Between

by Jessica Warman

  “Hey,” she says, exhaling, turning her head to look down the street. “Richie’s leaving his house.”

  Josie is putting the Ouija board back in its box. She seems uninterested in Richie’s whereabouts. But I know Josie better than anybody. I can tell she’s only pretending not to care. “He’s probably going running again. He’s been running like a fiend lately.”

  “Richie?” Mera’s tone is doubtful.

  “Mera? Can you not smoke in here?” Caroline sniffles. “Liz hated smoke. It seems disrespectful to her.”

  I glance at Alex, who’s still on the floor. “This from the girl who stole five hundred dollars from me not two weeks ago,” I say.

  He nods slowly with understanding. “You’re right.”

  The expression is startling. It occurs to me that it might be the first time since we’ve been together that Alex has smiled at me with anything other than detached disdain.

  Then I remember something. “Richie already went running once today.”

  “Yeah? Maybe he’s going out again,” Alex offers.

  As soon as the words leave his mouth, Mera says, “I don’t think he’s going running, Josie. He’s wearing jeans and a sweatshirt … and flip-flops.” She pauses. She exhales a ribbon of smoke. Then she says, “It’s past ten. You don’t know what your own boyfriend is up to?” Again, she and Caroline exchange looks. It’s clear they’re skeptical of the idea of Richie and Josie dating.

  “I thought you were going to go out with Jason,” Mera says. “He wants to ask you. You know that.” She’s talking about Jason Harvatt, who is only a junior but very popular. He’s on the basketball team. He’s cute. And he’s had a crush on Josie forever, but she’s never shown any interest in him.

  “He’s not my type.” Josie shrugs.

  “Where do you think Richie’s going?” I ask Alex.

  “I don’t know. Probably on a drug run.”

  But I don’t think so. I’m not sure why. It’s like I’ve said from the beginning—Richie and I are still connected. It’s almost like there is an invisible thread between us, binding us together somehow, and I can feel its tug as he makes his way down the street.

  “I want to follow him,” I say.

  Alex hesitates. He gives me a mock pout. “Can’t we stay? I was kind of hoping your friends would change into negligees and have a pillow fight.”

  I walk over to him and grab him by the arm. “Yes, because that’s what we do at every slumber party. Come on. We’re leaving.”

  But just as we’re heading toward the door, it swings open.

  “Oh no,” I say, stopping dead in my tracks. “This is going to be bad.”

  It’s my dad. He’s standing in the doorway in red pajamas—a Christmas gift last year from Nicole. His reading glasses are perched on top of his messy brown hair—exactly the same shade as Josie’s natural color.

  He turns on the lights, looks at the floor, at the Ouija box. He sucks in a sharp breath. “What’s going on in here?”

  Mera, stunned into stillness, is frozen at the window, her lit cigarette burning between her fingers.

  In a swift motion, Josie slides the Ouija box under my bed. “Nothing, Dad,” she says. “We were just playing a game.”

  “A game?” His eyes are wide with disbelief. “Is that a Ouija board? Where did you get that?”

  Josie glances first at Caroline, then at Mera. Both of them are staring at the floor, unwilling to make eye contact with my dad. I don’t blame them.

  “Did your mother give it to you?” my dad demands.

  Josie doesn’t say anything.

  “And what’s this?” He strolls into the room. There is an edge in his voice unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. He isn’t just angry. He’s furious. “Wine? Where did you kids get wine?” He raises his voice and, before Josie has any time to protest, booms, “Nicole!”

  There’s a thick, awkward silence in the room as my friends continue to avert their eyes. Only Josie will look at my dad, and she does so with a fierce gaze; she seems almost angry with him.

  “My mom said it was okay.” Her tone is calm.

  “Marshall?” Nicole appears in the doorway. “What’s the matter?” She stares at my sister, at my friends. “What are you girls doing in Liz’s room?”

  “I smelled smoke,” my dad tells her. “I was afraid the damn house was on fire. But no. It’s just your daughter in here”—Josie winces visibly when he says “your daughter”—“having a damn séance. And they’re drunk.” My dad’s voice is steadily rising. “Whose idea was this, Nicole? You two went to church today, didn’t you?”

