Notes from Ghost Town (14 page)

I let my head rest against the door for a second. I strike one final time against the door before giving up. He’s not home.

On my way down the driveway, the neighbor—a pretty older lady, in her sixties, maybe—a baseball cap over her pixie-cut hair, exercise pants, a short-sleeved shirt with
Breast Cancer Survivor
in dark, bold letters across the front—clicks her lawnmower off and starts walking toward me across her wide, newly tended lawn, waving broadly. “Hello!” she calls to me, coming closer. “Can I help you with something?”

“Maybe.” I step toward her, to the places where Greg’s poorly tended lawn meets her fine-trimmed one. “I’m looking for Greg Foster.”

A worried, close-lipped smile crosses her face. “I’m Debra Kilmurray,” she says, reaching out with both hands to shake mine. Her skin is dark gray—she must spend a lot of time in the sun—and beginning to liver-spot, brown circles dotted between her knuckles.

“Olivia Tithe,” I say, shaking back. “So, um, do you know Mr. Foster?”

She removes her baseball cap, holds it at her side. “Oh, honey. Yes—I did.” She blushes a little. “Were you a friend of his?” she asks.

I spit out the first lie that comes to me. “He’s my uncle.” She raises her eyebrows. “Estranged uncle, I mean … I haven’t seen him in a really long time … big falling out with my mom, all that.” I stare at the ground. Mud always looks like cement this time of day, when the sun dips into evening.

“So Greg had a niece and never even told me about it.” She clicks her tongue, shakes her head. “Go figure. I thought he didn’t have any family … the way he left all of his money to some charity. A forest preserve, I think. He was a big nature lover. Always watching birds, planting things in his garden. All that.” She clicks her tongue again, speaking softly. “A very sweet man.”

“Wait—
left
all of his money? What are you—?”

“Oh, sweetheart.” She puts her free hand to her chest, gasps a little. “You really don’t know? I can’t believe no one would have—”

“Know what?” I ask, bewildered.

“Oh, no. I’m sorry, sweetheart, that I have to tell you this, but Greg”—she pauses momentarily—“Greg passed away. Terrible story …”

“What happened to him?” I manage to stammer. “And when?”

The woman tilts her head and looks at me with concern.

“Six months ago,” she says. “The house has been on the
market ever since, but, as soon as people find out what happened, they get scared away, I suppose.” Then she lowers her voice, her eyes moving away from mine to stare steadily at the dirt beneath us. “It was the cleaning lady who found him, you know. Hanging right in the middle of his bedroom—neck broken and everything.”

I
’ll call you if I think of anything else,” Debra Kilmurray tells me before I walk, dazed, back to my car. I scribbled my number down for her as soon as I regained control of my speech, insisted she take it—just in case. Night has settled full-dark, and I feel like I’m swimming in it.

The wheels of my Capri spill me forward, shifting through the smooth-paved streets like a submarine. The trees float above like soft kelp, like coral reef hiding all sorts of secret, watchful things.

I drive with a constant chord of questions, wrapping itself tighter and tighter around me: what does it mean that Greg Foster is dead?
Does
it mean anything? How come no one
told
me about it?

Greg Foster lawyered the first half of Mom’s case. He seemed to be making so much progress, too—he passed on
very optimistic
updates to Dad; he told me not to worry. He told me he was going to get her out of Broadwaithe, that it wouldn’t be long, that we had a very strong case. And then he ditched her. Ditched her amidst his
steady stream of put-on optimism and, according to Debra Kilmurray, hung himself in his bedroom. Carol Kohl took up the reigns and suddenly everything became
hopeless
and
plea bargain
and
insanity as silver lining
. Everything became There’s No Way Out Of This So Just Give Up Now.

All I want to do when I get home is rush into Dad’s arms, bury my head in his white T-shirt, smelling of sand and salt and acacia from the thick of plants in the back garden of our old house, and tell him every single thing I’m feeling. And he’ll say:
You just lay your head down and shut your eyes and I’ll stay here the whole time and make sure no nightmares try to climb in
.

