Ghost Hope

by Ripley Patton

  Of course, I found her face immediately. My mother. A much younger version of her than I remembered as a child, but I’d seen similar pictures of her from her college days. Always, she’d looked gentle and motherly to me, but not in this photo. In this one, her expression was so angry and defiant; it was almost like seeing myself peering out of someone else’s eyes. Standing next to her was another face I recognized, though not nearly as fondly. It was Uncle Alex, much younger too, but not as fierce. In fact, he appeared strangely unsure of himself, as if my mother had dragged him along to a party he hadn’t wanted to attend. I scanned the group for my father, but he wasn’t there. I did, however, find Gordon, a much younger version of him but still obviously older than the other ten people. He stood slightly apart from them in the back row, almost as if he was their leader or teacher.

  “So, you knew my mother, my uncle, and my grandparents,” I said. “Is this where you tell me you’re my long-lost relative or something?”

  “We are both people of the Tenino,” Gordon said. “But no, we’re not closely related. I knew your family through the tribe and your mother and uncle took a painting class from me in college. Except it wasn’t actually a class. That was just a cover for what we really were.”

  “And you were what, exactly?” I asked, trying not to laugh because he’d made it sound so mysterious.

  “These days, I suppose they’d call us terrorists,” he said matter-of-factly. “Back then we called ourselves activists. Are you familiar with NAM?”

  “The Native American Movement? Yeah, I’ve read a little about them. But I thought they were based on the East Coast.”

  “There are smaller branches out here in the west,” Gordon said. “And this”—he gestured at the photo—“was one of the core groups at the height of the movement.”

  I scanned the picture again, impressed by its diversity. There were two women other than my mom, one native but one obviously white. And among the seven younger males, there was an Asian guy, a black dude, and two white guys, one with sunglasses, a ball cap, and a beard like the Unabomber, though the others looked rez enough. “Nice picture,” I said, holding it out to give it back to Gordon. “But what does NAM have to do with the mural or the cube?” I wasn’t surprised my mom had been an activist. Her entire life had been dedicated to setting wrongs right, and ultimately it had gotten her killed. As for my uncle, he’d probably joined just to make himself look good.

  “That picture was taken the night before we did something particularly bold and stupid,” Gordon said, finally taking it from me, his hands shaking a little. “Something that was my idea and ended in the death of four of these young people.”

  Kaylee was still at my feet, her eyes fixed on Gordon now, listening.

  “There was a government facility built on tribal land,” Gordon continued, running his brown, paint-stained fingers over the picture. “We wanted to show them they couldn’t take what was ours and get away with it. Their security was weak and we thought, if we could prove that, there would be media attention and an investigation. Maybe they’d even shut the place down.” He looked up at me, his eyes haunted.

  “Seven of us broke into one of the buildings while four stayed outside to keep watch. We were just going to move stuff around and tag the building with some grafitti. We weren’t even going to take anything. Your mother had the spray paint and she was writing on one of the walls. I shoved a crate aside to give her more room and it bumped into another one. To this day, I don’t know exactly what happened. One second, everything was fine, the next second we were on our knees, coughing and gasping for breath.”

  My mother had struggled with asthma for as long as I could remember. I’d always assumed she’d been born with it, but what if this had been the cause? Gordon didn’t look so healthy himself. There was just something about him that seemed off. But he was an old guy who thought aliens really existed, so obviously he wasn’t all there. I mean, he seemed to believe what he was telling me, but that didn’t make it true. My parents had never told me any of this.

  “Whatever was leaking,” Gordon went on with his tale, “I took the worst of it, but your mother was a close second. It filled the room and our lungs. We tried to crawl out on our hands and knees, but then we started going into convulsions. I saw your uncle try to drag your mother out, but they were both too weak, and then I lost consciousness. We all did, drowning in the poison inside that building.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I could see the scene in my head as if Gordon had painted it for me. Kaylee was clutching my leg and whispering, it will be okay, it will be okay, over and over again in my mind. I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me, or herself.

