We Are the Ghosts Page 15

  Gwen shrugs, and we cross the street to sit on the concrete steps at the base of a large monument that towers above the square. She curls up, resting her forehead on her knees, like she’s trying to make herself disappear. There are so many people moving around us that I don’t think anyone has even noticed us.

  Then, after I’m certain that we’re just going to sit here in silence, listening to the cars drive by and the noise of conversation, Gwen turns to me and says, “It’s like he died twice.”

  I just blink at her. “What?”

  She sits up, pressing her hands into her knees. “Luke was gone so long, it’s like he was already dead. To me, anyway.” She shrugs. “I could almost forget he even existed. I grieved for him, you know? And now…” she trails off, presses her face into her hands.

  I’ve never thought about it this way, but now that she’s said it, the truth of it cuts deep. Luke has been dead to us for the last year. When he left, he might as well have been dead already. He vanished into the night, and for all any of us knew, he had driven right off the face of the planet.

  It hurt then. It felt like death. It felt like being stabbed in the chest. I spent hours crying, days, weeks, until there was nothing left inside me, until I had cried all of my insides out. And then I got over it. I went back to my life, even though it didn’t make sense without him in it anymore. But I got used to a life without Luke, without the other half of me. And now that he’s dead … what’s changed?

  I have to look away from her to catch my breath, and I focus on the cars driving past, watching them until I’m dizzy so that I don’t feel anything else.

  “I’ve been so mad at him.”

  Her words scratch at the surface of what’s moving around in my chest. She was mad at him. She was mad when he left. She says it so simply, so calmly. I have to look back at her, and when I do, I feel a stab of jealousy for the way she feels everything out in the open, and not just today. I remember her crying so openly during the funeral when I couldn’t. She’s never tried to hide, never tried to stifle it.

  I nod. I can see that, of anyone, she has a right to be mad for what happened between her and Luke. Even now, after he’s gone, she has a right to feel anger over grief. No one will blame her for that. “Because he left without a word.”

  She shrugs. “That, yeah. But the whole thing with Margo, too.” I look at her, confused, but she doesn’t see me. She scrubs at her face with the palms of her hands. “All that shit that went down, it messed me up. I couldn’t get over it, and when he left, that made it that much harder. It’s like never getting closure, never really getting to say everything I wanted to. I guess I thought I’d get a chance someday.”

  “Margo?”

  Gwen sniffles and nods. “Yeah. You know, Margo Smith. She’s the one Luke cheated with.”

  My whole face goes hot, like someone just turned the temperature of the whole city up twenty degrees. “Cheated?”

  Gwen looks at me for a minute, blank, and then her eyes go wide, and her back straightens. “Oh God. Ellie, I thought you knew.”

  My stomach churns. “Luke cheated on you? When?”

  She bites her lip, but it’s not like she can take it back now. It’s already in the air, and she has to tell me the truth. “A few weeks before he left.”

  “But you … I mean, you guys were together. When he left, you were together.”

  She shakes her head. “We weren’t. We broke up.”

  I just stare at her, and she stares back, and I think maybe she’s waiting for me to react, waiting for me to say something, but I’m too confused. I feel like we’re talking about someone else now, not Luke, not my brother, some stranger that I didn’t know.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Cade and Wes cross the street, heading in our direction. “Then why did you come to the house that day?” I hear the words come out of my mouth, as if somehow this is the most important thing I need her to explain to me. The morning after Luke left, Gwen showed up on our doorstep, and I had to tell her what happened. I had to tell her that her boyfriend—at least, I thought he was her boyfriend—had picked up in the middle of the night and vanished without telling anyone where he was going. And she cried, right there in our dining room.

  Gwen glances at Wes, and I see his face change from calm to concerned as he moves to her side. “I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to try and figure out if there was still something between us before I let him go.” She says it so gently. She’s trying to comfort me, even though it happened to her.

