by Carter
“Nope,” she said. “He was real. Didn’t you see the way everybody parted around him?”
“No. I guess just assumed, because of the way he dressed—”
“You’re going to get yourself in trouble if you assume. How about the little girl with the old woman?”
“Really? She was a ghost?”
“Yep.”
“But not the old woman?”
“Nope.”
I felt the familiar frustration bubbling up at my inability to make any progress in this area at all. It had been eight months since the shooting, three months since Billie had returned to my life, and I didn’t seem to be any further along than when the priest passed through my hospital door.
We walked through the throngs, admiring the sculptures, the sun warming the top of my head. A few artist types spoke to Billie, and of course these were the easy ones, but that wasn’t going to be much help most of the time—especially since they all seemed nervous in my company. When she explained what she was doing with me, most ghosts glanced at me anxiously, then quickly excused themselves. It happened three times in a row, the third being a fairly burly truck driver type with forearms thicker around than my head. He made such a hasty retreat, his face pale and his eyes bugged out, that I actually laughed.
“That’s kind of rude,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said, “but I still don’t get why they’re afraid of me.”
“Same reason the living get freaked out when they see a ghost, I guess.”
“Doesn’t really seem the same at all.”
“Well, I guess you’ll understand better when you’re dead.”
“God, you know I hate it when you say that!”
“Shh. You realize how look right now, right?
She pointed ahead of us. A mother with two young girls, eyeing me fearfully, was ushering the girls away from us as if I was carrying the plague. I was going to ask Billie if they were living or ghosts, but of course it didn’t matter. If they were living, they were freaked out because I appeared to be talking to myself. If they were ghosts, they were freaked out because I was having a conversation with a ghost, which made me just as frightening to them. I dropped my voice to a whisper and spoke out of the side of my mouth.
“It’s like I’m in a no-win situation,” I said.
“It’s not all that bad. You just need to … I don’t know, learn to play by certain rules.”
“And what rules would those be?”
“Well, since you’re one of a kind, I guess you’ll have to figure out those for yourself.”
One of a kind. That was me, at least as far as we knew. We walked a little farther, my heart racing, sweat breaking out on my brow, before I felt the need to sit down and take a breather. We found a spot on the red brick steps that surrounded the square, arena-style, taking a spot comfortably away from anyone else. A dark-haired man of Middle Eastern descent walked past, a bloody ax embedded in his forehead.
“Don’t tell me he’s real,” I said.
“Don’t use the word real,” Billie said. “You know I hate that. But yes, he was a ghost.”
I watched him go. Most ghosts, I found, did not appear just as they did when they died, but instead as some better version of themselves around the time of their deaths. But there were exceptions, like this man, and Billie said they were kind of like the schizophrenics among the living, mentally unhinged, not always aware of themselves or their surroundings. This man certainly fit the bill. He walked straight through both people and objects, not weaving around them as ghosts usually did. A few of the people—living ones, I assumed—flinched when he passed through them.
“Had enough?” Billie asked.
“A few more minutes,” I said, and then, because I knew what she was really asking: “I think I’m going to call the bureau on Monday.”
She sighed. “Myron—”
“I’ve got to get back to work, Billie.”
“Do you really think you’re ready?”
“No, probably not.”
“Well, then.”
“But I don’t think I’ll ever really be ready. Looking at kids playing with sand castles certainly won’t do it. I just have to jump in with both feet.”
“Myron, this is your first real big outing. You could barely go ten minutes without needing to sit down. You’ve got learn to adapt better. To everyone else here, you look like a crazy person mumbling to yourself. How do you think that will look to the other detectives?”
I chuckled. “Half of them talk to themselves anyway. “
“Be serious,” she said tartly.
“What do you want me to do? Sit around collecting disability checks? I can’t just do nothing, Billie. I can’t.”
“I’m not telling you to do nothing. I’m just suggesting—”
“Well, it certainly sounds like it.”
“I’m suggesting,” she said, glaring at me, “that you just be a little more patient. I don’t want you getting in over your head. You’ve got to be pragmatic here—”
“Screw being pragmatic,” I said. “This is my life we’re talking about. And being pragmatic never got me anywhere before.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. And anyway, this isn’t about me. It’s about you.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You don’t want me back on the force. You never liked me being a cop.”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“It’s true.”
“Myron, you’re being completely unfair.”
“You told me yourself. You said you hated that I might get shot.”
She sighed. “That was before. Things are different now.”
“Oh, so now that you’re dead, you don’t care if I end up dead, too?”
“You know that’s not true!”
I was about to shoot back with another retort when a little voice said, “Mister, who are you talking to?”
The little boy who belonged to the voice was probably five years old, six tops, a blond cherub of a kid in a blue swimsuit and a Spider-Man T-shirt, a bright red plastic pail in one hand, a yellow miniature shovel in the other. He stood barefoot at the bottom of the arena steps, his tan toes pebbled with sand. His expression was not fearful but curious. When I used to imagine how our son might look—back when I spent a lot of time imagining sons and daughters—he pretty much was a spitting image of this kid.
