* * *
I jerk awake when someone taps on the window. It’s not raining anymore, and Cade and I have both dozed off in our seats, not touching. I’m facing him, watching him as his eyes open and his body stretches, but when I turn to look over my shoulder, I see Wes standing at my window, and I realize I can see him really well because it’s bright out, the sun high in the sky. I reach over and roll down the window.
“You know, we paid for beds,” Wes says, his mouth almost a smile but not quite.
“God, sorry,” I say, straightening up in my seat and holding in a groan when my stiff muscles protest. “I guess we fell asleep.”
“You know, if you guys wanted your own room, you could have just said so.” His eyes shoot between Cade and me. He raises his eyebrows, and I groan. I roll up the window, until Wes is forced to remove his face or else be caught in it.
In the passenger seat, Cade rubs at his eyes. “Damn. I can’t believe we fell asleep.” He sighs and then he looks over at me, and I know he wants to ask me if I’m okay. I sense the words, lingering on the tip of his tongue. But instead, he says, “What was Wes talking about?”
“Nothing,” I say quickly, taking the keys from the ignition and the map from where it’s fallen between my seat and the console. I stick both of them in my pockets and push open the door.
Wes is sitting on the hood of the car, and when he stands up, there’s a wet spot on his butt that makes me laugh.
“Gwen is worried,” Wes says, all of his previous humor gone. We follow him back into the hotel, past people eating breakfast and the smiling man at the front desk, straight into the elevator.
“Where the hell were you?” Gwen asks when we open the hotel room door. It’s almost eight, and both Gwen and Wes are packed and fully dressed, ready to go. Cade and I come in and sit down on the bed I shared with Gwen.
“We went for a drive,” I say, glancing over at Cade. He sends me an I-won’t-tell-if-you-don’t look.
Wes looks like he still has something to say, but instead, he snatches up his duffel bag from where it sits on the desk, and I feel, immediately, what he’s feeling: an agitated urgency. Keep moving, and you won’t feel anything. I learned this morning that that doesn’t work. I thought running away from Eaton would keep the monster inside me at bay, and it didn’t.
Down in the lobby, we wait as Wes checks out of the room and then we file out the front door, without bothering to partake in the hotel’s free breakfast. I trail behind, my eyes on the strange shapes that line the rug by the automatic sliding door. I’m having trouble focusing. Everything feels like a dream, like I stepped out of reality and into someone else’s life. None of this makes sense anymore.
When we’re all packed into the car, I think about sitting in the driver’s seat before the sun came up, sleeping in it with Cade, holding the map in my hands with nothing but hysteria in my brain.
I’m not sure I’m ready for whatever is next.
TWELVE
“Is this the place?” Gwen asks, looking out the window, but I don’t answer her. I don’t know if I could, even if I wanted to.
The address in Dexter is a little one-story house that doesn’t fit in with the rest of the street. Every other house is two stories with add-ons and large carports. It’s like the whole world was built around what was left of the previous one, and all that remains of the old world is this house, with mulberry branches sagging across the front yard.
Cade is beside me, like a bodyguard, ready to rescue me if I lose my nerve.
“Let’s go,” I tell everyone in the car, not even able to look at them. If I do, I won’t be able to do what I came here to. I walk straight to the house, standing at the end of the path that leads up to the door. Gwen and Wes press in on either side of me.
I stare at the house for a long time. There’s no car in the driveway, but there’s also no FOR SALE sign in the yard. Did Luke live here? And if he did, did he have a roommate? Maybe his roommate sent the map. Maybe the person who sent me the map isn’t even here. What if the house is empty, waiting for someone else to move in? Or worse, what if someone else already lives here? It can’t take that long to find new renters for a house, right? What if I knock and someone who doesn’t even know who Luke is answers the door?
Will I regret it if we came all this way and didn’t knock?
