Shutter(35)

“Rita, what are you looking at?” Shanice stacked quarters at her desk. When I didn’t answer, Shanice’s grandma turned her attention to me too.

“Can you see me, Rita?” Her grandma’s ghost smiled right at me. I must have nodded.

“Earth to Rita.” Shanice waved her hand inches from my face.

Shanice’s grandma walked over to the shelf and pointed at a book. I could hear her infectious laugh as her spirit dispersed into the sun at the open window.

“Are you on drugs?” Shanice was right in front of me, her nose touching mine. I stood up and looked at the shelf where her grandma’s ghost had been pointing. A Bible. I pulled it from the shelf and handed it to Shanice.

“Why are you giving me the Bible, Rita?”

When she opened it, a crisp twenty-dollar bill floated to the floor. She picked it up and glared at me, half curious and half scared.

“Shanice. What if I told you that I can see things that other people can’t see?” I was afraid of her reaction.

“What do you mean?” She stood with the bill in her hand. “Like money in books on shelves?”

“Like people who are dead.”

“Ghosts?” Shanice sounded excited. “Did a ghost tell you to hand me my Bible?”

I didn’t want to tell her that I saw her grandma. “I’ve been able to see them for a long time.” I wondered if this was the last time Shanice would ever consider me her friend.

“How come you never told me?” Shanice looked disappointed, but not for long. “I have a million questions! Do you talk to dead people? Do they answer? Have you seen any famous dead people? Like, you know, Elvis or anyone like that?”

“No, I haven’t seen Elvis. No, I try not to talk to them. I’ve learned to turn them off, just like a switch. But some sneak in.”

Shanice circled me, examining me like a lab scientist. “I can’t believe this is the first time you are telling me about all this!” She grabbed my face. “I thought I was your friend.”

“What do you want me to say? It sounds like a bad movie.”

“Well, our Halloweens certainly could have been a little more interesting.” She was bubbling with excitement. “We should go to that haunted house out by the church or over to the graveyard and see what happens.”

“No,” I said.

BY THE TIME the sun was setting, we were at the haunted house where the widow Mrs. Gutierrez used to live. The house, on the hill behind the elementary school, was boarded up and desolate now, the adobe wall crumbling at the gate. At Halloween, all the kids would go to the house to play with Ouija boards to scare the hell out of each other and prank the gullible. The story was that Mrs. Gutierrez had killed her husband and child after she found out that Mr. Gutierrez had another lady friend in town. She had meant to kill her husband, yes, with a poison pie that she had baked, but her poor daughter decided to share a piece and died too. They said you can hear her crying up a storm every night.

I didn’t believe it, but I felt an uneasiness. I remembered Mr. Bitsilly talking to me about playing with these forces.

“You never know what path a spirit has taken until they are in your head. Don’t let them know that there is a door. Don’t let them know that you are the key.”

We pulled our bikes along the tree line and leaned them against the withering gate. Shanice and I walked all around the house, shining a flashlight into windows and dying cottonwoods. The sun had gone down, and the full spread of darkness had moved into the Gutierrez house.

“Well? Do you see anything?” Shanice shivered in the dark.

“No,” I said. “I’m starting to get cold. Let’s go.”

We rode off that night without seeing Mrs. Gutierrez or her family. I was glad. I didn’t know what kind of person that Gutierrez woman was. For all I know, she could’ve haunted me forever. Shanice never mentioned it again, and we never went back. Maybe she got spooked.

The next morning, we rode into the parking lot of one of our main summer hangouts—the pool—only to see that the park adjacent had been closed for the day. Yellow tape lined the grassy border as cherry and silver lights turned in the summer sun. Police were scattered throughout the park, talking among themselves and taking photographs of whatever was behind the sheet they were holding.

We rushed through our swim lesson and hurried to the locker room, overcome by the morbid curiosity of whatever was being concealed beyond the yellow tape. We threw our clothes on over our wet swimsuits and ran for the soccer field, where we could get a better view. One man was still taking photographs, and I whipped out my 77x and took a few pictures myself. I had never seen a scene like this. The sheet was now gone. A young man’s body lay there in the heat beneath two giant cottonwood trees, one shoe missing, his arms outstretched. We watched in silence as the men moved the body into a body bag, then into a waiting car. The men left one by one, taking with them the streams of yellow tape, leaving behind only their footprints.

When the last of them were gone, Shanice and I walked across the street toward the trees. The blood had dried in the summer heat and pooled into the dark, thirsty soil. I saw white flecks of tissue in the deep cracks of the cottonwood bark. We stared for a long time. As we turned to walk home, I found myself looking off into that tree line, hoping that the man who left the earth was at peace. It made me sick.