Right Behind You

by Gail Giles

  Later I Googled the phrase, which sent me to a site that had the Buddhist Wheel of Life. Wheel Twelve:

  Hungry Ghosts

  Characterized by — Greed; Insatiable cravings; Addictions. “I want this. I need this. I have to have this.”

  This is the realm of intense craving. The Hungry Ghosts are shown with enormous stomachs and tiny necks — they want to eat, but cannot swallow; when they try to drink, the liquid turns to fire, intensifying their thirst. The torture of the hungry ghost is not so much the frustration of not being able to get what he wants; rather, it is his clinging to those things he mistakenly thinks will bring satisfaction and relief.

  So, I’m going out into the world and The Frown is leaving me with a Zen riddle for advice?

  Great.

  For three weeks, I practiced being a real person.

  “This is how it works. Even though high school is full of elitists, boneheads, and jerks, they’ll be a walk in the park compared to the Loon Platoon.”

  “I’ve never walked in a park,” I said.

  “It’s like walking in the woods without the bears.” The Frown looked me over. “I’d consider cutting your hair. But wait until you move and get a look at the people in your town. This is Alaska. I don’t have a clue what young people in the real world do to their heads.”

  “This is so encouraging,” I said.

  “Whatever you wear the first day of school will be wrong. Trust me on this.”

  “Tell me again what good this is doing me?”

  “If you depend on television for fashion, it’s either ahead of the times or way behind. Wear jeans and a casual shirt of some kind. Then the best way to make a friend or get someone to like you is to ask him for help. You know, throw up your hands and say, ‘Obviously I need help with this. We don’t know how to dress out in the boonies.’”

  “That works?”

  “Oh, hell, yes. Makes a person feel good. Superior, even. Taking someone under their wing. Totally effective. But do it with a sense of humor — don’t be whiney or needy.”

  “Were you popular in high school?”

  “I was a nerd.”

  “So, you learned all this from books.”

  “Nope, learned it from watching the popular kids. I was skinny and wore thick glasses and was in the band. You, though, are good-looking, have a long, lanky, athletic build, and when you’re not whining or swinging your fists, there’s something resembling wit. You can make this work.”

  “I am really good-looking, aren’t I?” I dripped with sarcasm, but I wondered if he was shining me or . . . I didn’t know.

  “And so humble. Now, first day. Everyone will stare at the new kid.”

  “In his totally wrong clothes.”

  “Right. Someone might say something crappy about you or your clothes. He’ll be a lowlife. It’s important that you ignore him or make a joke.”

  “So I don’t get expelled for fighting on my first day,” I said.

  “That and because giving pond scum attention is not cool.”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  “You’ll be late to almost every class because you won’t know how to get there. You’ll have to stand at the front to get signed onto the teacher’s roll.”

  “More staring.”

  “It’ll be like when the gorilla takes a dump at the zoo. Everybody has to come look.”

  “I’ll be gorilla shit for the day?”

  The Frown laughed. “Indeed you will. Be ready.”

  “And people do this to their children?”

  “On purpose,” The Frown said.

  “And the State thinks I’m crazy.”

  “Now, somebody asks where you’re from. How do you answer the question?”

  “Locked up with the other rabid animals?”

  The Frown didn’t think I was funny.

  “Fine, I say ‘Alaska.’ If that isn’t enough I tell them I lived in the bush. If they still seem to want more details, I start in on Alaska stuff, how I was homeschooled, and then stuff about moose and bears and snow and no igloos. Pull attention away from details about me that they can prove or disprove.”

  “Good. You could work for the CIA.”

  “Yeah, I hear they’re looking for assassins.” There was a long silence.

  “Now that’s feeding your hungry ghosts,” Doc said.

  I slumped back in the chair and scrubbed my face with my hands. “I’m not sure I got all that.”

  “I’m not trying to turn you into a Buddhist, but the idea runs along with Western therapy for addiction. Any addiction is your hungry ghost. Booze, food, anorexia, drugs, and emotional cravings. What’s your hungry ghost, Wade?”

