Notes from Ghost Town (24 page)

“You did. You said he was a big bird watcher or whatever.” Something tightens in my stomach. I have a breathless feeling.

“He was, and that’s why I think I made the mistake—because of the Cullen Nature Preserve. But, it wasn’t the nature preserve. It was the hospital that he left his money to. Shepherd-Cullen Hospital—they specialize in schizophrenia research, apparently.”

“What did you just say?” I say slowly into the phone: now suddenly an alien piece of plastic in my fist.

“Oh. Is the connection bad?” A muffled sound of tapping against the receiver: “I said that Greg Foster left all
of his money to a psychiatric hospital called Shepherd-Cullen. Over four million dollars. To their schizophrenia research department. And you know what?” she continues, her voice slightly higher-pitched. “He didn’t even leave it in his own name.”

“Whose name did he leave it in?”

“What was it? Oh, yes, I have it written down right here—Miriam Tithe. That was her name.”

My heart near stops.

Mom
.

“Hello? Are you there?”

“I—yes. I’m here,” I hear myself say. Everything is spinning around me. The ocean, the boardwalk, the clot of preteens sharing a single bottle of beer in a paper bag.
Mom
.

“I just find it very strange,” Mrs. Kilmurray babbles on. “He was so friendly—we used to chat quite frequently…. But he never once mentioned …”

He abandoned her case, killed himself, and left all of his money in Mom’s name. Why?

“I’m—I’m sorry, Ms. Kilmurray. I have to go,” I stammer.

“Oh! Of course, dear. Let me know if I can—”

Click
.

It’s almost ten by the time I get home; I hear the TV on in Dad and Heather’s room.
CSI: Miami
. Wynn must be asleep by now. But someone left the small light over the kitchen
sink on for me, a chocolate-dipped fortune cookie tied with ribbon on the kitchen table. The cellophane wrapper says
David and Heather
, is dotted with tiny white hearts—a sample of what they’ll have at the wedding, I bet.

I wonder what he and Mom had at their wedding.

I take the cookie and pad upstairs to my room, press my back against the frame of my bed, and try to make sense of the senseless.
Four days
. Greg Foster.
Four days
. What an absurd number. I can’t help but feel the universe is trickling out new bits of the puzzle, so slow, just to mess with me. Stern.

I gather my laptop onto my knees on the floor, drag up every article I can find from last year, when Stern was killed. Almost sixty separate tabs. Each one containing the possibility of something I’ve overlooked, of a pattern hidden between the endless stream of words, like in one of those Magic Eye puzzles.

I focus on my favorite picture: a wide-angle shot of Stern, dressed up nice in a suit and skinny tie, leaned against Mom’s piano. His eyes in the photograph are dark and serious, and I imagine they contain a tiny mirror reflecting the rest of the Mom’s studio: her Turkish rugs and stacks of books and sheet music, the vintage ceramic lamp on top of the piano, a small framed drawing I’d made for her in a distant corner of the shot.

I wonder, as I stare into his eyes in the photograph, if he can see me right back, if everything, somewhere, is still exactly as it used to be.

But what I really want is to go back and make things different. I wish I never once dismissed my mother on the phone when she annoyed me. I wish I’d never passed up a single chance to hug her, fiercely, to walk with her through the thick broke-bark trees behind our house, along the surf, to set up a picnic blanket with her in the middle of the night when the waves were always terrifying and huge and cold.

Every single time I missed helping her prepare dinner so I could wait around the mall for Jose Ruiz or Rece Zayden or Mark “the loon” Looner to maybe show up and mostly ignore me, every time I did not tell her exactly how much I loved her—with every cell, with every breath, with every streak of paint, every sway of my fingers down a page—I want it back.

Four days
. I stare at more articles, more pictures, because I can’t stop. And when I reach the pictures of Tanya Leavin, the girl who disappeared the exact same time Stern did, who looks so much like Raina, I can’t ignore the cramped, unsettled feeling that comes into my belly. I’ve made a real mess of things, with everyone who’s bothered to care.

I set the computer down. But I’m still itching to do something, itching for a distraction. In the closet, I drag out the box of my old art supplies from school—a box I haven’t bothered to open since I left, months ago. I rip the packing tape off the cardboard slowly, letting my hands hover over the flaps of the box before I air out its innards.