  I look out over the square, at all the people going about their normal routine. I want to know what normal looks like. I keep waiting for my life to feel normal, and it never does. Maybe my new normal is not really knowing my brother. Maybe my new normal is having the people I thought I knew constantly tell me things I can’t even understand, rewriting my history until not even the past looks like the normal I remember.

  I can hear Gwen and Wes talking, and I know she’s telling him what she just told me, but I can also tell, by the rhythm of her voice, that he already knew. Maybe he knew when it happened; maybe he knew later, when they broke up; maybe he didn’t know until he and Gwen became more than friends. Either way, he knew before I did, and I know that it’s not about me. I know that on the list of ways that Luke hurt me, this isn’t really one of them. This is how he hurt Gwen.

  But I still feel it, the residual pain, bouncing off everyone else until it lands on me, and I’m just the culmination of all of it. This is my new normal.

  “Ellie?” Cade sounds confused, and when he comes to stand in front of me, a bottle of water dangling from his fingertips, I feel sorry for him. He’s an outsider, a spectator to our lives as we live them around him.

  “Ellie,” I hear Wes say, “this doesn’t change anything.”

  “I don’t get it,” I say, pushing onto my feet, perching at the end of one of the concrete steps. My voice is low, free of inflection. I don’t feel the need to accuse or get upset. I just want to know. That’s all. I just want to know my brother. “How could he have so many secrets I didn’t know about?”

  “Luke didn’t tell you everything, Ellie.”

  I look up at Wes, standing on the step beside Gwen, still so much space between them, and something burrows inside me. “He was my best friend. He told me everything.”

  “No, he didn’t.” Wes looks defeated. “He always felt like he had to pick and choose with you. I know he didn’t tell you about losing his virginity or about the time he got the shit kicked out of him when we were freshmen. Or the time he ran away for three days and hitchhiked down the highway. Luke had secrets, Ellie. Even from you.”

  I think about that fight in the living room, the envelope Luke waved around, like it was a grenade he was about to launch into the room.

  Something heavy forms in my throat, and I can’t bring myself to look at any of them. I can’t admit to them that Wes is probably right. He kept that stupid map, cheated on Gwen, broke up with her, asked Wes to leave with him and got mad when he wouldn’t, and then took off. I try not to think about what else he was hiding from me. What else did he think I wasn’t strong enough to handle?

  I turn and walk away from them, heading for the other side of the street.

  “Ellie!” Wes shouts to me, but I turn to face them and throw up my hands.

  “I’m just going to find a bathroom,” I say, not even a lie. I wait for the traffic to open and plunge across the street, ducking into the first place I see, a bar. It’s mostly empty, which I’m grateful for, and I keep my head low as I make for the back of the small building, right into the ladies’ room.

  I clutch the edge of one of the porcelain sinks and try to breathe, but every time I think I have a grasp on something, every time I think I’m getting closer to understanding what the hell happened to Luke and to me and to all of us, I just get farther away. I’m not getting answers; I’m just getting more questions.

  I wash my hands and splash water on my face. I lean bac
k, my face turned toward the ceiling, and let the cold air from the vent blow on my face, cooling the blush that took over back at the monument. Once my face is a little less splotchy, I feel confident enough to open the bathroom door and step back out into the dark bar. I can’t stop, not even for a moment. I have to keep moving, until we’re in Michigan, even if knowing I might find more secrets there is almost enough to make me falter.

  I stand in the hallway where the bathrooms are, and I wait. I wait to see if someone is going to come after me, any of them, but they don’t. I stare at the door, at the outline of sunshine that makes it through around the edges. Maybe I can just stay here. Maybe they’ll never come looking for me. Maybe I can just disappear.

  I hear the crack of billiard balls and look over to where one of the only patrons of the bar is playing pool.

  In the light of the red wall sconces, I almost don’t recognize him. He’s wearing sunglasses, and I wonder how he managed to hit any of the balls if he can’t see them. He doesn’t seem to be playing with anyone, but he has a drink balanced on the edge of the table, something honey-colored with melting ice.

