Ghosts

by David A. Robertson

  2

  LIVE WITH THIS

  “EVA!”

  Despite the urgency in Michael’s voice, Eva did not break stride. She kept walking towards the clinic, and now she couldn’t get there fast enough.

  “Wait up!”

  “I’m busy!” Eva spat back, without turning around. Eyes forward, towards the clinic, which was now visible against the backdrop of Blackwood Forest.

  “Can’t I just walk with you?” Michael asked.

  She could hear him coming closer, jogging towards her, even though she’d picked up the pace. She considered running away, but it seemed too emotional, like she still had feelings for him. So she stopped and let him catch up to her.

  “What is it, Mike?”

  “I just…” But he couldn’t find the words and ended up just looking at the frosted grass, shimmering in the morning sun, as though he’d dropped what he wanted to say somewhere. Like his words were a lost contact lens.

  “You haven’t talked to me for a month, and now you, what, wait for me to leave the house and run after me? Were you standing outside my place spying on me or something? How creepy is that?”

  “I just…”

  “You just?” Eva crossed her arms. “You came up with this elaborate plan to talk to me, and you’ve got two words to say?”

  “Eva, please.”

  “Were you hoping that I’d still have glass splinters in my feet, so I’d be easy to catch? Were you waiting for me in the same spot as when you were watching Cole and me?”

  “We were dating! Of course, I was jealous. You were…” He stopped and sighed. Closed his eyes and rubbed them furiously. Scolding himself. “I’m sorry, okay? This isn’t about that. I can’t believe I even did that. I was angry. I…”

  “So what’s it about then?” She tried to sound less confrontational. He looked meek. Sad. Like he hadn’t slept for days. There were bags under his eyes and he was pale and disheveled. Not the Michael she’d known her whole life. “Are you okay?”

  He chuckled weakly. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  Eva ran her hands through her hair and tied it back into a ponytail. She didn’t want to look as bad as him, even if she felt it, even if it was for different reasons. “I’m fine, Michael,” she said. “I’m doing fine.”

  “I keep thinking…” Michael stared off into the forest for a minute before he cleared his throat, tried to look at her, but didn’t really. “Cole died thinking I hated him, that everybody hated him. I keep thinking about how he died like that.”

  “So are you asking how I am, or how he was?” She glanced at the clinic. Wanted to be there, not here. “It’s a little late for that.”

  “I don’t know, Eva. I’m confused. I just…” He shoved his hands in his pockets and a tear slid down his cheek. Eva pretended not to notice. “I wish things were different. I wish things had happened differently. That’s all.”

  “Mike, if you’re looking for absolution because of how you treated him, because of throwing a stupid rock through my—”

  “No, it’s not that. I swear it’s not.”

  “Good, because if this is about some stupid love triangle, I’m going to lose my shit.” She straightened, looked him in the eyes, even though he would not look into hers. “If you’re looking for absolution, for whatever reason, I don’t think it matters anymore. Cole had more important things on his mind. More important than you,” she pushed her index finger gently into Michael’s chest, then pointed it back at herself, “and more important than me.”

  “I wish things were different.” He met her eyes, tight-lipped, and nodded. He looked even more tired now than he had before.

  “Well, they aren’t,” she said. “There’s no such thing as a time machine. There’s no DeLorean hidden behind, you know, the ‘Wounded Sky’ sign ready to take us back a month, so we can save him. There’s no bargain to be made with Creator. We’re going to have to live with that.”

  Michael smiled through tight lips. “I don’t know if I can.” He walked away.

  Eva wanted to call him back, to talk to him, to make him feel better. She still cared about him, even if it wasn’t like before. They’d been friends since they were kids. She wanted to convince him that throwing a rock through a window meant nothing, that there was so much more going on that he didn’t know about. But, in the end, she just watched him until he was out of sight.

  “And here I thought that you weren’t going to show.”

  Mark stepped sideways to stand directly in front of the doors to the clinic, as Eva approached the building. Unfazed by his body language, by the gun at his hip, by his cocky and sour demeanour, she stopped just a few feet away from him.

