Apparition (9 page)

“Fainted,” someone replies.

Someone takes my pulse. A blood pressure band pumps on my arm.

“Amelia?”

“A little too much for her,” a voice says.

“She’s fine. She just needs to rest a bit.”

“Amelia, can you sit up? There’s a glass of orange juice for you here. Sit up and take a sip.”

I don’t want to.
Matthew?

“Amelia?”

I finally open my eyes, reluctantly. My grandmother is standing over me, holding out a paper cup.

“Juice,” she says. “You should drink.”

She’s got a vending machine coffee in the other hand.

I struggle to pull myself up on my elbow. Everything’s spinning. I force myself to think. “Jack?”

“He’s in good hands,” she says. “He’s safe.” She hesitates. “He’s still unconscious, but that’s no surprise. There may be a break. He’s in X-ray.” Another pause. “There may be a break in his lower back.”

Oh my God!
I look at her face for the first time. She seems frightened. She holds out the juice again and this time I take it from her, still shaky. I take a sip, for her sake. I should have woken her up before I left the house. I wasted precious time following him alone.
Oh, Jack
.

I lie back on the stretcher and look around. We’re in a corridor outside the emergency waiting room.

“I’ll be okay soon,” I say, trying to reassure her. “Where’s Ethan?”

“He’s checking out vending machines, looking for a snack.”

There’s silence, and suddenly I remember.

Oh my God, Matthew!

Morris Dyson answers the phone when I call in the early morning. He listens as I tell him that my brother had an accident in the barn last night.

“Your brother?” he asks. There’s some mumbling and what sounds like a swear word. “Is he badly injured?”

“He’s still unconscious. It’s not good. There’s a fracture in his lower back. They don’t know yet whether it will heal properly. But right now, we just want him to wake up.”

“Jesus! That’s … a shock. He fell inside the barn? What was he doing there? Do you know?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know. He’d hung out in there earlier in the evening, drinking beer with his friends. Then later he went back
alone.” I take a deep breath, forcing myself to go on. “I followed him. I saw what happened.”

“You were with him in the barn?”

I raise my free hand, cupping the mouthpiece as I whisper. “I lied to everyone. I said he slipped off a beam in the rafters because he was drunk. He wasn’t
that
drunk. He let himself fall. He just did some kind of backward swan dive onto his head. On purpose.” I can’t believe I’m admitting this to someone I hardly know after lying to the cops and my family.

Morris mutters under his breath.

“And something else. He was crying, hysterical. Over a girl. I don’t know what he was going on about, but he seemed really angry with her, really upset. He wasn’t making any sense. He’s never acted like that before. It was totally extreme.”

“I see.” That’s all he says. I wish he’d say more.

“I mean, it reminded me of how Matthew talked about meeting a girl the night he died. At the time I was too jealous to think straight. But now I’m seriously wondering if she wasn’t, you know, a ghost.”

I’ve been talking fast while Morris barely responds. I hope he doesn’t think I’m getting carried away with this.

“Okay. One more detail about my friend Paul,” he finally says. “You know how the Sorensons discovered a word carved in Matthew’s wooden desk at home? They said the word was
DOT
—in capital letters. Well, Paul’s sister, Emily, told me that she ransacked his bedroom after he died, looking for clues that he’d been depressed. Under his pillow she found the word
dot
written in Paul’s hand, on a piece of paper, about a dozen times.”

“Oh my God, I just remembered—I think I saw
D-O-T
carved inside the barn, inside the door frame on the right side. I could
be wrong. It just flashed at me as I was running to get help for Jack. I was so freaked at the time, I may have imagined it.”

“Really?” he says. “That’s very interesting. I think I want to check that out for myself.”

“There’s something else. Before Jack fell—or jumped, or let himself fall—he was kind of struggling with a rope on the beam. I was terrified because it looked like he was going to hang himself. But the rope actually fell from the beam before he could put it around his neck. As if it had untied itself. And then, even weirder, when I got back to the barn with my grandmother the rope was gone. It wasn’t where it had fallen.”

