Notes from Ghost Town (28 page)

I think back to everything that’s happened since Stern first appeared. How he showed me the caramels my mom kept hidden. How we played music together in my mom’s studio. The slashed tires. All the strange stuff between me and Austin that I still can’t quite name. How we went on that wild goose chase to confront Marietta Jones, which lead to what? Nothing.

There’s something I’m missing. Marietta Jones pops into my head again—the story Annabelle told of the classmate’s inhaler that she stole, hid in her piano. The one place she would revisit again, and again, and again.

The place closest to her—so obvious. So freaking obvious.

Of course
. Ted would do the same: hide evidence in the place closest to him, his pet project, a place he knew well. A place he had control of. The site of her death.

“Holy shit,” I whisper to myself. “Ghost Town.” It wasn’t finished yet. It was still under construction….

That’s where he hid her body. I’m sure of it, more than I’ve ever been sure of anything. But how can I prove it?

After a few minutes, I stand up and make my way carefully to the bathroom. My chest and shoulder look red, blotchy, but my face in the bathroom mirror is ghostly, almost translucent. Maybe I brought some of that other place with me—some of Stern, in those moments when we flowed into each other, weightless and timeless and without form.
I have loved you since we were four years old
.

I think I’ve loved him all that time, too—it just took me until a week before he died to figure it out.

But at least I figured it out. We both did. The heart doesn’t change. And I know this now. Maybe I have always known it.

I’ll find a way to make this right.

I shut the bathroom door softly behind me. Heather and Dad are mid-conversation in the kitchen, and standing in the hall, I can just make out their hushed voices from downstairs. I hold my breath and listen: “… Yes, I agree that she’s in shock, David. The way I felt, after I found Liam? The things that went through my head, the rationales I came up with to explain it … none of it made any sense, but I don’t think it’s all that uncommon.”

“In a few days, she’ll even out again, trust me.”

“Honey, I think it’s more than that—I just think that all the stress she’s been under, with Miriam’s final sentencing tomorrow…. She’s making up stories because she feels she has no other choice. I mean, that is a huge weight to hold for a sixteen-year-old—for anyone.”

“Well, what can I do? What am I supposed to do?”

A brief pause, and then: “Take her to talk to someone, David. Someone professional, who knows what to do in these situations. We’re not equipped to handle this anymore. It’s too big for us.”

Another pause; I hold my breath and wait for his response. I wait for him to defend me in some way. “She—she had an awful experience with therapy a long time ago,
Heath. A doctor we found through the school system. I felt so bad about it….” He trails off.

“David—you’re her father.”

Dad sighs. “I know. You’re right,” he says, weary but resolute. “She’ll make a fuss, but I’m her father. I’ll make her go.”

“She’ll understand one day, when she’s a parent.” I hear them kiss. It sets me shuddering.

I charge from the stairwell back into my room, buzzing with frustration, kicking a path through all the crap nesting on my carpet, throwing my book bag across the room where the books inside thud against the closet, crumpling shirts and dirty underwear into tight balls which I thud, in a similar fashion, against whatever surface I can throw them. It’s satisfying in a base sort of way. My skin burns and my lungs burn but I push the burning away and keep on. I grab the pair of dirty cutoffs I wear nearly every day—the pair I wore the afternoon I spent with Austin at the Ghost Town condo, just before I was nearly burned to death—and throw them with special rage straight up into my ceiling fan. But when they hit, something flies out of one of the pockets and lands a few feet away from me on the carpet.

I go to it, crouch down. A coin. The coin Medusa gave me the day at the park, when Carlos and his dickwad cronies were beaning her with their soiled trash. I turn it over in my fingers and start scraping away at some of the dirt and sediment melded to the surface. I have to shine the coin even further before I see that it’s not a coin, but
a small, round silver pendant, and that there are three letters engraved in script into its surface.
M.K.T
.

My mother’s initials. Miriam Kathleen Tithe.

I’ve seen it before: I remember it dangling from a thin chain around her neck. Her own mother gave it to her on her sixteenth birthday. I didn’t even know she’d lost it. Medusa, the ever-present beach urchin, found it. Always lurking somewhere on the sidelines, waiting beneath the piers, watching for things lost and forgotten.