  “Then when the concentration of that gas, or whatever it was, reached a certain point,” Gordon continued, “it erupted—or something. I wouldn’t call it an explosion because there wasn’t any heat or fire. But the entire building and everything in its immediate vicinity was vaporized, leaving only a crater.”

  “Wait, what?” I leaned forward. “But how did you escape the building?” He’d said earlier that four people had died, and it obviously hadn’t been him or my mom or my uncle, so that left the other people in the building. “Did the ones outside come in and get you?”

  “No.” Gordon shook his head. “They didn’t know what was happening until it was too late. When those of us who’d been inside regained consciousness, we were lying in the crater and they were gone. The vehicles we’d driven and everyone and everything in them. Obliterated.”

  “But that’s impossible,” I said, staring at him. “How could you survive inside if the people outside didn’t?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, sounding like a bewildered child. “To this day, I don’t know. Maybe we were in the eye of it, or the building protected us.”

  “The building that was completely gone?” I asked, incredulous.

  “I know it doesn’t make sense, boy,” he snapped. “If I haven’t figured it out in thirty-three years, you’re certainly not going to solve it in ten minutes. You’re not going to solve it at all. It’s a mystery. If I’ve understood anything after all this time, I’ve come to understand that. Not everything is explainable.”

  “So what happened then, after you woke up with my mom and uncle in a crater?” Not that I believed him. This story was getting crazier and crazier, but I’d humor him a little longer if it got me what I’d come for.

  “The seven of us woke up surrounded by armed guards and government workers in hazmat suits,” Gordon went on. “The guards grabbed us and hauled us away. They made us sit in the desert, coughing and hacking our lungs out for two hours. We demanded medical attention and they ignored us. We began to fear they were just waiting for us to die. I tried to get up and a guard pinned me to the ground, a gun at my head. Gradually, our symptoms started to lessen and a woman, who seemed to be in charge, came over and waved some kind of device up and down our bodies. Then she nodded to the guards, and they took us outside of the facility and let us go.

  “We were still dizzy and disoriented, but we managed to walk to the nearest hospital. It was late at night. There wasn’t a car on the road. At the hospital, we told them what had happened, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with us. They ran all kinds of tests. Everything came back negative. So, they sent us home. We might have convinced ourselves it had all been a bad acid trip, except you could see this strange cloud hanging in the sky above the facility for days afterwards, like a fading Polaroid.”

  “Yeah, and four people were dead,” I said, pointing out one of the biggest holes in Gordon’s story. There were lots of them, but this one was gaping wide enough to drive a semi through. “What about that?”

  “There was no evidence,” He answered. “No proof of anything. I told their families what I could. Most of them didn’t believe me. There were investigations, but they led nowhere.”

  “Then why tell me?” I stood up and stepped over Kaylee, pacing across the room, trying to rein in a sudden su
rge of anger and grief. I hadn’t been there. This wasn’t my fault or my responsibility. So, why did I feel as if I’d just lost those friends myself? “Even if any of this is true”—I turned back to Gordon—“maybe my mother never told me because it’s a fucking horrible story which accomplished jack shit. You guys thought you were standing for something, but look what it got you. Your friends were killed. No one believed you. You didn’t change anything. That’s just fucked up.”

  “Yes, it is,” Gordon agreed, “if that were the end of the story.”

  “What? There’s some kind of great moral, some Indian wisdom you’re now going to impart to me about how not fucked-up a world is where shit like that happens?”

  “No,” he said, grimacing. “I thought you wanted answers about the mural.”

  Kaylee was touching Gordon’s leg now. He hadn’t seemed to notice, but I knew what she was doing. She was making him feel better. Maybe he didn’t deserve to feel better. Maybe none of us did.

