The Gone Away Place

by Christopher Barzak

  My parents still didn’t speak. They just kept staring off into various spaces, as if they’d received the news that Drew had been killed in some kind of freak accident. And because I saw tears starting to fill in Drew’s eyes right then, I couldn’t hold myself back any longer. I said, “I love you, Drew.” And while that made Drew smile at me from across the room as he lifted the back of one hand to wipe at his eyes, it actually made things worse in the end, my saying that.

  “Becca,” Mom said in the voice she used only for seriously messed-up moments, for when she felt she needed to command everyone in the family like some kind of drill sergeant. “Go to your room. Right now.”

  “But I want to stay,” I said.

  And my dad shot out, “Becca, goddamn it, listen to your mother,” which set me to crying. I threw the fork down on the plate, ran to my room and slammed the door, then threw myself onto my bed, burying my face in my pillows.

  I heard a lot of things afterward, even though my door was closed, even though I was still crying in jags off and on for the next half hour. They weren’t good things, and my parents’ voices were harsh as they said them.

  “Your poor little sister saw those awful pictures on your phone!” I heard my mom say, scandalized. “How dare you?”

  “You know that this isn’t good, son,” I heard my dad say. “This is a sin, what you’re doing. What you are. You’re going to have to get right with the Lord. He’ll fix this for you.”

  And Drew pleading, asking, “Why can’t you see me? Why can’t you see me?” as if he were a ghost in the room, unable to communicate to the very people whose love he needed at exactly that moment.

  And he was like a ghost, really. Because on that day, for my parents—who knows, maybe even for Drew—the boy they’d previously known as Drew died.

  They gave Drew one chance—one single chance—to take back the change he’d initiated, to undo everything bad, and told him that everything would be okay, that we could all still move forward together, if he would just see a church counselor. Which, of course, Drew refused to do. “I don’t need to be fixed,” he told them. And as he turned from wounded to “hostile”—as my mother would later put it to friends at church, who were told of the terrible fate that had befallen her son—my mom told him not to darken their doorstep in the future (my mother actually said this) unless he was coming home to tell them he’d been momentarily insane and that God had brought him back around to them.

  I heard Drew thump past my bedroom door after that, and he was sobbing, which made my own crying jag start up again in sympathy. “Cowardly assholes, ignorant fuckheads,” I heard him say through the wall between our rooms. He was packing some clothes into the suitcase he’d brought them in. A few minutes later, my door swung open, and he stood there, face red from crying, eyes swollen. I immediately started to say I was sorry for playing with his phone, but he shushed me a little and said, “I love you so much, Becca. This isn’t your fault. Don’t ever forget that. I’ll see you again someday, okay?”

  “Leave her be,” my mother said from further down the hallway, and I nodded quickly at Drew so he knew I was making a silent pact with him. I wanted to go with him right then, but I knew that wasn’t possible.

  “I love you, Drew,” I told him one last time, and then he was gone.

  The very next day, my mom sat me down when my dad was at work and told me why they had needed to ask Drew to leave. She explained how he was choosing to live in a way that God couldn’t approve of, and how it broke her heart to do what she and my dad had done. “But it was necessary, Becca,” she said, sniffing away tears. “You understand that, sweetheart, don’t you?”

  I knew only one thing at that moment, after witnessing what had just gone down with Drew. And that new knowledge was that my parents couldn’t be trusted. Not with anything truly meaningful, that is. I made a quick decision not to ever let them know anything they might disagree with, especially if it was something to do with some major part of who I was.

  So I looked up at my mom and said, “I understand,” and let her squeeze my hand gently, maybe even with affection, for being such an agreeable daughter. And though what I was doing right then and forever after was a matter of protecting myself from them, I hated having to do it. The lie went down my throat, thick and bitter, making me suddenly cough a second later.

  “Are you okay, Becca?” Mom asked.

  I coughed a little more, nodding. “Just an itch in my throat,” I said.

