We talk about little things for a while, but not about my family. I don’t want to bring that crap into our friendship. Eventually we get to Lionel and the long talk we had on Saturday night.
“You know what you need?” she asks after I tell her. I shake my head. “A Ouija board. You need to do better than yes-no if you are going to get the names of these people or get more complicated information from him.”
I nod, it makes sense, I have no idea why I didn’t think about it. “I think we might have one at the bookstore. But…”
“What?” she asks.
“Too many questions if I get it from the bookstore.”
She nods and pulls at the green grass for a moment, ending in a shrug. “So get a piece of paper, write the letters on it, have him point.”
“Wow. Great idea. Next time he comes back, I’ll get the names of his friends.”
“Well there you go, problem solved. What else can I do for you today?”
She’s all smiles and in a good mood, but in a flash of intuition my mood goes a tumbling. “How was your date?” I ask. She postponed it on Saturday and had told me Sunday was “family” day, but she’s different.
Her smile actually deepens and my heart flips in my chest. “It was good… But how did you know?”
I force a smile onto my face. “Your mood is a bit effervescent.”
“He’s nice. Not like Jeff ‘the hands’ Tate.” She leans back onto the tree looking up at the one little cloud in the brilliant blue sky above us and pops a bubble with her gum. “I mean… It’s not like he’s the best-looking guy I’ve ever gone out with, or the most exciting. But he’s nice. And I’m hoping he’s honest too.”
I can tell I’m blinking too much as I watch her talk about this new boy. I’m “nice.” I’m “honest.” I’m certainly not the “best looking.”
She looks at me and her face gets serious, her mouth forming a straight line as she pushes up from the tree. “Wade…”
I hold my hands up. “I get it, okay. I really do. You and I are friends, but…”
She nods, “The hormones.”
I bite my lip and nod back. “It’s a work in progress.”
We’re silent then, the banging in the Adam’s Theatre, the slight breeze, and the cars on the street the only sounds. It’s a delicate place we are in. I am so glad to have her as a friend, but I have other feelings too. Feelings she doesn’t share. Feelings that I have to somehow keep in check.
She has a smile on her face as we say our goodbyes, but I know my reaction is why she is leaving so soon. I watch her walk away, wondering what’s next. With us. With Lionel. With my parents.
I’ve got time, so I ride through the graveyard on my way home. I am glad when I see Big Ed Lopez slowly pacing on the grass near Uncle Don’s grave.
“There you are, my young friend,” he says as I ride up, a smile on his face. I feel warm inside that he calls me a friend. As adults go, he’s different, less like my parents and more like my uncle was.
“Hi, Big Ed.”
He smiles, his cheeks pushing up and making his eyes narrow. I think he’s glad I called him “Big Ed.” “Can you distract an old man from his own cares for a bit?” he asks. I am getting fond of his southern drawl.
I get off my bike and set it down in the grass. “Sure.” I have gotten really comfortable being in the graveyard and being with Big Ed. I still have that little nagging question about the coincidence of a detective showing up just when I need to solve a murder, but it’s not a very big thing anymore. A kind adult that listens and treats me like an adult is very welcome.
“And what is the nature of your troubles today, Mr. Wade?”
We’re walking down one of the narrow paved streets that pass through the tall trees and granite markers of the dead. He’s got his hands clasped behind his back and is looking at me.
“Is it that obvious?” I ask.
He chuckles, a brief, deep rumble. “At your age, my friend, it is assured.”
“Let’s see,” I begin, holding up one finger. “My mother is mad at me and I’m mad at my father.” He nods, I hold up another finger. “The most beautiful girl I’ve ever met only wants to be friends.” He smiles and nods again as I hold up a third finger. “And I really want to solve this murder.”
He stops and sighs. “I am afraid that those first two items are just not things I would be much help with. But I would listen if you want to talk about it. That third item, though, now there I might be useful council.”
We start walking again and I tell him what I know about Lionel’s murder. One suspect that the police let go. Three close friends. Stabbed in the back while working late at night. A real loner.
