Notes from Ghost Town (13 page)

“A piano?”

“Yes. A piano. I’d never seen a piano before that night. It was at the edge of the water and when I sat down before it, my fingers began to play. Then goddesses began to appear, their hair was the color of fire. Just like yours. So red. They got very excited and started dancing and everything changed.”

“What happened?”

“My fins became legs, and my hair got very long, and when I opened my mouth, I could sing.”

“And you couldn’t live in the ocean ever again.”

“That’s true.”

“But as long as you have the piano, and as long as you can make beautiful things, you’ll be free.”

“Yes, Olivia. And you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made.”

“I am?”

“You are,” she says, as the wine dips from her hand and my bed slips away and I slip away and the needles reappear.

I wake up with three mosquitoes rooting into my blood supply as the sweat-lodge of a shuttle sputters into the Sea & Shine shopping center parking lot.

The bus driver nods to me as I exit. He’s a large, suspendered man whose features seem lost in the wide mallow of his face. It’s the face of someone who has absorbed
the psychic weight of so many journeys, back and forth between hellish dimensions.

A shiver runs through me as I walk to my car, that
watched
feeling creeping in again—the feeling of another person’s eyes focused right on me, waiting for something. I whip my head around—there are people around, milling through the parking lot, but they’re looking for their gas-guzzling sedans and beat-up pickups, not me.

I slide into the stupid-hot seat of my car and steer out of the parking lot—the wheel burning beneath my hands—trying not to think about Mom, about how she wigged out as soon as I mentioned Stern. It was like I flipped some switch that sent an electric shock of crazy straight through her. Bubbling and slurring and screaming—like the memory of it all was too much to bear.

“She did it, Stern,” I say, as I wait at a red-gray light, aloud, angrily, like he might appear. I still can’t understand why I can summon him when I’m not trying, but I can’t when I really am—who’s responsible? Who sends him to me? “Can you hear me? She did it. Okay? She’s gone.” I pound the rim of the wheel with my palm. “You’re gone and she’s been gone, too, since the night she killed you. You asshole. You dead asshole.”

No answer. I look over and the boys in the car beside mine are pointing out the open window of their LeSabre, laughing at me—the crazy girl, screaming at herself, all alone. I roll my window down, hot and furious. “Mind your own damn business,” I shout, honking for no good reason
at all except that I feel like making noise. The cars in front of me move—the light must have changed—and I peel onto the highway, furious, eyes burning with rage.

I roll up my window and scream some more. No words—just pure, hot, wild sound, bursting from some busted-up pipe inside of me. I scream until my lungs burn, until I realize there are tears streaming down my cheeks and the salt I taste on my tongue is real and not imagined, as I worry now everything I see and experience is. And I keep screaming, and howling, and crying, until I pass a sign up ahead for a highway exit that makes me go instantly silent:
BISCAYNE BLVD, EXIT 12A
.

Something clicks in my brain. Biscayne. It’s what Mom was mumbling. It wasn’t nonsense at all.

It was an intersection.

I dart into the right lane as quickly as I can, ignoring the honking of other cars, and take the exit, my whole body humming. Biscayne and Fifty-second is an intersection on the edge of a long commercial strip in Little Haiti.
When would Mom have been here?
I look for a parking spot between the run-down laundromats and
botanicas
and car washes—I know she used to like to go into some of the
botanicas
, ask about ways to spurt her creativity when she was having trouble composing.

I turn the corner and find a spot on Forty-sixth Street, in a dusty rectangle behind a strip of sagging houses. A man wearing a wife-beater, several teeth missing, helps guide me safely between two hulking vans. Music with a
heavy, steady drumbeat sounds from the handheld stereo of a man in a flowery button-up shirt, seated with a big pitcher of something several porches down.

In this corner of Little Haiti, there’s less lushness and more mosquitoes, fat with blood feasts. There are no canopies of palm and gumbo limbo and banyan, stretched across the streets. Still, it’s not awful—just isolated and eerily quiet, aside from the occasional man, hooting at me from an open window, usually things like
wouj
, on account of my hair, which Raina told me means
red
in Creole. Her mom used to have a Haitian boyfriend—he used to call me that, too, when I’d come over.

