We Are Here (41 page)

Kristina eventually came wandering down the street. I whistled and she spotted me in the doorway and came over.

She looked down at me in silence, then held out her hand. I passed her a cigarette. Kristina smokes only about once a month, and it’s always a portent of storm clouds.

“So what happened with you and Lizzie?”

She sat on the step next to me and took a light. “How do you know something happened?”

“The way you look, plus the fact that you’ve been gone a very long time and wouldn’t answer the phone. This isn’t a time for holding back, Kris.”

“I know.”

“So what happened?”

“She showed me some things.”

“What kind of things?”

She shrugged. “What her life is like. What
all
their lives are like.”

“Who
are
these people?”

“Lizzie’s adamant she’s not dead. I believe her. I don’t get why ghosts would attach to other people the way she is with Catherine. It doesn’t make sense.”

“Make
sense
? You realize we’re sitting discussing whether someone we’ve both spoken to is dead? So, what—are we back to them being imaginary friends?”

“I don’t know, John. That’s what Lizzie told me. I don’t see why she’d lie.”

“Did you ever have one? When you were a kid?”

“An imaginary friend? No. At least not that I remember.”

“Me neither,” I said. “But … I guess that’s their whole point.”

“What happened back at the church, with Billy?”

Now it was my turn to shrug. “I have no idea.”

“Didn’t you see?”

“I saw. I just don’t know
what
I saw, in that I have no way of explaining or understanding it.”

I described what had happened, up to the point where coffee and bits of Danish started falling through Billy’s body and splatting on the floor. After I’d left the church I’d stood on the street for a few moments. The guy/ghost/friend/whatever called Maj walked away without saying another word. His head was down. He looked like a person who had a mission in mind.

Kris listened and was silent for a while. “There’s only two options here, John. Either we’re screwed up in the head or this stuff is real—whatever the explanation is. Sitting with cold sun shining down on us, the first option seems more credible, maybe, but it’s not. You know that. If it were
just
me, or just
you
, that’d be one thing. But we’ve both seen these people, spoken to them.”

“How did the conversation with Lizzie end?”

Kris looked uncomfortable. “She’s unhappy.”

“About what?”

“Everything. She has a friend. Had one, anyway. That relationship is more important to her than anything else in the world—even more than the one with Maj. Maj managed to make contact with his friend. They’ve spoken, even hung out for a few hours. Lizzie’s glad for him, but it’s brought home how unhappy she is about her own life.”

“So?”

“What?”

“So what did you tell her?”

“That maybe she needed to do something about it.”

“Kristina, I don’t think we want to start interfering in these people’s lives.”

“I wasn’t interfering.”

“Okay, bad word. I meant, we understand nowhere near enough about their world to offer advice.”

“She’s my friend, John.”

“Friend? How many times have you even met her?”

“What difference does
that
make?”

“Friend’s a big word, Kris.”

“It’s big because it’s a tiny step and the tiny steps are the hardest to understand. The first time you came into the bar in Black Ridge I knew we could be friends—whatever else might happen. Didn’t you?”

I thought about it. “Yes.”

“That’s not shared time. That’s not interests in common or dating agency profiling. That’s something that passes through the air in an instant, that comes out of people’s minds and is real and you have to say yes to.”

“I see where you’re going, but I don’t think it’s enough to explain Lizzie, or Maj.”

“I’m not trying to explain them,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette. “I don’t have to. We’ve had conversations with these people. They exist. We’re out the other side of having to explain how or why. The question is what we
do
. That’s what I’ve been trying to work out. I left Lizzie hours ago and I still don’t have an answer. I’ve been alternating between thinking I’m crazy and knowing I’m not. It doesn’t make much difference. I still don’t know what to do.”

She was right. The problem of how something works is of little importance outside laboratories. The question is what happens next.

“I still think it’s a mistake to get between Lizzie and Catherine,” I said. “Other people’s relationships are written in a different language, especially when they’re broken.”

“You’re right,” she said reluctantly. “Next time I see her I’ll back off on the idea.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, the next thing—”

I was interrupted by someone cheerfully shouting my name, and started—suddenly realizing how wrapped up I’d been and that Reinhart could have come strolling up and shot me in the head before I’d known what was happening. Thankfully, it was only Lydia heading down the road.

“Hey, Lyds,” I said, standing painfully and trying not to sound tense. “How are you?”

“Well, you know,” she said thoughtfully, “I’ve been better. But, matter of fact, I’ve been worse.”

She looked okay. Certainly better than she had when I’d seen her the night before. “That’s good.”

“
You
look like shit, though.”

“Thanks,” I said, as she leaned forward to peer at my face. “I had a disagreement with someone.”

“They kicked your ass, by the look of it.”

“It may not be over yet.”

“Wasn’t Krissie here, was it?”

“No.”

She cackled merrily for a moment. “I talked to him,” she said, for a moment making me think she’d somehow run in to Reinhart. “Thanks for that.”

“Frankie? He’s back?”

“No. Don’t know where that asshole’s got to, and today I don’t care. Fuck him. I mean, I went and talked to the other guy. This morning. That priest.”

Kristina was looking question marks at me. “I gave Lyds his address last night,” I muttered. “This was before I knew Jeffers believed in ghosts.”

Lydia laughed, completely normally, a sound I’d never heard from her before. “He really does, doesn’t he? Good listener, though. I went around thinking I didn’t know why I was wasting my time, but I’d been feeling so shitty in my soul lately maybe it was time to try anything. Next thing I know I’m telling him about Frankie and all
manner
of crap, and he’s kind of like you are about it. He listens. He heard me out and went with it, and I only had to explain to him about three times that Frankie ain’t dead. Didn’t ask me to pray with him or nothing either. Gave me a pastry, too.”

