“Your dad and his crew seeing us was different from how it happens with my mom,” she said. “My mom…her need is strong. I think I was all she had left, after she and my brother stopped talking, and you know she and my dad…Well, it’s complicated. I can’t help but come to her. Especially when she’s been drinking, which seems to make her need even stronger. And she’s been drinking every night. She starts with wine at dinner, moves on to my dad’s bourbon after he goes to bed.”
“I’m so sorry, Becca,” I said, squeezing her forearm.
“I didn’t come to you when you called in the first few weeks because your need was…well…to be honest, Ellie, it was muffled. Or something like that. I could see you, and I could feel your need, but it was like you were calling from deep down inside a well or something. Somewhere far away.”
“I think I know why,” I said, taking a deep breath and sighing. “I was playing a game with myself. A head game. It hurts so much, Becca, everything that’s happened, all of you just…going away. So I kept telling myself and everyone that I was fine. And I could be fine, or at least seem so, if I didn’t leave the house or think about any of you for very long. For the first couple of weeks, I thought I actually was fine. But when the funerals began, I realized I wasn’t.”
“I know,” Becca said. “I saw what happened at mine. I understand. Don’t feel bad about it. And shutting yourself off might have been a good thing.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because,” Becca said, “that rope I told you about? Well, we can tug on it, too. The dead. I think we can bring the living over to our side.”
“Your side?” I said, repeating the word Becca kept using, the word that made it impossible for me to pretend she wasn’t really dead. “You can…bring us over?”
“I’m not sure exactly,” said Becca. “But I think so. That’s why I said that you have to move on. I don’t know how long this place will be thin like it is right now. I don’t know if it’ll ever change back. But there’s nothing for you where I am, trust me.”
“Are the others okay?”
“Rose is fine,” Becca said immediately. “Her father has been doing these rituals they perform in Japan after someone dies. I don’t understand what it all is, but Rose does. She never leaves their front porch, and when I’ve gotten near enough to speak to her, she says she wishes she could let me in the house with her, that it’s safe there. Dying changed some people, I think. They don’t want to move on, or they’re trying to figure out how to stay. Rose and I saw it before we found our parents.”
“What about Adrienne?” I said, raising one eyebrow. I’d noticed that Becca hadn’t mentioned her yet, and it was starting to feel weird.
“Adrienne,” Becca said, looking up to the rose I’d convinced her to black out with a marker all those years ago. “Adrienne’s one of the ones who’ve changed. I think she’s with Ingrid Mueller.”
“Ingrid Mueller?” I said immediately. In all of this time since the outbreak, I hadn’t mourned Ingrid Mueller’s death. I hadn’t felt anything in the last three months before she died but creeped out by her. And before that, a kind of automatic sympathy. “Adrienne never gave Ingrid Mueller the time of day,” I said. “Why are they together now?”
Becca turned onto her back to look up at the ceiling. “I don’t know for sure. Adrienne’s changed, Ellie. She and Ingrid have been acting strange.”
“Strange how?” I asked, even though I could tell Becca didn’t want to go into any detail.
“I don’t know how to explain it, Ellie,” she said again, shaking her head back and forth on her pillow. “You think people on your side of things have been having a hard time since the storms? You can’t imagine how some of us who died have been taking it.”
“I’m sorry, Becca,” I said. “I didn’t mean…”
“I know what you meant, Ellie. It’s okay. I don’t want you to understand how things are on this side of things. Just trust me. If you see Adrienne or Ingrid, don’t talk to them. Just look away as if you never saw them.”
“What about Noah?” I finally asked.
And Becca rolled back over, her face serious. “You need to forget about him, Ellie,” she said. “It’s in your best interest. He won’t come to you, no matter how hard you call.”
I felt the pressure of tears building behind my eyes then, and my bottom lip began to tremble. “But why? Is it because of the fight we had? Is it because…Does he hate me?”
Becca stroked the top of my head like her mother had earlier, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “Nothing like that. Trust me.”
I wanted to ask more, to press her for answers, but I could tell by the look on Becca’s face that she wouldn’t let any more slip than she had.
“I wish I could leave,” Becca said after a while.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, it’s this feeling I have. When my mom calls to me, it’s like being tugged at in the center of my body. But there’s another feeling, a different kind of calling, and it never stops. I can’t tell where it’s coming from, but it’s like it’s telling me to fly away. Except that I can’t. It’s like I’m anchored to this place, and no matter where I’ve looked, I can’t get past the gray area. Rose and I spent our first few days trying to find a way out, and I thought it was just smoke, but it’s not that. It’s like there’s a gray wall surrounding us.”
“Fly away?” I asked, thinking about my last encounter with Timothy Barlow.
“Yeah,” said Becca.
“There’s something that I should probably tell you, too,” I admitted. “I did something. To Timothy Barlow. Something that made him fly away, I think.”
“What do you mean?” Becca asked, her eyes narrowing as she studied me.
So I told her how I’d recorded Timothy with my phone, and how afterward he rose up and up until I couldn’t see him any longer, seemingly freed from whatever was keeping him here on earth. “The gray area,” I said, “or whatever you called it.” I told her that I’d done it because I’d wanted proof to show Dr. Arroyo that I wasn’t crazy, and that I hadn’t expected it would turn out like it did.
