A Boy a Girl and a Ghost

by Robert J. McCarter

  “Yes, sir,” I say. “I know what you mean.”

  “Do you have any idea who might have done it?” Helena asks.

  “Believe me, I want to know. I want to know bad.” He leans close, his eyes searching our faces. “You two fancy yourselves as Nancy Drew and one of the Hardy Boys?”

  “What… No…” I stammer, feeling the flush of blood on my cheeks. “It’s my… my extra credit for English.”

  He leans back and laughs loudly. “Bullshit.” I’m blinking too much and I know it, and Helena is fidgeting in her seat. I didn’t think we’d be this easy to see through. “But, relax, okay. Your secret is safe with me.” He takes a scrap of paper out of his back pocket and pulls a pen from the front of his overalls and writes on it. “You find out who did it and you need some help, you call me. Here’s my home number and my work number.”

  “Thank you,” I say, making sure I can read his sloppy writing.

  “And if you want to make a friend for life, call me when you crack this case. I want to be there to see the son of a bitch that done this get dragged to jail. Lionel may have been a weirdo loner, but he was a good guy. He was my friend.” Vincent rubs at his eyes to stop what I think are tears forming there.

  After he leaves, Helena looks at me and says, “Well, it’s not him.”

  I nod and say, “I’ll consult with Lionel tonight, see what he thinks.”

  As we’re driving down Main Street from the diner back to Cedar Books and Such, we see my dad going into the bookstore.

  “Shit!” I say. Billy is in there, behind the counter, but how long will it be until my father finds out I’m not there.

  “He didn’t see us, Plan B,” Helena says, taking a sharp left onto 65 North Street and then pulling up in the parking lot behind the bookstore. The stores facing Main Street are not all the same size, so behind them is an irregular sized parking lot that fills out the space between the buildings that face Main Street and the ones that face the other roads on the block. On our way to the bookstore, we pass what used to be Lionel Malak’s print shop. I see the sign on the back door hasn’t been replaced. “Malak Printing and Signs” it says.

  I don’t have but a moment to look at the sign before we’re past it and Helena’s got me in front of the bookstore’s back door. She lets me out and leans over and says, “Stay calm. It’s all part of the plan.” She then drives off. I stand there for a moment watching the yellow Comet go, trying to calm myself.

  We did plan for this. My father’s return to the bookstore from the university isn’t exactly on a set schedule.

  I slowly open the back door and breathe a sigh of relief when the bell doesn’t ring, Billy disabled it and oiled the hinges earlier.

  I can hear Billy and Dad talking out front as I slowly close the door behind me, pulling it ever so gently shut. I ease open the door to the storeroom (which wasn’t all the way closed and also had its hinges oiled) and use my foot to slide a box to disguise any noise I might be making.

  The storeroom of the bookstore is a place I love. It’s about density. There are more books here per square foot than in the main part of the bookstore. There’s a desk in one corner, where my dad does the business stuff, but most if it is strong metal shelving with box after box of books. New books we haven’t unpacked yet. Overstock we’ve got to ship back. One whole shelf that is our supply of Shakespeare books—Dad buys a lot of them when they are on sale and saves them for the tourist season. Books that are on order neatly laid out and visible with a receipt on each one that we are waiting for the customers to come in for.

  There are also cleaning supplies, stock for the rest of the store (like stationery and diaries and tourist stuff), but it’s mostly books.

  I fumble around a bit more, making noise intentionally, and come out with a box I prepared before I left. It’s got a few Bach’s, a complete works of William Shakespeare, the new Time we just got in with Jimmy Carter on the cover, and the feather duster.

  “Hey, Dad,” I say when I get out there with the box. My heart is pounding loudly, but I do my best to act normal.

  “How have sales been today?” he asks.

  I glance at Billy and he’s rubbing his chin awkwardly with this thumb and index finger—he’s signaling we made two sales while I was gone. “Six customers,” I say, adding the four that I rang up before I left. I don’t meet his eyes for long and start putting the books on the shelves, dusting as I go.

