Violet Ghosts

by Leah Thomas

  Her expression was angry and—oh god, terrified?

  “Dani, please.” She was crying globs of silver light as her arms and legs were pulled apart. “I’m never going to be better! I’m never going to be good for you! Just do it!”

  How long had Sarah seen herself as my poltergeist?

  I dropped the unlit fireworks into the snow. “I won’t, Sarah. I won’t do it.”

  She looked so crestfallen. The woman in black parted the crowd, who bowed their heads in deference, and bent before kneeling, sobbing Sarah. The woman kissed her on the forehead, then placed pale hands on either side of Sarah’s face, caressed her cheeks, and began pulling.

  MIRACLE-GRO (REPRISE)

  When a ghost in track pants put herself between me and Sarah, I wondered if she’d be the one to take my face. I wondered if that would make it easier to pass as a boy, I wondered if it’d kill me or if it’d be another ugly thing I lived through.

  It wasn’t until the woman put her back to me that I recognized the shape of her shoulders and the scrunchie in her hair.

  “Patricia?”

  “You really should stay home and read books. Go, Dani. I’ll get her out of this.”

  “Patricia—you’re outside—you came with us?”

  “I couldn’t let the pair of you carry on. This is an intervention.” Patricia nodded at the little boy in breeches and flipped on her teacher switch. “You. Young man. What’s your name?”

  “Alphonse, ma’am.”

  “Alphonse. You look like a clever boy. Are you?”

  “I hope to be, ma’am!” he said, pulling his shoulders straight.

  “Alphonse, I need your help. Can you do me the biggest of favors?”

  “I can try, miss!”

  Patricia jerked her thumb at me. “My friend is alive and in trouble. Can you get him somewhere safe?”

  “Okay!” The faceless little boy in breeches squeezed my hand—actually squeezed it, as though he were alive and present—­

  Suddenly I wasn’t in the corral, but a hundred meters away, back beside the barn, near the dogs barking in the kennel.

  “How the—what did you do?”

  “I nudged you, sir.”

  “What? How?”

  Alphonse puffed his chest. I could sense his pride despite his lack of face. “I have been dead and gone a good long while, sir, and I have learned such a lot of wonderful things! I have learned the alphabet, how to tie my laces, and how to whistle!”

  “And teleportation?”

  “Nudging, sir.”

  I clambered to my feet as I heard Sarah scream. My eyes found the sparking alpaca paddock—it was too far away, way too far, but I ran toward it—­

  “Sir, you mustn’t!”

  The fireworks went off. Not one bundle, but all of them, in a shower of powder and sparks. The exorcism satchel caught fire and I cried out, watching the space go up in flames and bursts of color. A burning fence post had set alight the hay that jutted from the snow, tickling the tall grass and licking it up.

  “Sarah!” I cried. “Patricia!”

  Time didn’t stop.

  Life wasn’t a movie.

  But I could see how people felt that way sometimes. The moment of the explosion felt longer than the time it took. And trying to comprehend what had happened would take far longer than that. It was all too much for my mind to absorb.

  I felt the needled sting of my hands, the cold in my ears. I smelled smoke and ash and fire. I heard a man hollering, and dogs howling.

  Suddenly Alphonse, the little ghost boy, cried, “Sir, you must run! The farmer is most unfriendly and—”

  Something heavy and toothy collided with my back, toppling me forward into the snow. I bit my tongue and spat blood. A hound was growling, teeth at my throat, hot drool down my neck. When I tried to roll onto my stomach, he clamped his canines around one of my ears. I yelped as the lobe tore away from the side of my face.

  “Goddamn delinquents!” howled a furious voice.

  This man wasn’t dead. He was worse: living and livid, with a rifle in his arms.

  Soon he was on me, pulling his dog back by the scruff and lifting me up by the elbow like I was a rag doll.

  “You think you can fucking light my farm on fire, boy? Goddamn delinquent. I should beat the hell outta you!”

  Through it all, I found myself laughing. I was passing, and I’d still end up dead at the hands of a man. But Sarah was wrong—I never thought being a boy would be safer, being a boy would just be more me.