A strange look came over Becca’s face when I’d finished my story. Her eyes went wide, her jaw tightened a little. “Ellie,” she said, “would you do it for me, too? Please?”
I couldn’t believe what she was saying. “Didn’t you hear what I just told you?” I said. “I have no idea what happened to Timothy. What if I…what if I accidentally destroyed him?”
It was something I’d considered ever since I’d recorded Timothy, but I hadn’t let myself dwell on it. It was too painful to consider: What if I had caused even more harm to a soul who had already suffered enough? Becca and I had always told each other everything, the whole truth, no matter what. But if I’d known this would be her reaction, that she’d want me to do to her what I’d done to Timothy, I would have made it the first secret I ever kept from her.
“I can’t keep on like this, Ellie,” Becca said. “I have no idea what’s going to happen. I’m being pulled back to my mom every night, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be free if you don’t at least try it. I’ll take the chance. Please, Ellie. Do this for me. Do me this one last favor.”
Tears spilled down my face, and my throat closed up as I wiped them away. I could feel myself slowly shaking my head at the very idea. I’d just gotten her back. How could I lose her again?
Becca undid her necklace then, taking off her half of our heart-shaped charm. “Please, Ellie,” she said again, slipping the charm into my hands and squeezing.
“Okay,” I said at last, through my ragged breathing.
Then I took my phone out of my front pocket, and told Becca to think of this as her last will and testament for our unfinished yearbook.
You want me to tell you a story? A story about myself? I’m not reall
y good at stories, Ellie. You know that. I’m even worse at talking about myself. You know that, too.
Okay, okay. I get it. I do. It’s for the yearbook. It’s for me. It’s for whatever I want to leave behind, before everyone forgets about me.
I know you won’t forget me, Ellie. I already knew that. You’re the bestest friend I ever had.
So. If I’m going to do this, you’re going to have to indulge me. Because the story I’m going to tell isn’t about just me. It’s about my brother. Drew. You remember him, don’t you? You used to think he was cute, in a best-friend’s-older-brother sort of way.
Sorry, right. I forgot. I need to talk to the camera. Okay, then. Don’t worry.
Just keep shooting.
* * *
I was nine when my brother, Drew, left home for college. Our parents had us far apart, not because they wanted to but because it’s just how things worked out. My mom had several miscarriages between our births, and the doctors had told her the probability that she’d be able to carry another child full term was something around one in a hundred thousand. Not good odds, but my parents kept trying. Mom always told me I stopped moving in the eighth month, and she thought that was it, that I’d died inside her. But a few weeks later, she was holding me in her arms in a hospital room, sobbing, mostly for joy, but also because she and my dad hadn’t thought about names. They were trying to avoid becoming attached, since her last few pregnancies hadn’t concluded happily. They ended up choosing Rebecca, which Mom once told me means “captivating, to be tied up, a knotted cord.” She always said the cord between us could never be severed. I guess that’s true, considering how she’s still pulling me back to the house to be with her, even though I feel this other tug in the center of my body, as if there’s a second cord attached there, pulling me in a different direction, away from this place, away from her and this world.
But back to Drew. When I was growing up, he felt more like an uncle to me than a brother, mainly because of our age difference. He treated me like a little sister, though, believe me. Called me names he knew I hated (brat, carrot-top, shortcake). Tousled my hair whenever he walked past, which I also hated. Bounced a basketball against the wall between our rooms when Mom and Dad weren’t home, which I hated more than anything.
Don’t get me wrong, though. Drew could be seriously nice, too. For my seventh birthday, he gave me a bicycle he’d bought with money he’d earned mowing lawns and baling hay at nearby farms. He was only sixteen, and when I look back on it, it’s hard to believe a teenage boy would do something like that. It’s the sort of thing you expect more from your parents.
Above all else, though, beyond being occasionally annoying or generous, Drew was talented. Mom always said, “That boy has the voice of an angel and the hands of God.” When he was six, he started playing piano. By the time he was thirteen, he’d been invited to sing with the Cleveland Boys’ Choir. Mom had used my aunt Donna’s address in Cleveland to get him an audition. It was the only thing I think she ever did that was, you know, kind of illegal. “But I’ll do anything,” Mom said (to my dad, when he questioned her actions), “to make sure Drew gets what he needs to fulfill his God-given talent.” What Drew needed were opportunities, and Mom said opportunities of the artistic kind wouldn’t be easily found in Newfoundland.
She probably regrets doing all of that for Drew now. Actually, I know she does. I’ve heard her say as much a couple of times. At church, when any of her friends ask if she has news from Drew, she’ll shake her head, tell them that she’s still praying for him. The other time I heard her say she regretted helping him with his musical ability, I was too young to understand what she meant.
