We Are the Ghosts Page 4

  What about me? What about what I feel? I’ve been left out since Luke vanished in the middle of the night and everyone moved on with their lives like we didn’t all orbit around him. I’ve been lonely since my best friend took the map in my hand and walked out the door.

  I grip the map and look at Wes. He stares back, and I know I’ll be the first to break, just like I always am, always the one to concede.

  “Fine,” I say because I can’t bring myself to say no anymore.

  THREE

  For the first time in almost a year, every single light is on in the house when I get home, and my mother is in the kitchen. It’s ten in the evening, and it smells like my mother is making seafood. My father is planted in front of the TV, his eyes glazed over as he watches some show about a pawnshop. As my mother pulls something out of the oven, I see that her eyes are a little unfocused, too. It’s like a cemetery in here, solemn and quiet. I thought it was bad when Luke left, when we all stopped talking and started avoiding one another. It’s worse now.

  When my mother sees me, her eyes go wide. “Ellie. Finally. I thought maybe dinner was going to get cold before you got home.” Pink fillets of salmon sizzle on the pan she just pulled out of the oven.

  “What are you doing?”

  Her eyes stick to mine, like she’s afraid that if she looks away, I’ll run. And maybe I will. It’s hard to know at this point.

  “I know it’s late, but I thought it might be nice if we started having dinner as a family again,” she finally says, pulling the oven mitts off her hands.

  “As a family?” My stomach tightens. “The three of us?” I can feel an ominous ripple in my blood as I look at my mother, like something swelling inside. Sure, we’ll just have family dinner, the three of us, what’s left of our family. Now that Luke is gone, we can pretend he never existed. We can move on with our lives. We can have dinner together the way Luke always hated. I grit my teeth and turn away from her. “I’m not hungry.” It’s never bothered me before that my mother feels the need to control everyone around her. Not the way it bothered Luke. I’ve always been willing to do exactly what she tells me to, never saw any reason to argue. She wanted me to take gymnastics, so I did. She wanted me to quit gymnastics, so I did. She wanted me to get up ten minutes earlier, so I did. She wanted me to go to bed an hour earlier, so I did.

  But Luke was always ready to defy her. They fought about school, about his future, about the girls he dated, the classes he took, what time he woke up in the morning, what he spent his money on. Always, always she micromanaged. She would tell him what time to get up in the morning, and he would forget to set his alarm clock. She wanted him to try out for the swim team, so he joined track. She told him to be home by eleven, so he snuck in at three.

  She told him to stay, to go to Tate, to give Eaton a shot.

  So he left and never came back.

  It makes me sick just thinking about it.

  Well, I’m not interested in backing down anymore. I’m not sitting next to an empty chair and pretending that we’re still a family. We haven’t been a family since Luke left. And now we’ll never be one again.

  I turn for the stairs, but my mother steps out of the kitchen. “Eloise, we’re going to have dinner together.” She’s got her stern voice on now, the one she uses on her lecture classes at Tate. This is the mother I know: unmoving as granite. Why did I think for even a second that she might just let me be? “And tomorrow, I think you should tell your boss that you’re not available to close up the shop anymore.”

  I grip the handrail beside me. It’s my own fault, I guess. I’ve given her free rein of my life, I’ve always been the easy one, the malleable one. “I’m not a dog,” I say, heading up the stairs, torn by both a bone-deep desire to please her and also a Luke-inspired desire to tell her off. “You can’t just order me around.”

  “I can take your car away.”

  I freeze, surprised, even if it is her, that she’s threatening me. She’s never had to do that before. I twist my hands into fists and consider my options. Sure, no car means my mother giving me a ride to school every morning; it means taking the bus from school to work; it means not getting to leave home anytime I want to. But there are worse things.

  “I’ll take the bus,” I say. I’m determined to win this one. My mother was the one who insisted I get a job in the first place. She wanted me to learn life skills. She wanted me to have something to keep me out of trouble. She wanted me to learn what it meant to be an adult. And now she wants to take it away. Because she can.

