TRENTON
Trenton was nearly out of time.
Seeing the ghost, and learning about the woman whose brains had gone splat in the den, had made Trenton temporarily reconsider his plan to die. For a few short days he’d felt that he had a purpose; there was a mystery for him, layered underneath the visible world, like a gift nestled inside folds and folds of tissue paper. He’d felt that everything was connected: coming back to Coral River, meeting Katie, and the ghost. Or ghosts. Whoever they were.
Katie had been . . . what? A friend? A kind-of friend? He didn’t know.
Now Katie was gone. Vanished. The day after the fire, while Caroline, Minna, and Amy were at the doctor, making sure Amy wouldn’t be asthmatic or psychologically scarred for life, or whatever Minna was worried about, Trenton had once again walked the mile and a half to Katie’s house, as he had for the party, and found all the doors locked, the house dark, the driveway empty—as if no one had ever lived there at all. He had rung the doorbell anyway and pounded on the door so loudly that a group of birds had startled up from the field and gone cawing together into the sky, like a shadow breaking apart and re-forming.
It occurred to him he hadn’t even gotten her number, though she had gotten his at her party. Write your number on my arm, she’d said, uncapping a blue marker with her teeth and pulling up her sleeve. He’d been so happy he nearly got his own number wrong.
But no matter how much he stared at his phone and willed it to ring—or locked it up in a drawer and told himself he didn’t care either way—his phone stayed quiet. Maybe, he thought, Katie had never even existed; she could have been a figment of his imagination.
Except that Amy remembered her. He’d had to swear Amy to secrecy, so she wouldn’t tell. Katie couldn’t get in trouble; she told him so herself.
Minna and his mom were treating him like he was a psych case, like he might go on a shooting rampage if they said the wrong thing. Minna thought there was something wrong with his brain—he’d heard her say so to their mom. She thought he’d started the fire, maybe even deliberately. He wasn’t allowed to be alone with Amy anymore. She hadn’t said so explicitly, but any time he went to check on Amy or play a game, Minna suddenly materialized, eyes sharp and worried, and whisked Amy away for a meal or a nap or a walk.
Maybe he had started the fire. Maybe it was all his fault. Maybe he was really, truly crazy.
His father’s memorial service was tomorrow. The ghosts didn’t leave him alone, even for a second, anymore.
“I wish they wouldn’t fight so much.” She was sitting in the bathtub, or maybe not sitting. It was hard to tell, since she didn’t have a clear silhouette. She was just a shadow on the tiles, shifting in the sun. “My mom and my stepdad were always fighting. Then he left. My real dad left, too, before I was born. I never even knew him.” Then: “I wish they’d just stop.”
She talked to him this way, in sudden bursts, half nonsensical, about people he didn’t know and places he had never seen, brief and jumbled outpourings of old memories and whispered complaints. He still had trouble figuring out how old she was. Sometimes she seemed as old as he was and sometimes just a kid. She had told him she was sixteen; based on what he knew about girls of that age, which admittedly wasn’t much, he guessed that she was younger.
She hadn’t told him her name, either. Sometimes she claimed to be the missing girl, Vivian. But when he had called her by that name, she had suddenly burst into tears—breaking apart in waves, like a pattern of broken sunlight across a wall—and sobbed that no one knew who she really was, no one would ever know her again, she was dead and she would be forgotten. It made Trenton want to die and strangle her and hold her all at once.
The other voices were still going, too.
“For a newbie, you got a lot of opinions.”
“Leave her alone, Sandra. She’s a child.”
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
“You can’t avoid me forever.”
“Hey. Newbie. Tell Alice to buzz off.”
“Shut up, all of you!” Trenton didn’t realize he’d spoken out loud until there was a sudden silence. He had been trying to count. Now he had to start over.
There was a knocking on the bathroom door. “Trenton?” his mom called out. “Trenton, are you all right?”
“Fine.” He shook all the pills back into his palm and began a recount.
“You’ve been in there a long time,” she said.
“I have to dump,” he replied.
He heard his mom sigh. “Language,” she said, and moved off.
The ghost went on as though nothing had happened. “I’m not a child,” she continued. “My birthday’s in July. My mom said we could go anywhere I wanted. I asked to go to Six Flags.” She was quiet for a moment. “Do you think . . . do you think my mom misses me?”
“Please,” Trenton said. His head was going to burst; the voices were like insects burrowing through his brain. “Please.” He didn’t want to care but he couldn’t help it; the world was fucked.
Nine. He had nine pills so far.
“That isn’t enough to kill you,” the ghost said. She was suddenly next to him. He hated that, how quickly she could move. And her touch was like a shiver, like something going wrong in his stomach. “You’ll just throw up.”
“How do you know that?” He was annoyed because she was right. He’d looked online and realized he needed at least twenty, to be safe. But he couldn’t take too many from Minna at a time.
“I saw a story like that on TV.” She paused. “It’s not fair,” she said. She was trembling. They weren’t touching anymore, but he could feel it—cold air, the hair on his arms standing up.
“No,” he said. He longed, suddenly, to touch her—this fragile, needy, broken child, to kiss the top of her head and pull her down into his lap, as he did with Amy when she was having a bad dream. But she wasn’t Amy, and she was only half a child. And, of course, he couldn’t touch her. He couldn’t even see her face clearly: just shifting patterns of light and shadow, a faint impression of hollow prettiness.
“When you die,” she said. “We’ll be friends, won’t we?” She hesitated, then said shyly, “We can be together all the time.”
He felt a sudden wave of panic. He hadn’t thought about it like that. He’d thought only of sleep, and of Minna sobbing and blaming herself; and the kids at Andover lighting candles in his name. What if death turned out to be just as awful and depressing as life? What if he was just as powerless?
“Don’t count on it,” Trenton said. “I’m not planning to stick around.” But he had trouble pouring the pills back into an empty bottle of calamine lotion, where he was hiding them, and dropped two. He had to get down on his hands and knees to retrieve them.
“You’ll stay,” she said. “You’ll stay, and then I’ll always have someone to talk to.”
She grew quiet, and Trenton felt her withdraw, saw her shadow-self shifting across the cold tiles, and the old shower curtain, spotted with mold. Soon, she wouldn’t even be a shadow. She would be nothing but a voice, telling stories no one could hear.
“I’m lonely,” she said, in a whisper.
He placed the bottle in the back of the medicine cabinet, which smelled like old Band-Aids and nail polish and the bubblegum scent of kids’ Tylenol. It comforted him. He thought of Katie leaning forward as she reached behind him to light a candle, her breast bumping his shoulder.
“Me, too,” he said.