Always lurking
. My breath stops for a second. That night—she might have been there that night.

Medusa
. I relocate my favorite cutoffs and slide them carefully over my legs, ignoring my dizziness, the sharp pains in my lungs. I slip out of my room, barely remembering to grab my purse, and make my way downstairs. Dad and Heather are still in the kitchen, sipping tea out of big white mugs. I scoot past the entranceway to the kitchen, hoping they won’t see me. No such luck.

“Olivia Jane.” Dad stands from his chair, quick as hell, intercepting my path by the door. “You trying to sneak out?”

“No, Dad,” I try to move my purse behind my back, real nonchalant, try to laugh but end up just sort of hacking instead. I poke my head into the kitchen. “Hi, Heather!” I say, very cheery.

She smiles warmly at me. “How are you feeling, Olivia?”

“A whole lot better,” I say, “but I’m feeling
really
claustrophobic up there. Is it okay if I take a short little tiny drive just down the street?”

“You’ve got a whole house to walk around if you’re claustrophobic, Liv,” Dad responds, but I hear a subtle softening in his voice. “Plus, we’ve got to change your bandages soon, hon. You know Doctor Carey said every single day, if you want to heal up right, not get infected.”

I inch my way closer to the front door, rest my hand on the knob. “Look”—I pull my cell phone from my bag, wave it a few times back and forth in Dad’s sightline before grabbing the keys to his truck off the hook by the front door, shooting him the biggest, sweetest grin I can possibly muster—“if at any point you need me in the ten minutes I’m gone, just call. I’ll be so safe, so don’t worry
at all
, okay? And we can change the bandages when I get back. I promise it’ll be fine. I’ll be fine. I love you both and I’ll be back with the truck so soon you won’t even know we’re gone. Great! See you soon!”

Dad stands there big-eyed, taking in my nonstop rush of words. I don’t even give him a second to respond before I open the door and shoot right outside, leaping out of sight and into his old Chevy before he can stop me.

I clutch Mom’s pendant in my hand as I drive through West Grove, past Beast Beach and the Smoothie-Kinged shopping center where I worked summer after freshman year, to the stretch of beach near Oh Susannah. The stretch of beach where Stern’s life drained from him into the wicked mouth of the ocean while the moon looked on, a silent culprit. I park Dad’s truck in the closest lot and make my way through the saw grass and patches of
crinum lilly to the skin-soft sand, pausing every few steps to hack, my lungs searing like they’re being stabbed, again and again. I feel bloody inside, raw, cut-up.

The old house rises in the distance and the sun’s too bright. I’m too far to see its graffiti ruin. I wind time backward for a moment until I’m eight years old, racing home from tree-climbing with Stern, and the windows of our beautiful purple house glow gold onto the beach, and the notes Mom plays stretch the length of the beach all the way to my ears, calling me.
Dinner, Livie
, they say,
Dad’s cooking us up a Texas special. You can help me ice the cake for later. Any color you like, sweetheart
. The notes laugh, crescendo, explode, and pour over me, until I’m glittering and coated all over in perfect particles of a past I would cling to forever and beyond forever if only I could.

But I cannot, and so I wind time forward, back to the present—this same beach, my dark, desecrated childhood home, searching for Medusa. There’s a wind picking up over the ocean and the waves look angry as they crash and foam, taking mounds of sand back with them. Further down the beach, there’s a bonfire going—the sight of it, the smell, makes my lungs cinch up even tighter—the silhouettes of several people gathered around it. They are laughing. Someone’s got a guitar—starts playing a song I don’t recognize.

I search the docks until I spot a shaky hovel, set up beneath one of the more wood-rotted piers further down the beach. I’ve seen Medusa emerge from this place before,
but I’ve never gotten this close. It’s not a big place—two big slats of wood she must have dragged from a trash heap and rested into each other, a sheet guarding part of the entrance—and it smells briny, sour.

I peer inside. Medusa’s huddled in the corner—sleeping, it looks like, on a towel on her side, her back pressed up against one of the wooden boards, another towel covering her legs. The rest of the narrow, triangular space is literally stuffed with junk—piles of shells, old pizza boxes, glass bottles, a whole load of flip-flops and other shoes that don’t match.

“Medusa,” I say her name softly, not wanting to startle her.