I was going to say something to him when Billie stood. “He’s alive, just in case you were wondering,” she said.
With that, she descended into the crowd and disappeared—leaving me to find my own way home.
Chapter 9
After leaving Bernie Thorne’s office, I wandered Portland’s downtown streets for a little while in the brisk November morning, hoping Billie might show herself, but it was not to be this time. It was not to be most times, truth be told, when Billie felt wronged or slighted or provoked in even the smallest of ways. Where she went, I didn’t know, but the one thing I could always count on, whether she was gone for an hour, an afternoon, or even, as it had been lately, a day or two, was that she would always find her way home eventually. She might make me sweat it out a bit, but she always came back to me.
I didn’t know what I would do if she didn’t.
As I climbed into my Prius, my mind was buzzing with dozens of different things I could do next, people to speak to, leads to follow, but for the first time since Karen had shown me the picture of her husband, I was feeling a creeping anxiety about the whole thing. This was the man who’d shot me. Since seeing the picture, I’d been so focused on just doing the next thing that I hadn’t given myself a chance to process what this was all about. Now, alone in the cool and dank garage, I was really feeling it—a pressure on my chest, a tension in my neck and back, a dryness in my mouth.
I needed time to think.
Instead of heading back to my office on Burnside, my house in Sellwood, o
r to any of the other addresses I had written on the little spiral notebook of people who might help me find Tony Neuman, I drove aimlessly through the downtown streets. I figured I’d just clear my head, but a few minutes later I found myself heading west on US-26. When I passed out of Portland into the tree-lined hillsides that bordered the highway, I realized I wasn’t driving aimlessly at all.
By the time I reached the Forest Grove exit a half-hour later, at least some of the anxiety was gone.
The Mistwood Senior Living Center was a sprawling series of tan brick buildings on a side street lined with rust red dogwood trees, close enough to Pacific Avenue that it was easy to reach while still comfortably nestled in a vibrant residential neighborhood. With its huge sweeping grass lawns and dozens of duplexes surrounding the larger complex all connected by a web of sidewalks, the place had the feel of a small college campus. It was the main reason I’d chosen it. Looking at pictures of it online, it hadn’t seemed like a nursing home at all.
I parked in the lot nearest the main buildings. An old man dressed in a black tuxedo and red bow tie was sitting on a wooden bench next to a fountain of a lion. When I got out, he pointed a white cane at me.
“What in tarnation is that thing you driving, boy,” he said.
“Hi, Bill,” I said.
“Eh?”
“I said hello!”
“We met?”
“More than once.” I patted the hood of the Prius. “It’s a hybrid,” I told him, probably for the tenth time.
“A hy-what?”
“Newfangled technology. It can run on electricity or gas.”
“Really! What will they think of next? You going to the ball?”
“Not this time, Bill.”
“Well, that’s too bad. I’ll tell Agnes you said hello.”
I smiled and headed for the building. A wet wind whipped across the lawn and shook the dogwood trees, knocking a few leaves loose. One of them drifted right through good old Bill, settling on the bench, but he didn’t even notice. I wondered where Agnes was, and whether she’d ever come back for the ball. After our first encounter, I’d looked them both up and found out he’d died ten years ago, his wife two years after him, but I’d never seen her around. Then again, I’d discovered quickly that not everyone was willing to stick it out in marriage when they had all eternity in front of them. A lot of couples took the whole “Until death do us part” vow quite literally.
Inside, a teenage girl was playing Beethoven on the grand piano, while a crowd of seniors gathered around to listen. The hall, with its wide, dark green carpet and soothing tan walls, was just as crowded as always, far too crowded for the number of rooms the Mistwood had. At night, though, I’d noticed that many of the seniors just slept wherever they found themselves—on couches, recliners, or even in their wheelchairs. Many of these people weren’t even ghosts.
The air had the faint whiff of mothballs and the pine air freshener I know they used. When I reached Dad’s room, the door was open, and I heard Mom haranguing one of the caretakers.
“Don’t give him the green Jell-O,” Mom was saying, her smoker’s voice as rough and grating as always. “He doesn’t like it. Give him the red stuff.”
I entered the room to find the aide, a pert young blonde wearing glasses that could have doubled as a windshield on an airplane, setting the lime green Jello-O on Dad’s food tray, next to a tuna-fish sandwich and a glass of milk. He was seated in his favorite recliner, a well-loved brown leather La-Z-Boy he’d had forever and insisted on bringing with him when he moved into the facility, and staring transfixed at the TV in the corner. It was some kind of financial show. The sound was off, but a ticker of stock numbers whizzed past on the bottom of the screen.
Dad was dressed in tan slacks and a brown polo shirt, his belt cinched so tight that the extra could have looped around his waist a second time. The clothes appeared clean and wrinkle-free. What was left of his hair, a fringe of brown-gray in a typical arc of male-pattern baldness, was neatly trimmed and combed. Other than one red nick on his chin, his face looked good: a close shave, a bit of color in his cheeks, the bags under his eyes not quite as dark as last time. I was always startled at how gaunt he was—it didn’t matter how many times I saw him, I would always have the image of the stout, thick-in-the-chest man of my youth fixed in my mind—but at least it was a healthy gauntness.
