Notes from Ghost Town (31 page)

“It’s okay, Mom.” By instinct, I move to her, ribbon my arms around her neck.

She’d blamed herself, the whole time, for Stern’s death. She’d held all of that guilt in her cells, let it expand, take up every single inch of her brain so there were no parts left to play back the truth of that night.

She pulls away after a few minutes, our hands still held in the space between us, surrounded on all fronts by white. White walls. White bed. White sun. “So, Livie,” she finally says, blotting at her face. “It’s not too much of a dump here, is it? It’s plain, I know … but, I bet we can fix it up. Don’t you think?”

I take it in again. White walls. White bed. White sun. White walls. Blank walls. Something forms in my brain—in my fingers. I stand suddenly from the piano bench, put my hands on her shoulders. “Hold on a minute, Mom. Okay?”

“Where are you going?”

“Be right back, Mom! One minute!”

I jog down the wide, sun-drenched hallway—past the nurses station, several other patients stirring things in the common kitchen, NPR humming along on the radio, holler “coming right back!” to the short-haired woman at reception—and to the parking lot. Raina’s passed out, snoring softly in the leaned-back front seat. I reach through the (mostly open) window to unlock the door, grab my book bag, lock everything up, and run back inside.

Mom’s still at her piano when I get back. “Thought maybe you got freaked and decided to skip town,” she cracks, leaning her elbows against the piano lid.

“No, no,” I tell her. “I just remembered I brought you something.”

I grab the wooden chair from her desk and start unzipping my bag.

I unload my sketchbook, my charcoals, a red pen, India ink. Mom lights up—I do, too, seeing her face.

“Artwork,” I say, “for your new place. But I’m going to need some music, while I draw.”

“Oh, Liv—I don’t—my hands are … they’re not back to normal yet, you know.”

“Mom—it doesn’t matter what you sound like.” For a moment, I consider telling her about my own artistic “issues,” but something stops me—some fear, maybe, that she’ll blame herself. That the glow in her eyes will retreat, that all her forward-moving healing will freeze in place and shrivel to some black goo in her center that sucks her back inside of it. So I say nothing. “Just play for me.”

“Well,” she sighs, “just don’t say I didn’t warn you if it’s no good.” Then, slowly, she opens the lid, hovers her fingers over the keys like she’s not quite sure what to do next. But when her hands touch down, they just
go
—and what starts to fill the room is sound that actually does manage, in some small way, to stop time, to reverse all its salty, vengeful effects. And when I draw her, it’s as she was—as she always will be to me when she plays—young,
and long-haired, and mermaid-finned, and strong, and passionate, and healthy.

Free.

I rip it gently from my sketchbook when I finish and place it in front of her.

“Liv,” she says, turning to me, my sketch trembling in her hands as she stares at it. “You remembered. The mermaid story.”

“Of course I remember,” I tell her, feeling so full-up with joy I’m surprised my body hasn’t burst from it yet. “It’s my favorite story.”

She lays the sketch down on the piano stool and comes to hug me. Big fat happy tears roll down both of our cheeks as we sway there, rocking foot to foot, almost dancing. In her white room, with its white curtains, white carpet, white sunlight, blue sky.
Blue sky
.

“Mom!”
Holy crap holy crap holy crap
.

She pulls back, looks at me worriedly. “What’s wrong? Is something wrong? What’s wrong?”

“No—it’s just—the sky.” We turn together to look at it. Hope brims up inside of me to bursting as I see it:
blue
.

Not gray. Blue. I’d thought
innocent
was the finest word in the entire English language, but I change my mind.

It’s
blue
.

My whole body flushes with it—the most brilliant, sparkling thing I’ve ever seen in my life—this sky. Today. I’d forgotten what it was like, to see like this. To see
color
.

Blue
. Every cell in my body feels lit up.

“It’s really beautiful, isn’t it?” she says, and I open my eyes wider because I want them to be absolutely flooded with it.
Blue
. “You should go outside and enjoy it, Liv. Too gorgeous to stay cooped up in here.”

I stall, a little tug of fear in my belly—fear of all the things that might happen as soon as I leave her. “What are you going to do?”

