Passing Strange

  There wasn’t any trace of the artwork that Popeye had done; rumor had it that Father Fitzpatrick insisted that both our scene and the manger, bullet holes and all, be left up throughout the holidays, as a reminder of the crime he felt had been committed against us, but a well-meaning (perhaps) parishioner cleaned up the ruin of splintered wood and toppled figures.

  I locked the car, crossed the street, and followed a short walkway lined with tall arborvitae. The rectory door was unlocked, and I stepped inside, nearly crashing into a figure in black who was moving swiftly toward me.

  “Pardon me,” the figure said. If I had to breathe I would have been holding my breath just then.

  I looked up and saw that the man, a priest, was trying to get his collar into place. I recognized him immediately; it was Father Fitzpatrick.

  “I nearly bowled you over,” he said. “I’m so sorry; I’m late for my turn in the confessional, as usual.”

  Confession. The thought of the elderly couple taking their turns in the confessional made me smile. “Father forgive me, for I have sinned,” Grandpa would say. “I just don’t like Gertie’s lasagna.”

  “No worries,” I said, “seeing how you’re in such a hurry to save souls.”

  His laugh was rich and sincere, laugh lines deepened around his eyes as he rocked back and forth. “Absolutely,” he said, regaining his composure. I could still see the light of mirth dancing in his eyes as he peered into my face with sudden interest. My wonderings about my trad facade as he scrutinized me disappeared with his next statement.

  “We’ve met,” he said, and he lifted his hand to his chin as he thought about where or when that event might have occurred. I shrugged as though to convey that I didn’t recall our meeting.

  “Karen,” he said. “Karen DeSonne. We met at the funeral of your friend. The Talbot boy. The contact lenses threw me.”

  “You have a good memory…for faces,” I said. (I paused because, for some reason, his authority or his knowledge that I wasn’t alive threw me.)

  “Yes,” he said, smiling. “Are you here for Melissa?”

  “Yes, Father,” I said.

  “Excellent.” He beamed at me for a moment before checking his watch. “I’ve got to go. Miss Riley is in the basement; the stairs are at the end of the hall. I think she’ll be pleased to have a visitor. I’m off to save some souls, as you say. Good-bye, Karen.”

  “Good-bye,” I said, watching him hurry down the steps and then jog down the walkway. I started down the dim hallway, passing beneath a huge portrait of Mary. There was a ghostly amber halo around Mary’s blue-veiled head, and the artist had imbued her expression with a lifelike peacefulness and compassion, but I felt only anxiety as I passed beneath her loving gaze. There was a statue of a bearded saint on a pedestal at the end of the corridor, the green paint flaking off his robes in scales. I wasn’t sure that I liked the way he was staring at me. I also didn’t like the way the heels of my boots sounded in the hollow hallway, and I made an extra effort to keep silent as I descended the stairs to the basement, which was dark except for dim red exit signs on either end.

  “Melissa?” I said, my voice echoing. Dark as it was, my dead eyes could see everything. The rectory basement was basically one long open room, with sofas and beds, bookshelves, and a large round table ringed by metal folding chairs. There was a television cabinet in one corner, a monstrous relic of another era. It stood on a braided rug, and a few battered recliners gathered around it like faithful dogs awaiting command. The room must have been styled by the same decorator and yard-sale aficionado that worked his threadbare “magic” on the encounter room of the Hunter Foundation.

  “Melissa?” I repeated. She was across the room, sitting on an old couch. I could see the pale green flash of her eyes from within the white mask that she wore, the lone spot of color in the room save for the feeble glow of the exit signs. “Melissa, can I come talk to you?”

  The white mask—different than the one she’d worn to class—lowered and raised in a nod. The mouth of this mask curled slightly upward in a smile. Melissa reached up and clicked on a floor lamp standing beside the couch. As I made my way around the random groupings of furnishings and support poles I saw that Melissa was holding a whiteboard that was a little larger than a spiral notebook. She began writing on it with a green marker. When she was finished she held it up for me to see.

