Forever Finley

by Holly Schindler

  If she and Damien parted ways now, she would go back to being alone all over again. She had been away from her childhood hometown just long enough to know that a close friend was itself as precious as a diamond—no, more so.

  “You’re still in the midst of getting to know the people at the news station. Are you sure you shouldn’t date around?” her mother’s e-mail asked.

  Should she?

  Question marks, Natalie knew, were actually contagious. They’d jumped from her e-mails and infected her own brain.

  Her door clicked open; Damien stepped inside, bringing with him two breakfast plates—omelets topped with orange shavings of cheddar cheese. It had become part of their daily routine, Damien whipping up their breakfasts in his own apartment just down the hallway, then carrying his concoctions to her place.

  Was it strange that they were still in two separate apartments? That the engagement meant they’d only exchanged extra keys? Was that a sign? Indication that they both secretly wanted to maintain some polite distance?

  Natalie accepted her plate, squinting at Damien for some stray hint that he might actually be having the same misgivings. But he offered no clues, just pulled his mug from her cabinet like he did every morning, filling it with the coffee from her pot. They started toward her balcony—as they’d begun to do every single morning, workday or weekend—but didn’t make it outside before her computer pinged once again.

  “You want to—?” Damien started.

  “No way,” Natalie said, pushing the lid down on her laptop. “This smells too good.” And reached for her sliding glass door. Outside, they leaned against the balcony railing as they sank the tips of their forks into their eggs.

  It was nesting season; the birds were busy, building in tree limbs and on top of air conditioning units or small grills or the gutters. The night before, Natalie had tugged the wad of hair from her brush and tossed it into the grass below. It pleased her, as she chewed her eggs, to see a robin swoop in and begin to peck at her chestnut locks, cocking her head to the side as if to shoot a grateful look before swooping upward. A piece of Natalie would be part of her home.

  There was territory to claim, too—the birds were cackling at each other—the robin who’d snatched Natalie’s hair was cautioning the nearby cardinals and blue jays not to get any big ideas about the branch she and her partner had claimed for their own. As Natalie watched it all, she heard a funny electric-sounding squawk unlike the others. She started to point it out to Damien, because after reading yet another in the unending barrage of sour e-mails, she needed to hear his laughter. More than anything, their moments of friendship were what made her feel better about their engagement. More than kissing or weaving her fingers in his. More than champagne or dancing. Their friendship was the one thing that comforted her.

  But she stopped short. The squawking was human, coming to her as though through crackles of static. “Mayday Mayday Mayday…” hit her ears, insistent and afraid.

  “Do you hear that?” Natalie asked Damien.

  His summer breeze eyes rolled about as he listened. “Hear what?”

  “Mayday Mayday Mayday…” the voice continued to plead through the increasingly louder static.

  “That,” Natalie said, pointing her finger into the air.

  He shook his head. “Come on,” he insisted. “Bottoms up. We’ll both be late.”

  Natalie’s own eyes went straight for the cemetery—the one right across the street from the apartment building she and Damien shared. The National Cemetery, marked by austere wrought iron gates and filled with pristine white headstones. The same where she had met George last December.

  And she wondered, as a rash of goose bumps spread across her arms and the back of her neck, if George was trying to talk to her again.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Natalie raced home at the end of her workday, throwing her long dark hair in a ponytail and tying her sneakers so severely in her rush that she had to stop halfway to the cemetery and loosen them.

  She hurried through the cemetery gate, jogging straight toward the marble headstone that had been in her head all day: “G.A. Hargrove. US Army. WWI.”

  As she ran, she relived the utter loneliness that had consumed her on her arrival to Finley. Away from home for the first time, it had infected her in a way that had literally made her bones ache. To make matters worse, the holiday season was in full bloom—all decorated and full of an anticipation that was every bit as bright as the tinsel that wrapped everything in Finley from car antennas to front doors and utility poles.

  After work, the streets and sidewalks were so crowded with shoppers and carol-hummers that for safety she had chosen to jog through the old cemetery across the street from her new home—an apartment that had felt more like solitary confinement. She remembered the piercing cold making her lungs tighten the first time she had jogged there, and the sadness she had felt being surrounding by an entire field of stories that had reached their final sentence. It had seemed to her that the sweetness of her own life had died, too. That a person’s younger years were as wide open as an arched entryway with no door. But here, in her working adulthood, everyone around her was as closed off as a vault, their inner workings kept purposefully hidden. She was merely another stranger to walk around.

  Until she had fallen into George—literally slipped on wet leaves and found herself in his arms. George was himself a stranger in a strange land. Hadn’t he told her that? As they’d walked together, arm-in-arm? And hadn’t he assured her that her feelings were fleeting? “Come December,” he’d promised over and over. Come December, everything would change.

  But “George” had disappeared in one of the wisps of fog that had stretched across the fringes of the cemetery last winter, never to be seen again.

