Giving Up the Ghost (5 page)

At bedtime on the first night I was there, an image came into my head, an image of a dead boy, dripping wet, standing outside the patio door. I imagined his jellied, waterlogged white skin, his dilated eyes. His face stuck somewhere between desperation and anger. In my mind, I saw him just standing there, shaking. Every night before I lay down in bed to not sleep, I’d see the image in my mind. I’d just lie there or toss and turn all night, waiting for the drowned drunk nonswimmer to show up. I eventually was so freaked out and tired that on the last night I was there, I got up and walked out onto the patio at 3
A.M
. and called him out.

I’m going to close my eyes. And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again
.

Nothing.

I went back inside and fell asleep.

After three weeks, long after my visit had ended, they found the boy, almost directly across from my parents’ house, tangled in some sunken branches deep under the surface.

I stand there at the head of that trail near the Clinton Road reservoir, in the dark, listening to Curry and Joe fade away into the distance.

I’m going to close my eyes. And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again
.

When I open my eyes, all I can see through the darkness is the bridge itself.

The only thing I can really see is the graffiti on the Jersey barriers mounted on top of the bridge. According to stories, the ghost boy’s name is written on the bridge’s guardrails. I
conclude that unless the dead kid’s name is Alice or I Love Weed, we can immediately write off this part of the story. One of the few legible things written on top of one of the barriers is “All the fairytales of Clinton Road … never prove true.”

Curry and Joe’s voices are getting louder; they’re heading back up the trail toward me. They tell me that they’d made it about forty yards before Joe thought he heard and saw a pack of approaching bears, then announced he would go no farther and headed back to the road. After reuniting, we line up along the guardrail.

There is a part of the reservoir bridge legend that is Clinton Road’s best-known ghost story. It says that if you stand on this bridge and throw a coin into the water, the dead boy will throw it back to you. This is the story that most drew me to Clinton Road in the first place. It’s a pretty cut-and-dry legend. Either the coin comes back, or it doesn’t. Sometimes the coin hits you, sometimes you see it land on the ground, and other times you might find it in your car or clothes the next day. Some versions call for pennies, others quarters. We have brought both, each covered with our initials in red fingernail polish.

“Which way are we supposed to face?” asks Joe.

“What do you mean?”

“Are we supposed to face the road … or the water?”

“I don’t know,” I answer. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I’m facing the road,” Curry interjects. “If this ghost kid is going to knock me in, I want to see him coming.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in any of this.”

“Well, fuck you guys then. He’ll push you in first.”

The thing I’ll remember most about the moment that follows is how quiet it is. No breeze, no insect or animal sounds, and none of the chatter you associate with being out in the woods at night. Nothing. It is absolutely and completely still
and silent. It’s as if someone suddenly has pressed a Pause button and life has simply stopped.

Then Joe whispers that he sees someone in the woods coming toward us.

“Look over in the trees. Someone’s shining a flashlight up the path.”

Curry and I swing our heads over, and then we see it too. It’s like a lightning flash inside the forest, and then it’s gone.

I think to myself: Who would be walking down a dark path in the woods in the middle of the night? The trails around the reservoir simply run in giant loops going nowhere. There are no houses or parked cars for at least four miles in either direction. Anyone or anything out on that path probably has even less of a reasonable excuse for being there than we do.

A few seconds later we see it again—a bright light swinging in our direction, then gone. It’s maybe thirty yards down the bank of the reservoir.

“Oh, shit,” Curry states flatly.

“What do we do?” asks Joe.

“You can start by keeping your voice down.”

“Oh, shit,” Curry repeats softly.

We see two flashlights pointing toward us, then back toward the lake.

Then we realize that they aren’t flashlights at all but headlights. Headlights from a car winding along Clinton Road, going very fast and heading directly for us.

My first thought is that the car would come around the hairpin curve, see three sketchy-looking dudes standing on the bridge, freak out, go out of control, and slam through the barriers, thus taking its passengers, us, and whatever else is lurking around that bridge straight into a watery grave.