  She’d written Hi Karen in tall streaky letters, the curves in the e and the r giving her a little trouble.

  “Hi, yourself,” I said, sitting on her sofa. I greeted most of my friends, dead or alive, with a hug, but there was something standoffish in the way she sat, as though she were constantly trying to pull her limbs into her body, that made me think a hug would not be welcome—no matter how it was needed.

  The light from the floor lamp cast shadows in the eyeholes of the mask, so now even Melissa’s green eyes were hidden from my view.

  “My friend Mal used to stay here,” I said. “And a girl name Sylvia. We talked about her at the Hunter Foundation. Colette and Kevin, too. You know them from class.”

  I guess it was a little awkward. I realized that I was talking to her as though she were about six years old and couldn’t remember anything prior to the event on the church lawn. She just nodded at me, the red corona of her hair bobbing with the gentle motion. She probably thought I was an idiot.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. What else could I say? “You know, relatively speaking?”

  Melissa erased my name and wrote something new on her board.

  OK she’d written.

  “That’s good. Really good. I’m sure you’re lonely here and all. I’m lonely, too. I live…I stay with my parents and my sister, but there aren’t any dead people around anymore, you know? I guess it isn’t the same kind of lonely, but…I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

  Melissa gave one slow nod of her head. She erased her board but didn’t write anything.

  Melissa tapped her pad twice before writing. The words took a little longer, and she stopped at different points to cross words out.

  Its XXXX okay here. Father Fitzgerald is awesome. I XXXX miss XXXX Cooper.

  Then

  He wouldn’t come w/ me when I left the Foundation, and we had a fight. I get XXX lonely.

  She waited until I had read the whole page, before erasing and writing some more.

  “You didn’t want to stay at the Foundation?” I asked.

  Melissa shook her head with a little more vigor this time.

  “How come?”

  Melissa took a few moments before writing.

  Its haunted is what she wrote. She underlined the word haunted three times.

  “Haunted?” I asked. Without the benefit of inflection or expression, it was difficult to tell what she was thinking. I guess that’s how the trads felt most of the time when talking to us. “As in, ghosts and stuff?”

  Melissa nodded again.

  “Have you been able to get out much?”

  Squeak, squeak, write, write.

  I’d ♥ 2 get out, she wrote. The ♥ was underlined. Fr. Fitz thinks too dangerous.

  “He’s probably right,” I said, which kicked off another flurry of erasing and writing. I looked around the room. There was another portrait of Mary, a smaller version of the one upstairs on the wall behind them, and this time her beatific gaze was trained on a portrait of Jesus done in the same style a few feet away.

  But U R Out????

  She’d capitalized the O in “Out,” which was funny, because I wasn’t Out, capital O, at all, was I? I was In. I was passing. But how could this poor dead, scarred girl feel about that?

  I didn’t know. But I decided to tell her the truth. Part of it, anyhow.

  “I’m passing, Melissa,” I told her. “As a human. I mean, a traditionally biotic person.”

  Erase, squeak, squeak.

  Passing?

  “People don’t know I’m dead. I don’t know if you can tell in this light, but my hair is a litt
le darker.”

  Erase, squeak, squeak, squeak.

  W/A yr eyes?

  “Oh,” I said. “That. Contact lenses.”

  She leaned forward, her head tilting to the side.

  “You know, Melissa, you don’t need to wear that mask with me, if you don’t want.”

  Melissa sat completely still for at least a minute, and I worried that my offer had offended her. The time lag gave me enough time to realize how hypocritical my statement was, considering the mask I wore on a daily basis.

  When Melissa finally responded, her reply was brief.

  Thank U

  She made no movement to remove the mask.

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve got to get going. I’ve got a job—if you can believe it. I work at Wild Thingz! in the mall.”

