A Boy a Girl and a Ghost

by Robert J. McCarter

  “I don’t feel great, but yeah, I think I can manage,” I say.

  She nods, a brief smile on her lips. My dad is staring at me, he’s trying to figure out what I’m up to, but he doesn’t say anything.

  As I sit on the hard pew among the parishioners at our small Lutheran church, I ponder what’s going on. All these people share a set of beliefs that revolve around sin, redemption, how to live your life, and what happens when you die.

  They believe something. They all think they know what happens after our bodies are done with us. This, presumably, gives them peace of mind, helps them deal with the inherent cruelty of our biological lives.

  In the middle of Pastor West’s sermon, feeling like I want to throw up, I suddenly get it. Why religion is so successful—just looking at it in terms of its popularity. It would be a relief to “know” what’s going to happen to me when I die.

  I then look around and wonder if Lionel is here. He’s something I don’t have to believe in. When I proved to Helena he existed, I proved to myself that he existed. I am not imagining it. Lionel does not require belief. He exists independent of anything I think.

  I proved Lionel exists. Proved.

  Something clicks in my head and I look at my mom and smile. She looks back at me and smiles too. She probably figures I’ve had some kind of religious epiphany or something. Well, it’s an epiphany, just not religious.

  I know what I need to do, after the appropriate groveling and apologies, of course.

  28

  Tuesday, July 12, 1977

  Our table is more full than usual. Billy and Helena are here and so is Lionel. I’ve got a plan. It took some doing to arrange.

  Step 1: Apologize for my dumb-assery. After church on Sunday, I apologized to my parents and told them the truth—that I was struggling with the news and the chemo. I then waited until pretty late and called Helena from the pantry and told her the same. She wasn’t all that keen to accept it until I told her my plan.

  Step 2: Arrange for all parties to be present. I talk my parents into letting Billy and Helena come over for dinner, since I’m all grounded and stuff. I then arrange for Lionel’s presence next time I saw him.

  Step 3: Be nervous as hell. It’s a big leap I am about to ask my parents to make, but I’ve got to do it. I’ve got to clear out the junk and start living my life—especially now.

  I clear my throat as everyone is about done eating. Mom made meatloaf and mashed potatoes with gravy. Usually one of my favorites, but my stomach is still kinda chemo-ized and I mostly just ate the potatoes without any gravy.

  “I have a confession to make,” I say, rubbing my sweating palms on my jeans. Helena catches my eye and nods and Billy bites his lip. Parental trust is not the teenage norm. But my situation and relationship with my parents is not normal.

  “First of all, I want to apologize again for being so… you know.” I feel the heat of shame on my cheeks. While there was some truth to what I said—I am the one with the Cancer—it was mostly self-obsessed BS. This is hard for everyone. “I am sorry. This has not been easy, not for any of us.”

  My mom smiles and says, “Thank you, Aaron. We appreciate your apology.”

  “And now to the confession.” I take a deep breath and let out a long sigh. Dad has got his arms crossed and Mom is a little blinky and appears to be nervous. “I need you two to keep an open mind as to what I’m about to say. I can prove it and am prepared to do so, but you need to be open and give me the time to do it.”

  “What is going on here?” Dad asks, his brow furrowed.

  “I’ve… I…” I stammer, looking desperately at my friends for help. Billy looks away, but Helena gives me a nod.

  “Something extraordinary has happened to your son,” Helena says to my parents. “It’s time you knew about it.”

  “What? Aaron, what is this?” Mom says.

  “I have something I need to do, something important,” I say, swallowing hard. “I made a friend, a very unique friend, and he needs my help. I want to introduce you to him so you understand. So you let me help him.”

  “Is someone else coming over?” Dad asks.

  “He’s already here,” I say.

  “Well, I’m just confused,” Dad says. “Frankly, Aaron, you’re not making much sense.”

  How do you tell your parents something like this? I don’t want them to think I’m crazy. I want them to believe me. I want them to let me help Lionel.

  “Just spit it out,” Billy says. “There is no other way.”