The smell of it gets me first—the mineral smell of all the hard tubes of my oil paints, scattered within a lidless shoebox on top of my charcoals and sketchbooks, my linseed oil and gouache and watercolor, dirtied-up chamois, a hardened tangle of paint rags, and a long, slender wood box full of sable-hair wood-handled paintbrushes and reed pens, their tips black with old India ink.

I’m transported by this smell—to dark-curtained rooms full of easels and brushes and the paint-spattered floor, to stretcher boards and the grain of loose linen and the way my fingers would ache after stretching too many canvases in a row, to everything my life used to be, when my parents’ separation was the worst thing that could possibly happen, and was (I thought) only temporary, at worst. When I still had Stern to show snow to on Skype.

My fingers fumble through the shoebox, lifting all my paints, one by one, onto the floor in a sunburst arc. I can’t tell which color is which anymore without great, inexact effort, or by the names stated explicitly on their labels. There is still some oily wetness around the neck of one of the tubes. It gets on my fingers as I lift it out—red, I’d guess. Only slightly darker than a stop sign, and definitely red. Red oils take forever to dry, longer than any other color.

Near the bottom of the shoebox, my fingers grip something distinctly un-paint-like. They inch the foreign object out and onto my palm. A CD.

I flip it over. Marked with dark pen across its center:
L.STERN, PIANO GOD
, and subtitled:
Lucas Stern vs. Juilliard: Practice sessions of our nation’s foremost musical savant
.

My heart thwunks around in my chest, stunned that I’d forgotten about this for so, so long. The CD he gave me
to remember him by
. That’s what he’d said that day—the day we kissed, dust and heat rising around us like a fog. The day my eyes changed. The last day I ever saw him, alive. I never listened to it.

I just stare at it for a long time before pulling another relic out of my closet—a CD player from early middle school—and plugging it into the socket near my bed. My hands are shaking a little bit, my throat all lumpy. I slip the CD inside and press play.

At first: a few seconds of thick silence that make me think he forgot to even press
record
before he started playing, but then, it’s him. It’s him. His voice. My whole body starts shaking. His living voice.

Hi, Liver. It’s me, Lucas Stern, piano god. (See front of CD for confirmation of this title.) I made you this CD to preserve, in memory, a time in my life prior to my being internationally adored, and accepted early to Juilliard, of course. Duh. So …
he whistles, long, soft;
here goes, baby. Here goes. Oh—and one more thing—thanks for, uh, thanks for listening. And, ya know … for being my best friend. Okay. Enough with the corny sentimental shit
.

I drag myself onto my bed and shut my eyes and listen because I can do nothing else. Every note he plays swallows
me new, reincarnates me, swallows me up again. I can’t stop seeing his face as he’d play—so serious, his eyes so supernaturally clear, almost—like he understood something big in those moments, bigger than the shit we know in the trap of our skulls. Big like life, and death, and love. Big like things ancient and overwhelming and universal but still somehow ungraspable to most.

Then an off note in the recording startles me from my reverie—a note just a little bit flatter than I remember it being, every time I’d hear him play in Mom’s studio.
Weird. Stern was
never
off
. The song repeats itself, or, more accurately—Stern repeats the song, over and over again. And each time the note comes around, it’s flat. Definitely flat. I let the tape continue to play, all knotted up by nostalgia, suddenly moved to pull out one of my old sketchbooks from my art supply box and give it a flip-through.

I flip through sheaths of crappy old sketches and stop at an old sketch of Stern’s face. He was in my room that day—I see him still—sitting with his spine against the wood frame of my bed. He wanted me to draw him like a tintype, flat-mouthed. I started.
No smiling
, I kept telling him, but then he keep cracking up, because he wasn’t allowed to.
Stern, I can’t draw you if you keep moving. You’re just going to look like a freak—all of your features out of place
. He was laughing so hard, hyena-ish, he even stopped worrying about covering up the little gap between his front teeth. And so I caught it, exaggerated
the gap so that in the drawing he looks like he’s missing a whole tooth up there.

