We Are the Ghosts Page 17

  Saw it coming.

  I think about that day in the living room, Luke yelling so loud at our mother, his whole body shaking with anger. Maybe I should have seen it coming, too. Maybe if I had paid more attention.

  “Toward the end, I don’t think he loved me anymore. I think he knew I didn’t want to leave Eaton. And it was like I was a waste of his time if I didn’t want something more. He wanted somebody who wanted adventure, someone with wanderlust, just like him. And I didn’t have that.”

  She falls quiet, and I try to process everything. Something about knowing this, it turns anxiety into a weight on my chest. Maybe it’s knowing that Luke did cut all of his ties. Maybe he didn’t just walk away from all of it like I thought he did. He wasn’t friends with Wes when he walked out that door, and he wasn’t Gwen’s boyfriend.

  But he was still my brother. He still walked away from me.

  Gwen’s quiet for a long time, and then I hear the soft cadence of her breathing, and I realize she’s fallen asleep.

  * * *

  All the lights are on in the house when we get there.

  “That’s weird,” I say to Cade as we walk up to the front door. I imagine my mother waiting angrily at the dining room table.

  “Think you’re in trouble?” Cade asks with a grimace.

  I shrug. “No clue.” I’m used to my mother’s anger, to her disappointment and her fits, but not even she can ruin this perfect night.

  On my doorstep, Cade stands with his hands in his pockets. He looks nervous, and it’s so adorable, it makes my skin tingle.

  “Thank you for taking me to the drive-in. It was awesome.”

  He smiles down at me. “I’ve thought about taking you there for a long time.”

  I take a step closer and tilt my face up to his. “You can ask me out anytime.”

  His eyes drop to my mouth, scan my face, but he doesn’t move. Is he waiting for me to make a move? I’m not feeling quite as brave as I was back at the drive-in, and I wait for him to close the distance between us, but he doesn’t. He takes a step away from me, one foot resting on the step below us.

  “I’ll see you later?” he asks, and for just a second, I imagine waiting for him at the garage, holding his hand at school, going on dates every Friday night.

  But he obviously isn’t going to kiss me tonight. He takes another step, now completely on the step below me. I try to hide my disappointment.

  “Good night, Cade.”

  He smiles and takes the rest of the steps down to the sidewalk. “Good night, Ellie.”

  I watch him get back in his grandmother’s car and drive away.

  * * *

  I get out of bed and tiptoe out into the hallway. I know where Sam and Laney are sleeping, so I go the other way, opening a door beside ours that has PRINCESS LANEY written in pink glittered letters on it. The room is completely dark, but this side of the house is right under the shine of the moon, and I see in its light that Cade isn’t asleep in the bed. Wes is.

  I back out, shut the door, and keep moving until I’m in the living room, right where we first came in. The moon is shining down through the windows in here, too, and I see Cade, his eyes open, looking up at it, spread across the sofa.

  “I thought I heard someone moving around,” he says, and then his eyes find mine. He doesn’t move, just keeps his head propped in his hand as he watches me, waiting to see what I’ll do.

  I lean against the doorway. I don’t even know why I’m here, other than that I can’t seem to stay away from him. “Tell me why you came on this trip.”

  “Ellie—”

  “Tell me the real reason. Is it because you wanted to come here and see your family again? What happened to make your grandmother keep you away from them?” I’m feeling bold. It feels like Cade knows everything about me after the past few days. Well, almost everything. I still can’t bring myself to tell him why I put an end to what was so obviously starting between us that night on my doorstep. So maybe I don’t have the right to ask him this, when I’m still holding on to so much, but I want to know something about him, and seeing as how I’ve just walked right into the center of his family drama, now seems like a good time.

  The smile falls from his face. He pushes himself into a seated position, the blanket falling to his waist to completely reveal his Star Wars T-shirt.

  I can practically hear the wheels turning in his head, can practically feel his hesitation in the air. He takes a deep breath, and it’s so quiet in the house that I can hear it as loud as I can hear the ticking of a grandfather clock somewhere.

