Between

by Jessica Warman

  And there’s never any real food in the house, just things like wine and ketchup and the occasional container of leftover takeout. Richie’s parents spend most weekdays in the city, where they have a gallery—why should they bother to go grocery shopping? It’s not like their son needs to eat or anything like that.

  Richie and his mother stand in the kitchen together as Mrs. Wilson stares into the massive, almost-empty stainless steel refrigerator. Aside from the shelves on the door, which are fully stocked with condiments, all I can see inside are a two-liter of pop, a pizza box, and a cardboard container of soy milk. The soy milk, I recall as I look at it, has been there for months.

  “Richard, I know you won’t like hearing this from me, but I don’t want you spending time with Josie.” The kitchen is modern, sleek, cold: all marble and steel and glass. It screams of hunger by design, coupled with the conspicuous absence of any food whatsoever. A spare set of keys dangles from a hook. The dishwasher, with its transparent glass door, is completely empty. Richie used to eat breakfast at my house most days. I’m not sure what he’s doing with his mornings now.

  “She just lost her sister,” he says. “She’s a mess.”

  “That’s exactly the point. She just lost her sister.” When she closes the fridge, Mrs. Wilson’s face goes dark. The only light in the kitchen comes from the window above the sink and cuts the room in two, dividing Richie and his mom spatially. Mrs. Wilson—thin; in her fifties; no makeup; dark, curly brown hair; wearing a flannel shirt and dirty jeans—presses the heel of her palm to her forehead and leans against the kitchen island. “You aren’t old enough to remember what it was like right before Liz’s mother died. Lisa was my friend. Richard, she used to cry about Nicole. She used to tell me, ‘That woman is trying to steal my husband.’ It was horribly sad. The four of them—Josie’s parents, Liz’s parents—started off as friends. Lisa didn’t know that Nicole was obsessed with her husband. Can you imagine?” She scoffs at him a little bit. “Of course you can’t. You’re a kid.”

  Richie stares at his white shoes. “What do you want me to do, Mom? I can’t ignore Josie. She doesn’t deserve it. She didn’t do anything.”

  “She’s his daughter. Josie is Marshall’s daughter. You know that, don’t you? That affair went on for years right under everyone’s noses. And then his wife died. She starved herself to death. She was humiliated and heartsick and broken. You know, I don’t think she’d been buried a week when Nicole left her husband for Marshall.”

  There are some things I don’t want to remember, no matter what I might be here to learn. I don’t want to listen; I don’t want to hear it. But I can’t help myself.

  “It was years ago,” Richie says.

  “It was horrifying.” Mrs. Wilson stands upright and goes to the only part of the kitchen that is remotely stocked: the wine cabinet. She opens a bottle of red and pours some into a coffee mug with the likeness of Edvard Munch’s The Scream printed on the side.

  Richie bats his long, boyish eyelashes at her. “Mom,” he says, “it’s barely even noon.”

  “It’s fine.” She grips the mug with both hands. Her fingers are dirty with clay. Her nails are short and brittle and unpainted; she seems, for someone so grounded in aesthetics, impossibly plain. She blows into the cup, as though attempting to cool what’s inside. “Pretend it’s coffee.”

  “You liked Liz. I know you did.” Richie glances out the window, at the sky; it seems he wants to look anywhere but at his mother. She is so concerned about the lives of her neighbors. Meanwhile, it has probably been years since she actually cooked a meal for her only son.

  “Yes. Sure, I liked her. She couldn’t help any of it, could she? I felt terrible for her.”

  “How is Josie any different? It isn’t her fault what her parents are like.”

  “She’s their daughter, though. At least Liz was Lisa’s child.” The declaration seems to carry great significance for Mrs. Wilson. “I don’t want you going over there anymore. This is your home.” And for the first time, she seems to notice his outfit. “Why are you dressed like that?”

  “I was about to go running,” Richie says. “I need to leave. Right now.”

  I would do anything to run with him. Anything. I would run in these boots, if the pain wouldn’t be unbearable. So what if my feet became swollen and bloody? What does it matter? I’m not even a corpse. Amazing how I can still hurt so badly, my toes crowded into the front of my boots, frustration welling into tears as Alex and I watch Richie trotting down our street, turning onto the road leading to Groton Long Point. I know from standing here in these boots, there’s no way I can run. The pain would be intolerable. It would kill me all over again. Just being upright feels like torture.

