by Alex Silver
“It’s fine, I brought it up,” Chad shrugged. “My mom died of breast cancer when I was a teenager. First, they wouldn’t cover screening because she was ‘too young’. She fought for it, because she had a family history. Then we had to fight with them to cover treatment.”
“That’s awful.”
“She was already stage four when they found it. She fought, Mom was always a fighter, but it wasn’t enough. From diagnosis to her final hospitalization, she lasted eighteen months. Long enough to attend my highschool graduation and meet my oldest niece. My older sister, Kay’s, kid.”
“She had a good policy too, so it covered most of her medical expenses. But we spent way too many of her last days battling with the company to get claims approved and arguing about rejections. She had life insurance so Kay and I didn’t go into debt giving her a nice funeral.”
“Is that why you worked in insurance?”
Chad barked a laugh, “Hell no. I hated those bastards for what they put my family through. But they offered a decent benefits package and they had flexible hours. A few years into community college, my college fund and Mom’s life insurance had run dry.
“I was hitting a brick wall getting transition covered through the school’s policy beyond them offering me a few sessions a semester with a mental health counselor. Chorus Insurance was hiring.
“The starting pay was enough to afford the rest of my degree courses if I stayed enrolled part-time while I worked.
“Plus, their policy covered top surgery and getting started on T. The monitoring early on can get pricey with the regular blood tests, so it worked out for me. I’d always planned on it being temporary, but then I saw a chance to help some people out. People like my family, and you, just looking to get the services they’d paid for with their premiums, you know?”
“I get that.”
“Right. Well, that delved deeper than I meant it to. Figured for sure you’d ask about the raccoon,” Chad forced a weak laugh.
“Seemed too obvious. I’m sure that’s a story though, what happened?”
“Kay and I were playing in the woods at our grandparent’s house. Kay threw a ball into a blackberry bush. I followed in after it, ran back out with a raccoon chasing me. We ran into the house and slammed the door behind us. Kay thought it was hilarious.”
“It sounds funny.”
“In hindsight, maybe it was funny. I was fine. That animal was freaky though. We assumed it would lose interest and go back to the berries. It didn’t though. It stayed right in the doorway hissing and making a terrible racket. Grandpa ended up shooting it an hour later when it was still there.”
“Did the raccoon have a personal vendetta against you? Now I’m picturing a tiny Rambo Raccoon shaking its adorable little fist at you.”
Chad shook his head, but he was smiling. Mission accomplished, I loved his smile.
“Not a vendetta, rabies. They got it tested and sure enough, it came back positive. I didn’t get bit, I don’t remember the raccoon touching me at all. I ran like the devil himself was after me when that thing hissed at me. The branches left my arms scratched to ribbons, so I had to get vaccinated just in case though. It was miserable.”
“How old were you?”
“Nine, Kay was fifteen.”
“She’s your only sibling?”
“Yep. What about you, any siblings?”
“Only child. My friends all said it made me spoiled,” I laughed it off. “I think it was just that my parents didn’t know what to do with a kid so they figured throwing money at me constituted parenting. But enough about that, my turn. Hmm, let’s see, how do I top rabid wildlife and an altruistic streak a mile wide?”
Chad pinked at the praise. So cute. And why had I mentioned topping? Not where my mind needed to be with my employee. Time to think unsexy thoughts.
“My grandmother, who died before I was born, used to visit me when my parents were working late. The first time I tried to stay overnight in a haunted house I chickened out after the first hour and lost a five hundred dollar bet. My first kiss was with a girl named Trixie behind the bleachers at our highschool.”
Chad laughed, “Well, since you know that I know you’re gay, I’ll guess Trixie is true, too obvious to be the lie. And I can picture you swearing never to lose another bet after failing the first one. You’re stubborn like that. So I’ll guess your grandmother didn’t appear to you as a kid.”
I laughed, “Nope, it wasn’t Trixie, it was her twin brother Trent. They were my best friends, but Trixie didn’t speak to me for three months after she found out.”
“Did she have a thing for you?”
“No, she was just pissed that I screwed up the dynamics of our friendship. It was weird dating my best friend’s brother and when we inevitably broke up, things were weird between Trixie and I for a while. Can’t say she was wrong to be upset, in retrospect.”
“Do you keep in touch?”
“Some, Trix doesn’t believe in the paranormal. So she thinks I’m being ridiculous traveling around the country with Vanessa to film make-believe. What can you do, right?”
“So, you believe your grandma’s ghost was looking out for you?”
“I saw her. My parents told me that ghosts aren't real. They assumed it was an imaginary friend thing. We moved when I was ten, and I stopped seeing her. Convinced myself that it was a product of my overactive imagination, and ghosts aren’t real.”
“But you believe in them now.” It wasn’t a question.
“Yeah, at first I didn’t. I figured haunted sites were just creepy abandoned old buildings, and it was our collective consciousness that made them seem ominous or whatever. People read patterns into situations that aren’t there. There are logical explanations for hauntings, right?
“So I was initially planning to go around sleeping in haunted places to debunking local urban legends about hauntings.”