  Nicole presses her lips together in a tight smile. “Marshall,” she says, her voice so calm and kind that it seems patronizing, “your heart.”

  “I don’t give a damn about my heart. Your child is in here trying to contact the dead.” He stares at my friends. “You girls. You think this is okay? Elizabeth was your best friend. She’s dead now.”

  He chokes up. He begins to sob. It hurts so badly to look at him as he’s falling apart.

  “She was my daughter,” he says, his voice wavering with sorrow and tears. “My daughter is dead. You think there’s anything okay about that? You think it’s okay to come into her room, to conduct a séance? What did you learn? That she’s never coming back? She was just a baby. You girls are just babies, do you know that?”

  My dad cannot stop crying. He’s breathing hard.

  “Marshall,” Nicole soothes, rubbing his back, “come back to bed.” She glances at Josie. “The girls are just having a slumber party. It’s what they do.”

  “It is not what they do. It is not okay, Nicole.” He stares at the floor. His cheeks are flushed with anger.

  “Oh, Dad,” I whisper. “I’m right here.”

  Alex stares at me. “I wish he could hear you,” he offers.

  “Me, too,” I murmur.

  “Think about him,” he suggests. “Remember something happy.”

  Reality slips away almost effortlessly as I close my eyes. When I open them, trying to remember my father, I see that I’ve settled on a memory of the two of us. We are alone, and right away I realize that I’m revisiting the short period of time in between my mother’s death and my dad’s marriage to Nicole. He was only single for a few months before she and Josie moved in with us.

  We are standing outside my dad’s car; back then he drove a silver Porsche. He has pulled over to the side of the road, where a large cardboard box rests in the sandy brush a few feet away. On the box, in black permanent marker, somebody has written: FREE KITTENS!

  I am nine. It’s summertime. The sun shines brightly overhead in midafternoon, and from the looks of it, I’ve obviously just come from swimming somewhere. I’m wearing a pair of denim shorts over a one-piece red bathing suit. My long hair hangs in thick wet strands down my back. My shoulders are tan, my face slightly sunburned. My dad, I realize, probably had no idea how to raise a little girl by himself. I’m guessing he didn’t think to put sunscreen on me before I went swimming.

  “Stay there, honey,” my dad says, taking a step forward by himself to peer into the box. “Let me see.” He stops, staring downward. “Oh my … would you look at that?” he breathes.

  “What is it? Dad, are there really kittens?” I stand on tiptoe in my jelly sandals, trying to catch a glimpse.

  “Come here, Liz. It’s okay.” He smiles at me over his shoulder. “There’s a whole litter, I think.” His forehead wrinkles in mild concern. “Who would leave them out here alone? How awful.”

  Standing beside my younger self and my father, I look inside the box, already knowing what I’m about to see. Inside are seven tiny kittens, bright orange balls of almost unbearably adorable fluff and paws and sweet pink noses, their small mouths open, all of them mewing in a high tinny cacophony. There is barely enough room for them to move around in the box; they almost pile on top of one another, stumbling as they struggle to claw at the cardboard walls. Their tails are short an
d pointy, eyes glassy and bright blue, and as we gaze down at them, they tremble a bit, undoubtedly frightened, all alone in the world, beside the road, with no food or water. Whoever left them here didn’t care a bit what happened to them.

  At age nine, I kneel beside the box and pick up a few, one by one. My dad watches as I hold their furry bodies against my chest, pressing them to my cheek, grinning wildly. “Daddy? Can we take them home? Please?”

  Watching us now, the request strikes me as absurd. There are seven of them. But I remember this: I know how it works out. I realize that Alex is right about me, at least in one way: I was incredibly spoiled.

  My dad shades his eyes, staring at the cloudless sky. “Kittens grow up, Liz. They won’t be little and cute forever. We should take them to the humane society.” He pauses. “I’ll let you keep one of them, if you’d like. But just one.”