  Natalie had waffled in the months since. What had George been? A solitary person, visiting the area for the holidays, who had liked to walk with her? A person who knew that loneliness never lasted forever—that it simply ran its course, like a virus? Or had “George” been nothing but the work of Natalie’s overactive imagination, a product of her empty, needy heart? Had she simply been telling herself, over and over, that things would change if she just held on long enough? Come December, come December…And when Damien had appeared, with that funny last name—it had been nothing more than coincidence. Or—was George—could he have actually been—?

  Natalie found George’s marker easily. She stopped beside it, panting, hands on her hips. She glanced about the grounds, which had turned green and soft. Peonies were growing, promising to bloom in time for the Memorial Day parade. The caretaker was puttering about on the other side of the cemetery, pulling weeds and stacking brush to be removed.

  “G.A. Hargrove. WWI.” The man she had seen was young. And that old-fashioned, woolen coat…Could she have been talking to a spirit? Had the ghost of George Hargrove come to keep her company until Damien appeared?

  Natalie remembered how beautifully, perfectly magical it had seemed when Damien had told her his last name. Here he was, the “December” George had predicted. It had filled her with the Christmas spirit, with the assurance that holiday magic was real.

  She’d kept George a secret, never once mentioning the strange occurrence to anyone—not to Damien, or her mother, or any of the girls in the Rockette picture on her phone.

  But she hadn’t minded, either, that George had disappeared. How could she? She was too busy falling in love. Too busy marveling at the way the winter air sparkled with possibilities. Too busy savoring the body-warming rush of first kisses. She and Damien had been a perfect winter couple—a couple of woolen topcoats, enjoying Sunday movies and weekend dinners, champagne on New Year’s, and dancing.

  Their cozy winter months had faded with the first dogwood blooms. And now she was left wondering: What did Damien do once he hugged his last kindergarten student and sent them off to enjoy three months of pure freedom? Would he take drives to one of the lakes surrounding Finley? Did he water ski? Did h
e fish? Did he prefer to stay in and sit on the air conditioning vent? What would he say when she told him she had never learned to swim—that the extent of her water-bound abilities was a cannonball dive and the dead man’s float? Would he laugh? Would he teach her? Or would he prefer that they do nothing more adventurous than sit on the edge of the dock, side-by-side, dangling their feet in the cool lake water?

  Most importantly: How could she have agreed to marry him—to face every single season of her life with Damien—when she did not even know what kind of a summer couple they would be?

  So many question marks—her own and those splashing across her computer screen every day—would have been enough to torture her. That very morning, though, an external voice had called out to her: “Mayday Mayday Mayday…”

  “Are you trying to talk to me?” Natalie asked George’s headstone. “Am I screwing up here? Is this a mistake?”

  No response—only the sound of the caretaker’s chainsaw in the distance.

  The same bone-rattling loneliness that she had felt upon her arrival came crashing into her all over again.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Natalie was working late when the news came across the station’s police scanner: a single-engine plane had crash landed in Founders Park.

  She grabbed her jacket and climbed into the white news van. She had not yet covered a breaking news story of this magnitude in her six months at the station, and as they steered through the black night, chasing their own headlights, her heart thundered with the kind of anticipation she had felt as a kid at the moment an amusement park ride made its first lurch forward.

  But when the van stopped, Natalie stepped out, her camera already propped on her shoulder and her heart already filled with the urge to turn away. Flames clawed against the night sky. The smell of gasoline and charred everything: metal and upholstery and electrical wire and maybe even—surely even—the passengers inside crawled into her nose. Heat spewed from the wreckage, scorching her face.

  She clenched her eyes shut, the fire crackling in her ears. This was not something she wanted to walk closer to; she could feel the rest of the news team passing her by. When she cracked her eyes again, they were far enough ahead of her to be testing the limits of the line established by the police and paramedics and fire crews.

  “Get back! Back!” police officers shouted at her coworkers. The emergency crews had jobs to do—but so did Natalie.

  She steadied her camera at the same moment another voice broke in: “Mayday Mayday Mayday…”

  Natalie gasped as a silhouette appeared in the middle of the flames. A man’s figure. Wearing a military overcoat.

  “George,” she whispered. She recognized him instantly. He was just as she remembered.

  She took a step forward, another, not caring about the wafting heat or the smell of gasoline, not anymore.

  A police officer blocked her view and her forward progress. “Get back,” he barked. “That’s your last warning. The next time we talk, it’s going to be in the backseat of my cruiser. Understand?”

  Numb, she nodded.

  She nodded again when her coworkers asked if she was okay. She backed up slowly and continued to shoot from a safe distance, hoping she was not trembling so much that her footage would shake when it was aired during tomorrow morning’s news.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Natalie hovered in the editing room. She leaned in, trying desperately to find some hint of the silhouette she had seen at the crash site. Some whisper of “Mayday Mayday Mayday…”

  But she had captured the horrendous sight of the flames and wreckage minus any footage of the silhouette she had seen. The outing had been a success—the backs of her shoulders were slapped and various shouts of “Congrats, Nat. Good work” were tossed her way. But Natalie felt like she’d bungled the whole job because she’d somehow failed to capture George. How could she have missed him?

