Call Me Home (24 page)

Even as stupid as this Society business sounded, standing on the hill Jackson started to feel the vertigo shift into a manic excitement. Chris had given him some pills and he'd taken one and it was making him feel full of air and also warm toward Randy. They could get Randy into the Society, and what would that mean to his only friend? Everything. More than everything. All those big dreams, and here they were running in the blue light on this nowhere hill. The poignancy of Randy was that he wanted so little.

“If we can get some raw data,” Randy said, “they might get interested. And if they get interested then that's the go-ahead to start obtaining better equipment. I'd like to get a video camera and of course better sound equipment. But this is it for now.” He stood on the tarp. “So, who wants to go first?” Randy said. He opened one of the packages of cupcakes and took a bite of one.

“Maybe you should show us?” Jackson asked. He really did want to see what Randy wanted, but he felt bad at the same time. Randy wasn't a runner. He was the perfect director of his own movie.

Randy nodded. “All right,” he said. “But you guys don't laugh.” He put down the half-eaten cupcake and shrugged out of his trench coat, dropping it on the tarp. He started toward the side of the road.

“Wait,” Lydia said. She fumbled for the tape recorder, ejected the tape, and pressed it back down again. “Here.”

“This is just to show you,” Randy said, but he took the recorder. “You're going to run as fast as you can up the hill – press play when you start. And if anything happens – if you hear
anything
– then you should just say it. Shout or something –
Ghost!
” He grinned. “Or,
Now!
Anything that indicates that you've made contact. Got it?”

Jackson nodded. “Got it.”

“Okay,” Lydia said. “Show us.”

“First,” Randy said, “I think it's important that we invite him in.”

“Invite him in?” The pill was softening the edges of everything. Jackson felt like he was watching something elaborate and silly. A puppet show. Invite him in. Have him over for a nice dinner.

“Tell him that you're good, you know. So he feels comfortable. If it's a he.”

“How do you do that?” Lydia asked.

Randy arranged the tape recorder under his arm. “Just say – like, ‘Okay, here I am. I'm here in peace. I'm here to run with you.'” He cleared his throat and looked straight ahead. “I'm here in peace. I'm here to run with you.” He hunched down. “Ready – oh, shit,” he said. “I forgot.” He walked back to the base. “Okay, before you do it, you're going to mark the time.” He held down the first two buttons of that old tape recorder and the tape started to turn. Would the Washington Ghost Society accept such archaic equipment? Randy's face looked a little distorted and Jackson wanted to laugh. Lydia was so serious. She'd tucked her hair behind her ears and she was frowning. She had eyes like their father's, deep-set, shadowy. Someday soon all those shitty commercials were going to start targeting her, trying to get her to buy shit for her under-eye circles. Jackson wondered a lot about what kind of grown-up she would be. It was hard to imagine her as some kind of femmey cheerleader, but she wasn't a complete tomboy either, and he was pretty sure she wasn't queer. She could stand there and be engrossed in Randy's ghost chase, but she wasn't the same kind of devoted dork. She seemed unformed, existing before all of that.

“Jackson,” Randy said. “Are you even listening?”

“Sorry.”

Randy held the tape recorder out again. “Okay, so one more time: you push Play and Record at the same time to get it to start recording. Then, you're going to mark the time.” He pressed the buttons and droned, “Tuesday, September 23, 2009 6:53
PM
, Firetrail Hill, Tulalip, Washington.” He stopped the tape. “Got it?”

They nodded. “Okay,” Randy said. “I'll demonstrate.”

He ran a hundred feet up the hill, his T-shirt fluttering behind him like a flag, the tape recorder under one arm and the other in front of him, like a football player. A car driving down the hill honked and Jackson gave the driver the finger.

