Haunt Me

by Liz Kessler

  “One extreme or the other,” she murmurs.

  “Yeah. Exactly. And the need. It was scary.”

  “Scary? How?”

  I let out a breath. I don’t know if I can do this. I pull my hand away from hers and rub my chin.

  Erin gets out of her seat. “Hey, where — ?” I begin.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she says, stopping me. Coming around to my side of the table, she pulls out the seat next to mine and puts her hand back on mine. “Go on,” she coaxes me as I close my other hand over hers.

  My throat is taut and on fire, but I want to go on. I need to. I have to get this out now that I’ve started.

  “He had these rages,” I say, hating myself for how disloyal I sound, but knowing that I won’t be free of this unless I tell her everything. “He’d always had them. When he was little, he’d throw things around. Then he discovered poems and songs, and all his feelings went into writing those instead. But toward the . . .” I stop. There’s a rock inside me. I can’t get past it.

  “Toward the end?” Erin says gently.

  I nod. The rock softens a tiny bit. “He stopped writing so much. He didn’t have the patience for it anymore, so he wasn’t getting the rage out of him. It was like the writing was part of what he needed to do for his life to work. D’you know what I mean?”

  Erin smiles. “Yeah,” she says. “I totally know what you mean.”

  From the way she says it, I get the feeling she has a story of her own here. And I want to know it. I want to know everything about her. But not yet. Not till I’m on the other side of this and I’ve found out if she still wants to know me.

  “So one weekend, we’d been out to a party as usual on Saturday night, and the next morning, Joe woke up with the worst headache in the world. Mum and Dad had gone out for one of their long Sunday walks, and Joe came bursting into my room.”

  “I’m guessing you were sleeping off a hangover yourself?” she asks.

  “Yup. It was all pretty much par for the course on a Sunday morning. The weekends had developed a bit of a pattern. Get in after Mum and Dad had gone to bed on a Saturday night so they couldn’t see how wasted we were, then sleep in all morning on Sundays while they went out for a long walk. Twelve hours’ sleep and a massive breakfast, and we were normally fine by lunchtime.”

  “But not this time?”

  I shake my head. I don’t want to go back there. Don’t want to relive any of this. But I can’t stop now. I feel like I’m on a one-way track to the edge of a cliff. There’s no way out, and there is nowhere to turn around and go back.

  “He was clutching his head and screaming, said he was in agony. His screams woke me up before he’d even come into my bedroom.”

  “What did you do?” she asks.

  I don’t know if I can answer her. She’ll judge me. I know she will. But then, she could never judge me more harshly than I have judged myself every single day. I twist around in my seat so I’m facing her. “I’ve never told anyone what happened next. Not even Mum and Dad. No one.”

  Erin swallows. “You can trust me,” she says hoarsely.

  I nod. I’m at the end of the track. It’s time to take a leap of faith.

  I hold her eyes, turning them into a promise. “Yeah,” I say. “I hope so.”

  “You can trust me,” I tell him, and as I say the words, I know they’re true. At least, I think they are. But what does that mean? If he confesses to killing Joe, does it mean I’ve just promised not to report him to the police? Does it mean I can never tell Joe what I am about to hear? Never tell anyone?

  Even as I think the words, they sound crazy in my mind. Olly isn’t a killer. He can’t be. He just can’t.

  But then why is Joe so convinced he is?

  “I hope so,” Olly says, breaking me out of my thoughts. It sounds like he has as much doubt as I do about what we both mean by the word trust.

  But we’re in it now, and I can tell he needs to say this as much as I need to hear it.

  Olly looks down, talking to the table. “Joe came into my room, complaining about his headache.” He swallows hard. When he talks again, his voice is so strained, I can barely hear him. “I pulled my comforter over my head. Told him to go away.”

  “And did he?” I ask.

  Olly shakes his head. “He kept talking about it. Said he couldn’t bear it, and he needed something stronger than Tylenol. So I . . .”