  “It’s all the pollen,” Mom said, nodding. “You’re sensitive to it, like me.”

  I don’t think I’d ever heard my mom draw a comparison between us before that day, or at least not in a long while. Long enough not to remember when the last time was. And though I still didn’t completely understand why they’d told Drew he was now a stranger to them, I was even more confused when it seemed that my mom had decided, seemingly overnight, to put her remaining energies into me, despite my not having any obvious talent to nurture. For the next eight years of my life, she’d throw herself in regardless, and her support would almost always feel suffocating.

  Drew’s twenty-six years old now. He sings in the New York Metropolitan Opera Chorus. He has a website with his bio, a list of upcoming events, his résumé, his photos and reviews, and sound clips. For years, I used to visit that site and watch videos of him I’d find on YouTube. I always did this on the school computers, so I didn’t have to worry about Mom prying into my search history at home. I’d stare and stare at his contact information for what seemed like hours, wishing I could bring myself to click the email button.

  I finally did that, about a year ago. I’d played by my parents’ rules until I was sixteen and hadn’t contacted Drew, like they’d ordered. At sixteen, though, I was starting to feel like I needed to talk to someone about what I should be doing to make sure I could get out of Newfoundland, and out of Mom and Dad’s world, after I graduated. Drew replied to my email within minutes. Oh my God, Becca, he said. I’ve been waiting so long for this. He said he knew one day he’d hear from me, he just didn’t know when, and he asked me if I was able to talk on the phone without Mom and Dad finding out. If not, then we’d keep talking by email. My whole chest felt like it was going to explode as I read his words—my brother’s words on the screen of my phone—and I released that breath only when I called him from the school parking lot after classes were over the next day and heard his voice for the first time in years. I think we both cried for at least five minutes before either of us could say full sentences that made any sense at all.

  I’d been talking to Drew every week since then, for the past year, before…before, well, you know what happened. I was going to get on a bus to Manhattan a few days after graduation and move in with him. That was my big escape plan.

  And now it’ll never happen.

  I’ve only seen him once in the past month, since I died. My mom and dad, I’m betting, wouldn’t let him attend the funeral. But I felt him a couple of days after the ceremony. It was like the tug I feel in the center of my chest whenever my mom pulls me to her.

  When I felt Drew tugging at me, it was a little like that. A tug of desperate need. A need for me to be there with him. And because I could sense it was Drew, I flew to him in an instant.

  He was at my grave, in the one cemetery the tornadoes didn’t touch when they destroyed Newfoundland. He was wearing a black suit, a white button-down, and a black tie, like he was holding his own private funeral for me. “Oh, Becca,” he was saying through his tears as he looked down at my headstone. The words Beloved Daughter had been inscribed on it. No mention of Beloved Sister. “Oh, Becca, we had so much we needed to do together.”

  I didn’t want to haunt Drew. At least, I didn’t want to be forced to haunt him, the way my mother forced me, keeping me around in her typically selfish way. And if I didn’t want that kind of entanglement with Drew, I knew I co
uldn’t call out to him, that I shouldn’t turn him in my direction. I worried we’d be bound in the way I was bound to my mother, making it that much harder for me to find a way out of this world.

  So instead of calling him to me, I flew home and found a photo Dad had taken of me standing proudly next to the bike Drew bought for my seventh birthday. I brought it back to the cemetery, right as he was turning away from my grave. I left the photo on his dashboard, and waited far enough away to watch without being seen as he discovered it.

  After his mouth stopped hanging open in shock and after he stopped crying a few moments later, Drew looked around, as if checking to see if there was something unearthly in the car with him. Was his sister a ghost now? Was she there with him, invisible but present, trying to reach out to him? Trying to tell him, “I love you, Drew,” one last time? I could see these thoughts on his still-angelic face as he scanned the headstones and then the skirt of the woods surrounding the cemetery.