Jackson went next. It was chilly but bearable, the lukewarm edge of summer still in the air, and it hadn't rained in two days. He recited the day and time to the tape and started up the hill. It felt like he was running into a green tunnel, the trees knitting together over his head. He'd hadn't run much since his freshman year, but still he didn't expect to be as winded as he was, sprinting that stretch, the gravel spitting up under his shoes. He forgot to look for the ghost at all, and he supposed that made it a definitive non-sighting.

Jackson passed the tape recorder to Lydia and she wound herself tight, crouching low to the ground. “Time?” she asked, and they told her; she recited the date and time into the recorder and took off like she was built of pistons. She shot up the hill and jogged back down again. “Sorry, Randy,” she said. “Nothing.”

“Jack?” Randy asked. “You want to –”

“I want to go again,” Lydia said. She shrugged out of her sweatshirt and went back to the side of the road. “Time?” She ran again, tirelessly, hardly panting.

“
Damn
,” Randy said. “She's
fast
.”

The light was fading. “Stay off the road!” Jackson called, but she kept going, two hundred feet up, loping back down, crouching on the shoulder.

“If this doesn't work, it's not because we didn't try,” Randy
said, sticking his lower lip out and blowing his bangs off his face. “Jesus.”

Jackson stopped paying attention at some point. It was like watching Chris swim; sometimes ten or fifteen minutes would pass with nothing to mark it, just the lap of the water against the sides of the pool, the silver beads of water raining from Chris's fingertips as they surfaced and dipped. Lydia lighting up the hill, shrinking into the dim light, the trees, pivoting, descending. There weren't many cars. He was watching the twin paths of headlights starting toward them from below when he heard her scream.

He was running before he realized it. He had been standing on the tarp in the ditch, and now he scrabbled and tripped his way up onto the shoulder, stepping on the bag of chips and exploding it under his boot, pounding up the hill toward her dim form. She had flown from the shoulder and into the overgrown ditch, almost a straight line from where he'd been standing, and the sound of that scream rang in his ears still, loud and ragged – was she hurt? He tripped back down into the ditch; she was on her knees in the long grass with her head in her hands. He leaned over her.

“Lydia!” he took her by the arm. “What is it? What is it?” She kept her face buried in her hands. “
Lydia!
” He was yelling but fear was all over him like he'd been splashed with it. His skin was cold and clammy. Randy came up behind them, breathing hard.

“What happened?” Randy asked. “Was it the ghost?”

Lydia took her hands away from her face and there was a shallow gash on her temple. There was gravel in it. “It wasn't the ghost,” she said. “I just fell.”

“Shit, Lyds,” Randy said. “Oh, shit, her head.”

“Lydia,” Jackson said, “what happened? Are you okay?” He took her face in his hands and tilted her head to get a look at the cut. It didn't look deep but it was bleeding.

“I fell,” she said.

“It was like something pushed her,” Randy muttered.

“Come on,” Jackson said. “Let's go.” He helped her up. “Randy, will you take us home?”

They folded the cupcakes, the chips, and the flashlights into the tarp and pushed it all into the backseat of the car. Randy had the tape recorder and Jackson knew he would be up all night, running over Lydia's scream, listening for the ghost, for a hidden message. Fucking werewolves and spirits. Lydia's banshee scream. Jesus Christ. He sat in the backseat with her while Randy drove them over the hill, through the lightless corridor of trees, turning down the gravel road that would lead eventually to the little trailer, the squares of light spilling out on the sunken grass.

“Bye, Randy,” Lydia said. “Sorry we didn't see the ghost.”

Randy smiled. “You're a hell of a runner,” he said, and she grinned. She looked eerie, with the blood on her face. It made Jackson think of a horror movie.

THERE WAS A
fire in the woodstove and Lyle Lovett was playing. It was such a relief, the pure physical comfort, after the dark stretch of Firetrail Hill. There was chicken in the oven, and Jackson could tell it was going to be an easy night. He would get Lydia to the bathroom, help her clean the cut, and nothing would need to be said. Before they were completely inside, though, his father was in the kitchen. “Whoa,” he said. “What happened here?”

“What is it?” his mother called.