  I stroke his arm, encouraging him to go on.

  “I told him I had some pills in my bag.” Olly’s words come out in a strangled sob. I can only just make out what he’s saying. “Told him to help himself and leave me the hell alone.”

  He looks up at me. His eyes are pools of tears. “It was the last thing I ever said to him, Erin. The last words he ever heard from me.”

  He stops trying to talk. He’s crying openly now, and I know there’s nothing I can say to make him feel better. I wish there were. I want to pull him to me, hold him close, tell him it’ll all be OK. But I can’t. And it won’t. I can’t take his pain away.

  Olly swipes the back of his hand across his eyes. “So he took the pills, and he left me alone. Like I told him to. I went back to sleep. Didn’t wake up till Mum was at my door, telling me it was nearly one o’clock and lunch was on the table.”

  “Everything OK here?” The waitress is suddenly at our table. The incongruity of her presence is like a jolt to my body.

  Olly swiftly looks away. I hold his other hand tighter. “Yeah, everything’s good, thank you,” I reply. The waitress clocks our linked hands and gives me a little nod before turning away. She probably thinks we’re having a lovers’ tiff.

  As the waitress leaves, I notice there are a few other people in the café, too. I’m glad we’re in the darkest back corner. The others are at the front, looking out the window. No one’s bothered about us.

  “Go on,” I say to Olly.

  Olly covers his mouth. He looks as if he’s trying to hold the words back, trying to stop them from coming out, trying to stop them from being true.

  I stroke his hand. It’s the only thing I can think to do. I can’t rescue him from this, however much I wish I could.

  “Mum said she’d tried to wake Joe up, but he was . . .” He stops, holds a fist against his mouth. The rest of his sentence comes out in a choke. “She said he was ‘dead to the world.’ Those were her words.”

  “Oh, Olly.” My hand still holding his, I close my other hand around it.

  Olly shakes his head. “I told her he had a bad headache and that we should just leave him to sleep it off.”

  He looks at me with an expression of utter helplessness that I have never seen before. Not on anyone, anywhere. “Even then,” he says, tears dripping into his mouth. “Even then, he might have lived. If we’d known. If we’d called an ambulance. If we’d done something.”

  “If you’d known what?”

  Olly takes his hand away from me and pulls the napkin from under his glass. He loudly blows his nose, then shoves the napkin in his pocket and reaches out for me. I take his hand in both of mine again.

  “Joe had a brain aneurysm,” he says.

  “He what?” For the first time in the whole conversation, Olly has completely thrown me. No matter how hard I try, I can’t attach his words to something that I had expected to come from this.

  Joe had a medical condition? He was ill? I mean, it’s not as if I was expecting Olly to tell me he’d hacked Joe to death with an ax. But I thought — I don’t know — maybe that they’d both been completely out of it and gotten into a fight, Olly had gone too far, something like that. But this . . .

  Maybe it isn’t Olly’s fault at all. Maybe Joe got the whole thing wrong.

  “No one knew,” he’s saying. “According to the doctors, loads of people have them. Something like one in fifty. Most people never even know they have one. You only know about it if it ruptures.”

  “What does it mean if that happens?”

  “Well,
your odds are pretty much divided in three. A third survive and go on to lead normal lives. They’re the lucky ones. Another third survive but with brain damage . . .”

  “And a third don’t make it?”

  Olly bites his lip. “Yeah. Guess which third Joe was in.”

  I don’t have to guess.

  “Turned out his headache wasn’t a hangover at all. The aneurysm had started bleeding. That was why his headache was so bad. If we’d known he had an aneurysm, we’d have known what to look out for.” Olly exhales heavily. “If we’d known he had one, I would never have let him touch the pills.”

  “They made it worse?”

  “Oh, yeah. The rush of Ecstasy — it raises the blood pressure. It was about the worst thing he could’ve done.”

  I don’t know if I’m being disloyal to Joe with my next thought. Am I?

