We Are the Ghosts Read online

  Her phone number.

  While I’m still looking at the card, she bends my way slightly and puts her hand over mine. I meet her eyes, so blue and so kind. “Call me if you want to talk,” is all she says, and then Officer Phelps helps her to her feet.

  “I’ll walk you out,” he says, taking her by the arm and leading her to the door like she’s injured. I watch them go and feel a weird pull toward them, something that makes me want to beg them not to go.

  Because now I’m completely alone.

  * * *

  Officer Phelps has been filling out paperwork for what seems like hours when I look up and see two faces pressed to the door beside the reception desk, looking in on me. My heart leaps into my throat, and I glance at Officer Phelps quickly, waiting to see if he’s noticed. I can see through the window that Gwen’s and Wes’s faces are pressed to that the reception desk is empty.

  “I need to use the bathroom,” I tell Officer Phelps.

  He doesn’t even stop writing. “Out the double doors, hang a right. It’s at the end of the hall. Be quick.”

  I hurry away from his desk and as soon as I’m in the lobby, I grab both Gwen and Wes and pull them into the hallway where Officer Phelps said the bathroom was. I can see the sign for it at the end of the hall.

  “You can’t let anyone see you,” I say, panicked at all the many ways this could possibly go wrong, but Gwen has already moved toward me, wrapping her arms around me.

  “We were so worried,” she says, squeezing me. “We went back to the house and there was no one there, and then Cade told us you guys got picked up by the police.” She steps back and looks at my face, examining me like I might be injured. I try to erase the image in my head of her crying and running from Chloe’s house.

  “It wasn’t quite as scary as it sounds,” I tell her. I don’t want her to give me any more credit that I deserve. “Gwen, I’m so sorry,” I say, feeling like it’s the most important thing that needs to be said right now, but she waves me off.

  “It’s fine,” she says in a way that tells me it’s really not but that she’s going to pretend it is. “Just tell us what to do.”

  I shake my head and glance behind them, watching to make sure the receptionist isn’t coming back. “Nothing. Just go home, okay? Go back to Eaton.”

  Gwen’s eyebrows turn in. “Without you?”

  I shrug. “It’s kind of our only option. My parents are on their way anyway. You guys should go back home. Or um…” I stop, the words catching in my throat. “Or you can finish the trip without us.” The thought makes my stomach ache.

  Gwen reaches out and squeezes my arm. “Absolutely not. We’ll go back to Eaton, wait for you there.”

  I just nod, feeling, irrationally, like I’m going to cry again. “And don’t tell anyone you were with us. I don’t want you to get in trouble.”

  “Yeah,” she says, and then she’s hugging me again, and I wish I could beg her to stay. I wish I could ask her to wait for me, to stay until my parents come, but I know I can’t. So I pull away and look at Wes.

  Wes looks just as tired and sad as Gwen does. “We’ll see you in Eaton,” he says, tapping me gently on the shoulder before the two of them disappear out the front door. I stand at the end of the hallway and watch them drive away for the second time today.

  * * *

  It’s just Officer Phelps and me in the room when he gets a call to tell me that my father is here for me. He doesn’t mention my mother, and I have to assume that’s because she’s not here. I meet my father at the reception desk, and he signs some kind of papers, but I can’t even watch him do it, so I just wait by the front door until he’s done.

  We don’t say a word to each other as we walk out to the parking lot and get in a car that I’ve never seen before: black and shiny. A rental.

  We drive to Detroit, where my father buys two tickets back to DFW airport, and by the time we’re on the plane, my skin is clammy from the anxiety of no words passing between us. I feel like I need to say something, but I feel even more like I need to wait for him to ask me something, to ask why I’m here or how I knew where to go or who I was with, anything. But he doesn’t, and it’s been so long that I feel like my lips are permanently attached together, that I couldn’t get my mouth and jaw and vocal cords to work, no matter how hard I try.

  So I turn away from my dad on the plane. I don’t have anything to do, don’t even have my phone, since it’s all in Wes’s car. So I stare out the window, and I wait for something to make sense.

  * * *

  The display on the seat in front of me says we’re somewhere over Kansas when my father puts something in my lap. I have no clue what to expect when I see the long, white envelope. I stare at it for a long time and then glance at my dad, but he’s not looking at me. He presses his face into his hand, so I reach for the envelope.

  There’s a stack of papers inside. I turn the flap down and look at the front of the envelope, and that’s when I see the addresses on it. It’s addressed to my father’s building at work, but that’s not what gets me.

  It’s the return address.

  From an address in Ann Arbor.

  Ann fucking Arbor.

  I close my eyes, bracing myself, telling myself that maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s from a long time ago. From someone my father used to know. A business acquaintance. A friend from college. It’s definitely not from Luke.

  I try to make myself believe it. I take a deep breath. And then I open my eyes and reach inside the envelope. I pull out a stack of papers. They’ve been unfolded and refolded multiple times, until they have more than one crease down the middle, the papers bisected in half in a dozen different spots.

