Notes from Ghost Town (29 page)

I always knew.

I
watch, poised with sketchpad on my lap, from the top of an overlooking hill as the wrecking ball arcs through the sky and crumbles the charred walls of Ghost Town to the ground.

It is a deafening, glorious event—one which Dad couldn’t bear to watch, still reeling, both furious with himself for not taking my word over Ted’s, and in total shock that a man he trusted so deeply turned out to be, as Dad put it earlier, a
goddamn maniac
.

Once Dad was ready to actually
listen
to the whole story, I told him—not about Stern so much as the “weird hunch” I had, based on things Austin had told me, things I’d started to figure out on my own. Since there was little more reason to avoid it at this point, I also told him about my eyes; he was concerned and fussy and asked a million questions between pulling me in for big, tight, heaving hugs, but, he didn’t think I was crazy. And that’s all I really needed. He said we’d go back to the doctor, that we’d figure something out. That we’d get me better. It felt good to say it, to have him know.

I reach for a tube of watercolor, squeeze out a squiggle onto a small easel, and dip my brush in. I don’t care that it just looks black to me, even though the tube says
alizarin crimson
. I’m just happy to feel paint on the edge of my brush again, moving soft across a surface.

So I paint. I paint what looks like ash, sailing through the sky, paint the death of this evil place. The death that might actually make life possible again.

Amazingly, at the police station last night, Medusa didn’t go cold. The police gave her blankets, and something to drink, and once she got rolling, it all slid out clear as when she told it to me. Even more amazing: they listened.

I told them the truth—about the fire, that Ted trapped me there when I’d gone to search for evidence against him. I told them about Tanya Leavin, how she and Ted must have been having an affair. They perked majorly up at her name. They’d been trying to untangle Tanya’s case for the past year, and they’d suspected her involvement with Ted because of phone records and texts, but hadn’t yet figured out a way to pin her disappearance on him. They warned us that even with substantial evidence, the case might be a difficult one to make against such a well-connected, well-lawyered man. But they got the DA to postpone Mom’s sentencing in light of what we told them.

Finally, she’s got a chance.

I watch them work, the men in muddy boots and
reflective vests, the sky thick with clouds promising impending drench. It’s music, really, hearing the pieces of this structure fall, thud to the ground. Soon it will all be dust for them to sift through, piles of drywall and wood and glass from which they might decipher human remains. Bones. Teeth.

I picture a whole well full of trapped ghosts, finally released, and I picture Stern—I picture him in that time-stopped instant before everything changed—sunlight making honey of his skin, the flash of his teeth, his eyes fixed just on me inside that old shed outside of Oh Susannah. I shut my eyes amidst the crashing and the banging and the twangy jaws of monster-big machines opening and shutting and spitting and I think of his face: the square angles of his jaw, eyes that pierce through to some hidden layer of me, how even in black and white and gray, he somehow had more color than any person I’d ever seen, even when I could see the stuff full.

So I paint him, too, hovering in the corner of my wide, watercolor-smattered page, my best friend who, even in death, forced me to fight just when I started to think I had no fight left to give. I ring the brush around in my water bottle.

I still don’t know if any of it was real. Maybe Stern was a way for my bruised-up brain to dissociate me from the things I already knew. Maybe it decided all that pain was too much to contain inside the walls of one body, and it had to form his image so that I could move forward in any
kind of way. So that I would have a reason to keep hoping. So that I wouldn’t just slink away and die, or something. So that I’d love. So that I’d fight.

Still … there were things. Things
only
Stern could have known about. And the feeling I had when he would come—like both of us were bridging some gap between life and death, existing in that gray space neither of us quite knew how to figure. I just don’t see how all of it could have been made up.

I finish Stern and paint Medusa, too. The cops tried to set her up in a shelter, offered her a clean bed and showers and everything but she didn’t want it. She likes living in the sand, searching for treasure. I paint her on a big pile of gleaming combs, the ocean rising around her feet-turned-fins. So she can dive in and escape whenever she needs to, whenever she’s in danger, so, like Mom in the mermaid stories she’d tell me as a kid, she’ll always know where home is.

