Notes from Ghost Town (9 page)

I remember my promise to say good-bye to Clare. I find her outside, watering plants on the deck in the fading daylight. “Come back soon,” she tells me as we hug a brief good-bye. “And say hello to Austin on your way out. Aus!” she yells, down toward the pool. I freeze—I forgot, somehow, that he might even be here.

“What?” He calls out from somewhere below the deck. His voice is muffled. There’s a splashing sound.

“He’ll get such a kick out of seeing you, I’m sure,” Clare says, sotto voce, to me. If only sweet, BOTOXed Clare knew of our sandy little tête-à-tête on the beach.

I suppress the urge to let slip that he
has
seen me … a lot of me, as well as my French-inspired lingerie. Unless he was too drunk that night to remember.

“What, Mom?” Austin calls out again. Clare nudges me forward, down the stone stairs to the pool, where Austin makes easy backstrokes through the glassy water.

I can practically feel Clare’s eyes on me from above. There’s no way I’ll be able to make a sneak exit, although for a moment I consider bolting for the back gate. Instead I suck in a deep breath, wait for his head to emerge from
the water at my end of the pool, and force myself to say: “Hi, Austin.”

He whips around, beads of water spiraling off his hair. “Whoa. Olivia Tithe. Hey.” He sounds oddly pleased to see me. The bad girl. The poor girl. The girl who gets so drunk she takes her shirt off for boys on the beach. He moves a few feet forward and rests his forearms on the smooth concrete lip of the pool. “What are you doing here?” He grins. “Did you miss me?”

Something about being in the presence of such sheer boy-brain loosens the knots in my stomach. It’s like watching the same romantic comedy remake again and again. It’s so easy to know what’s coming and how it will end.

“I came here to see your dad, so, don’t get too excited,” I say, watching the water ripple around his body with every small movement. “Working on your sunset tan?”

“You could say that, Tithe.” He hoists himself up to the deck, grabbing a towel from the beach chair beside me and shimmying the wet from his slender torso, his legs, his shoulders. He’s got a lot of freckles I hadn’t noticed before, when I still saw in color, a little bit of hair around his flat, dark, penny-sized nipples. He moves a little bit closer, all six foot two of him, suddenly towering over me.

“Look.” He says, and his perfect face grows perfect-serious. “I wanted to apologize for ditching you the other night…. I was way more drunk than I thought.” He grins. “It’s not every day a girl can outdrink me.”

I look away. The way he’s staring at me makes my
body feel hot. “Yeah, okay,” I mumble. “I was pretty drunk, too.”

“Well, hey.” His voice drops: “Nothing to get your purple panties in a bunch about.” Ugh. So he does remember. Everything. I bite hard into my bottom lip. A lick of wind sweeps more ripples across the face of the pool.

I check my phone for missed calls or text messages that don’t exist, and announce in a tight voice: “Shit. My best friend’s having a crisis. I gotta go.” I drop the cell phone back into my purse and wave him an awkward good-bye, walking as quickly as possible to the back gate to let myself out.

“Hey, Red,” Austin calls out, right before I unlatch the little wedge of wrought iron from its resting place. I turn, cringing at the nickname. Not the most original, but better than Fire Crotch, which was the name I heard practically every day in seventh grade. He beckons me back. I hesitate for a second by the gate, hand still on the latch. “Come here for a second. Just a second.”

I walk slowly back over to him. “What?” I ask, annoyed now.

He leans close, pressing his lips almost directly to my ear. “I just wanted you to know,” he whispers, “purple is my favorite color.”

I don’t even want to know what color my face must be right now.

I
call Carol Kohl first thing before work Friday morning, but all I get is the drone of her voice on the machine.
This is the office of Carol Kohl. Attorney at Law. Office hours are Monday through Friday, nine AM until five PM; please leave a detailed message with your number and the time you called and we’ll get back to you shortly. Thank you
.

Seven days
. The number lodges into me, an uncomfortable knot in my throat.

A long beep. My words tumble out: “Hi. My name’s, um, Olivia. Tithe. I’m—I need to speak to Carol, I mean, Mrs. Kohl. To Carol Kohl. Concerning my mother, Miriam Tithe. Please call me back as soon as you can. It’s important.” I pause, correct myself: “No. Urgent. It’s urgent. Thank you.”

Work is impossible.