  “What does any of this have to do with the mural?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said, taking a deep breath, “we all came back here that night after we left the hospital. Everyone was scared to go home. We were in shock. What if the government changed its mind and came for us? What if we were going to die slowly, over the course of days or weeks? We needed to process what had happened, to make sense of it, even if only a little. So, we each took turns describing what we’d experienced, piecing together each tiny detail to understand the whole. I was the first to admit that while I’d lain unconscious in that building full of gas, I’d had a vision. And as I described it to the others, their eyes grew rounder and their heads began to nod and they began to add their own accounts because we’d all seen something similar.”

  “And what was that?” I asked reluctantly, not sure I wanted to hear any more of Gordon’s old man delusions.

  “You,” he said. “I saw you. And your mother saw your sister.”

  5

  DAVID MARCUS

  I stared at Gordon Lightfoot. “You’re telling me you saw me in a chemically induced vision fifteen years before I was born, and my mother saw Danielle?” I barely stifled a laugh.

  “Yes.” He nodded. “Every one of us saw a different young person with PSS ten years before it existed. This man”—he pointed at one of the white guys in the photo—“is Stephen Black. He saw Kaylee.”

  “Stephen Black? That’s her father,” I blurted.

  “I know,” Gordon said without batting an eye. “He went on to become a very accomplished painter.” He suddenly looked down at Kaylee, who was leaning against his knee. “Of course you can see it,” he said, handing her the photo and pointing. “He’s the one in the middle there.”

  Shit. She was mind-speaking to him and he didn’t realize it. She could trick people that way for a while. She’d tricked me at first but, later, I’d noticed her lips weren’t moving when I heard her voice. Gordon would notice too. And that would be dangerous.

  “Whatever we were exposed to,” Gordon said, “the visions were ours. They couldn’t take that from us. Stephen painted his, and I painted mine, first just on canvas, but eventually the tribe commissioned the one of you to go on the wall at the lodge.”

  This was crazy. It couldn’t be true. My parents would have told me. They wouldn’t have lied to me about something this important.

  “I think I’ve heard enough,” I said, moving toward Kaylee. Someone was outside, sneaking up on the house. I had seen a bulky form out the window I’d been standing near. Why had I come here and brought Kaylee to the home of a lunatic, surrounded by a labyrinth of junk an entire army of CAMFers could hide in? I’d been lulled into a false sense of security by Reiny and Lonan and the tight-knit community of the rez, but the reservation was no protection from CAMFers.

  “Come on, Kaylee.” I took the photo from her, handing it back to Gordon and pulling her up. “Time to go.”

  “You think I’m lying?” Gordon asked, a new edge to his voice. “Why would I make this up? What could I possibly gain?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, turning toward the door just as Mia came in. She’d taken off her armor and helmet, but her face was still rosy from the heat of her welding.

  “Are you leaving already?” she asked, surprised.

  “He thinks I’m lying or crazy,” Gordon told her. “Just like the rest of them.”

  “Oh, give him some time, you gruff bear,” she scolded, sounding half-amused, half-annoyed. “You can’t spring this kind of news on someone and expect them to gobble it up like candy. That story is hard to believe and you know it. As for you two”—she turned her eyes on me and Kaylee—“you can’t go yet.” She shooed us back toward the chairs and the woodstove. “Lonan tells me you were born on the rez, David, and need proof you exist for the white man. How a piece of paper can do that better than a body standing smack in front of them, I’ll never understand. But hell, they pay me to shuffle their papers, so who am I to complain about it? Now, when were you born?”

  I told her my birthday, and she turned to a large filing cabinet in the corner of the room. “While I’m doing this,” she said, flipping through faded manila folders, her back to us, “Gordon can go fetch you that thing you wanted. What was it again?”

  The cube. In all the mayhem and ridiculous revelations, I’d completely forgotten why we’d come in the first place. We had to get that cube, and I’d possibly just blown our only chance by shitting doubt all over Gordon’s story. Did he or Mia have any idea what they had in their possession? Probably not, or they wouldn’t have been selling it at the bazaar. How could they know? To anyone without Kaylee’s powers, it was just a weird metal cube.