The light is fading, the big toothy machines finally starting to clear away some of the larger bits of rubble, when I hear footsteps behind me. I turn, and my heart throbs fresh:
gu-gug-gu-gug-gu-gug
. Austin, coming up the hill. His hair is all messed up and his clothes look dirty, like he’s been wearing them a couple of days. There are dark circles under his eyes like he hasn’t been sleeping much lately, either.

I don’t know what he knows. I don’t know what he knew. I can’t help but look at his face and, though there’s
no biology connecting them, think of Ted’s. I start to pack up my paints quickly.

“Olivia—stop. Please don’t leave.”

“Austin, I can’t talk to you.”

“Just listen for a second. Please,” he pleads, his voice raw, husky. “I’ve been looking for you for hours. Then I realized you might be here.”

“Okay.” I tell him, still uneasy. But I owe him this—a fair hearing, I guess. “Sit.”

He sits, tentatively, beside me. “I’ve been trying to talk to you since I found out you were in the hospital. The police came to our house. They grilled Ted about the fire. He said it was an insurance thing, you know …”

“I know what he said.”

He frowns, staring hard at the ground. “Olivia—I know you don’t have to believe me, but, I really didn’t know. Anything. Until it was already too late.”

“Is that what you came here to tell me? That you figured it all out a little bit too late?” In the distance, another wall of the building crumbles.

“No.” He runs a hand through his hair. “I came here to say sorry. For—for everything. For keeping that secret from you, for so long.”

“Why didn’t you say anything sooner? Why didn’t you just come clean? I would have known so much sooner. Austin—this whole thing is so much bigger than you or me.”

“Olivia. If I thought there was a
reason
he asked me to keep an eye out for you—other than the fact that he was
worried—I
would
have said something.” Austin says. He sucks in his lower lip. “Ted has raised me pretty much my whole life. He’s been a father …” His voice breaks and he coughs. “I didn’t know it was all a lie,” he spits out.

I stare across the broken landscape, the gray sky, the stretch of highway just out of sight that leads to Broadwaithe, to Mom’s cramped cell. “I know exactly what you mean.”

He gulps back something thick in his throat. “That night, when you came over for dinner, and he freaked out—I told you I thought he was just upset over some business deal. But I realized after I drove you home that he really
did
freak right after you brought up the hearing.”

I nod, watch the grief building on his face—on his beautiful mouth, in the twitching of his right cheek, just below the eye.

“I kept thinking about it, how strange he’d acted. And then, the other night, in the condo,” he blushes, eyes flashing up at me, “after we fought, and you left, I had this really bad feeling about everything—like maybe he was messed up in something pretty bad, and—I didn’t know how, or what, or why—but that you were somehow involved.” He grips his knees, hard, like he needs something to hold onto. “I asked him about it. I wanted to know why he was so
obsessed
with you, and what you were doing, and everything you said. Why he wanted me to become close with you. I told him I thought it was screwed-up, and I thought he was lying about something. I told him
I thought he was messing around on my Mom. And then he … he exploded.”

“So what did you do?”

“Well—that’s when I started trying to call you—but you didn’t answer. I went to sleep, hoping that when I woke up you’d have gotten in touch. When I woke up, my phone was missing from my nightstand. Which was weird, because I’d definitely set it right there before I passed out.” He bites his lip, blinks, shielding his eyes from the sunlight. “I called it from Mom’s landline—and that’s when I heard it ringing … inside Ted’s office. I saw the text messages.”

“The ones he sent me. Pretending to be you.”

He clears his throat, picks at the grass beside the blanket, his stomach muscles visibly tight, clenched beneath his crumpled polo. “Yeah. Those. Later the police showed up to talk to Ted. He was talking about the insurance scam—it didn’t make any sense. And the police mentioned a girl who’d been inside, after the fire had been set. They mentioned you. He hurt you. I knew it. I—” He looks at me, starting to shake. I’ve never seen Austin Morse shake. I’ve hardly seen him ruffled at all. “I don’t know why I didn’t say something right then to the cops, right there—my mom, maybe—the look on her face. I just—I froze. Maybe I’m an idiot, but, I wanted to talk to you first, that’s all I could think of. I called your house—over and over again. I called the hospital. They said you’d been discharged already. I let him hurt you—I never would have—I didn’t know that he was going to—” His voice breaks.