“That’s great,” Kristina said thoughtfully. I could see her trying to make something of this, to work out whether Lyds maybe wasn’t crazy after all, and if for all these years she’d been trying to make contact with something that actually existed; if perhaps this was a case of a real person trying to reconnect with a friend, one who’d decided he didn’t want to play ball.

“Jeffers seems like a good guy,” I said, to forestall this. I felt Lydia’s world was complicated enough and that if an hour of being taken seriously had made a difference then there was no need to get it tangled up with other stuff.

Lyds sniffed, losing interest, and wandered off down the street. “You put that ugly mug of yours indoors,” she yelled back as a parting shot. “You’re going to scare people looking like that.”

“You need to come upstairs now,” I told Kristina, when Lydia had finally turned the corner. Kris was about to crack wise, but then she saw the expression on my face.

She stood in the middle of the room, not saying anything. I think she’d started to guess what was up from the way I double-locked the street door, but there’s no substitute for seeing something in the flesh.

The apartment had been destroyed. Not just turned over, not merely vandalized. They—or he—had been extremely thorough. Every drawer had been turned out and its contents broken or torn. Every plate, bowl, and piece of glassware had been smashed. The fridge had been opened and pulled over onto its front, turning the floor into a sea of liquids. Everything from the cupboards had been broken, thrown around. Every lightbulb in the apartment was smashed, along with the mirror in the bathroom and the two wooden chairs we’d bought for good money at a nice store in SoHo in the first flush of living in the city. Cards we’d written to each other, along with a few pieces of cheap art we’d picked up in local thrift stores, had been set fire to. The ashes from these had been thrown onto a pile of Kristina’s clothes and the sheets from our bed in the middle of the living room.

It had been meticulous. I’d had plenty of time to go through it in the hours while Kristina wasn’t answering her phone, and yet coming back into the apartment after a couple of hours was a shock. The apartment as it had been yesterday was still alive in my mind. It takes a while for your mind to understand something’s gone.

Eventually Kris looked at me. Her eyes were dry, but she was blinking rapidly. “Other rooms the same?”

“Yes.”

“Guess we did right not coming home last night, huh?”

“Guess so,” I said. “And I don’t think we should stay here now. He’s going to come back. He only did this because he couldn’t do it to me.”

“Jesus.”

“FYI, he didn’t tear or burn
everything
, unfortunately. I can’t find your diary or that notebook you insist on keeping stuff in. Like your passwords and ATM numbers. And your credit card.”

“He’s a psycho, isn’t he.” This was a statement, not a question. “I mean, a real one.”

“Yes. An angry man just trashes the place. This is dismantlement. He went back and forth, breaking everything that could be broken, and then he went back through it and broke it some more. I don’t want to think what the equivalent would be when committed upon a person. I especially do not want it to happen to us. So let’s go.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Not back to Jeffers. He’s in deep enough already, and I don’t think him being a priest will stay Reinhart’s hand.”

“Well then, where?” Kristina said, her voice rising. The reality of what surrounded her was beginning to sink in. There were spots of high color on her cheeks. “Where else can we
go
, John? Are we going to be fucking
street people
now? Should we chase after Lydia and see if she knows some good parks to sleep in?”

“The first thing we should do is leave, Kris. Seriously. Let’s talk about this outside.”

“Outside? Oh—you mean
where we live
, right?”

I put my arms around her. “We’ll find somewhere for tonight. We can sleep in the bar if we have to—Mario’s got some serious locks on that place. After that …”

I trailed off, not knowing what would happen after that. I’d even wondered if it was excessively insane to consider talking to Lizzie or Maj or one of these other people. They evidently had places to roost at night. Maybe there’d be room for us, maybe not.

Kristina didn’t say anything. She was looking past my shoulder, and I figured she’d noticed something else that was broken or missing or was maybe trying to see past all the chaos entirely.

“What times were you in here? From when until when?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “I got here around ten. Why?”

“Then what? When did you go outside? Right after we spoke on the phone?”

“Yeah, pretty much. I was certainly down there a few hours. Why?”

She disengaged from me and pointed. I turned and looked at the window. There was writing on it, scrawled in the dust and rain dirt on the other side.

“Was that there when you were here?”

“No,” I said, going closer. “I remember being amazed he hadn’t broken the window too. There was nothing on it then.”

We angled our heads to catch the light against the dirt. It was easier to read than the first time, as if whoever had left this had tried a lot harder, pouring all their concentration into it.

It said:

“Oh no,” Kristina said. She ran out the door.

Catherine turned from unlocking the front door to find Ella and Isabella weren’t waiting on the steps behind her as she’d assumed, but were still down on the sidewalk. More than that, they were arguing. This had been brewing from the moment she’d picked them up from school. Usually the girls got along as well as you could expect of lifelong competitors for parental attention and resources, but once in a while something (or someone) snapped. It was almost always Isabella. She had stronger opinions than Ella on just about everything, and no compunction about taking incisive action to ensure they were widely understood. Ella took life as it came. Isabella regarded the world as a work in progress and herself as a one-person focus group of infinite power. In that, Catherine privately believed, she took after her mother.

“Hey, hey,
hey
,” she said, as Isa abruptly escalated to shock and awe mode and punched her elder sister in the chest. “Isa—
stop
that!”