Notes from Ghost Town (2 page)

“I don’t believe I asked you to select one, Sterny….” And then he flips it around so I can see it: my self-portrait. My
naked
self-portrait. Boobs. Fire crotch. I painted it last year for an assignment. One of those art-class-bonding things. We all had to do it. Mine was a major fail.
Disproportionate
, Mrs. Webb had commented as the other students nodded their agreement. When I came back home that summer, I made sure to hide it way back in the shed so I’d never have to think of it again, which I haven’t, until right now.

“Nice … um,
work
, Liv,” Stern says, barely managing to stop himself from laughing. “You’ve got really nice … brushstrokes.”

I try to wrestle it from his hands, but his grip is strong. “Let go, asshole!” I cry, leaning into him, wrapping my arms around his waist, trying to tickle him. He lifts the painting over his head, moving his weight into me. We topple over onto the hot, dusty side yard just next to the driveway, pushing and pulling, the canvas sliding from his fingers, face up, onto the gravel. I grip my thighs around the outsides of his legs and roll into him until he’s panting beneath me. But before I have an opportunity to reach for the painting, he rolls me under him again, leg rooted between my thighs, and presses my wrists together above
my head so I can’t even wriggle them an inch. I gaze up at him, sun gold-white behind his head, grunting, sweating.

“Stop freaking out,” he says, gazing down at me, a little crack in his deep voice. “I meant it: I think your painting is beautiful, Olivia.” I realize by the heat in my cheeks that I’m blushing like crazy. And so is he. Cheeks vibrant pink, almost electric. He’s moving his big hazel eyes over me like he’s never seen me before. We stay like this, heat pressing against us from all sides. And then, tentatively, he moves his hand to my cheek and draws me toward him, touching his lips to mine, so soft. I feel his fingers through my hair, his big hand cradling the back of my head; a hot rush, a pulse, fills my whole body as I press into him, kissing him back. I let my eyes shut as he presses even closer into me, and I stop noticing the heat. I stop noticing anything but a vague, vibrating dizziness pulsing through me—my body melting and trembling into his.
Stern. This is Stern
.

He pulls away for a moment and when I open my eyes to look at him my stomach drops out from beneath me, hard, like on a roller coaster. His eyes.

His hazel eyes have turned gray.

I scuttle back, dizzy, blinking hard—his eyes won’t change back. We kissed and now his eyes won’t change back. The world seems to tip, pulling me with it. I can’t get steady, can’t make sense of it. His skin isn’t tan anymore; it’s the color of old newspaper.

Suddenly—like the flash of a photograph—the sky loses
its blue, goes heavy-looking. I blink several times, but it’s still the same: dim, gray, disorienting, like I’ve stepped into a black-and-white dream.

No
. I’m shaking my head.
No
. Panic floors me. I cannot move.
The Gray Space
. The place Mom told me about: the dead place, without music, without color. Is
this
the Gray Space?

It’s happening. I’m going crazy. Like Mom.

Stern looks deflated. “That was—that was a mistake,” he mumbles. “I didn’t … I wasn’t thinking. It just happened.” He bites his lip. “I hope it doesn’t … I don’t want this to mess things up for us. As friends.”

No
. “Stern—” My chest is tight, voice weak—I don’t know how to explain what’s happening without seeming totally
nuts
. I can’t get anything out at all. I can’t tell him that I don’t regret it, that I would never regret it. That I wanted it. So I just sit there. Mute. Terrified. He stands up, avoiding my eyes.

“I—I have to get to work….” He slaps the dust from the back of his basketball shorts. “Forgot I was covering Lupe’s shift…. Look, I’ll see you soon, okay?”

And that’s that.

Moments later, still frozen there in the dirt, I watch him—shirt back on—speed walk back out to his now-gray Toyota without even a wave good-bye. I watch the gray exhaust snake through the gray sky.

Gray. Gray. Gray.
The Gray Space
. The dead space. Mom’s hands, lingering on the piano keys as she described
it to me.
As long as I have music, as long as I am healthy, the Gray Space stays away
.

I bang the back of my head against the wood, trying to knock out whatever has gone off. But it sticks. The horrible, sickening gray. Everywhere.

