Denis Ever After

by Tony Abbott

  At home we go up the front steps like we did a thousand times together, only this time he doesn’t know we’re together. He’s alone in his mind and in his body. I’m alone too because when Mom opens the door for us she sees only Matt.

  Don’t be sad or anything. I’m just saying.

  Looking at her now, it puzzles me how I can ever appear to Mom. You need light to appear. There has to be light in the air, so the person can see you, but that person also has to be light inside, to give him or her sight. Mom’s got secrets whirling around inside her like a simmering industrial fire. I don’t know if there’s enough light for me. Which sounds selfish, but isn’t meant to be.

  As I pass I feel that Mom loves Matt so much that she aches when he’s around, but she’s terrified he’s pulling away because our dad’s obsession with my death is rubbing off on him. Since Matt’s started to hide his own secrets—which she can totally sense—her love has gone dark, like a switched-off light. I feel all of this oozing from her.

  “Homework?” Dad calls from the kitchen. He tries for a kind voice, but he’s tired.

  “On it.” Matt also tries to be bright. “I got what I needed from Trey.” Inside his bag are the printouts of Georgia and Afghanistan. “I’m going up. Love you. Love you, Mom.”

  “Okay,” she says, with the stiff smile she gets when he and our dad say more than two words to each other. Her hands tremble when she closes the door. “Love you.”

  “Good night, Mom,” I say. “Good night, Dad. I’m here, too.”

  The words sound hollow and almost snarky in my mind. My parents can’t even guess I’m home and that bothers me. I follow Matt silently upstairs.

  His room is dark. He doesn’t care, doesn’t switch on either the ceiling light or the lamp on the desk or the flashlight he keeps under his pillow. He just plops onto his bed and closes his eyes.

  “Matt.”

  He doesn’t respond. Not a flinch.

  “Yo. Matt.”

  Nothing.

  Trying to beam a sliver of the moon’s glow into his room, I hurl myself at the shade over the window by his desk. The dumb thing doesn’t move. I do it again, this time with my fingers clutching at the top roller. Nope.

  A third time, now with a running start from out in the hall, straight through his closed door, aiming right at the top of the window and—bang!—the shade snaps up.

  Matt jumps out of bed. “Geez!”

  “You all right up there?” Dad calls up.

  “Yeah. Fine!” he yells. “I guess . . .”

  His head swivels comically around the room. He freezes when he sees a form take shape in the moonglow from the window—a misty figure sitting cross-legged on his desk in the filmy white light. Me.

  He sees.

  He stares.

  He begins to choke.

  14

  Me and My Halo

  “What in holy heck are you?”

  Matt’s really hoping I don’t answer. I mean, he’s asking the question, but no way does he want a reply. I give him one anyway.

  “Obi-Wan Kenobi. Your only hope.”

  I say this in his mind, which Russell insists is how you have to start when you haunt people. For, like, a minute, his mouth hangs open, with little strings of spit from the top lip to the bottom. He can’t make out my face yet, but he sees something.

  “Well, get out of here!” He scrabbles back against the wall as far as he can. “Just get out!”

  “Matt?” Mom calls.

  “You begged me to come. You screamed for me to come.”

  Matt’s response is simple. “No. I didn’t.” His voice is pitched very high. “I’m okay,” he calls down.

  “You’re kinda not,” I say, moving from inside voice to outside voice, to see if he hears. He blinks at that, so I know he hears me. “I’m Denis, by the way.”

  “You’re n-n-not Denis.”

  “Uh-huh, I am. Aren’t you glad to see me? You’d better be. I went through so much weird junk to get here, you don’t want to know. But I’ll tell you anyway. There’s this giant, hot razor. . . .”

  Matt begins to twitch his head from side to side.

  It’s so odd, looking at yourself do things you’re not doing. Except for the long, messy hair, we’re so much alike in the face, the Egan chin, our mannerisms, our quirks. With twins as identical as we are—were—it’s crazy seeing yourself, but not you. Like gazing into a mirror where your reflection is doing things you’re not.

