The Gone Away Place

by Christopher Barzak

  “Where else is there?” she asked.

  “Here,” I said, looking around the room. “I know it’s not much, but I think it’s a start, don’t you?”

  Mom was quiet when I came out of Dr. Arroyo’s office. I found her sitting in the makeshift waiting room of what used to be an empty storefront in downtown Newfoundland. The building had been vacant for as long as I could remember, and I couldn’t help but think now how weird it was that a vacant building was one of the few to survive, as if the tornadoes had known there was no life inside it and ignored it.

  “Everything okay?” Mom asked as she got up from one of the folding chairs Dr. Arroyo or her assistants had arranged against the bare wall, trying to make the front of the place feel more like a lobby than an empty store.

  “Yep,” I said, nodding, and just then Dr. Arroyo appeared in the doorway behind me.

  “Thanks for bringing Ellie in to see me, Patty,” Dr. Arroyo said. “She’s a fine young woman. Very intelligent, just like you said.” I blushed and looked away from both of them, focused on a corner of the floor opposite to where we stood. Being talked about in the third person only made me feel like more of a troubled person than I wanted to be, especially after I’d had a decent conversation with Dr. Arroyo. I half expected them to start pantomiming call me gestures while I wasn’t looking. But when I turned back, they were both just watching me, as if waiting for me to join the discussion, which had moved on to some of the community programs Dr. Arroyo was organizing. To pool physical resources, she said, but also to pool emotional resources. She wanted to hold a community wake at the Newfoundland Lighthouse, she said, where everyone could come together.

  The place where Noah and I had come together. The place where I’d watched everything fall apart.

  I snagged on to the mention of the lighthouse and couldn’t make sense of anything Dr. Arroyo said afterward. Eventually, though, when I realized she’d stopped talking, I pulled myself together again and told her, “Thanks for everything you said in there.” And that was sincere. I appreciated her way of seeing things. Especially because she didn’t make me feel like a head case for telling her I’d seen a ghost.

  “I’m looking forward to hearing the stories you might tell in the future,” she said as Mom and I headed for the exit. “And remember, you can see me anytime you want. Just give me a call.”

  I nodded, giving a brief smile while Mom thanked her again, saying we’d be in touch. Then we walked out the front door and into the daylight shining down on the ruins of Newfoundland.

  * * *

  It felt wrong somehow, I thought as we picked our way down the street, literally walking along the yellow line in the center of it, since the area was still not open to through traffic. The bright light, the huge white clouds drifting like dreamy islands through the watercolor-blue sky. It felt so wrong to have such beautiful weather above, while below, everything was gray and brown and broken.

  As we were turning up the street where Mom had parked the car, I saw a flicker of light in the air. Possibly just a sunbeam bouncing off broken glass. But where it reflected was what stopped me cold.

  My school. The school where they had all died. It was like the photographs you see online of war-torn cities, the building just a shell of itself. Half of it still there, the other half a pile of blackened rubble, exposing pipes and beams, the remains of the hallway that joined the west and the east wings together. If I squinted hard enough, I could almost see where the trophy case for Newfoundland High School sports teams once hung on a wall that was no longer there.

  The area had been taped off, but at this point some of the tape had fallen and now lay across the glass-littered ground. At the curbside, a pile of flowers, stuffed animals, and teddy bears had started to grow, brought down here by mothers and fathers and grandparents, by neighbors and friends, by classmates who had survived that day. People who, unlike me, had been there with everyone. People who weren’t safe inside a lighthouse on a hillside, watching while others’ lives were taken from them.

  “Honey?” Mom said, and I blinked, then looked back to where she stood waiting for me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We shouldn’t have come this way.”

  “I want to look at it,” I said, surprising myself even as I said those words. “I need to see it.”

  “Well,” she said, a hesitant tone edging into her voice.

  “Alone,” I said. “Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. You’ll be able to see me.”