  I coughed as the farmer dragged me toward the farmhouse, cussing and threatening murder and the police in equal measure, pondering whether he should give me a black eye or two before the firefighters arrived.

  Alphonse scurried around our ankles as the man dragged me toward the porch. The boy (he was probably a lad, I thought deliriously) darted back and forth, apologizing, squeaking that he was sorry, sir, so sorry, but he couldn’t nudge me if we were already moving, squeaking that he was rather afraid of dogs, sir.

  “It’s fine, kid!” I told him. “Just go check on Sarah and Patricia!”

  “Yes, sir! Sorry, sir!”

  “Talking to yourself, too!” the farmer cried, as I fell into the wet mud of the driveway. “Don’t suppose anyone would even miss a rat like you.” He looked up at the sound of an engine. “The hell? I didn’t order any damn flowers!”

  Despite the haze I was in, the farmer’s words woke me up. I lifted my bleeding head from the mud, pulled myself free, and kneed him in the groin.

  Before I got far he was on me again, pinning my wrists. I wondered if Sarah and Addy had gone through this, if they’d felt as angry and ridiculous as I felt, and how unfair it was that anyone could make you—­

  There was a swinging thunk and the dull thud of impact. The man yelped like one of his dogs and rolled off me, groaning and clutching his skull. A beautiful pair of black eyes looked at me, wide with worry, his hair still pulled back by a festive holiday ribbon.

  “I just hit a man over the head. I guess I am yakuza now.”

  “Seiji,” I gasped, as he helped me stand. “We have to go back for Sarah and Patricia and the others! Alphonse is a little kid—and some of those women and men aren’t monsters. I don’t think they are—”

  “They’re already dead, and we can’t go back, unless you want to die in a fire.”

  “What if I do want to?”

  “You don’t. Besides, how can you say that to me?”

  “Seiji—”

  “Your tongue is bleeding.” He led me to the car. “And your ear’s falling off. You are not going back there.”

  “I didn’t want to be fucking rescued!” I hollered, and hit him once in the chest. “I’m not some fucking girl in distress!”

  “You don’t have to be broken to need rescuing, and you don’t have to be a girl. Don’t be sexist.”

  Seiji strapped me into his truck. I felt Patricia’s hand in mine. “I’m here, hon.”

  “But Sarah? Where’s Sarah?

  She did not answer.

  As Seiji pulled away from the barn and the burning field, the pounding in my ears intensified. I peered at Patricia’s face, dead but still trying, and Seiji’s face, too, alive but still trying. There was nothing else any of us could do.

  DECEMBER 2002

  SARAH (REPRISE)

  SOPHIE

  I thought I’d wake in a hospital, but I woke someplace warm and familiar. All the rooms inside the Green House were painted a soothing minty green. When I was little, I asked why this was, and one of the staff, a friendly woman named Shanaya, told me that green was a hopeful color, the color of saplings and morning dew.

  That bright green didn’t soothe me now. It reminded me of Patricia’s son and daughter-in-law, longing for a spring their child could never see. Every spring was chased by another winter.

  Aching and muddled, I tilted my head on the pillow. The dorms at the shelter usually housed up to three women, with a cot in every cor
ner that didn’t have a doorframe. Across the room a recognizable form was tucked under a battered old quilt.

  Mom’s legs were curled up against her chest, one arm draped over her face. She looked a lot younger when she was sleeping, but even now she was frowning. I wondered who had called her here, and how I’d gotten here, and whether I looked more like her or more like my father today. I wondered whether Mom’d had a moment like mine last night—a striking moment—when she realized she was in love with a bad situation, happily riding a merry-go-round of violence.

  I saw Sarah: screaming and calling out, begging to fall off that ride.

  “She conked out hours ago.” Sophie looked a lot less cheerful than she had at the Thanksgiving party. She was tucked into a chair at my bedside. “We don’t usually allow visitors, but Seiji assured us your mom hadn’t harmed you. Besides, she’s a familiar face around here. We made an exception. Don’t report us, now.”

