Paper Ghosts

by Julia Heaberlin

  A couple whose tongues are marrying lets me push by them toward a dim exit light. As soon as the monster metal door chunks shut behind me, I realize my mistake. I reach back for the knob. Locked. Not an Entrance is sloppily hand-lettered in fluorescent white on the door.

  I’m stuck in the back parking lot with an army of stinking trash cans, a fence lined with scraggly bushes, and a single bulb above the outside door that barely illuminates either.

  Two shadows are taking long, aggressive strides out of a dark patch along the fence. Coming for me.

  Muggers. Rapists. Rednecks.

  It takes a split drunk second to decide to run, not toward them, because they seem determined, but the other direction, into the gloom behind the building. I want to get my bearings. Maybe I can go around the other side. Maybe I’m overreacting.

  “Jesus,” one of them whines as I take off.

  Halfway around the building, I realize there is no exit.

  I’m kneeling behind a dumpster, the very first place they’ll look. My options are climbing a ten-foot wooden fence or pulling out my gun. Neither appeals to me.

  Bad things happen when you point a gun. Three-fourths of the decision is already made. There has to be another option. Still, my hand falls back to the holster.

  I remember the day my father presented me with my own Glock. His agony that he didn’t save his other daughter. I don’t want to disappoint him, even dead. I pull out the gun.

  Where are they?

  Music is leaking out of the bricks behind me. The Beaumonts are crooning about jumping in the hay.

  The men should be on top of me by now.

  I slowly edge back to the corner of the building and peer around. Now there are three shapes in the dark. Two to one. The new guy swings a sharp punch, and one of the men falls to his knees. The other one instantly raises his arms in surrender and backs away, dragging his injured companion with him. All of this happens in deep silhouette, like I’m watching a violent cartoon.

  I hear the chirp of a remote. See the brief flash of headlights.

  The third man watches until he’s sure they’ve pulled out.

  Then he turns back. He stares so intently into the dark that I think he must see me. And then he’s gone.

  I’d only heard one clear word since that door slammed shut behind me. Jesus. I’m thinking, maybe Jesus heard.

  42

  Carl stole my sister’s picture. The senior portrait posed by the red barn. This sudden realization floats up while I steam myself to death in a hot shower at the Motel 6 and try to forget the entire night at the bar.

  Last night, I left my sister’s picture under the lamp in the ZaZa hotel suite. When I got up this morning, I was so distracted searching for an escaped Carl, I forgot about it. It bothers me, even though I can find it online in a hundred places with a few simple clicks on my keyboard.

  I lean my face into the hot water and strip it nude. After an hour-and-twenty-minute hike back to the motel, this fiberglass rectangle feels more luxurious than the two-seater stone waterfall in the ZaZa bathroom.

  I’d waited by the dumpster for half an hour before easing my way out of the parking lot to the front of the building.

  “You sober?” the bouncer had yelled out as soon as he saw me round the corner. “Need a ride?”

  I said yes. I had wanted to ask him where the hell he was when I needed him. He was way too tall and wide to be my savior in the parking lot.

  While he was distracted, calling me a cab, I’d slipped away. I’d needed to walk fast, to filter the whiskey and fear out of my pores. It wasn’t hard to remember the route back, which was an unpleasant hike near a buzzing, chaotic highway. I clung to all the ruts and dark places. I’d had plenty of time to think about those men in the alley—all three of them.

  I’m toweling off my hair, dressed in shorts and my panda T-shirt, when there’s a sharp rap on the door. I’m almost expecting it. Barfly’s ears have perked up; he’s lying on the bathroom mat beside me. I pick up my gun from the counter by the sink. Maybe my hero wants to be rewarded. Maybe the men who gave up want to finish what they started.

  “Everything’s OK, Barfly. You stay here.” He’s up on four legs now, but I shut him in the bathroom and cross to the door. The blinds are tightly closed.

  I stare through the peephole. It’s a blur, greased on the other side with Vaseline. Probably done a long time ago, the trick of teenagers who like to tilt side mirrors on cars and replace Oreo filling with toothpaste.

  When I open the door, my gun is pointed.

  It’s not my dance partner from the bar. Not Carl. Not the aggressors from the alley. Not my trainer, testing me because he’s an insane nutjob.

  In many ways, the man standing in front of me is the one I fear most.

  He’s also the third man.

  He pushes his way in, disarms me, and slams the door.

  * * *

  —

  “I thought your dad taught you better than that.” He releases the magazine and ejects the round from the chamber. He sets them on the bedside table.

  I’m glaring at him, not thinking clearly, still in shock. I’d hurt this man. It’s been more than a year.

  My hair is red now instead of brown; his head is shaved bald instead of like fine black sandpaper. I don’t like it shaved. It makes him look a little mean. Relentless. His costume is the same as the last time: black polo, black Nikes, black jeans, a badge, gun attached to his waist. Everything about Andy is true.

  I’ve felt his shadow for months and yet I’m still wondering where the hell he came from. What mistakes did I make with my quick-changes, fake-IDing, car-switching? Which one did me in?

