He Started It(49)

“All the ghosts,” I say.

“Even Grandma.”

Yes, Nikki had said that. I believed it. We all did because we wanted it to be true. No one cared what Grandpa thought about seeing Grandma’s ghost. He was just the asshole who hit her.

The drive also made him sick. He vomited when we got to the top, although that was probably due to the pills and the NyQuil. Bad mix.

Now Felix is the one who looks queasy. He has one hand on the dashboard, the other clenching the seatbelt.

I pat him on the arm. “Exciting, right?”

“Almost there,” Eddie says.

“Jesus Christ, your grandfather brought you guys up here?” Felix says.

I don’t answer that. No one says another word until our car makes that final lurch up to the top. I exhale because that’s what you do when you escape death, or at least feel like you did.

Another dirt road brings us to Kirwin, where two hundred residents once lived and worked mining both gold and silver. We get out of the car and stare at the buildings. They’re all boarded up, every last one. If there are ghosts, we can’t see them.

It’s spooky, though. Spookier than I remember as a kid. Now I can imagine the people who used to be here, can envision them walking, working, growing food, and praying at the little church. What I can’t imagine is the same thing, day after day, without any relief in sight.

Not so different from life now.

Felix is the only one who hasn’t seen Kirwin before. He glances around, still looking a little sick from the ride. “Seems like we could’ve done this with a drone,” he says.

It takes a second, but everyone starts to laugh. A big laugh, the kind you feel deep in your belly, the kind that makes you double over and try to catch your breath.

Sometimes Felix makes me laugh this hard. I might miss that.





What are you most grateful for?

Having a brain. I can’t imagine being stupid.

I’m also grateful for Beth, not that I’d ever say that to her. But really, this wouldn’t work without her, because someone’s got to keep an eye on everything when I’m driving. If Eddie wasn’t so into his NIN world, maybe he’d help out, but of course, he’s not. Trent Reznor’s got his attention.

I’m also grateful for Thelma & Louise. Grandma and I used to watch that together. She loved it, but I never understood why until she got sick and told me what Grandpa did to her. Then I got it. She was Thelma, the one with the horrible husband, and all she wanted to do was run away and get back at him. At everyone. When I finally understood why she liked that movie, I told her I’d be Louise. So that’s what I’m doing.

I just wish she was still around. I wish she was on this trip, so she could see that I’m getting Grandpa back for her. I told her I would.

I promised.





We all knew the trip up to Kirwin was long and treacherous and the drive down wasn’t any better, but we also knew we had to do it. We worked under the assumption that our whole trip was being tracked.

The reality was we had no idea, we just assumed, and no one wanted to chance breaking the rules just in case we lost our inheritance. For all we knew, there was a camera in the car.

There were other reasons to go back, though. The first was the air. Nothing like it, at least not that I’ve experienced. This is pure clean air, high up enough to avoid any smog, exhaust, or any other sign of the modern world. If you’ve never smelled that kind of air, believe me when I say it’s different.

However. I sure as hell didn’t risk falling off a cliff just to inhale air. We have a more interesting reason to be here.

I point to a squat log cabin, the first one on the right. “Behind it. Fourth to the left, five back.” It was all in the journal. Every place we visited was marked on a hand-drawn map inside the back cover.

Eddie and Portia started walking. Felix looked at me and said, “What’s that?”

“The tree.”

“The tree?” he says.

I nod but don’t explain.



* * *



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It was Nikki’s idea. When we got tired of running around the abandoned town and started complaining about the lack of ghosts, she said we needed to leave our mark. “People will know we were here,” she said. “Forever.”

Eddie suggested carving our names on one of the buildings, but Nikki said whoever was in charge of Kirwin would get rid of that. This was a clean place—no garbage or graffiti—so we had to pick something that wouldn’t get erased. The best we came up with was a tree, in part because they were everywhere. The whole town was surrounded by giant evergreens that had to be twenty feet tall and a hundred years old. We went with the odds. Kirwin was in a national forest and you couldn’t just walk up and cut down a tree. We bet the tree, and our carving, would be here forever.

“What did you say?” Portia yelled. “Fourth to the left?”

“And five back,” I said.

Before we carved anything, we all argued back and forth, like that old seesaw, about how big the carving should be, what the carving should say, where on the tree it should go. We wanted to be able to find it again, and to have others see it, but it couldn’t be so ridiculous that the park rangers would get mad about it. Maybe they’d scratch it out or change it. Then we’d disappear forever.