Because it’s all I have left. This is all I have left: these stupid stops he made on the way here and then something concrete, some person who knew Luke, who got a hold of that map, and knew that it should come to me when Luke died. Maybe that person is inside this house. And maybe they’re not.
I’m still staring at the door when I notice the little white cross in the front window. It looks like a living room window from the outside, and the cross is so small, barely visible, just two white strips of paint no longer than the palm of my hand. Without thinking, I bend down and run my finger along the vertical line. I can feel the texture of the paint, and that tells me it was painted on from right where I’m standing. I straighten up and walk back to them Gwen’s eyes never leave the cross.
When I knock, it seems to echo around the entire neighborhood. There are no people out jogging or walking their dogs. No cars driving by. It’s just this house and us, early in the morning.
We wait a long time, but nobody answers. I knock again, that same echo-y knock from before, and still, nothing. Whoever lives here is either not home or not answering. Maybe even still asleep.
“I guess that’s it?” Wes asks, gesturing toward the front door. I turn to look at him and Gwen, and I can see in their desperate eyes that they’re expecting me to give them an answer. They’re waiting for me to make the next move, either to get back in Wes’s car and drive on to Chicago or not. I can’t let this trip be for nothing.
I walk along the side of the house, around to the back. There’s a back door with a screen in front of it. I open the screen door and knock.
Nothing.
I decide to take my chances.
“What are you doing?” Wes hisses at me when I check to see if the door is unlocked. “Are you fucking insane? We don’t even know whose house this is.”
I still don’t answer him. If I open my mouth, I’m afraid I’ll lose it like I did this morning in the car. That I’ll start talking about what Luke did to us, and how we deserve better than the way he left us, than the way he moved on without looking back. So I keep my mouth closed and keep looking for a way to fix this.
The back door isn’t unlocked, so I start looking for open windows. The window over the kitchen sink is locked and so is the window that looks into a dining room, which I can tell only because the curtains are wide open. I keep feeling around the house even as Gwen and Wes continue to ask hysterical questions.
“Who lives here?” Gwen hisses at me.
“Are you seriously about to break into someone’s house?” Wes demands.
Cade stays quiet, following my every move.
When I find an open window, covered with plastic blinds from the inside, I look over at Cade while I push it open. “You’re a bad influence on me,” I tell him. His eyes are wary as he watches me. This isn’t the same as what we did at that theater in Shreveport, and we both know it.
The window opens all the way, and I reach in and push the blinds aside before crawling into the room. Luckily, there’s no furniture under the window, so I crawl into the room and turn to yank on the cord to pull up the blinds before Cade scrambles in behind me.
“Ellie,” Gwen says from outside, and when I stick my head out the window, she and Wes are still standing there, their arms crossed. “Ellie, I don’t think this is such a good idea.”
Wes doesn’t say anything. He has his jaw clenched tight.
I look down at them, and I know I can do this without them, but this doesn’t just feel like mine anymore. I think whatever we find here belongs to them, too, just like this trip belongs to them, too. “Guys,” I tell them. “I’m not going to make you climb through t
he window. But I need you with me. Please.”
Gwen looks at Wes, and he looks back at her, and then she moves forward and throws her legs over the windowsill.
The window we come in is the living-room window. The house is bright from the sunlight flooding into it, and I glance around. There’s no evidence of Luke here, just frilly throw pillows and tan furniture. The living room feeds right into the open kitchen, the dining area off to the side. It doesn’t even look like Luke could have possibly decorated this place. The walls in the kitchen are bright red, and the dining table has a bowl of fruit in the middle. The furniture looks old, and I imagine a family living here, with antiques that have been passed down for generations.
“What the hell is this place?” Wes asks, and I walk back into the living room to join him.
“I don’t know,” I finally say, and I mean it this time because I’m pretty sure that Luke was never here. He couldn’t have been. I’m ready to admit defeat, admit that someone else must have moved into this house recently and there’s nothing of Luke here, and then my eyes catch on something sitting atop a shelf of the entertainment center.
It’s a picture frame.