You look like a proper hick, now, Sternum
, I’d told him. And he donkeyed-out his teeth, and with an invisible banjo, began to sing,
Oh! Susannah, don’t you cry for me, I come from Alabama with a banj-y on mah kneeeee
. Over the notes of his recording, I start to sing our old song, quietly, to myself as I stare at my haywire charcoal scrawl of his face, tears coming again, fast and loose: “I come from Alabama, a banjo on my knee, I’m goin’ to Louisiana, my true love—”

“—for to see, it rained all night the day I left, the weather it was dry, the sun so hot I froze to death, Liver. Don’t you cry.”

He’s here. Real, or mirage. I don’t even care. He’s
here
.

“Stern!” I cry out.

He has big circles under his eyes, and a face that is not quite fixed in the solid way of the living, and, behind his lips: a glimpse into that dark valley of the whole of existence.

“Liv.” He looks at me—those dark, serious eyes. “It’s getting harder for me to come. Much harder. But I did it.”

He pauses for a moment. I see his chest rising, kind of wavering in and out, as though he’s short of breath. I watch his body shiver within his Christmas flannel, the pale, grainy gray of his skin. I miss him. Even when he’s here, next to me. A logical part of me knows it’s not true, it’s not real. And I miss him, the certainty of him. His eyes go wide. “Hey—why does this sound so familiar?”

“It’s your recital song,” I remind him, practically pleading, as though that will bring it all back: his memory, his life. “The one we just played, in Mom’s studio.” We listen together for a few more moments, silent.

“You were recording it?”

I shake my head slowly. “You made me a CD. I just found it.”

“When did I do that? When is this from?”

“It’s from the last time I saw you. Right before I went back to school.” I gulp down a new lump in my stupid lumpy throat. I try and smile. “But you must have been off your game.”

“Off my game?” He smiles, pale, perfect. “Impossible.”

“Listen.”

I skip it back and we listen for a bit. The flat note comes around and I watch his face tilt slightly to the left, wincing. “
See
? That note!”

“It
is
off. But it’s not me. The whole scale is fucked up….” He closes his eyes, bites his lip, starts playing air scales along with the music. “It’s the piano.”

“It can’t be Mom’s,” I say. “Hers was
always
tuned, like, religiously. What piano did you record this on?”

And as soon as I ask it, the answer falls out of my mouth. “Ghost Town.”

We stare at each other for a second. “But, wait—Ghost Town wasn’t even
done
before …” At the last second, I can’t say it. Stupid.

“Before I died,” he finishes for me. His whole body is
shaking, the light half-wavery quality of skin almost glowing behind the gray of it.

“But the lobby was done,” I say slowly. A strange prickly feeling is working its way up my back. “It was furnished and everything, so they could show it off to perspective dickwad clients. Anyway, they have that baby grand in the lobby. You must have gone there, Stern. You must have played there sometimes.”

Stern closes his eyes. For a long time, he is quiet. Then he says: “I must have found some way to sneak in—so I could practice at night.” His face almost glows as rare memories flow through him in tiny waves. “I remember walking up dunes … all that saw grass. It smelled muddy.”

My chest is hammering, hot, wild. I try to work it out in my head—what might have happened.
If he wasn’t at Mom’s that night—and he remembers sneaking into Ghost Town to practice
—“you must have been there the night it happened!” I say, my words all hot and rushing together.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s a blank.”

“Okay, just close your eyes for a second,” I tell him, “and listen to the recording. Assuming you were there, it’s what you would have been playing, so, maybe … maybe something will come back.” I search his face as he listens, as though I can pry my way into his brain and dislodge the clogs of his memory with my eyeballs. “Anything? Even something fuzzy?”

Stern’s eyes move over the drawing, his pointer finger hovering right over all the vectors separating black from white, shape from nothing. “I remember light reflecting through the windows—sudden light.” His face is carved in thought, trying to remember. “But that’s it. Everything else is shadow.”

“Those windows face the parking lot,” I say slowly. “Sudden light could mean headlights. Did someone show up while you were playing? Do you remember hearing anything?”

He bites his lip, his face contorted, as though he’s in pain. “Yelling,” he finally says.

“Yelling?” I prompt, urging him on.

He opens his eyes. “Voices. An argument.”

“What kind of voices? Do you remember what they were saying?”