A Boy a Girl and a Ghost Read online

  The ghosts are gathered around Uncle Don’s grave. Lionel, once again, the only one I can see clearly.

  “So, it’s time,” I tell her as I drop my backpack to the grass. My eyes are adjusting, and although I can’t see her face clearly, I can see the question on it. “Time to tell you why I am here.”

  She claps her hands together once, like a kid about to get a present. “It’s summer solstice today, very auspicious. So I guess this means we know each other well enough now.”

  I shrug. “I hope so. You may run away screaming once you I tell you. You may think I’m crazy. But I am hoping you can handle it.”

  She shoves her hands into her pockets and nods. “I can handle it, Wade.”

  I sigh and start pacing in a little circle. “I am experiencing something,” I begin. “It all started the night before we met. I had this dream, of when I was a little boy and my mother brought me here. I was young, four or five, and I saw these transparent-looking people. I waved at them and they waved back. My mom couldn’t see them.”

  I pause my pacing, stopping right in front of Helena. I know this is a risk, that with her history, with her mother, any sign of me being mentally ill could send her running. But if we are to be friends, then I need us to really be friends.

  She doesn’t say a word, she just stands there, her breath shallow, as she stares at me.

  “After the dream, I snuck out of the house and made my way down here. I told Billy about it and he was meeting me here the night we met.”

  She let out a big sigh, her shoulders relaxing. “You had a bad dream, you were just down here walking it off. You didn’t see…” Her voice trails off as she studies my face. “You didn’t see anything that night, did you, Wade?”

  I don’t answer but nod my head.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Wade,” she says as she digs a cigarette out of her purse and lights up. “I told you things… private things… don’t… don’t…” Her hands shake as she brings the cigarette to her lips.

  “We’re friends, right?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says, tilting her head up and blowing out a long stream of smoke.

  “Friends speak the truth to each other, right?”

  “Yeah…”

  “I swear that I am telling you the truth. I saw flashes of light out of my peripheral vision that night. I’ve been coming back and each time I can see this one ghost clearer and clearer. I can’t hear him, but I can see him now. He’s standing right there.” I point to the left of Helena. Lionel has his hands in his pockets and a worried look on his face.

  Helena begins to pace, away from where I said the ghost was. She quickly finishes the cigarette and lights another, her pacing increasing. “Do you… do you think he’s real? That ghosts are real? That you can see them?”

  I sigh and feel weak, the energy flowing out of me like a burst balloon. “Truth?” I ask.

  “Truth,” she says.

  I pause, thinking about it. She asked me not to treat her like she broke easily. She says she’s my friend. I really tell her the truth. “I don’t know. I am worried about it, worried that there is something wrong with my brain. Leukemia can go there sometimes, and they pumped so many chemicals in my system, that…”

  I hear her sniff, like she’s crying or something and she stops her pacing and comes up to me and places her hand on my shoulder. I look up and can see the moonlight glinting off the tears running down her cheeks. She takes a deep breath and I’m terrified of what she is about to say. “I’m glad you told me.” Her hand squeezes my shoulder. “You shouldn’t have to carry something like this alone.”

  I almost collapse in relief. She’s not running away. She’s being my friend.

  “Have you told anyone else besides Billy?”

  “No. God no! Who the hell would I tell and not get myself locked up?”

  Helena sucks in a breath and her hand leaves my shoulder.

  “Sorry, Helena. God I’m sorry… Your mom… Shit, but I really have worried about this.”

  She nods, lights another cigarette, and resumes her pacing. After she’s done smoking, she walks back up to me and says, “This is what we are going to do. We are going to start with a hypothesis and then we are going to test it.”

  I stand there gape jawed. She must have noticed it, because she says, “I’m not stupid. I go to my classes. I study.”

  “Of course,” I say. It makes sense, it’s just not the kind of thing you expect to hear a girl that looks like her say.

  “So, our hypothesis is that you are really seeing this ghost.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “His name is Lionel Malak.”

  “Wait. What?” she asks.

  “I know his name. We spelled it out last night.”

  “Lionel…” she began. “Isn’t that the guy that ran the little print shop? Not far from your old man’s bookstore. It was less than a year ago that he died. I remember seeing the cop cars out front and hearing rumors of something awful.”

  “Yes. Yes. That’s it,” I said. “I knew the name was familiar. He was… he was murdered, wasn’t he?” Lionel’s movements catch my eye. He’s shaking his fists vigorously. “You were murdered?” I ask him.

  He nods and says “yes,” his mouth movements making the word clear even though I can’t hear him.

  “He’s here?” Helena asks, her voice thin.

  “Yeah. He’s always here.”

  “Shit,” she says, reaching into her purse again but then pulling her hand out, wrapping her arms around her chest and pacing again. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

  “The hypothesis. How do we prove—or disprove—it?” I ask.

  She’s biting on her thumbnail as she paces.

  “There’s got to be a way, Helena,” I say. “I gotta know.”

  “You can see him?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “He can see you?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Can he see me?”