The only paying customers for the carousel, all day, are a mother and her bouncy pigtailed daughter. I take their five dollars and watch them go slowly round and round, the little girl shrieking. The ride seems to last forever.

After they leave, I check my phone every minute—waiting for a call back, fingers working nervously at the edge of my Parks and Rec T-shirt—driving myself crazy.
Seven days
.

And the whole time, though I’m sure no one’s paying me even a lick of attention, I swear I feel
eyes
on me, boring into the back of my head. But, every time I whip around to catch whoever is there, I realize I’m just as alone as I ever was.

I plunk my cell phone into the pocket of my purse, fingers brushing against my sketchbook. I pull it out, open it onto my lap—an action that brings back the singing realization of how easy it all used to be, how art just flowed from me. I start to sketch a teenage couple, entwined on the swing set across the park, hungrily making out. But I keep seeing Stern. All I can see is Stern. His lips, his teeth. His hands. The black of his hair in every shadow, in every fractured angle of sunlight. It’s always him.

Stop it, Olivia. Stop it
. I start to sketch the sprawl of banyan trees mid-park instead, wild roots licoriced through the dirt. But Stern’s face keeps returning to me, everywhere I look—how different he is in death. The dark smudged now beneath his wide hazel eyes.

A storm rolls in around three-thirty—huge, pregnant clouds—and then the mother lode of thunder erupts from the sky. Everyone rushes away to the shelter of their cars before the rain starts, except for a boy, Carlos, whom I recognize vaguely from the neighborhood, and
his crew of dipshit friends. They start to hoot, slide in the grass with their shoes off. A homeless person is rooting through a trash can near the water fountains, oblivious to the storm.

I decide to cut out of work an hour early, so I can go to Carol Kohl’s office before it closes. I do a scan for boss man and, seeing that he’s not around, quickly complete my end-of-day duties, powering down the creaky carousel before locking up the ticket booth and fence outside of the carousel grounds.

Carlos and his friends are still roughhousing in the dirt, and I’ll have to pass them on my way out of the park. Weirdly self-conscious—
why do I even care?
—I pull the sweaty Parks District shirt over my head, revealing the even sweatier paint-smattered tank top I wore underneath it, zip my sketchbook into my bag before it gets too drenched, and re-ponytail my hair, prepared now to cross their path en route to my car.

As I approach, the boys have started on a new game: crumpling up their wet, empty, greasy potato-chip bags and cans of orange Slice and Coke and throwing them at the homeless woman, hunched, still digging through a trash can several feet ahead of them. The woman turns briefly to face the source of her bombardment, a wad of sodden tissues clenched proudly in her fist. I recognize her as I come closer: Medusa. Her three remaining teeth nub over her bottom lip as she frowns, turning back to her task, wild wet hair plastered to the sides of her face.

“Get outta here, you crazy bitch,” Carlos shouts, nailing her right ear with a soda can. She swats at her ear and keeps digging, undeterred, like she’s lost something precious that she’ll stop at nothing to find. She drops her treasures into the plastic bag at her feet: empty cigarette boxes, a broken flip-flop, dirt-encrusted latex gloves. Carlos’s friends crack up and ping her with more shit, nailing her in the small of the back, the bony right shoulder, the edge of her other ear. She hunches more, but keeps digging.

Carlos approaches her, a sharp stick in his hand, which he uses to start poking at the center of her back. Like she’s a piece of trash on the side of a highway. His crew cackles from the sidelines.

With a hot rush of horror, I march over to him, knock the stick out of his hand. “Get the hell out of here.” My voice is a contained growl. “Right now. I’ll call my boss. I’ll call the
cops
.”

“Jesus. Okay, okay. We were just messing around.” Carlos raises both hands, still laughing.

“I’ll have you kicked out, or you can
get
out. Up to you.” I squeeze my fists into balls.

“Come on. She doesn’t know the difference. See?” He motions to her. Medusa has her back to us again. Carlos’s crew echoes their approval, and look up at me like I’m some unreasonable teacher who’s just given them three weeks of detention for chewing gum in class.

Something snaps in me then, some twig-dam in the
center of my heart. “You think because someone’s different you can throw your
trash
at them?” I say,

“Oh, shit, I forgot.” Carlos smirks. “You got a crazy mom. You know,” he smiles sideways as he licks his lips, real slow; “you look a lot sexier when you’re not yelling at people.”