  She nodded, biting her bottom lip like I do whenever I’m anxious. “Okay,” she said. And then, after a moment, she said it again, as if she were trying to convince herself of it. “Okay.”

  I reassured her and then left her clutching her purse at the corner, a sentinel watching my every step.

  What I hadn’t told her was that I didn’t just need to see the remains of the school. I needed to know if he was there. Lingering, maybe. Confused, like poor Timothy, not even aware of his death. If I found him like that, it would explain why he hadn’t come to me. I hadn’t thought beyond that imagined moment. But as I picked my way across the rubble and came as close to the ruins as I could without crossing the yellow tape, I thought for one long moment that I could feel him in there. His spirit. Waiting for me to find him.

  “Noah,” I said. Whispered, really. “Are you here?”

  I closed my eyes and thought of his voice, the sweet rasp of it, and the way he’d turn when I called to him in the hallway with a smile that always managed to make me happy, even on my worst days. A test I hadn’t done well on, an argument I’d had with my mom or dad. Nothing could stand up to that smile. It crushed everything bad around me. I needed to see it now, more than ever. I needed it so I could smile back, the first smile I hadn’t faked since the outbreak.

  A breeze picked up, lifting my hair from my shoulders a little, stirring dust and grit on the ground around my feet. But as I opened my eyes, nothing more than that happened. No one emerged from the shadows of the ruins.

  I stayed for a little longer, hoping as hard as I could. But eventually, I turned, saw my mom still waiting patiently in the distance where I’d left her, and made my way back to her.

  * * *

  On the way home, Mom acted funny. She was tight-lipped, facing forward, never looking over at me, not trying to spur any conversation between us. This wasn’t like her. Even before the outbreak, she was the sort of mom who was always playing twenty questions. What happened at school today? How is the yearbook coming? How’s Noah? Did you tell Becca she could come over for dinner this Saturday? That sort of thing. And in the weeks after the outbreak, she’d hovered and chattered even more than usual. I didn’t blame her. I knew she was worried about me. Dad was worried about me, too. People from school I hadn’t talked to in weeks were worried about me. Even I was worried about me. But when my mom went silent that afternoon, I started to worry about her instead.

  At home, she started cleaning up rooms that she’d already cleaned that morning. And then she began to pick her way through each of our hampers, despite having finished the majority of the laundry the night before. She was scavenging for distractions, I realized, and when she took out a can of furniture polish from a cupboard, I said, “Mom, what’s the matter?”

  She looked up and, wide-eyed, said, “What do you mean?”

  “None of this stuff needs to be done,” I pointed out. “You dusted in here already. And you haven’t said a word since we left downtown. Something’s wrong. Go on. You can say it. What? Did Dr. Arroyo tell you I was a lost cause or something?”

  Mom put the furniture polish back in the cupboard and turned to me, clasping her hands together in front of her waist, closing her eyes, and sighing. I started to think I’d hit on the truth there, and for a moment my worrying turned away from Mom and back to myself. Was I a lost cause?

  “Just the opposite,” she said, opening her eyes, giving me a wea
k smile. “Dr. Arroyo didn’t say anything. You could see that for yourself. You were there.”

  “So,” I said, “isn’t that a good thing?”

  “I hope so,” Mom said. “It’s just that, well, she either thinks you’re going to be fine and I don’t need to know anything, or else…”

  “Or else she just doesn’t know what to do for me yet?” I offered.

  Mom closed her eyes again, and tears trailed down her cheeks suddenly. That’s when I realized why she seemed so worried. She wasn’t upset by anything Dr. Arroyo may have said or not said. She was upset because she didn’t know how to help me.

  I went to her and hugged her, I told her not to worry. I told her that I liked meeting Dr. Arroyo. I told her that she’d given me a different way to look at things. “I’m not really fine,” I grudgingly admitted. “But I think maybe I can see a way to move forward through all of this at some point.”