  He swings his legs over the side of the couch. “Come on, I want to show you something.”

  * * *

  “This might be a little crazy,” I say as Cade leads me out into the woods behind his aunt’s house. It’s so dark, even with the moon shining high above us, and I’ve read my fair share of news stories about people getting lost in the woods and never being found.

  Cade laughs. “Don’t worry. There’s a path.”

  I feel a little ridiculous, walking through the woods in my pajamas, but he’s wearing his, too, so I guess that makes it a little less ridiculous. But I still feel exposed, naked, in my thin clothes in the open air.

  “I want to go to school out here, in Indiana.”

  I stop walking, feeling like he just dropped something right in the path that I can’t get around. “Really?”

  He nods and motions with his chin for me to keep following him. We go in so deep that the house disappears and all I can see is trees and shadows. The only thing keeping me from freaking out is the shape of Cade in front of me.

  “My parents met at the University of Indiana,” he says. “My grandmother used to tell me the story.”

  “Really?” I’ve heard stories of people meeting in college, falling in love during orientation or a dorm hall party or whatever. But I’ve never known someone directly who had that kind of story, someone who was the product of it. My parents met at a mutual friend’s wedding.

  Cade stops walking, and I almost run into him. When he turns, I can just make out the lines of his face, the way his mouth is turned down just slightly, a frown. “They died. That’s why I moved in with my grandmother. That’s why my grandmother doesn’t really talk to my uncle anymore. She took me, moved to Texas, and tried to forget about Indiana.”

  I feel like my heart has completely stopped beating. “Cade, I’m so sorry. How did I not know this? How have I known you for so long and not known that?”

  Cade shrugs. “My grandmother didn’t want people gossiping about me, so she’s tried to keep it quiet. You know how it is in Eaton.”

  The muscles in my stomach go rigid. All this time I thought we were the only ones who lost someone, and here Cade was the whole time, hurting. “You could have told me.” I’ve known Cade since we were kids, we’ve been friends for so long, and I could have been there for him better. I could have helped him somehow.

  The thought almost makes me laugh. How can I help Cade if I can’t even help myself?

  “Anyway, that’s why I’m here.”

  I look over at him, confused. “Because of your parents?”

  He starts walking again, and I follow him, even though I feel like my whole body has gone numb. “I’ve always felt like I was missing out on a part of them by never coming back. But it was so hard for my grandmother when it happened that she never let me.” He stops again, and I stop beside him. He finally looks down at me, finally sees me.

  “I know you came on this trip because of your brother. I don’t understand it, and it’s okay if you don’t want to tell me everything, but when I saw that map in your car, I knew it had to do with him, and I was so jealous of how brave you were, taking the leap, leaving Eaton just like that, and I wanted to be brave, too. I wanted to come here. I wanted to…” He stops, presses his hand into his stomach, exhales. “I wanted to bring you here.”

  I take his hand, overlap our fingers. “I’m here,” I say, and even thoug
h it’s meant to comfort him, it comforts me, too. I’ve been so lost on this whole trip, so confused about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, what I’m going to find in Michigan and what I left behind in Eaton. But with his skin against mine, I feel grounded. “I’m sorry about your parents.”

  He leans close to me. “I’m sorry about Luke.”

  We’re quiet for a long time, and I set my head against his chest, listen to his heart beating. It’s the loudest thing in the world right now, drowning out the sounds of the wildlife and the occasional car on the road.

  I look up at him, at the way his eyes are focused on me. “Why didn’t you kiss me that night? At the drive-in?”

  His mouth opens a little, and I think I caught him off guard, saying the thing he least expected. Maybe it was the thing I least expected, too. His hands wrap around my arms, his fingers digging into my skin just a little, like he’s keeping me from floating away. “I guess I thought I had time.”

