Ghost Hold

by Ripley Patton

  “My life? You’re going to turn this around and try to blame your pathological lying on my life?”

  “You think I’m a pathological liar?” He laughed bitterly. “Oh, that’s a good one. People have been lying to you your entire life, and when I throw you the tiniest sliver of truth, you accuse me of being the liar. That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.” He turned his back on me and started to walk away.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I demanded, going after him, grabbing his arm. “Who’s been lying to me my entire life?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He yanked is arm out of my grasp. “I’m a compulsive liar, remember? You should probably look for your truth from a better source. You never know, you might find it’s been hanging right in front of your face.”

  “Oh, great, thanks for more of your cryptic bullshit. That really helps.”

  “You want me to be more specific? Okay. Go ask The Other Olivia for the truth.”

  “The Other Olivia?” I asked, stepping away from him. “What has that got to do with—” I had been four when my father had painted the first Other Olivia and sold it to The Hold. Marcus would have been five. He and his mother and sister had been enmeshed in The Hold when he was that age. “You knew they had it.” I stared at him. “You saw my father’s painting all the way back then, when you were in The Hold, and you recognized my copy the moment you saw it. You’ve known all along the CAMFers were after it.”

  “Yes,” he said, hope glimmering in his eyes.

  “That’s why you wrapped it carefully and kept it with us all this time.” I felt my insides turn to stone. “So you’d have leverage with the CAMFers and The Hold. So you could use it as a bargaining chip.” He’d kept this from me the entire time. All the nights we’d slept in his tent, The Other Olivia watching over us, he’d simply wanted it for this. “It was for you. For this fucking mission. That’s all you wanted.”

  “Really? That’s the truth you see in all this?” he asked sadly, his eyes glancing away from me, hollow and betrayed.

  How dare he look betrayed?

  “Obviously, whether I lie or not,” he went on, his voice flat, “it doesn’t really matter. Either way, it ends up hurting you. Honestly, I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

  “Do this?” I repeated, glaring at him. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  He stared back at me, a horrible finality written in his eyes.

  I turned away, pain welling up in me. Really? After all we’d been through he was willing to bail over this? He had lied and deceived me, over and over again, and now he was breaking up with me? Yeah, that made sense. “You know what? I think you’re right,” I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could. “I’m pretty sure you can’t do this.” I turned and walked away, across the living room, up the stairs and down the hall, straight to the perfect room Marcus had made for Passion and me.

  And I didn’t even cry until my face hit the bed.

  21

  ASKING THE OTHER OLIVIA

  Passion let me cry it out. She sat on the edge of my bed, her hand on my back. She didn’t ask why I was crying. She didn’t really need to. I cried, snot running down my face, until my pillow was soaked and my insides had turned into a puddle of nothing. Even when my dad had died, I hadn’t cried like that, because he hadn’t hurt me by choice. He might have been gone, but I knew he still loved me, and that he would have stayed if he could have.

  But this. This was Marcus downstairs, still existing and choosing to hurt me and leave me. It was me upstairs, still wanting him, except now that want was an open wound I kept touching every few moments, just to see if the pain was still there, just to see if I could feel the part of me that belonged to him, even though I didn’t want it to anymore.

  When I was all cried out, I sat up, and Passion handed me a box of tissues to wipe the raccoon makeup off my cheeks.

  “We broke up,” I said, saying the words more for myself than for her.

  “That sucks,” Passion said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.” I glanced at The Other Olivia leaning against the wall. All this time I’d thought that Marcus cared about it because he cared about me. Turns out we were both just two more weapons in his arsenal. “I’d just like to be by myself for a while, if that’s okay.”

  “Yeah, sure,” she said. “We’ve still got a couple of hours before the car comes.”

  The car. Which was coming at six for the dinner party at the James’ house. The same party that had started the fight between Marcus and I. Ha, I’d like to see him convince Passion not to go.

  “I just need a few minutes,” I said.

  “No problem,” she said, getting up and slipping out of the room.