  Two could play at this game.

  “Morning, Mark.”

  “Are we going to do the thing where you ask to see your daddy, and I tell you that you can’t, and then you get all upset, and then I—”

  “I just want to know he’s okay. I haven’t seen him in a month. I haven’t heard from him either.” Eva took out her cell phone and waved it in the air. No signal. She wondered if Mark got a signal, if Mihko employees were granted that luxury. The luxury of texting with a loved one—something she’d always taken for granted. “Get him to wave at me from the window, something, I don’t care. Just let me see his face.”

  “So we are going to do this. Okay. The answer is no.”

  Eva took one angry step forward. “You asshole!”

  A gust of wind pushed across their bodies timed with Eva’s aggression. Mark’s hat blew off his head and scuttled across the grass into the forest to his left, but he kept his feet firmly in place. And instinctively, slightly rattled, he put his hand on his gun.

  “Seriously?” Eva nodded at the gun.

  “Just back off, Eva, alright? God, I thought I’d like you better now that City’s dead.”

  “Cole. His name was Cole.”

  “Whatever.” Mark eased his hand off the gun, and placed both hands on his hips. Tilted his head to the side. “Look, Eva, if I could let you in, I would.” He tsked. “Thing is, there’s some top-secret shit going on inside, and it’s my job to keep people out of Mihko’s business.”

  “My dad is my business!”

  “Your dad wouldn’t want you in here! Trust me. It’s a safety precaution.”

  “Oh! And you think I’m predictable. You say the same thing every day! Do you enjoy this? What if it was your dad was in there, hey?”

  “What am I, supposed to empathize with you now?”

  “Wounded Sky is quarantined. People are going missing like every other day. What could possibly be—”

  “Yeah, the curfew is a safety precaution, too, genius, speaking of people going missing.”

  “What could possibly be the safety precaution in keeping people away from the clinic, if all the bad shit is happening out here? Are people sick again? Is my dad sick?”

  “And this is where I tell you that it’s classified, Eva.” He zipped his mouth shut, and doubled down on the gesture just to piss her off, pretending to lock a lock and throw away an invisible key.

  “Enjoying yourself, Mark, you dick?”

  In response, Mark pointed at his lips, shrugged, and waved goodbye with all the sarcasm he could muster.

  Eva shook her head, shot Mark a disgusted look. “You should be ashamed of yourself, doing what you’re doing, being where you’re from. You’re the only Wounded Sky band member who’s working for them. This is your home, too.”

  “And how do you feel, Eva, being friends with that arsonist murderer? Defending him even now, after he died in a fire that he started. Arsonist, murderer, and idiot. The trifecta.”

  “I—” she shouted, but stopped. Not worth it. He didn’t even deserve her anger. Didn’t deserve her disgust. Didn’t deserve one more word from her mouth.

  She walked away.

  “Can we do it again tomorrow?” Mark called after her.

  After she’d been walking for a minute, she turn
ed around, to see Mark jogging off into the forest. He must’ve been sure, she figured, that she was far enough away not to make a dash for the clinic while he left his post. She found the window to her dad’s hospital room on the second floor and looked into it, willing him to get up and just pass by, so she could see him for a second. But he didn’t. She looked for as long as she could, until anticipation turned to heartache.

  The best cure for heartache wasn’t more heartache, but Eva had made it a point, after Cole’s death, to visit his grandmother and Auntie Joan every day. Having one of Cole’s friends around so often, she thought, made his loss hurt a little bit less for them. And it must’ve hurt even more having to stay here where he had died, and where so many people despised him for what they believed he had done. They’d tried to leave after his funeral, a service attended only by Eva, her dad (the last time she’d seen him), Lauren, and Dr. Captain. They’d tried to leave right after it had ended, right after his body had been lowered into the ground, but they had been stopped at the community perimeter, on the road that led to the ferry.

  “Nobody in, nobody out,” the Mihko’s security guard at the road had told them. “Besides, that little bastard burned down the ferry, too.”

