Taking Risks (26 page)

             
My mouth dropped open wide, and then I looked straight at my mom. She was full on crying now, and it broke my heart to see her hurting. I threw my arms around her neck.

             
“Don’t feel bad Mom. No one would’ve believed it.” I said as I stroked her hair to comfort her.

             
She sobbed into my neck for a minute and then said, “Marlee, you’ve been talking about this since you were old enough to speak. I should’ve believed you. I’m your mother!”

             
Mom pulled away and dried her eyes, and Risk grabbed my hand. Gray came to sit in one of the kitchen chairs with us. He looked at me with a huge grin as to say “We told her so!” and I rolled my eyes at him, which made his face sour.

             
“Is this…Gray?” Mom said, and pointed to the picture. I nodded my head and then she asked, “Is he here…right now?” I glanced over at his chair and then nodded at her again. She looked nervously at Grays chair for a minute and then asked one more question. “You said that you were in some kind of trouble…is everything okay?”

             
“Yes, we took care of it.” I said, and Mom seemed to relax a little.

             
“I want to understand this,” Mom said, “I want you to explain your world to me Marlee. I’ve ignored it for so long, and now I feel like I don’t even know you.”

             
So Risk, Gray, and I spent the rest of the evening explaining to my mom about the Lost Ones and how I help them. I told her about the ones with the red eyes, and how they turn into those kind of souls. She asked some questions along the way, but mostly she just listened. Gray was talking up a storm, and I would relay what he said to Mom. He seemed like he was pouring everything that he ever wanted to say to her out in this one sitting.

             
“I love to watch you cook, you make it seem like a home when you’re flipping pancakes and humming.” He told her. He also told her about the time that I broke my leg while trying to climb a tree and he made the neighbor’s dog bark so that she would look outside and see me. Mom flinched at the memory of seeing me in that kind of pain, but then looked at where I told her that Gray was sitting and said “thank you” with a big smile on her face.

             
Mom turned to Risk when Gray was finally at a loss for words and asked, “So you can see them too?”

             
Risk nodded. “It’s a recent development.” He joked. “The first time I saw Marlee I felt drawn to her. I always knew that there was something different about me, but I could never put my finger on it. After she and I spent a little bit of time together she told me that she knew what I could do, and I should quit lying to myself about it. She told me what she could do too, and it freaked me out…a lot. I thought she was nuts, but by that time I was already head over heels for her, so I took her word for it. When I started to believe, my abilities started to develop.”

             
Hearing Risk telling my mother about falling in love with me gave me butterflies. I wanted to squeal with delight, but I didn’t want to get made fun of, so I just settled for googly eyes and a moron grin. After we had all explained our stories to Mom she stretched and yawned then excused herself to bed. Before going, she gave me a hug and whispered in my ear, “You’re a truly amazing woman, and I’m so honored to have you as my daughter.”

             
In that moment, my life was whole. All of the people in the world that I truly loved were sitting side by side in my kitchen, and Mom had accepted the existence of Gray. I wasn’t going to have to hide who I was anymore from my mother, whom I adored, and my best friend, and the man that I love were now part of my family. Mom went off to bed, and I stayed at the table in a state of complete bliss as I watched Gray and Risk laughing and telling stories, both of them with sparkling green eyes.

             
Summer time was my favorite part of the year. The weather was finally warm again, and it made my spirit feel freer with every degree that rose in the temperature. My life had finally fallen perfectly into place. Mom moved her things out and Risk moved his things in. Since Gray could finally be acknowledged he was given his own corner of the living room to make his own. He had a futon and an arm chair along with a bookcase full of some of his favorite books (he made me turn the pages for him) and the wall was littered with pictures. Some of the pictures Mom had given him and they were of me as a little girl.

             
I was happy to see that the camera had caught his image some over the years and not just in the prom night photo. There was one where I was playing in a sprinkler in the yard, and you can just barely make out the gray smudge to the side of me. There were a few others that had balls of light in them that I’ve come to realize are images captured of spirits. None of them were as clear as the prom photo that my mom discovered though. He was a little transparent in that one, but you could definitely see him. It was the cold hard proof that Mom needed to believe that I wasn’t bat shit crazy.