  “Seiji.”

  “Yes, he brought you here. Selfless to a fault, that one.”

  “I’ve hurt him,” I said, swallowing hard. How had he found me? Why had he come after me? Why had he demanded that I save myself?

  “He brought some of your things. They’re in the nightstand. But now you need to rest, and then we can all work together to come up with a plan.”

  That sounded like something Sarah would say. I closed my eyes. “A plan.”

  “Your mother told us this isn’t the first time you’ve turned up bleeding. We operate with confidentiality here, Dani, but I know a pattern when I see one. You don’t have to tell us who hurt you—I wish you would, but we can’t make you. What we can do is help you get away from whoever this person is. All right?”

  “All right.” I couldn’t tell her it was ghosts.

  But maybe it really was one person I needed to escape. Maybe it was Sarah and me, together as one, tied up like we had been for years. Maybe we were sick with each other. I didn’t know how either of us would get better, but I was beginning to see the strings.

  MOM

  The morning passed slowly, but things picked up after Mom woke up, all her hair flattened on one side.

  She wouldn’t let go of my hand. “I’m gonna start going to a support group here on Thursdays, Dani. And I want you to come with me.”

  “What?”

  “Whatever’s going on with you, you can’t carry it alone. Sometimes . . . ​sometimes I get that notion in my head, the idea I can carry everything alone, and I don’t think straight, and that’s lonely. I know I’m not okay. I know I’ve let terrible things happen to you, and I know I need help. But so do you, hon. Say you’ll come with me, okay? Please, Dani.”

  Goddamn it, why was it so hard to be different from her?

  “Okay, Mom.”

  ———

  Eventually we left the dorm and made for the lobby, which wasn’t as cluttered as the one at the Teepee but was pretty busy and decked out for Christmas. Mom and I played Jenga and euchre with some of the women there, and when my ear and head and bruises began aching, I took some ibuprofen and melatonin and slept most of the afternoon.

  Mom had to work that night, but promised to be back as soon as her shift was over. She told me to call her if I needed anything, and that she could call me, too, every half hour, if I wanted.

  “I’ll be okay, Mom.”

  “I’ll always come back,” she said, and kissed me goodbye. “Merry Christmas.”

  I drew the curtains and shut the door as soon as she left. As darkness encroached on the empty room, I felt too anxious to stay in bed. I paced, desperate for anything to occupy my mind, and remembered Seiji’s delivery in the nightstand.

  In a box alongside my binder and boots, I found The Left Hand of Darkness. I crawled back into bed and peeled open the book, surprised when a red envelope slipped from the pages.

  Inside was a schmaltzy Christmas card with a cat on it. Seiji’s handwriting was neat and blocky like the rest of him.

  Hey, Dani.

  I’m writing to you because we both know I’m not a great talker and I don’t know when I’ll see you again. I am pretty good at writing, though.

  I can’t imagine how you’ll feel when you wake up in the Green House tomorrow, and I’m sorry I won’t be there. You should know it’s okay to feel whatever you’re feeling. I asked you why you’re always angry, but I have been angry for a long time, too.

  I was angry at my mother for dying, which wasn’t fair, and I was angry at my father for leaving, and angry at myself for wanting to make out with boys. Now I’m also angry at my aunt for lying to me about Dad.

  I confronted Aunt Lavonne in the café. I must have shouted, because a lot of the customers got up and left. She told me the truth, and she told me that Dad’s ashes are in the apartment. All that time they’ve been in one of the flower vases and I never even knew. I don’t know if that’s more haunting than his haunting.

  I don’t care if Aunt Lavonne thought it would be too much for me to handle after Mom, and I don’t care if she’s Christian and thinks people who kill themselves deserve to suffer because that’s bullshit. I don’t know what to feel about my dad. He’s been gone so long, but now it’s a different kind of gone.

  I came to your place to say sorry. I thought I might find you in the lobby. But when I was there, your ghost friend Patricia got my attention by creaking the doors and fluttering pages, until I figured out she wanted me to go down into the basement.