She glances over her shoulder, at her piano. “I think I might keep playing.” There’s a glint in her eye that I recognize—that middle-of-the-night-adventure glint—and a flush in her cheeks that I can see. I never thought something that small, that simple, would send chills ripping through me—a kind of base joy I’d even forgotten I could feel.

“I’m gonna be back real soon, Mom,” I promise, hugging her again. She kisses my forehead. Her lips are soft; her hair smells good. Little things—little things you don’t realize until they go, and come back again, as though by magic. “Real soon.”

I let myself out of Mom’s room and stand by the door a minute, until I hear the notes of her piano again, wafting out her door and down the hall like a siren song, calling me back to myself, calling me to the outside.

To Raina, awake, now, and singing along to the radio, as she waits for me to emerge.

To the wild cerulean sky.

O
n the other side of chaos is order.

Order is what we make happen—an instinct hammered into our lizard brains to help us stay upright, even when everything around us is chaotic, tilting, trying to buck us off its back, back into bottomless Nowhere, back into the Gray Space.

People die. They die too early, sometimes. And there is grief that almost crushes everything.

Almost. But then there is the realization that it
is
worth it to be alive, even if just to smell the very particular scent of your mother one more time—the scent as she leaned over you nightly before you fell to sleep, and told you, again and again, what made a person free, and how you meant something, and how you were meant
for
something—even if it takes a long time to figure out what that thing is, even if that thing is just to remember this story and tell it, or keep it.

You remember it is important to be alive because there is love, even if you cannot touch it with your hands or your lips. There is love.

“Liv!” Heather calls from the bottom of the stairwell, Wynn in hand, bouncing back and forth on her sparkly pink flats.

“Almost ready! Almost ready!” I lean over the banister; my hair’s still a wet mess, my dress tugged about halfway on, paint still caked to the parts of my forearms and elbows I forgot to scrub in the shower.

Heather looks beautiful. I, however, am full-mess: makeup not on, heels that have dug themselves into some mysterious black hole in the crumpled-up-clothes wasteland of my room (who knows what other lost things I’d find in there, if I bothered to really look), paints scattered, loose across my windowsill, the canvas I’ve been working on slowly, for the past month—since the day I first visited Mom—still dripping-slick with burnt sienna, olive, canary, linseed oil. Every time I finish one, I bring it right to Mom; she’s started to joke that I’m just using her for the free gallery space.

“I’m heading to the church now,” Heather says. “My sister’s waiting in the car, and your dad’s already there.” She smiles, a happy, nervous smile. “We’ll see you soon.”

“See yoooou soon, Livieeeee,” Wynn squeals.

I run down the stairs, tugging my dress just a stitch more secure before lifting Wynn up into my arms. The bandages have finally come off and I’m getting used to the scars, raised and pink and trying to find their way back to normal skin. Raina says they make me look “hardcore.”
Pam, my new therapist, who’s like some blissed-out, grown-up, yoga-hippie version of Rain, says that the physical body, the idea of the self, is kind of a scar: a brief puckering of time, a fleeting sewing together of energy and heart, which go beyond the physical form, on and on and on, forever.

“Mommy sandwich,” I whisper into Wynn’s ear, and she giggles like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever heard as I lean her over to Heather’s right, and I lean left, and we kiss both of her cheeks at once. She smells like honeydew and hairspray.

I put Wynn down, and she resumes twirling, and admiring the stupendous glitter of her footwear with funny little coos. “Do you need any help?” I ask Heather. “With your dress, or the car, or anything?”

“How does my makeup look? Does it look okay? Is my hair—has it fallen out? Should I have left it down?” she asks, patting at her pearl-studded, tendriled blond bun as she searches my face for some sign of
uh-oh, you got this
all
wrong
.

Her sister
beeeeeep
s from outside. Heather inhales deeply. “I told her not to come in,” she says. “I’m already running late, and she’d just fuss.”

I’m pretty sure Dad’s pacing in some back room at the chapel right now, just as nervous; he rehearsed his vows to me for an hour last night after dinner. “You look perfect,” I tell her, understanding this is what she wants. Perfection. Order. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

“I didn’t expect to feel this nervous.” She laughs, exhaling,
shaking herself out. She hugs the plastic-encased mass of dress into her chest with one hand and grabs Wynn’s hand with the other. “Okay, then.” She starts to shut the door behind her and then turns back, panicked again. “You’ll be there by four?”