  “But Daddy, they’re brothers and sisters! They’ll miss each other!” And I pick up two more—they’re really tiny—so that I’m clutching five of them against my body. “Please? Please can we take them home? Just for a few days—then you can give them to the humane society. Daddy, they’re hungry. They’re lonely.” I gaze at my father with wide, pleading eyes.

  My father: recently widowed, living with his young daughter, wanting more than anything in the world to make her happy. Wanting more than anything to make her smile. For her to not be alone. He would have done whatever I wanted. He did do whatever I wanted.

  I didn’t have to pout or cry. I barely even had to beg.

  “All right,” he says, smiling, “you can keep them for a few days. Maybe a week.”

  I watch as my younger self—so overjoyed, so giddy with happiness that I practically seem drunk at nine years old—places the kittens back inside the box. My dad carries it to the car. Since the Porsche doesn’t have a backseat, he rests it on my lap for the ride home.

  I watch the two of us drive away. I don’t have to follow to remember the rest of what happened with the kittens.

  A week went by, and they were still so small—so cute!—that I couldn’t bear to part with any of them. I named each one after a day of the week. Sunday used to crawl into my dad’s dress shoes and fall asleep. Thursday never quite grasped the idea of a litter box. I remember it all so vividly.

  I loved them for the next two months, for the rest of the summer. Then they started to grow into cats; eventually, they weren’t as cute anymore. I lost interest. I stopped playing with them. And one day, when I came home after school, they were gone. My dad had realized I didn’t want them anymore, so he took them to the humane society. He traded those seven cats in for a new, tiny kitten. I named her Little Fluff. And when she started getting big, he took her to the humane society and returned with another kitten—Mister Whiskers, who used to curl up in bed with me at night and purr away. I decided to keep Mister Whiskers.

  I realize now that, if I’d let him—and if the humane society had tolerated it, which they probably wouldn’t have after a while—my dad might have continued trading cats for kittens, over and over again, so that I would never have to experience them growing up, so that, to me, they would be tiny and cute forever.

  After my mother died, he did everything in his power to make me happy. Everything. He gave me whatever I wanted: the most expensive name-brand clothes, front-row concert tickets, designer handbags and shoes and makeup, and all the things my heart could possibly desire. He bought me a brand-new car when I turned seventeen.

  He let me have a party on our boat for my eighteenth birthday. Anything and everything I wanted. No matter what the cost.

  Back in the present, I watch my father as he stands in my old bedroom, crying. We don’t have Mister Whiskers anymore. One snowy day a few years ago, he went outside and simply never returned.

  “Looks like the rest of your family isn’t holding up as well as you thought,” Alex says quietly.

  “Yeah,” I say, nodding, “it looks that way.”

  “Girls,” Nicole tells Josie and my friends, still keeping her tone light, “why don’t you all go down to the living room and … I don’t know, drink some cocoa or something?” To my father she says, “Marshall, let’s go. Let them be.”

  Before they leave the room, he turns to Mera, who is still frozen, holding her cigarette. By now, it has burned down so far that it’s mostly ash, dangling at an angle from her limp hand. “Put that damn cigarette out right now,” he says, his teeth gritted.

  Mera flicks the cigarette out the window.

  “Good.” My father takes a deep breath. “That’s better.” He looks at Caroline—who seems to be near tears—at Josie, and finally at Nicole. “Let’s go back to bed,” he tells her.

  “Sure, honey. Let’s go.”

  They leave, closing the door behind them. My friends don’t say anything for a long time.

  Finally, Mera says, “Wow, Josie. Liz’s dad is in rough shape, isn’t he?”

  Josie stares at her. She narrows her eyes. “My dad,” she corrects Mera. “He’s my dad, too. You know that.” When I was alive, she was never this forceful about the idea that we might have the same father. Now that I’m gone, though, she is adamant.

  “She really believes it,” I say. “Listen to her, Alex.” I look at him. “She’s convinced we have the same father. I never thought it was possible, never once.”

  “But now?” He lets the words dangle with possibility in the air.

  I shake my head. “Now I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know anything.”