  “Maybe it’s time you quit the shop.”

  I bark out a laugh. I feel manic, like I’m going to rattle apart if I don’t have something to grab on to. But there’s nothing, no anchor. Just my mother, pushing and pushing and pushing.

  When Luke was twelve, he asked for a scooter for his birthday. Everyone had scooters, including Wes, and Luke wanted one of his own, a little silver thing that he could ride around the neighborhood. Mom got him a brand-new bike instead.

  “You’ll like it better,” she told him. “I promise.”

  He didn’t like it better. He hated it so much that he mowed lawns all summer to save up for a scooter. And then he rode it around our house to rub it in our mom’s face.

  “Just leave me alone!” I shout, throwing open my bedroom door. “Please, for God’s sake, leave me alone!”

  The tightness in my chest gets worse until I can’t breathe, and even as I slide to the carpet, wrapping my arms around myself, trying to just make it stop for a minute, just a minute, I hear her voice on the stairs, then right outside my door.

  “You’re not the only one who lost someone, Eloise.”

  * * *

  Mom and Luke fighting is like the soundtrack of my life. It’s turned into white noise, always going in the background when I’m trying to do homework, trying to do dishes, trying to live my life. I’ve learned to ignore it, learned to drown it out with a constant internal monologue of equations and lines of Shakespeare.

  And yet somehow, the fight this time is happening in the hallway outside my bedroom door, and even though I’m plugging my ears as hard as I can and have my music playing loud, I can still hear them, every single word crystal clear.

  “Lucas, if you’d like to run around in the middle of the night, doing God knows what, well I guess I can’t stop you, but you are absolutely not getting your sister involved in all of your shenanigans.”

  I wait for Luke to growl at her not to call him Lucas, which he hates, but instead he latches onto something else. “God! Shenanigans? Really? Mom, she’s sixteen! It’s my senior year. I just want to spend a little quality time with the one member of this family who doesn’t want to put a fucking leash on me.”

  Usually, I don’t want to hear it. Mostly because they never seem to fight about anything real. It’s always the same things: how Luke never does what he’s told and Mom works so hard and why can’t we just be a normal family? I almost never make an appearance in these fights, unless Mom is pleading with Luke to be a little more like me. I’ll do what Mom tells me to. I’m obedient.

  “Oh, give me a break, Luke,” our mother sighs, like she’s just so exhausted. “You act like you’re so misunderstood, such a tragic case. Must be so awful to have a roof over your head and parents that love you and a future all planned out for you.”

  “I don’t want a future all planned out for me!”

  I flinch. Luke is always the first to raise his voice, to really get angry, and it’s always enough to make me want to cringe. I’m used to the quiet Luke, the gentle Luke. That’s who he is with me, all smiles and afternoon naps and goofy jokes whispered low where no one else can hear. I don’t like the Luke that yells.

  “Great,” my mother says, sarcastic. “That’s just wonderful. I guess my job here is done.”

  I hear her footsteps move down the hall, but Luke’s stay put.

  * * *

  The next morning, my car won’t start. I stare at my steering
wheel. I’m exhausted down to my bones, and the idea that my mother may have sabotaged my car is just a little too much for me to handle this morning. I grind my teeth together, standing on the edge of rage. I will myself not to go over.

  And then it starts to rain.

  I get out of my car and stare at it, letting the rain drench my hair and my clothes. I know it’s not the battery because I’ve had a dead one enough times to remember the sound it makes. This is something different.

  I have two options. I can take the bus.

  Or I can call Cade.

  * * *

  The hood of my car blocks Cade from the rain as he leans under it and messes with something in the mass of metal guts. He makes a humming noise and then a clucking noise and then leans back out.

  “I think I need to look inside,” he says, not meeting my eye.

  I rush to open the door for him and then watch as he sits in my seat and pulls a panel free from the inside of my car. He examines it for a second and then nods.

  “Yeah, it looks like your starter fuse is missing.” He pops the panel back in and looks up at me expectantly, like I have any clue what that means.