And beneath the gray heaviness, a sharp, jabbing concern: why didn’t I fully realize until this instant that I
want
Stern? I want him like
that
. I want to wrestle with him in the dark dirt and kiss his lips and run my fingers through his thick black hair and hold his hand at parties. He was always the best part of coming home, on break from school, and I’d hardly even realized it.

Stern. I want to feel him press against me, spin me under him again.

But he said it was a mistake. It didn’t mean anything. So why did he do it?

My head won’t stop spinning. The world still looks stone gray.

The first time mom’s brain “went funny” on her, or at least the first time I really heard about it, was when I was almost twelve. She was sure she’d seen snakes, pressing up through the keys of her piano. She stood hovering over the instrument with a butcher knife, preparing to stab clear through to their hearts. Later, after Dad calmed her down and her eyes cleared up, she said:
Something’s happening to me. It isn’t right. I’m scared
.

Boom
. Thunder shudders through a dark gray sky, warm raindrops spatter to my skin—I guess my eyes
aren’t totally wrong. A storm is coming. I lift myself from the ground to my car, slam my trunk shut, lean against the hot metal, and let the rain take the dirt from my skin.

Tomorrow, I’ll drive clear through the heat and swaying palm, far away. I’ll give it a few days, settle into my new dorm room, finish my paintings. If Stern doesn’t call within a week, I will break down, and I will call him.

I will tell him I love him. There will be tearful confessions on his part, and we’ll be in love. And my eyes will flood back with color, instantly returning to normal.

I’m not worried.

Except that there is one tiny little snag in my plan.

In one week, Stern will be dead.

And Mom will be taken in the middle of the night and stuffed behind the bars of Broadwaithe Jail, accused of murdering him.

A
little less than a year,” I tell Dr. Levine, my ophthamologist, face planted against a heavy metal contraption as I stare at shapes projected against the wall in colors I can’t distinguish.

I’ve been completely color-blind for ten months. Ten months since the kiss; ten months since the last moments I ever spent with Stern. Ten months since he died. I can’t help but wonder what the Fourth of July fireworks will look like tonight, shooting through the sky in shades of gray.

I’m starting to forget what color ever looked like. Since I’ve stopped painting, other things have started to mute themselves, too: how a brush felt in my hand, the feel of the palette knife, the smell of charcoal and turpentine. I miss leaning toward the mystery of what would appear on the canvas. I could trust my art. I could depend on it.

But that’s gone now. That trust has disappeared, along with my mother’s freedom, the most important friendship of my life, and my relationship with Dad.

Now, all that’s left is to wait for the inevitable.

Nine days. Nine days until her hearing. Nine days until they tell us, officially, she’s gone for good.

Dr. Levine was nice enough to take an appointment on a holiday. Maybe, like me, he doesn’t have anything better to do. He moves the machine to the side and turns the light back on, swiveling a chair up beside me. He’s tested me for the past hour—quick bursts of air to each cornea, a too-bright light so he can see straight through to the back of my skull, pieces of paper filled with dotted numbers, rising from similarly dotted backgrounds.

“Olivia,” he begins gently, “There’s no evidence of retinal damage in your eyes. Actually, your grayscale contrasts are surprisingly high.”

“So? What does that mean?” I shift forward in the big leather chair.

He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Cerebral achromatopsia, which seems to be what you’re complaining of, is almost unheard of. It’s an
extremely
rare condition—almost always a result of some kind of damage to the occipital lobe on both hemispheres of the brain, which is why it’s so unlikely that you have it.”

I can feel my face flushing. “I—I can’t even paint anymore.” My voice catches and I try to clear my throat.

“I’m not saying that it’s not a big deal, or that I don’t believe you, Olivia,” Dr. Levine says, resting his hand softly on my shoulder, like he’s speaking to a four-year-old—he’s spoken this way to me
since
I was four, in fact,
never bothering to alter his tone. “What I’m saying is … I don’t think there’s a
physical
reason for what’s going on.”

I look up at him, narrowing my eyes. “Then why is this happening to me?”

He clears his throat, pulls a pen out from behind his ear, and replaces it absently. “Maybe you ought to think of talking to someone—someone professional. I know some really excellent people. I think it would be very good for you.”

He tries to put his hand on my shoulder again, but I instantly recoil.

“What are you saying?”