  “Wade doesn’t have any ghosts. He’s brand-new.”

  “Bull. He’s carrying Kip’s baggage. What’s Kip’s ghost? What’s he crying out for?”

  “That’s what I don’t get,” I said.

  “Guilt,” Doc said. “But truth is the only thing that will shut up the ghost and give you peace.”

  The Frown looked like he was waiting for something from me. I still didn’t get it.

  “What do you want, Kip?”

  I thought a long minute. “To be normal. To be just like everyone else. To not have burned a kid to death. To forget it ever happened and live my life.”

  “Is that possible?” Doc asked.

  “I’m going to try like hell,” I said.

  The plan was to release me at one minute past midnight. Even though court records are sealed, information gets around. The Anchorage papers had already run a story that the child murderer was being released under a new identity. Carrie and Dad picked me up. Doc Schofield and Belinda were there to say good-bye.

  Belinda gave me a travel chess set. “Lord knows you need practice,” she said. “And don’t go biting any gorillas, you hear?”

  I grinned at her. “Doc, the woman needs professional help about this biting thing.”

  “I would, but she scares me,” he said.

  Belinda lifted one eyebrow and gave him the evil eye. “At least the man is smart. He should be scared of me.” She squeezed me in a long hug.

  Dr. Schofield shook my hand. “Go, live, be happy. Doctor’s orders.”

  Wade set a little boy on fire?

  He killed a child.

  When Wade was a child he murdered a child?

  No, not Wade. I don’t even know Wade. He’s Kip.

  Kip?

  I don’t know Kip.

  But I don’t know Wade either, do I?

  He’d been in a . . . what exactly was it anyway? A hospital for the criminally insane?

  They’d all lied to me from the beginning. Not only Wade, but his father, and Carrie. This “secret” was so hideous no one could know his name. Could know anything about him. About them.

  What were their real names?

  Were they afraid of him? Is he still dangerous? He harbored guilt and anger that raged inside him for years. What kind of damage does years of this do to a person that’s already damaged?

  Do you get to kill someone and say, “Oh, really sorry now,” and everything is fine?

  I closed the second book. I didn’t want to read any more. I had already read too much.

  I went downstairs to get some coffee.

  Dad was at the kitchen table working on his sermon.

  I sat. “Dad, talk to me about redemption. Is it possible for any sin?”

  Dad’s eyebrows rose. “Are we talking about you?”

  I hadn’t been, but his question made me pause. My silence must have been a positive answer for him.

  “Redemption is often confused with forgiveness. To re-deem yourself you must change, become stronger; sometimes you must make amends if you have caused harm to another. Forgiveness — well, I have my own views on forgiveness.”

  My eyes got cloudy and wet. “Have you forgiven me?”

  My father put his hand on mine. “I refuse to forgive anyone because that implies that I’m superior — that I have
a right to make a judgment. As if I haven’t fallen to temptation or will never fall. What a load of horse manure.”

  “But . . .”

  “What I know is that you ran into something you were too young to understand. What I know is that there’s a history of this in my family. How could you know what you were dealing with? I can’t forgive you. Do I forgive someone who falls down and is injured? No, I help them recover.”

  I breathed out. “Are you angry that I don’t go to church anymore, Dad?”

  “Now, that’s about forgiveness. You haven’t forgiven yourself. You think you aren’t worthy to be in God’s house.”

  I tensed. “No, I’m fine. I know what happened to me and made my peace with it.”

  “And that’s why you hide out here at the beach. You sail, you go to class, you study. The only people I’ve seenyou speak to are the new neighbors. People that don’t know your past.”

  So, had I lied to them as much as they lied to me?

  I started the conversation wondering about redemption for Wade. I ended wondering about forgiving myself.

  Nothing is ever easy. There’s never a straight road.

  I made coffee. I would be reading for a while.