  I look to Lionel who is nodding his head. “Of course he can see you.”

  “Okay,” she says, stopping, facing me, and holding her hands behind her back. “How many fingers am I holding up.”

  I shrug. “I don’t know.”

  “Have your ghost look, dummy.”

  Lionel moves behind her and holds up three fingers.

  “Three,” I say.

  “And now.”

  Lionel holds up six fingers. “Six.”

  She takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “And now?”

  “One.”

  Her hands come to her face as she rubs it. “Three out of three, Wade. Holy fucking shit! Three out of three. What are the odds?”

  “Umm. One in ten chance, three times. That’s one in a thousand.” I feel this warmth spreading through my body. I want to dance around the graveyard singing “I’m not crazy,” but resist the impulse. I think I’ve tested Helena way enough with my weirdness so far tonight.

  “Hmm… That’s not good enough,” she says.

  “What?”

  “Look, we want to be absolutely sure. We want the odds to be one in a million. How do we do that?”

  I look at my fingers and start running odds. “If Lionel showed me exactly how your fingers are positioned the odds would be two to the 10th power. Or 1024 to one. We do that twice in a row, that would be a million to one.”

  “Okay, then,” she says, holding her hands behind her back. “But let’s do it three times.”

  I nod and look at Lionel. He’s got the index and thumb up on his left hand and his index and middle finger on his right hand. I tell Helena.

  She nods. “One down.”

  “All four fingers on both hands,” I say.

  She nods. “One more.”

  I laugh as Lionel shows me the middle finger up on each hand. “Now you’re just giving me the bird.”

  “Holy mother of…” Helena says as she sinks to the grass. “You’re not crazy, Wade. You are really seeing a ghost.”

  “Thank go
d,” I say as I flop down on the grass next to her.

  We are silent for a while, lost in our own thoughts. I can hear her breath we are so close. I can smell that cigarette-mint breath of hers. I am becoming very fond of that odd scent.

  “But why can you see him, what does he want?” she finally asks.

  I look around and find Lionel a few yards away. “What do you want?” I ask him.

  He moves close, a look of pain on his face. His mouth moves, but I don’t know what he’s saying. “I’m sorry, I still can’t hear you,” I tell him.

  He holds his index finger up and I see him take a deep breath. He then pantomimes a knife being plunged into his chest as he falls to the ground. When he sits up, I ask, “You were murdered?”

  He nods his head vigorously.

  “Do you know who did this to you?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Do you want us to solve your murder?” Helena asks.

  He gets up and jumps up and down, a wry smile on his face.

  I look to Helena. “That’s it. He wants us to solve his murder.”

  Part 2

  A Ghost and a Murder

  10

  Tuesday, June 21, 1977

  (continued)

  Everything is different. Everything has changed. My head is buzzing as I walk home.

  I can see ghosts. I’m not crazy. Helena is… here it gets a bit tricky, but this thing with her feels doable now. The crushing weight of the infatuation has lifted somewhat. We now share something that bonds us together. Something unique.

  It’s not what my hormones want, but my heart is happy. She is now a real friend.

  As I walk the sidewalks of my neighborhood, I can’t help but smile about it all. It’s very late, nearly 3 a.m., and I’m not walking alone. Lionel is with me. Something changed for him tonight too. After Helena left, he accompanied me out of the graveyard. He’s done that before, but this time, he just kept walking as I reached Main headed south.

  “What’s happening?” I ask him. He just shrugged.

  “Is it because you finally got through to us? That you know we will try to figure out what happened to you?”

  He nods, but it’s tentative. I get the impression that he doesn’t quite understand what is going on either.

  As I quietly sneak into the house, I get the second shock of the night.

  “Good morning, son,” my father says. He’s sitting in a rocking chair in our living room, a book open in his lap. The living room’s got vaulted ceilings, a few floral-print couches, and quite noticeably lacks a TV. We don’t own one. My dad doesn’t believe in it.

  My heart is thumping loudly in my ears and I feel my face flush red. I don’t say a word but walk in and sit on the brown couch. Lionel has a worried look on his face and stays in the hallway.

  “Do you mind telling me where you have been?” His voice is freakishly calm and that is a bad sign. It means he is furious. He doesn’t yell when he’s mad, he gets even quieter.

  I just sit there looking at my hands. I feel sick to my stomach and know this is going to be bad.

  “I need some kind of explanation,” he says smoothly.

  I’m freaking out. What the hell can I tell him that won’t end up with me getting a mental health evaluation?

  “You know,” he says leaning forward, looking at me over the rim of his glasses, “in some ways I consider this a good sign.”

  “What?” I ask, meeting his eyes.

  “If you were getting chemo, if you were sick, you wouldn’t do something like this. You are well enough to violate your parents’ trust. There is a bit of a silver lining there.”

  I look back down at my hands.

  He sighs and gets up and paces the room. There are tall bookshelves lining the walls. His hands linger on some of the rare books. A copy of Huckleberry Finn, I believe.