The way Mom was perched behind his chair, bony fingers clutching the leather like claws, dark hair slicked back like wet feathers, the black shawl over her shoulders covering all but a hint of the gray shirt underneath, made me think of a raven perched on a branch. Her ruby red lipstick appeared all the brighter because of the blinding paleness of her cheeks. She was a tiny woman, short as well as petite, but the harshness of her cheekbones and searing intensity of her dark eyes, the irises almost as black as the pupils, made her far more intimidating than her size warranted.
Mom saw me first. “Well, it’s about time.”
“Hello everybody,” I said.
Dad went on staring at the screen, which was no surprise. The blonde, however, jumped a little.
“Oh!” she said.
“Sorry,” I said, “didn’t mean to scare you there.”
“Don’t apologize to her,” Mom said. “She’s nothing but a little tart.”
“No, it’s okay,” the blonde said. “Are you Myron?”
“That’s right.” I peered at her name tag. “And you’re Holly, I take it. Are you new here?”
“Two weeks,” she said, smiling furtively. It was a hell of a smile, even if it was tentative. “That’s one week less than how long it’s been since your last visit, by the way.”
“Ouch,” I said, covering my heart in mock wounding.
Holly waggled a finger at me in admonishment and we both chuckled. We locked eyes for a beat longer than necessary, the kind of gaze, though brief, that was rich with possibilities. There was something about those glasses that made her even more attractive. The green uniform, boxy and ill-fitting, didn’t do much for her figure, but I could still tell there was a great figure underneath. Maybe the glasses made me think of librarians. I always had a thing for librarians.
“Your father tells me you’re a cop just like him,” she said.
“Private investigator, actually,” I said. “I was a cop, though. Before.”
“Really? That sounds interesting.” And the way she said the words, it did sound interesting—at least to her. “I’d love to hear more about it sometime. He’s always telling me stories of his time on the force.” And there was a flash of that smile of hers, a weapon of male destruction.
“You stay away from my son,” Mom scolded her, wagging a finger of her own. “He’s too good for you. And I know what you do with the vibrator of yours, you little tart. It’s revolting.”
I winced. “Sorry,” I said.
Holly raised her eyebrows. “Sorry for what?”
“Hmm? Oh, nothing. I mean—sorry, if Dad talks your ear off with his stories.”
“Oh, that’s no problem. He’s really proud of you. Isn’t that right, Hank?”
Dad stared at the screen.
“Hank?” Holly said, stepping closer. “Hank, I was just telling Myron here how proud you are of him.”
“Leave him alone,” Mom said. “You’ll probably give him herpes if you get too close.”
With Holly looming right in front of him, Dad finally looked at her, his face brightening as if it was the first he’d realized that someone else was in the room with him.
“Oh!” he said. That deep baritone of his was one thing that hadn’t changed. “Hello.”
“Myron’s here, sweetie,” she said.
“Myron? Oh, yes! I see him! Hello, Myron!”
As always, whenever he looked at me these days I felt both the joy of him seeing me and the sadness of knowing that the person doing the seeing wasn’t the man he once was. “Hi, Dad,” I said. “Good to see you. You’re looking great.”
Holly
patted Dad’s shoulder. At the touch, Mom glared at her as if she was imagining plucking out Holly’s eyes, which she probably was.
“How dare you!” Mom spat. “He’s much too old for you!”
“I was just telling Myron,” Holly whispered, leaning in close, “how proud you are of him. You really should tell him yourself.”
“Of course I’m proud of him!” Dad said. “Everybody is! My brother here played football at Notre Dame! They beat Duke for the championship and he scored the final touchdown!”
“Oh,” Holly said, “no, Myron is your—”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“But—”
“No, it’s okay, Holly.”
“Isn’t that so, Jack?” Dad said to me. “Tell this sweet little thing here what kind of player you were.”
“You would know,” I said to Dad, and I had to fight a bit to keep my voice even. I was standing in front of him, alive and well, his only son, and his brother Jack had died two years after that game in a mountain-climbing accident, dead long before I was born, and yet it was the ghost who wasn’t even present that he saw and not his only son. “You would know because I used to give it to you good when we were growing up in Klamath Falls.”
“Damn straight!” Dad said, slapping his knee and letting loose with one of his blow-the-house-down laughs.
“You’re upsetting him,” Mom said, her eyes welling up with tears. “You’re all upsetting him.”
Dad’s laughter was like nitroglycerine—a huge burst, but then it was spent. His attention quickly returned to the television. Holly regarded me with concern. I shrugged.
“Well,” she said, her own voice cracking a little, “it really is good to see you here. I hope—I hope you’ll come more often.”
“You can count on it,” I said.
With another smile, this one more sad than suggestive, she took her tray and left. I felt vaguely guilty flirting with her. When she’d departed, I shook my head at my mom.
“You know she can’t hear you,” I said.
“Of course she can,” Mom said. “She’s just ignoring me. The whole staff at this place is rude beyond belief. It’s terrible.”