  He was the hero in the dark, and the realization suddenly pisses me off.

  “Why in the hell are you following me?” I spit out.

  “Where’s Carl Feldman?”

  “Are you here to arrest me?” The conversation is beginning to feel like the ones late at night with Carl, where every next question spins us deeper into a dark hole.

  Andy shoots me a look of incredulity.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. The words hardly cover the things I’ve done. “Please, sit down.” I gesture to the side of the bed. He flips the desk chair around and sits. I can’t bear to see exactly how much he despises me, so I perch myself on the corner of the bed and focus on his shoes, size 11. I know the size of everything on him.

  The first time I saw Andy, I was seventeen. He was a twenty-four-year-old up-and-coming cold case detective with a cheap suit and hope that coursed through his veins and into mine like sugar water. My sister’s face had smiled off his computer screen while she leaned against that dumb red barn.

  The last time I saw him, he wasn’t wearing anything.

  We slept together for the first time when I was nineteen, almost twenty. It stretched on for a month, on picnic blankets and his old leather couch, in the back of the five-year-old Lexus SUV that my parents bought to keep me safe.

  It began with a covert kiss in a parking garage. He was politely escorting me back from his FBI office in Dallas after dark. When we arrived at my car, I reached up. He lifted me off the ground. I was a broken bird, rescued. Seconds later, he’d declared the kiss a slip. Slip. I was a feathery four-letter word, not even big enough to be a mistake.

  That was back when we officially met every year on two significant dates to discuss my sister’s case: the anniversary of her disappearance, and her birthday. Regular briefings turned out to be too painful for my parents, so I’d arrived each time by myself, with fresh questions and my obsessive research jumbled with college textbooks in my backpack. I never told him everything, of course. He would have thought I was crazy.

  Andy updated me on any little blip in my sister’s case; plugged in headphones for me so I could listen over and over to recorded phone
call tips; compared Rachel’s disappearance to other, more current ones; assured me there was still an ongoing effort to track the whereabouts of Carl Louis Feldman and link him or his photographs to my sister or other girls who vanished.

  Every visit grew more personal. The fourth time, I noticed that the picture of the twins was his screensaver. I knew he believed me.

  Andy was finishing his master’s in English, a promise to his grandmother, a former teacher, who was terrified he’d die in a gun battle he didn’t see coming. We would collaborate in the interview room over ugly files until he’d force me to take a break. Sometimes he’d recite poetry to dilute the horror.

  Angelou and Frost, Hughes and Dickinson. He said it kept him sane in a job like his to be reminded of all the joy and sorrow of the lives before us, to know we are knitted into a beautiful, flawed pattern that never ends. For a long time, Andy and a bunch of poets were the best therapy I got.

  He had been otherwise kind the day in the garage that he declared me a slip, while I’d tried to cover my embarrassment. He’d named every reason why we were a terrible idea, like I hadn’t thought of those before I reached up.

  He had a girlfriend. I was too young. It was unprofessional and could end horribly. He would lose perspective on the case. Hurt me. Get fired. My parents would feel betrayed. He was black and I was white and his own mother would kill him if a redneck, cop-hating asshole didn’t first. The last reason he meant as a joke, to make me laugh, but I didn’t, because it wasn’t funny.

  We met again, as scheduled, six months later. I remember thinking my sister would have been twenty-six, plenty old enough to kiss him.

  I remember dressing carefully that day. He didn’t want me, but I wanted to appear worth wanting. So it was thin lace and bare legs, loose hair and musky shampoo, a blue line around the smoke-and-mirror eyes that either drew people in or shuttered them out.

  I didn’t feel nineteen and naive. Around him, I felt electric. I had leaned in and put my fingers on his shoulder just once that day. He flinched. I loved that bit of power.

  The poem he’d shared at our break was sexless and lovely and full of hope—Walt Whitman on miracles. Every cubic inch of space is a miracle. In return, I recited a poem I wrote about the twins long before my sister disappeared. Two little girls play in the dark. There are monsters.

  This time, when he walked me to my car, he jumped behind the wheel and drove us to his apartment. We didn’t speak all the way, just held hands tightly, knowing exactly what would happen when we got there.

  Each time, afterward, it chewed at him. He thought he was ruining my life. I was the selfish one, though. My life felt pretty ruined already. I didn’t make it easy for him to end it. When I was wrapped in his body like an eternal poem and he was urging me to let my sister go and get on with my life—those are the only moments I ever thought I might.

  After twenty-seven days of this, he stopped calling. He didn’t have to tell me why. He’d told me a hundred times. I let him go. I didn’t want to ruin him.

  Last July, after more than three years of silence, he called out of nowhere and asked to meet at a restaurant. The man with all the reasons didn’t give me a good reason why. I showed up anyway and ordered a potent Lemon Drop martini. He seemed worried that day. Asked a lot of questions about my life, my Sister Quest (as he called it), the bruise on my right knee.

  Later, he kissed that bruise.

  While he was sleeping, I’d scoured his phone for passwords and codes that would get me access to more of what I wanted. I discovered a file on his laptop about my sister. The sight of the little icon with my sister’s name made me ache. He hadn’t given up. It had been opened only three days before. I copied that on a thumb drive, too.