And inside is a picture of Luke and a girl I’ve never seen before, smiling at the camera, looking like they just won the lottery.
For a second, it’s like everything inside me is frozen. But then I move toward the frame, my hands shaking as I take it off the shelf and look down at the glossy image. My eyes move over him first: his familiar smile, made straight by braces, the round nose he got from our dad, skin so white he burned outside in minutes. And then I look at the girl, their faces pressed together, their eyes shining, their happiness obvious.
My stomach turns, and I drop the frame onto the carpet. I can see the open bathroom door at the end of the hall, a pale blue bathroom with the sun shining in, and I rush for it, slamming the door in time to throw up in the toilet.
“Ellie?” Cade’s voice filters in through the door. He tries the handle, and I press my back against it. I know he can open it if he wants to, but he stops trying. I almost feel like I can hear him breathing on the other side.
I take a deep breath, but the world is spinning. I open my eyes, and there Luke is, scattered all over the countertop. He’s in the cologne on the counter, the bottle of aspirin by the sink, the tube of toothpaste, the same brand he always used.
I turn and open the door and suddenly, I’m on a rampage. Luke is everywhere I look, and I can’t believe I didn’t see it the second we came in through that window. He’s in the guitar on a stand at the end of the hallway; he’s in the Nova poster on the wall; he’s in the way the carpet smells.
I can feel Cade’s eyes on me as I move into the kitchen and throw open cabinets. His favorite cereal, his favorite brand of soda, his favorite flavor of chips.
I spin around to find that Cade is approaching me, slowly, like I’m a rabid animal, and honestly, at that moment, that’s what I feel like—an animal in a cage, ready to bite if someone comes near. So, I rush around him, my eyes focused on the hallway. By process of elimination, I can guess which door opens to the master bedroom.
Inside, the room is dark, the curtains pulled closed. I don’t turn on the light. I don’t need to. I can make out everything in the room by the light of a nightlight beside the bed, and I head straight for the closet. When I open it, the scent of Luke is like a tidal wave, and it’s so strong that I’m paralyzed.
“Ellie.” It’s Cade’s voice. He’s opened the curtains, sunlight flooding in, and when I turn to face him, I don’t see him at all.
One wall is covered in Nova posters, pictures of Jack Olsen rocking out on stage, gripping his guitar for dear life. There’s a desk with a computer on it, and I know it’s his, recognize the stickers covering the top, band stickers that he collected at merch tables over the years.
I feel something crawl up my throat, but I try to ignore it as I turn to the wall by the desk. There are pictures there. Glossy photographs are taped to the wallpaper. No frames, just little squares of scotch tape on the four corners of every picture.
The pictures I see first are of Luke and the girl from the framed picture in the living room. Pictures of them lying in bed, smiling sleepily up at the camera. Pictures of them in the park, wherever that is. Pictures of them at some romantic restaurant.
But as I move to the outer pictures, the ones bracketing those photos, I see more familiar faces. Wes, smiling at the camera begrudgingly with a controller in his hand. My face, the three of us on the Ferris wheel at the carnival, when he whispered in my ear to keep me calm. The three of us laughing at some joke that I can’t remember now as my mother snaps a picture. Luke and me at a Nova concert when I was thirteen.
The monster crawls around in my stomach, but I don’t know what he’s looking for anymore. My eyes flit from picture to picture, and only one thought goes through my head again and again.
“He had a whole life here.” I can feel Cade watching me. I can feel him inching closer to me, but I don’t move away. “He left us, and he came here, and he started a whole new life, like none of us even existed anymore.” The words scrape their way out of my throat, painful and raspy.
My eyes catch on another photo. This one isn’t taped to the wall. It’s in a small black frame on the nightstand. It’s a picture of Luke and me. It was the night he graduated, and everyone wanted him to go to their parties, all his friends and his fans. But we went bowling instead, me and him and Mom and Dad, and ate so much junk food that we made ourselves sick. I want to smash the picture. I want to watch the glass break into tiny pieces, but I fist my hands by my sides instead.