  “So, I just need to replace it?” I back away from the car so he can get out and shut the door, and then we’re both standing in the rain beside my house, pretending that we’re not getting completely soaked. I’m trying not to show just how nervous I am, how the way he’s standing so close to me is affecting me. I cross my arms like a barrier.

  “Oh,” he says, like he forgot something, and then he pulls an item out of his pocket. It’s a little piece of plastic with metal plugs sticking out of it. He offers it to me, and when I reach out to take it, I feel a surge of affection toward him, like he just put a blanket around me on a cold day.

  “You just carry fuses around in your pocket?” I ask, a smile trying to creep up. I bite it back down. I shouldn’t be flirting or whatever it is I’m doing. I should be getting in my car and going to work. I should be planning this trip to Michigan.

  I shouldn’t have called Cade. I shouldn’t have asked him to come out here in the rain when we haven’t really spoken in over a year.

  He smiles down at his feet, where rain water is pooling around his shoes. “When you explained the problem, I narrowed it down, that’s all. I brought one just in case I was right.”

  I grip the fuse so tight the metal spokes dig into my skin. “I can pay you for the fuse.”

  “They cost, like, four dollars. It’s not a big deal.” He reaches up and runs his fingertips along his scalp. Once upon a time, Cade had thick, dark hair. And then the summer before sophomore year, he buzzed it, and he’s been wearing it short ever since. But I’ve noticed that he presses his fingers into his scalp like that, reaching up as if the hair might have grown back without him noticing.

  “I should get to work,” I say at the same time that he says my name, like a whisper beneath the sound of the rain hitting the roof, the metal gutters, the hood of my car.

  He shuffles his feet and tries to put his hands in his pockets, but the denim is too wet so he lets them hang at his sides. “Would you maybe want to get dinner sometime soon? Maybe just to talk? Maybe we could even—”

  “Cade.” I brush the water droplets off my face. I tried to save Cade from me a year ago, when I was just beginning to fracture. Now that I’m completely broken, I can’t let him any closer to me than he is right now, for both our sakes. “Now’s just not a good time.”

  He nods, and specks of rain fly from the ends of his hair. “Right. Yeah. I’m sorry.” He pushes away from my car and starts walking down my driveway, back to the bus stop at the end of my street, where the bus dropped him off.

  I watch him go, and when I get in my car, my entire body is wet, my shirt heavy, my pants soaked all the way up to my knees. I do what Cade did, opening the fuse box and putting the one in my hand where there’s an empty space. The car starts, and I pull out onto the road, whisking water off my windshield.

  Cade stands there at the bus stop, the rain pouring down on him, and I feel that same tug toward him, an attachment that’s somehow still there under the surface after all this time. I can’t just let him stand in the rain for the bus.

  I stop at the end of the street, pull up to the curb opposite the bus stop, and roll my window down.

  Cade’s head hangs low, and I say his name, trying to get him to look up at me. When he doesn’t move, I realize sometime between my house and the bus stop, he put earbuds in his ears.

  I take a deep breath and shout his name louder. His back straightens, and his head comes up. The rain has slowed down a little, but it still leaves tracks on his face. He sees me and glances at the (I hope, waterproof) watch on his wrist then back at me. Maybe he’s afraid that if he comes to talk to me, he’ll miss the bus, but he comes anyway.

  “Get in the car,” I say when he’s close enough.

  He looks over his shoulder at the bus stop. I don’t know the schedule, but I know chances are good the bus that runs all the way around Tate is just around the corner. It doesn’t matter, though. He came when I called him, and he brought me a fuse, and even after what happened between us last year, he still wants to take me out to dinner, so the least I can do is give him a ride to work.

  “Just get in, Cade.”

  He hesitates, but he finally walks around to the passenger side of my car and opens the door. “It’s no big deal,” he says as he climbs in. “I wait for the bus in the rain all the time.” He shuts the door, and I put the car in drive.

  “Well, not today.”

