We Are the Ghosts

by Vicky Skinner

  “Shit,” I say, because I don’t know what to do.

  Cade’s eyes are flitting around, like he’s trying to figure something out, and then there’s another knock. This time at the back door.

  “Shit,” Cade says. We walk to the back door together. We’ll just explain the situation, right? We can tell the cop that Luke used to live here, tell him … God, no. I can’t tell him that Luke is dead. I don’t even know that the words would make it all the way out of my mouth. And none of it matters anyway. We’ve been reported missing. He’ll figure it out, and we’ll be shipped back to Texas.

  “Out of options,” Cade says, and I nod, agreeing with him.

  Cade opens the door, and standing in the doorway is a cop who looks completely unamused. He looks at us with a blank stare and his hands on his hips.

  “I’m going to need you to step outside,” he says, taking a step back from the door to give us space.

  Cade lets me walk out first and then follows close behind me. My nerves are going haywire, sending messages to my brain to run, to get away from this any way I can.

  “Is there a problem?” I ask in my smallest voice.

  The cop scoffs. “The neighbors saw you and three other people sneaking in through a window.”

  I deflate when he says this. There’s no getting out of it now. We’re busted. We’re going to get arrested, and they’re going to call my parents, oh God, they’re going to call Cade’s grandmother, and she’ll probably forbid him from seeing me ever again, which I guess is really a good thing, at least for him.

  The cop looks over my shoulder, back into the house. “Where are the other two?” he says, hands still planted on his hips.

  “They—” Cade starts, but I cut him off.

  “It was just the two of us.” I glance at Cade, trying to convey to him that he has to shut up about Gwen and Wes. I know the law. If we’re minors, reported missing, Gwen and Wes could be accused of kidnapping us.

  The cop sets his jaw. “The person who called said he saw four. Where are the other two?”

  “You can search the house. I swear, it’s just the two of us.” I’m infinitely grateful that I’m able to tell the truth and that Gwen and Wes took off, even if the way it happened still sits heavy on me.

  The cop eyes me distrustfully, and then footsteps sound on the dirt road on the side of the house, and someone appears. It’s a small red-headed girl, with an apron tied around her middle, but it’s not enough to hide the bulge of her stomach, and when she sees the three of us standing by her back door, her eyes go wide.

  “What’s going on?” she asks, her eyes moving over all of us, and I feel like someone just turned me into a concrete statue. I can’t move, can’t speak, can’t blink. And when her eyes fall on me, I stop breathing, too. I don’t know what to acknowledge first, the fact that the girl standing in front of me is the same girl from all the photos inside the house, the fact that she is very obviously pregnant, or the fact that she’s looking at me like she knows exactly who I am.

  “Ellie?”

  When she says my name, I flinch. Even though I know she knows me, know immediately that she’s the one who sent me Luke’s map, I’m still not expecting her to say my name like this, like we’ve known each other for a long time.

  The cop looks between us. “You know these people?” he asks. “Because your neighbor said—”

  “It’s fine,” she says, looking away from me finally, and I feel like I can breathe again as soon as her pale eyes aren’t on me anymore. “False alarm.”

  The cop scowls at her and then at me and then rolls his eyes. He doesn’t say another word before walking around the side of the house that the girl came from. As soon as he’s gone, she turns to me.

  “I recognize you from the pictures,” she says, which is weird because I, of course, recognize her from the pictures. I’m distracted by how unbelievably pretty she is in real life, with big blue eyes and freckles across her nose, and a glow that probably has something to do with the baby in her stomach.

  When I still just stare at her, unable to fathom in my mind what’s going on, she says, “I’m so sorry. I’m Chloe. God, of course you don’t know who I am.” She holds out her hand to me, and I’m not sure what to do, so I shake it, even though my entire arm is numb. She shakes Cade’s hand, too, but I can’t watch it.

  “Do you want to come inside?” Chloe asks us.

  Chloe.

  Something about knowing her name makes me finally come awake, and suddenly the only thing I can see is her belly, protruding into the space between us.