  In the end, he just nodded, the way I’d nodded to him the day my parents threw him out of the house, to let him know I’d find him one day. Drew must have decided right then that he knew how the photo came to him, that he didn’t need to see me to believe that I was there. He just propped the photo back up on the dash before leaving.

  * * *

  You’re probably wondering why I’d tell this story when I have only this one chance to leave something of myself behind. There are so many other stories I could tell, it’s true. But that’s the story that means the most to me, because it’s the one time in my life when I feel like I was a whole person, doing what I wanted, seeking out my brother despite being ordered not to. I didn’t care about the potential consequences. Because it was right, and it was true.

  I’m telling this story not just for myself, though. I’m telling it for my mom and dad. Make sure they watch this, Ellie. Make sure they watch it all the way through.

  My mom and dad named me Rebecca. It means something like “captivating,” but it also means to be tied up with a knot, and my mom has managed to make that definition more than true. She’s kept me here with her. She’s tied me up with so many knots, because she doesn’t want to lose her last child, and I don’t know how to free myself.

  She and my dad do have another child, though. They just refuse to see him. They refuse to cut the cord to me, but now I’m going to do that myself, if what you say is true, Ellie. And what I need them to hear from all of this, my last will and testament, is that if they want to keep any part of me in their hearts after I go on to wherever I’m headed next, they need to find Drew. They need to love him. Because he’s the only family left on earth who’ll have a piece of my heart after I go away.

  If they want to keep me alive in their hearts afterward, too, they need to see this. They need to hear this. And they need to pray that Drew will forgive them.

  That’s all I have to say. Otherwise, I’m ready to go. And I hope that, whatever happens next, I never have to return to this world.

  The first time I saw them was five or six days after the storms, and I was out with my crew, cutting up fallen trees. It seemed as if at least half of the trees around Newfoundland had snapped like twigs in the high winds of the outbreak, and now they crisscrossed the roads. Each time my crew finished clearing a path, we’d move to a new road and just find more trees waiting to be cut up and thrown off to the side.

  It wasn’t me who saw the ghosts first. It was Joe, a young guy, maybe nineteen. He was lugging a large wheel of tree trunk to pitch across the ditch into a field, and suddenly he stopped, made this weird sound I can’t even imitate. It was like some kind of animal was caught in his throat, scratching and clawing to get out. Joe dropped the chunk of tree, and it bounced once on the pavement before rolling a few inches away. “What? What’s that?” Joe said to pretty much anyone in hearing distance. So I turned with a couple of other guys to look.

  Joe was pointing toward the hayfield he’d been pitching pieces of trees into all morning. And in the middle of that hayfield, we saw two girls walking toward us. There was something wrong with them, but I couldn’t understand what, exactly, at the time. Something about them seemed fuzzy, like the outlines of their bodies weren’t very defined. I chalked it up to having worked sixteen-hour days for the past week, helping the National Guard clear roads and secure downed power lines. As the girls came nearer, when they were no more than thirty or forty feet away, I finally recognized them as friends of my daughter: Rose Sano and Becca Hendrix. Ellie would be so happy, I thought, knowing they were okay. She’d been so worried about them. But what were they doing out here? It wasn’t a good time to be walking around Newfoundland, with all of the storm debris, some of it dangerous, littering the place.

  Relieved, I sighed and said, “Rose, Becca! You’re safe! Thank God!”

  The girls didn’t say anything in response, though. They just kept walking through the ankle-high grasses of the field, staring ahead as if they hadn’t heard me.

  “Rose!” I said as they came even nearer. “Becca!”

  But still the girls didn’t seem to hear me.

  A few moments later, they stepped cautiously down into the ditch near the roadside, then climbed up the other side, where I was standing with the rest of the guys, who had stopped whatever they’d been doing and were now watching openmouthed, same as I was. It was then that the girls paused beside me for a second, and Becca Hendrix looked over at me to say, “We’re just trying to get to Rose’s house, Mr. Frame.” They stood there for a moment longer, staring at me quietly, and it looked like the outlines of their bodies shimmered or wavered, went out of focus.