“Wow! Okay, listen. You’ve got to be with your family now, so how about we wait a bit before digging any deeper into this? I’ll be in touch. I hope you don’t mind if I use my son, Kip, as a bit of a go-between. He’s been working at the Grey County Archives and doing some title research for me on the side. On the Telford farm. To find out if it has any secrets. He’s a decent young man, once you get to know him.”

“Sure,” I say. “Why not?” We say goodbye and hang up.

I’ve told Morris all I’m going to tell him. Because maybe it was only my imagination—that last thing I saw.

A
s soon as school ends I go straight to the hospital, feeling hugely anxious. The entranceway is depressing, with its pale blue-green walls and antiseptic gel dispensers and parked wheelchairs, the gift shop with its get-well cards and knick-knacks and slippers, the harsh lights and white noise. I’m having flashbacks of my mother in her pink bathrobe and pale blue hospital gown.

I find Joyce in the intensive care waiting room on the third floor. She’s reading a magazine but she looks like she’d rather be smoking it. She’s been trying to cut back, not smoking in the house and that, so this must really be testing her willpower. She raises her bushy eyebrows in greeting, and I sit down in the empty chair beside her.

“Anything new?” I ask. It’s hard to read her face. It’s always pretty hard.

She shrugs. “The specialist is in there with him now. He said he’d come get me in a minute. Jack’s awake.”

“Oh wow! That’s good, isn’t it? That’s great, isn’t it?” You wouldn’t know it from her voice.

“It
is
good. But … he doesn’t have any feeling in his legs.” She pauses and then adds flatly, “It looks right now like his legs are paralyzed.”

For a second, I try to picture Jack not walking—not running or jumping or skating or skiing—but I just can’t. Impossible. Instead, I imagine him starting physiotherapy in a few weeks, walking by Christmas, running in the spring track meets, good as new. If anyone can do it, Jack can.

Joyce and I sit in silence until she says she’s going to run downstairs for a coffee and a smoke. She asks me to stick around in case the doctor comes.

I’m waiting for something to happen, for someone to come, feeling so tired my head bobs forward and it jerks me awake. I couldn’t sleep last night. At about three a.m. I looked up the word
dot
in the online dictionary. “Full stop.” That’s more or less what it means. It’s just a piece of punctuation. I lay on my back with my eyes open in the dark, Matthew flashing to life in my head. And when I wasn’t seeing Matthew standing at the back of the barn, I was thinking of Jack.

Jack’s room in intensive care is filled with machinery and bags of fluid hanging from hooks. His bed is at the far end, by the window. There’s another bed as well, with a man in it who looks like he’s sleeping, thank God. He kind of looks dead, actually, except he’s snoring.

Jack is on his back, white sheet and thin blanket pulled high on his chest. He has some kind of cast or brace around his torso. Something stiff. He has a neck brace too. His face looks tired and pale. His hair is a mess, and he has a tube running from his hand. I catch sight of a bag of pale yellow pee peeking out along the side of the bed. His eyes are half-open, and he gives us a little smile when he sees us. I rush at him with a hug, careful not to hurt him anywhere.

We don’t talk much. At some point I ask him if he remembers what happened, but he says everything’s a blank after he went into the barn with his buddies. I let him know that I followed him into the barn the second time, when he fell. I was worried about admitting this, but he tells me he already knew. He says some detective guy dropped in to see him earlier. That surprises me. I wonder if it was Grierson.

Just then, the doctor walks in. He tells us that Jack is one very lucky guy, that the damage could have been a lot worse. He could have died. But he adds that Jack isn’t out of the woods yet. He says he has an “incomplete” injury to the cable in the spinal cord that controls movement and sensation. That’s better than a “complete” injury, obviously, and also it’s low on his back, which is better than high. So the doctor thinks that with time and lots of therapy, Jack has a ninety-five percent chance of recovering. But for now his legs are paralyzed, and he’s in for an “uphill climb.” That’s the doctor’s phrase.

On the drive home, Joyce and I barely speak. The atmosphere is so tense that when she steers the car into the driveway and parks, we both just sit there. It’s as if neither of us can move. She looks so stressed, I’m afraid she’ll have a stroke. Finally I have to say something.