  I nod, looking at everyone seated at the table with me. Mom, Dad, Billy, Helena. I then close my eyes tight and cover them with my hands and see Lionel standing behind my parents. He’s nodding towards me slowly and he gives me a thumbs-up.

  When I open my eyes, my folks are seriously staring at me. They’re all worried so I figure it probably doesn’t matter and just tell them. “I see ghosts. There is one named Lionel with us right now. I can prove it.”

  I expected noise, lots of it. Yells of disbelief or cries of worry. That’s not what I got.

  “What?” Dad says.

  “Ghosts?” Mom says.

  I nod. “I can only see one ghost clearly. His name is Lionel Malak.”

  Recognition blooms on my father’s face. “The printer who had a shop near the bookstore? The one that was murdered?”

  I nod, my mouth dry, the scent of the meatloaf making me nauseous.

  “Ghosts?” Mom asks again, slowly shaking her head. She seems distant, as if caught up in an old memory.

  “I… I thought you were sneaking out at night to see Helena,” Dad says, looking at Helena and then me.

  “I was. But to see Lionel, too. It’s got to be dark for me to see him easily.”

  “I… Oh…” Mom stammers.

  “Is this true?” Dad asks Helena.

  “Yes, Mr. Wade. He proved it to me. “

  “My…” My mother says as she stands, her hand brushing at her face. “I…”

  My father surges up. “Laura, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  She looks at my father, her eyes wide and says, “Ghosts. There… there’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  “I can prove it, Mom,” I say. “Just give me a chance.”

  “I… I think I need to lie down, Henry. Can you help me upstairs?” Mom says.

  He nods and puts his arm around her, gently guiding her. She’s acting like she’s drugged or drunk. Something is clearly wrong.

  I’ve got the nerves, bad. Helena, Billy, and I are sitting in the living room. I’m in that uncomfortable rocking chair again.

  After my father took my mother away, we stared across the dinner table at each other for a few minutes until Helena told us it was time to clean up. We took care of the kitchen, quietly and quickly, and ended up in the living room. Waiting.

  “Is he still here?” Billy asks, his eyes narrow, as if squinting will help him see the ghost.

  I close my eyes and cover them with my hands. Lionel is pacing nervously across the shag carpet of the living room. Somehow that helps calm me some. I tell Billy.

  “Should you go check on them?” Helena asks.

  I shake my head. It’s an adults-only thing that’s going on up there. I don’t think I’d be welcomed.

  Helena gets up and starts perusing one of the bookshelves. My dad calls it his “essentials.” It’s got everything from Homer to Dickens to King. Books that are already classics or ones he thinks are bound to be. Actually, Stephen King is there because of me. I’ll occasionally suggest a new author for the essentials and we’ll have great big debates about it. After King released Salem’s Lot I was able to make a convincing argument that he belonged there, even though it’s only his second novel.

  She’s got Tom Sawyer open when my dad walks into the living room. He’s pale and looks a bit lost.

  “Your mother won’t be joining us,” he says, his voice a bit shaky. And that scares me. My dad is not a shaky voice kind of guy.

  �
��Is she okay?” I ask.

  “It’s just… she will be, Aaron. She just needs to rest right now.”

  “But… I need to prove this to her too. That I can see Lionel.”

  The smile he gives me freaks me out. It’s more of a crazy smile than a happy smile, all lopsided with a bit of a tremble. I might have expected this kind of look after I proved I could see Lionel. Not before. “Oh, she already believes you, son,” he says.

  It’s like the air just got sucked out of the room. Helena is frozen with the book halfway back to the shelf. Billy is blinking and chewing on his fingernail and I’m leaning forward in the rocking chair.

  My father takes a deep breath, straightens up, and squares his shoulders. “Now, let’s get to this,” he says, his voice back to normal. “Prove to me that ghosts are real.”

  It took more than Lionel telling me what fingers he had held up to prove things to my father. It took a lot more.