  Dad takes Billy’s place behind the counter and Billy walks over. “Shit!” he whispers to me.

  I give him a small grin and nod. We had prepared for this. We had planned for this. We had been hoping not to need it.

  “Same time tomorrow?” he asks in a normal tone.

  “I’ll be here,” I say. “Thanks for hanging, B.”

  “Any time, A,” he says, heading out the door.

  It’s quiet then, Dad’s looking through the receipts for the day and I’m shelving the books and magazines and doing more dusting. Dad is crazy about us keeping the dust off the books. “Dust is no friend of a book, so it’s no friend of mine, “ he says all the time. Fastidious is the word. It seems to come naturally to me, I am that way too. My father and I have a shared hate for dust mites and that scent that infects books that have those mites chomping on them.

  “How are you feeling today?” Dad asks when I end up back at the counter with my empty box.

  “Good,” I say. “I mean, not as good before chemo started back up, but not bad. I haven’t wanted to puke every waking moment today.”

  My dad nods and then gets an odd look on his face. He leans over the counter and sniffs me loudly, his eyes narrowing.

  “Is there something you want to tell me, Aaron?” he asks, leaning back and crossing his arms.

  “No, sir,” I say. It’s the truth, there is not a thing I want to tell him.

  “How’s Helena today?” he asks.

  I’m taken aback. How does he know? The sniffing? I lean over and smell my shirt—button down dress shirt, can’t wear T-shirts while on duty—and get a whiff of Vincent Long’s cigarette smell. Dad thinks it was Helena.

  “I’m… She…” I stammer, feeling that heat of shame on my cheeks again. I can’t believe that I’ve been caught already. He doesn’t know what we were doing, but he knows I was with Helena.

  He smiles and shakes his head. “You really ought to take her out to dinner or something.”

  “What?” I ask. I’m confused.

  He leans forward, putting his elbows on the counter, our heads almost at the same level. “If you two are sneaking off in the middle of your shift, the least you can do is take the girl out. Buy her some food.”

  My mouth is open, my eyes are blinking, and my cheeks feel like they are on fire. He thinks we were sneaking off to make out or something, not go interview a potential murderer. “But… She… I…” I stammer some more. My mouth and my brain just don’t seem to be connected.

  Dad sits back up and laughs. “Think about it.”

  I nod, taking the empty box into the back room. I get the box cutter and break it down and put it on the low shelf we keep empty boxes on. Folks that are moving sometimes come in and ask for them, we like to oblige them if we can.

  I pause and take a few deep breaths. Helena and I out on a “date.” I had never thought of the idea, but now that it’s in my brain it begins to take over like some freaking virus. A date with Helena. She had said she’s not sure where we are in our relationship. I’ve told her I’d take whatever she wants to give and don’t care if she is seeing that yet-to-be-named other boy.

  A date with Helena. I get this cheesy picture in my mind of candlelight and soft music. She’s wearing a dress, I’m wearing a tie. We’re sitting at this little round table and the waiter brings fancy dishes with silver metal covers. With a flourish the waiter removes them revealing an exquisite plate of surf and turf. Helena leans over to me, a smile on her face, her hand reaching to mine—

  But I’m grounded. The thoug
ht rudely derails my little fantasy and heat comes back to my cheeks, but this time it’s anger.

  I stomp back into the bookstore. “I’m grounded you know. So… umm… thanks for putting a thought in my head I can’t possibly act on.”

  I stomp back into the storeroom and fumble with an unopened box of books. This is usually one of my favorite activities. It’s a little like Christmas every time—I never quite know what I’m going to find. I’ve got the box cutter in my hand, but it’s shaking. Asking Helena out on a date never occurred to me. There are other hurdles besides being grounded. Like getting her to say yes, not having a car (or a driver’s license, haven’t gotten around to that yet), having no idea what to do or say on a date.

  But the thought of it… My god, I can think of nothing else.

  “I’m sorry, Aaron,” Dad says from the door to the storeroom. “I wasn’t thinking when I said that.” He pauses and then smiles. “But I’ll tell you what. I’ll talk to your mother, see if we can have a special dispensation for this.”

