Rock N Soul (34 page)

Eric had a radio spot that night. He offered to cancel it, but even without knowing the guy very well I could tell he didn’t want to, so I unselfishly offered to just call it an early night and say our last good-byes in the morning. He dropped us off at the new hotel, a much nicer place in a
much
nicer part of town, and Chris gave me a lecture about being careful with his guitar before he would finally let me carry it up to the room. We watched Eric drive off into the afternoon sun and then headed upstairs.

The room at the new hotel was fancy, with a kitchen and sitting area in addition to a king-size bed with more pillows than I’d personally ever seen on one bed in my life. I dropped my backpack on the couch and put Chris’s guitar case on the coffee table, then threw myself face-first onto the bed.

“I’m guessing you’re comfortable,” Chris said.

I didn’t lift my head when I answered, so my voice came out as an indistinguishable mumble. Chris didn’t ask what I’d said, which was probably good since I wasn’t one hundred percent sure it had even been English. Or any other language, for that matter. But the bed was so much more comfortable than my lumpy one back home that lying there motionless seemed like a wasted opportunity, so I scooted into a more comfortable position and snuggled into the fluffy comforter and just let myself enjoy it.

“So what are we going to do now?” Chris said after letting me writhe around on the bed moaning ecstatically about thread counts and memory foam for a while. “The night is young.”

I stopped wriggling and shrugged. “We could watch a movie or something. Or find something dumb on TV.”

“Or I could play for you,” he offered, glancing away like he was embarrassed at the suggestion.

“That would be really cool,” I said. “But nothing that
he
sings on. I can’t handle that yet.”

Chris’s eyes met mine, and I felt raw, like my skin had been removed and the air was hitting my exposed nerve endings all at once. After a second, he nodded. “No ITM. Got it. I’m sorry about the ‘Houses on Fire’ thing. Again.”

“It’s cool,” I said, because it was actually starting to feel like it
was
cool. “I forgive you.”

“I have a few covers I remember,” he said. “And I do still know some classical guitar solos from when I was first learning. Sonata in A and all that.”

“That sounds nice. But first let me make a phone call.” I sat up on the bed and motioned at the door to the balcony. “I’m going to go out there.”

He watched me for a moment before nodding again. “I’ll make sure it’s tuned while you talk.”

“Cool.” I stood up and went out onto the balcony, closing the door behind me. I waited until I heard the faint thrumming of guitar strings before pulling out my phone and looking up Aunt Greta’s number, then took a deep breath and dialed it.

“Marshall residence.” Aunt Greta’s voice was tinny and strained over the phone.

“Hey, Aunt Greta, it’s Tyler,” I said, making an effort to sound chipper.

There was a pause. “Tyler whom?” she said, emphasizing the
m
in “whom.”

I rolled my eyes hard. “Tyler Lindsey. Your nephew.”

“Oh,
Tyler
,” she exclaimed. “I don’t believe you’ve ever called me before.”

I forced out a laugh. “I don’t think I have. Listen, can I talk to Chad for a second?”

Another long pause.

“Aunt Greta?” A car sped by on the road below me and distant sirens and car horns flowed into the slanting light of the early evening. The auditory cues were the same as the ones in Boston, but the cities had different personalities. Boston and I were friends, maybe even more than that. LA and I . . . well, we could become close acquaintances if we spent enough time together, but I could already tell I’d never
love
it like I loved Boston.

I wondered how I would feel if I ever went to Denver.

“Yes, I’m still here,” Aunt Greta said after another second. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, Tyler. You know how upset he gets in new situations.”

“He’ll be okay, I promise,” I told her, trying to infuse my voice with trustworthiness. I put one hand on the balcony railing and leaned against it, closing my eyes, while I waited for her response.

Aunt Greta made a frustrated but oddly ladylike grunt. When she spoke again, her voice was lower in pitch and more gravelly. “I suppose a few minutes won’t hurt. Don’t upset him.”