  PART II

  Indiana

  Chapter 10

  THE “GO” PART

  I was Wade Madison and had papers to prove it. Son of Jack and Carrie Madison. New residents of Whitestone, Indiana. I had a new backpack and a class schedule and the totally wrong clothes. Alaska is all about flannel. Indiana looked to be all about long-sleeved tees. I had the wrong shoes. At least I was prepared to be wrong.

  I figured nothing new happens often in Whitestone, Indiana, because I got the total stare down when I got on the bus. It didn’t help when some kid that looked all of ten stuck his foot in the aisle and I tripped over it. My first thought was to break his leg off at the knee and let him carry it in his backpack, but I kept it together while some of the bus riders laughed and others continued staring. I sat at the back, so they had to work to look.

  By the time I found my locker, my totally wrong clothes and shoes had moved from the abstract to fact. “Do you think he’s homeless?” was one of the nicer snippets of conversation I picked up in the halls. I couldn’t get the combination lock to work until my fifth try, and I was red-faced and sweating when I stood like a dumb ass in the hall trying to figure out where the hell corridor C could be.

  I finally blundered into my first class ten minutes late: English I. Kind of a combo of reading, writing, and whatever else the teacher finds to broaden the minds of freshmen.

  I handed the teacher my form.

  “Wow, Alaska. You’re a long way from home.”

  I nodded. At least the teacher thought I had a home. A quick look at the class made the blush and the sweat return. Most of them stared at me like they thought I’d crawled out from under a bridge.

  “What brings you here, Wade?” the teacher asked.

  I had the Wade thing down now. And my story. “My stepmom got sick of the dark winters. Dad got a job here.”

  “I see you were homeschooled.”

  Was the sweat showing? Did I have huge pit rings on my shirt? Could the earth swallow me whole?

  “We lived pretty far out, not in a town. Homeschooling is common in Alaska.” Okay, that last part sounded way rehearsed. The Frown and I had practiced a little too much.

  “Take a seat, Wade. You can choose the empty one.” The teacher grinned like she was a stand-up comic. This was going to be a long day.

  “Ms. Bales?”

  “Yes, Justine?”

  “Can we ask the new guy stuff about Alaska?”

  “What do you say, Wade? I’ll admit I’m interested, too.”

  I gave her the “I’m cool with that” chin jut.

  “All right, class, Wade is open for questions. Introduce yourself before you ask him anything, please.”

  A boy with an enormous square head with hair so blond and short he looked bald spoke first. “So, dude, I’m Dave. Did you, like, live in an igloo?”

  The teacher rolled her eyes.

  Was I ever going to be able to sit down?

  “No, we lived in cabins and regular houses, but no igloos. I noticed that here in the lower forty-eight there are lots of brick houses. There’s not much brick in Alaska.”

  “Have you ever seen a polar bear? I’m Justine.”

  “No, I did see black bears and a few grizz.” Flashes of TwoFer and his dead-eyed stare, or Cowboy and that toothbrush swept through my mind, and I knew I’d seen way scarier things than polar bears during my four years on the ward.

  “What about penguins?”

  “Introduction, please?” Ms. Bales said.

  “Brandon.”

  I shook my head. “Penguins, South Pole. Alaska, North Pole.”

  A couple of people laughed. The guy named Dave coughed the words “dumb ass” behind his hand, and a really good-looking girl said “du-uh.” Then she curiously blew a kiss at the knucklehead.

  The stares had turned to interest in the subject, and I didn’t feel so troll-like now. I wondered if I was still redfaced.

  “How cold does it get? I’m Amber.”

  “In the interior it’s not unusual to have a few days of fifty and sixty below.”

  “No way!”

  “Thank you, Anthony,” said Ms. Bales. “But, Wade, can a person breathe air that cold?”

  I hadn’t lived in the interior since I was nearly ten, but I could remember Mom wrapping a wool scarf around my nose and mouth before taking me out in the cold. I was swamped with longing for the old cabin. For the moose that would munch on the willow branch outside my window. For my mom. Right now, even for the safety of the doc’s office.