  I’m staring at him, box cutter in hand. “Th… Thanks,” I say, and then look down. I can’t meet his gaze. There’s guilt (letting him believe what he wants to about how I got smelling like cigarettes), surprise (that there might be some relief from being grounded), and desire (I can’t tell you how much I want to do this but barely dare to hope it can happen).

  “I’m going to try hard on this,” Dad adds. “Cause… you know… every man should have a shot at the woman of his dreams.”

  I can’t help it, I’m staring at him again. Is Helena the “woman of my dreams”? Well… yeah. Duh! The romantic phrasing, though, had never occurred to me. Another thought that occurs to me is that this is one of my dad’s “just in case you don’t live long enough” things. He had fought hard to let me go to Disneyland with Uncle Don when I was twelve. It was during my first remission and my mother and father couldn’t go, but Uncle Don had a haul out to Anaheim and thought it would be fun to take me along.

  He was going to fight for this because he didn’t know if I would live long enough to have another chance at a date with a girl. With the “woman of my dreams.”

  “How you feel about her is obvious to anyone with eyes,” Dad says. “I’ll do what I can, but there will be some conditions if I can get your mom to agree.”

  “Conditions? Like what?”

  He smiled. “Just the usual. Knowing where you’re going, when you’re going to be back. And… and you and I will have to have a man to man talk first.”

  I nod, it still feels like a dream. Date. Helena. Woman of my dreams. “Sure, Dad. Thank you for this.” I’m biting my lip now and he’s smiling a real smile.

  “We’re not there yet, but I’m going to do my best.”

  30

  Thursday, July 14, 1977

  Helena and I don’t go out interviewing potential murderers today—we still need to interview Ann and Joe Edwards—I’m a bit spooked by the close call we had yesterday.

  Lionel didn’t have much to add last night to what we got from Vincent Long. He did say that he believes what Vincent said and that we should trust him.

  “What do we know about the Edwards?” I ask. Helena is leaning against the counter of the bookstore, I am sitting behind it. Her cigarettey-minty scent is in full force as she chomps on her gum.

  “They’re local business owners, just like Lionel,” she says, snapping out a little bubble with her Wrigley’s. “They have been married nine years and run the bakery two blocks down.” She lazily waves to the north. “They’ve got weird hours—arising at an ungodly time to start baking bread—and seem to keep mostly to themselves. No one’s got anything bad to say about them, but no one’s got anything particularly good to say either. Except that their éclairs are to die for… a fact I can heartily attest to.” She grins, a hungry smile on her face. Which makes me think of what Dad said about taking her out.

  I straighten up on the stool. I had been slouching a lot today. And not just the normal teenage slouch, but the chemo slouch. I don’t feel particularly bad, but my energy is complete shit and I can’t get that metallic chemoy taste out of my mouth. It’s driving me a little nuts, to be honest. And there is one more component to the fatigued slouch—I didn’t sleep very well. Lionel and I talked briefly, and after that, as I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, thoughts of Helena—a date with Helena—plagued me like a batch of hungry mosquitoes up at Navajo Lake in the middle of summer.

  “You keep looking at me funny,” she says.

  “You’re beautiful,” I say, the words slipping out accompanied by a flush of heat on my cheeks. “I… What I…” I stammer.

  She laughs, straightening up and shrugging. She’s got on jeans and a form-fitting blue shirt. The shrug makes me want to stare at her chest, but I don’t, I look away. I remember what she told Billy when he was staring at her in her tart outfit at the green show. Mr. Chadow. If you ever expect a girl to pay attention to you, the absolute wrong approach is to unblinkingly stare at her breasts for minutes at a time.

  But god did I want to stare.

  I take a deep breath, meet her eyes, and slowly say what I was trying to say. “You’re beautiful, so beautiful it’s hard to look away.”

  Now Helena’s cheeks flush red and she looks down. “Thank you.”