“I’ve learned what I can about his life, like you suggested, but I’m kind of stumped as to how I get people to talk to me about this directly. I’m not the police. I’m not a detective. I’m just a teenager.”
He’s silent, his gait slow as he walks. He reminds me of Pastor West, at least in his size. He’s short with such a broad chest and must weigh 250 pounds. I’m a skinny teenager, it’s hard for me to imagine being that big.
“In life, it’s best to use what you’ve got and it’s best to stick to the truth when possible—much easier to keep things straight.”
I nod, encouraging him to continue.
“If what I’ve heard about you is correct, you’ve been ill, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, son,” he continues. “If you are willing to use that, I think you’ve got a great way to get people to talk to you.”
He then tells me his plan. It’s a good one, all I need now is the names of Lionel’s friends.
Dinner is quiet and tense. I don’t know what to say to my mother and I don’t want to talk to my father. After eating and clearing the table, I excuse myself and go up to my room as soon as possible.
I use some paper, a ruler, a pen, and scotch tape and make something of a Ouija board. It’s a bit more logically laid out though—A through Z in a simple grid with another grid of common phrases and words: “Yes,” “No,” “The,” “I Don’t Know,” and the like.
Then I wait. And wait… and wait…
No Lionel. I try to read, but my head just isn’t in it. Writing this diary is the only thing really helping me keep my head on straight right now. Except it’s not on very straight, is it?
17
Tuesday, June 28, 1977
Nothing to report. No Lionel, no Helena, and things still tense at home. Billy and I did hang out for a while and we both avoided the subject of Lionel and what his ghostness means to him.
I have decided to do something for my mom. Something unexpected. Something special. I want to go back to my father’s original suggestion, which was she’s been through a lot for me and now that I am healthy I should do something for her.
I don’t exactly know what that “something” is yet. But I’m getting into the idea. I want to see my mom happy again.
18
Wednesday, June 29, 1977
I have to talk to my dad today. I can’t execute my plan concerning my mother without a little of his help. It’s not a big, grandiose thing. It’s just lunch. I want to prepare a picnic lunch and surprise her with it at work.
Her schedule can be a bit unpredictable, being a nurse and all, but I figure I can just show up at her usual lunch time—I know what it is very well. When I was sick at home and she was working, she would always call me on her lunch break.
This is what I need to talk to Dad about. I need the day off from the bookstore.
“Can we talk?” I ask him when I arrive for my shift.
One eyebrow raises and he says, “Sure.” He thinks we’re going to talk about why I’m mad. How can he not know?
“I need tomorrow off. I want to surprise Mom,” I say. My hands are shoved deep in my pockets and I’m not making a lot of eye contact.
“What kind of surprise?” he asks.
“A good one. One she won’t expect so sh
e can’t be disappointed if I flake out or something goes wrong.”
He rubs at his chin and nods. “And you don’t care to tell me this surprise?”
“No, I don’t. I don’t want to disappoint anyone. Best just to do it.”
“Sure, Aaron. That sounds good. I’ll find someone to cover for you tomorrow.”
I’m excited. Seriously, I am. Although I don’t really understand my mother, I love her. And, really, how could I understand her? I’m her child. She almost lost me way too many times. How can a teenage boy ever hope to understand that?
And I bet she doesn’t understand me either. Maybe I should share some of Helena’s wisdom and tell her that it’s the hormones that has caused some of my recent behavior. I certainly can’t tell her about the ghost.
“He hasn’t come back?” Helena asks. We’re under our tree again. I’m kind of glad we can meet in the light of the day now. That somehow makes our relationship seem more real.
I shake my head. “And something odd happened Sunday night.”
“What?”
“We had been at it most of the night. I was exhausted and starting to fall asleep myself. I thought I was imagining it, but maybe I wasn’t. He seemed to, like, fade away right before I fell asleep.”
“Fade?” she asks. “What do you mean fade?”
