Notes from Ghost Town (16 page)

Hold on—just another minute—with a banjo on my knee—just one more second—

*   *   *

“Liver! Liv. Yo! Wake up.”

I groan, hug my knees tighter into my chest. It’s suddenly so cold. It feels too early to be morning. But there’s sunlight ripping through my big curtain-drawn window.

Morning. Sunday.
Five days left
.

Someone blows directly into my right ear and I shoot up in bed, startled wide-awake now. Two top buttons of Stern’s Christmas flannel are unbuttoned.

“Stern!” I look away, cheeks flushing, because I’m worried that he actually
can
see straight into my thoughts and knows that I spent all night dreaming of him beside me in bed, trying to make it last forever. “What are you doing here? What
time
is it?” I catch him looking at me in my big nightshirt and nothing else and scramble for my comforter on the floor, wrap it around me, suddenly self-conscious.

“Dunno, Liver.” He looks around, noting the light, the clock on my nightstand. “Eleven-something. Seventeen. Eleven-seventeen.”

I’d be way late for work—if I’d even planned on going in the first place.

“Isn’t there, like, some ghost version of knocking?” I cross my arms, pretending to be annoyed, but his presence is comforting to me, somehow. Maybe this is how Mom feels about her own delusions—they’re all like close friends you start to miss when they don’t show up for a little while.

Stern laughs at my sudden modesty. “Nervous about something?” he asks.

I shrug, embarrassed by the fact that I’m embarrassed—by a
ghost
. “Guess it’s not like you haven’t seen all this before anyway.” Truth is—you can’t really make it through a childhood without seeing your best friends naked for one reason or another.

He glances at me, a glint of interest in his eye—and of alarmingly genuine surprise. “Have I?”

I just nod, wondering just how selective his post-death memory is. If he doesn’t remember any of the events surrounding his death, and he doesn’t remember the countless occasions of childhood-bath-taking or truth-or-dare-strip-downs or late-night-skinny-dippings, is there any way in hell he remembers our kiss?

“You know, I was wondering when you’d show again,” I say. “It’s starting to weird me out when you don’t haunt me.”

He smiles shyly. “You know what? That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me. Unless I just can’t remember anything nicer. Which is highly probable. Anyway … I’m just here for the scantily clad women.”

My heart skips a beat as he sits beside me on my bed, leans close, wide-eyed. I inhale deeply, wanting him to smell like himself, but he smells like air. Like nothing.

“Liver, I had a memory. A
memory
,” he says, excited.

“Oh, yeah?” I ask, weirdly nervous.
Is he going to bring up the kiss? Right now?
My heart thumps. I wait for him to continue.

He scratches at his scalp. “And then next thing I
knew
,
I was
here
. I watched you while you slept. I never knew you were a snorer….”

I stand from my bed, horrified, somewhat confused—
is he gonna bring it up or what?
—and lift a wrinkled halter dress from the floor. I pull off my nightshirt and wriggle the dress over my head. “That’s really creepy, Stern.”

He laughs. “I’m kidding. I just got here.
You
brought me here. You have a big something to do with it, you know, so don’t act like I’m the only creepy one here.”
He knows. He knows about the dream. The kiss. Everything
. “Anyway.” He unfolds his long legs from beneath him, turning over to rest his stomach on the edge of my bed, knees on the floor, elbows beneath his chin. His eyes are childlike, excited. “I heard music, Liv. I haven’t felt
happy
like that in … well, in forever, it feels like. It was like being lifted out of a swamp. And then you were there. Or, here, I mean. I was here. With you.”

“Oh.” My heartbeat returns to normal.
Oh
is all I can say right now. I guess, through all of it, part of me hoped he’d come to me
this
time because he was ready to confess to everything he remembered and everything he needed to say involving his undying love for me, and all related topics.
Stupid
. I’m so stupid. He had a
memory
, something that actually might help us. That’s what’s important here. Not some impossible, transcendent love connection I’ve concocted in my many hours of misery and missing him.

He closes his eyes, starts playing an invisible piano on
the bed. His whole body seems to grow brighter, like it’s being lit from the inside. It’s hard not to see Mom’s old excitement in him—the way she looked when she’d play. Sometimes, she wouldn’t let me in the studio because she needed to focus, and so I’d watch her secretly through a crack in the door. “I remember … a big recital. A competition, maybe,” he goes on. “I was nervous, really nervous about it.”