  He ended up moving us all back into the kitchen while he setup one of the “essential” books in the living room for Lionel to read and convey to me. It took me getting my Ouija papers and us turning all the lights out so I could see him clearly and easily.

  I had a little penlight that I used to record what he pointed out into the diary. It was eerie, I must say. My dad standing in the doorway of the kitchen watching us, making sure none of us was sneaking into the living room and looking at the book. Helena sitting next to me leaning towards me, as if closeness might help her see what I was seeing. Billy sitting across the kitchen table from me, leaning away, continuing to chew on his fingernails. And Lionel going back and forth to the living room and back into the kitchen. He, for one, seemed happy, a smile on his face as he floated through the wall as he went back and forth getting me a few words at a time. (I think he was avoiding walking through my father, which I appreciate).

  When it was done, we turned the lights back on and I handed my diary to my dad. He picked up what I had written and read it.

  “Tired?” he said. “Well, I should think so. And now I will tell you all about it, since you have treated me so well. I am the spirit of the Petrified Man that lies across the street there in the museum. I am the ghost of the Cardiff Giant. I can have no rest, no peace, till they have given that poor body burial again. Now what was the most natural thing for me to do, to make men satisfy this wish? Terrify them into it! haunt the place where the body lay! So I haunted the museum night after night. I even got other spirits to help me. But it did no good, for nobody ever came to the museum at midnight. Then it occurred to me to come over the way and haunt this place a little. I felt that if I ever got a hearing I must succeed, for I had the most efficient company that perdition could furnish. Night after night we have shivered around through these mildewed halls, dragging chains, groaning, whispering, tramping up and down stairs, till, to tell you the truth, I am almost worn out. But when I saw a light in your room tonight I roused my energies again and went at it with a deal of the old freshness. But I am tired out—entirely fagged out. Give me, I beseech you, give me some hope!”

  I didn’t recognize the passage, but the humor of it being about a ghost was not lost on me. Dad took it and came back with a collection of Mark Twain short stories, which I hadn’t read. The story title is, quite simply, “A Ghost Story.” He sits down at the table with us and goes word by word over the book and my diary. At the end he closes both, leans back and sighs.

  “I have no explanation for this,” he says.

  Billy is blinking too much. He hadn’t seen proof of Lionel before, he had taken my word.

  “It’s real, Mister Wade,” Helena says.

  Dad nods and rubs at his chin and then looks at me. “Without your mother vouching for this, I still wouldn’t believe it.”

  I’m scared and excited. There’s another secret in the family, but this one is about ghosts. My mother believes me without any proof. Why?

  “And I assume there is a reason you’re choosing to tell me this now,” he continues.

  I nod, but don’t speak. There’s just too much whirling around my head. Too much for me to come up with a coherent sentence.

  “Can you tell me what it is?” he asks.

  I nod again and take a deep breath. I’m wishing either Helena or Billy would speak up, but it is not theirs to do. They are here to support me. I sit up straight and square my shoulders, pretending again I have my father’s unflappable calm (well, nearly unflappable, as I am learning).

  “Just like that ghost in Mark Twain’s story, Lionel needs help,” I say, my heart thumping loudly. “He needs to know who killed him. He… he wants me to find his murderer.”

  Dad sits there blinking, his jaw slack for the longest time.

  “We have a plan,” Helena says, a gentle smile on her face. “We’re going to interview his three closest friends. We’ll tell them it’s for a paper Aaron is doing, makeup work for missing so much school.”

  “He won’t be doing this alone,” Billy says. “One of us will be with him the whole time.”

  “We’ll be real careful, Dad,” I say. “We’re not going to go out and accuse people of his murder. We’re just going to do some interviews. Lionel will be with us too. I… We… Please, Dad. Please. I need to do this. Lionel is my friend, he is suffering not knowing who killed him and why.”

  My dad takes a deep breath and says, “No.” With that he gets up and leaves the kitchen.

  “Lionel is the reason we caught my leukemia so early,” I call after him, but he doesn’t turn around.

  We hear his footsteps on the stairs, undoubtedly to check on my mother.

