Last Girl Ghosted(12)

You’re gone.



six


Then


The air in the old minivan was thick with misery, the trailer on the back thumping and squeaking behind us, threatening to break away. I turned to watched it swerve and lurch, thinking of my stuffed animals and books piled into boxes inside, imagining what it would all look like scattered across the highway if the trailer got away from us, went crashing off the road.

I’d stopped crying, tears dried up as the hours on the road passed, after the town I knew as home receded in the rearview mirror, and soon there were only trees and sky, the long and winding road to nowhere. The radio station we were listening to faded into static. I’d told my friends I was moving but I hadn’t said when, because I didn’t know. We left in the night; I never got to say goodbye. That is the core problem with being a kid; the adults in your life make decisions and you are carried along in the current of their choices. Avery. Grace. Sophie. Would they wonder where I’d gone and why I hadn’t really said goodbye? I asked my mother.

“We’ll send everyone a note when we get where we’re going. They’ll understand. People move all the time. It doesn’t mean you’re not friends anymore.”

How could you be friends with people you might never see again?

I tried to reach for my brother’s hand, but he pulled away, turning against the window, looking out, his face a mask of sullen adolescence.

“The best thing about this place,” said my dad from the front seat. His eyes caught mine in the rearview mirror. “Is the land.”

“It’s gorgeous, Luke,” my mother, Alice, agreed, her voice taking on the false brightness reserved for doctor’s visits. “So peaceful.”

He reached across the seat for her, rested a hand on her thigh.

“The world of men is failing,” he went on. “Where we’re going, we’ll be free.”

“The world of men is not failing,” said Jay. “You are. You lost your job, our house is in foreclosure, and there’s no place else for us to go.”

I felt my whole body stiffen, heard my mother draw in a breath. If we were sitting at the kitchen table, it would have been a moment of ignition. A leap, a chase, a beating if my father could catch Jay. My brother was growing bolder as he grew in size. He was fast. Faster than our father usually these days.

“Shut your mouth, boy,” my father said easily, instead. He was driving; he was sober. He was a different person than he was after a few beers, or when he was hungover. “I could fill a book with what you don’t know.”

Jay scowled, fell silent.

“Little bird knows the truth,” he said, catching my eyes again. “Don’t you?”

My mom turned to me and smiled. She was a golden beauty with glittering sea glass blue eyes, kindness etched into her face. I was her accomplice in calming my father, telling him what he wanted to hear so he didn’t get angry.

“It’s our family home,” I said. “It’s where we belong.”

And in doing so, I betrayed Jay. He shot me a venomous look, and I moved as far as I could away from him in the car. I didn’t have the words to tell him that I was doing it for him as much as for mom and me. When my dad hit him, I felt every blow.

“That’s right,” said my father, eyes shining. “It’s where we belong.”

It was dusk when we finally arrived, pulled up the long gravel drive. The house hulked ahead. It looked as if no light had ever burned inside its windows. The trees around us were inked lines, hiding shadows.

Houses are like people. They have memories, and energy. They wait. They wilt from neglect. They sicken and decay. They haunt, and they are haunted. This house was a too big, rambling old place, populated by restless ghosts and bad memories. It seemed to rise out of the trees as we grew closer.

Its windows were eyes. Its eaves, arched brows raised in dark surprise.

The land, acres and acres of it, I’d come to learn, was a forest of ill-conceived ideas and broken promises.

But when my father got out of the van, his face was lit with a smile I had never seen. Even Jay seemed to shift off his cloak of unhappiness, as he exited and reached high in a stretch.

My mother got out and went into Dad’s open arms. Jay stood beside them, and when I came to join them, he dropped an arm around me, looking down. It was an apology for being such a jerk in the car; I accepted as any acolyte would, shifted into him, glad for the warmth and strength of his body.

It was just the four of us then, standing on the edge of an uncertain new life.

“Do you hear that?” my father asked, face bright. I shivered and pressed into Jay, wrapped my arms around my middle.

“Nope,” Mom said after a moment of listening. “Don’t hear anything.”

“Exactly,” he said with a laugh. “You don’t hear anything.”

Just the wind in the leaves on the trees all around. The smell of pine.

He released my mom and clapped his hands together once, the sound echoing.

“We’ll have to get the generator running tomorrow,” he said. “Tonight we’ll make a fire out back for cooking—good thing we grabbed those groceries and firewood in town.” Even at ten years old I was thinking about the case of beer, knowing without the words to say it that exuberance, like depression, might lead to drinking. And drinking could lead anywhere.