  The first thing I see is Luke’s signature, on a line with two others, stacked one on top of the other. I can’t make out the printed words above them. Not because they’re illegible, but because my hands are shaking so fiercely that the words are a blur on the paper.

  When I can finally read it, when I get everything in my body to settle enough, when I get my blood to stop quivering, I look at the papers. It’s some sort of legal paperwork. It’s some kind of paperwork for a house. And it has Luke’s signature on it. And my dad’s. I skim over it, trying to make sense of it, when I see the address, printed clearly on the very last page.

  26 E Cole St, Dexter, MI 48130. The house that Luke lived in with Chloe. There’s a ton of papers, some kind of lease, but then the legal paperwork ends and there’s just a letter. I recognize Luke’s handwriting immediately. It’s always been slanted chicken scratch, since we were kids, so small and almost unintelligible. But it’s there.

  Dad,

  Thanks for doing this. I’ll fax a copy to your office as soon as everything is taken care of. We’re moving in next week. Talk soon.

  Luke

  There’s a lot to wade through, so much information and so many questions in just three sentences. But my eyes get stuck on those last two words. Talk soon. Talk soon. Like they were talking all the time. Like they were in constant contact.

  But that’s not possible. It’s not possible because Luke was on the road. He didn’t leave us anything. His social media accounts were deleted. His phone always went to voice mail.

  But here it is, a piece of mail from him like it’s nothing. Like we didn’t lose him in every way, like this isn’t a tiny piece of him that’s so goddamn huge that it could be hidden away until this very moment.

  There’s still one more piece of paper, and when I look at it and see that it’s a US map with Luke’s exact route penciled in, it’s almost more than I can take.

  “I don’t understand what this is.” I almost choke over the words. My hands have started shaking again, so hard that my father reaches over and takes the papers out of them. He puts them back in the bag that I just realized he has.

  “I helped Luke get out of Eaton.”

  I finally look over at him. I watch his mouth move, but everything sounds fuzzy. How long did he know? How long
did he know that Luke was going to leave? How long were they planning it? How long were they keeping this a secret from everyone? And how many times did my father look at me across the dinner table, knowing that Luke was going to leave and maybe never come back? How long did the two of them smile knowingly while I sat there like a clueless idiot?

  “He came to me a while ago, said he had this trip all planned out. He said he couldn’t take it anymore, and that he needed to leave.”

  I scrub my hands over my face. I’m so angry at him, I could scream. But I want answers. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. “But why? Why did he need to leave? Why couldn’t he just wait?”

  My father presses his lips together, and I’m afraid that his words have dried up. He’s barely spoken a word to me since Luke died, wasn’t much of a talker before that, and I’m certain that any second now, the words will stop flowing, and he’ll go back to being the ghost he’s been for the last month, for the last year, floating around on the edge of our lives.

  But after a minute, he says, “I think that’s a story for another day.”

  “No,” I say, my voice too loud. I lower it when the person in the seat in front of me sends me an angry glance. “No, you don’t get to just not answer my questions.”

  He puts up a hand to stop me. “That’s not my side of the story to tell, Ellie. All I can tell you is my side. I helped Luke, got him a credit card that your mom didn’t know about, helped him get a house, kept his secret.”

  “I can’t believe you knew all of this and didn’t tell me.” Anger is a monster I don’t have to invite in anymore. It always lives inside me, so it takes close to nothing for it to make an appearance, to butt its head into any situation.

  “He asked me not to tell you.”

  “I’m pretty sure that promises like that expire when the person with the secret dies, Dad.”

  “How was I supposed to tell you this, Ellie? How could I possibly put this on your shoulders after everything? How could I know that you would be able to handle it?”

  “It’s not your job to worry about what I can and can’t handle. I deserved to know.”

  His shoulders slump. “I know. I wanted to. But I thought maybe it would be easier for you not to know.” He pauses. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

  “Why?”

  He pauses, looks like he’s measuring his words, treading carefully. “It’s hard being left behind. Right?” He looks at me expectantly, but I don’t think I can agree with him. Not because I don’t know what it feels like to be left behind, but because I’m not so certain that he was left behind.

  I resist the urge to reach into his bag and rip the letter back out of it. I think again about those last words: Talk soon. “But you got to talk to him all the time. You knew where he was. How can you even—”

  “We didn’t talk all the time. He needed my help. He asked me for help when he needed it, and the rest of the time I didn’t exist. You know how Luke was.”

  My stomach clenches. It was hard enough for me to admit to myself that I was mad at Luke, that he did something wrong by me, but hearing my father talk about Luke this way, after being so disconnected for so long, is too much for me. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  His eyes turn to me, slits that seem accusatory. “Yes, you do. You knew better than anyone. Luke kept people around when he needed them, but at the end of the day, it was only Luke. He looked out for himself; he did what he wanted. Hell, he took off and forgot we existed.” He’s starting to raise his voice, and I’m afraid we’re going to get kicked off this plane.

  He seems to realize this. He looks around, ducking his head a little like no one will realize he’s there if he just makes himself small enough. Finally, he speaks again. My face is hot with rage, my heart pounding hard.

  Even though I know he’s right.

  I want to put an ocean between us.