I see him wink at me again and then:
whoosh
—everything inside of me, once contained, surges forward. “Out.
Now
,” I shout, louder than I mean to. “What the fuck are you waiting for?”

The boys look to Carlos for the verdict. He shrugs before signaling the others to move out. As they start walking away through the rain, he shouts to me over his shoulder: “Guess crazy runs in the family.”

“Guess asshole runs in yours,” I shout back. Rage bubbles up inside of me. I free my right hand, grab a crushed soda can, and hurl it at the back of his head.
“Dicks,”
I scream. The four of them take off running, laughing.

I’m still standing there, staring after them, trying to catch my breath, when Medusa hobbles over to me. She stretches a clenched palm toward me and says, “tu
mano
,” in her deep, cigarette-ash voice, pointing to my hand with shaking ash-colored fingers.

“What do you want me to do?” I ask, confused, cringing slightly at the rotten smell of her.

“
Abrete
,” she says. “Open.” I open my hand to her and she drops a small, dirty coin in my palm; it has a small hole poked through the top, like something that has once
been worn on a necklace. “Tank you.” She cups her palm over mine and smiles, walking slowly back toward her trash can, where she resumes her digging, undisturbed.

I turn the coin over in my fingers again, trying to make out the design on the front—it looks engraved, but I can’t make out the initials beneath the crust of dirt—before slipping it into the pocket of my shorts and racing through the park gates, just as the storm redoubles its force, and the skies open up like they’re bleeding.

B
uzzzzzz
. The secretary (wo)manning the lobby of Carol Kohl’s office peers through the glass at me, and I see her hand feeling for a switch beneath her wooden desk. I’ve had that same
watched
feeling ever since I left the park. Maybe it’s residual ghost-sensitivity. I expect to find Stern, secreted away in every molecule of air, and at every turn. The lock to the door clicks, and I push through into a shocking wave of air-conditioning, my still-damp cutoff shorts sticking to my thighs.

The walls are a drab gray, lighter than the carpet, darker than the secretary’s pinned-back hair and lipstick. The furniture in the waiting area is ultra-modern, expensive-looking. All right angles, sharp-looking edges. A small plastic sign next to the secretary’s computer says
Jeanette
; a giant Monet reproduction—smeary, blurry grays—decorates the wall behind her desk.

“Hi. I’m looking for Carol Kohl?” I try not to fidget too much with my hands, but, momentarily overcome with self-consciousness at how wet and raggedy I must look in
this neat, gleaming office, I try and stealthily smooth out the wrinkles in my wet tank top and reconfigure my ratty ponytail into a smooth(ish) bun.

Without looking up,
Jeanette
jiggles the mouse along the mouse pad, peering at the computer screen. “I see a four-fifteen …” She consults the clock, frowns, and glances up at me. “Was she expecting you?”

“No. Well, I don’t know. But it’s urgent.” I tug at the bottom of my tank top, tighten the rubber band around my ponytail, feel the words start to pool beneath my tongue. Her eyes are warm. She wants to listen. “My mom’s hearing is coming up really soon …” I trail off, shaking my head. “I just really need to see her. Mrs. Kohl. I’ll wait all night, I don’t care.”

“Let me see what we can do,” she says softly. The flesh of her arms jiggles as she picks up the phone and presses a square button on the console. She examines her long, tricked-out fingernails as she speaks, low, into the phone. “Someone here to see you. Olivia Tithe …?” She looks to me for confirmation. I nod. She writes something down on a notepad, nibbles on the pen cap after; her molars carve new shadows into the plastic. “Yes. Well, okay. Uh-huh. And did you want me to move your—No. Okay then.” She hangs up, stands from her chair and crosses behind her desk to the edge of the hallway. “Come on,
bonita
,” she says, cocking her head toward the offices. “Let’s go.”

I follow her, my rain-drenched shoes squishing noisily in the quiet of the building. At the end of the hall, Jeanette
directs me to
turn left at the dolphin sculpture
. When I do, I find myself standing in front of a wide glass-paneled room.

I peer quickly inside and see Carol perched at her desk, typing furiously. I’ve only met her a couple of times. I hadn’t realized before how birdlike she looks: sharp-beaked with small, piercing black eyes; close-cropped blond-streaked hair emerging light and feathery from her scalp.