“Juilliard. That’s what you must be thinking of. It’s the last concert you played.” I stare at him, waiting for something new to come. “Ring any other bells?”

He shakes his head. “That’s all I really remember. Just that it happened. This big thing. My stomach hurting before.” He gulps. “Everything’s getting blurrier, the longer I’m here. Or, at least, almost everything.” He looks at me. “You’re still clear, who you were.
Are
,” he corrects himself. “Who you
are
.”

Ignoring the flood in my heart for more important matters, I grab my laptop, and plop back onto the bed, dragging up articles from the
Herald
about his burgeoning musical career, his shocking death—articles I used to look through obsessively, right after he’d died, making myself sick.
Lucas Stern was a child prodigy; pure genius. Had his young life not been cut tragically short, he would have been at the top of his class, the top of his field, the top of the world
.

And then more, the same ones I’d spent hours analyzing for clues. Stern just shrugs, none of it seeming to
trigger anything at all but little mutters of surprise, grief, and, sometimes, glee.

I notice the picture of a girl named Tanya Leavin at the bottom of one of the articles. It mentions her death in relation to his—her body, still missing, never found—of both of their deaths representing a general sense of failure within the Miami PD in the prevention of violent crimes. Something about her face—her eyes, maybe—reminds me so much of Raina it makes my stomach churn.

My eyes move to her neck—there’s something funny about it, like it’s twisted in a weird way, but looking closer, I realize she’s wearing a scarf just a few shades lighter than her actual skin tone. Pink, probably. She looks like the kind of girl who’d wear a pink scarf.

I close the article and look back to Stern. Something has just occurred to me. I’m almost afraid to ask. He’s playing invisible keys again. His whole body leans into it, following the music in his head.

“Hey, Stern?” I swallow down the lump in my throat. He turns to look at me, still playing the air. “Do you think—do you think your parents know anything?”

He stops playing, moves his arms back by his sides. “My parents?”

“I mean, about my mom. Do you think they might know something about who really did it?”

“No way.” He frowns. “If they did, they never would have let your mom get put away.”

“Have you—have you see them?”

A troubled look crosses his face. “It doesn’t work like that,” he says, shaking his curly head, slow. “I wish I could, but, I can’t.”

I almost think of asking him if he’d visit Raina, too, if he had the choice, but I’m too ashamed. I’m actually turning possessive of a ghost.

His hands have picked up again at the air piano.

“Liver,” he says, eyes flashing, “I have to play it. The song I was working on for the competition. Elvira Madigan. If I play it, it might help me remember.” He moves quickly toward the door of my bedroom.

“We don’t have a piano.”

“Your mom was my piano
teacher
,” he says, fingers still skating across an invisible surface. “There has to be a piano around here somewhere.”

“Maybe I brought the wrong one,” I mutter to Stern as I try to turn the key I found in Dad’s desk in the locked door of Mom’s storage unit. Number 108B: a door among many doors in a cold, windowless, warehouse space with tall-ceilinged hallways, a flickering overhead light, the smell of raw paint. Dad’s been storing Mom’s piano for her since she’s been locked up, way the hell out here in Liberty City—a crumbling, poverty-struck part of town—claiming there’d be no room for himself, Heather, Wynn, me,
and
a baby grand no one would even play. But I don’t buy it. I think the truth is it’d just make him too sad to see
it every day. Because, secretly, I think he misses her, bad. Regrets Heather, the overhasty replacement. Realizes he’s the real reason all of our lives are fucked.

I smack the door with the side of my clenched fist. “This stupid lock!”

“Relax. Ease it in,” Stern says. Always the moderator, always the person to calm me down. I look to him—all that height, a strange, slender column, stark and beautiful. He steps right beside me, the icy tingle of his skin sending rivers of cold up my arms. “You’re just nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” I lie. Pins and needles in my hand, on the doorknob. We’re almost touching, and it sends a different chill through me, and a familiar buzzy warmth, too.

The key finally turns in the lock and the door swings open on its rusty hinge. We step into the small, dark room. I flip on the light, which flickers over the dusty space. Over the piano.