  I have to look away from him. I thought we would have time, too. I imagined a nice future for us, complete with candy hearts and prom dresses. “I’m sorry,” I say. I probably should have said it a year ago, when I stopped answering his calls and stopped looking at him in the hall and stopped being his friend. “I never meant to hurt you.”

  “What happened?”

  It’s too hard to explain. It’s too hard to try and put a name to the rift between my life before and my life now. There’s no simple definition. “I guess I just don’t even know who that girl is anymore. I don’t make sense without Luke.”

  He doesn’t reassure me. He just looks down at me for a long time, and then he takes my hand, steps backs, and pulls me farther down the path. I follow him in silence, and stop when he does.

  “Want to go up?” he asks, and I realize that I’ve been so busy looking at him that I didn’t notice the tree house directly beside us.

  I look up at it and laugh. “Do people really build tree houses in the woods?”

  Cade smiles at me and starts to climb the wooden ladder. I watch him go, smiling at the way his bare toes curl around the wooden planks. Who knew that feet could be cute?

  When he’s at the top, he sits at the edge of the little porch that hangs past the doorway, dangling his feet over the edge and looking down at me. He pats the wood beside him, and I crane my neck.

  “Um. That’s kind of high.”

  His smile falls. “Oh. Shit. Sorry. I’ll come back down.”

  “No,” I say quickly. “No. I want to come up.” I’m still feeling brave. I’ve come all this way, followed Cade into the woods, said things I never thought I’d say. I can certainly climb a damn wooden ladder.

  He stops, his hand still wrapped around one of the wooden slats. “Okay.”

  When I was a kid, my parents took Luke and me zip-lining. The tree was taller than the one Cade is in right now, the line extending through the forest, to a tree so far away that you couldn’t even see it.

  “Don’t forget to throw down the rope so we can stop you,” the instructors told me. The idea that whether or not I was going to crash into a tree on the other side was dependent on my own competence was too much for me. I made it halfway up the tree before I stopped, unable to go any farther.

  Down on the ground, my parents called to me that I was okay, that I could do it, but I couldn’t. Luke had already started climbing up behind me, so they told me to slide as far as I could to the left of the ladder to let him up beside me. I held on with a death grip, and then I felt Luke’s body slide past mine. He was moving so fast, completely unfazed. I watched him climb over the lip of the wooden platform and then heard his far-off celebratory noises when he reached the other side while I climbed slowly back down to the ground.

  I look up at Cade, focus on his legs dangling over the edge as I force my way up, my limbs trembling as I go. When I get close enough to the top, Cade’s hand wraps around my arm, and I know that if I slip, he won’t be able to keep me from falling, but it’s nice to know he would try.

  I pull myself up onto the platform and swing my leg up, grabbing on to the wooden slats and finally landing all of my weight onto it, flat on my back. Just past the edge of the tree house’s roof, through a break in the trees, I can see the stars. I hold my fingers up to the sky, looking at the way the stars are the same color as my pale skin. I let my hand drop.

  “It’s not so bad once you’re up here.”

  He smiles and lies down beside me, our faces side by side, our bodies pointed in opposite directions.

  “I thought you’d like it. My dad and my uncle built it when I was a kid. We didn’t have as much land as my aunt and uncle do, so they let us do stuff like this here. As you can tell, Laney has sort of adopted the place.” He points at something on the wall inside the tree house, and I realize it’s a crayon drawing of a unicorn, galloping atop a rainbow. It’s actually pretty good.

  Cade turns his head, so I turn mine, and I feel like I should memorize every crevice of his face. The freckle he has on his right cheekbone, the way his top lip has a little Cupid’s bow dip in it, the way his eyes shine with moonlight.

  He takes a deep breath, and I wait for what I know he’s going to say, what I can already feel seeping in through my pores. “I know it feels like you’re not you without him. But you are, Ellie. You’re still that girl from the drive-in.”

  I shake my head, feeling like I can’t pull air into my lungs. “That girl was someone else.”

