I don’t believe her, but at least she’s not looking at me like I’m insane or pathetic, which is a relief. Just telling her seems to help me get my breathing back under control.
“Do I even deserve to get better, though?” I ask. My voice cracks on the last syllable, and I swallow hard, fighting to pull myself together.
She takes my face in her hands, her thumbs softly tracing my cheeks. “You’re going to be just fine. It takes time to heal. To move on. And not just physically,” she says, then takes a deep breath. “When your dad died, it took everything in me to pull myself together so I could show up and be the best parent I could be for you.”
My memories from then are so hazy and incomplete because I was just barely in kindergarten. I can’t get my shit together now, but she did it all while taking care of a kid.
“How did you do it, Mom?” I ask her. “Kim said that night that I didn’t know how to be myself without her, and I’m starting to think that she’s right.”
“I’m still doing it. One step at a time,” she says. “Always forward. Never back. Just like you’ll do.” Her eyes grow serious. More serious than I’ve ever seen them. She reaches out and pulls me in for a hug. With her face buried in my neck, I can just barely make out her whisper. “You’ll fight to come back.”
Always forward. Never back.
I think about that as I unpack the groceries and smuggle the pizza rolls into my mini fridge in the basement. She said I’d fight my way back. But I’ve never had to fight alone. Through the shoulder injury, through pregame jitters, through tough classes at school, I always had Kim’s support.
Kim told me that night that I could move forward without her.
The thing she didn’t tell me was how.
I pick up the photo of us from the homecoming game and sit down on my bed. Her smile glitters up at me.
My forward always had her in it. We had already signed up for classes at UCLA, my schedule mirroring hers, even though she was the only one with some idea for a major. But I thought there would be time to figure out the specifics for me. To figure out what I wanted, Kim alongside me the entire time.
I guess, if I think about it, I didn’t have much of a plan for myself. More of a plan for us.
Even if I could picture it, there’s no way I can move forward now, haunted by the ghost of my girlfriend.
Ex-girlfriend, I correct myself. And somehow that makes it worse. Like I don’t have claim to the grief inside me. Just the blame. Even thinking of Kim haunting me makes me feel like a dick. She didn’t want to be with me in life, so why would she spend her time following me now? I toss the photo of us down on my bed, realizing there’s only one other possible answer for what happened tonight.
One that actually makes sense.
Maybe I’m just going crazy.
Maybe that’s what I deserve.
7
“Well?” I ask Dr. Benefield first thing Monday morning. “Am I cracked?” My mom scheduled the appointment to prove to me I’m not crazy.
She clicks her penlight off and slides it into the pocket of her white jacket as she shakes her head, giving me an amused smile. “No. You suffered a significant loss, and that could be manifesting in unexpected ways.”
“Like being haunted by Kimberly?”
“Like… seeing what you want to see,” she corrects, holding up her iPad to show me my brain scans from this morning. “Look.” She flips back and forth between a healthy brain and my brain to make some point about how I’m “just fine.” My mom cranes her neck to see the images, but I don’t even bother to look.
“Our brains are magnificent machines,” Dr. Benefield adds, closing the iPad. “They’ll do whatever it takes to protect us from pain, whether that’s physical or emotional. There’s nothing wrong with yours that time won’t heal. Okay?”
To protect us from pain? How is seeing my dead girlfriend protecting me from pain?
She looks at me until I comply with a nod, then pulls out a prescription pad and a pen and scribbles on a page before ripping it off and holding it out to me.
I take it from her, looking down at her handwriting. I expect to see a gibberish prescription name, but instead it says: Chill out. It’s not really happening.
Great.
“Kyle,” she says, and I look back up, meeting her no-nonsense gaze. “The visions you’re having, they’re not real, okay? They’ll fade when you’re ready. I promise. But for now, when they happen, you take out that prescription. Read it, remember it, believe it.”
I nod, but her words don’t reassure me. Fade? What happens when even this last trace of Kim fades? When I see her, I feel crazy, which sucks, but I also see her. And I’m not ready to lose that.
* * *
After we get back home, my mom heads to work. I pour myself a bowl of Lucky Charms and slide into a spot at the kitchen table. For a while it’s just the sound of my noisy crunching, but then I swear I hear a muffled voice, the words difficult to make out. I pause, the spoon halfway to my mouth, my ears straining.
“Mom?” I call out, my voice echoing around the empty house. Did she forget something? I listen harder and realize the sound seems to come from below. My pocket.
When I pull my phone out, noise is crackling through the speaker. Oh man. Who did I butt dial?
“… Sam,” the voice says as I lift the phone to my ear, the words finally becoming clear enough to hear. I open my mouth to respond, but he keeps going. It’s a voice mail. “I don’t even know if you’re going to hear this, but I gotta tell you, I’m scared. And before you laugh, asswipe, I’m serious. You’re scaring us.”
The voice mail cuts off and the screen lights up, showing the string of other unheard messages.
I stare at my phone in the palm of my hand. My thumb lingers over the green call button so long that the screen goes dark. I swallow hard, then shove the phone back into my pocket.