  Who knows? What I do know is that Joe isn’t here and Olly is — and he needs me. “But he wanted you to take him to the parties,” I insist. “He took the pills. You didn’t make him.”

  Olly stares down at his drink for a full minute at least. Then he drains the dregs, takes the straw out, folds it in half, and in half again.

  Only then does he look at me. “No. I didn’t make him take anything at the party,” he says. His eyes are dark holes, deep wells with no end. “But it was the pills he took on the Sunday morning that blew the aneurysm apart. The ones I gave him. I had really strong painkillers in my bag, ’cause I get muscle spasms sometimes from soccer. But that wasn’t all I had. I had other pills in there, too, left over from the party the night before — and those were the ones he took.”

  Olly breaks away from me to rummage in his jeans pocket. Then he pulls out a pill bottle.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “It — it’s what I kept my pills in,” Olly replies carefully. “So Mum and Dad wouldn’t suspect. It’s exactly the same as the bottle my painkillers were in, except I took the label off this one.”

  I stare at the bottle. It’s just a normal pill bottle from the pharmacist. “He took those pills instead of the painkillers?”

  Olly nods. “They were both in my bag. I didn’t tell him which ones to take. I didn’t tell him to be careful — I just said take the pills from my bag. I basically told him to take poison.”

  “Olly, you —”

  He shakes his head and carries on. “And when Mum looked in on him and told me she couldn’t wake him up — when I was the one who told her to leave him — he wasn’t asleep. He was unconscious.”

  His last words come out as such a hoarse whisper, I can barely hear them. He clutches my arm as he says them, as if I can save him, as if holding on to me will stop him from sinking. “I killed him, Erin. I killed my own brother.”

  The starkness of his words, the way they almost mirror Joe’s . . . For a moment I am speechless. The shock and, yes, the relief are overwhelming. Because as far as I can make out, what Olly’s just told me means that he isn’t responsible for Joe’s death.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I say. “You didn’t know.”

  Olly’s shaking his head. I let go of his hand and reach out to touch his face. Tears stain his cheeks, running down them in tracks.

  “Olly,” I whisper. Eventually, he turns to face me.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I say again.

  Olly tries to look away, but I’m holding him too firmly. His jaw is tight. His cheeks — so unlike Joe’s — are smooth, apart from the tear tracks. I hold his eyes as firmly as I’m holding his face.

  I want him to know I am holding him. I want him to feel the safety of me. Because he is safe, and I won’t let him do this to himself.

  Joe’s been dead for over six months. That’s over six months of Olly carrying this guilt like a prisoner’s chain around his neck.

  “He’s in here,” he whispers. He’s still holding the bottle.

  “He what?” I stare at the bottle in his hand.

  Olly swallows. “I know, it’s a bit grim. We — after he was . . .” His voice trails off.

  I suddenly realize what he’s telling me. “Cremated?”

  For a moment, my brain feels as though it’s been put through a spin wash, twisted around and around like a knotted ball of string, and churned out through a potato masher.

  I’m staring at a bottle that contains Joe’s ashes. Joe. The boy I love. The boy I see nearly every day — the reality of him is a bottle full of ash.

  I can barely take it in.

  Somewhere outside of my messed-up brain, Olly is still talking. I drag my attention back to him, back to here and now.

  “Yeah. Mum and Dad spread his ashes at Raven’s Point, his favorite place. I couldn’t go with them. But I asked if I could have some for myself.” He holds the bottle out in front of him, stares at it. “I kept them in here so I’d never forget what happened — why it happened. So I’d always have him close.”

  “And keep your guilt even closer,” I say.

  “I dunno. Maybe. Yeah, I suppose.” Olly lifts a shoulder. “I’ve never told anyone any of this.” He looks so lost. I want to give him something in return.

  I don’t have much to offer.

