air-conditioning system that worked, hooray. I went to the earliest two showings of Evangeline’s Well back to back. The first time I watched it like I was receiving a message straight from my dad—I sat with my eyes wide open, not wanting to blink and miss a single frame. The second time I relaxed and enjoyed the story more. I noticed the finer details and formed opinions about the actors’ performances and the costumes and the music that played behind their words. I watched it like a movie, the way it was meant to be watched. Then my back was stiff, and I went out to get some newspapers and read the reviews while I had dinner. Then I planned to return for the evening show.

  Evangeline’s Well was about a man who saves his daughter from a monster. The critics likened it to those dark, imaginative films like Pan’s Labyrinth where you feel like you’re becoming part of some vivid, intense nightmare. And it had more heart, the critics said, than Gideon Chase’s other recent films.

  The story goes like this: There’s an old well in the center of town, and at a certain time of day, when the sun is overhead just right, a person can see the future in the reflection of the water in the well. The daughter of the town’s mayor goes to look at her future more than anyone else. She’s a pretty girl—a life-of-the-party kind of girl—and when she gazes into the well she sees herself on the arm of the richest boy in town or something equally promising. But one day as she leans over to peer at her reflection, a monster reaches up from the depths of the water and pulls her in. Then her father must go after her into the well, which turns out to be a dark and mystical world underneath our own. He fights his way through a tangled maze and defeats the shadow creatures that run wild in the forgotten land, all to rescue his missing daughter.

  If it sounds lame, well, I guess it should have been. But the critics were right—it was beautifully imagined and horribly, horribly sad.

  When it was over the third time, I wiped my eyes and looked around. I was wearing the Hoodie and nobody else could see me, but I was still embarrassed by how hard I’d been crying at the end, even this third time through. The theater was about half full—a good turnout, I thought, for a lower-budget film like this, and the audience was made up almost entirely of people on dates.

  There’s nothing like being surrounded by couples to call attention to the fact that you’re alone.

  One couple two rows behind me caught my attention. The woman was sitting back with a thoughtful expression, tears on her face but also a quiet smile, still watching the credits move up the screen.

  “So was it as good as you thought it would be?” the guy sitting next to her asked.

  She gave a satisfied sigh. “It was better.”

  It felt like time stopped and then started again with a heave, and then the theater was spinning all around me. I knew that mouth forming those words, that voice—although her voice was slightly different now, lower. I knew those freckles across her nose, visible even in the dim theater. She was older, so much older than the last time I’d seen her, but I would have known her anywhere.

  The woman sitting two rows behind me was Rosie Alvarez.

  Ro.

  My ex-best friend.

  She was on a blind date, it turned out. After the movie they walked around for a while, making small talk as I followed in the Hoodie. Then they stopped at a frozen yogurt shop. I sat one table over and shamelessly listened to everything they said.

  Ro loved my dad’s movie. That was the first thing they discussed.

  “My favorite part was how the man offered up his own soul to save Evangeline,” she said. “Even though he knew the Shadow King would trap them both, he couldn’t just leave her to her fate. He still sacrificed himself, knowing how things would end. There’s such a beauty in that. Choosing love, no matter what it costs.”

  She’d said the L-word, which kind of flustered her date, because they’d never been out together before, and here was this girl talking about beauty and love with such passion in her voice. He was sort of cute, this guy, blond-haired and blue-eyed and extra super dull. But he knew how to dress at least—a simple button-up black dress shirt and dark-wash jeans. Nice watch. Quality shoes. She could do worse.

  “So you actually know the director?” he asked.

  Ro nodded. “My mom was his first wife’s makeup artist for years. I was over at his house all the time when I was a kid.”

  I waited for her to tell him about me.

  “I owe that man a lot,” she said instead.

  I’d never thought about my dad and Ro even knowing each other that well.

  “He has a huge study where he keeps all his own books and the ones people send him w
hen they’re trying to get him to make their novels into films,” Ro continued. “When my mom was working, getting his wife ready for some event, I used to sneak inside the study. I had trouble with reading at first, dyslexic, you know, but here was this . . . feast of wonderful, exciting books, right within my reach. One time he caught me in there, all curled up with a novel. I was scared, but he just laughed and told me I could go in anytime, borrow any book I wanted.”

  I didn’t remember anything about that. I knew Ro was sometimes in the house while my mom was getting ready, nights I usually spent at my grandma’s so my parents could go out together. I knew that Ro had dyslexia. She had a favorite tee that read, “Dyslexics of the world untie,” that she wore, like, once a week when we were freshmen. And I knew she loved books, and she was always reading something or other, but I never knew where her books came from. She never told me.

  “He’d ask me about the things I read, too,” Ro said. “Later, there was a period at the end of high school when he became a bit of a shut-in. I’d go and visit him, and we’d have these amazing conversations. About philosophy. Religion. Art. Once he said something about the nature of stories that I never forgot. He said, Without stories, we’re all just lonely islands.”

  Her date looked at her blankly.

  “Stories let us see and hear and feel what someone else does,” she explained. “They build bridges to the other islands. That’s why stories are so important. They create true empathy.”

  She glanced away for a second, embarrassed to be going on and on about this. “Anyway. Gideon Chase is a big part of why I wanted to become a writer. He made the telling of stories sound like a sacred calling.”

  Wait, Ro wanted to be a writer? When had that happened?

  Wonderful, said the Inner Yvonne wryly. Just what the world needs. Another writer.

  “It must have been inspiring to get to know him,” said Captain Bland. “It sounds like he was a good mentor to you, for sure.”