“What changed?”
“I saw that the spirits are real,” I said, a simple statement of fact.
Chad wasn’t someone talking would convince. He’d have to conclude the paranormal was real for himself. Like I had.
I could only pray that when he did, he didn’t run the other way. Because I already suspected he was irreplaceable.
TWENTY-FOUR
Chad
Van life was growing on me. Tuesday had marked a week with Daniel, and it was already Thursday. Time flew when you kept busy. I hadn’t realized how lonely and boring my life was when I was working at Chorus until everything changed.
My studio apartment was in a building full of young professionals. We all lived in similar solitary studios. Most of them worked the day shift and had established groups of friends.
My flex schedule at the customer service center often had me working evenings. I never saw my neighbors unless one of us was arriving home while the other was leaving for a work shift.
Work was always busy. Clients on the phones, managers breathing down our necks. The evening shift was a little more lax on that score, but still, the general mood in the office was that we were co-workers, not friends.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d shared a cup of coffee in the mornings. Probably my last year of highschool.
We found out Mom’s diagnosis was terminal at the end of my junior year. My heavily pregnant sister and her husband, Brad, had moved Mom and I into their suburban cookie cutter home. Mom took an upstairs guest room, and I got the pullout couch in their finished basement.
Kay took care of Mom during her illness. My sister made sure I made it to graduation. When I turned eighteen, she had insisted on getting us both tested for the BRCA mutation that made Mom’s cancer so aggressive. She only waited that long because that was the minimum age for our insurance to cover testing.
We all breathed a sigh of relief when that came back negative. Still, the worry that it might claim me too had been another tick mark in the pro column for getting my chest surgery ASAP when it became an option for me. Th
ere was still a risk, but it was much lower with most of my breast tissue removed—good riddance.
Kay had held our family together through everything. She was the reason I made it through that last year. The reason Mom hung on as long as she did. Kay had been our rock, all while adjusting to becoming a mom herself.
Those last few months with Mom had been bittersweet—awful and wonderful. Awful to know we were losing her, to see her get sicker with each passing day. And full of the wonder of hoarding a treasure trove of family moments. Moments of being together stolen back from the illness that ravaged her body.
Watching her play with my niece, and getting to see Sadie every day for the first few months of her life. Feeling like a burden on my sister when her focus should be on her baby and instead she had to deal with my emotional crap.
The simple ritual of gathering around Kay’s table to share a hot cup of coffee and a meal in the morning encapsulated all that emotional upheaval. Intense highs and lows. We’d embraced those shared moments of being a family in Mom’s last months.
It had all fallen apart after the funeral. I couldn’t face the painful memories, so I stopped joining my remaining family for breakfast.
When the fall semester started, I moved into a cheap apartment near campus. I worked my ass off to afford it without having to take out student loans. I’d been on my own ever since. Kay gave grudging acceptance to the excuse I had a penchant for solitude and wanted the quiet to focus on my studies.
This morning, as I sat cradling a warm mug of coffee in my hands, I recognized it for what it was—I’d been lonely in my old life. Daniel sat across from me, reciting an animated account of one of his earlier ghost hunting exploits. I’d spent years lonely and alone, and now, because of him, I wasn’t either of those things anymore.
Daniel had given me so much more than a job when he made the offer to hire me. Not that I could tell him that without it coming off creepy and clingy. He was my boss. Even if I was technically one of the show’s financial backers, so in a way I was, in part, paying myself.
My phone pinged with a notification, interrupting Daniel’s story. This one was about a former PA. A ghost’s sudden presence in the room spooked her into dropping an expensive camera. The fall broke an even more expensive lens.
I doubted there was a spirit, just a drafty old house. The broken equipment made me cringe though. Daniel babied his cameras almost as much as his van. He touched them with the same tenderness Kay reserved for her kids.
“Need to get that?” he broke off in his telling and gestured to my phone.
I waved away his concern, “It’s just a calendar reminder to do my shots today, every two weeks.”
“Sho—Oh, right, T? Do you need help with that at all?”
“No, I’m fine, thanks. You don’t mind me doing it here in the van though, right?”
Daniel snorted, “No way, man, as long as you’re here I want you to consider Vanessa your home. Do whatever you need to do. Should I give you privacy?”
“It’s fine, I’m doing the shot in my gut this week, so nothing you wouldn’t see at the beach.”
“If you’re sure.”
“I am, I’ll wait until after we eat though,” I said, nodding to the swiveling table we were eating on. The ritual of a shared breakfast in the mornings, sitting across from each other, had fast become a highlight of my day.
With the table perpendicular to the wall, it would be a pain to climb up to my bunk. Much easier to retrieve my injection supplies, let alone use them, once we restored the table to its usual position, and put away the breakfast dishes.
“Oh, right, speaking of the beach, I tracked down Evie Goodman. Well, her daughter, Annette.”
“How is that related to beaches?”
“They live near Myrtle Beach now. I guess Evie is in a nursing home with dementia, but Annette told me her mother kept a diary. I guess she reads entries to Evie when she visits her.”