  “I understand,” I say carefully. “I once carried around something similar.” My breaths are coming out short and sharp. I plow straight on before I talk myself out of it. “A pill bottle as well,” I continue. “I — I went through a bad time, and I had some painkillers from an injury. I used to look at the bottle every day. Emptied it out and counted the pills every night. It sort of became a habit, a compulsion. The counting. Like I had to do it to keep me safe.”

  I can hardly believe I’m telling him this. I haven’t even told Joe that part. But suddenly I need to share myself with Olly. And I want to. I want to give him something of me, something real, something deep and painful, like he’s given me.

  “You didn’t . . . ?” Olly takes my hand.

  “It’s a long story,” I say. He doesn’t need the whole story. Not now. “But even after . . . the worst had passed, I kept the bottle. Kept it till we moved here, in fact.”

  “In case you needed it?” he asks.

  I shake my head. “No. I kept it to remind me of my darkest time. As a warning never to go back there.”

  Olly grips my hand more tightly. “I get that,” he says. He’s staring at me so hard, it feels as if he’s looking right inside me. As if he can see all my secrets, all my lies, my past, my fears, the bits I haven’t told him.

  I feel exposed. I feel opened up now, as though I have no defenses, as though he can just walk right in and have whatever he wants of me.

  But it’s even more dangerous than that. The really dangerous thing is that I want to open up and let him in. I want to close myself around him. I want to be with him.

  I want him.

  And I guess I’m not doing a good job of hiding it, because in the next minute, he does the most dangerous thing of all. Reaching out to touch my face more softly than I think I have ever been touched in my life, he leans toward me, closes his eyes, and kisses me, as gently as a wave stroking the beach on a hot summer’s day.

  And if that isn’t dangerous enough, I’m kissing him back.

  My last thought as he wraps his arms around me, pulling me closer, his hands in my hair, his lips pressed against mine, his kiss making me lose myself completely, is a question I can’t answer.

  Can you be unfaithful to a ghost?

  This is it. I can feel it. I’ll look back on this in years to come. I’ll picture the scene. I’ll remember the taste of my milk shake, and the taste of hers in her kiss. I’ll remember the distant sound of the waves outside. I’ll remember the couple in the corner, the peeling paint on the wall. And I’ll remember that this was the moment my life started to go right for me again.

  I break away from the kiss. There’s something I need to tell her.

  “Erin,” I begin. I need her to know this. “I’ve never done this before.”

  “You’ve ne
ver kissed a girl? Um, I find that a bit hard to —”

  “Not that,” I add, with a laugh. “I’ve never cried. Over Joe. Not once.”

  Erin pulls away a little — or she tries to. My arm is still around her waist, and I’m not about to let her go. “I’ve wanted to, hundreds of times. Every day, probably. But I haven’t allowed myself.”

  “Why not?”

  I pause for ages, trying to get the words right. Finally I say, “I didn’t think I was entitled to.”

  “Oh, Olly. You’ve been going through as much hell as him.”

  I squint at her. “Huh? As who?”

  Erin’s face flushes, and this time she does pull away. She looks down and bites the edge of her thumbnail as she carries on. “The hell that Joe went through, I mean,” she says hurriedly. “At the end. The nightmare it must have been for him. You’re going through a nightmare, too.”

  It’s true. I would never have looked at it like that, but she’s right. She makes me look at things differently. She makes me look at myself differently.

  There’s something else I need to tell her — and I can’t hold it back.

  “Erin,” I say again.

  “What?” She looks up at me from under her bangs.

  “I . . .”

  I catch my breath. This is a first for me. First time I’ve felt flustered with a girl. First time I’ve said these words. “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  I’m not sure what I expect her to do or to say. I know I don’t really expect her to say she loves me, too. Sure, I hope for it, but in my heart I know that’s not where she’s at. Not yet.

  But I know what I don’t expect.

  I don’t expect her to freak out.

  Erin’s face has drained of color. She looks as white as the walls. Whiter, probably. She gets up from her chair.