  “Why do you think my feet hurt so badly?” I ask Alex. “I can’t feel pain anywhere else.” It seems odd that we haven’t discussed it before now, since the pain is constantly present.

  He stares at my boots. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  The question frustrates me; it’s almost like he’s trying to get me to realize something, but I don’t feel like playing a guessing game right now. “Alex, you’ve been here a lot longer than me. If you have any answers, just say so.”

  Alex shrugs. “I really don’t, Liz. You’re right; it’s weird.”

  I sigh and turn to stare at Richie. “All I want to do is run.”

  “Yeah?” Alex follows my gaze, then looks down at my boots again. “But you can’t. Not now, anyway.”

  But Richie is free. He can run along the beach, beside the houses that tower obscenely in their decadence. In Groton Long Point, most of the homes are vacation places, and they’re unbelievable. There are homes with elevators. Houses with their own putting courses. In the summer, their driveways are crowded with Mercedes, Ferraris, and even a Bentley or two. These are people who never hear the word “no.” They are my neighbors, my parents’ friends. In a way—even though I’m a local—I was one of them. Because I wasn’t used to hearing the word “no,” either—especially after my mom died.

  But now everything is no: No, you can’t remember. No, you cannot see your mother. No, you cannot run.

  Richie, though, can jog on the cool beach; he can breathe the salty air and feel his ankles trembling as he holds his footing in the sand. I’ve done it hundreds of times myself. It only makes sense that I would not be able to do it now; running made me feel more alive than anything. Of course I can’t know it, now that I’m dead.

  Richie’s mom watches from the front door as her son disappears at the end of the street. Leaving Alex behind, I follow her as she goes upstairs, into his bedroom. For a moment she just stands there. She goes to the bed, takes a corner of the quilt between her thumb and index finger, and studies it. Quietly—as though she knows she shouldn’t be in here, as though Richie might come in at any moment and catch her—she crosses the room to his desk. She picks up a photograph of me. She covers my face with her thumb, so all that’s visible is my hair and body. I was skin and bones by then, a few months before I died.

  “Lisa,” she murmurs. And she moves her thumb away to reveal my smiling face. Despite my expression, there is a lackluster quality to my superficial prettiness: my hair, though long and blond, is limp upon closer inspection. There are shadows beneath my eyes, I’m sure, obscured by plenty of thick concealer. And there are my bones, their outlines visible beneath my skin. The leg bone connected to the knee bone, the knee bone connected to the hip bone …

  “What’s she doing?” Alex asks.

  I’m startled. I didn’t think he was following me, but he’s right here.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “She’s looking around.”

  “What’s she looking for?”

  I shake my head. “I’m not sure. But if she goes snooping, she won’t like what she finds.”

  Mrs. Wilson is inept as a mother, but she isn’t a bad person. Watching her now—gazing at the books on Richie’s shelves, each one hundreds of pages, their informat
ion contained within a son that she knows next to nothing about—I feel almost breathless with pity for her. I knew him better, I realize, than she likely ever will.

  Except maybe she knows him better than I thought. Her fingers, tracing the spines of the books, land on the oversized, hardback copy of Great Expectations. They stop. She slides it slowly from the shelf and lets it fall open in her hands. Can it be a coincidence that she’s chosen this book?

  The hollow space within is absolutely jam-packed with trouble: bags of weed, several bottles of prescription pills, a knotted plastic bag containing a serious amount of white powder, and a wad of money held together with a rubber band. Look, Ma! Your son sells drugs!

  I expect her to gasp and cry, to confiscate the whole thing or call her husband or the police or something. But she doesn’t do any of that. Carefully, with delicate fingers, she closes the book and slides it back into place. She adjusts my photo on the desk until it’s exactly where it was before. Then, almost without a sound, she leaves the room, shutting the door behind her.

  As ghosts, we can travel so easily. Even if I can’t run alongside Richie because of my horrible footwear, all it takes is a series of blinks, the mere thought of him—with Alex touching me in order to come along—and we’re at his side again.

  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?”