“What do we do?” Joe repeats.

“I don’t know,” I offer. The car’s less than twenty yards from turning onto the bridge and isn’t slowing down.

“How about we duck?” Curry suggests.

“Duck?”

“Yeah.”

“Now?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Three … two … one, duck!”

With that, we all slam against the ground behind the Jersey barrier, just as the car skids around the corner, tears up and over the bridge, and then speeds away into the night.

“Man, I can’t believe we hid,” I say, brushing little bits of Clinton Road from the front of my shirt and pants a minute later. “We’re lucky it didn’t lose control.”

“Let’s try the coins.”

“Eric should go first,” Curry says.

I should. The three of us have traveled here so that I can do just that.

As I raise my hand, I can feel a heavy rush in my chest. I would have expected that I’d feel scared, but this time it isn’t fear. It feels more like sadness. Or maybe it’s just a sudden memory of sadness.

You see, this is less a story about ghosts than it is a story about what it means to be haunted.

As much as I want to encounter the boy at the bridge, or a haunted Camaro, or any of the hundreds of other horrible things that we’re supposed to stumble across up and down Clinton Road, I know no coins are ever going to come back. But I’m still scared. I’m scared to begin facing the truth. Not the truth of Clinton Road, but the truth of me.

You might think that standing there on the reservoir bridge, with no idea where this journey will take me, I’d want to throw
the coin hard, to heave it into the lake in a way that reflected all the weight attached to it.

Instead, I simply open my hand and bend it slightly, letting the coin slowly slide off my fingers, down past the guardrail, and quietly into the darkness. The hushed
plop
of a single coin sinking into the still water marks the beginning of my quest.

I just close my eyes, hold my breath, and wait.

“Eric!” my dad shouted from downstairs. “Phone!”

It was about seven or eight at night, in June. A year before things got really bad.

My room was in the attic of our house on Thirty-fourth Street in Canton, Ohio.

The closest phone was in the den one floor below.

I’d spent the evening before raiding my pill stash and washing it down with a warm twelve-pack of Wiedemann, drooling for a while, and then throwing the bottles over the neighbor’s roof. I hadn’t left my room at all that day, mostly because I couldn’t work up the courage. Leaving meant walking by the door to the spare room. My family rarely went in there, except to get Christmas decorations, wrapping paper, or whatever else was stored in its closets and crawlspaces. The door was always closed. It was always dark in there, and terribly hot in summer. Of course, my room was the same way, just on the opposite side of the hall. But it wasn’t the heat or the dinginess I minded.

The spare room was where She was.

Usually, when I could tell She was there, I’d summon the strength to run by the door before She could realize I was just an arm’s length away. This morning I wondered if She could
simply reach out and grab me as I ran by. I’d never thought of that before. Therefore, I just sat there, too scared to find out the answer to my new question.

Earlier that day, I’d thought I heard Her moving around on the other side of the door. I had slowly walked out of my room into the hallway, barely breathing so that I could hear any other telltale noise. I told myself that I was going to walk right up to the door, call Her out, swing the door open suddenly, and have this over with. But of course, I never did. Instead, I used the phone call as an excuse to chicken-shit out and run past the door and down the stairs. Nothing reached out and grabbed me. Despite the fact that my fear had kept me captive for more than twelve hours, pissing in empty soda bottles to avoid having to go downstairs to a bathroom, as I rounded the landing to head downstairs, I’d already forgotten all about it.

I was surprised that my father was even willing to speak to me to let me know I had a phone call. My parents and I had just had a big fight over my “unacceptable behavior” at a cookout they’d hosted. At some point during the gathering, someone had pulled out a camera to take a few photos. I leapt up and asked them to stop taking my picture.

I’d noticed my parents immediately start to squirm. I’d previously announced to my family that I did not want any photographs taken of me. I had read somewhere that American Indians did not like having their photographs taken because they felt the process stole part of their soul. At the time, I needed every bit of my soul I could hold on to. So every time a camera appeared, I disappeared or asked that whoever was holding it not take my picture.

