Notes from Ghost Town (26 page)

His facial muscles start to twitch just slightly. “No one knows why mental illness strikes, Olivia. It’s one of the many tragedies—”

“No! Why him? Why Stern? What happened that night?”

Ted has pulled his phone out of his pocket and begins dialing a number. I knock the phone from his hands, then back away quickly, my back against the wall. He looks at me in utter shock.

“Tell me what happened that night. I want to know about your girlfriend, the one you brought over here. Were you just here to screw around?”

A flash of something that almost looks like sadness passes across Ted’s face and wrinkles his brow. But his voice is unemotional. “Who told you about Tanya?”

I suck in a deep breath. “Tanya …” I say slowly, drawing it out, remembering. Ever so slowly. The girl who looks like Raina.
Tanya Leavin
.

The girl who disappeared around the time of Stern’s death. The one who was wearing a pink scarf in the newspaper photo.

Disappeared. She disappeared. “What did you do to her?” My mind is spinning and I feel sick.
I need to call my dad. I need Stern. I need to scream
.

“You don’t know what you’re saying, Olivia. You’re
sick
. Okay?” He comes back over to me, takes my wrists hard in his hands. I try to tug away, but he’s gripping too hard. “Sit down. Okay? Just
sit down
, Olivia. Just. Sit.” He forces me down, into Dad’s swivel-back leather office
chair, his hands moving to my shoulders, pushing them back.

“Stop. Get off of me.” I try to swipe at him, to push him out of the way, but he moves the chair back to the wall, holds me there, stands guard, staring down at me. “Get
off
of me.”

“Listen,” he says, little circles of spit collecting at the corners of his mouth. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re imagining things.” He leans his face toward mine—his breath smells of liquor. His whole body smells of it—whiskey. “Do you understand me?” His voice breaks when he says it.

I rocket out of the chair, toward the door. But he blocks my path, grabs me again at the shoulders. The man who pretended to care, for so long, so long. I cry out, struggling to break free of his grip.

“Olivia, I don’t want to hurt you, that’s not what I want,” he says, his jaw clenching tightly. His clothes aren’t clean, I realize—there’s a long ovular stain (coffee?) down the front of his button-up though the rest of him is, as usual, impeccable. I can’t take my eyes off the stain. Ted Oakley never has stains.

“You’ve already hurt me,” I say. My voice comes out small and breathy. The room starts to wobble. “You killed my best friend. You sent my mom to jail in your place. You pretend to be so freaking great and kind and caring but you’re—you’re a liar.” Impossible to hold it back anymore, I let it fly. “You’re a killer. And I’m going to tell
everyone, so they know, so everybody knows.” And then I spit. I spit in his eyes—that’s where I aim, at least—and, momentarily stunned, his grip softens on my shoulders and I reach for the door handle, jiggling it open. I’m two leaps out the door when he forces me back in, his hold firmer than ever around my arms. He’s almost hugging me.

“I never wanted to hurt anyone. I had no choice. If I could make a different choice, Olivia,” he says, his voice shaking, soft, “I would.”

“You
had
to?” I’m so scared and so angry, I feel like I’m going to explode as I struggle to get out of his grasp.

“It wasn’t easy.” He’s shaking his head. I think he might be crying. “No. It wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to—to hurt any of them.” He’s starting to break down, to shake. My body shakes, too, as his arms tremble around me. “I’m not a killer.”

A hot surge of anger goes clean through me. “You’re a
coward
. You ruined my mother’s life.” I try to push him away from me but he’s too strong—grabs onto my arms tighter and wrestles them tightly behind my back, presses me face-first against the wall behind the desk.

“I didn’t want to kill Tanya. I didn’t want to kill her.” He’s breathing hard, practically sobbing.

“Oh my god.” The final piece clicks into place. Stern saw Ted with Tanya. He saw him
kill
her. “She was a kid, and so was he,” I manage to get out, and then he knocks my head back against the wall, and I let out a whimper.

“You were screwing her. You were cheating on Clare.” My chest is fire. My lungs are fire. “Why did you do it?”

“You watch your
mouth
. You know nothing.”

“I know you’re a coward,” I retort, and he knocks my head into the wall again, hard. I bite my tongue, and blood fills my throat. Metallic and thick.

