Notes from Ghost Town (7 page)

Stern.

He’s back.

L
iv. Stop ignoring me. Look at me.” The invented ghost plants himself in front of me on the shiny floor. He’s wearing the same clothes he was wearing yesterday—same basketball shorts he wore pretty much every day he was alive, same painstakingly selected flannel shirt.

I don’t look at him because he’s not real. And I know that because I’m not crazy. I’m a rational person, waiting for her father, sketching on top of the blueprints for an ugly building.

“Hey. Come on. You need to look at me. I don’t know how long I can stay.” His voice breaks when he says it; I glance briefly over at him: he’s watching me, so intense, so focused. “Liver, you have to listen to me. Your mom didn’t kill me, Liver. I wanted to tell you last night, but you ran away, and …”

I start humming to myself, blocking out the words.
Just ignore him
. I will myself to keep breathing, though my air supply feels short and strained again.
He isn’t real. If you ignore him, he’ll go away. You’re not crazy.
You’re
not
crazy. You can choose to make this go away
.

“She didn’t do it, okay? I know that. That might be the
only
thing I know for sure. That’s what I wanted to tell you.”

I’m startled to see the paper blurring in front of me, feel the burn of tears behind my eyes.
Wish fulfillment
: A Freudian theory; unconscious aspirations that come out in dreams, hysterical fantasies. I’d paid attention that day in psych class. It resonated with me, even then. I bored pencil into paper, digging lines across it, just shapes now, nothing concrete.

“Did you hear what I just said?” He moves to squat right in front of me now, hands on his knees, leaning only inches from my face. Weirdly, he smells like firewood. “Do you understand? She’s innocent. You can
help
her. You can help
me
.”

I’m starting to shake, my own terrible hopes squeezing my insides like mutant weeds. “Stop. Just stop.” I want to stand up, I want to run, but I don’t trust my legs to hold me.

He sits down now, still in front of me, quiet for a moment. For a while, he says nothing. He stares out the wide, glass lobby doors, over the parking lot.

“What was here before?” he asks abruptly. He looks around, at the sparse, light-flooded lobby and the darkened hallway beyond it, at the highway visible just beyond the gates. “It was Shepherd’s Field, wasn’t it? We used to have Little League games here! Oh, man … that’s one of the first memories I’ve had since … since being wherever I am now. It feels so good.”

“Raina and I call it Ghost Town,” I say cautiously, quietly, conscious that I am having a conversation with someone who doesn’t exist. “She says it’s got some major bad energy.”

“She’s right. It does—I can feel it.” He cocks his head to the side. His dark curls stick up from his head. He could never control them. He won’t stop looking at me. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

He closes his eyes, presumably to better listen. “Someone’s crying…. Can you hear it?”

I shake my head—I can’t. I can’t hear anything but the sway of thick palm leaves, knocking occasionally against the big glass doors, the distant swish of cars along the highway.

I decide that I will not wait for my father any longer. I need to get away from this—from this moment, this insane, imaginary, hysterical moment. I refold the architectural plan and slip it into my purse.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

“Home,” I answer, sharply. “You’re not here, Stern.” I look him square in the eye. “I invented you.”

As soon as I say it, he shivers violently, and then disappears.
Poof
. Like that. I shake my head, heartbeat quickening, skin hot, tingly. I’m losing it. I’m really losing it.

I throw my purse into my bag, sling it over my shoulders, and push through the lobby doors to my bike. The humidity’s so thick it practically chokes me. My hands shake as I
twist the key into the chain lock, and leap onto the broad, hot seat, weaving quickly down the long gravel drive and down Sparrow Street to the boardwalk.

The road blurs behind me as I ride. My tires bump against the up-and-down of the boardwalk slats, and images flash into my head, memories unbidden, unwanted.

When Mom’s paranoia got bad, she couldn’t leave the house anymore without a baseball bat; the doctor upped her meds so high she could barely move, let alone go anywhere. She said the pills dulled her brain, that even if she lived half the day in fear of death-by-rattlesnake, she’d rather that than the alternative: sitting at her piano and finding her brain blank of all inspiration, her fingers unable to remember the intricate symphonies they’d had down cold before.

One of her sonatas, one that always made me think of Dad—steady and comforting, cowboy boots clicking through a rainy street—plays through my head as I ride.