“I won’t,” I assured her, even though it wasn’t like I knew I could actually keep that promise. Who knew what would upset Chad? Was having someone to talk to about the ghost issue better for him, or would it just make everything worse?

There was a fumbling noise on the other end of the line, then Chad spoke in his slow, slurred voice. “Hi, Tyler. Why are you calling me?”

“She made you take your meds again, didn’t she?” It wasn’t how I’d planned to start the conversation, but the poor guy sounded like he was about to start snoring.

“Yes.”

I waited for a second to see if he was going to elaborate, then continued, “I had some questions about your nana.”

The silence stretched on for long enough that I was afraid he’d hung up. I wondered if his awkwardness was a product of the medicine or if he just took after his mother. Finally, he whispered, “I’m going to my room so I can talk,” and then the phone went muffled as if he’d put his hand over the receiver.

I waited patiently while he made his way to his bedroom. There was a loud noise, then the muffling was gone and he spoke a little louder. “Okay. Nana. She’s dead.”

“I know,” I said. “But I had a question about when she was with you.”

“Before? Or . . . after?”

“After.” I suddenly realized that my eyes were still closed, and I opened them again and looked back out over the city. “Just humor me and pretend she was real, okay?”

He sighed. “You know, I’ve been thinking about it since Christmas, and I can’t come up with a good explanation for why we would both be able to see the same guy saying the same things if he wasn’t real. So . . . yeah.” He took an audible breath. “She was real.”

Awesome. That would make this whole conversation a lot easier. “Okay, cool. So I was wondering . . . did she ever touch you?”

Another long, long pause. “Nana wasn’t like that,” Chad said after a second. “And believe me, all the psychiatrists have asked that question to death, and I’ve never been abused so there’s nothing—”

Shit. “No, no, no, I didn’t mean
touch
you. Sorry. Not like that. I just mean . . . she was a ghost. Could you touch her? Or was she just . . . feel-through? Jesus, man, of course I didn’t mean did she abuse you. Fuck.”

“Oh,” Chad said, and I could practically feel the heat from his cheeks through the phone. It probably matched the heat-production of my own cheeks. “Um, yes.”

I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me since I now had pretty good proof that ghosts could touch some people, but knowing that the Eric thing wasn’t a fluke was kind of encouraging. “She touched you? Or you touched her?”

“Both,” he said. “We hugged. Before she left. And one time I was crying and she wiped my tears.” A slight pause, then in a defensive tone: “I was a little kid. That’s why I cried.”

“It’s cool,” I said. “I don’t think any less of you. Could you
always
touch her? Like, when she first appeared?”

“I don’t remember,” he said, then continued in a small voice. “I don’t remember much about my life.”

“You’ve got to get out of there, man,” I told him. “This is no way to live.”

“I can’t leave.” His voice was still small and a little afraid.

“You’re a grown man.” He acted even younger than the twenty-three or so that he was, but still. “You can leave if you want to. They shouldn’t drug you when you’re not crazy.”

“My parents want what’s best for me,” he replied. “And it’s not like I can support myself since I’ve got the psych records I have. Nobody will ever hire me.”

“Well, that’s all bullshit,” I said, “but I’ll let it go for now. Anyway. You don’t remember at all?”

“I don’t remember ever
not
being able to touch her,” he said after a few seconds. “But maybe I couldn’t sometimes and I just don’t remember.”

“Okay.” I shifted my weight to one foot and pulled my jacket tighter around me. It was so much warmer here than back home, but it was still a little chilly when the wind blew. I missed having someone to curl up with. Chris looked like the sort of person who would radiate heat if he had a real body. Had Eric felt that warmth when Chris touched him today?

“But I couldn’t touch Lucas,” Chad said, breaking into my thoughts. “If that helps.”

I’d forgotten about Lucas. Now that Chad had said the name I had a vague recollection he’d mentioned him before, but I hadn’t known who he was so I guess I hadn’t committed it to memory. “Who was Lucas?”