  His face is as blank as the day he told me Luke was dead. I wonder if there’ll ever be life in his eyes again.

  “I didn’t do any of this to hurt you. Luke asked for help. He was my son. I would have done anything he asked me to. If roles were reversed, you would have done the same thing.”

  On this point, I know for certain that he’s wrong. Just like Luke thought, I would have been selfish. I would have begged him not to leave. I would have begged him to take me with him. I would have given anything to keep him.

  “If it was your secret,” he goes on, “I wouldn’t tell, either.”

  I look him in the eye for the first time in months. They’re ice blue. Luke’s eyes. I was always jealous of that, of the way Luke and my dad had interesting eyes, the kind of eyes that people comment on when they meet you, while my eyes were plain: brown and simple like my mother’s.

  “I’ve never had secrets,” I say, and this much is true. Until the moment I got that map and kept it from Gwen and Cade, I’ve never kept secrets. Not from my parents, and certainly not from Luke.

  My father just nods. “That’s something I’ve always admired about you.”

  Once the moment has passed, and I’m pretty sure my father isn’t going to pick up the thread of the conversation, I say, “What about Chloe?”

  My father grimaces. “I didn’t know about the baby, not until we got there.” He shudders. “We found out we were going to be grandparents the same day we went to pick Luke up. It almost destroyed your mother.”

  I try to imagine it from my mother’s point of view, but it’s tainted. All I can think about are all the words they screamed at each other, all the ways she found to sabotage Luke, over and over again. I scrub at my face. I can’t bring myself to think about my mother’s role in all of this right now. I’m ready to be done with this conversation, to be done with all of it. But my father isn’t ready to let go.

  “Why’d you go to Michigan, Ellie?”

  It’s a question with a million different answers—to find Chloe, because we planned the trip with Luke, because Luke did it, to get away from my mother, to get away from Eaton—but I don’t know which one will be the most satisfying for my father. I shrug. “I don’t really know.”

  He frowns but doesn’t say anything.

  “If I’m being honest,” I say, “I guess I thought maybe you’d be glad to be rid of me. It’s not like Mom really wants me around.”

  I try to read my father’s expression, but he’s still a blank page. “This is still our family, and that’s not going to change.”

  A hot tear slides down my cheek, and I brush it away quick. “I don’t know if I can do this without him,” I say, so quiet that I’m not positive he heard me at all.

  * * *

  When I open the door, I hear voices in the living room, and I know immediately it’s not some movie that my parents decided to watch. I know these voices, know the cadence of their arguments because it seems to be their consistent state: Mom and Luke.

  “I can’t believe you did this,” Luke says, his voice like acid. “I get it, you want to control everyone’s lives. You think you know what’s best for us, but this is crossing a line.”

  I tiptoe up to the wall that separates the living room from the kitchen and as subtly as I can, I peek around the corner I’m hiding behind. Luke has an envelope in his hand, and he’s waving it in my mother’s face as my father looks on from the couch. I recognize it. I know it because I watched Luke discover it sitting on top of his desk this afternoon when we got home from school. I watched the way his entire body deflated when he opened it. An acceptance letter from Tate.

  At first, I thought he was overreacting. Luke does that. A lot. I thought maybe he was looking at that acceptance letter as something so much worse than it was, like it was the final straw, like it was the sound of the chains being attached to his wrists, the door to any other kind of life finally closing.

  But now, watching the two of them, I know it’s more than that.

  “You want to go on adventures and see the world, that’s fine, Luke. But when that’s over, a
nd when you still need a future to look forward to, Tate will be here. All I did was secure this for you so that you would have something to come back to.”

  Luke slams the envelope down on the table beside the sofa and rushes off, and I stay where I am, hidden behind this wall, certain I’ll never move again.

  * * *

  The house has never been as quiet or as still as it is when we get back home, like the only thing to touch the air for days has been the specks of dust that float though the patches of light coming in through the entryway window. I don’t know if this house is ever really going to feel like home again, but it feels emptier now, with just the two of us.

  “Where’s Mom?”

  My father sets his duffel bag down beside the front door. I’ve somehow come away from Michigan completely empty-handed. “She went to stay with your aunt for a few days.”

  I snort. “Guess she wasn’t really that worried about me. Why did she did bother with the missing-persons report?” I’m already halfway to the stairs when I hear my father’s voice behind me.

  “Actually, I’m the one who filed the report.”

  I spin around and see that he’s still standing by the front door, his hands tucked into his pockets. For just a second, he looks more like the father I remember: starched jeans, button-down shirt, brown shoes, always brown shoes, even if they don’t match his clothes. There’s some color in his skin, and for the first time in a year, I feel like he’s looking at me instead of through me.

  “Why?”

  He shrugs. “I was worried. Luke left, and look what happened. I didn’t want it to happen to you, too.”

  My parents aren’t affectionate. They’re not the kind of parents who insist on saying I love you anytime one of us leaves the house or demands hugs and kisses or anything like that. This, right here, may be the first time my father has said anything that gave away that he cares. I’m so unpracticed for such an occasion that I have no idea how to respond.