Back home, the air-conditioning is on full blast. I pull my shoes off and rest them in the cool-tiled foyer, peek my head quickly into the dark kitchen, and see a lizard scurrying across the far wall over the pantry. I lean my bike against the wall and pad quickly up to my room, locking the door as soon as I step inside, waiting for my heartbeat to slow.

This room still feels foreign to me. I miss the room I grew up in—wood floors, Turkish rugs, Mom’s old childhood furniture we repainted together when I was a kid.
Only my bed is the same, and now I can’t wait to crawl under the covers. Sleep long, deep—maybe forever. Like him. I wonder if there’s singing where he is, in Nowhere. If there are lullabies. Maybe I’ll put him in my head as I fall to sleep. Maybe I’ll have him sing to me.
I had a dream the other night when everything was still I thought I saw Susannah a’comin down the hill. Don’t you cry, oh don’t you cry, Susannah, don’t you cry for me
.

I turn around, prepared to jump under my covers, and freeze: Stern. Sitting patiently at my desk, leaning forward on his knees, staring at me.

“You know,” he says, smiling in a way that still looks pained, “you’ve always biked like a girl.”

I have an impulse to scream, wrestle him to the ground, and claw his face off. Instead, I shut my eyes, place my hands over my ears, and start chanting, “I can’t hear you I can’t hear you I can’t hear you,” and: “I’m not crazy I’m not crazy I’m not crazy …”

Stern stands up and crosses to me. “You’re not crazy,” he says. And as he says it, I feel his hands over my own—like a shiver where he touches me.

My eyes shoot open; he’s so close, so cold. “Why is this happening?” I whisper.

“Look.” His voice is steady—so reassuring and familiar, it makes something break inside of me. That rational boy I grew up with my whole life, the boy who always knew how to bring me back down to earth when I was scared, nervous, upset, anything. The boy who anchored me. “I
realize this must
seem
crazy to you, but, in the simplest terms, I’m telling you: the person who killed me is still out there. Walking around. Free. And this light I keep seeing, from wherever I am—when I reach for it—it sends me back to you. And not just because you’re my best friend. Not because we said we’d be best friends forever, okay?” His voice turns pleading. “You’re supposed to
help
me. You have to help me. We have to figure this out. Solve it. End it.”

I stare at him, hard. “I can’t help you, Stern. The murderer isn’t free. She’s in jail. She’s my
mother
.”

He shakes his head. “She didn’t do it.”

I’m shivering all over now, furious, full of fire. “Are you insane? There’s
evidence
. They
found
her with you—with your body. It took a long time to deal with it, but now we are, or we’re starting to, and I just need to come to terms with it. Okay?” I blink hard, unable to keep the shake from my voice. “Dad wanted to stay in Oh Susannah, to have Heather come live there. For me. But we couldn’t. People egged our house every day. They painted—they painted horrible things on our door. They made sure we would never, ever forget.” I take a deep breath, try to collect myself.
You’re speaking to a person who isn’t real. He’s not real. He doesn’t exist
. I keep having to remind myself of this. “I’m sorry,” I say, turning to face him. “It’s really strange to fight with a person who isn’t even here. Especially one who wears his Christmas flannel in the middle of summer.”

“It’s always cold where I am,” he says, honestly and simply. There’s a pause, and then he says, “Is any of your mom’s piano stuff here?”

I’m too tired to wonder about the nonsense logic of my hallucinations. “Just a few boxes that I wouldn’t let Dad put into storage,” I say, rubbing my eyes. “Sheet music and notebooks and other random stuff. Why?”

At that, he sweeps past me—more shivers—toward my bedroom door. “Take me to them,” he says, and I hear excitement in his voice. “I’m going to prove to you that I’m real.”

“They’re right here.” I walk toward my closet. The cardboard boxes have been buried here, underneath my shoes and old scarves, since Dad moved all my things from the old house, but I haven’t looked at them once. After I’ve dragged them out of the closet, I stand there just staring at them.

“Open them,” Stern urges.

I tear slowly at the packing tape merging the edges of the box together. Once opened, stacks and stacks of papers are revealed. Now the tears are practically impossible to keep back: this is my mother’s music. I turn away from Stern for a moment, embarrassed. “Well,” I finally get out, “is this what you’re looking for? Sheet music?”