I was ten then, and at that point Drew had been away at college for a year. He was a classical voice and opera major at New York University. He’d received several scholarships—some on the basis of his audition, others academic, and, of course, his financial need—and in the end, the money he was granted covered nearly all of his expenses. He still took a part-time student job on campus, though, to make spending money. I knew all of this despite being uninterested in the lives of college students. I knew because whenever Mom and Dad took me with them to run errands, they’d inevitably see friends from church, who would always ask about Drew, and my parents would beam with pride as they listed his accomplishments. Dad in particular was unable to fill people in on Drew’s doings without saying, “My boy’s a hard worker. Think of that. Still working a part-time job, even with all of those classes he’s taking.”
Having spent my entire life hearing my parents describe Drew like he was God’s gift to the world, I knew it came as a complete shock when they turned on him. And even worse, when it turned out to be my fault.
It happened on a Sunday the summer after Drew’s first year in Manhattan. Drew had been home for just two days, and my parents insisted he come to church, where they had a surprise in store for him. They’d made arrangements with the choir director to have Drew lead the congregation in singing “Amazing Grace” (my mom’s favorite song, the very first one she taught Drew how to play on the piano), and of course Drew handled it with his typical humility and ease. I sat in the first pew and smiled so hard, I could feel the skin pull back on my cheeks. It was the first time I felt like I’d really heard my brother sing and was old enough to appreciate it.
Drew was a pretty boy. I could tell that about him even as a little girl. Some of my friends (ahem) had told me they thought he was cute. He had curly brown-blond hair, this nuclear bright smile, green eyes, and skin like porcelain. No wonder my mom poured herself into him. He might as well have been her doppelgänger. He sang like her (though better). He played piano like her (also better). All those years she’d devoted to him, the opportunities she gave him to develop his abilities? That was just like giving things to herself, but pouring them into another vessel.
I’d known all of that about Drew for years. You know, that he and my mom looked alike and how his musical talent set him apart. It was hard in some ways. Sometimes I felt like a shadow on the walls of my house, compared to all the space his legend took up, even after he was gone. My being a good reader who occasionally wrote poems didn’t really inspire my mom in the way Drew’s music did. And yet it took me a superlong time to put it all together. How Mom really did see herself in Drew. And how that was what drove her pride in him. It all suddenly clicked for me when I watched her in church that day, seeing her beam at the notes he was able to produce and hold.
I spent part of that service holding on to Drew’s phone. He’d given it to me when he went up to sing. I guess he’d been checking his text messages because the phone was unlocked, and I started to look through it, curious, hoping I might find a glimmer of what Drew’s life away from home looked like. And as I thumbed through his photos, I kept seeing photos of Drew and this other boy, whose name I found out later was Craig. Pictures of Drew and Craig singing karaoke. Pictures of Drew and Craig in the back of a taxi with a couple of other friends. Pictures of Drew and Craig at a park with fountains turned on behind them. Pictures of Drew and Craig sitting on a bench beneath the bough of some kind of flowering tree, the petals framing their faces, their faces turned toward each other, their lips just barely touching.
That last picture stopped me, and the mix of happy surprise and shame for having found it made me gasp aloud. My mom turned to look at me then, in the middle of Drew’s song, and saw the phone in my hand, the picture of Drew and Craig kissing right there on the screen. I looked up, afraid at the sight of her eyes widening and her skin tightening around her mouth as she pursed her lips a second later. But all she said was “Give that to me, Becca. You shouldn’t look through other people’s things. It’s rude.”
When the service was over and the handshaking and catching up among community friends had finished—when we were all at home again and the picture on the phone hadn’t been brought up by anyone yet—I started to think nothing bad m
ight come of it, and began to set the table for our Sunday afternoon meal as usual. I was wrong to think nothing bad would come of it, though, because it was just as I was putting silverware beside the plates that Mom called Drew out of the living room, where he’d been watching football with Dad, to ask him directly, with no gentleness in her tone, if he “had become gay in New York City.”
Drew’s face fell while my mom’s expression was firm. But I did notice her hands trembling at her sides a little as she waited for his answer. And that answer came, matching her directness with a quiet defiance. Drew said, “I didn’t become gay in New York City, Mom. I’ve been gay for as long as I can remember,” and I saw a look of utter destruction tear across her face.
You think those tornadoes were something, Ellie? You should have seen how fast Drew’s confession leveled the entire foundation of my mother’s existence. Everything it once carried—her hopes and dreams bound up in Drew’s future—fell in one moment. And all of it, everything about that horrible moment, was because of me.
“I’ve always been gay,” he said once more, after no one responded immediately. I was still standing at the dinner table, clenching the fork I’d been about to lay next to a plate. I knew instinctively that what Drew had admitted would change everything in our lives, but I wasn’t exactly sure why. I was ten, okay? I knew what being gay was, but in the same vague way that I understood anything about sex or love at that point. And I knew that, in my parents’ house, because of their beliefs, being gay wasn’t a good thing to admit. But there was Drew, admitting it. And there were my parents, shocked into silence: my father staring up at the ceiling in his recliner in the living room, as if he’d just noticed a crack that needed to be patched over, my mom staring down at the palms of her hands, which she closed and opened as if she were just discovering the use of her fingers. “I hope that you can still love me,” Drew said, trying to bring a human voice back into the room. “Because I still love you, and I want you to love me, all of me, as I am.”
The Gone Away Place Page 10