“I know he’s going to get better. That’s Jack. It’s his nature. Don’t you think he’s going to treat this whole thing like a big training session? Like he’s training for the Olympics or something?” She doesn’t even answer, which is so not like Joyce. She just lowers her head. “I mean, if there’s anyone in the whole world who can recover from this one hundred percent, it’s Jack.” I’m trying to sound positive but something pushes back.
Why Jack? Of everybody in the world, why did this have to happen to Jack?

F
or the next few days I try to focus on school, try to think positively about Jack. Try not to obsess about that vision of Matthew. I remind myself I was probably hallucinating.

By Friday, Jack’s out of intensive care and in a regular ward. To cut the boredom, we get him a new set of earphones and a little TV with a DVD player on a metal arm that can swing over his bed, and he gives us a list of movies to rent. They’re all movies he’s already seen, but I guess it helps to feel that some things stay the same.

On Saturday morning, Morris phones my cell and asks if we can meet at the Telford barn at two p.m. for a little survey. That’s what he calls it. I say okay, but inside I’m dreading this. I haven’t been able to get the sight of Matthew out of my mind. And I haven’t said anything about it to Morris, because what if I only imagined it? What if it was only wishful thinking, like Dr. Krantz says?
Matthew, I’ve been talking to you all along, but in my mind you were still alive. Still living, breathing Matthew, your dark eyes squinting in disbelief at something I’ve just said, twisting in your chair to face me, raised eyebrows and a
forgiving smile. I can still feel your heart beating against the palm of my hand. I never once imagined you as a ghost
.

It’s a grey November day, early afternoon. Joyce is out back with Ponyboy and Marley, cleaning up after them and grooming them. It’s like having a second job, but she seems to like it. Ethan is playing on his computer, as usual. I have the bathroom to myself for a while, so I stand in front of the full-length mirror in my underwear, feeling anxious. I look at my white body. Thank God summer is over and I can cover up with more clothes. My hair hangs down past my shoulders like black straw. I need hair conditioner. I think maybe I’ve lost some weight lately, though my hips still look kind of wide—to me, anyway. I wonder if I’m ever going to have the nerve to be naked in front of a guy. I mean, so far I’ve barely been seen in a bathing suit. It’s not that I’m not interested in guys. I’ve just had zero experience. Except for a non-event with an Italian kid whose parents visited our neighbours the summer I was twelve, I’ve never even been kissed. And that kiss didn’t actually land on my mouth. He meant it to, but he kind of missed.

Then, during the summer before grade eight, when my girlfriends were hanging out at the mall and comparing stories about getting groped by boys, my mom got sicker and sicker and I stopped going out much. There was no point in trying to explain. She died later that year, and I almost failed grade eight. After that, going to school made me feel sick to my stomach.

So much for my so-called love life. When other girls my age started whispering about their Saturday night dates, I pretended not to hear. But this year … who knows what might have happened? I probably would have lain naked across a railway track with Matthew if he’d wanted me to. In the dark, anyway.

I layer up as I dress. It takes a while to find a combination I can live with. A black sweater over a yellow tank top, and my blue jean
jacket. I put on some clear lip gloss and tie my hair back with an elastic band. I try the ponytail high at the back of my head but it sticks out too much and looks stupid. I tie it low at the back of my neck—boring. This is nuts.
I’m acting like I’ve got a date with you, Matthew. A little late for that
.

I don’t want Joyce or Ethan to see me leave, so I wait until they’re both in the kitchen and then sneak out the front door. I walk south on 12th Line, and once I’ve reached the crest of the hill I can see Morris’s car in the Telford farm’s driveway. For the first time, I see the weathered grey barn in daylight. Now I’m really getting nervous. In fact I’m freaking out. When I think back to the night Jack fell, I remember bizarre sensations, mysterious noises. It felt as though that barn was crowded.

The difference today is that Morris is here in case I get spooked. I’m going to have to rely on him to get me through this. I hope he’s up to it.

As I approach the property, he gets out of his car and leans against his bumper. He has a small camera on a cord around his neck, and he’s carrying a bag. He’s wearing a dark overcoat, the one I saw him in at the funeral. With his long grey hair and scruffy beard, his lined face and worn features, he looks like a biblical character, or maybe a European film director. I give a little wave as I approach, and smile as best I can.