“I love my wife. I love Austin. And I didn’t want that all to go away. I had to do what was best for my family.”

“What’s
best
?”

But he’s hardly listening to me now, just holding me too tightly for me to move. “I’m not—I’m not an immoral man,” he says. My wrists throb within his grip. “I have a
family
, Olivia. You don’t understand because you’re just a kid. Tanya didn’t understand, either. She wasn’t married, she didn’t have
children
. But I did. I
do
. The stakes were higher for me. I did it for them. For my family, Olivia.” His grip loosens and I try to push him away, but he tightens instantly, presses his hand to the back of my head. “It would have been the end of my life. And Clare’s life. And Austin’s life.”

“What about
Tanya’s
life? What about Lucas Stern? And the people who cared about him? You don’t even know—how many people’s lives you destroyed. He didn’t do anything wrong. You killed him just for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.” I try to turn myself around, to face him, to claw his eyes out. But he leans an elbow into me, flattens me against the smooth cold office wall.

“I tried to talk to him. I
tried
. He wouldn’t listen to me.”
I can feel his whole body trembling behind me. His hands tighten again over my wrists. “I offered him money—so much money and he wouldn’t even hear it. Stupid kid. I didn’t have a choice—I didn’t have any choice. I didn’t—” He chokes on a sob—a weird old man sob so pitiful and sickening I could die right there.

“You’re disgusting. You’re a goddamn—”
Thwack
.

Blinding pain in my head. I sink to the ground. Everything is spinning, I try to sit up but I can’t. I feel him moving away from me. Time passes—I don’t know how much. I can’t move. I can’t see.

And then I see Ted, through the haze settled over my eyes—climbing on a chair, dismantling something above the doorway—an alarm. Wires hanging limp against the wall. Then he’s opened the door to the hallway and returns with something in his hand, a large bottle, glass: a spilling sound—liquid hitting solid, spattering the desk and the carpet. A familiar, biting smell—whiskey. A loud crash, the sound of something shattering. Everything happens so quick, I can’t get my bearings, I can’t get it straight.

His voice reaches me, hollowed out, from far away.

“I’m sorry, Olivia,” he says. His voice comes out wobbly, strangled—he’s crying. “I’m so sorry. I’d hoped we could talk, that you’d be reasonable. I care about you, Olivia, like a daughter. You have to know that. Olivia, honey, I didn’t plan this, not for a second. You have to understand”—the sound of a struck match, sudden skin
of heat, tickling my arms, my legs—“it’ll look like an accident this way.” The door slams shut, the lock twists. I can hardly open my eyes because there’s smoke beginning to rise from the carpet, to weave itself around me.

The office is on fire.

T
he office is full of fog and black air. My lungs are beginning to fill—so quickly it happens, so quietly thick and painful. I try to pull myself up on something—move toward the door, away from the fire snaking toward me, licking up the carpet, wild, the legs of the desk—but it seems I’m somehow stranded on a blank island, nothing in my path but the heat.

My brain clicks in and out of seeing, of hearing. Blink. Open-mouthed. No sound. Too hot. So hot.

I start to crawl—crawl through the places not burning—but my head still throbs, and my wrists hurt. The space I’ve got is shrinking. I claw at the carpeting, pulling myself, pulling, pulling. I try to scream, but my voice won’t come.
Please. Help me. Someone help me
. And then I think of him—if this is what it felt like as he died, if choking on smoke and choking on water feel like the same thing when they both just equal death.
Stern
.

I see his face—like it’s right in front of me as I pull myself forward. Every cell in my body stretching too wide,
pain searing through every single inch. I have to reach that face. I have to reach that door. I can hear the flames, the mouth of them, devouring in snaps and roars.

The wires hanging from the wall belonged to the smoke detector. That’s why there’s no scream from above, no call for help.

I try to call out again, to cry, but I’m coughing so hard there’s no space for words.

The carpeting is wet beneath my hands, sodden with liquor. I try to suck in clean air, but there is no clean air. The smell is like a big whopping smack in the face—my lungs will explode—I will explode.
Stern
. I reach for him—for the door—reach up and up, to the handle. My hand brushes the door handle, tries to jiggle it. Locked.