  I shook my head and blinked, rubbed my eyes, and when I looked up, the girls had started walking again, crossed the road, stepped down into the ditch on the other side, then came up into the soybean field on the other end, which I knew was owned by Rose Sano’s family.

  The Sano house stood in the distance, a white clapboard farmhouse with forest-green trim. From my vantage point, it looked small, more like a cottage than the many-roomed place I knew it was, from various visits over the years when they had Patty and me over for dinner or to play cards on a lazy weekend.

  Now, in silence, my crew and I watched the girls head toward the Sano house, and kept watching until they were so far away, they seemed to wink out of existence. Blip! Here now, gone the next moment.

  After that, I blinked and blinked, rubbed my eyes, looked around at the shocked faces of the men. Young Joe turned to me and said, “I know those girls. They were just two grades below me. They…they…”

  Before he could say what I suspected he was thinking—that he’d seen their names released on one of the casualty lists that were circulating—I looked away from him and at the rest of my crew and said, “Listen up, guys. I’m not sure what we just saw, so maybe we should keep a lid on this until I can check into things. There are…there are a lot of legal things we need to pay attention to right now. Legal protocols for disaster-zone maintenance. So I appreciate your cooperation in getting back to work. Can I rest assured that everything that just happened will stay between us for now?”

  I was making it all up on the spot, of course. The disaster-zone legal issues, I mean. And I wasn’t even sure why. It’s not like I had anyone to protect. It’s not like anyone had done anything wrong.

  But I instinctively wanted to tamp it all down, regardless. To deny what we’d seen. What I’d seen. We’d been working too many overtime hours at that point, with barely a chance to eat and sleep in between shifts, that I figured a collective hallucination was, you know, a possibility. And if we’d hallucinated the ghosts of those two girls, I thought the best thing to do was pretend it never happened in the first place. To make it go away.

  “It’s cool, Dan,” one of the guys said. Muttered, really. “No need to worry about us. Right, boys?”

  And that was that. Everyone nodded in silence, excep
t Joe, who still looked a bit shaken up by it all as he stared toward the spot in the distance where the ghosts of my daughter’s friends had headed.

  * * *

  There were more sightings after that first one, of course. Everyone in town would eventually come to know about the hauntings, because you can only see so many ghosts in a short span of time before someone breaks down and says they can’t take it anymore. They have to say something. They have to tell someone. They think they’re going crazy, and so they decide that they’re going to talk to those psychologists or psychiatrists, whichever they are, who the governor sent to Newfoundland to help our community heal. Like the woman my wife took my daughter to see, because Ellie was clearly not coping with the loss of her friends and boyfriend.

  The woman I eventually went to see, too, to confess what I’d witnessed on the road that day, as well as a few times after, in other circumstances. Once, the neighbor boy, Timothy Barlow, out on his back deck, knocking on the sliding glass door and calling to his parents. The other time, it was Ellie’s boyfriend, Noah, standing just at the edge of the woods in our backyard, hidden in the evening shadows. I blinked, and then his back was to me as he moved into the trees. I saw a number on the back of his shirt, though, right before he disappeared from sight. It was his number from the soccer team. “Lucky number seven, Mr. Frame,” he told me once, back when Ellie finally brought him over to have dinner and I was trying to get to know him better. “A winger,” he’d explained. That was his position. Someone who comes in from the wings to take care of things. Not so lucky a number after all.

  Noah was a good kid. Treated Ellie like gold, from what I could see. I trusted them together. Around him, she seemed to come to life even more than usual, and it reminded me of how Patty and I were together, back when we were kids just getting ready to graduate high school and figure out what to do with the rest of our lives. There’s nothing I love more than seeing my little girl happy, and that’s what Noah Cady did for her. Made her happy. After he was gone, it was like he took some part of Ellie with him. And no matter how much Patty or I tried to comfort her, to take away her pain, there seemed to be no way to reach her.