Not that I was really much you’d want to photograph.

I’d fallen in love with thrift stores before I was old enough to drive myself to them. I bought as many old suits, hats, and
coats as I could get with the lawn-mowing money I had left over after buying records. Even though I had no idea how to sew things together, I routinely tried to alter my clothing by cutting pieces off collars, sleeves, pockets. Eventually I graduated to saving up money for the annual rummage sale in the prop and costume department of the local community theater, which allowed me to expand into pirate gear and military uniforms. I loved vintage clothes but hated ironing, so most of what I bought eventually ended up looking like it had spent the previous three decades stuffed in a shoe box.

For most of my teens, I wore my hair long to hide from my parents a variety of piercings. (In the days before it was routine for men to have
any
earrings, I had no idea there were such things as starter or piercing earrings, so I gave myself multiple piercings by pushing regular earring posts through my earlobes.) I’d taken to cutting out sections of my hair in order to make it spike up straighter, so all my piercings were eventually discovered. Then I discovered hair dye. Then I discovered how to make your own hair dye with Kool-Aid mix and bleach.

Whenever “Punk Day” or the impossibly politically incorrect “Hobo Day” would pop up during Homecoming Week, someone would invariably compliment my costume even though I was just wearing my normal clothes.

Even my parents would have to admit that by graduation I’d started to tone down my look considerably. Rather than wanting to be instantly recognizable as an individual, by then I simply wanted to disappear.

“Hello,” I said into the phone as I plopped down on the den couch, slightly out of breath from my run down from the attic.

It was my friend Cassandra. She was a “friend” the way that former “girlfriends” become “friends,” especially when the
“girlfriend” is the one who would rather just be your “friend.” Honestly, Cassandra was never really my girlfriend, just someone I openly and repeatedly tried to trick into being my girlfriend. A few dates. A few hand-holding incidents at football games. I’m not sure there was ever even a kiss involved in the torrid affair I had tried to create.

As in most of my friendships lately, there was strain. It had been a while since I’d spoken to Cassandra.

There was a time when my friends found my antics charming, maybe even exciting. They thought I was a fun person to be around because I seemed to have so few boundaries and was always “acting wacky.” To me there was nothing particularly wild about suddenly speaking in gibberish or wearing a Halloween costume to the grocery store in the middle of summer. If it was eccentric, it was the most tepid, safe form of eccentricity imaginable.

But at a certain point, as I felt less and less connected to the world around me, those mild antics stopped feeling like enough to express myself. I just kept pushing. I used my behavior as a smokescreen, worried that if I wasn’t being wacky, people might see me as I felt I really was. The more cut off I felt, the more desperate and outrageous I felt I had to be. My friends grew less and less enthused about spending time with me when I started throwing food or stuffing tree leaves into my mouth or flipping over drinks on a restaurant table or forcing myself to vomit in public or lighting bags of garbage on fire. My antics weren’t so funny anymore.

I was just about to make something up in order to get off the phone when Cassandra blurted out, “There’s someone here who wants to say hello.”

Fumbling phone noise
.

“Hey,” announced a girl’s voice.

I had no idea who it was.

“It’s me.”

Still clueless.

“I just got back last week, and we were wondering what you were doing.”

“Oh … I’m just … umm,” I answered.

“You don’t know who I am, do you?”

“Sure I do,” I lied.

“It’s Laura,” she said.

“Laura,” I replied, as if saying the word out loud would pluck the connection out of the haze for me.

“Laura Patterson,” she said, getting a little testy. “Did you even know I was gone?”

“Sure I did,” I said, telling the truth this time. I knew she had been on some exchange program to some foreign country and had been gone the whole school year.

I had met Laura in junior high, where she was a year behind me. At the time, she was “going with” my friend Timmy. Outside of note passing and the occasional tight-lipped kiss after school events, “going together” in seventh grade was pretty meaningless. You couldn’t drive, had nowhere to go, and either weren’t allowed or couldn’t afford to do anything. It was kind of like being an old married couple, except you could control your bowels and stay awake past 8
P.M
.