  “I’m getting out of here.” He steps to the door.

  I really don’t want to break the spell, but I fly into his path and try to hold the light with me. This is important. First, you catch the light, then you keep it. Apparently I’m good at this, because I manage to block the door.

  “Seriously, bro? You don’t recognize your own brother? I’m Denis. Denis Egan, your brother. Your twin.”

  He backs up to the wall at the foot of his bed and tries again with a simple, “No.”

  “But yes. Denis. Me. Twin. You’ve been screaming at me for days, and I’m here to tell you to knock it off. It’s messing with my beauty death.”

  “You are some kind of freak.”

  “You are.”

  “Denis is dead.”

  “No, really?”

  “You’re not here.”

  “I sort of am,” I say.

  “I can’t even see your face. There’s light glaring behind your head.”

  “There’s always light behind my head, bro. I’m holy. Wait. No, I’m not. But the light, that’s my thing.”

  “Well, switch it off. It’s annoying.”

  Matt’s trying to get control of himself by being aggressive, which Russell says is a standard response to haunting. Still, I allow the light to drain off slowly enough for him to make out my features—his features. I’m not in moonlight anymore, and the brilliance has dimmed, but I’m still visible to him. GeeGee would be so proud.

  Matt rattles his head like his ears are filled with water. “You’re lying. You can’t be Denis.”

  “Look. My eyebrow. See?”

  “He always had that, but you’re not him, because Denis died when he was seven years old. You look . . . you look as old as me.”

  “Thanks to you, I do.”

  “Why are you twelve? If you really are Denis, who died five years ago, how did you get as old as me?”

  “Ah. I have a theory about that.”

  He blinks in my direction. “You have a . . .”

  “You see—and stop me if you’ve heard this before—I aged because you kept imagining me doing things with you as you aged. Get it? You’d think of me biking around with you, playing ball, swimming, studying, joking, playing video games, all of it. You needed a playmate, and you kept wanting it to be me. Memories are a big deal where I come from. That’s how I got older along with you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This doesn’t always happen, of course,” I add. “There’s this girl—you don’t know her, she’s dead—but her name’s Ellen. Well, we call her that. Or Ella, maybe. Either. She’s got a funny ponytail and sits on the beach every day, watching the boats come in. For the last thirteen years she’s been exactly seven years and ten months old. How do I know? Russell told me. He’s a guy up there. Seven years and ten months! For thirteen years! She was basically my age when she got there, but now I’m older than her. Why doesn’t she get older? I bet you could tell me, but I’ll tell you. Russell says that her family keeps remembering her being seven years old. If there are any photos of her, they’re when she was seven, and that’s all they know, so she stays seven. Dude, it’s because of you that I’m twelve, thank you very much. . . .”

  His eyes are glazing over.

  “But I see I’m losing you. Anyway, I came to tell you to back off with the scratching and the moaning and groaning. Things are okay where I am now. I’m okay. Happy and happy. You don’t need to worry about me. Really. It’s always sunny. I have a porch. There’s water, a beach, all sorts of
folks in Port Haven, the part of the afterlife I’m in—”

  “You were killed!”

  “Says you.”

  “Says me? Says the world! You know this! You were murdered. It was horrible! There are tons of questions. You can answer them. If you’re a ghost, you have to know everything!”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Captain. I don’t know a single thing about how I died. Well, a bridge and/or bridges. Something silver. A spoon maybe. And some tall thing in the corner of my eye that might be a telephone pole. Or the Eiffel Tower. Maybe I died in Paris, that’d be cool—”

  “Stop it! You know how you died and who killed you!”

  “Sorry. Big blank there. But I have to ask. Why are you all about this now? After five years? Because you finally read the police file?”

  “You saw that?”

  “I was leaning over your shoulder.”

  He gives me a face like I stink. “I was seven when you died. I’m twelve now. I was afraid to know before. I’m still afraid, but I need to know. There are hundreds of questions we don’t have answers to.”