  “I’ll go get what you really came for then,” Gordon said, setting the photo down, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “No more of this nonsense about your mother or NAM. The boy needs his alien artifact.” He got up and went into another room.

  Kaylee stood and stared after him, a look of concern on her face.

  “You kids don’t mind him,” Mia said, still flipping through folders. “He hasn’t been feeling himself lately. I think it’s his heart, but the man’s so stubborn he won’t go see the doctor in town. And here it is.” She turned, waving a paper in her hand. “Your birth notation, exactly where it should be. Now I just have to transfer it over to an official certificate, put a seal on it, and stamp it with my registrar stamp, if I can find it. Gordon,” she called, “have you seen my registrar kit?” But she wandered into another room before he could answer.

  Gordon came back, the cube in his hand, and held it out to me. “I’m not lying,” he said, “or crazy. It happened just like I said. Your grandparents had similar visions of people with PSS years before we did, and they weren’t being gassed when they had them. I know you’ve heard that story, and it must mean something. Maybe what we did was foolish and dangerous, but it was part of something bigger.”

  I reached out and took the cube. I didn’t want to argue with the guy, but now he was dragging my grandparents and their grand delusions into this, and that pissed me off.

  “Maybe you all saw what you wanted to,” I said. “Something to help justify what you’d done and the loss of your friends.” My mother and uncle passing out and having visions similar to their parents was understandable. Those images had been described to them their entire childhood. They’d been held up as something huge and spiritual and important. My mother or my uncle could have described them to Gordon and the group before the gas accident. Maybe they’d all shared a group hallucination, or pretended they’d had one afterwards to comfort themselves. There had to be some explanation other than the one Gordon was offering. Because he wasn’t offering an explanation, really, just some revised version of The Hold’s mythological fairy tale about PSS.

  “Here it is. All done,” Mia said, coming back into the tension-filled room like a breath of fresh air and handing me a crisp, very official-looking birth certificate. “The white man will be able to see you
now,” she teased, winking.

  “Thank you.” I took it, folded it up carefully, and stuck it in one of my pockets, then dug in my other one for the money Reiny had given me. “How much do I owe you, for both the cube and the certificate?”

  “Oh, none of that,” Mia said. “They’re gifts. You’re practically family now, and we don’t take money from family.”

  Family. That was a laugh. Everyone in my family was dead, but at least I had the cube and we could get out of here. I turned, looking for Kaylee, but she wasn’t behind me. She wasn’t anywhere in the room.

  “She was here a minute ago,” Mia said, glancing at the door. “Maybe she slipped out to go find Lonan.”

  I hadn’t heard the door open or close. Neither had they, and I could see that realization dawning in their eyes.

  “Kaylee,” I called, battling to keep the fear out of my voice.

  “I’ll check the bathroom,” Mia said. “Gordon, you check the den.” She went one direction and he went the other, back to the room he’d come from when retrieving the cube.

  I went into the kitchen. She wasn’t there. I glanced out the window, but it had gotten very dark since we’d come into the house and I couldn’t see a thing. I looked down at my empty hands. Gordon had given me the cube, but I didn’t have it now. By the time Mia had handed me my birth certificate, I’d used both hands to fold it up and put it away. I didn’t have a pocket big enough to hold the cube, but Kaylee did. Had I handed it to her without even remembering? Or had she slipped it out of my hand when I’d been arguing with Gordon? Shit. Kaylee was gone and the cube with her. My heart was hammering in my chest. Where were they? How could they both have been taken right out from under my nose? Even if Kaylee had just wandered outside and gotten lost in the maze of junk, she’d be terrified. Or maybe this was exactly what Gordon and Mia had planned all along. Lure us with the cube. Set their trap. Take the cube and Kaylee as the prize.