“Any chance of us getting our hands on the diary?”
“It’s possible. Annette offered to dig through the ones from the 30s and send screenshots of anything that sounded relevant. From talking to her, I think she’d like the chance to do a televised interview. Although she seemed fuzzy on the difference between broadcast television, streaming services, and a vlog webisode.”
“Think she’d be willing to return to the family home to get her shot at social media stardom?” Daniel asked. The twinkle in his eye made it seem like I was in on some private joke with him.
“I don’t know about that, but I bet she would do a video interview with us if she finds anything of note in the journal. I think she’ll be telling everyone she knows about the show when we get it online too.”
“I never say no to word-of-mouth advertising. Well, it would be nice to read the journals, but I can understand the sentimental attachment. Digital versions will have to suffice.”
“In the meantime, I’ve got Lara’s brother coming to film an on camera interview with us this afternoon.”
“Nice. I want shots of the loft too. We can play them with a voiceover of him giving us a firsthand account of the time the ghost pushed him and he broke his arm.”
“Oh, I had some thoughts on that. Lara said they had a structural engineer check out the building to see if it was worth refurbishing after the roof caved in. Looks like the loft is still sound. Let's do one better. What if I cast local kids to do a dramatic reenactment?”
“Filming kids can get dicey, we need all kinds of releases…”
“I’ll handle it, I looked up the regulations. We just need to follow some common sense guidelines as far as work hours and safety regulations. And have all the releases signed by the kids and their guardians and we should be golden.”
“Well, so long as you’ve got the legal side covered, I like it. If we can get the raw footage, it’s a piece of cake to slap a filter on it. Like they do in the big budget productions. Then we add a voiceover of Leon telling the story over top of the video, splice in some modern day shots of the interview and the loft. A healthy dash of sound effects, and bada bing bada boom, we’ve got an awesome segment.”
“Spooky sound effects?” I asked, amused at how enthusiastic he was about my suggestion.
“Yeah, I’ve got a whole library of them to use when we get to the editing portion. I’ll show you when we get around to that part. For this one, I’m thinking we can go simple—children laughing, creaking boards, maybe a bit of a crash as we have the actor fall out of frame. And some ominous mood music.”
“I’ll get right on casting then,” I said.
I hadn’t seen him do dramatizations in past episodes, but I had seen them on other paranormal investigation shows. I figured it would give our webisodes the feel of a higher production value, without too much of an outlay.
A warm glow of happiness filled me at his approval for my idea. It made me feel like a bigger part of the show.
“It’ll be a good exercise to show you the basics for compositing video.”
“I’m always up for learning new tricks.”
“I’ve noticed, I’ll teach you on the fly. The editing is one of my favorite parts so it isn’t like I need you to take over that role. It would be ideal for you to know the basics if I ever need to delegate it to you for any reason.”
“Reasons like you being in the hospital with a broken leg?” I deadpanned.
“Exactly like that. It’s almost like you’ve known me a while,” he teased.
I chuckled, “Well, at least long enough to realize you are the uncrowned king of accidents.”
“Spoken like a true insurance salesman.”
“I didn’t sell the stuff, I just tried to help people access the coverage they already paid for.”
“True. Well, you did a better job of it than anyone else I spoke to at Chorus. There’s a reason I had you on my speed dial.”
I didn’t have an adequate response to the praise, my cheeks heated, and I ducked my head trying to hide
my embarrassment behind a sip of lukewarm coffee.
“Well, anyway, their loss is my gain. In case I haven’t told you, you’re doing a splendid job of managing things for the show. I don’t know how I’d have gotten on without you.”
More praise, my face was in danger of catching fire, “I just made a few calls, arranged paperwork and did the heavy lifting, nothing major.”
“You pulled everything together to get a film site on short notice and you’re picking up the technical details fast. I’ll make a proper paranormal investigator out of you yet, mark my words.”
I laughed at that ridiculous statement. Still, the job suited me well enough, and I enjoyed working with Daniel. There were worse things in life than a job I didn’t wake up dreading every morning and a boss who appreciated my talents.
TWENTY-FIVE
Dan
I cleaned our breakfast dishes while Chad climbed into his bunk. He muttered to himself as he got his prescription out of the overhead cabinet where he stored his personal effects.
I smiled to myself. Cramped as Vanessa could get, I enjoyed sharing my space with another person. It didn’t hurt that Chad was adorable and devoted to making Hauntastic Haunts the best show it could be.
He seemed to grasp my vision for what the program could become. I meant what I said, that I was lucky to have snapped him up when I did.
Chad slid from his bunk with his supplies. The coffee pot needed a quick wash, so I took care of that, then set about returning our dishes to their secure spots in the cabinet over the sink.
My chores complete, I turned to face Chad. My offer to get out of his way so he had room for whatever the shot thing entailed died on my lips. I stood frozen in place when I saw that he was shirtless and held a vial and syringe in one hand.
The grip required to hold both in place looked uncomfortable, and the syringe seemed to fill in slow motion. It distracted me for a moment.