  “Oh my God,” Mom said, letting me hold some of her weight up for her, her arms squeezing me tight. “That is so good to hear, Ellie.”

  “What’s good to hear?” I asked, pulling back to look at her face, all of the muscles in it starting to relax a little. “That I think I’ll eventually be fine?”

  “No,” Mom said, smiling weakly as she shook her head and pushed a lock of hair away from my face. “It’s good to hear you finally admit that you’re not fine.”

  * * *

  I didn’t tell Mom that I hadn’t shared absolutely everything I’d been experiencing with Dr. Arroyo. I hadn’t told Mom about everything, either. She didn’t know I’d been seeing Timothy’s ghost. And she didn’t know that every night, when she and Dad fell asleep, I lay awake, staring up at my ceiling, trying to replay every second, every detail from the day of the outbreak—from what I pulled out of my closet that morning until the moment I saw the tanker fly out of nowhere and hit the west wing of the school like a missile. I’d fallen backward and hit my head on the stone floor of the lighthouse. And I’d blacked out for a couple of hours afterward. But I was starting to remember things. Feelings. Realizations I’d had in the moment that I instinctively wanted to unrealize, like a movie on rewind, until the event hadn’t occurred at all. I spent my nights like that, replaying and rewinding, trying to understand, trying to take it all back. The stupid fight. The name-calling. The idiotic drama of feeling jealousy toward Ingrid, a girl who had nothing, just because Noah cared about her.

  I didn’t want to be me, not how I was that day. But it seemed like the only impression I had left of myself. I couldn’t see any other part of myself but her. That girl. That stupid, selfish girl who should have been with her friends but instead was safe and sound in the lighthouse, nursing her stupid, trivial feelings.

  I hadn’t told Mom any of that. How small and stupid I’d been. How shallow. How I didn’t deserve to have survived while other, more deserving people had lost their lives.

  I also hadn’t told Dr. Arroyo something else about Timothy’s ghost. I could tell from the way she had talked about ghosts that she saw them as metaphors, strong memories that had taken on a life of their own, at least for the person who felt haunted. It was the same way my English teacher, Mrs. Hammond, talked about ghosts that appeared in a book or a play. They weren’t real. They felt real to the characters they spoke to, but they were really there to move a plot forward, and they were always a metaphor for something else. For something the haunted person needed or desired.

  So I hadn’t told Dr. Arroyo the one thing that actually proved, at least to me, that Timothy’s ghost was real and not just a figment of my imagination come to life out of despair and grief. I hadn’t told Dr. Arroyo that I’d seen Timothy Barlow bouncing a basketball on his back deck before I even knew who was dead and who wasn’t.

  Timothy Barlow died in my high school that morning, but I hadn’t known that, and I’d still seen him.

  I couldn’t tell Dr. Arroyo or my mom or dad or anyone, except maybe Becca’s mother, something like that. It would only serve to make my mom more upset than she already was, and Dr. Arroyo would probably say I needed more intensive intervention. Clearly, she’d say, I was having auditory and visual hallucinations. Clearly, I’d had a psychotic break. That’s probably what I would have thought before the outbreak, too.

  So I left Mom downstairs to continue distracting herself with her unnecessary cleaning efforts and went up to my room, letting her feel relieved about me for the first time in weeks.

  I sat on my bed but didn’t look out my window for fear that Timothy would be out there waiting, as if he knew I’d been talking about him to Dr. Arroyo. Not that him knowing something like that would matter. From what I could tell, Timothy didn’t even know he was dead. He just kept on living, at least in his own mind, seemingly impervious to the reality of his circumstances.

  Across my room, my laptop was open, its screen blank with sleep. Next to it was a flash drive I hadn’t touched in weeks. A flash drive that contained all the contents for the school yearbook. That is, all the contents except for a few remaining senior wills—of the members of the yearbook staff itself—that we were planning to record for the digital edition. We’d left ours for last, and now I couldn’t bring myself to open the files, knowing our words would never be recorded like the rest of our classmates’ had.