  He nods, turns to look up at the stars. “Maybe. But when I look at you, I still see her in there. Maybe a little different, but still the same person, just without all the pieces she adopted from her brother.”

  I scowl at him, his words driving away the unease in me. “What do you mean?”

  He shrugs, his shirt making a rustling noise as it slides against the floor. “You liked all the things he liked; you did what he wanted to do. This is the first time you’ve ever had you all to yourself.”

  I feel like someone just cut me open. I’ve never thought about it like that before, like the reason I’ve felt half complete since Luke left is because so much of me was just made up of him. Nova, the parties, the map, even Gwen and Wes. Everything is him. So what part of it is me?

  “You’ll figure out the rest,” he says, so casually, so gently, like he didn’t just gut me. “You want to know something?” he asks in a way that I expect him to say something about the stars or about the history of Indianapolis, but instead, he says, “This might sound totally twisted, but when I heard about Luke, I guess I just felt maybe you would understand.”

  “Understand?”

  “How I felt when I lost my parents.”

  I’m still searching for something to say, but he keeps talking. “I know things have been weird between us, and I’m not saying I thought we’d get back together or anything like that. It’s not about that. I just want to be your friend again. I just wanted you to know that I’m here, and I know what you’re going through.”

  “So, what? You thought you could save me?” I don’t mean for it to sound so harsh, but it does anyway. I’m falling apart, right here outside of this tree house.

  His eyes go wide. “God, no. If anything, I thought maybe I would be able to save myself.”

  I don’t know what to say after that. I don’t know the right things to say to comfort him. I can’t even reconcile what I know about Cade with what I didn’t know until tonight. He didn’t just lose someone, he lost two someones. And he still feels it. Maybe I’ll still feel it, too, a decade from now.

  When I open my mouth, I’m not sure what I’m going to say, but somehow, I end up saying, “I can’t believe I met Jack Olsen in that bar today.”

  Cade turns to me with his whole body now, flipping onto one side so that he can see me entirely. “Yeah, how did that really happen?”

  For some reason, the ridiculous look on his face makes me laugh. I cover my face, laughing hard, trying to speak but unable to find the air. “Oh my God,” I sa
y, pressing my hand to my stomach. “I have no clue. I went to the bathroom and when I came out, there he was.” I gasp for air, laugh more. “He was playing pool, drunk, wearing these awful sunglasses.”

  He snorts then, looks at me, smiling. He reaches out and thumbs away the tear that’s tracked down the side of my face. The laughter dies down inside of me, and I have to look away from him. He’s so close, I can smell a hint of toothpaste on his breath.

  I look up at the sky, see the way the stars swirl above us in the dark. “Hey, are you still interested in astronomy?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” he says, his voice dreamy. His eyes start to close, but then he opens them quick and shifts onto his back again. “See, there’s Ursa Major right there and Corona Borealis.” His hand moves in circles, his finger making me dizzy. “And there’s Polaris, also known as the North Star.”

  He keeps talking, and I close my eyes, listen to the soft cadence of his voice as he talks about the night sky.

  * * *

  When I open my eyes again, the sky is just barely starting to lighten with sunrise.

  “Shit,” I say, pushing up on the hard wooden slats, feeling how sore my back is. Beside me, Cade is still fast asleep, rolled onto his side, his arms tucked close around him like maybe he got cold during the night.

  “Cade,” I say, shaking him. “Cade, we have to get up.”

  He groans and shifts onto his back. It takes him a second, but his eyes eventually open slowly, staring up at the sky for a long time before finally shifting to me. “Ellie?”

  I can’t help but smile. “Tree house, remember?” I point at the tree house over my shoulder, and his eyes go there and then shift back to me.

  “Right. That would explain all the pain.”

  Without waiting for him, I stand up and move to the ladder. Hopefully no one else is awake, and we can just sneak back into the house without any fuss. Going back down the ladder is way easier than going up, as my destination is solid ground, and I wait for Cade at the bottom.