  He was still sleeping when I walked out the hotel room door.

  An hour later, he’d changed every password I’d stolen.

  I didn’t get much more than I already knew, and I lost a lot.

  I can appreciate that right now when he’s real and present, four feet away, so livid and beautiful that I can’t breathe.

  43

  Barfly is raking his paws across the back of the bathroom door, a steady scratch-scratch rhythm. Andy has wheeled around, his weapon drawn and aimed.

  This is fear—the thought of bullets ripping and splintering through that door. I grab Andy’s arm. “That’s my dog on the other side, not Carl. Put your gun away. Please. I’m the only one here.”

  “Show me.” He shakes me off.

  “It’s my dog,” I repeat, twisting the knob. Barfly bounds out, jumping on Andy’s legs, tail wagging, as if his scar is drawn on with a marker. I whistle Barfly over and listen to Andy slide open the shower door, making sure. Trained.

  “Where is Carl Feldman?” he repeats, as soon as he reappears.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m not messing around. I know you are together.” And then he says my name. It spreads like a warm burn through my chest. The name that will be permanently etched on my grave, just like Sophronia’s and Jimmie Elizabeth’s on those stones at the cemetery where my sister and I used to roam. My mother picked my name out of a novel when she was a child herself.

  “Carl and I were together for a few days,” I admit. “He took off.”

  “You don’t know where he is.” Flat. Disbelief.

  “No.” I’m trying to remember where I left the map that I had no interest in showing him. In the glove compartment? In full view on the passenger seat?

  “I never thought you’d go this far.” He’s pacing the narrow patch between the double beds. My trainer said pacing was a good technique to use on the other guy. It’s like a player on first base toying with the pitcher. Barfly, sitting perfectly still beside me, begins to pant. I rest a hand on his head.

  “Meaning…”

  “Meaning, taking whatever delusional, dangerous path you’re on. You don’t understand what you’re stirring up.”

  “I do. And I’m prepared.”

  “Oh, good God, you only think so.” He’s stops abruptly. “What do you expect to gain from this? Do you really believe Carl Feldman will lead you to Rachel’s body?”

  Harsh. He knows the soft spots so well.

  “The day we first met, I should have shut you down. Convinced you that a picture you accidentally found in your house had absolutely nothing to do with your sister. Nothing. That it was a coincidence or your mind made a connection that wasn’t there. I should have never let you consider for a second that Carl Feldman was a possibility. I should have gotten you some…help.”

  After all this time, he’s finally implying what he never would.

  “Don’t you understand?” I strain to ask the question calmly. “I would have arrived at this place, in this motel room, with or without you. You always blame yourself, Andy—it drives me crazy. I’m not a kid. I was never a kid.”

  “Are you positive Carl’s responsible for your sister’s death?” he snaps. “Because I’m not.”

  “We don’t know for sure she’s dead.” It’s like releasing a breath I’ve held since the very first night her bed was empty beside mine, the sheets tangled the way she left them.

  But it’s true. No one has ever handed me a single piece of evidence. No one has shown me a sharp sliver of my sister’s bone or a microscopic spot of her blood, which always ran a little darker than mine. No one has played me a confession.

  That leaves one percent hope. Or ninety-nine percent despair. It depends on whether my glass is filled with whiskey or tea.

  There is such weight and pain in my name. He’s saying it again. He needs to stop saying it.

  I’m trying to think. Did Andy put a tracker in my suitcase?

  Was he in my apartment? Has he been on my tail since Mrs. T’s?

  How much does he know?

  “How long have you been keeping tabs
on me?” I fume out loud. “Since we last met? Since Carl popped up on the radar. Longer? Have you been tracking me longer?”

  “Go home. Or to London, where you’ve convinced your mother you are having the time of your life. Let us do our jobs.”

  But you won’t, Andy. Not like I will.

  He’s talked to my mother.

  “Who is us?” I ask softly. “Do you have a partner with you?” My head pivots toward the window. The idea of someone else, anyone else, on the other side of those blinds feels like a betrayal.

  The us was always Andy and me.

  “Are you wearing some kind of wire? Go ahead, take me in.” I hold out my wrists. Daring him. I need to know how far he will go. Why he’s here. “I’ve done plenty of things I can be arrested for. I’ve stalked people. Bribed people. I stole Carl’s camera out of evidence.”

  “Stop. Talking.”

  “If you aren’t arresting me, then please leave. Carl is gone. That’s the truth, Andy. My Sister Quest is a failure. That should make you happy. I appreciate that you took care of those creeps at the bar, but you need to understand something. I would have gotten out of that myself. And you? You would not be in this room unless I let you in.”

  My wrists still hang in the air.

  I can’t let him stop me.

  Andy takes a purposeful step forward. It’s a mistake.

  ENGLISH/MRS. ARCHER

  Paper Ghosts

  Two little girls

  In pretty white dresses

  And floating veils

  Play in the dark

  There are monsters

  In my closet

  In their forest

  Don’t be scared!