  Even as she asked it, she already had an answer: Because George did not truly exist. He’s only in your head, Natalie.

  As the days went on, she woke to share breakfast on her balcony with Damien, always while hearing the same cry: “Mayday Mayday Mayday…” Late in the week, as they ate oatmeal and blueberries, Natalie heard a new sound mixing in with the now-familiar distress call: a cracking—like the sound of a branch the moment before it snapped in two.

  Her entire world, she feared, was splintering.

  Damien nudged her. “You okay?” he asked.

  She wasn’t. But she nodded anyway.

  She jogged and jogged—on the weekends, sometimes twice a day. Hoping to see “George.” Well—hoping to run into the figure she had met in the cemetery last winter. She felt it would be like finally looking at herself in a mirror. Finally getting to the bottom of what she really thought. What she really wanted to do. She jogged so much that Damien began to joke—with just about anyone who would listen—that she was going overboard about looking good in her wedding dress. But it was kind of a proud joking, like he was telling everyone how important it was to Natalie. Like he thought she was doing it for him as much as for herself.

  Which made Natalie feel kind of awful, really.

  “We don’t have a date yet,” he reminded her. “Not officially. We haven’t even talked about what kind of ceremony you want. Will you and your mom be going dress shopping soon?” This could have been her opening. Her chance to talk about how worried her mother was.

  When Damien asked this question, though, it was over lattes at the Cuppa coffee palace, in front of his lifelong best friend, Justin—a reporter at the local paper. Justin raised his eyebrows at her as he lifted the cup to his lips, waiting for her response. Justin had also been telling Natalie since January how good she was for Damien—how he’d never seen his friend so relaxed; how a smile had never been quite so quick to spread across his face. How he had gone from always-nervous worrier to calm adult. That surprised Natalie every single time Justin brought it up. She’d never seen Damien that way—but Justin always assured her that he had changed the moment she’d come into his life. So how was she supposed to admit—sitting here, in front of him—that her mother was sending her e-mails that begged her to come home because if her Natalie was rushing headfirst into marriage with someone she hardly knew, she was obviously falling apart and in need of fixing?

  “December,” Damien announced so loudly that two women three tables over turned to look their way, wordlessly asking if everything was okay. “It’s got to be December. That gives us plenty of time, right? No need to crash diet. Or run the soles off of twelve pairs of sneakers. Gives us plenty of time to plan—well—everything,” he added, gripping one of her chair legs and scooting her closer, kissing the tip of her nose.

  “December,” she agreed. How could she say anything else?

  But she continued to jog—and knew, each time she stepped outside, that Damien was surely watching her. If he were a man who had been dragged to a few Julia Roberts movies, he might get the idea that she was aching to become the next runaway bride. But that thought only made Natalie feel sad, because she did not know, exactly, if Damien was the type to get dragged to chick flicks. One more thing that Natalie didn’t know about him.

  She was squatting at George’s headstone, tugging a stray dandelion free, when the old caretaker approached her. “You sure are fond of that fellow. Hope you’re not seeing too much of him.”

  Natalie flinched, standing. “I—what?”

  “He visits those in need,” the caretaker said, widening his eyes and wiggling his fingers. His beard was particularly overgrown, his face was covered in dirt, and his eyes were spring-allergy-red and borderline scary.

  “What do you mean ‘in need’?”

  “George was a survivor. Or so the story goes. Saw the worst of the war, and still he came home, with nothing more than the tiniest little scar over his left eye. Men back then weren’t talkers, but one night—George mighta had a bit too much liquor in him—he admitted that the thing that got him through those
dark, horrifying battles was a whisper.”

  “Whisper,” Natalie parroted.

  “Right. Like a—well, a ghost. Whisperin’ right in his ear. Tellin’ him when danger was coming. Kept his spirits up and wouldn’t let him give in when times were tough.”

  “He did? He said that?”

  “Well, I might be a little on the agey side, but I’m not so old that I forget a good tale. I remember that one for sure.”

  “Huh.”

  “Yeah, well, like I said, he swore that he was saved by that little whisper in his ear—time and time again.”

  “So the story goes.”

  “Right. And he swore that if he had a choice, when his own life was done, he would stay anchored to this very earth, doing the same for other people right here in Finley—whispering in their ears, telling them when to watch out. Been a bunch of stories that circulated through the years—people claiming to have seen him, heard from him. Been saved by him. Just like George wanted to do.”

  The caretaker paused to shrug, hands on the hips of his coveralls and wind in his long wild beard. “He was a Hargrove, too,” he added, staring at the headstone. “Which surely helped the story take root. Whole town of Finley was founded by a Hargrove. Yeah, the Hargroves, they move in and never move out—and I mean never.”

  Natalie shuddered. Surely he just meant that there were even today still Hargroves left in the area. But Natalie felt herself flooded, for a moment, with the same certainty that had gripped her last winter upon meeting George: the sense that he was real, was her friend. George was with her, even now. And he was telling her she was about to go down in flames.