Tobias swallows. His eyes seem to retreat behind his glasses. “I was with Silas.”
“When?” My chest suddenly seizes. “Wait. You were with him? Are you serious? What were you two doing? Did you watch him—”
I can’t finish the thought. I don’t have to—the answer is already on Tobias’s face. He looks back at me with a blank expression.
“Why didn’t you call an ambulance? Jesus, why didn’t you try to help him?”
“I did.” Tobias reaches into the same leather satchel he’s had since college and pulls out one of Silas’s marble composition books. I recognize it right away, still bound by a rubber band.
“How did you get that?”
“Just hear me out, okay?” His voice remains maddeningly calm, every word level with the next, like he’s trying to talk me out of jumping off the fire escape. “I know how this is going to sound, but you’re just going to have to find a way to believe me.”
“Believe what?” I’m losing my patience for Tobias’s meandering, his inability to just fucking come out and say what he wants to say already. “What am I supposed to believe?”
“Have you ever heard of Ghost?”
vessel
A haunted drug? The words didn’t make sense.
“You’re the one who’s haunted,” Tobias said. “Ghost just lets you see who’s haunting you.”
Our friend just died of an overdose and now Tobias wants to get high?
Not high. Haunted.
Silas discovered something. A miracle, Tobias said. But when I asked him to explain, he clammed up and wouldn’t say any more. Not on my fire escape, where people could be listening. We needed seclusion, where no one would bother us, a safe space to be alone with our ghosts.
A clean slate, he called it. A house without a history.
“This is what Silas wanted us to do for him,” Tobias said. “It’s not me asking, it’s Silas.”
His dying wish.
I want you to find me, Erin, he said on his last voicemail.
* * *
—
Tobias tells me to take I-95 toward Hopewell. The town had been nicknamed the “Wonder City” back in the early 1900s, thanks to its mushrooming growth in manufacturing. The DuPont company even set up their own gunpowder plant during World War I, only for the factory to catch fire in the dead of night. Most of Hopewell burned down with it. A civilian-spawned militia took it upon themselves to lynch any looters they apprehended, stringing them up in the streets as their city burned. DuPont pulled up stakes shortly thereafter, before the embers cooled, leaving what was left of its homeless citizens and cindered buildings behind.
No hope in Hopewell now, folks always joked.
“What’s the big mystery?” Amara has the backseat to herself, lounging like a bored Cleopatra. She rolls down her window and hangs her arm out, fingers gliding through the air.
“It’s easier if you just see for yourself,” Tobias says. He and I agreed to keep mum on the finer points of our weekend getaway. Better not to freak Amara out before we even get started. Not that Toby’s been totally up-front with his itinerary with me, either. “Take this exit.”
Why he couldn’t drive is beyond me, but Toby wants me to chauffer. He’s keeping his focus out the window, sinking low into his seat, as if he’s worried someone’s following.
“Are we being tailed?” I ask, hoping a joke might drag him out from his shell.
“Just keep your eyes on the road.”
The zombie subdivision is less than thirty minutes from Richmond. Hundreds of acres of woodland were developed during the last housing boom—the woods cut down, the land platted and zoned—only for the whole suburb to go bust. Construction on these homes halted the second its developers went belly-up. The abandoned development is now nothing more than vacant lots and half-finished homes. A faded sign reads SHADY ACRES: LOTS AVAILABLE. Below that—PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
Amara leans out her window and marvels at the skeletal homes. “We’re house hunting?”
“Keep going straight,” Tobias says.
“Which Suburban Barbie Dream House do you pick?” Amara asks.
“I’ll take that one.” I point to the bones of a home whose window frames bloom with blue tarps. Pine stakes connected with guide strings and fluorescent-pink streamers map out the rest of the lot, tinder ribs reaching out from the soil.
“Spacious. What about you, Tobes? Which house do you have your heart set on?” Amara flosses her fingers through the headrest to tickle his neck. When I’m feeling spiteful, I’ll remind her about that one time in college they hooked up. Amara was drunk and bored. Tobias was too timid to say no, a deer in the headlights of Amara’s sixteen-wheel libido, the two colliding head-on in his dorm. Worst mistake of my life, she moaned the morning after and ever since.
“Take this left,” he says to me as he bats Amara’s hand away, shoulders scrunching.
I turn onto Wakefield Road, plunging deeper into the empty neighborhood. Already I feel lost in this labyrinth. Every block looks the same to me. I don’t think I could find my way out.
Amara slumps back in her seat and sings that Peggy Lee song, “Is that all there is…”
“Turn right.” Tobias doesn’t say it soon enough, so I have to stand on the brakes to make the turn onto Shoreham Drive. The road ends in a cul-de-sac. A cluster of half-built homes sit empty.
Perfect for Tobias’s plans, apparently. No nosy neighbors. No prying eyes.
A house without a history.
“Here we are.”
Our home away from home is a two-story modular townhouse nestled in the center of the cul-de-sac.
“This one?” Amara scoffs. “We passed, like, a dozen better-looking houses.”
“This is the one.”
We all climb out of the car and take the house in. I’m reminded of a transparent model of the human body, one of those see-through plastic kits that details each layer of our insides, our organs, the red and blue pathways of veins and arteries. I picture myself pulling out the circulatory system, then the nervous system, exposing the bones and guts of this place: the concrete foundation, the plywood sheathing on the exterior walls and roof, covered with plastic house wrap to prevent wood rot. Rolls of fiberglass insulation that may as well be muscle tissue pad the walls. But somewhere along the way of this house becoming a home, on some cellular level, everything halted. The life of this house just…stopped. It has no soul, no family: a Pinocchio house yearning to become real. That’s all houses truly want, right? To one day become a home?
“Sure hope you got a good deal on it.” Amara punts an empty Mountain Dew bottle down the street. Patches of crabgrass dot the yard. Boot prints are scattered about the mud like a how-to diagram for some sort of frantic ballroom dance. Whoever had been working on this home just walked away—or ran, I can’t help but think—leaving their supplies behind.
A clear plastic tarp is wrapped around a pallet of bricks in the front yard. One end has loosened itself, flapping haplessly in the wind like the canvas sail on a schooner lashing against its mast. The pallet’s bindings have snapped, bricks spilling out from their tight stack, like tiny red headstones tumbling into the mud. The whole lawn is a cemetery, its forgotten monuments toppled over and sinking into the soil.
“Is there an Indian burial ground under our feet?” I can’t help myself. It’s more for Amara’s sake than mine, which by the smirk on her face I can see she appreciates. “Did the developers only move the headstones?”
“These houses are clean,” Tobias says, not getting the joke. “Nothing haunts them yet.”