“Well… he’s a ghost so he’s transparent, right?” She nods so I continue. “Towards the end, he became more transparent, his appearance going kind of smoke-like on the edges. And then, at the end, he was getting so transparent I could barely see him.”
Helena stares at me for a while and then pulls at the grass a bit. She looks back up at me and sums it all up beautifully. “Weird.”
I smile. It’s her word for me and certainly the word for this situation.
We spend the next hour or so blabbing about all kinds of things. But no more about ghosts and neither of us bring up dates. I don’t know why she didn’t bring it up, but I know why I didn’t. I don’t want to know about her dates. I want to be able to pretend that there is a tiny part of her that is only for me.
Lionel’s back. The Ouija thing I’ve drawn has changed everything. I can have an actual, real conversation with him. It’s slow. I still write the questions in regular English in scratch paper, and then watch him as he points at my Ouija papers and I write the questions and answers in the diary properly encoded. It’s not fast or anything, but it’s a hell of a lot faster than the yes-no game.
Here is our conversation… well the important parts anyway.
Did you have any enemies?
NO.
Anyone angry with you, want to hurt you?
NO… WELL, OBVIOUSLY, SOMEONE WAS ANGRY AT ME, BUT I DON’T KNOW WHO.
What about Paul Durr? The man the police questioned. What happened that night?
HE WAS ANGRY, BUT JUST NORMAL ANGRY. HIS BROCHURES WERE LATE, AND HE ACCUSED ME OF DRAGGING MY FEET BECAUSE OF THE NON-PROFIT DISCOUNT I GIVE HIM.
Do you think he did it?
NO. PAUL HAS ALWAYS BEEN MORE BARK THAN BITE.
You told me you had three close friends. Who are they?
ANN AND JOE EDWARDS, AND VINCENT LONG.
Do you think they know anything about your murder?
I DON’T KNOW.
Do you think they’ll talk to me about you? I’m going to tell them I’m doing a makeup paper because of all the school I missed.
THEY MIGHT. I HOPE THEY WANT TO TALK ABOUT ME.
Where do you go when I can’t see you?
JUST GONE. GHOSTS GET TIRED, KIND OF LIKE SLEEPING.
What’s it like being a ghost?
LONELY.
How is it that I can see you?
I DON’T KNOW.
It’s not much really. I’ve got the names of his friends, some people to go talk to, but it seems like I should be able to get more from Lionel. I mean, I’m talking to a freaking ghost here. He ought to provide some better clues to his own murder.
Towards the end, when I start to ask him about me, things get interesting.
I write, “Why is it that I can see you?”
He replies, pointing to the phrase on the Ouija board, “I DON’T KNOW.” But there is something going on. He looksguilty, and he won’t meet my eye.
“Lionel,” I whisper, breaking my silence, “what do you know?”
He blinks, his eyes briefly meeting mine before they dart away. He looks down at the floor and bites on his lip.
I have an idea why I can see him. I haven’t spoken it to anyone. I haven’t written it down in this diary. But right then, sitting on my bed with my heart pounding, I ask him, writing it on a scrap piece of paper that I tear up and throw away later. “Is it because of my leukemia? Because I’ve almost died so many times?”
I hold the paper up and point at the question and whisper, “Is it?”
His eyebrows furrow and he looks like he’s about to cry. He points at “I DON’T KNOW” on the Ouija papers, but I don’t believe him. His face says “yes.”
I just stare at him, suddenly feeling cold, letting my diary drop onto the comforter of my bed.
He holds that look of compassion on his face so long I begin to freak out. What does he know? What can he see?
“Is it coming back?” I ask. I forget myself and don’t even whisper. My voice isn’t loud, but this isn’t that big of a house, there’s a chance my parents heard it. My mother specifically. When I was really sick, I could hardly make a sound without her showing up at my bedside.
Lionel doesn’t point at the Ouija papers. He doesn’t even mouth an answer. He just disappears.
