I turn to run, but suddenly his hand is on my arm, holding tight. Curtailing the blood supply. “Let go of me!” I scream, but he doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. I’m a wiggly worm on the end of a fishing hook, kicking and screaming for dear life.
And then there, in his hand, he brandishes something, a weapon, the light from a streetlamp a solid twenty feet away casting a faint glow on the shiny matter—steel, maybe, or maybe metal. Is it a gun, a knife? I don’t know. I tug at my arm. I try hard to pull away. I begin to cry.
“Don’t hurt me,” I beg. “Please, don’t hurt me.” His hand is hurting my arm, making it ache, the ligaments and muscles stretching in ways they aren’t meant to go.
But all he does is laugh.
There are three million people in all of Chicagoland and not a single one of them with me on this street tonight. I should scream. That’s what I should do. Help me! Help me! But my voice is nothing more than a whisper. I open my mouth to scream but nothing comes out.
“Hurt you?” he says. “I ain’t trying to hurt you.”
I say it again. “Let me go, let me go, let me go.”
“You left this on the bus, lady,” he tells me. “That’s all. You left this on the bus.”
And then I see the item in his hand. It makes a ting, a slight noise hardly audible over the sound of my cry. Not a gun, not a knife. But a phone. Esther’s phone. Which must have fallen out when I dropped my bag under a seat where I couldn’t reach. As I snatch the phone from his hand, he lets go of my arm and I draw back quickly, tripping again over my own two feet. But this time, I don’t fall.
An incoming text message has just arrived.
I don’t need a password to read this one. There it is, right on the display screen.
Payback’s a bitch, it says.
Alex
We’re sitting on the dusty, dirty floor of the old tract home. Homes likes these, there’s nothing unique about them. About a hundred of these very same homes popped up almost overnight, fifty or sixty years ago, so that this one is the same as the next, as the next, as the next. They’re all the same, every single one of them, except that one may be brown and one may be blue. But they’re all ugly and stodgy and just plain blah. Just like my very own home across the street from here. It’s ugly, too.
It’s dark outside, still night. We walked until we could walk no more, and then, instead of going back home and to bed, I came here. To this home. To Pearl’s home.
“Tell me about this ghost,” Pearl says. She sits on the floor before me, her legs pulled up into her. How I came to be here, I don’t know. I just did. She folds her hands into her lap. The scintilla of light that sneaks in through the edges of the boarded-up window reflects off the pointed, triangular tooth—my necklace, my shark’s tooth necklace, which lies over the neckline of her own T-shirt. It’s dark in here. Between the boarded-up windows and the lack of lights, I can no longer tell day from night. I’ve lost all sense of time. Pearl sits just two feet away, staring at me, until I can hardly dredge up my own name or the reason why I’m here.
“What ghost?” I ask, though of course I know what she means. She looks a bit tuckered out. Tired. I imagine it’s not easy sleeping on a hard floor, spending your days roaming some small town’s streets. Just passing through, she’d said, and I wonder how long until she leaves. Not that I want her to leave, because I don’t, but I wonder when the day will come that I’ll show up at this godforsaken home and she won’t be here.
“You told me this house was haunted,” she says. She won’t believe any of the stories I’m about to tell; I don’t even believe them. But it’s conversation. Small talk. And anyway, what’s more important than the ghost—or this stupid idea of a ghost that half the town has conjured up—is the little girl she used to be. The rest of it is just for fun. People like to make themselves feel scared. They like to tell the tales to scare other people, too. But it’s all just make-believe.
Genevieve has been dead for years now, since before I was even born. What I know is hearsay. As the story goes, she drowned in some hotel bathtub while her mother was in the neighboring room, attending to a baby, incognizant of the way five-year-old Genevieve slipped beneath the water and drowned. There was no scream like people do when they’re hurt or in danger, but rather a silent death, the sagging underwater and drifting off to sleep. She never cried out; she never gasped for air. That’s how the story goes.