But I can’t. Heather’s Prius is in the driveway. Which means she’s home. Which means going inside and seeing her and Dad together—nuzzling or watching a movie in the living room or setting up some cheesy game night for all of us to play together. I’d rather be knocked off the side of the road than have to walk inside and feign excitement about Scrabble or Boggle. So, I sit in the driveway, eyeing the flickering light of the TV screen. I dig my phone out of my bag to see what Raina’s doing, but before I can dial, it starts ringing: a number I don’t recognize. I let it ring three times before answering: “Hello?”

“Olivia Tithe.”

The voice takes me a second to place. “Austin,” I say, trying to suppress the weird nervousness I feel vining up my throat at the sound of his voice. An image of our
almost-kiss pops into my head. And then the much paler image of Stern’s face that, at the last second, replaced his own. “Did I … give you my phone number?”

“Nope. It’s listed on your Facebook page. What are you doing right now?”

“Well, I was maybe going to go to this party thing in Lauderdale with Raina,” I lie. “But I don’t know … why?” I check out my hair in the rearview mirror, shake it loose from my ponytail holder.

“Sounds like you’re free. Meet me at the marina. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

“A surprise?”

“I’ll give you a hint: It’s not as good as half-naked night swimming, but, it also won’t get us arrested. Well—it
probably
won’t.” I can hear the smile in his voice.

It’s hard to believe that Austin Morse actually went out of his way to find my phone number. And call it.
Weird
. I can’t imagine there aren’t a million and a half private school girls who wear the right clothes and drive glittering-new sweet-sixteen BMWs throwing themselves at him.

But maybe he’s tired of those girls. Maybe he really has secretly been into weirdos like me all along.

“Fine,” I say. It’s just the distraction I need. “When?”

“Now, Olivia Tithe. I’ll be there in ten.”
Click
.

I text Dad from the driveway:
going to a movie with Raina. Be back later. Love, Liv
.

He responds, seconds later:
Not 2 late!! Have fun. I love u
.

I rest my cell phone in my lap and check my hair once more in the rearview, little buzzy plucks of nerves working their way through my belly.

I put my hair into a loose braid, smear cherry-scented gloss across my lips, spray some of the jasmine body spritz Raina left a while ago in my glove compartment all over myself, and hit the gas.

Austin Morse
. Dad always told me never to underestimate just how much a person can surprise you. It sure happened to him, to all of us, after all: a big old giant smack-in-the-face of a surprise.

Austin’s “surprise” that
probably
won’t get us arrested turns out to be a sailboat.

The first thing I think of when I see it is that it looks like a giant white banana with benches for sitting, ropes for pulling, a mast that seems too tall for its smallish body, a giant, billowing mainsail with three stripes down its center, a smaller, plainer sail he calls the
jib
.

“Don’t fall.” Austin catches me at the waist as the sailboat rises suddenly in the crest of a wave. Now that we’re out of the marina, the wind picks up and the waves are choppier. The mainsail puffs out and sucks back in, collecting the air, absorbing the wind. The stripes wave in and out, back and forth like they’re dancing.

“I wasn’t going to,” I say. I don’t pull away immediately. “I’ve been on sailboats before, Austin Morse. They aren’t
only
for the overprivileged.” The tips of his fingers linger on my waist. Warmth radiates up through my stomach.

“Oh, you didn’t hear? The mayor made some new laws while you were gone. You have to show your Dad’s pay stubs before you can sail out of this marina now.”

It’s not even that funny, but the way he says it—so deadpan—makes me laugh. And relax—finally. It feels good, being around him, being paid attention to in a way that’s not about Mom and Stern, that’s not about pain. I thought that all my mourning and pining for Stern meant there was no room for another person.

But maybe the heart is an organ on constant-ready, always waiting to try again, always open to the next best thing.

Both sails make a sound like muffled clapping, the mainsail bubbling out like someone’s putting his big mouth up to it and blowing right in, the
jib
simmering beneath it. I rock back on the smooth wooden bench as Austin pulls the main sail taut so the boat immediately tilts to the side for a moment before righting itself. His face is tight with concentration. He tugs the creases out of both sails so they spread smooth like cellophane over a serving dish.

“You really get to learn this stuff at Finnegan?”

“Yeah,” he says. “But I’d been wanting to learn for a while. This was my dad’s boat. He left it to me.” I can’t help staring at his lips, at the shadows made in the crease of his arm muscles.