Not like that night he became more and more transparent and then was gone. Lionel gets this look of concentration on his face and then is just gone and I’m left there feeling the weight of the “C” word sitting on my chest like an obese elephant.
19
Thursday, June 30, 1977
Everything is different now. Everything.
Although I’m still dating everything when it happened, I’m way behind in writing these entries, you’ll soon see why. And no, it’s not what I thought was going to happen.
Having been sick so much, I’ve often pondered survival. How I survived two rounds of Cancer—sure I’ve pondered that, but more the little things. How we survive the near accidents in the car, the falls from the bike, the random virus that takes out a few people, but not most.
Every day we are faced with things that can (and for some will) kill us. Every day. Choking on your dinner. Having a heart attack. A head-on collision. Earthquakes. Fires. Sure, leukemia and Cancer are big and dramatic, but they are by no means the only things queued up to hasten our exit.
When you pull back from the individual—and I mean pull way back—and look at humanity as a whole, it gets even dicier. With genocide and wars and plagues. It’s a wonder we’ve survived at all as race.
So what’s my point? Good question. My point is this: survival should never be taken for granted. Never. I may only be sixteen, but this is one lesson that has been driven home over and over.
When I wake up, I feel thick, my mind is slow, my body is sluggish, as if that obese elephant has really sat on my chest. My pits stink and I’m sure my halitosis could have been lit on fire as I stumble to the bathroom.
What does Lionel know? Can I see the dead because I am dying?
The hot water helps revive me, and as I take stock of myself and my day, I realize that in some ways it doesn’t matter. I have this day and I have something to do. Something special. Something for my mother.
So I shake off the fear of the unknowable and the inevitable and concentrate on Mom. She who birthed me into this world and nurtured me for sixteen years, she who worries about me, she whom I don’t understand but love.
Maybe this is different for daughters, but there is some inevitable tension that comes in the relationship between a son and a mother. When you’re a baby, you need that intense level of nurturing. When you’re a kid, you still need
some of it, and as you come into adulthood you want it in limited quantities, but it’s time to stop needing it.
I’m not sick anymore. I’m getting strong and growing up. I’ve got to find my own way in this world, and my mother still remembers me as a helpless infant and as a sick boy. The infant part is long ago, but being sick isn’t. My last chemo treatment ended seven months ago. We still have to go get regular tests to make sure the Cancer hasn’t come back.
I don’t want to be that boy that needs his nurse mother for survival. I want to find my own way, I want my mother to worry about me less (because we know she’s going to worry some no matter what), and I want my mother to know that I’m okay.
At breakfast I let things stay tense, as they have been since Sunday and the whole church debacle. I don’t want to let onto anything. After my parents leave, I get to work.
I dig a picnic basket out of the garage and use some bungee cords to attach it to my handlebars. I go into the kitchen, dig out some crackers, cut up some cucumber and carrots and put them into a Tupperware. I find a nice checkered tablecloth, some napkins, plastic cups, forks, and a couple of paper plates.
I find myself whistling and smiling as I make my preparations. This idea is a good one—she will love a surprise picnic lunch. I’m even grateful to my father for suggesting I do something nice for her.
I change out of my T-shirt and into a navy-blue polo shirt—it has a button. For me, in the summer, this is dressing up.
I pack everything carefully into the picnic basket and check my bungees. I don’t want it falling off. I head out on my bike, there are more preparations to make. I need to go to the market for cheese and some apple cider.
This is going to be a good day. I just know it.
As I pedal up to our hospital, I’m tired. I had to put some miles in to get from my house to the market and then to here. The Valley View Medical Center is on a hill on the south end of town, near the steep juniper-covered hills that rise up to the Colorado Plateau and Cedar Breaks. Except for this odd tower, it’s a low building, one and two stories, and sprawling with lots of glass and some stone walls made of fist-sized rocks cemented together. If not for the ambulance bay, you might mistake it for office buildings.
A Boy a Girl and a Ghost Page 12