  “I… I was wondering about something,” I say. I’m already embarrassed, my heart is beating a loud rhythm in my ears, what is there to lose at this point? My dad was right, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, time seems to be less on my side than most people.

  “What?” she asks, her brown eyes meeting mine.

  “Can we go out sometime? I mean, provided I can get permission and you want to. I mean… only if you want to. I don’t have a car and I can’t drive, but maybe you could borrow your dad’s car. I’m sure my father would drive us, but that would be—like—so embarrassing.” I’m rambling and I know it, my eyes wandering the bookstore and avoiding hers. Maybe since I actually got it out, I can’t stop talking. Maybe I just keep babbling because I am afraid of her answer. “It doesn’t have to be anything big, just the two of us at dinner. A movie if you like. I mean if you want to, I know that what we are, beyond friends, is not exactly well defined, but why can’t we just have a meal. If it’s just as friends, that’s fine with me, if it’s—”

  She puts her finger on my lips and I look at her. She’s not smiling, her face is actually rather serious and my heart flutters and does a backflip and I swallow. “Shut up, Aaron,” she says, but her voice is soft, almost a whisper.

  “I… Well…” I stammer, her finger still pressed to my lips. It’s not much in the scale of these things, but it somehow feels intimate to me. Not a kiss or anything, but she’s touching me.

  “Shhh.”

  I nod, my cheeks feeling like they are on fire and she slowly takes her finger away and licks her lips. I swear I’m going to die soon if she doesn’t say anything, but I keep my mouth shut and stare at her like some love-struck fool (which I am, of course).

  She bites her lip and says, “You know that it’s complicated, right?”

  “I don’t care,” I say. “I meant what I said.” I was referring to our recent phone call where I told her I would take whatever she would give, no questions asked.

  She’s looking at me hard, her eyes searching mine. “You really don’t, do you?”

  “No.”

  “That is not normal, you know. Most boys get jealous so easily.”

  I shrug. I don’t understand why. Maybe it’s the leukemia and all the life I’ve missed because of that. Maybe it’s that we have a solid friendship already. Maybe it’s because I’m some kind of mutant, emotionally transformed by the repeated infusions of chemicals in my brain.

  Her eyebrows furrow as she continues to study me. I know she’s looking for signs of jealousy, of me not telling the truth, but it’s not there for her to find.

  “Okay,” she says and then nods. “We’ll do it.”

&nb
sp; My smile is huge and my whole face feels warm. The most beautiful girl in the whole town just agreed to go out with me. What is there to not be happy about? Now, if only Dad comes through and lets it happen.

  We chat some more, Helena leaning against the counter casually, me sitting up on the stool, real straight now, but not about anything that important. Not the date that she has agreed to. Not the ghost. Not my Cancer.

  I almost feel like I’m not really in my body, like I’m looking down and witnessing it all. She is just so damn beautiful it is hard to look away. It’s hard to look at her too. I feel these things I’ve never felt before.

  I feel equal measures of excitement and fear. I feel so lucky that she’s there, just chatting with me, but I am also afraid of when it will end. She will leave and my life will not be as bright.

  Does every boy at some point feel this way about a girl? If not, I feel sorry for them. And do girls ever feel this way about boys? And because of my father, I wonder if boys feel this way about boys and girls about girls. All joyful and terrified at the same time. I hope they do.

  “Gotta go, Wade,” she says straightening up and pulling her long black hair into a ponytail. She’s got a pink whatcha-ma-thing (I honestly don’t know what they’re called) that holds her hair in place. It’s an unusually girlish touch for her. Her colors tend to blues, greys, and black. She’s not a bright color kind of a girl.

  “Yeah,” I say, trying and failing to seem casual. “Thanks for… you know…”

  She laughs, and shakes her head, her newly placed ponytail swinging gracefully. “You’re a weird kid, Wade.” With that she turns to leave.

  “And you’re a beautiful woman,” I call after her. She shakes her head and gives me a wave without looking back. I’m not sure if she caught that I swapped “fascinating” for “beautiful.” The truth is she’s both.