  There’s something so familiar about him, something that tugs at something deep in my brain. It’s the way he carries himself as he moves from one side of the table to the other, the way he gently grasps the pool cue, the way he leans against the table with the weight of one slender hip and takes a drink from his glass. The more I watch him, the more I know it’s him, and I can’t seem to take my eyes off him.

  Jack Olsen.

  I have to be hallucinating. There’s no way that Jack Olsen is here, in this bar. There’s no way that the one place I walked into in Indianapolis is the one place where Jack Olsen, lead singer of Nova, just happens to be at seven o’clock on a Monday. It’s probably just my eyes—or my brain—playing tricks on me the way it did back at the arch. I’m just seeing Jack Olsen here because it’s what I want to see.

  “Are you in line?”

  I drag my attention to a girl who’s a foot taller than me, motioning at the bathroom door behind my back.

  “Oh. Sorry. No.” I move out of the way to let her pass, and when I look back, Jack has abandoned his game of solo pool and is leaning against the bar, talking to the bartender. He laughs, and it’s the laugh that does it, the familiar smile, the way he grips his drink in one hand and gestures wildly with the other. It’s definitely Jack Olsen. I’ve seen the way he moves on stage, in music videos, in interviews, enough to be sure, even if it’s dark and his sunglasses are obscuring so much of his face.

  I try to seem natural as I sidle up to the bar, praying that now, of all times, Wes or Cade or Gwen doesn’t decide to come into this bar to check on me.

  Feeling bold for some reason I can’t even begin to fathom, I take the stool one over from Jack’s, a red vinyl stool still between us. Jack glances over at me, but he doesn’t miss a beat in his conversation with the bartender.

  “I’m not saying the Colts are going to the fuckin’ Super Bowl or anything, I’m just saying that if they keep up the way they are, they could sweep the AFC South, okay?”

  The bartender makes an incredulous sound and then glances over at me. “You want something to drink?”

  I tap the bar, like I know what the hell I’m doing, and say, “Jack and Coke.” I’ve never actually had a Jack and Coke, but Luke used to drink them in Wes’s basement when they could talk the guy at Liquor House into selling them Jack Daniel’s for twice the sale price.

  The bartender glances at Jack and then the two of them start to laugh. The bartender comes to stand in front of me. “You look like you’re about twelve, so why don’t I just bring you a Coke without the Jack?”

  He turns away, and I watch him, terrified to look at Jack. I focus on a group of girls by the front door who seem like they might already be on their way to drunk. But then again, I’m fairly certain Jack has already had one too many.

  “Did you think that was going to work?”

  I turn and look at him, struck by how different he looks now than he did the last time we saw him in concert. His hair is longer, his face covered in days-old stubble. One side of his mouth is perked up in amusement, and I decide to take advantage of that.

  “I figured it was worth a shot.”

  He snickers and throws back the rest of his drink. “You’re better off flirting with a cashier at a gas station or something. Bill’s not the kind to serve anyone who’s underage.”

  With that, Bill sets a glass of Coke in front of me with a grunt. “Damn right. I’m not losing my liquor license because some teenager wants to get drunk.” He sets another drink in front of Jack and turns to help someone else.

  I glance at the door, certain that any second now, someone is going to come after me. But when I turn back around, Jack is off his stool, taking his drink back to the pool table.

  “I just came from the catacombs,” I say loudly, and then mentally curse myself for acting like an idiot. There were definitely smoother ways to strike up a conversation with someone like Jack Olsen.

  Nevertheless, this makes him pause. He presses his hip against his vacated stool and looks at me. “Oh yeah? Teenagers love that place. Used to be a lot less of a tourist spot.” He cocks his head and takes a gulp of his drink, his eyes never leaving mine. He smacks his lips and sets his glass on the edge of the pool table. “Used to spend a lot of time down there when I was your age.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  He raises an eyebrow at me. “Yeah? And how would you know that?”