  “Is it his?”

  Chloe’s eyes shoot to me. She looks like she can’t decide what she’s going to say, how she’s going to answer this question, and then, as if I never spoke, she asks, “Are you hungry? I can get us free food at the diner where I work.” Without waiting for us to answer, she marches over to the back door, slams it closed, and locks it.

  * * *

  What do you say to your dead brother’s pregnant girlfriend when you just met five minutes ago? I sit in Chloe’s front seat, the air conditioner blowing directly on my sweaty face, wishing I was in the back with Cade.

  I don’t say anything. I don’t say anything because I have a million questions sitting on the tip of my tongue, and absolutely none of them will come out. I can’t even decide which one is the most important.

  “Are you cool enough?” Chloe asks, reaching forward to adjust the blower level.

  “Yes,” I squeak out, the word high-pitched and unrecognizable. When I glance over my shoulder at Cade, he smiles reassuringly at me.

  Sal’s is a minuscule diner in Ann Arbor that smells like vanilla ice cream and coffee. We pick a booth against the front windows, the sunshine shining brightly in at us, almost blinding.

  “Chloe,” the waitress says when she makes it to our table. The diner is full of people ready for their pancakes and coffee, and I’m just ready to get out of here because I can’t even process this life that I’ve stepped into. “I thought you went home.”

  Chloe waves the girl off. “I’m just hungry. Can you bring me some hash browns? And, um, this is Luke’s sister, Ellie. And her, um…”

  She motions at Cade, who smiles up at the waitress. “I’m Cade. It’s nice to meet you.” I’m in awe at how easy it is for him to push aside everything that’s happened in the last hour in order to be polite to this stranger.

  The waitress, whose name tag says CHARLOTTE looks at us with wide eyes, and I really wish Chloe hadn’t told her I was Luke’s sister. It’s like being back in Eaton the day he died all over again. My cheeks heat, and I avoid her eyes by pretending to examine the menu. I can’t bring myself to smile at her the way Cade did, especially not now that I can feel sympathy coming off her in waves.

  “Order whatever you want,” Chloe says without looking at us, and I realize that the waitress is already pouring her a cup of coffee, the word decaf written on a strip of orange plastic on the carafe.

  “Some toast?” Cade says, like a question, and it makes something go warm inside me. Everything in this world is strange and confusing, but Cade is something familiar, a little piece of home, and even though I know I probably shouldn’t, I cling to that. Because somehow I have ended up adrift in Michigan, a place I don’t know, with people I don’t know, and I reach over and take Cade’s hand. He looks at me, but then he just squeezes my hand under the tabletop.

  “For you?” Charlotte asks. Charlotte looks like the kind of person who always covers your shift when you ask her to, the kind of person who always answers her phone, the kind of person who cries over other people’s misfortunes.

  “Just some orange juice, please.” I don’t actually want anything. The thought of eating just reminds me of my dinner coming back up in Chloe’s toilet. Luke’s toilet. My stomach roils again, but I also don’t want to be rude, especially after Chloe drove us here, all the way from Dexter.

  Charlotte tucks her pad back into her pocket, the pad that she
didn’t have to use because all we ordered was hash browns, toast, and orange juice, but she doesn’t walk away. She puts her hand on the table, her fingers spread out against the Formica, and I look up at her, her head blocking the fluorescent light shining down on us.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” she says.

  There are moments in my life I can remember that don’t feel real: when I hit the brakes too hard on my bike and catapulted over the handlebars, when we got into Luke’s car one morning before school to find it had been broken into and ransacked, when I walked into the kitchen one evening to find my parents arguing menacingly in hushed tones.

  When I look back on those moments, they feel like they happened to someone else.

  When Charlotte says this to me, it feels like it’s happening to someone else, like I’m watching it happen from a stool by the bar, and it has nothing to do with me or my life.