In time, the accounts of Genevieve’s death became romanticized to say the least: a little girl immersed in a cornucopia of bubble bath and soapsuds so that all that remained above water were a few random strands of brunette hair. They were in a lavish hotel room, on vacation. The description of the death scene was redolent: the puce-colored bubbles with their raspberry sorbet scent, the girl’s creamy skin, reddened by the warmth of the water, though none of the people telling the tale were there to see what it is that they describe: the few random bubbles, silvery bubbles floating in the air, sticking to the bathtub tiles. Genevieve had drowned, forgotten in the bathtub thanks to a little moppet in the adjoining room, her sister, only a year or two old at the time, who had fallen from the bed and cried, taking her mother’s attention away from the girl in the bathtub.
It was too expensive to ship the body across state lines, or so they say, those neighbors who are old enough to remember the day the family car pulled into the driveway of the yellow home, the three-foot corpse tucked away in the trunk to skirt whatever legalese was required of moving a body from here to there. Neighbors say they’ll never forget the way they hovered in the cracked, concrete driveway, waiting to help lift the rudimentary wooden casket from the trunk and into a hole they’d dug up at the cemetery in town. The news of Genevieve’s death had already arrived, leading the way into town well before her corpse.
People were shattered. Little girls weren’t supposed to die.
All that was left behind was Genevieve’s ghost, said to haunt people even in sleep, their dreams filled with bath water spilling over the sides of a tub, a little girl like a seraph: dead. Her skin, ashen and white, wings sprouting from her body. Her hair jet-black and wet.
I don’t believe any of those things.
“Genevieve,” I say to Pearl. “That’s her name, the girl’s name who died. The ghost’s name supposedly.”
“It’s pretty,” she tells me. “It’s a pretty name.”
“It is.”
“And she died?”
“She did.”
“Here?” asks Pearl, doing a sweep of the room with her slim arm, but I shake my head no. I follow the path of her arm, anyway, to the shadows that linger in each and every corner of the room, the spiderwebs that hang from the ceiling like lace. I have half a mind to excuse myself and come back with a mop and a vacuum, to clean this place up. I think that I would do that for Pearl. I would make this place somewhat more livable and nice. I couldn’t fix everything, no, of course not. But I could sweep the floors and dust the webs. That kind of thing. She shouldn’t have to stay here in this hellhole.
The cold room has drifted to hot, thanks to the heater. Hot enough that Pearl has removed her coat and my sweatshirt and sits beside them on the floor in a thin cotton shirt and her jeans. Her arms move with the grace of a ballerina, moving through their positions in the air. I want to ask her if she ever danced, if she ever took ballet classes, what the nature is of her relationship with Dr. Giles. But I don’t. Of course I don’t. None of these things are my business. Everyone has their own secrets. She doesn’t ask me mine, so I won’t ask her hers. Though I’d tell her, of course; I’d tell her anything and everything she wanted to know.
We’re friends, right? You and I. We’re friends.
“No,” I say then, focusing on the conversation at hand. “Not here. Genevieve didn’t die here.” And then I go on to tell her about the family vacation, about the lavish hote
l. The cornucopia of bubble bath and soapsuds and all that stuff. I watch as her face saddens with my narrative of little Genevieve’s death.
“She didn’t know how to swim?” she asks me, and I shrug my shoulders and say, “Apparently not.” Because of course if she did know how to swim she would have held her breath under water, and not inhaled deeply and let the water fill her lungs. There was speculation that Genevieve tried to stand up in the bathtub and hit her head on the ceramic tile, causing her to become unconscious before she drowned. That’s just one hypothesis. No one was there to say for sure. No one saw her die. There’s also the assumption that she was playing a game, trying to see how many seconds she could hold herself under water, but the water won out in the end. Oxygen deprivation, they think, summoning a breathing reflex, the body’s natural need to breathe even when submerged in soapy water, filling the stomach first, and then the lungs, with fluid. Hundreds of thousands of people die each year from drowning. Of these, a huge percent are five years old or less, like Genevieve was. People can drown in anything from bathtubs, to toilets, to puddles. I think of Pops drinking himself nearly to death; he’s liable, one day, to die in his own bottle of beer.