  I shrug. “Rolling Stone.”

  He pauses, looking at me, and then a smile spreads across his face. He nods at Bill, behind the bar, and Bill nods back. I guess that means he’s getting another drink.

  “Should have seen that one coming. You know,”—he points one long finger at me—“they made it seem like that article in Rolling Stone was going to put us on the map. But that didn’t happen at all.”

  I shrug again. I’m really making a good impression here. “I think you guys do okay.” Nova isn’t exactly selling out stadium shows, but they’re not playing to drunk crowds in dive bars, either.

  He smiles at me. “You don’t see my paychecks.” He picks up a pool cue and chalks the end, and I just watch because I’m not nearly as good at pool as I am at foosball, so there’s no way I’m going to suggest I join him. Not that I should anyway. I’m supposed to be on my way to Cade’s family’s house right now. “Where are you from?”

  I perch one hip on the side of the pool table and watch as he lifts his sunglasses, takes a good look at the table, and then sinks a ball, all in less than thirty seconds. “Texas.”

  He whistles. “Long way to come just to see the catacombs.”

  I pull at one of my cuticles, unsure whether I should drop this on him. He’s a stranger. I’m a stranger. But I grip the pool table and do it anyway because I’m never going to get a chance like this again.

  “Actually, we came here because of you. Because of what you said in the article, about meeting the rest of Nova down there.”

  Jack grins at me and adjusts his sunglasses. “A fan, huh?”

  My stomach drops. Nova was always Luke’s band. He took me to all the concerts, uploaded all of their albums onto my iPod, played them in his car when he drove me to school or to football games or anywhere really. Nova is Luke’s band, not mine.

  “My brother was the real fan.” This is not an answer to his question, not really, and I know how it sounds as soon as it leaves my mouth. I know it’s the kind of thing you say when you want someone to ask questions.

  His grin persists, and he pushes his sunglasses up to look at me. “Let me guess, he loved the Rolling Stone article and the one song they played on the radio, but he lost interest when we fell off the radar.”

  “Actually, um, no. He always loved you guys.” The words catch in my throat, and there’s a creeping up my back, an uncomfortable awareness that I’m talking about Luke to a complete stranger, even if it feels
like I’ve known Jack Olsen for a long time.

  Jack blinks at me like he already knows what I’m going to say.

  “He died. Two weeks ago.”

  “Fuck.” His smile is gone, and he sets his pool cue against the table. “Hey, Bill!” I watch as he makes eye contact with the bartender and nods at him. “Get us that Jack and Coke.”

  Bill makes a strange face but reaches for a bottle anyway.

  Jack sits on the edge of the pool table. “I’m fucking sorry. That’s … Christ, that’s awful.”

  I decide immediately that even if he’s being kind, I won’t go into the details. The last thing I want to do is ruin Jack Olsen’s night with my and Luke’s story, with the way things seem to be unraveling with every step, with the fact that the three people I came here with are across the street, waiting for me.

  Bill slides the Jack and Coke across the bar to us, and I watch as Jack goes to get it, looks down into it, and then hands it to me. Bill doesn’t say anything, just raises his eyebrows and walks away.

  “Thanks.”

  “Is there anything I can, uh, do or…?” He looks so uncomfortable that I’m almost sorry for saying anything about Luke. He fiddles with his sunglasses.

  “In that Rolling Stone article, you said that being sad over people who’d died didn’t do anybody any good.” I remember the night I sat in my bed, reading the article again for the fifth time while Luke snored on the other side of our shared wall. I remember reading that line over and over again and thinking how cynical it sounded. Cold. Emotionless. It felt like something only someone who was heartless could think.

  I forgot about those words he’d said, that article a piece of my past from two years ago, but now, standing in front of him, the man who said them, makes them come roaring back like a tidal wave.

  Jack groans and rubs a hand over his face. “Shit, kid. I gave that interview right after my dad died. I was bitter. It wasn’t supposed to mean anything. I was just … talking.”