I nod. “Deep breaths.”

Only a few minutes later, back up in my room stepping into my heels and putting on the final touches of lipgloss, I hear the
diiiing-dong
of the bell. I straighten Mom’s pendant necklace against my collarbone, and rush downstairs to open the door.

“Olivia Tithe,” he says, leaning against the door frame in his tux. He runs one hand through his thick blond hair, a piece of it coming to fall over his eye as he looks me up and down. He swallows hard before he says anything. And all he can say is: “Wow … I mean. Wow.”

For some reason, all I can think at that moment is of Wynn, that thing she repeats when she’s uber excited:
wowwowowowowowowowow
. This sets me giggling. Giggling hard, smiling stupidly, embarrassingly big as I say his name, and step right up close to him.

“Austin Morse.” He puts his hands on the waist of my silky cobalt blue gown and draws me to him—into the spice of his skin and his warm chest and his fast-beating heart—and I keep my eyes open as we make out there in the doorway, squares of sunlight reflecting against his face so it looks gold. And we keep making out, there in the doorway until my phone buzzes.

Raina.
Get yer hand out of Morse’s pants and come get me!

“It’s time,” I tell him, trying to pull away but finding it very, very difficult right at this moment because, though I still don’t quite know what Austin is to me or even what I want him to be, it’s just so goddamn fun to kiss someone. I kiss his lips, the dimple in his right cheek, the shine of his cheekbone. “Then again … what
is
time, anyway? Just a human invention … clocks …”

He laughs. “I think it starts to matter when you have a wedding to go to.”

“Oh. Right … a
wedding
.” I stare at him funny. “I was wondering why you were wearing that tuxedo.”

Austin climbs into the backseat of my perfect, rusty junker of a car when Raina gets in—two braids today, flowing down the back of her emerald green dress—only a little past four o’clock.

The three of us drive—windows all the way down even if it totally messes up our hair, late-September wind flowing in—plumeria, sweet acacia, honeyed lilt of palm and fresh-cut grass—and Blonde on Blonde blaring from the radio. My hair is wind-wild, whipping behind us. However it ends up looking when we get out of this car, it doesn’t matter. It’s perfect, far as I’m concerned. Nothing matters right now but this.

We pass Dovedale Park on the way. The carousel slides past in a shock of color—the ponies and their pastel manes and wide green eyes, the glow of bulbs overhead, pulsing
through all that velvety red. I’d forgotten how beautiful it was, how I used to ride it for what felt like hours, amazed, as a little girl in Mom’s lap.

And then, from the rearview mirror, I see him again—the memory of him, full-color, fully alive, sitting in the backseat beside Austin. And, for a moment, it’s the four of us, stuffed together in my car—like some funny double date no one knows about but us. Me and Stern. My Stern. And, right now, in the car—I see him as he was—Stern—leaning his face out the window to let the wind whap him as he always did, his ink black hair, hazel eyes squinted into the falling sun.

For a second—a second that lasts infinite seconds—he turns his face away from the wind to meet my eye. He smiles, he smiles without worrying about the gap in his teeth, he smiles in a way that I know: he is free.

And then he goes. He does not shiver away this time. He glows, he glows so bright, and then I can’t see him anymore. But when I blink, I see the brightness of him for a whole minute, like after staring into the sun. And I realize, right now and forever, maybe: so what if I am a little crazy, if ghosts are real, or if they’re not. I got to tell him I loved him. I got to say it. Who knows if it was real for him, if he felt it, if we were there together in some other place entirely. It was real for me, real as anything else, a thing that burned inside of me and found release.

Raina leans forward to turn up “Fourth Time Around,” and our mouths—hers and mine and even Austin’s (who
is messing up all the words because he’s just starting to figure out Bob Dylan)—open to take the music in and release it: a loud, fearless, whole-hog singing, which is the only way to sing as you drive to your father’s wedding with a person you love deep, and another you might love—one day—and another you will always love, forever, and who is gone.

But you are here. And the sky is four different colors right now, at least. And you are free.