“I wonder what happens when you drown,” Pearl says. “I wonder if it hurts.” She looks at me then, her sad eyes wanting to know.
“I don’t know,” I say, “but I bet it does. I bet it’s scary, not being able to breathe.”
These aren’t the words she wants to hear; I know that. She wants me to tell her that Genevieve merely closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. That Genevieve didn’t know any better, that one minute she was blowing bubbles in a bathtub and the next she was dead. In the afterlife. Heaven. At the pearly gates, and all that. She never knew she was dying. That’s what Pearl wants to hear. But for some reason or other, I tell her the truth. Maybe because I think she’s been lied to enough and she deserves the truth.
“Really scary,” she agrees. “Did you ever see her after, you know...after?”
“You mean, like her body? After she died?” I ask, and she says yes. That’s exactly what she means. “No,” I tell her. “I wasn’t even born when Genevieve died. All I’ve heard are the stories.”
“Oh,” she says, and she seems a bit let down, like she wants to hear more. Like she wishes I had seen Genevieve’s corpse. But I don’t have any more to tell. “I bet her family was sad,” she says, and I nod my head and say, “Yeah. Really sad.” But this I don’t know, either. I don’t know anything about Genevieve’s family. They were long gone before I was born.
And then I get to wondering. “When you die, do you think you’ll come back as a ghost?” I ask. It’s tangential, sort of, and entirely hypothetical. Theoretical and speculative and completely make-believe. Of course, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I ask, anyway, for the sake of conversation.
“No,” she tells me decisively. “No way. There’s no such thing as ghosts. Besides, if there were, I hardly think anyone would be scared of me,” and she holds her flashlight up under her chin and dons a morbid expression on her face, ghostlike sounds emerging from her chest. Ohhhh... Ohhhh...
I laugh.
She’s not scary at all. She’s the flip side of scary. Her tone of voice and her warm smile and her kindly eyes, they’re soothing. I find that I’m not so nervous anymore. Well, sort of. I’m still scared to death I’ll say something stupid to screw the whole thing up. But I’m not so scared of her. There’s something about her that puts me at ease.
“What about you?” she asks, meaning whether or not I’d come back and stalk loved ones from the beyond.
I tell her yeah, I would. Well, not loved ones exactly. But other people I would. “I’d screw with all those guys who used to pick on me in school. The girls who ignored me. My boss, Mrs. Priddy, for all the times she was mean. That kind of thing,” I say, and for just a minute I savor the thought of an apparition of me tormenting Priddy from the great beyond. I smile. I kind of like that idea.
“Do you ever think about it?” she asks.
“About what?” I ask.
“About death,” she says to me. “About dying.”
I shake my head. “No,” I say. “Not really. I try not to think about that kind of thing. You?”
“Yeah,” she admits to me. “I think about it all the time.”
“Why?” I ask her, and I feel her body shift closer to mine. Is it real, or is it only my imagination? I don’t know, but it seems suddenly that she’s within arm’s reach, that if I wanted to, I could reach out and touch her hand. I don’t. But I imagine that I do, running the pad of a thumb along her soft, smooth skin. “It’s not like there’s anything you can do to stop it. We’re all going to die one day, you know.”
“Yeah, I know,” she says. “I get it. It’s just that, what if that day is soon?”
“It’s not soon,” I assure her, but of course I don’t know one way or the other if it’s soon. For all I know, a hunk of drywall could come crashing from the ceiling right this very instant and smother us both. “You just have to try not thinking about it so much. Live for the moment, or whatever they say. Enjoy life and all that stuff.”
“Enjoy life,” she repeats. “Live for the moment and enjoy life.” And then she turns to me, and in the murky room, I’m half certain I spy a smile radiating on her face. “You’re smart, you know?” she asks, and I nod my head and tell her that I know. I am smart.