  The first thing I did was lock the bedroom door. Then I looked up to find the camera staring back at me from the corner of the room. Someone was on duty up in the security suite, and I wanted some fucking privacy.

  I grabbed The Other Olivia and carried it into the bathroom, shutting and locking the door behind me. Once safely inside, I leaned it against the bathroom wall, sat down on the toilet seat, and stared at it. It did not belong to Marcus. It belonged to me. I got to say how it was used and what was done with it. If he’d wanted to use it as a tool against the CAMFers and The Hold, he could have asked me. Instead, he hadn’t even bothered telling me.

  Considering it had been through a house fire, it was still in decent shape. The frame was scorched some, and the canvas had a few small singe marks at the edges, but a slight trim and reframing and it would look as good as new. Now that I was looking at it closely, comparing it to the one I’d seen in Samantha’s house, I was pretty sure my father had done this version on a slightly larger canvas. Trim it up and they’d be the same size and nearly indistinguishable from one another. Except for one thing.

  I lifted the painting onto my knees and held my ghost hand up to it, only inches from the surface.

  Immediately, in the lower right hand corner of the painting, a faint glowing letter “O” appeared in a dark swirl of paint. “O” for Olivia. For me. My father had shown me that special little feature when he’d hung the painting up in our house for the second time. He hadn’t shown me before, so my guess was it had not been in the original. He had been thinking ahead, knowing that someday I might find out about the other painting. And he’d wanted me to be able to tell them apart. But why?

  I turned the painting around, inspecting the back for damage.

  My father always did his own framing and, as usual, he’d used a covering of brown paper to hide the unsightly metal hardware that held the painting inside its frame. The paper had been burned pretty badly in one corner, leaving a hole that exposed the frame and canvas inside it. With all the traveling and moving we’d been doing, the paper was starting to disintegrate even more. Probably better to remove it completely for now, until I could replace it.

  I stuck two fingers in the burn hole and slipped them under the edge of the paper, feeling the brittle glue release a little at a time as I worked along the edge of it. A few places, the paper cracked and split, but I finally made it to the last corner and it came away in my hands.

  I leaned the painting against the wall again and began to fold up the thin paper, but something on it caught my eye. There was faint writing in one corner on what had been the inside of the paper, not the outside where someone might write a public dedication or an artistic notation. The writing was small, done in pencil, almost as if its author had never meant for it to be seen. But I could read it by the glow of my hand. Just barely. But I could make out the words written in my father’s beautiful swirly scrawl.

  For Kaylee. We will always love you.

  For Kaylee.

  Oh, fuck.

  My dad hadn’t known a Kaylee. Our family had never known anyone by that name, as far as I knew.

  People have been lying to you your entire life. Those had been Marcus’s words right before he’d told me to seek
answers from this painting. How could he have known about the inscription? He couldn’t have. It had been on the inside of the paper. But he’d known about the other painting all along. The one titled Kaylee Pas Nova.

  For Kaylee.

  They couldn’t be the same Kaylee.

  Kaylee Pas Nova did not exist. She was a made-up religious icon.

  So, who the hell was this Kaylee my dad loved? No, not just him. He’d written, We will always love you. That meant him and my mom. And maybe even me.

  I looked at The Other Olivia—I stared at the ghost girl with the flesh hand and she stared back at me, her eyes as familiar as my own. To me, she had always been the sister I’d never had, a product of my father’s imagination to keep me company. But one did not write painting dedications to products of one’s imagination. What had I told Samantha in her father’s art gallery? Artists paint ghostly figures to represent death, and grief, and their own immortality. What I hadn’t said was sometimes they painted ghostly figures to represent people they’d loved who had died, so they could remember them.

  Why would my mother be so upset by a painting my father had done? Why would she plead with him to destroy it, and leave him, and come back, and be devastated that he’d gotten rid of it only to make him paint another one? And why then hang it, like a shrine, in the foyer of our house? How had death forever become a taboo subject with my mother, while my father and I seemed to always be wallowing in its shadow? Death was something we’d talked about together since before I could remember.