“Nobody I know,” he said, then corrected himself. “Well, nobody I
knew
. Before he appeared.”

“How did you end up with him?”

“Nana had been gone for a while and I was starting to feel normal again,” he said, and I noticed that his voice had gotten stronger. By now he almost sounded awake. “I could still see ghosts, I think, but I didn’t have one of my own and they were easy to ignore. So I thought it was over and then Mom took me to a garage sale. I guess I was about fifteen or sixteen then. I picked up a cool necktie—I was in a ‘maybe if I dress nice the girls will forget how weird I am’ phase—and there was a tie tack on it, and then there he was.”

“So he was just some random guy?”

“Yeah, he was the son of the man running the garage sale. He’d died about six months before that and his dad was finally cleaning out his stuff.” A sigh filtered through the phone. “Lucas was a suicide. It really upset him to find out that he still had to deal with all the things he thought he was leaving behind.”

“Did you guys become friends?”

Chad sighed. “We tolerated each other. He was depressed and only spoke when he had to. It took me a while to convince him that we should find some way to help him go on to the afterlife.”

“Wait. Didn’t he
want
to go on to the afterlife?”

“He wanted to be dead. He wanted there to be nothing. And since there was clearly
something
. . .” He trailed off meaningfully like the sentence didn’t need an ending, but I still wasn’t quite sure where that was going.

“Then isn’t that all the more reason to want to go to heaven?” I asked.

“Not when you don’t think it’s heaven you’re going to.”

He had a valid point, so I grunted in agreement. After a second, Chad continued. “So even after we got his unfinished business done, he didn’t leave for a while. He was very resistant. He stayed and he cried and he fretted until I just couldn’t take it anymore and I yelled at him to stop being afraid and move on. And he did. I hope he went to heaven because that’s on my conscience if he didn’t.”

I thought about what Chris had said before about the afterlife question. “It seems like a cruel trick for the universe to play, though, if he didn’t. You’d think if he was going to hell anyway, he wouldn’t have gotten the chance to make things right.”

“That’s what I told him, but he didn’t believe me. Not that I blame him. I was a sixteen-year-old boy on trippy medication trying to lecture him about religion and philosophy like I had a clue what I was talking about.”

“Yeah, I get that.” I took a deep breath. “So you never touched him.”

“No,” he said. “I didn’t really want to. And I don’t think he liked me much either, so it wasn’t a big deal.”

“Okay.” I let out my breath slowly. “Well, thanks for the info.”

He didn’t say anything for a few seconds, then: “So you’re gay?”

Jesus. “No,” I said, a little too fast and too loud. Then the guilt kicked in because here I was on the verge of an emotional meltdown because Chris was going to leave soon and I wanted to fucking kiss him just once, so denying it felt a little shady. So I decided to man up. “I mean, not totally. I’m bi.” And then, when he didn’t say anything: “Surprise?”

“I saw the way you stared at him,” Chad said quietly. “At Christmas.”

“There wasn’t anything there at Christmas,” I said, but we both knew that was sort of untrue. There hadn’t been anything I was ready to acknowledge, though.

“Okay.”

“Is that . . . okay? That I’m bi?” I asked him. “You’re not going to rat me out to Grandma, are you?”

“No, I won’t. And it’s fine.” Aunt Greta yelled in the background. “I have to go,” he said. “Mom’s getting nervous.”

“Thanks, Chad,” I said.

“Yeah, no problem,” he responded, then hung up.

I let my hand drop to my side, holding the phone loosely. The city was alive in the sunset, and the air was full of tension and the ocean, and Chris was inside the hotel room playing something soft and intricate on his guitar. I took another deep breath, letting the salt in the air mingle with the space in my life that I was starting to realize was the same size and shape as the man waiting in the room for me, and I wanted him so much it just
had
to make a difference.

I turned around and went back inside. He glanced up like I’d just woken him up from an awesome dream, then smiled at me. I dropped my phone on the bed and then walked toward him with purpose in my steps.