  Melissa drew an exclamation point that covered her whole board.

  I laughed. “Yeah, I know. Pretty crazy, huh? They don’t know that I’m a zombie yet, if you can believe it.”

  I can believe it, she’d written.

  “Thank you, Melissa,” I replied, as Melissa flipped to a new page and started writing again.

  I want 2 not be a zombie someday

  “I know what you mean,” I said. I put my hand on Melissa’s knee. The masked girl didn’t try to shrink away from me.

  “Take care, honey,” I said. “I’ll see you soon, okay?”

  Melissa nodded. She wrote Thank U on her tablet and then lifted her hand in a wave.

  “Soon,” I said. I leaned forward and tilted her mask to the side, gently. I thought she might turn away, but she didn’t. I kissed her cheek, and her skin made a crackling sound beneath my lips.

  She sat back and her mask was back in place, her eyes hidden in its shadows. I said good-bye again and stood up.

  I hadn’t yet crossed the room when I heard the click of the floor light going off, and I left Melissa in the darkness.

  I was going off to pretend I was a real person, selling lame T-shirts and tongue studs to kids who most likely wanted to set fire to the Haunted House and everyone in it, while people like Melissa sat alone in the dark with nothing to think about besides the grim circumstances of their deaths and the even grimmer circumstances of their unlives. It wasn’t fair.

  A voice in my head told me that my working and having a job was a good thing for dead kids like Melissa, because only by our getting jobs and going to dances and joining football teams would we ever get the opportunity to do anything else in this society. I knew that the sentiment made sense, but I couldn’t help but think there was an element of selfishness in it, too. I was going because I liked to “pass.” I liked living people flirting with me, and I liked buying new clothes with the money I made. When I first started passing, I told myself I was doing something radical, that I was contributing to our cause, whatever. I thought I’d be helping. But really I was just hiding.

  What I should have been doing was sitting in the dark, trying to teach Melissa how to laugh. How to heal her skin.

  I passed under the portrait of Mary, amazed that there was no hint of reproach in the blue painted eyes. I reached the edge of the arborvitae just in time to see the elderly couple step onto the sidewalk from the stone steps. They both smiled at me as they went by. I looked up at the stone Christ and, before I was even aware of doing so, I began to climb the stairs they’d just descended. They looked even happier now than when I first saw them.

  I stood in the atrium for a long moment before going in. There were a few people in the pews awaiting their turn. I forced my lungs to draw a deep breath, and I stepped into the church proper.

  The roof didn’t cave in, flames didn’t burst through the floor to engulf me. There was no shortage of people in the world that thought me a damned thing, a damned dead monster, an abomination in the eyes of the very Lord whose image looked down on me from the cross at the front of the cathedral. I took a seat in the back pew beneath a stained-glass image of Jesus holding a lamb, a ring of smiling children gathered at His feet. I looked up at His image and then I took the kneeler down.

  What am I doing here? I thought. What?

  But I knew. I had a lot to atone for, didn’t I?

  I’d been to confession twice in my life but not once since my death. The door to the confessional opened, and to my horror none of the three other people in the pews rose to enter next.

  Saying their rosaries, I thought. What am I doing here, damned thing that I am?

  No heaven for me, I thought, rising from my knees. No heaven for me, no afterlife. Just afterdeath, back here on earth.

  I exited the pew with every intention of bolting out of the cathedral as fast as my undead legs could carry me. Instead I walked into the confessional and closed the door. The curtained box smelled like antique wood and incense. The curtain was closed.

  “Father, forgive me for I have sinned,” I said, and I told myself that the wooden booth was nothing at all like the coffin that my parents had picked out for me. I was pausing in my speech, like when I first came back.

  “Go on,” Father Fitzpatrick said from behind the curtain. I could tell it was him just from those two little words.

  “I…I…” I began, my zombie speech impediment coming on fullbore. “I…have…not…always…been…truthful.” Like that. “With my…parents. With…with friends.”

