“Why would she do that?” I ask. I can see them together, but I can’t see her killing him. I can see Joe Edwards exploding in a jealous rage, but not Ann, the woman that loved him.
“Silvia,” he says, his voice low.
Silvia is Ann’s niece, the girl they took my swing set for. She is probably with them right now after losing her mother to an accident and after her aunt (Ann’s sister) had mental health issues and had to give her up.
It’s still not adding up for me, but he is not being very communicative. “How do you know?”
Lionel makes a real show of chewing on his lower lip as he paces around the room. He’s not watching where he’s going and ends up walking through the bed and the curtain. His hands finally come out of his pockets as he starts to speak. “We were in love. She was going to leave Joe, but when her sister died, it all changed. She changed. She knew her other sister, Kim, wasn’t really up to the challenge, but let her try anyway. Joe and her had never had kids, had never wanted kids.”
He pauses, searching my face. I nod, encouraging him to continue. “She cut it off with me then. Said she had to get her marriage right, said she thought little Silvia would need her. Said we couldn’t even be friends anymore.”
I’m shaking my head, I still don’t get it. Lionel’s eyes are wide, too wide, and his face looks even more gaunt than usual. There is something that looks like mist forming at the edges of his ghostly body and he looks a bit out of focus.
“But she couldn’t stay away. After two weeks she was back in my arms, but so full of guilt. Ann was making a go of it with Joe for Silvia, but the cracks were already showing.”
He’s even more out of focus now. “Are you okay?” I ask.
He shakes his head, little staccato movements back and forth. “I remember some things from that night. The presses were running, loud. The smell of the ink filled the air. But right before it happened, I smelled lavender.”
“Lavender?”
He nods slowly, shoving his hands back into his pockets. “Her perfume. I am sure of it. It was her.”
I slowly roll it over in my mind. She tries to break it off with Lionel, but can’t. She wants to stabilize her marriage so she can care for her orphaned niece. So she kills Lionel so she can truly end the affair. It doesn’t add up. “But why would she resort to this?”
He sighs. “You’re too young to understand. Passion makes us do strange things.” He’s looking at me but is blinking a lot. He’s holding something back.
“That’s not all of it.”
He chews on his lower lip some more. “No. The three sisters, Ellen, Kim, and Ann, had a difficult childhood. Their father was… well… he wasn’t a kind man. They have all struggled with depression. Ann herself has been diagnosed as bipolar. She had been prescribed medication for it.”
The way he said “prescribed medication” tickles something in my mind. “She wasn’t on it when she killed you, was she?”
He shakes his head. “She hates the pills. She says they make everything grey.”
Lionel goes silent and I let him as I ponder it all. It’s too much for me, really. Way too much. From what Big Ed has said, I’m going to have to fight to survive, but what am I going to do with this?
“I’m going to have to tell someone this,” I finally say. It’s so clear to me. So simple.
Lionel’s eyes get wide. “No. Please. She’s back on her meds, I’ve been watching her. Silvia needs her, Ann won’t do anything to screw that up.”
“She killed you, Lionel. I don’t think she should be caring for a child.”
His mouth twists and that fuzziness of his ghostly body disappears. I see a flicker of red run along the edges. I’m beginning to suspect that ghosts’ emotions are sometimes visible. “No!” he shouts, his face twisting into an ugly mask. “You cannot. You must not.”
“I have to, Lionel,” I say. “Please understand. What if she goes off her meds and hurts Silvia?”
The red flicker along the edges of his ghostly body is growing darker and thicker. It’s like a red fire is engulfing him. “You will not tell anyone,” he says, taking a step towards me.
For the first time as a spirit, I feel fear. Lionel is not rational. Lionel is desperate. Lionel wants to hurt me to protect Ann.
His eyes flick around the little ICU area. From my mother still slumped in the gray chair, to the bed with my struggling body, to me, to the silver cord floating placidly in the air between us.