  He smiles at me, unexpectedly. My foot slips off the brake pedal, and we jerk forward.

  “Sorry,” I whisper.

  His white T-shirt is waterlogged and sticking to his skin, I see when we stop at a light on Main Street. I try not to notice the shape of his body through his wet T-shirt. Unfortunately, this means I can’t look at him at all because his torso makes up such a large portion of his body that every time I look at him, all I can see is wet, peachy skin.

  I focus on the road.

  “So, you work at the garage, but you still don’t have a car?” It’s a stupid question, but I’m still a little distracted by how wet we are, not to mention the fact that this is the first time Cade has ever been in my car.

  He looks over at me, eyebrows raised. “And exactly how many antique lamps do you own?”

  I smile out the windshield. “Touché. Although I have about a million books, so that argument doesn’t quite hold up.”

  When I sneak a look at him again, he’s laughing quietly, moving his fingers over each other in a way that says he might be as nervous as I am. “So, out of curiosity, how exactly did you just lose a starter fuse?”

  I grip the steering wheel and try not to growl in frustration. “My mother. She’s trying to get me to quit my job so that I can be home all the time, and we can pretend we’re a perfect family.” By the time it’s all slipped out, my eyes have gone wide. I can’t believe I just said all that to him. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “It’s okay,” he says over me. “I know your mom can be a bit of a control freak.”

  I scoff. Control freak seems like too forgiving a term. “Yeah. I forgot that I told you all that.”

  “Yeah, before we—”

  “Right.”

  The car falls into silence. We’re almost to the strip mall where we both work, but we’re sitting at the worst light in Eaton, watching cars fly through the intersection.

  “What’s that?” Cade nods his head in a gesturing motion, and I realize I left Luke’s map sitting on the dashboard, tucked against the glass of the windshield. My eyes go wide, my thoughts immediately spinning in an attempt to come up with a lie. I didn’t even realize I left it up there, and from where I’m sitting, I can see Luke’s handwriting along the edge of the paper. There’s a crackle of panic under my skin.

  “Oh, it’s just a map.” I try to play it off like it’s unimportant so that he won’t as
k to see it, but my casual answer has him reaching for it instead. I fight the urge to get to it before him. Instead, I watch him open it, watch his eyes fly over the marks all over it. It’s not a big deal. I don’t have to tell him about Luke. I don’t have to tell him that someone sent that to me just a few days ago. To him, it’ll just be a map. I can almost breathe again.

  “Are you going on a road trip?” he asks, still looking down at it, and I pull into the parking lot by the mechanic shop and stop the car.

  “Yeah, maybe. It’s just a little thing. Me and some friends.” It sounds weird coming out of my mouth, and I think Cade understands that I’m trying to make it sound like something it isn’t by the way he looks over at me carefully before folding up the map and putting it back where it was.

  “Looks like a lot of fun,” he says. “Have a nice time.”

  I start to thank him, but he’s already opened the door, and the sound of the rain drowns out anything I try to say.

  FOUR

  On Friday morning, the house is so quiet, it feels like the silence is crawling along my skin as I pack my things.

  Before Luke left, there was always noise in the house. My father was throwing an office Super Bowl party or my mother was hosting book club or Luke was holding a Call of Duty tournament in the living room. It was almost never me. Even when I had friends over, we mostly camped out in my room, watching movies and eating junk food. But our house was always like Grand Central. The front door was often left open because someone was always on their way in or out. “They’re right behind me,” my mother was so fond of saying. Wes and Gwen came in without knocking because they practically lived here, and sometimes my father’s office buddies were mingling with the track team in the kitchen because if you came over, chances were good you were going to bump into someone you didn’t even know.

  But when Luke left, our need for social interaction went with him. First the holiday parties stopped, then the book-club meetings, then, of course, my friends stopped coming around because I stopped asking them to. And now, our house is so quiet, all the time. Even now, I can hear the ice maker all the way downstairs, the tree limbs brushing against the window of the guest room, the soft ticking of the clock above the TV in the living room.