  She doesn’t wait for a response, and I’m thankful because I have nothing to offer right now but vocal cords that won’t budge. When she’s gone, I realize that I’m clutching Cade’s hand so hard that my palm is sweating, so I loosen my hold. Cade doesn’t let me go.

  “I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” Chloe says, her voice quiet. “I know this whole thing has probably been … shocking.”

  “I want to know everything,” I say, steamrolling over the end of her sentence. I am at once eager and terrified. I do want to know everything, but I also want to hide myself from all of this. I want every detail, and I also want to go on knowing nothing. I want the truth, but I also want her to lie if the truth is something that’s too hard to hear.

  “I feel like I know everything about you, so it’s only fair that you know everything, too. Where should I start?” Chloe asks, herself not us, looking down at the tabletop, spreading her hands out across it like she’s about to explain to us a very elaborate math equation on its surface.

  “Who are you?” I ask, and I almost look at Cade to confirm that the words even came out of my mouth because I can’t remember making my mouth move, but it was definitely my voice.

  Chloe’s eyes shoot to me—finally—and she bites her lip. “Luke was my boyfriend. I, uh, I work here, at this diner. We worked here together.”

  “Luke worked here?”

  She nods, and then she points to something over her shoulder, and there on the wall, right by the kitchen entrance, is a framed photograph that I never would have noticed if she hadn’t pointed it out. Luke smiles out from the picture, looking proud, in a red T-shirt with a name tag pinned to it. Employee of the Month, the writing across the top of the frame says. It’s so much the complete opposite of the photo they had on display at his funeral that my breath catches. He looks so happy, his cheeks all puffed out in a huge smile, and I find it startling how Luke seems to exist everywhere in this place just like he existed everywhere in Eaton.

  Charlotte returns with my orange juice, but I know if I try to swallow it now, I’ll just choke. She leaves my glass and disappears again. A second later, she puts a plate of toast in front of Cade and hash browns in front of Chloe. The smell of the potatoes makes my stomach turn.

  “Are you the one that sent me the map?” I already know the answer, but I want confirmation since it’s the reason I’m here in the first place.

  Chloe is sipping at her coffee, but she pulls it away from her mouth when I ask her this, like it burned her. “Oh, my God, yes. I forgot about the map. Yes, I sent that to you. I thought Luke would want you to have it. He told me all about that trip.” The corners of her mouth turn up. I don’t know why. “Luke was always talking about it. And, um, about you, Ellie.” She gestures toward me, like I don’t know who I am. Maybe I don’t. “He told me about leaving Texas and going on this trip that he planned a long time ago—”

  “That we planned.”

  Her eyes shoot to me, and whatever trace of a smile there was is gone now. “Right. I know. You and Luke and Luke’s best friend…” She trails off like she’s trying to remember.

  “Wes,” Cade says.

  She nods. “Wes. Luke talked about him a lot, too.”

  I throw my hands up, waving them around, trying to get her to just stop for a second. She’s moving too fast. “How did you even know Luke? None of this makes sense. Ann Arbor wasn’t in the plan.”

  Chloe nods, and she laces her fingers together on the tabletop, like we’re in a business meeting. “Luke said he came here because he wanted to see all the Great Lakes. He was on his way to Lake Huron. He stopped to get something to eat and…” She gestures again. I want words. Why are words so hard for her? As soon as I think it, I feel guilty. I’m pushing her to talk about this when it took me a whole year just to tell Cade about the night Luke left. Do I really have any right to hurry her along?

  She sighs and fiddles with her coffee cup.

  “I was working the night shift. We’re a twenty-four-hour diner, and I always take the midnight to eight because I’m kind of an insomniac, and I sleep weird hours, so I don’t mind taking the night shift.” When she says this, I notice the bags under her eyes. She must have just worked that shift before she found us with a cop behind her house. “People always tip better because they assume you’re being forced into working the crap shift.”

  She takes a sip of her coffee, and I feel that same urgency, like I want her to tell me the whole story without taking a breath.