  “Hmm, right, that kind of cold can damage your lung tissue. You have to have something over your nose and mouth and breathe through it to warm the air first. Or better, stay inside. When it’s that cold, most Alaskans are smart enough to stay where it’s warm.”

  “I’d like to know about how long it stays dark, and then we need to get on with our lesson,” Ms. Bales said.

  “Depends on what part of Alaska. Farther north, the bigger the differences. In the interior in the dead of winter you’ve got about three or four hours of daylight. Summer, you’ve got about two or three hours of dark, and that isn’t real dark kind of dark.”

  “Midnight hoops! Sweet,” Dave said.

  I nodded, even though the Loon Platoon hadn’t played a lot of midnight hoops.

  Ms. Bales set the class up with a reading assignment and called me to her desk to show me a list of things they had read that semester. As I scanned the list I saw that I was light-years ahead of this group.

  “I’m good here. Homeschooling gives you lots of reading time.” I pointed at one title. “That’s the only one I haven’t read.”

  “Since you’ve read the Poe stories the class is working on now, why don’t you read The Light in the Forest independently? I’ll give you a written assignment when you’re done so I can assess your writing skills.”

  She dug in a cabinet and handed me a worn paperback, and I dogged back to my desk. Ten minutes into my first class, school had been mood-swingy, but with nobody to hand me lithium in a little paper cup. When I stood waiting for the bus, it seemed impossible that I could walk into a place with so many normal people. Those stares and trips and comments in the hall somehow seemed more brutal than the ward. But except for that flash of homesickness, the rest had gone pretty much like Doc had said.

  After I escaped into The Light in the Forest for the two-hour block, the bell rang and I checked my list to see where I was headed next. The square-headed kid stopped at my desk. “Lemme see?” He pointed to my schedule card. When I handed it to him, he fanned it and said, “Who’d you kill, man? They did you wrong.”

  My skin crawled and my heart stuttered. Then I realized it had to be just an expression.

  “Must be because you were homeschooled and
transferred from Siberia or wherever, but they put you with the brain-dead.”

  “Is the room in this hall or where?”

  “Come on, I’ll walk you over. That way I can miss part of speech. I hate that class.” He handed me back the schedule and gestured for me to accompany him. I scrabbled for my backpack and tried to keep up.

  “I’m not from Siberia. I’m from Alaska,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, cool. Whatever. Listen, here’s the deal. Most of us take Indiana history in, like, eighth grade and it’s easy-peasy, but you have to pass it or they, like, throw you out of the state or something, so if you’re a dumb shit or if you have to, like, unzip to count to twenty-one, you might have to take it again as a freshman, so I’m telling you this for free. There’s going to be some real night crawlers in your class. And those leeches love to welcome newcomers. If I was wearing those weird-looking shoes, I’d do my time and not make any close, personal friends. But if you have a drug habit, it’s the place to connect.”

  He took a breath. Again, my heart hiccuped.

  “So?” he asked me.

  “So? I asked. “What?”

  “So, are you a druggie?”

  Yes, I’m pharmaceutically fueled, but prescription only, I felt like saying.

  “Nope, but I was wondering something?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why in the world you wouldn’t like your speech class.”

  Square-headed Dave gave a laugh that sounded more like a truck backfiring. “It’s because the teacher keeps letting those other people talk.” He pointed me to my door. “I don’t even want to get too close to that room. Could hurt my cool quotient.”

  One of the “night crawlers” walked past us on his way into the class. “You rob a homeless dude for those shoes, loser?”

  I glanced at Dave. Then to the night crawler: “Family heirloom. Grandma loved these shoes.”

  Chapter 11

  UGLY PUP AT THE POUND

  The things I noticed most about the Indiana history class was that there was a lot of eyeliner and tattoos. The kicker was that the eyeliner was on the guys and most of the visible tats were on the girls. The guys were like cartoon people: dog collars on wrists and necks, leather vests, and eyeliner. Black, neon, sparkly. Did a whole cult of Maybelline-inspired XY chromosomes get together and flunk Indiana history? Did the flunking of history produce this behavior? Was there tangerine eyeliner in my future?