Between (17 page)

I try to concentrate as hard as possible on him, to make him realize that I’m here with him.
Richie, it’s me,
I think.
It’s Liz. Can you feel me? Do you know I’m here?
I try to hone in on our connection, which I know is real. But Alex’s presence distracts me from focusing completely on Richie. It is as though the two of them blend together in my mind for a moment, Alex standing beside me and Richie coming to a stop, placing his elbows on his knees.

I’m right here. I’m beside you. Can you feel me? It’s your Liz
. Watching him, I become hopeful: he seems transformed, infused with energy. His face is flushed, cheeks red and eyes glinting as he stares at the afternoon sun in front of him. He hasn’t been jogging so much as sprinting, it seems; we’re all the way across town from his house.

“He didn’t go to the beach.” Alex never seems overenthused about much of anything, but his tone is flatter than usual. “Why would he come here?”

He feels a connection. He must. Why else would he have stopped so suddenly?

I inch closer to Richie, so close that I can reach out and touch him. Concentrating as hard as I possibly can, trying to empty my mind of all other thoughts, I do it: I touch him. And it works. When my hand rests on his sweaty back, I can feel the life beating beneath my palm: warm, damp, solid. My arm tingles all over, until my fingertips feel ready to burst, and in less than a second I go from a feeling of pleasant euphoria to the sense that I’m on fire. I yank my arm away.

“Why not come here? There’s a road. He followed it.” I stare at the space between our bodies. The air feels electric, energy everywhere. Can Richie feel it? When I was alive, I think I sensed it sometimes, after a long run: the idea that everything around us is breathing, that there is no such thing as empty space, that even the air has a presence.

Richie continues to catch his breath. He blots sweat from his forehead with the bottom of his T-shirt. His pretty dark curls are matted against his face. He gazes, almost in awe, at the house in front of him.

It’s a small white Cape Cod with red shutters. One and a half stories of cramped New England style. Not a terrible place, I guess, if square footage isn’t your deal.

It is a dingy corner of town, though: close to the cemetery, far from the beach, and even now, in the bright afternoon with the sun hanging down from above us, the landscape feels like a shadow is cast upon it. There are no clouds, no obvious obstructions to the skyline. But there seems to be a grayish pallor slung across this edge of the universe, like a net that makes the air feel somehow thicker.

My boyfriend looks around, as though he thinks someone may have followed him.
Me!
I want to shout at him.
It’s me!
He walks toward the little white house, around the side, to the detached garage, and stands on tiptoes to look in the window.

“Alex,” I say, “I did it. I touched him.”

But Alex doesn’t seem interested in the breakthrough. “Do you know who lives here?” His voice trembles.

“No. Of course I don’t.”

“Of course, because it’s shitty?” With his foot, he tries to kick at the dirt on the front lawn. Obviously, he can’t; his foot goes right through the pile without making so much as a dent.

I’m still reeling from the effect that touching Richie had on my body. I hold on to myself, arms wrapped around my torso, trying to maintain just a trace of the sensation. It slips away like sand through a sieve. I can’t stop it. Alex’s rotten attitude seems to yank me away from any pleasant feelings I might have managed to make contact with, and I realize that, for a moment, I’d forgotten all about the pain in my feet. But now it’s back, so severe that I can barely stand.

“Yes,” I say, frustrated that Alex made me lose the feeling, “because it’s shitty. Is that what you want to hear? I don’t know what he’s doing on this street, why he’s so interested in this particular house. I’ve never even
seen
this place before. None of my friends live in this part of town. I wouldn’t even want to go trick-or-treating here. I’d probably end up with a bunch of lousy, off-brand candy.” Not that it would matter; it isn’t like I ever ate candy.

“What is he doing, then?” Alex is almost hysterical. “Why would he come here?”

“I don’t know! He’s looking around. He’s looking … in the mailbox.” I pause. “What?”

It’s true; Richie is going through the mail. He holds each piece up for a moment, taking a hard look before shuffling to the next envelope. Once he’s seen everything, he puts it all back. He takes one final, long look at the house. Then he continues on his way, quickly gaining speed as he heads downhill toward town.

“I want to go inside,” Alex says.