  “Take your time,” he said, his voice free from judgment.

  “I have been…neglectful.” I thought about when I’d made the sacrament of confession for the first time, with the rest of my catechism class, how they joked about all the fake sins they manufactured in “the box” so as to somehow minimize the existence of their real sins. “I have…I…I have…”

  I could hear the priest sigh on the other side of the divider. “You do not have to worry,” he said. “You are here for forgiveness.”

  “Father, I…I don’t…I…”

  “Yes?”

  “I killed myself,” I whispered. “And…”

  I was shaking, actually shaking, something I didn’t think my body was capable of doing any longer. I had more to say, but the words wouldn’t come. I was kneeling and shaking, and my hands were clenched together so tightly that my nails bit into my skin. I was shaking because I was there for forgiveness, but I was afraid I would not get forgiveness. How could there be forgiveness for me, who had taken God’s gift and thrown it away?

  And was that even the worst of my sins?

  Just when I thought the priest hadn’t heard me, he spoke. He said my name.

  “Karen?”

  And then I ran as fast my undead legs could carry me, bursting out of the confessional as though I were bursting out of the coffin I was almost buried in. The door slammed against the side of the booth with enough force to split the wood, and the faithful crouching over their beads looked up at me with shock and horror, and I knew that they could see me for what I really was: a monster. An undead monster.

  The noise of my exit echoed throughout church. As I passed through the feeble light beneath the stained-glass window I felt my heart beat in my chest three times.

  I literally fled from the church, wondering if the stone Christ’s arms were open not to embrace me, but to catch me.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WHAT THE HELL, PETE thought, punching the button on his cell phone and throwing it to the floor of his car. He’d just left his fifth message for Christie in three days, which is about four more messages than he’d ever left for any girl in his life, after Julie.

  His fingers drummed an arrhythmic beat on the steering wheel of his mother’s car. He knew Christie wasn’t dodging him because she was offended by the way things went the other night. She’d been around. And she’d enjoyed it as much as he had, so why couldn’t she answer her damn phone?

  Was she playing a game? Was that it? Was this some kind of childish payback for when he went to Arizona? She’d seemed more mature than that.

  He turned into the parking lot of the Winford Mall, parked, and went inside
. The mall was dead; the only part that had any traffic was the food court, and only because it was lunch time. Pete walked to Wild Thingz! and appeared to be the only person in the store.

  Pete hung around the counter for a minute or two before the beady-eyed guy with the piercings came out of the back room, wiping pizza sauce off his chin.

  “Hey,” Pete said. “Is Christie working today?”

  The guy looked irritated, as though he couldn’t believe Pete was interrupting his delicious pizza lunch to ask him that.

  “I’m not really supposed to discuss employee schedules with the customers.”

  This guy—Craig, by his name badge, which had a sticker of a comic skull next to his name—had a very hittable face, Pete thought. He considered knocking Craig down and asking him, “How about if I step on your neck, could you tell me then?” Instead he played it cool. Playing it cool wasn’t easy, though—he felt a dark tide of anger that had been building since his first unanswered call to Christie a few days ago.

  So instead he smiled. He smiled, but what he said wasn’t a question.

  “But you’ll make an exception for me.”

  He could see the impact of his words—and their tone—on Craig’s face as his beady eyes grew wide and he licked his lips.

  “We don’t have a Christie working here,” he said.

  The dark tide swelled. “Don’t be cute. Slim, blond—probably the only person here that doesn’t have any hardware or tattoos on her skin.”

  “Oh,” Craig said. “You mean Karen.” Craig said, looking relieved. Pete saw no point in arguing with him, he just wanted to know where she was.

  “You her new boyfriend?” Craig said.

  Pete nodded, gratified that she’d talked about him at work.

  “She was supposed to work today,” Craig told him. “She called in sick. That’s why I’m all alone.”