  “Except I died. There’s no question about that. I’d like to help, but I can’t. It’s too messy down here, and I need to be the opposite of messy. Plus, I’m dealing with my own junk right now. There’s GeeGee slipping away—she’s our great-grandmother, by the way—not to mention how I’ve got to concentrate on my own tiny story fading more each day.”

  “It’s not tiny,” he says, pushing strands of loose hair behind his ears. “It’s not tiny and it has everything to do with everything!” He wants to say more, but he’s suddenly out of breath.

  “Look, I have to go back,” I tell him. “Really. I have to. Besides, there’s a party at the beach club tonight. Well, there’s a party every night—”

  “You’re not going back! And stop being such a snot about it.” He swings out to grab me, clutching nothing but light. He drops his hand.

  “I mean it. When you . . . died . . . everything changed. Except no, it didn’t change then. It was already changing. You died because of things that were moving years ago. The police file is one thing, but Mom and Dad have secrets they won’t tell me. Maybe not even to each other. There’s stuff to know. And everything that’s happened, our family falling apart, everything that happens every day, all of it, is tied to what happened to you.”

  I try to take that in. It’s too huge to comprehend, so I try to be funny, with an edge.

  “Well, I’m sorry I screwed things up. Me dying is so about you.”

  “I don’t mean that!”

  Which, of course, I knew, but he storms around the room, then plops back onto the bed because that’s where he can see me the best. “Do you know how many times I tried to undo that day, make your death not happen? I went through everything I did, then everything I ever did, to understand how if I changed one little thing, I could make you still be alive. Do you know what that’s like? I was sure I killed you. Mom and Dad, too. We beat ourselves up over and over.”

  His face is down, his hands covering it. Matt begins to cry.

  It’s hard to look at him. I imagine him trying to bring me back to life, and I feel like a cheat, a creep, soulless. I try to tell him, but there are no words for it. “You didn’t kill me. You didn’t.”

  “Too late now!” he growls, then sniffs up his tears. “Look, I don’t know how, but it’s not like somebody randomly murdered you. Mom and Dad have secrets they probably don’t even know they’re hiding.”

  “Matt, I’ve got nothing for you. We forget our deaths first thing.”

  “But . . . why? That’s so dumb. Why?”

  I laugh, but it’s a false laugh and I know it. “To scrub yourself clean. That’s what death is. You die, you land in Port Haven, and you forget everything from the most recent to the early stuff. Being a baby, growing up with you always around—I can still remember that. Biking? Geez, the biking. We went everywhere, didn’t we? The time we crashed our bikes head-on, the road trips in the back seat, that spelling game we did with the letters, what was it called?”

  “Who cares?” He rubs his palms into his eyes then down his cheeks.

  My throat thickens in a way I didn’t think possible. I don’t even have a throat, not a real one, but it’s choking me. “Look, Gettysburg? That’s a stunner. It must have been pretty sensational.”

  He looks up at me with wet eyes. “It was horrible. The searching? Dad’s whole crew went down there to the amusement park. Teachers from school. Your teachers. The PTA. Everybody. How do you think it was? You were seven and somebody murdered you! It was like it was always raining. All the water, everybody sobbing and yelling. How do you think it was . . .”

  The recitation burns my chest. “Matt, I’m so sorry—”

  “Don’t tell me you’re sorry!” he snaps, throwing me an angry look. “I’m serious. You need to stay until we find out why you were ripped away from us.”

  “I can’t stay here. One time through the razor maybe I can survive. It hurts, but I’ll make it.”

  “There’s a reason they found you at Gettysburg, you know,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s payback or what, but there’s a reason, and it’s about you and me and our parents. I need you here, Denis.”

  “Matt—”

  “Haunt me, Denis. Haunt me!”

  15

  Brothers

  “Haunt you.”

  Even saying the words aloud, I feel the razor slice into my face. I can barely hold the light.

  “Matt, really, I can’t do this. . . .”