“No. There’s a small black wooden box with white music notes along the sides.”

“I never saw Mom with a box like that.” I reach tentatively into the first cardboard box, rifling through dog-eared
papers slowly, carefully, as though they’ll disintegrate at my touch—like she does now, in my nightmares.

“Try the next box. It’s not in there. Next one,” he continues urging. “C’mon.”

I’ve stopped fighting his voice. I push the first box aside and start on the next. This one’s got a few old photo albums on top, and beneath them: a small black box. White music notes dotted across the sides. A chill creeps along my arms. I’ve never seen the box before. I’m sure of it. So how could I have made it up?

Stern kneels next to me and I shiver as he inches closer. “That’s it,” he says, excitement piped through his voice. “Open it. There’s a little top layer you have to remove, and beneath that, there’re Goetze’s Caramel Creams. She always gave them to me after piano lessons. She knew they were my favorite. And she told me once that she hid them in here so you and your Dad couldn’t get to them.”

Feeling as though my hand belongs to someone else, I lift the lid to find another wooden layer beneath it, as Stern told me there would be. I remove the thin slat of wood slowly from the box: Goetze’s Caramel Creams, layered two-deep inside the small box. I stare at him.

“Jesus …” I feel my pulse rapidly quickening, a duel sense of relief and terror surging through my bloodstream. He
is
real. He must be.

He nods. “Yeah.”

Questions fire suddenly through brain, out my lips. “Do you remember what happened? How you were killed?” I
choke a little on the words. Stern. My Stern—here. Real and yet not real. Still not back, and still not mine.

Stern rubs his forehead, looking troubled. “No.”

“Then how can you be so sure my mom is innocent? How come you can remember where she hid her
caramels
, but you can’t remember what happened the night you were killed?”

Stern’s mouth flattens. “That night is just … dark. Almost
all
of my memories are dark. But I just …
know
. I can still, I don’t know,
feel
certain things. I can feel you. And I can feel that there’s something wrong about my death. It must be why I’m here, right? Unfinished business. The memories I have are sort of random—I don’t know where they come from. I don’t know why I get some and not others. Nothing makes a lot of sense right now, but I think that’s part of it—of dying. Of pushing your way back in, when you’re not really supposed to. I can’t access most of it. It’s slipping away.”

He lifts his eyes to mine, and for a moment we stare at each other.

I take a deep breath.
Let’s just play along for a second. Let’s just see where this goes
. “Okay … let’s start with the basics. What
do
you remember?” I ask.

My door flies open just as he opens his mouth to respond.

Dad.

I turn instinctively back to my best friend, to my love, to my Stern, but he’s gone. Disappeared. I don’t know why
I’m so shocked—he’s a ghost. A real ghost, with weird ghost powers.

I don’t know why I feel so empty, too.

“Christ,” Dad says, breathing air hard through his nostrils. “I was worried sick. You could have been dead, or
kidnapped
, or something.” He puts a hand to his head, shuts his eyes for a moment, still catching his breath. “I told you to
wait
for me. What happened? Did you forget to tell me you had better things to do?” Sweat beads against the ridge of his salt-and-pepper hairline; he pats it off with the hanky in the pocket of his suit jacket he always carries around. Mom always called him old-fashioned because of it.

I stare back up at him, defiant, even though he’s right: I blew him off, bolted when Stern showed up. “You didn’t leave me the key to your office so I just left the files.” Thankfully, lying is a skill of mine. “Sorry, but I wasn’t just going to wait around for you and Heather to finish up meeting with wedding caterer number 973.”

“I cancelled my meeting with Mr. Pomeroy. I told him I had to make sure you weren’t lying in some ditch in Liberty City. He drove all the way from
Key West
for the meeting, and I had to send him back during rush hour.” He sighs, fiddling with his old fashioned hanky. “You can’t
do
that, Liv. I’m trying to get a business started up here. You might have cost me a client.”

“You didn’t
have
to cancel.” I scratch at a hard spot in the carpet, trying to push back a guilty feeling. “It’s not my
fault you freaked out. I’m not some defenseless two-year-old, okay? So, just stop worrying. Focus on your clients and your blushing bride … I’m fine. I’m
golden
.”