“Um… Okay…” I stammer, putting my hands up and backing up to the foot of the hospital bed. “You’re right, Lionel. Ann would never hurt Silvia. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
Lionel’s face twists again, his mouth disappearing beneath his mustache. “I can’t take that chance,” he says softly.
He’s not looking at me anymore, but the silver cord that connects my spirit to my body. Why is he focused on that? The red around Lionel starts flickering and condenses into a solid red hue that hugs him. His right hand starts to change and I gasp. His fingers melt together, his hand becoming a solid whole, the color sliding towards silver. The bottom end of his hand becomes a fine edge and now it looks like he has a crude butcher’s knife for a hand.
His face is clenched and his eyes are focused on his hand, not me or my silver cord. I suddenly know what he means to do.
Ghosts like Lionel are spirits without a body. I am a sprit with a body. That silver cord is what connects my sprit to my body. Lionel wants to sever that cord, detaching my spirit from my body. Lionel wants to kill me.
I’m sure of it. To stop me from telling anyone that Ann killed him, he will kill me.
Something snaps in me. I don’t want to die. I don’t want the last look on my friends’ and family’s faces to be what I just saw in the waiting room. I don’t want my mother to wake up when my heart stops and the monitor squeals out an alarm.
Big Ed told me I would have to fight for my life, but I had no idea it would be something like this.
Just as the edge of Lionel’s knife-hand finishes forming, I rush him. I don’t know what will happen, I am acting like I have a body when I don’t, but what else can I do?
I hear a chirp of surprise when I run into him, my shoulder connecting with his chest. It’s a strange feeling, or rather mostly a lack of feeling. I feel the contact, but it’s this numb barely-there sensation like when Big Ed grabbed my wrist.
My momentum carries us through the curtain and out in front of the ICU nurses’ station. It’s a curve of a counter with stacked charts on metal clipboards. Nurse Iona is there as well as another nurse and Doctor Rogers.
“That sweet boy just can’t die,” Iona says to Doctor Rogers. “We can’t let him die.”
“It’s out of our hands now,” Doctor Rogers says with a sigh. “We are doing everything we can.”
We slide past them and through the counter. There’s a young blond nurse there writing on a medical chart. We end up on her, or rather she is inside our spirits. I feel a tingle as we pass through her and she bolts up, steps away, and shakes her head and hands.
“What is it, Mandy?” Iona asks.
“Just felt a chill… A horrible chill,” she says, still shaking her arms.
Iona crosses herself and says, “The spirits, they are sure restless tonight.”
Our momentum has stopped. I feel my cord tugging me back to my body, but I seem to be able to resist it. Lionel reaches over me, his arm with the knife on the end rising to take a swing at my silver cord.
I stop resisting the tug of the cord and am rapidly pulled back to my body.
I see Lionel’s hand slice through empty air (and the counter that forms the nurse’s station) as I slide back to my body.
“If man is done with that boy,” Iona says, her arms crossed over her chest, “then I say we pray.”
I end up through the curtain and in the middle of the hospital bed (and my body). Lionel is rushing towards me, his knife-hand leading the way.
I look around,
reflexively, but there is no help for me here. My mother, still asleep, can’t help me. My father and friends in the waiting area can’t help me. I’m not sure if I can even help me.
As Lionel comes flying through the curtain (literally), his knife-hand outstretched, I react instinctively. I hold my hands up and catch his wrist as the knife is speeding down towards the belly button of my body, to the place where the silver cord emanates.
And I catch his wrist, that dull sensation of touch again, and am face to face with Lionel.
“Don’t do this,” I say. “Please. I don’t want to die.”
“For Ann,” he growls. “I must protect her.”
It’s this strange moment. I’m face to face with the Lionel, his teeth bared, his eyes too wide, a layer of translucent red surrounding him. I can feel his arm pressing down and I don’t know if I can keep him from cutting my silver cord, keep him from killing me.