“Do you remember much about him?” I inhale deeply—brine,
kelp, the way-down-deep, full cold—think of Mom, and her stories about mermaids that return to me now in dreams.

“Not really. I think I remember him feeding me a hot dog at a Marlins game. But it could have been a dream. I was only three when he died. He got cancer right after I was born, so Mom says he was in the hospital most of the time anyway, but I don’t remember any of that.” He pulls a lighter out of the pocket of his plaid shorts, sparks it a few times, and drops it back in his pocket.

“I do remember you, though, when you were little.” He smiles. His teeth are very white, supernova white or some astral shit like that. “I remember some party your parents had when we were four or five, and that you were naked and refused to put any clothes on—”

“What? I
don’t
remember that.”

“But I do. My mom wouldn’t let me play with you even though I wanted to; I think she was threatened by what a sexy four-year-old you were. I think she thought you would corrupt me.”

“Gross,” I say, hugging my arms across my chest. “I can’t believe you just used the words ‘sexy’ and ‘four-year-old’ in the same sentence.”

“Well, I wouldn’t use them for just anyone, you know.” He raises his eyebrows, and I can’t help but smile.

“You’re weirder than I thought you were, Austin.”

“I’m just a man on his dead father’s boat, looking for answers to all of life’s toughest questions. Right?”

I’m not sure how to respond—all I can think is,
maybe his dad’s in the Gray Space, along with Stern
.

“It’s nice out here,” I say finally.

Austin shoots me a look I can’t decipher. “It’s better than hanging around the house, where my mom is constantly on some new self-improvement kick and Ted is out all hours at the condo. Or
wherever
he goes.”

“What do you mean ‘wherever he goes’?”

Austin doesn’t answer right away. He just stares up at the black sheet of the sky. I stare up with him at that same blackness, the bigness of it spinning all sorts of strange philosophies through my head. All the usual, corny stuff about how small we all are and how far the ocean goes and how getting swallowed up in the unendingness of it all is both the loneliest sensation in the world and also the most comforting.

The boat slides between waves. The sails
whapp
in the wind.

“He’s just so busy all the time,” he says abruptly. “My mom argues a lot with him, whenever he comes home in the middle of the night.” He leans closer to me, one hand still at the helm, guiding us steady through the water. “I think he might be screwing around, behind her back or something. Or maybe she knows. And I know my mom can be a bitch sometimes, but, I really think it would kill her. He’s my dad, you know? He raised me, and he makes my mom happy—or he
used
to. But he’s also sort of taught me not to trust anyone.” He shakes his head. He looks
almost startled, like he’d never expected any of that to come out. “Sorry, Tithe. Didn’t mean to get all serious on you. I’ve never really told that to anyone before.”

I don’t quite know what to say, sort of walloped by the fact that Austin Morse even has thoughts that run this deep.

I wonder if his suspicions about Ted are accurate. Is Ted that kind of person? Even though he’s been around in the background for so many years, it hits me that I don’t really know much about him.

And then, I wonder if it even matters—the real thing is that Austin feels betrayed. Like the rules somehow changed while he wasn’t looking.

“I get it,” I answer softly. “I mean, I get parents turning out to not be who you thought they were. Being a disappointment. Believe me, I get it. And it sucks.”

“Yeah,” he says, focusing on the water. “So what about you, Tithe? Tell me something good.” He bites his lip. I can smell the cologne he’s wearing—citrus and fig and some other dark layer. Tar. Mulch. I have to fight an urge to tackle his mouth with my own and tug him, hard, into me. It’s the same feeling of excitement I used to get when painting—smearing oils wildly across a fresh canvas, open wide to take me in, all those base, earthy smells of paint and linseed oil and charcoal and linen.

It almost
—almost
—makes the ghost of Stern feel like a distant breeze, a confusing dream.

I can feel the heat coming off of Austin’s body and at
the same time, the coldness spreading inside my chest every time I think of Stern. “I used to paint a lot of nudes, at school,” I blurt out, trying to clear out the coldness. Maybe if I keep talking, it’ll all go away. Everything except this moment, everything except Austin. “Old women, fat dudes. They’d get up in front of us and pull off their robes and sit there under the lights for probably like three hours, but it always went by so quick. I loved it. I loved drawing big naked fat people. They’re so much more fun than skinnies. Full of wrinkles and shadows.”