  I’m sorry I told you your friends weren’t real, when you’re the only real friend I’ve had. No one’s ever bought me a shirt with a cat’s face on it before.

  Patricia helped me go after you. She was pretty slow at typing, but she showed me the map and where you’d gone and you know the rest. I know you don’t want to be rescued because it’s a cliché for boys to rescue girls and you aren’t a girl. But like I said, boys need rescuers, too. I think if people cared more about rescuing each other we wouldn’t need shelters. We wouldn’t need to lie about death and all that.

  I wish I could convince you that you aren’t as awful as you think you are. I wish I could convince you that even if you’ve made mistakes, you’ve done good things, too. I think everyone’s like that. All you can do is hope it balances out.

  I am not good at ending letters.

  Seiji

  I read his words several times.

  Darkness had fallen, but no one appeared to haunt me.

  I was alone, and I really didn’t know how to be alone.

  ———

  The morning dawned snowy and bright, another Hallmark Christmas. I celebrated with a dozen other women who weren’t exactly strangers. Their expressions were serious, but their kids smiled like any kids would when they received their Toys for Tots.

  Maybe some of the smiles were strained, but the space was warm and we made time for charades between rounds of eggnog. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen Mom talk to anyone outside of work, but she was swapping stories with a woman who’d grown up not far from mom’s Ohio hometown.

  Rolling Hot Wheels cars on the linoleum with a seven-year-old, I thought that a shelter was not a building so much as a place to belong to. If there was any way to bring that to our lobby, I wanted to try.

  ADDY

  We left the Green House on Boxing Day.

  “Don’t come back soon,” Sophie said. “Unless you’re looking for work.”

  “Do you hire boys here?” I asked.

  “We hire people, mostly,” Sophie said, smirking. “So sure, we’ll hire boys.”

  Mom didn’t comment on that, not even when we were in the car. I’m not sure if she was processing the exchange, ignoring it, or accepting it. It didn’t matter. Whatever she decided wouldn’t change what I’d decided. It was never going to be easy between us.

  ———

  After Mom went in to work and darkness began sinking through the living room window like mud, I pulled on my coat and stepped outside our crappy apartment. Under the ice, the
sidewalk was cracked, paled and broken by years of footsteps.

  To my right was the lobby. Maybe Patricia and Sarah were there, but maybe they weren’t. Maybe they were faceless in the alpaca field now. Maybe I couldn’t expect them to always be there waiting for me.

  But to my left, someone else was waiting. I couldn’t pretend she wasn’t anymore.

  I walked four doors down to apartment 7 and pushed in the door, ignoring the caution tape and the soot stains.

  Fire doesn’t just burn and leave a place ashen. It warps plastic into new shapes, it transforms a familiar room into a devastated landscape. Sometimes I thought about kids who grow up to be pyromaniacs, about the boys who set things on fire, and I wondered how much of that started with trying to change the way the world looks.

  The roof had collapsed directly over the living room sofa, and pink insulation hung dripping like cartoon cotton candy. Icicles had formed on the roof, and on the lip of the broken coffee table. The walls were marred with arcing swoops of black, hell’s graffiti, and the air felt less like it contained oxygen and more like a sulfuric impostor. You’d think a demon had been summoned here, rather than exorcised.

  Standing there, I believed Addy’s tormentor was gone, at least for the time being. It felt like nothing existed in this place, apart from the door and Addy behind it.

  It was still closed, like it had been when she told me to leave her. I expected it to be locked, to be jammed or twisted by the heat, but the plastic-coated plywood eased open, revealing a bedroom spotted in black soot and black mildew.

  Addy sat upright in empty space, on a mattress that no longer existed. The ropes were still around her wrists, but she wore them like bangles.

  “Hello,” she said, as I stepped inside. “I thought I told you not to come back here.”

  “You did,” I said, “but I wasn’t sure you meant it.”

  We didn’t mention her hauntings, but I expect we were both thinking of them.

  “Maybe I didn’t.”