And in the moment, I think about relationships. Yeah, weird, I know. But it’s just a flicker of a moment that the thoughts tumble through my head. I think about how passionate I feel for Helena, how I long to be close to her, how I want to always be with her, how I would protect her from the pain of the world if I could.
I’m losing the battle with Lionel, he is forcing his hand closer and closer to my cord.
And then I feel two things. Empathy for Lionel and what he is trying to do—his passion has twisted into this strange form where he is willing to do horrible things to protect Ann. I also feel a fierceness I’ve never felt before. I am not fighting just for my own life, I am fighting to protect my family and friends from losing me. I am fighting for myself, but I am fighting for them too. For Mom and Dad and Billy and Helena.
“No!” I shout, and feel a strength surge through me. Lionel’s arm starts to rise and surprise flickers across his face.
That surprise doesn’t last long, it soon turns into a look of triumph. “Sorry, kid,” he says as he suddenly goes out of focus, looking more like smoke for a moment than a person.
In that moment, his wrist passes through my arm, and then the knife is traveling towards my silver cord. There is nothing I can do to stop it.
My father once told me that it’s not important how long you live, but how you live. When he said this, he was sitting on the edge of a hospital bed at Sunrise Children’s Hospital in Vegas. I was eleven years old at the time and was in the midst of my first chemo treatments. I remember his face, it was so serious, his eyes so earnest.
“Quality over quantity, Aaron,” he said. “Always choose quality over quantity.”
I was in the hospital because I had spiked a high fever a few days earlier, which meant an infection, which meant my leukemia and chemo-compromised immune system would need help.
I was only eleven and was just trying to get my head wrapped around what was happening. I think this was my father’s way of telling me that I might not have a long life. That I had to do my best with the life I was going to have. It was an obtuse way to say it, but I know that is what he was getting at.
As Lionel’s knife-hand speeds towards the silver cord floating lazily above my body, I have a silly question run through my head. How do I make my last moments of quality? Even if it’s only a second or less. What can I do to live this, right here, right now, to the best of my ability?
I think of running away, but my cord is rooted in my body, that’s where the vulnerability is and I can’t run from it. I think of running through the walls to the waiting room to get one last look at Helena, but I don’t want that blank stare to be the last thing I see.
And suddenly it all seems funny to me. Here I am a ghost already worried about the last time I see Helena or finding the right thing to do for my “last” moments. But if Lionel severs my chord, I will be a ghost just like him. I will still be “me” just without the body. All this worry about endings just seems ridiculous.
So I laugh right out loud. A belly laugh that rises up from deep within. And I am laughing at Lionel in his desperate attempt to control the situation. To stop me from telling someone about Ann Edwards murdering him.
Lionel’s hand is moving quickly, solid again, so I don’t laugh much before it strikes the silver cord, but I see his knife-hand slow just a touch. And when it passes right through the cord without me feeling a thing, I laugh even harder.
This Shakespearean tableau just strikes me as so funny. Me, the young man trying to “survive.” Lionel, the crazy ghost desperate to save his murdering lover from justice. All the living so worried about this process of “dying” which, since I am currently a ghost, doesn’t seem like all that big of a deal.
Lionel curses when his knife-hand passes through the cord again. I laugh.
This time he doesn’t take another swing, he stares at his knife-hand with a look of intense concentration on his face. The knife becomes this buttery silver that matches the silver of my cord. It doesn’t have the glow of the cord, but it looks much more like it.
His eyes meet mine and I stop laughing, a chill running down my spine. There is no sorrow in his eyes, no regret, just the grimmest of determination. This time, his eyes say, this time it will work.
And I believe that look.
His eyes flick away from me and back to the cord as his hand rises up high. This is it, he is going to do it this time.
“Stop!” a deep voice yells just as Lionel’s knife starts its descent. It’s Big Ed with about a dozen ghosts arrayed behind him. He has stepped through the curtain and I can make out the glow of the other ghosts dimly behind him.