“He’s not coming back,” I say. I can’t even explain why I say it. I can’t explain why, in this moment, it feels real. For the first time, it’s real. Luke isn’t just gone. He’s not in another state. He’s not somewhere I can’t see him. Luke is nowhere. Luke took his last year from us, and now I’ll never get it back.
I’ll never get him back.
And then my knees give out. All the adrenaline that’s been holding me upright for two weeks finally dissipates, and the only thing keeping me from collapsing is Cade’s arms.
“Ellie.” This time it’s just a whisper in my ear, as he wraps his arms around me like a snake. But his arms are the only things keeping me breathing.
“Let’s go,” he says against my ear, his breath warm. I haven’t noticed until now how deep his voice is, soothing. How tired I am. How hot my face is, like the sun is shining directly on it, and it takes a second to realize it’s hot from the tears.
“Come on, Ellie.” I let Cade usher me out of the bedroom, but in the hallway, Gwen is standing against the wall, one hand against her stomach and the other pressed to her mouth.
I stop in front of her, forgetting about the pictures in Luke’s room and the scent of him in every inch of the house and the pain that’s radiating all the way from the backs of my eyelids down to the balls of my feet.
The full force of what I’ve done hits me. I brought her into this house without any way to warn her of what would be inside. But I never, for even a second, thought there would be pictures on the walls of Luke and another girl. I never would have brought her here if I thought that was what we were going to find.
I open my mouth to apologize, Cade’s arms still surrounding me, but the look on Gwen’s face, horror and shock and sadness, makes me feel like I’ll crumble. She has tears streaming down her face.
And when she finally speaks, I guess I’m waiting for understanding, for something that’ll help us both survive, but she says, “I can’t do this.”
I try to imagine this scenario from her point of view. Her dead ex-boyfriend’s little sister, who she didn’t see for almost a year, drove her to Michigan and snuck her into a house that just happened to be the house that her dead ex-boyfriend shared with his new girlfriend.
“I’m sorry,” I say, but she’s already walking away. I watch her throw open the front door and rus
h out to the car. Wes watches her for a second, and I realize he’s crying, too. The tears streak down his face, and he sniffs once, wiping his hand across his mouth, before taking off after her. And while I watch, the car pulls away.
“Where are they going?” Cade asks, his eyes on the open doorway.
But I don’t know. And I don’t know if it even really matters. I walk to the front door and shut it, leaning against it. The room is spinning, and I don’t know how to make it stop.
“Come here,” Cade says. He’s gripping the kitchen counter, and I go to him because I don’t know how else to steady myself. I don’t know how else to process where I am, what I’ve seen here.
In the kitchen, Cade puts his arms around me, and I let my arms hang by my sides. I’m too exhausted even to try.
“I’m an awful person,” I say, and Cade sighs.
“Ellie, you didn’t know.”
I squeeze my eyes shut for a minute and then open them, looking at the refrigerator, at all the things scrawled across it.
“Ellie,” Cade says, but then I process what I’m looking at. I pull away from him, gently move him out of the way.
Luke’s fridge is covered in magnets, holding up ticket stubs, pictures of him and the red-headed girl that are all over the house, and right in front of me, a black-and-white printout. A sonogram photo.
I’m still staring at it, my brain stuck on the little white lines, unable to formulate a response, when someone knocks on the door. Cade’s hand rests on my arm, and I turn around to face him as someone knocks again, louder this time. Cade walks slowly and quietly to the front of the house and tries to look out through the blinds without touching them.
And then a voice through the door.
“Someone in there?”
Cade backs away from the door and looks at me over his shoulder. “It’s the police.”
THIRTEEN
We can’t even try to make a run for it. Gwen and Wes took the car, and it’s not like we’re going to try to get away from the cops on foot when they have a car.
We Are the Ghosts Page 21