  “Here is what we are going to do,” he says, squatting in front of me. “You and I, we are going to talk about this, right now. Or we are both going to sit here and wait for your mother to get up and I’ll turn this matter over to her.”

  It’s a threat, pure and simple. My mother would not be quiet or the least bit logical about this. I know I’m better off letting my father decide what my punishment will be.

  “I was down at the graveyard,” I say.

  He sucks in a sharp breath, stands, and slowly moves back to the rocking chair and lowers himself into it. I’ve decided to stick with the truth—in as much as I end up telling him. I don’t know how much he knows, and even with that reaction it’s not out of the realm of possibility that he knows exactly where I was. That he followed me. That he knows much of the truth already.

  “And why were you at the graveyard?”

  “I’ve been… I’ve been visiting Uncle Don’s grave.”

  He nods slowly. “And why?”

  “A little over a week ago, I had this dream of when Mom took me there. I was really young and I remember seeing these people that Mom couldn’t see among the gravestones. Transparent people. I waved at them and they waved back. Ghosts, you know.”

  “And this inspired your visit?” he asks.

  “Yes. My first one. With all I’ve been through… well, I wanted to know if I could see them again.”

  He nods and I hold my breath. I’m waiting for him to ask me if I see ghosts now, but he doesn’t. I don’t think his logical brain thinks it’s even in the realm of possibility. “And why do you keep going?” he asks.

  “Helena,” I say.

  He’s quiet for the longest time, slowly rocking in the chair, his fingers steepled and pressed to his lips. I feel sick and need to pee real bad, but I sit as still and as calm as possible. The smell of the bowl of potpourri next to me is strong and I feel nauseous.

  He’s making assumptions, and while I feel the need to let him make them, I feel bad about it. I’m not exactly lying to him, but I have definitely hidden the truth from him.

  “These nighttime outings have to stop, obviously.”

  “Yes, sir,” I say.

  “And you and I are going to sit down and have a long talk about how a man should treat a woman. We are going to make sure you are conducting yourself properly and respectfully where she is concerned.”

  The thought strikes horror into my heart, but I nod in agreement.

  He rubs his chin and continues to stare at me. “But,” he finally says, “I think we can keep this between the two of us. This would worry your mother deeply, you know. I don’t think she would understand.”

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “If your mother is to be told, I’ll handle it. I have your word, don’t I? You will not sneak out of the house anymore.”

  “You have my word,” I say, meeting his eyes.

  11

  Wednesday, June 22, 1977

  My mind is mush over breakfast, it seems to have less structure than the oatmeal I am eating. I pile on the brown sugar in the hopes of waking myself up.

  After my little talk with Dad, it took me a while to get to sleep, and then it seemed only minutes before my alarm went off. Must have breakfast with the folks, missing it would be more suspicious than my current zombified state.

  My mother is eying me. I know she’s about to ask about my health. “I just didn’t get much sleep, Mom,” I say, trying to head her off.

  “Neither of us could,” my father offers. “We had a nice chat in the living room in the wee hours. Some father-son bonding time.”

  My mother’s right eyebrow raises and she smiles. “That’s nice. And that explains the voices I thought I was hearing last night.”

  Lionel isn’t around this morning. I remember him coming into the house with me, I remember him watching as my father started his lecture, but I didn’t see him after that. Weirdly, I didn’t even think of him. The whole being caught thing drove him out of my mind.

  I poke at the white goo in my bowl, wondering where he went. What do ghosts do all day (and night) long?

  “Well, gentl
emen,” my mother says as she kisses me on the forehead and then kisses my father on the cheek. “I am off, you boys be good.”

  She leaves quickly, her flowery perfume lingering.

  “I’ll need you at the bookstore by 11:30 today,” my father says.

  My usual time is 1 p.m. I groan, I don’t want to go to the bookstore today, I want to crawl in bed and sleep. At first, I think he’s punishing me for my nighttime outings and that pops the thought of Helena into my mind. If I can’t go to the graveyard at night, when will I see her? I do know her phone number, but the thought of her father answering strikes terror in my bones for some reason. Going there even more so.

  “I’ve got a faculty meeting at lunch. I’ll be there to unlock the shop, but I need you to open up.”

  “Sure, Dad. No problem.” I say it with a smile, but he’s looking at me and hard. I know he’s trying to figure out what’s going on in my brain.

  “And I want you to do something nice for your mother,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Do something special, something she would like, surprise her.”

  I now look at him hard, trying to figure out what’s going on in his head.

  “She worries about you,” he continues. “You going out of your way and being thoughtful will not only delight her, but help her realize you really are healthy now.”

  I nod. I’m not a complete idiot, I totally get how hard my Cancer has been on my parents. They’ve had to give up a lot just to keep me alive. It’s a nice thought now that it’s penetrated my sleep-deprived brain. “Okay, Dad. That’s… that’s really a good idea. I’ll think of something awesome.”

  He smiles widely and pushes his glasses up all the way onto his nose with his index finger.

  He gets up quickly, noisily gathering his newspaper. “Thanks for cleaning up, Aaron.” Now I know he’s punishing me.