I see Lionel’s face clench, but he doesn’t stop, his silver hand, sharp as a knife, comes crashing down on my silver cord.
My life doesn’t flash in front of my eyes. And if it did, I don’t think it would have taken very long. A normal childhood sequence for the first eleven years and then a blur of treatments and hospitals and feeling like crap. If my life had flashed before my eyes, I would have wanted this summer to be the bulk of it. Starting out in health, sneaking to the graveyard at night, the wonder of Helena and seeing the ghost of Lionel, even all the madness with my family. I would have taken it in all again and savored it to the level it deserved. The smoky-minty smell of Helena. The earnestness of Billy as he tells me to “make a move.” The sweetness of my mother becoming my friend. The sparkle in my father’s eyes as he urges me to ask Helena out.
Time seems to slow as the knife arches down. My mother moans and shifts in her chair. Snippets of Iona praying float to my ear, Jesus, please, please watch over this fine young man. The stern look on Big Ed’s face as he rushes towards Lionel, his large hands outstretched.
And then the knife contacts with the cord right where it exits my body’s belly button and…
A sharp, slightly melodic, clink rings out like glass against glass as the knife connects. A flash of the brightest light emanating from the point of contact. That light flowing down the cord to me and up through Lionel’s arm to him. A surge of energy, like I’m being electrocuted. Screams. Lionel flying backwards away from my body and I am flying towards it, the silver cord reeling me in like a hooked fish.
The scream of my heart monitor, a flat line displaying. My mother bolting upright and screaming. “Crash cart! We need a crash cart in here!”
Big Ed’s face close to mine as I fly towards my body. “Fight, boy! Fight!”
And then I’m in my body and the real battle begins.
Being biological is hard. This is something I’ve learned well in my five-year dance with leukemia. It’s hard being in a body. But I never felt it like I did when my soul was reeled back into my body after Lionel tried to sever the silver cord.
I went from feeling so light to feeling so dense. From this airy freedom, to feeling like I had been buried alive. From ease to suffering.
Remembering it now, it feels like a horrible nightmare. Which is probably accurate, because I wasn’t “awake” in the normal sense, nor was I fully unconscious.
I feel this crushing pres
sure on my chest, like I’m caught in some great vice. I vaguely feel the respirator pushing air into my lungs, but it doesn’t counteract the pressure.
It’s too much. I can’t do it. I can’t be in this bag of flesh and bones. I want to be free of it again. Free of the pain. Free of the struggle. Free.
And then things change. I feel a fire in my chest and I’m vaguely aware of my body convulsing. They must be shocking my heart. And right after that I feel this beautiful sensation. It’s hard to describe, but it feels like a warm honey-colored light is engulfing me. The pressure on my chest eases. I calm down some.
“Fight, Aaron. Fight now. Find your way home.” It’s Big Ed’s voice that I hear in my head. It travels down with the honey-colored light. His voice is sweeter than I have ever heard it.
I can’t see anything. I feel the fire in my chest again. I hear Big Ed telling me to fight. The warmth engulfing me intensifies.
And I fight.
I fight for just one more breath, just one more moment in the sunlight, one more smile from my mother, on more hug from my father, one more look at Helena.
I seem to be locked in this epic battle in this nightmare state. I can’t describe it to you in concrete terms, because it wasn’t like that. It was my will, that warmth, and whatever the doctors were doing to me fighting against the cold and the darkness.
It seemed to last forever. Until I woke up with the tube in my mouth and Helena by my side.
41
Friday, July 29, 1977
I’ve decided to stop writing this diary. In fact, it’s now fall, the leaves have changed, and I’m back in school and I am just coming back to this. The story, as I’ve written it here, is unfinished, and I just can’t abide by that. There is a little more to tell, so here goes.
A Boy a Girl and a Ghost Page 29