             
Risk seemed like a kid in a candy store for the first few weeks of living with me. He went on and on about my cleanliness and home cooking. He went and saw his mother here and there, but he always seemed to be in a horrible mood when he got home. I knew he had told her about moving in with me, and I also knew that she was giving him a hard time about it. That woman could make him feel like mud on her shoe, but I always gave him a reason to perk up when he got back to the house. Normally in a way that we had to kick Gray out for a little while.

             
Risk had quit his job at the car shop and had fallen into an amazing position at the bank. Since he had been the one to do all of the finances since he was just a kid, he knew what he was doing when it came to pushing money around. Risk wasn’t interested in going to college, but the bank paid him very well and he was going to work on climbing the ladder.

             
After the ghost apocalypse everything went back to normal. Only the usual amount of Lost Ones hung around the old town square behind our house, and the ones that were held back by Joey had passed on. We rarely ever saw any souls with red eyes. I showed Risk how easy it
normally
was to help the lost souls, and that the situation with Joey and his family was a once-in-a-lifetime ordeal. He loved doing ghost work. Gray and I taught him the basics of how to approach them and manage their moods, and we told him everything we knew about them that he didn’t already know. The first soul that Risk helped was someone who had died giving birth. She wanted Risk to tell her husband that she was so sorry that she had left him alone, and that she didn’t want him to beat himself up over being remarried. She approved of his new wife and said that he was raising their daughter with grace. She wanted a separate letter written for her daughter, who was now six years old. That was really emotional for Risk to do because he saw the kind of love that a parent
should
feel for their child. She poured her undying love into that letter, and made sure to leave no doubt in her daughters mind about how much she loved her, even though they didn’t get a chance to know one another.

             
On a beautiful sunny day Risk, Gray, and I went for a little fishing trip behind Risks old trailer. On the drive there I hung my head out of the window to feel the breeze in my hair and the warmth of the sun on my face. Gray sang along to an old AC/DC song and I couldn’t help but hope that my life would always be this perfect. I had the man of my dreams, and the most loyal friend that anyone could ask for. I felt completely loved and it made my stomach do back flips to think about it.

             
Risk put his hand on my knee from the driver’s seat, and I pulled my head back in the window to look at him. I saw the smolder in his eyes, and he licked his lips. My body started to ache just from that look. He was impossibly beautiful. He had kept his hair much like Gray’s with it cropped close to his scalp on the sides and longer on top, but Risks hair was darker, almost black, and it seemed to be less strategically placed and more like he just had my fingers tangled in it. He wasn’t wearing a shirt because of the heat, and I took a peek at the rise and fall of his perfectly sculpted chest. Then my gaze went to his tattoo on his hip. Even though he got it when he was lost and hurting, I still loved it. It making me drool as it peeked up out of his cargo shorts right at the sculpted V that led down into his shorts. I wanted to be that tattoo.

             
I bit my lip and then I heard that Gray had stopped singing. I turned to look back at him, and burst with laughter. Gray had a look of pure disgust on his face, and he was totally pouting like a child. Risk took a peek in the rear view mirror and joined in on the laughter.

             
“What’s wrong man? We’re just trying to communicate telepathically. It’s no big deal.” Risk said and then gave me the bad boy smile that brought my mind back to the way he was making me feel.

             
Gray sighed over dramatically and said. “Is this stage of your relationship ever going to fucking end? I’m running out of shit to occupy myself with while you’re…doing that.”

             
We got to the pond and put our poles in the water. Risk had much more experience with fishing than I did, but luck was always on my side. I seemed to always catch more than him, and they were always bigger. He never told me that it irritated him, but the look on his face each time I pulled one out of the water was priceless. The first fish that I caught on that day was a huge one, and Risk caught me giggling at his reaction.