  Bullshit. It was all bullshit. It was bullshit that, everywhere she went, she had to listen to people talking shit about Cole, ignoring all the good he’d done. It was bullshit that they forgot he had stopped a murderer. It was bullshit that they didn’t know he’d given his own blood to stop the illness that killed Chief Crate and the others. It was bullshit that Brady had to leave the community and hide with his kókom and estranged parents. It was bullshit that Cole’s grandmother and auntie were forced to stay in a community that hated Cole.

  They hardly left their house anymore.

  Eva visited them there each day, and once a week, she brought them their rations. Eva had to bring a letter from Cole’s grandmother to prove that she wasn’t trying to get more food for herself. The truth was, she gave them some of her rations, too.

  She didn’t want more. She couldn’t stomach more.

  A hot cup of coffee was waiting for Eva when she arrived at their place. And a plate of food she wouldn’t touch, food that she hadn’t intended to eat herself when she’d brought it to them last week. When Cole’s grandmother saw Eva’s reaction to the food—a Klik sandwich and mixed vegetables—a deflated look, like air being let out of a balloon, she said, “Eva, you have to eat, too. You look so thin.”

  “I eat.” She sat down at the table, across from Cole’s grandmother and auntie, and picked up the cup of coffee, ignoring the food.

  “You don’t eat enough,” Auntie Joan said.

  “I’m never hungry.”

  “Cole used to say the same thing, back in the city,” Cole’s grandmother said. “There were times when he said he couldn’t eat, that he was never hungry. Sometimes, he got so thin I thought he might waste away into nothing.”

  “He told me that. But he had anxiety. I don’t.” She took a long sip of coffee. This was her fuel. Morning, afternoon, night. This was how she tried to avoid sleep, so that she could avoid the nightmare. But it chased her down anyway, just like the monster chased down Cole, while she helplessly tried to kill it.

  And failed.

  “Do you think depression is that much different from anxiety, Eva?”

  “Do you know that you and Elder Mariah could be best friends?”

  “Mom has a point,” Auntie Joan said, sliding the plate closer to Eva, close enough that the edge of the plate touched her elbow. “Just a few bites. Make us happy.”

  “No fair.” Any mention of any of them being happy felt like cheating. She picked up the sandwich and took a small bite, then put it back down beside the mixed vegetables, which nobody could make her eat for all the happiness in the world. “There, happy?”

  But they didn’t answer. What was there left to talk about? She’d been here every day, and nothing new had happened, so there was nothing else to say. They’d try to get her to eat, she’d nibble at something they’d made to appease them, and there would be small talk. Most days, Cole wasn’t mentioned. Too hard to talk about. Eva was surprised that his grandmother had brought him up this morning. It still felt nice, though, to hear his name, said lovingly. Said sadly. Bringing his name up, to Eva, opened the door for her to ask what she rarely asked of them anymore.

  “You should come with me today, to see him.”

  “I don’t…” His grandmother started, but that was as far as she got.

  “We don’t like seeing…” Auntie Joan cleared her throat, and took her mother’s hand, and Eva saw her hand tense as she squeezed the Elder’s hand. “…it’s too hard still.”

  “Do you think it’s easy for me?” She’d never snapped at them before. She cupped her mouth and apologized, whispering, “Sorry,” through her fingers.

  “It’s okay, dear,” Cole’s grandmother said.

  “We don’t like seeing all those things people write about him,” Auntie Joan said. “We want to believe, imagine, that people here think of him differently.”

  “Well, they don’t.” Eva caught a tear before it fell, rubbed it away. “And I’m the one who wipes those words off his tombstone every day. I’m the one who has to read them.”

  “You’re right.” Cole’s grandmother reached across the table and touched Eva’s arm. “This isn’t fair to you.”

  “It’s just,” her voice cracked, and the tears weren’t easily caught now, they weren’t easily rubbed away. She tried, and failed, and stopped trying altogether. She buried her face into her hands. “It’s just that maybe if you came to visit him, maybe something would change. Maybe somehow, he would know you came, and something would change.”

  “What would change, Eva?” Auntie Joan asked. “What do you mean? What do you think is going to change if we go?”