But as it turns out, being smart doesn’t always get you where you need to go. Sometimes you need guts, too. And so I take a deep breath and reach out and touch her hand. I do it before every single neuron in my brain can scream at me, No! Before my overly logical and judicious side can come up with ninety-nine ways why this could go bad: she’ll laugh at me, she’ll pull her hand away, she’ll slap me, she’ll leave. Instead, the pad of my cold thumb strokes the satiny surface of her skin, and when she doesn’t pull back, I smile. Secretly, quietly, on the sly, I smile. A vapid, wimpy sort of smile that I’d never want her to see, but one that seeps into every orifice of my being.
I’m happy, happy in a way that I’d never known I could be.
She doesn’t say a thing; she doesn’t laugh; she doesn’t leave. Instead, we stay like that on the floor of the old darkened home, holding hands in silence, thinking about something other than ghosts and death and dying. At least I’m thinking about something other than ghosts and death and dying, though of course I don’t know what she’s thinking about until she tells me.
“I want to see her,” she says then, and I ask, “See who?”
“Genevieve,” she says.
“You mean the ghost? Genevieve the ghost?” I ask, feeling utterly absurd as I say it. Needless to say, it’s a strange request. She wants me to summon the ghost of Genevieve. I’ve played Ouija once, a long, long time ago, but I’m absolutely certain that game is gone. We could hold a séance, I guess. Light candles, sit around holding hands and all that crap. Try and channel Genevieve’s spirit. Sounds like a bunch of BS to me, but I’m guessing there isn’t any request Pearl could make which I wouldn’t oblige.
But still, I’m more than a little bit relieved when she says no.
“No,” she says. “I want to see her grave. Where she’s buried,” Pearl adds.
“It’s the middle of the night,” I say, not to mention that the idea is a bit bizarre. Why in the world does she want to see Genevieve’s grave? Why now?
“You’re not afraid, are you?” she asks me, smiling as she slips her hand out of mine and rises to her feet. She stands before me with her hands on her hips, waiting for me to reply. It’s a dare.
I shake my head. I’m not afraid. I rise up to my feet, too, dusting off the seat of my pants with my hands. What kind of ninny would I be if I passed up a midnight rendezvous in a cemetery with a woman? “Live for the moment,” she reminds me then as we scale the window one at a t
ime and return outside. “Enjoy life.”
“Enjoy life,” I parrot as we walk down the street. The night has grown cooler in the short time we were inside; the wind has picked up speed. It’s cold, but somehow, with Pearl walking beside me, closer than she was before, I feel warm. I reach out again and hold her hand. I don’t think twice this time; I just do. She doesn’t pull away, and so we walk like that, hand in hand, down the middle of the street and to the cemetery in town. She’s got to be ten years older than me, but not for a second does it feel weird. It feels right. We don’t talk, we don’t shoot the shit. We don’t say anything. I lead, planning to show Pearl where the cemetery is, though every now and again I get the sense that Pearl is the one drawing me there. She wants to see where Genevieve is buried.
The cemetery is old. One of two in town, and this is the older of the two. It existed before the public cemetery was built over a decade ago. The only reason I know Genevieve is buried here is because this is where the boys and I used to play ghosts in the graveyard when we were little kids. Of course, it’s not really a game that has to be played in a graveyard, but somehow it made it all the more fun. This old cemetery belongs to a church, a small old-world building that sits off to the side. We cross the lawn and take aim on Genevieve’s slumping tomb. There’s no more space here to bury the dead and those who are here, entombed six feet below, beneath brittle, moss-covered headstones, are often forgotten, their offspring buried on the other side of town where visitors tend to go. I haven’t been here in years. Not since I was a boy, maybe eight years old, and I would walk past all the headstones, wishing my mother was buried beneath one. Oh, how I wanted her to be dead. Because that would have been better. Dead would have been a better excuse than just plain gone. I’d take death over abandonment any old day of the week.
But this is where Genevieve is buried, with a small grave marker, the kind small enough for a dead pet. It’s a beveled marker, gray with black details, sunken into the browning, moribund lawn.