             
After a moment of confusion on his end, he understood why I was laughing and started to laugh too. Risk ran over and tackled me to the ground, tickling me until I nearly peed my pants. Gray laid on the bank in the sun watching us. He looked pretty blissful as he watched us play. We were more like children to him than we were friends, but Gray had seen me grow into the person that I am, and he had helped me the entire way, so I guess he’s entitled to be proud of his work.

             
A short time ago, Risk started to ask Gray questions about his life. Over the years I’d asked him all sorts of questions, but he didn’t really have much to tell me because he didn’t remember anything about himself from before he died. Risk asked him things like, “Where did you grow up?” and “How did you die?” I knew Gray’s answers to these already and they were unsatisfying.

             
One day though, we all took a walk through town, just to get out of the house, and we happened to walk by the park. We stood and watched the kids on the swings for a few minutes and then resumed our walk. Risk was quiet for a little while, and then he asked Gray, “Did you ever want kids?” Gray chewed the question over for a minute before he answered him.

             
“I feel like there’s this hole inside of me that was once filled with a great love. It’s a joy and a sorrow kind of feeling. I’ve been around a while, and I’ve only ever seen that emotion in someone who has children, so I believe that I did want kids but even if I didn’t in my life time, I think… I would have some now, if I could.

             
I was a little shocked at the depth and honesty of the answer, but it made since. I asked Gray that same question when I was little, but he responded vaguely, probably because I was just too young to understand. I had always seen Gray as a big brother. He looked after me, and knew all of my secrets. He could have gone and seen the world, but the world can be a lonely place when you have no one to share it with, and he and I had bonded, so he stayed with me. I had never taken his company for granted.

             
Risk saw his line go taught on his fishing pole so he ran over to it. Gray appeared next to me on the ground and put a hand in my hair. I had gotten used to the tingling sensation of his touch, and I welcomed it.

             
“Without you Spud, I would be one of those red eyed monsters for sure.” Gray said as he stared into the distance.

             
“Without you I would be friendless.” I said and started laughing. Gray “punched” me in the shoulder and we watched Risk as he through his tiny fish back into the water.

             
The rest of the day we spent playing around and fishing. We had a small picnic and even took a little nap as we listened to Gray singing and the water running down stream. I couldn’t have even imagined a more perfect day, but every day has to come to an end, so we packed up our stuff and started back towards the Delray that was parked in front of the trailer.

             
On the walk back, I listened to Gray and Risk talk about sports and joke about the women that Gray sat with at Rocktop. When we cleared the woods the nasty trailer came into view. It had been inhabitable since he moved out. He never cleaned up the mess that his parents had made of it, and I made sure that he knew that it wasn’t his responsibility to clean up another one of their messes. He never packed his dads things up or took them out, and only packed the things up for his mom that she specified that she wanted, so the old house was still full of bad memories.

             
We packed the trunk up with all of our fishing supplies and Gray transported himself to the back seat. I was settling into the passenger side as Risk said, “Just a minute, okay?” I have to run inside and grab something for my mom.” I made a sour face at him, and he just chuckled as he ran into the broken down house.

             
A few minutes later he came back out with an old shoe box that was covered in dust.

             
“What is it?” I asked him, and Gray peeked over to see.

             
“I don’t know, probably just some old papers.” Risk said and opened the box. Inside was a document folder filled with paper work. He opened it up to find a legal document with his name on it, but the last name had changed. This document said, “Risk Walters” and we all knew that it was his adoption paperwork. Gray made a little gasping sound and Risk turned pale.

             
We all read silently down the paper until we reached some names. Braxton Walters and Tonya Hill were the unwed, teenage parents of Risk.

             
“I want to find them,” he said, “I want to find out why they gave me away. I know that its so cliché, but I need to know who they are.”

             
Risk shifted the folder, and when he did, something fell from it. A photograph laid face down on the floor of the car. It seemed like I was moving in slow motion as I stooped down to pick it up. What I saw was a beautiful blonde girl with pale green eyes and Risks perfect smile. He looked like her, but next to her was a guy that I knew. He had honey brown hair, and sparkling emerald green eyes...Risk and I called him Gray.