  “What now?” Billy asks.

  I feel my cheeks flush again, but this time it’s not shame, it’s anger. I told the truth. I proved something amazing and all I got was a one-word answer from my father. I deserve more.

  “We’re going to do it anyway,” I say.

  29

  Wednesday, July 13, 1977

  Vincent Long reminds me a bit of Lionel Malak. He’s whip thin and tall—just like Lionel. He looks different, though, with his short black hair and a few days’ growth of beard.

  “We went to high school together,” Vincent says, taking a drag on his cigarette and blowing the bluish smoke up towards the ceiling. We’re sitting in the Cedar City Diner on Main Street. “I hated him at first, he had this aloof air that I thought was about him thinking he was better than everyone else, but it turns out he was just shy.”

  We’re in one of the tall-backed booths with red vinyl covering it. Mr. Long is drinking coffee and Helena and I have Cokes. Billy is at the bookstore covering for me—Helena picked me up from my shift early.

  I’m taking notes in my diary as he talks. He may look a bit like Lionel, but he sure seems to be more of a talker.

  “Lionel put together the school yearbook starting his sophomore year in 1958. He just had this eye for detail, and he was so damn meticulous.” Mr. Long stubs out his cigarette and looks at me. “Why are we doing this, again? Talking about Lionel, I mean.”

  “It’s an assignment for English. I’ve missed a lot of school and am trying to make things up a bit over the summer.

  He nods, his dark eyes locking with mine. I’m afraid he doesn’t believe me. “What’s your name again, kid?”

  “Aaron Wade, and this is Helena Monfort.”

  He nods, his chin ending with it tilted up as he gazes down at us. “How did you know Lionel?”

  “My dad runs Cedar Books and Such. I work there. Lionel’s place was just a few doors down,” I say, trying to step around his questions. The truth is I didn’t really know Lionel when he was alive. I had met him, I knew who he was, but he kept to himself.

  Mr. Long sips his coffee noisily and fiddles with the stub he just put in the ashtray. Helena is mostly quiet, watching the two of us. She’s sitting in the booth next to me, her nearness something of a distraction. She was the one that came up with meeting these people in a public place—safer that way. Vincent Long works at
a local garage and is dressed in a dirty denim shirt with his name embroidered on the pocket. He smells of oil, and grease is imbedded under his fingernails.

  He takes a deep breath, letting out a noisy sigh. “I miss the shy little bugger,” he says. “Crying shame what happened to him. Crying shame. Never harmed a person in his whole life, and someone ends up shoving a sharp piece of metal in his back.”

  “Do… do have any idea who would want to do it?” I ask. He has been reminiscing about Lionel for a while, but I didn’t expect it to be this easy to get him talking about the murder.

  He scratches at his scraggly beard and shakes his head. “He had that big job he was working on for the food bank the night it happened. I had been there earlier helping box up some of the brochures.”

  “Was he all right then?” Helena asks, leaning forward. “Was anything unusual?”

  He snorts. “It was Lionel, things were always unusual with him. He was an odd bird, if you know what I mean. But, no. It was all the norm for him. He was stressed, being behind on the job, which he absolutely hated—and is why I was over lending a hand. He knew Paul Durr, son of a bitch that he is, would be raising a ruckus.”

  “Do you think he did it?” I ask, my voice low.

  Vincent bites his lip, his eyes going distant for a moment. “I thought he might have. You know, it’s a weird thing. Paul’s got this big fancy mission and yet he’s such a dick. You’d think the people doing the supposed nice things in this world would be nice themselves.”

  “But you don’t think he did it now?” Helena asks.

  “Nahhh,” he says, sipping more coffee. “He’s an asshole, but he’s not a murderer. I got a hold of him after the police let him go. I was sure he did it and wanted a piece of his flesh. I cornered him in his office in the food bank’s warehouse. Little chicken-shit about peed his pants when I got a hold of him—I was none too gentle in my questioning. Turns out Paul’s all bark, no bite, if you know what I mean.”