  Since before I could remember.

  What happens to the memories you have before you can remember? Who keeps them for you? And how do you get them back if you find you suddenly need them to make sense of the world?

  “Olivia, are you in there?” Someone was banging on the bathroom door. “Olivia, talk to me.” It was Marcus, and he sounded scared. He wasn’t knocking. He was banging so hard I could see the door shaking on its hinges.

  “Just a minute.” I folded the brown paper and stuffed it in my pocket. Then I stood up and opened the door only to find Marcus, Passion, Yale and Nose all standing there looking about as scared as I’d ever seen them. “What?” I said.

  “What were you doing?” Marcus asked, glancing at The Other Olivia leaning against the wall.

  “Having a moment alone,” I said, picking up the painting and pushing past him, pushing past them all into the open room beyond. “What did you think I was doing?”

  “I—we—Passion said you were really upset,” Marcus stammered, “and then Yale saw you lock the doors and go into the bathroom, and you didn’t come out.”

  I turned, noticing the looks of relief on their faces. The pink glow crawling up Passion’s neck.

  “You thought I was hurting myself?” I asked, setting the painting down and staring at Marcus. “Wow. Is your ego seriously so inflated you think I’d hurt myself because you broke up with me? God, get over yourself.”

  I shouldn’t have said it. I knew it as soon as the words were out, hanging in the air between us. But you can’t take that shit back.

  “My mistake,” Marcus said stiffly. “I won’t make it again.” He turned and walked out of the room.

  “I’m sorry,” Passion said. “I got worried after I left you alone, and then when I went up to the security suite, and Yale told me you’d locked yourself in—”

  “Why were you in there with a painting?” Nose asked, puzzled.

  “None of our business,” Yale said, grabbing Nose and guiding him from the room by his arm.

  “Olivia, I’m really sorry,” Passion said again. “But you have to admit, the way Marcus reacted didn’t seem like the response of someone who doesn’t care about you. He practically broke down the door.”

  I followed her glance. There were fist marks dented into the wooden bathroom door. And cracks.

  “He’s always the hero,” I said, shrugging it off. “He would have done that for you too. Or for Nose. Or any of us.”

  “Maybe,” Passion said. “But that’s not what I saw.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Even if he cares about me, apparently, I can’t handle the truth. How did you guys even get into the room?”

  “Marcus has a key,” she said.

  “And now he’ll probably have one made for the bathroom too. So much for privacy. Whatever. I guess we’d better get ready for this party,” I said walking into the closet, the brown paper from my father’s painting crinkling softly in my right pocket.

  For Kaylee. We will always love you.

  I wanted to know what that meant. And I was terrified to know.

  One thing was for sure, Marcus wasn’t going to tell me.

  If I wanted to find out the truth about Kaylee, I’d have to look for it somewhere else.

  Maybe Alexander James would tell me.

  Maybe The Hold had the answers I needed that Marcus would never give.

  22

  THE DINNER PARTY

  I made it through the dinner party at the James’ house mostly in a daze. The food was probably amazing, but I barely tasted it. The conversation was all mindless small talk and social banter. I barely listened to it. Samantha and her father were gracious hosts, and if they noticed I wasn’t all there, they didn’t point it out.

  Renzo was sitting to my left. His sunglasses were gone and his PSS eye was kind of mesmerizing. I mean it probably wasn’t any freakier than Nose’s nose or Marcus’s chest, but I think I might have been staring at it, because I kept catching him looking at me. Once, his glance seemed to linger on my gloves until I tucked my hands under the table. Another time, he caught me fiddling with the dog tags through my shirt, and I dropped my hand in my lap again. It made me wonder if that eye had a power. What was Renzo really seeing when he looked at me?

  Dimitri was there too, and Eva, and Juliana, but Lily was at home, still sick. And of course, Passion and Samantha were sitting as close as they could, and I suspected they were holding hands under the table. Well, at least two people in the world were happy in love, though I doubted it would last.