  Alex nods. Then he asks, “Do you still want to follow Richie?”

  I’d almost forgotten. But I’m grateful for the interruption. Seeing my father so upset is heartbreaking. My poor dad. He seems so alone now. I feel an incredible sense of guilt for having left him. Even if I didn’t do it on purpose, it doesn’t change the fact that I’m gone.

  “Yeah,” I say, my voice cracking, “let’s go.”

  There is almost no moon, just a tiny slice of silver crescent hanging in the sky as if by magic as we follow Richie through town.

  “I wish we knew where he was going,” I say, wincing with every step. I can feel the blisters on my toes. I can feel nerves being pinched with every motion. “You don’t know how badly this hurts. If we knew where he was headed, we could just go.”

  “I have an idea about that,” Alex says.

  “You do? Where do you think he’s going?”

  “It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? We’re almost there.” And he nods at the wide iron gates ahead of us in the distance. “He’s going to the cemetery.”

  It’s a cool night; Richie’s feet must be freezing in his flip-flops. For a minute, I imagine how my toes would feel in a pair of sandals—so free, finally.

  Almost immediately, it becomes clear where he’s headed. It should have been obvious right away. He walks past several rows of tombstones until he reaches a fresh plot that is cluttered with flowers and teddy bears. It’s my grave.

  Alex and I are close together, watching him. For a long time Richie doesn’t say or do anything: he only stands there in the dim moonlight, staring at the earth. My tombstone is not up yet; according to Alex, it takes at least a few weeks for them to carve the stone—sometimes more, depending on how elaborate the marker is.

  Slowly, Richie kneels, brushing his fingers against the dirt. He puts his head down. He starts to cry.

  “I would have forgiven you, Liz,” he says out loud. “I don’t care what you did. I don’t know why you would have … I don’t know anything. But I would have forgiven you. I promise.”

  I have tears in my eyes. “I’m so sorry, Richie,” I whisper. “I don’t know what happened. I love you.”

  Alex is staring at me. “You really do,” he says.

  “I really do what?”

  “You really do love him.”

  I nod. “Yes. I’ve loved him forever. Alex, I don’t know what’s going on, or why you and I are here together. But when I saw my dad back there, in my old ro
om, I remembered something … Alex, I used to be different. You don’t have to believe me, but it’s true. I was just a normal little girl, and then my mom died, and everything was different after that. It’s almost like … like I thought that if I were pretty and thin and popular, if I surrounded myself with people who liked me, if I could control everything that went on in my world, then what happened to my mom wouldn’t hurt so much anymore. And my dad was willing to do anything to keep me from suffering. It made me shallow. I get that now. Alex, you have to understand, I’m sorry for how we all treated you … for how I ignored you. And for how we treated other people, too, people like Frank Wainscott. I’m sorry things were so hard for you in school. If I could go back and change the way it all happened—”

  “You can’t,” he says simply. He doesn’t sound angry or compassionate. Maybe just a bit regretful, but mostly, his tone is matter-of-fact. “It’s over for us.”

  I look at Richie. “It’s not over for him.”

  My boyfriend kneels for a long time. Then, in a deliberate motion, he lies down on my grave. The grass beneath him is young and thin; it has barely begun to sprout over my freshly dug plot.

  Richie lies on his side. He lies on top of my body, down there in the earth, and he closes his eyes.

  I go to him. I lie beside him and put my arms around his body. As my sea legs make themselves known again, the ground seems to rock gently. Like last time, when I concentrate hard, I can feel Richie. But it’s also different from before, outside Alex’s house. Instead of our contact growing unbearably hot, forcing me to pull away after a few seconds, I’m thrilled to find that, this time, I can really hold Richie. The feeling is beyond wonderful. It is the most alive I’ve felt since my death. As we lie there, it occurs to me that I held him almost exactly the same way over a year ago, when he was sick in bed. And even though Richie doesn’t give any sign that he can sense me, I am almost giddy from the feel of his curly hair against my face, his clothing beneath my hands. I can feel his breath. I can hear his heart beating, feel the coolness of the damp earth beneath us.