My head goes blank, and then: a gap in the air, in the fabric of the room, in the weave of time; a well-deep hole through which I slip. Light in my head—an image, a memory. Dad holding my hands, spinning me around and around through the sprinkler on the grass. The water cutting little rainbows through the sunlight. Mom watching from the porch, waving. Her hand disappearing every time I spin, giggling, through the water.

Sprinklers. Pipes. Water.

The blueprints
. The CAD. An image roars back to me for a second—the paper from dad’s files The snakes. I drew to cover them, drew flowers and leaves over the little rectangles that showed where the pipes connect.

Then it’s fog again. And the sprinkler—one more time—Dad’s
face illuminated by the shards of sunlight through the trees. The water spiraling out from the swing-circles our wet hair made through the air.

Blank again. I fight to stay awake. Stern’s voice skates around me, and I can almost feel the individual notes of his voice floating like snowflakes through ash and flame. I don’t know if he’s here or not.

My hands reach through the thickening smoke and touch the legs of the chair—wet, too, with whiskey, but not yet huge with fire. I struggle to lift myself up from the ground, to pull myself up to my feet. To reach the fire alarm beside the doorway, the wires I watched him disconnect. In the haze of my head I think I’ll be able to reconnect them. That this will be the easiest way to end the thickness clotting every breathing living part of me. The smoke is like a fortress. I steady myself against the wall with the flat of my palms, trying to keep my knees from buckling, trying to keep every bone in my body from giving up right there. I reach through the thick air, feel my way to a little square box protruding from the wall:
Fire alarm
.

I paw desperately for the wires, coughing. My chest is full-up. Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe. I reconnect them by touch, not sure if I’m doing it right, everything slipping away.

Nothing happens. My fingers find the fire alarm again, one more time—and then they find it—a small switch—click it on.

And then the room fills with screaming. Everything is wet, pouring from the sprinkler system in the ceiling. My head is one giant, soaking scream.

I pass out but come to when something screams somewhere in the distance, then, and I’m screaming, too. My hands slip from the wall, choking as my knees finally buckle beneath me and I sink to the ground. My belly drops straight out of me, like it does on a roller coaster. A rush, a flash.

Screaming, screaming. The door opens. People rushing in. Men. Boots. Helmets. Voices I don’t recognize, shouting, hands, lifting, lifting me up.

Silence.

“Liver, you can’t stay here.”

It’s very dark. Stern is beside me. There is no echo and there is no weather and space does not quite exist around us. And I realize it then: “I’m dead.”

“Not yet,” he says. “Go now, or you’ll get stuck.”

“I want to stay with you.” My voice sounds very far away, but I feel him beside me, and I reach for him. When we touch, we fall into each other, like separate streams meeting to become a river. We become the same thing.

“No. You don’t want to be here. Here is Nowhere, Liver. The Gray Space. We won’t be able to stay together here.”

Snowflakes. I see his voice as tiny orbs of light, streaming through the darkness and disappearing as soon as
they are born. A thousand tiny deaths in a single instant. “The Gray Space,” I whisper, understanding that, before, I was only on the edge of it. Now I’m smack dab inside its heart. I am part of it.

“How long have I been here?”

“I don’t know, Liver. There’s no time in the Gray Space.”

“I can’t leave you, Stern.” My voice seems to bounce for a moment between invisible walls and then get sucked clean away, into nothing. “Even to have one more minute with you, I’d take it.” I feel wrapped in silk, like I’m floating through cloud-mists.

“Liv—I have to leave. And once I go, I can’t come back.”

“Ever?”

“I can visit you in your dreams.”

“I hardly ever remember my dreams.”

“You’ll remember these.”

“Stern—”

“Liv—”

“Lucas—”

“Olivia Jane—”

“I need you to know,” I pause. It’s my last chance, and so, bodiless, in the middle of Nowhere, I tell him: “I love you.”

“I’ve loved you since we were four,” he says, simply.

“But that day … we kissed, you said it was a mistake. You ran away. Do you even remember?”

“Of course I remember. It was never a mistake, Liv. I got confused. I didn’t know how to deal with any of it; I don’t think either of us did. But I always loved you. Always. And
I will love you until you come back to me. Somehow, and somewhere. In a very, very long time. You will come back to me.”