“Why?” I ask.

The bleak feeling that has stretched so lightly around me feels thicker, heavier; it has expanded to a sense of genuine dread. Before he speaks, I know what he’s going to say. I can’t imagine why. I don’t fully understand any of it. All I know is that I was thinking about Alex as I watched Richie run. Something beyond my comprehension is happening. Our worlds are intertwined, my thoughts influencing Richie. That much seems clear. I know, even if it doesn’t completely make sense to me yet.

“Because it’s my house. I want to go home.”

Eleven

I guess people deal with death in all kinds of ways. My family, it seems, is trying to let me go without too much messiness: they’re giving my things away. My father is drowning his sorrow in liquor. My stepsister, though she’s obviously grieving, is still claiming my boyfriend for her own. They don’t seem to be embracing the mystery surrounding my untimely passing, or even acknowledging that there
is
any mystery.

But some people don’t let go; they cling to the loss of a loved one like a warm blanket. Alex’s house is a monument to him, constructed from drywall and linoleum flooring and bad curtains. His photograph hangs in every room, surrounded by religious iconography and dried flowers and—more often than not—a few candles, all of which are burning in the empty house.

“Aren’t they afraid they’ll start a fire?” I hold my palm over the flame of a bloodred candle, its glass holder painted with a crude approximation of the Virgin Mary, and am enthralled when I realize that I feel nothing. Being a ghost can be fascinating sometimes.

“I don’t think they’re afraid of anything anymore.”

“You said they’re religious. Your parents, I mean. They’re Catholic?”

The only thing close to religion that I’ve ever known is Nicole’s new age, hipster version of spirituality. In our house, you couldn’t get in touch with the other side unless you had the right uniform: fitted tank top, peasant skirt, turquoise jewelry, henna tattoos. Nicole has been quiet and generally uninspired to practice the religion of the month since I died, as far as I’ve noticed. I’m not surprised. Real loss—the sight of her stepdaughter in a body bag, the vague understanding that my last moments were spent submerged, salt water infiltrating my healthy lungs, certainly an unpleasant death at best—does not lend itself to the casual flip of a tarot card or the absurd ceremony of a séance.

But she had no problem breaking out the Ouija board when my mother died. Why not? Was she only trying to comfort me? If so, the plan seems misguided, insensitive, almost grotesquely inappropriate. What the hell was she thinking?

“Yes, they’re Catholic. And I didn’t say they were religious,” Alex corrects me. “I said they were
very
religious. I mean, have a look around, Liz. Their entire lives revolve around Christianity.” He pauses. “Not that it’s a bad thing. I think it’s brought them some comfort. There’s something to be said for the rituals of religion, don’t you think?”

I hesitate. To me, the house is just plain creepy. “Sure,” I say, “I guess so.”

“Like you with running,” he adds. “It was a ritual, wasn’t it? Something you did over and over again, to keep you feeling sane and in control?”

“Okay. I see what you’re saying. But it wasn’t a religion exactly. I mean, Alex”—my gaze drifts around the room—“this is taking it to a whole new level of devotion.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. “My parents are like that.”

“So tell me,” I ask, “where do your pious parents think you are now? In heaven?”

“Of course. I was baptized.” He squints at me; aside from the candlelight, the house is dark. “Don’t you know this? Aren’t you in the FCA?”

He means the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. “Yes,” I say. “In fact, I’m the vice president.”

“Then you should know.”

I shrug. “I only joined so I could put it on my college applications. I wasn’t really a Christian.” And I pause. “It’s weird that I remember that. Don’t you think? Why would it possibly matter?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “It’s sort of telling, though. It says something about who you were.” He crosses his arms against his chest. “If you weren’t even a Christian, then how did you become an officer?”

I don’t answer him at first. Instead, I look around some more. The house is cluttered as hell. Aside from all the religious knickknacks, the candles and figurines and calligraphy prayers hanging from the walls, there is ubiquitous disarray. In the kitchen, I see a sink piled with dishes. Laundry—I can’t tell if it’s clean or dirty—is heaped into three separate baskets beside the living room sofa. In a corner of the room, a litter box sits in dire need of scooping.