  Not that I even knew what would happen with the yearbook, now that nothing in Newfoundland was certain. The rest of the school year had been canceled after our town had been declared a disaster zone, and besides, we really had only a few weeks left. There was talk of a belated graduation ceremony for the surviving seniors, but according to Mom, there was pushback from various people who thought it in bad taste to proceed with one, out of consideration for the parents of the dead. I agreed with those pushing back, whoever they were.

  We surviving seniors didn’t need a graduation ceremony to feel like we’d moved on to the next big phase in our lives. The outbreak had marked that change for us. And that mark would never leave us.

  I got up and went over to my desk, stroked the red flash drive with the tip of one finger, wishing I could go back in time and record Becca’s and Noah’s and Adrienne’s and Rose’s senior-will videos. Regret and guilt. Those were the two feelings my entire existence revolved around, and I didn’t know how to put either one to rest. I didn’t know if there was even a real way to do that. According to Dr. Arroyo, there was, and I wanted to believe her. But knowing that a way forward exists and knowing the way itself are two different things.

  I took last year’s yearbook off my shelf, lay down on my bed with it open in front of me, and started to page through the junior-class pictures, stopping to look at the photos of my smiling friends. They were good photos, of course, but they were school photos. Nothing like the kind of photos Steve McCurry meant when he’d said, “If you wait, people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view.” These were photos staged to capture the kind of smile every parent expects their children to have in a school yearbook. But they weren’t real. These weren’t how I knew my friends. My God, looking at Becca’s fake smile, you’d never know how suffocated she felt by her family, by her mom. You’d never know this was a girl who couldn’t wait to graduate so she could leave home and Newfoundland forever. Her soul wasn’t in these pictures.

  I heard the slow and brassy notes of a saxophone just then as I was looking at Becca’s picture, and knew that Timothy Barlow had come to haunt me after all. I wasn’t disturbed or frightened by his appearances; he wasn’t a threat to me. He was just hanging around, clueless.

  I didn’t get up to go to the window right away, deciding instead to see if he’d stop and go away if no one came around to pay him attention. But after a few minutes, as the jazzy saxophone notes kept slipping through my open window, it became clear he wasn’t going to stop.

  What would Dr. Arroyo do, I wondered, if I showed her the truth of what I’d been experienc
ing?

  I got up from my bed, leaving the yearbook pages to flutter behind me, and went to my window. Timothy was on his back deck, leaning into his saxophone, playing a slow song with a sad and winding rhythm. I felt my front pocket to make sure I had my phone on me, and then I went downstairs, where Mom was vacuuming the living room and didn’t notice me leaving by the back door as I carefully closed it behind me.

  I walked slowly across the backyard to the Barlows’ house, cautiously fingering the cell phone in my pocket, unsure if I was maybe somehow wrong for doing what I planned. But I needed to know if it was possible. For myself, for my sanity, for evidence, if it ever became necessary. So I recommitted myself to my initial impulse and didn’t waver from my path.

  Up the steps I went, one, two, three, until I was on the Barlows’ back deck, standing behind Timothy, who faced the sliding back door of the house, watching his reflection in the glass, as if he were practicing to look cool and sexy at his next jazz recital. And when he eventually spun around and saw me there with him, lips still locked on the saxophone, his eyes went wide and he removed the sax from his mouth immediately, running the fingers of his free hand through his shaggy hair.

  “Oh hey, Ellie,” he said, voice cracking. “I didn’t see you there. What’s up?”

  “Nothing,” I said, trying to sound normal. “I just heard you playing and thought I’d come over to listen.”

  “Oh,” he said, smiling awkwardly. “I wasn’t bothering you, was I?”

  “You weren’t,” I said. “I like to hear you play. In fact, I was thinking of doing a profile on you for the yearbook, for our digital edition. You know, get a video recording of you playing, maybe a short interview? What do you think?”