His mother cleaned the cut and his father bandaged it. “Kids will be kids,” his father sighed. It was strange, Jackson thought, that when he said she'd fallen, no one asked for more information. The excuse was accepted so easily. It gave him a sick feeling. So many times that his mother had been hurt and no one had said a word about what they all knew. If Lydia was his kid, he thought, he'd want every detail.

“Hell,” Gary said. “When I was a kid, if I wasn't in a cast, I had a rusty nail in my foot. Kids will be kids.” Jackson wished he'd stop talking. The conversation was giving him a bad feeling.

When Lydia's cut was bandaged and they'd eaten, Gary pushed back his plate. “We need some dance music, Amy,” he said. He looked like any father, any happy man. His beer was propped
beside him on the windowsill, but he wasn't drunk; he was smiling his big, easy smile, cuffing Lydia lightly on the shoulder, calling her fierce. Jackson looked at him. What would it be like if his father was this person all of the time? If he'd chosen to be a dad, a husband?

His mother had changed the music – Garth Brooks, Randy Travis, George Strait. “The Fireman,” which always made Jackson think about some hot older man, a bear, maybe, wearing a fireman's hat and slicker, carrying a big hose. Original, he thought. A big hose. His mother was laughing, doing a quick two-step with his father. Lydia was dancing a little, weirdly, but he knew that just to dance was probably a big deal for her. They weren't exactly living in a haven of approval. He went to her, and spun her, dipped her. He wanted, one day, to be able to say, “We were good sometimes. It wasn't all bad. We danced.”

His father whistled at them, and Lydia smiled. The corner of the bandage was dipping over her eye. His mother cut in and danced with Lydia, and then with him. She looked happy. They were all flushed from the warmth, from the dancing. Even when he felt tired, Jackson kept dancing; he wanted to hold it, to keep it exactly as it was.

He remembered a night when he was four or five, sitting next to his father, patting his dark hair, telling him how much he loved him. “I love you,” he said over and over, and his father would say, “You, too, son.” Every time his father said it, Jackson would start again. “I love you.” Even then it seemed like the answer might change at any moment. The only thing he could do was to keep vigil. “I love you,” he said again, stroking his father's hair in the lamplight, a deep sadness in him, as though even this moment was already lost.

Lydia

Tulalip, Washington, 2009

MARTA KEPT ASKING ABOUT JACKSON. IF MY FATHER WAS
working in the neighborhood, I rode the bus with her until he picked me up. Jackson stayed after school. “Working on the paper,” he said, but I knew it wasn't true.

Since the week we went to camp, Marta wouldn't stop. “Does he have a girlfriend? Have you, like, seen him naked?” she asked. We sat in her pink room across from Jennings Park and she tried on all of her clothes and read out loud from magazines. I looked at myself in the mirror. Marta used a flat iron to make her hair fall straight and smooth. It was movie star hair. My hair was still short. It looked the same as it did when I was seven.

“No way,” I told her. “Gross.”

“I want to have sex with him.”

I didn't want to talk about sex. It felt like it should be secret. “Stop,” I said. I felt dizzy.

“Whatever,” she said. “He's cute.”

I knew she was right. Jackson had shaggy hair that looked perfect, like a boy in the pictures that Marta tacked on her wall. His eyes were big and he had long eyelashes, while mine were stubby and pale. “Your brother is a rogue,” Marta announced, the copy of Teen open in front of her. “‘This bad boy is nothing but trouble! Unfortunately, that makes him extra hot! Enjoy listening to his band practice, or sitting around a fire on the beach, but don't expect him to come over for dinner with the parentals – it's not his style!'”

I tried to imagine Jackson in a band, or with his arm around a girl at the beach. It didn't seem fair, I thought. Jackson didn't even like girls, and girls liked him so much. No boys liked me. Randy was the only boy I knew.

Marta stood up and went to the closet mirror. She pushed out her chest. “What do you think?” she asked. “Am I hot enough to date a junior?”