Her eyes pop open. She sits up slowly, her tangle of steely gray hair blowing around her face. Her eyes are red, and the skin beneath them droops in little dark triangular folds, like her skin can’t wait to crawl right off her bones and be free. She pulls the towel around her legs into her chest—I can’t tell if she’s suspicious or just cold. “Oleevia,” she says, moistening her thin, cracked lips.

“I need to talk to you,” I say. She hugs the towel tighter to her chest. “
Por favor
,” I say more gently.

She watches me, silent—tilting her head, her eyes crinkling up, tongue peeking slowly out of her mouth and back in again like a lizard, testing the air.

Not sure how else to convey what I need, I open my fist to her, revealing the cleaned pendant in my hand, holding it out to her. It glints with sunlight. “My mother,” I say, half
of my voice lost to the thrashing of waves. “You had this pendant. You gave it to me. You knew her. You know who she is.”

She nods. Slowly, she brings herself forward onto all fours, and crawls out to meet me. Stoop-backed, shaking slightly in the legs, the hands, she straightens up as much as her curved back allows, staring sadly at me.

“Si, yes,
tu madre. Yo se
. I find this.” She points to the pendant in my hand. “She drop it.”

I lick my lips. “A long time ago—last year—she was here, at night, and a boy was killed. Were you here? Did you see anything?”

Her head starts shaking, her whole body, curling her lips in and out, in and out, against her gums. She stoops back to the sand, digging her fingers in, as she always does. I can see that I’m already losing her.

I stoop to the ground beside her, speaking low and calm. “Medusa. I don’t want anything from you. I just need to know what you saw, or,
if
you saw, anything at all. Please,” I beg. “Please.”

“
Si. Lo vi
,” she says, suddenly. She blinks several times, looks out over the waves. “I see it.”

“What did you see? Did you see him—the boy? He was tall—black hair—”

“I see him.
Si. Sangre, cubriendo todo su cuerpo
—” she motions at her head, down her chest and arms.

“His body,” I say, breathing hard. “Blood?”

“
Si
, his body. Blood. All over …” Her hands curl in and
out of tight fists. She digs, digs, digs into the sand. “The man chase him, he hit him on the head with
un ladrillo
, and
sangre
, blood, and the boy—
se callo
.” She demonstrates, falling into the sand, her eyes shutting, body shaking. “I warn you, this man. I see—The shadow man—he take the boy to the water. He run away.”

The shadow man.
Ted
. I’m trying to control my body from shaking. “Did the shadow man see you?”

She shakes her head. “I hide there.” She points with a dirty finger to one of the rotted piers straight ahead.

“What about my mom?” I press. “What happened?”

“She come out,
más tarde
, and the boy is back on the sand,” Medusa whispers, bringing her fingers to her mouth. “
Y, entonces, todavia estava sangrando
—he still bleed—and she see him and make a loud scream and run and sit, and take his head in her lap and she put her hands on his head, on the blood, and she is crying, she is very sad—”

“She was trying to stop the bleeding,” I whisper. “She must have gotten confused,” I say, “she must have somehow started to believe that she was the reason he was bleeding, somehow, that she was killing him. She was just confused.”

“She kiss his head. She say ‘I so sorry, I so sorry.’ She don’t stop crying.”

The image flashes bright before my eyes: my mother on the sand with Stern, as he bled all over her lap, as he finished dying. And everything bursts out of me—all the
darkness in my lungs, in every organ, in my head, and I’m sobbing, big, heavy, salty tears.

“Then
la policía
come for her. All she say is ‘I so sorry, I so sorry,’ and she look behind her, and she say ‘tell Oleevia I so sorry. Tell her I love her.’”

Her last thought was of me. I think about the words she’d repeat at night, stroking my hair in the lamplight of my bedroom, wind coming sweetly through the screen:
You’re the most beautiful thing I’ve ever made
. More beautiful than music, she’d said, bigger than that.

She didn’t do it. Stern was real
. Is
real. I’m
sane.

“Shh, shh,
mija
,” Medusa says, her hand on my head, and I hug my arms around her legs and she just keeps saying “shh” and I stay there for a long time, hugged around her.

Tell her I love her
. No one told me. But they’d never needed to.