Her piano. Stuffed there into the cobwebbed corner, closed up.

I move slowly toward mom’s vintage Steinway baby grand, hover there for a few long moments, breathing the piano in, watching it, as though it might suddenly grow feet and run the hell out of here. I run my hand slowly across the bench before I sit. It’s cold.

Stern follows. I’m grateful for his nearness, his bone-chill, as I lift the heavy lid, breathe in the scent of the ivory keys beneath like they might keep something of Mom inside of them, spill her out.

Stern sits down beside me. He seems to vibrate there, holding his hands over the keys, shaking a little. “Damn,” he says, softly, trying to make the keys move. But they won’t.

His eyes bore into them. He finally gives up and sits with his hands in his lap. “I can’t even touch the keys.” His voice is suddenly bitter, defeated.

I stare at the shiny stretch of black and white, take a deep breath, and burst out: “I—I went colorblind. Out of nowhere. Right before you died.”

He looks at me funny, cocking his head. “Seriously? You can’t see any colors at all?”

“Just black and white and shades of gray. Everything looks like it’s covered in dust,” I tell him, pressing lightly against a key. A dull note sounds out. “Food, people, clothes, traffic lights. My world is one giant Pompeii.”

“And nothing happened? There was no … trigger?” he asks. I bite my lip, watching him, assessing the flickering of his own eyes. Once again, my curiosity refuses to abate:
does he know? Does he remember what happened between us?

I shake my head, push away the stampede of anxieties, of negatives in my brain, to make way for this thought:
tell him. You have to tell him
. “It happened the last time I saw you.” I feel a hot pulse rising in my chest. I have no other choice—the moment is bursting inside of me, demanding release.

But if he remembers our kiss, he doesn’t say anything about it.

“Liv.” He slides just a little bit closer to me. “We have to help each other out,” he says softly.

It’s not what I expected him to say after my big confession. “Help each other out?” I repeat.

“Yeah,” he says, his voice smooth, sure. “You’re a colorblind painter. I’m a dead pianist. Right?”

“So? How does that help anything?” The light flickers bright for several seconds and then settles darker around us. I shift on the bench.

“Like this.” He stands and moves behind me, and then I feel him, wrapped around me, all around me. His legs straddle my legs, his arms wrap around my arms, his fingers press against my fingers, onto the keys. My whole body trembles, hot and freezing at the same time; his body is a storm, hovering around me. I press back into him, shivering, burning up, scared, sad, amazed, unsure what he wants me to do, how he wants me to sit, how long we’ll stay like this. His fingers begin to move mine along the keys, clumsily at first—learning my hands, the shape of my fingers, how deep he needs to press to make this work. I can hardly breathe. I can hardly think.

So I give in. I release into him. His fingers press against mine—slowly at first, picking up speed—moving, sweeping, storming across the keys.

The music pours from me, from us, electric and whole-bodied, passionate. It shivers through me. My legs quiver, fresh blood rushes through my fingers. The notes curl
and ache and it’s almost like I can
taste
them, like I can see each one separately, shining, vibrantly formed.

The song he played, over and over again—it’s like I’m inside of it now. Transported back to those last, hot, lazy days when everything was safe. Mom was safe. Stern was safe.

And for the briefest flicker of a moment, I swear I can see color again. The cream of his skin, the red of my dress, the blue tips of his sneakers. I stare at Stern’s hands wrapped around my own but still separate, not there, not whole … and I ache more than ever for him to be solid, to be able to pull him into me for real and kiss his warm, solid, living mouth one more time, two more times, a million more times.

“Wake up,” I whisper to him, feeling suddenly like it really might be possible. “Wake up and be alive.”

“I think this is as close as I can get.” He whispers it softly into my ear, as the sonata crescendos and our bodies connect at some other point, some point higher-up in the body, higher than the human form, higher than life or death or skin or blood.

The sonata finishes. I didn’t want for it to finish, because it means that I’m not there anymore—faraway, in the safe past-place of those notes. Stern stays wrapped around me for a few moments, still shaking, shaking in the way he does right before he disappears. I press a little closer into him, worrying that he will, needing him to stay. And I can
feel
it: the place he goes when he’s not with me—the endless dark, the bone-ache of it.