The strips of houses and grocery stores and
botanicas
are far apart, interspersed with dry patches of grass and weeds. Even though there’s really no one around, my heart is beating wild—like walking through a dark house you know is haunted, waiting with held breath for the first impossibly terrifying thing to jump out and snatch you. The heat settles on my shoulders; flies buzz warnings in my ears.

The only thing on the corner of Fifty-second and Biscayne is a dentist’s office. Confused, I start up the sidewalk, and climb the three creaky stairs to get a better look. Mom’s dentist was
my
dentist—Dr. Fink—and he’s in Brickell; no way in hell he’d ever set up shop in Little Haiti.

I ring the bell anyway and it
guzzzzzzzzes
open. Inside, it’s lukewarm—the air-conditioner is clearly struggling in the window of the small (empty) waiting room. The single
youngish receptionist lifts her head from the keyboard of her computer when I come in; a tiny spinning fan oscillates on her desk, blowing the few loose tendrils of her hair back.

“Sorry, miss, but we’re closed,” she tells me, unable to mask the yawn in her voice. She squints at me. “Office hours are Monday though Friday, eight to six, and Saturday to one.” Her eyes are warm, almond-shaped—they remind me of Raina’s, even in the flecked quality of their gray.

“You can call the office first thing Monday morning if you want an appointment.”

“I don’t need an appointment,” I say. “I’m looking for information. About a crime.”

Her head seems to tip back with the weight of her hair—piled about six inches off her head in a prom-ish up-do—as she turns quickly back to me, pursing her plush lips forward, swiveling her swivel chair right up flush with the edge of the counter, suddenly interested. She leans forward. “What are you talking about … like a break-in? The laundromat on Fifty-third got broken into last week, but we’ve been okay so far.”

I shake my head, flushing pepper-hot, so embarrassed that I’m even here, that I actually took Mom’s babbling to mean something. “No—I meant … it’s about a murder.” I can barely pronounce the word.

“Murder?” Her eyes go wide. “When?”

“A little under a year ago.” I manage to say.

Immediately, her face falls. “Oh. Well, you won’t have any
luck asking me, then,” she says, moving the fan out a bit so I feel a stream of cool air. “We haven’t even been here six months. You writing an article for school or something?”

“Yes. School,” I say, finding it difficult to breath. Mom’s words were nonsensical after all and I—the crazy daughter of crazy Miriam Tithe—was just hearing what I wanted to hear. “Well, thanks anyway.”

As I turn to walk away, Big Hair says: “It was a lawyer’s office before, if that helps any. Foster’s, or something.”

I freeze where I stand. A chill runs straight through me. I turn back to face her, the dark slate of her skin shining beneath bright overhead lights. “Greg Foster?” I ask, almost a whisper.

“That’s the one.” She beams, returning to her computer screen, tucking a loose tendril behind her ear. “Greg Foster.”

I step closer to her, right up to the counter. “Did he leave any information? An address for his new office, anything?”

“Honey—I really don’t—”

“Please,” I say, my voice catching in my throat. “Could you just look for me? It’s—it’s really important. For the article.”

“Will my name be in it?”

“Yes. Definitely.” I answer. “I’ll write you down as a contributor.” Her gaze seems to warm one hundred degrees when I say it. She swivels her chair to a metal file cabinet on the other side of her desk.

I watch her rifle through a thick stack of papers,
humming under her breath. I stand on tiptoe and watch her fingers sift and separate. After a couple of minutes, she edges a sheet of paper out of the file and turns back to me. “It doesn’t say whether this is a business address or what, but it’s all I could find.” She writes her name—
DEANDRA MENDEZ
—in big letters at the bottom of the paper before she hands it to me. The air-conditioner clicks its gray tongue from the corner window. “Good luck. And bring a copy of the article when it comes out, okay? I’ve always wanted to see my name in print.” She laughs.

I grip the paper with Greg Foster’s West Palm Beach address hard in my fist as I walk to my car, past the empty lots and weary grasses, past the half-bald palms striped along the medians, past the men on their sagging porches mumbling
wouj
, whistling beneath their breath. I nearly start skipping as I turn the corner at Forty-sixth and spot my dusty car. Something zings in my brain—hope, maybe. A bright, hot rush of it.
I was
right. And so was Mom.

She needs me. She needs me to pull sense from the muck of her mumbling.

And I will.
Six days
. Six days to make this right.