He opens both hands, palms up. “There’s nothing shameful about it. I’ve seen a therapist for decades. It’s very normal.”

The room goes suddenly morgue-cold. I know this path: my mother went down the same one, and he knows it. “You think I’m crazy.”

“No.” He shakes his fuzzy white-gray head. “I’m saying you’ve been through a lot lately … more than your fair share.”

More than my fair share. He doesn’t know the half of it.

I don’t respond, just scoot quickly out of the deep-set chair. He sighs as I make my way to the door. I don’t want to talk about all I’ve
been through
with him or with anyone.

I tried therapy for the first time when I was twelve. That was the first year Mom’s patchwork craziness crept in full-quilt-swing. Dr. Adley Nolan, an old dude with a
long, horsey face, told me after two measly sessions that crazy was in my genes. All I had to do was wait.

Dad never made me go back to therapy after that. I think he felt guilty about how much that traumatized me. Also, Dad doesn’t really know how bad things have gotten.

No one does.

Dr. Levine opens the door, ushers me into the lobby, stopping me just before I can scoot the hell out of there. “Olivia. Look—I’ve known you since you were a little kid. I’ve listened to your parents go on and on about you. I know how important your artwork is to you. How important it’s
always
been.”

In my head I’m going,
yeah. So?
I stare at my chipped black fingernail polish—last year, I would have been able to see that it was plum.

“Keep sketching—just stick to black and white for now,” he says. “The colors will be there for you when you’re ready for them, don’t worry about that. You’ll see—everything will turn out fine. I know it will.” He fixes me with the kind of condescending grin reserved for babies and nutjobs. “You’re young; that won’t last forever. Try to relax, for me, huh? Can you do that?”

I sit in my car for a while, forehead against the searing-hot steering wheel, not caring that the air’s so stiff it’s almost impossible to breathe. A group of middle school kids amble through the dry lawn in front of the parking
lot, obviously on their way to the beach. They wear string bikinis over their little tadpole chests, barely-there booty shorts high up on their brown legs.

Brown
only because they’re a darker gray than my own.

I’ve become good at such guesswork—distinguishing things like blue from red from brown. I memorize the particular hue and texture of things like postal boxes and stop signs, trying to place them again in things like T-shirts and lip gloss and sand. It’s hard: relearning the colored world in shades of gray.

The girls push one another into the hairless boys in front of them, giggle, and cartwheel.

I turn the engine on and blast the AC, finally, to block out their sounds. They remind me of a time that only makes me sad now—before I left, before Mom started seeing things in droves that weren’t there, before Dad decided he couldn’t handle it anymore, before Stern and I ever had the notion that we’d be anything to each other but BFFs for life. Before we knew that we were not permanent, and that a good, easy life is not something the universe is contractually obligated to grant you.

I inch out of my parking spot, pull through the manicured complex of boxy, brick doctors’ offices, lines of plumeria trees stooped in heat—all of it, to my eyes, the same smudgy, dull gray color. I keep wondering when my mind will get even worse: when I’ll start imagining things that aren’t there, when I won’t be able to hide it anymore, when everyone will know.

It all started for Mom in her freshman year of college, those first insidious signs: lights suddenly seeming overwhelmingly bright, snippets of other people’s voices heard alone, in the dark.

I’ve read that schizoisms usually start creeping in between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, often set off by trauma or an unexpected event
(check)
.

It’s starting
, a small voice jabs at the backs of my ears.
Now’s when it starts
.

My phone vibrates in the pocket of my favorite old cutoffs, badly frayed at the bottom and covered in paint. Maybe it’s Raina. Calling to beg me to come to her uncle’s boat to watch the fireworks, like we used to do every year with Stern.

This year, I’m being forced to attend my father’s awful business party, and Raina’s already offered up my spot—and Stern’s—to
Tif and Hilary, from the swim team
. I wonder sometimes if she’s bragging—like we’re keeping secret tally of new friends made. Olivia—minus one; Raina—gain two. But maybe—by some miracle—she wants to ditch the whole thing to pregame in the parking lot with me, then stumble drunk into that stuffy ballroom arm in arm. I check my phone at the next stop sign with shaking hands, but it’s only Dad:
Darlin! Don’t 4get about the party 2nite!!!