  “I don’t know.” It was so hard to talk through the tears, to push words out when she could hardly catch her breath. “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything.”

  “When do you go? We’ll go,” Cole’s grandmother said. “We’ll meet you there.”

  “Tonight.” She could hardly speak. After a few seconds, after a few breaths, calming herself as best she could, she repeated, “Tonight. I go every night.”

  The northern lights were bright over Wounded Sky when Eva came to the cemetery’s entrance, so brightly lit that it didn’t feel like night at all. She stopped where she was, her hand on the gate, which was already partially open. She took time to stare up at the lights, at the swirling ribbons of cool colours, the greens and blues, and wondered if Cole had just decided to stay there, rather than come back. How could she blame him for that? It was true. It wasn’t a legend. Cole had shown her that when he’d asked Jayne to burn her name into his arm. It was true that those beautiful colours overhead were spirits dancing. All the kids that had died ten years earlier, all their friends that had died this autumn, were up there.

  And Cole.

  Down here, straight ahead was just a body. Not really Cole. What she had told Michael this morning, that they just had to live with it, maybe it was okay, maybe it had to be okay, that everything happening in the community wasn’t Cole’s responsibility anymore. It was theirs, the people who had blamed everything on him. It was her responsibility, too. And she needed to stop waiting for a miracle that might never come. The gate creaked as Eva pushed it open, and she took a step inside. But before she could take another, she heard Tristan calling her name, frantically, repeatedly.

  “Eva!” Tristan skidded to a stop on the gravel pathway.

  “What the hell, Tristan?”

  “I saw it.”

  “You what? You ‘saw it’? Saw what?”

  He hunched over, hands to knees, trying to catch his breath, and held up one finger.

  “You come here shouting my name like you’re running a 100-meter dash, and now you want a minute?” She put her hands on his shoulders and made him stand up straight. “What. Is. Going.
On.”

  “I saw that monster, the one that everybody was seeing before.”

  “The monster?” Eva’s mind raced. Nobody had seen the monster since the night Cole had died. He’d killed Reynold, and had died in the process. He died saving Wounded Sky, not setting the X on fire. “No, that can’t be right.”

  “I did. I just saw it. I saw it, then I saw you.”

  “You couldn’t have, Tristan. You didn’t.” Her hands remained on Tristan’s shoulders, and his eyes searched the area, all the trees around them, searching for what he’d just seen. His eyes were a mix of curiosity and fear.

  “Tristan!” She slapped him in the face.

  “I know what I saw!” He snapped to attention.

  “You saw shadows, a bear in the forest, something. You didn’t…that monster, Tristan. It’s huge. It has red eyes. Is that what you saw?”

  If the monster was still alive then Cole had died for nothing.

  “No,” Tristan said quietly, distantly. “No, no, no. It wasn’t that. It was like…” he trailed off.

  “Tristan! It was like what?”

  “The Walking Dead.”

  “The what?”

  “It was like that. Like a zombie. A monster.”

  “A zombie? Like…a dead person? Walking?”

  “Yeah, Eva, that’s what I said. Like The Walking Dead. You’ve seen it right? That’s what I saw. Wouldn’t you call that a goddamn monster?” He couldn’t catch his breath. Eva could see his heart beating through his sweater. Rapid. Hard.

  But Eva was calm. Calmer than she’d felt in a month.

  She smiled.

  “What the hell is wrong with you? I saw a fricking monster, Eva. We need to get out of here. Now. Didn’t you just hear what I said?”

  “Yeah,” Eva said. “I heard you.”

  “And you’re just going to stay outside? You’re just going to walk into a cemetery when I literally just told you I saw a dead body walking around?”

  Eva just nodded.

  “Suit yourself, crazy.”

  Tristan kept running.

  Eva stayed where she was, outside the cemetery gates, for a long time. She looked up at the northern lights, suddenly furiously bright, moving fast like a river. Then she looked into the cemetery, and listened to the quiet that only the dead could bring. When she shut the gate, the shrill sound disrupted the quiet.