“And you’ve been looking for me?”

“I would have looked forever. Seriously, Tithe. I don’t give up easy.”

Austin comes closer to me, tentatively taking my hand in his. His big warm hand. Against my will, Stern’s face takes siege of my brain, sending knives through my sore lungs. I wonder if that’s just how it feels to miss someone so bad—like being stabbed in the gut a little bit, each time you think of them. I bring myself back. Here. To Austin. A boy I’ve hated. A boy I’ve wanted. A boy I will forgive, for not knowing. There is so little we really know, after all.

I touch the tips of my fingers to his face because he looks so sad and there’s some nurturer instinct in me that suddenly kicks in, wanting to ensure him that he’s cared for. He kisses my fingers, one by one, puts my palm in his. Just holding it, on the grass, on the dirt, the clanking, thudding symphony of Ghost Town’s destruction rising around us.

“Olivia?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m scared.”

“I know.”

“I’m scared about what’s going to happen when … when it all goes down,” he says, watching the machines devour so much brick, mortar, glass.

His jaw clenches up, his right foot digs into the ground. “My mom won’t talk. She just … she screamed, and then
she went mute. The house feels different. Like—dark, all of a sudden, even though it’s not….” He trails off, looks to me.

“Whatever happens, Austin: you’re not alone,” I tell him, kissing him softly on the cheek. “You’re never going to be alone.”

“That a promise, Tithe?” His voice is small and soft.

“Yeah, Morse. It’s a promise.” I stand, pull my blanket up from the grass, fold it up small, gather up my book bag and art supplies.

I extend my hand to lift Austin from the ground. More police cars are gathered near the rubble of Ghost Town, poking around with flashlights, saying hushed things into walkie-talkies. “Come on,” I say, letting go of his hand and weaving my arm in his, shivering hard with the souls of who-knows-how-many unleashed ghosts, sidling up against my warm, fire-blotched, living skin. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Austin offers me a ride home, but I don’t take it. I want to walk, to hold the speckled leaves of trees in my fingertips, let the moist air soak my skin, to sweat, to feel earth beneath my feet. I go slow, taking the long way. It takes me nearly an hour to get home.

The smells of dinner greet me as soon as I make it back—thick smells of cooking pasta, roasted garlic, olive oil, something else bubbling in a pan. I see Wynn in the living
room—the light-reflections of the television against the side of her face, the yippy sounds of cartoons just loud enough that she doesn’t hear me come in. Dad’s sitting at the kitchen table, Heather behind him, rubbing his back, soothing him.

For a moment, I don’t see Dad and Heather as parents, but as people, soothing each other. Keeping each other alive.

And then I see them as parents again and I get a little grossed out because old people aren’t supposed to touch when it’s possible younger people might see them touching.

I stand in the doorway; he looks up from the table as soon as he sees me. “Livie—darlin’—” I know by the sound of his voice, the bright in his eyes, that something’s happened. I drop my bags in the foyer and rush in. He stands and pulls me in, hugs me so tight.

“Dad—what? What’s going on?”

“The police …”

“I was just there. I watched the demolition.” My stomach tightens up. “Did they find something?”

He hugs me tighter. “Bones.”

“Tanya?” I ask, shivering, wondering if Stern’s beside me right now, too invisible even to see, hugging the side Dad can’t cover.

“They need to verify, of course. They need to be sure.” My dad exhales. “They’re going to rush it. Of course, this changes everything. It’s proof—real proof that Ted was connected to another murder, that he’s been in this game
for a long time, that Mom was a pawn in this whole mess, someone he manipulated based on what he knew about her.”

Mom
. I want to call her, to run to her, to spread out a picnic on the sand and run through the surf with her beside me. I wonder if I’m dreaming. I feel like I’m floating, bursting, made of light and air.

“We’re going to get her out of there, Liv, we’re going to get her out.” His voice breaks on the word. Heather comes beside us, wrapping her thin arms around my back so they connect with Dad’s. There are some things you don’t choose, but then, things change, and you have to. Or you will starve.