I remember going along to West Palm sometimes as a kid, with Dad, to see some of the houses he was working on. On the way, we’d always stop at a convenience store for Sno Balls—Twinkie-type snacks filled with cream and covered in coconut icing.

He’d tell me the houses he was working on were ours until someone bought them up, or moved in—let me choose what color to make the door, or the shingles. I’d almost always choose purple, so every one would be a little bit like Oh Susannah. For a long time, every time I passed a house with even the littlest bit of purple, I considered it part-mine.

Dad was forced out of his career as a builder because of the failing market. He agreed to become part of a giant commercial real estate venture because Ted Oakley was behind it—because he didn’t see any other way to keep his hands in a thing he loved. Maybe he thinks Ghost Town will help resurrect Miami’s bombed-out housing market. Just like he probably thought by marrying Mom he could make her better.

I used to think this heroic: my sturdy, stable dad, capable of anything. But now I realize that he’s just drawn to dying, helpless things. The unsaveables.

Like Mom.

Maybe, like me.

I plug Greg Foster’s address into my GPS: the place is seventy-five miles away, and it’s almost rush hour. But I don’t care. I play a dumb top-forty pop station on the radio and sing along, loudly, to every song on the long drive there to distract myself from my nerves.
What will he say?
I wonder.
What will he know?

Raina and I used to speculate, during a couple three-hour long phone sessions my last semester in art school,
why Greg Foster left Mom’s case halfway through. Raina thought maybe he was in love with my mom, and it drove him so mad he could no longer focus on the case and was forced to quit to save his own sanity. I thought maybe he was a drunk. Then Rain thought maybe he was both a drunk
and
desperately in love with Mom, and, in his drunkenness, made a pass, which caused her to fire him.

I wonder how different all of this would feel with Stern beside me, alive, in the passenger seat, if the kid who had died that night almost a year ago had been someone else entirely, someone neither of us knew. He’d want to be here—to confront Greg Foster with me, hold my hand as we walked toward him, faces set in hard, serious lines that mean
don’t fuck with us; we mean business
. And I ache, as much as I have since the day Stern and I kissed, for a person beside me who understands exactly what I need without my ever having to say it.

Even if the world stays gray forever, I just don’t think it would be so bad if I knew I could have Stern, permanent, solid, for real.

Traffic clears up after Boca, and the rest of the drive on 95 and onto Route 1 is smooth. The sky is already beginning to darken as I turn off the highway. My car hums along the narrowing roads of West Palm, as I move beyond the more populated business district full of high-rises and condos and little shops to a winding, hilly residential neighborhood marked by a giant sign, arced between two
palms, that reads:
Palm Grove
. So, the address I have is his
home
.

Now I
really
wish Stern were here. But he’s not.

I’m fine. I’ll be fine. I tell myself this as I turn onto Greg’s street—Formosa Lane—past big, lush, wide-windowed homes with bucket-tiled roofs and three-car garages. Some instinct tells me to turn my music down, and I do, as though I might hear his voice flitting to me through the heavy palms.

Your destination is ahead, on the right
. My navigation system seems to scream in the new silence of my car. My heartbeat quickens, whole body flushing, as I inch up to Greg’s house, parking a whole house away—just in case.

Just in case what?
I’m not even sure what I’m afraid of.

West Palm feels cooler, somehow, than Miami. The sky is layered like a gray neopolitan. Bet it’s beautiful in color—a vivid melt of tangerine and periwinkle and vermillion. I imagine all those colors stretched along the spotless sidewalk, creating a separate sky beneath my feet—a downward heaven. I take a deep breath, keep walking.

Greg Foster’s home is just as impressive and large as the rest of them—dotted with palms and sweet acacia, a heavy, grassy, sweet smell lifted from the earth. No part of his house is purple.

I lift the heavy brass knocker in my hand and strike it, twice, firmly against the door.

No answer. I press my ear closer to the door, try to
listen for sounds or movement within, but I hear nothing. If there is anything to hear, it’s too quiet, lost in the buzz of a neighbor’s lawnmower, the distant gossip of birds. I try again, knocking even harder this time.
Come on. Be home. Be home, dammit
. I fight an urge to scream it through the slim crack beneath the door—to the whole neighborhood, even.
Show yourself, Greg Foster
.