  “So I was working the night shift,” she says when she’s put her coffee cup back down. “And it’s three in the morning, and this boy waltzes into the diner like he owns the whole world.” She sighs again, and I notice she’s smiling again, too, down at the table. “Mostly what you get at three in the morning is tired truck drivers who want too much coffee and too much bacon and people who just got off long overnight shifts. Cleaners, stockers, people like that. Sometimes people who just got in on a red-eye in Detroit, on their way home from business trips or whatever. I like to ask people where they came from, where they’re going. But there was never anyone like Luke.”

  She stops, takes a deep breath. “I’m not much of a romantic. I don’t believe in love at first sight or any of that but…” She shrugs. “It just happened. One minute I’m serving him waffles and scrambled eggs, and the next minute, it’s the end of my shift, and I’m sitting across from him in that booth, telling him my whole life story. And he told me his, too. About how he left everything behind in Texas because he didn’t want to live in the same place his whole life. He said he didn’t want to be another Eaton High School cliché, working at the J-Mart at forty and sending his kids to the same schools he went to.”

  Fuck, she sounds just like Luke. All the same things he’s been saying to me since we were kids, when we realized that all the adults we knew in town had lived there their whole lives, all Eaton High and Tate alumni. I believed every word she said before, but now that I’ve heard this, it feels real. It feels true. And that knot forms in my throat again.

  “My parents moved us around a lot,” Chloe says. “When I graduated high school, I moved here for a guy.” She rolls her eyes. “That didn’t really work out. And by then, my parents had just separated, so my dad moved out here with me. So I don’t really know what it’s like to want to leave like he did. I just wanted to stay somewhere.”

  I clear my throat, clear away the knot. “How old are you?”

  She stops with such a surprised look on her face, like she forgot I was here. “Nineteen.”

  Nineteen.

  I can’t imagine being pregnant at nineteen. At nineteen, I fully intend to be at Tate, probably still working at Books and Things. But a mom? I don’t really mean to, but I can’t keep from looking over at Cade, and when I catch him looking back, I blush and focus on Chloe again, sending a little nod so she’ll know to continue even though I feel, now, like everything is moving too fast. In his place, I would have been in a panic, and yet I think of all the pictures of the two of them in their house. They were so happy.

  “He told me
he decided to stay in Ann Arbor after that night. And he came in every night after that, always at three in the morning, staying until I got off work.” She shrugs. “It was kind of a whirlwind after that. I found out about the baby, and we got the house, and…” She doesn’t finish her sentence. Because she doesn’t have to. I know what comes next in the story.

  Luke dies, and Chloe is left here on her own.

  “Who’s going to help you take care of the baby?” Panic settles low in my stomach. There’s a piece of Luke still on this planet, and I can’t even believe it. Even with the evidence in front of me in the form of Chloe’s swollen tummy, this is the part of the story that still doesn’t feel real. How can Luke be having a baby when he’s not even here? He’s going to be a dad, and he won’t even be alive to see it.

  She shrugs. “My dad. It’ll probably just be us.” She rubs her stomach with so much fondness in her eyes that I have to look away.

  “He wasn’t going to tell me,” is all I can say. I feel like shit as soon as I say it. This isn’t about me. She’s going to have a baby, by herself. But the only words going through my mind, over and over are the ones I’ve already said. “He wasn’t going to tell me.”

  “He was,” Chloe says. “He just didn’t know how. But he was going to tell you. He talked about you all the time, I swear it. You were his favorite person in the world.”

  “Then why?” I say, my voice swallowed up by the sounds of plates smacking together and people all over the diner having loud conversations. “Why did he leave me behind? Why didn’t he tell me he was leaving? Why didn’t he ask me to come with him?”

  “Because he knew you would.”

  Cade squeezes my hand hard, and I didn’t even realize that my hand has gone limp.

  “Look, I’m not going to pretend I know everything about you or about you and Luke. I only know what he told me. That he really loved you, but that he had to make his own decisions without worrying about you. He knew you’d be fine with whatever you chose to do with your life.”