  When the meal was done, and the dessert dishes cleared, Mr. James looked at Samantha and said, “Will you play for us?”

  “Oh yes, please,” Passion said, clapping her hands together like a little child.

  As for me, I was sorely disappointed. I had expected everyone to talk about The Hold and try to suck Passion and me into it. I had hoped to have an opening to ask about Kaylee Pas Nova, the painting and the person who must have inspired it. And I desperately wanted to know how my father was connected to it all. But instead, no one had even mentioned The Hold, and there would be even less chance of it during a private concert.

  We all followed Samantha into a large, domed recital room with acoustics so amazing you could hear your footsteps echo back to you as you walked in. Soft, plush chairs surrounded the piano in the middle of the room and we all found a seat.

  Marcus was right. This party was very dangerous. First, they had tortured us with rich food and now a piano recital. I should run before evil Mr. James and his daughter corrupted my soul forever by teaching me ballroom dancing.

  Passion was sitting in the chair closest to the piano, and Samantha turned to her and said, “Can I play you?”

  “I’d be honored,” Passion said shyly, blushing.

  Even though I’d heard Passion’s music before in the practice room, it wasn’t any less spectacular the second time around. In fact, it was more so. This time it was louder, flowing and ethereal and yet confident. This time the end was different, full of visions of Passion. Passion meeting Samantha. Passion hearing her play. Passion stabbing her thumb and revealing her PSS for the first time. Passion seeing the art in Mr. James’s collection, the music swelling to a heart-wrenching crescendo of strength and finality.

  “Wonderful!” Mr. James exclaimed when Samantha stopped playing, and I opened my eyes to find Eva staring at me from across our little semi-circle of chairs. I stared right back, but she didn’t look
away, and without even thinking, I stuck my tongue out at her.

  Eva cocked her head to one side, smiled, and stuck her tongue out at me.

  Her PSS tongue.

  It was a quick in and out, but there was no mistaking it.

  How in the world had I not noticed that before?

  Of course, Eva didn’t say much. She was quieter and more introverted than even Passion and I. She barely ever opened her mouth, and now I knew why.

  “Eva, can I play you next?” Samantha asked, turning on the piano bench.

  “Sure,” Eva said, smirking at me.

  Eva’s music was quiet and subtle and sweet, and even though I didn’t see images of her in my head the way I had with Passion’s, by the time the music stopped and I opened my eyes, I felt like I knew Eva. Like we’d been friends for a very long time, even if I didn’t know her middle name, or her birthday, or if she had any siblings. I felt like I knew who she really was.

  After that, Mr. James was called away for a phone call and the room, with no adult in attendance, got slightly more casual.

  Samantha played Renzo, and his music was very bouncy and spicy and Spanish-sounding. It made you want to get up and dance, though no one did.

  Then Samantha looked at Dimitri, and he nodded his head, but instead of starting to play him, Samantha turned to Passion and said, “You asked me yesterday if I’d ever known anyone else with PSS blood, and I haven’t. But I also told you I can hear PSS no matter where it is, or how deeply it is hidden.”

  “Yes,” Passion nodded.

  “Everyone knows that PSS is very rare,” Samantha went on, “but it isn’t as rare as it seems. PSS doesn’t only manifest outwardly as an eye, or an ear, or a tongue. When I was a little girl, I knew a boy with both external and internal PSS.”

  I clutched the arms of my chair. She was talking about Marcus. Samantha James was referring to Marcus.

  “And that was when I first realized why I could sometimes hear PSS from people who didn’t appear to have it. I was hearing the sound of the PSS inside of them. You see, sometimes PSS manifests as an outward limb, where it is visible. But sometimes it manifests on the inside of us, as blood, or an organ, or a bone, where it can’t be seen. When that happens, the music is usually much softer, and muffled, and sometimes I can barely hear it, but over the years my ear has gotten better and better.”