  “Mom started to take your stuff out of our room. Did you know that?”

  I didn’t.

  “After about a year. Your clothes first, then your toys and books. One day she came in and said she wanted to take your bed out, to let me have the whole room to myself. That was the big thing she saved for last.”

  While he lets that sink in, I look at my bed, not a wrinkle in the blanket, not a dent in the pillow. “So why is it still here?”

  “Dad said wait. He looked at me, but he said it to her. Let it wait. So Mom waited. The bed stayed. It’s been here every day since you died.”

  “Did you even change the sheets? It’s got Star Wars sheets on it.”

  “She made the bed for when you came back, before we knew you wouldn’t. A few months later she said let’s move to a different house, maybe a different town, but Dad said not yet. Then she wanted a new baby and started fixing up the extra room as a nursery. She said it would help us heal. But he said we’re still recovering, no brothers or sisters yet. Okay, she said, but maybe I could have the spare room? I told her no.”

  It stuns me to imagine five years of Matt and our parents, a family of three that used to be four. What were the days like? The mornings? When they woke up, did it take time to remember I wasn’t there anymore? What happened to me in their minds? Where did I go?

  “After that Mom started to shut down, like click, click, click, the lights going off. I didn’t want to be like Dad—against her—I just didn’t want to leave our room. I couldn’t do it. You’re right. I still thought of us having fun together. If all your stuff was gone, what would I do?”

  My heart aches just looking at his face. “What about Trey?”

  “I didn’t know Trey yet. And Trey’s Trey, but you’re my brother.”

  Matt goes quiet and seems to be trying to come up with more words to explain things, but he doesn’t have to. I get it. I feel it.

  There’s a brand-new laptop sitting on his desk, a birthday present maybe. The box it came in is on the floor next to the desk. The packing foam and empty plastic are stuffed in his wastebasket. At the foot of the bed is not just a student trumpet but a professional one. The phone he uses mainly to call Trey is new too.

  He deserves it all, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that the things our parents would have had to split between us, he’s gotten for himself, an only child now. I sense it’s Mom who really pushes for these things. Maybe that�
��s how she’s able to show she loves him. I think she always figured Matt was her baby and I was Dad’s, the way he flew me around the room while she cuddled Matt on her chest. She always hugged him more, loved him more. I’m not judging, just saying that Matt gets great stuff since I’m not here to need any.

  That’s why when Matt says no to her, it hurts so much.

  “Matt, look, I seriously don’t remember. Yellow leaves. A dark pole of some kind. Something silver. Snow, maybe, or junk moving in the air?”

  He looks up suddenly. “The first snow came the day you died.”

  “Maybe not snow. Maybe ash from a fire. Confetti from a parade. See? I don’t even know what I know.”

  “So help me find out! I can’t do it alone, but we could together. Mom and Dad are going down the toilet. I’m going down the toilet. You’re the only one who can stop it. I need you. We all need you.”

  This hits me harder than I would have thought. I want to explain death to him, how the razor will cut deeper each time I go through it. I want to tell him I’m afraid my death will be ruined because I’ll be too soiled to move on. But why would he even care how much it hurts me?

  He’s hurting so much more.

  “Well,” I start. “I mean . . .”

  “You mean what?”

  My head spins. Nothing comes to me fast enough.

  He throws up his hands. “Exactly. You’re haunting me. Starting now!”

  16

  Geegee’s Advice

  Well, that was a big fail.

  I had just split myself down the middle to tell Matt to leave me the heck alone, and instead I’d vowed to return and promised to save my family—if such a thing like saving living people is even possible for a ghost!

  I told Matt I needed to talk to GeeGee right away. I had to know how much I can haunt him before it backfires big-time on me. The razor damage. “Rip, rip, rip!” All of it.

  I tear myself from the blade and stagger down the hills. The pain slashes my face, and the long cut burns. I feel like I’m leaving something—a lung or two—back in Matt’s world. The hurt fades a little when I finally see GeeGee standing on the flagstone path in front of her house.