I wrinkle my nose. “I thought cleanliness was next to godliness. And to answer your question, we took a vote. It wasn’t like I had to campaign or anything.”

“And you just got elected? Even though you’re not really a Christian?” His annoyance is obvious. It’s like he doesn’t have the first clue what it means to be a teenager. Because that’s the thing: none of it means anything. We’re only kids. What does it matter if I’m not a Christian? Nobody’s going to quiz me on the New Testament in order to challenge my authority as the vice president of the FCA, because there
isn’t
any authority. I think the most I ever had to do for the position was last spring, when I helped organize a collection for the local food bank. My sole responsibility was to put cardboard boxes in every classroom to hold nonperishable items. Again, the memory seems so random, so meaningless. Why do I know this, yet I can’t recall other things that are obviously important? Being dead, it seems, requires a patience that I don’t have. Not yet, anyway.

“Big freaking challenge,” I say to him. “Let me tell you, I could never have done it without the intervening hand of God.” From a young age, religion has seemed ridiculous to me. What kind of God takes a girl’s mother away from her at age nine?

Okay, I’ve pissed him off. He’s visibly shaking with anger. “Don’t say that. Not in my house. Show some respect.”

“For who? For God?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” My tone becomes light, almost mocking. I can’t help myself. His continued faith seems absurd to me, considering our circumstances. “Let me ask you, Alex, where do you think he is? God?”

“We’re here, aren’t we? It’s not like there’s
nothing
after we die.”

I gaze at my boots, wiggling my aching toes, each one its own special symphony of pain. “I think this might be hell.”

“If that’s really what you think,” he says, “then you’re way more spoiled than I imagined.”

At the back of the room, there’s a wooden upright piano pressed against the wall. The lid is crowded with photographs. Alex sits down at the bench and stares at the keys.

“Do you play?” I ask him.

He nods. “Since I was four.”

Every picture on the piano is of Alex, from the time he was a baby up until what I assume was only a few months—weeks, maybe—before he was killed.

He closes his eyes. His fingers begin to move effortlessly across the keys.

The odd energy—the web of sadness that I first noticed outside, when Richie was looking through the mail—feels even thicker now, as though it is cloaking the entire house, enveloping us so tightly that I feel like it could almost shatter the windows. As I look at the photographs, it’s like watching Alex grow up, a display of what seems to be every major event in his life, from his birth up to his school photo from sophomore year. There are pictures of him on Christmas morning, an only child sitting under a tree, smiling beside a small pile of presents. There’s a Little League photo: Alex in a baseball uniform, holding a bat, his grin crooked and toothy. Then there’s him at a piano recital: he’s wearing a coat and tie and has his arm around his mother’s waist.

Only now do I realize how bizarre it is that I can hear what he’s playing on the piano. I don’t understand how it’s possible. But the music is so lovely that I don’t want to question it.

“What was that?” I ask, once he’s finished.

“It doesn’t have a name.” He shyly lowers his gaze. “I wrote it. When I was fifteen.”

“I think I’ve heard it before.” And then I realize where. “I have,” I say to him. “At your funeral.”

“Oh.” He continues to stare at the keys. “You’re right.”

He seems distracted for a moment as his expression becomes faraway and his hands slip from the keys. Almost as though I’m not here, he shuts his eyes again. But it’s different from just a moment ago. This time, his shoulders slump, his normally upright posture going slack. He’s slipping away, I realize, into the past. Maybe it’s an accident; he’s never done this before in front of me, except for the day I died, when he showed me the uncomfortable scene in the cafeteria.

I don’t think about what I do next; it just sort of happens. I reach out and grab Alex’s wrist tightly. I shut my own eyes.

At first I don’t know where I am; all I can tell is that it’s some kind of store. I’m standing before a glass display case filled with row upon row of high-calorie foods: pasta salads, breaded chicken breasts, glistening filets of sugar-glazed salmon, charred scallops wrapped in bacon. And the desserts—oh, God, the sight of them alone feels so gluttonous that I actually take a step backward. There’s a cheesecake piled with large, glazed strawberries. Beside it, there’s some kind of walnut-crusted, butter-and-cinnamon concoction. A silver tray holds piles of brownies, cookies, and thick squares of fudge.