“I might still try calling the hospitals,” Wendy said. She gave Jilly a pained look. “God, I sound like a parent, don’t I?”
“You’re just really worried.”
Wendy sighed. “What gets me is that Brenda’s always so… so organized. If she was going somewhere; she’d be talking about it for weeks in advance. She’d ask me to drop by to look after her plants. She’d—oh, I don’t know. I thought we were close, but she’s been avoiding me these past few weeks—nothing I can really point to, it’s only when I look back on it I can see there was something more going on. Whenever I called, she was just on her way out, or working overtime, or doing something. I thought it was bad timing on my part, but now I’m not so sure.”
She gave Jilly a worried look. “The idea that she’s gone on some weird diet really scares me.”
Jilly put her arm around Wendy’s shoulders and gave her a hug.
“Things’ll work out,” she said, wishing she felt as confident as she sounded..
Wendy’s anxiety had become contagious.
19
I wait until it’s past ten and then realize Ellie’s going to pull a no-show. Waiting for her, I find myself wondering about my reaction to all of this. From the voices rising up out of the well and their lost faces manifesting in my dreams to the ghost of the motel’s old proprietor… I seem to accept it all so easily. Why doesn’t it freak me as much as it should?
I don’t have an answer—at least I don’t have one that makes me feel comfortable. Because either the ghosts are all real and I’m far more resilient than I’d ever have imagined myself to be, or I’m losing it.
I’m tired, but I’m not quite ready to go to bed. Maybe weak would be a better way to put it. I’ve had a busy day. Since there’s no maid service—along with everything else this place hasn’t got—the first thing I did after I got up was go exploring for water. There was the well, of course, but it was deep and I’d no way to bring water up its shaft. I wasn’t so sure I’d even want to if I could. Bad enough I called up ghosts, just by thinking of them. I didn’t want to know what would show up if I took some water from that well.
Turns out I didn’t have to worry. Not a half dozen yards into the forest, on this side of an old set of railway tracks, I found a stream. The water’s clear and cold, even at this time of year. Using a battered tin pail that I discovered inside what must have been a tool shed, I carried water back to my unit and scrubbed the floors and walls. It sounds pretty straightforward, but it took a long time, because I had to rest a lot.
I’ll be glad when I’ve regained my strength. I think I’ve caught some bug—a summer flu or something—because I keep getting these waves of dizziness that makes the room do a slow spin. It only goes away when I rest my head.
I forgot to mention: I checked my weight this morning, and I’m right at a hundred pounds even. When I look in the mirror, I still see some flab I could lose, but I really think I’m getting there. Once I hit a comfortable ninety-six or seven, I’ll switch to a hold-and-maintain diet. Well, maybe ninety-five. No point in going halfway.
I just wish I didn’t still want a cigarette. You’d think the urge would be gone by now.
Jim’s been on my mind a lot. I’d really been enjoying our telephone conversations. I find I can relate to him so much better knowing that he can’t see what I look like when we’re talking. It seems to free me up and I found myself talking about all sorts of things—the kinds of conversations I had when I was in college, when we were all going to change the world.
A couple of miles back towards Newford, there’s a diner and garage sitting on the corner where a county road crosses the highway. I noticed a pay phone in its parking lot when I drove by. I’m thinking of driving down tomorrow evening and giving Jim a call. This time I’ll really be out of town. The only thing I worry about is moving the car too often. If I keep driving over the lawn, anyone with half a brain will be able to see that someone’s staying at the motel.
Then I laugh. What am I worrying about? I’m not trespassing. I paid for my room.
I wonder what a ghost does with money.
I give Ellie a little longer to show up, but when the minute hand’s crept to quarter past ten, I finally put on a jacket and go outside. I want to clear my head. It takes my eyes a few moments to adjust to the dark. The night gets absolutely black out here. The stars seem so close it’s like they’re hanging from a ceiling the height of the one in my unit, rather than in the sky.
But you get used to the dark. Your eyes have to work harder to take in light, but after a while you can differentiate between shapes and start to make out details.
I look around, listening to the crickets and June bugs, the frogs down at the bottom of the pool. My gaze crosses the lawn to where the rose bushes have overgrown the wishing well. After a while I cross the lawn. The tall grass and weeds make swishing noises against my jeans. My legs are damp from the dew, right up to the knee, and my sneakers are soon soaked.
I use my flashlight to light my way as I squeeze through the rose bushes, but it’s a more awkward process than it is by day and I’m nursing a few thorn pricks before I make it all the way inside to the well. I shut off the light then and put a match to the candle I brought. There’s not much of a wind at all, just a slight movement in the air so that the candle casts shadows that make the rose thicket seem even denser than it really is. I pretend I’m—well, not Sleeping Beauty, but one of her handmaidens, say, hidden away behind the wall of thorns. Did they all sleep straight through the hundred years? I find myself wondering. Or did they wake from time to time and glance at their watches, thinking, “When is that prince coming?”
It’s weird what’ll go through your mind when you’re in a situation such as this. There are people who pay good money to go away on spiritual retreats. I always thought it was kind of weird, but now it’s starting to make a little sense. When all you’ve got is yourself, it changes the way you think. You have the freedom to consider anything you want, for as long as you want, because there aren’t any distractions. You don’t have to go to work. The phone won’t ring. Nobody drops by your apartment. It’s just—
“So what are you hiding from, girl?” a voice asks.
I’m so startled I jump about a foot off the fieldstone wall. This is getting to be a bad habit of hers, but I’ve got to admit, Ellie sure knows how to make an entrance.
I see her sitting on the edge of one of the benches, the candle’s light playing a thorny pattern on her white hair. She never made a sound, coming through the bushes, but then I guess a ghost would just float through.
“Who says I’m hiding?” I ask.
“Everything about you says it.”
I shake my head. “I just need some time to be by myself, that’s all.”
“You’re not a very good liar,” Ellie says. “I think the only person who believes you is yourself.”
“I’m not lying,” I tell her, but the words ring as false to me as they obviously do to her.
If I stop to think about it, I know she’s right. I have been lying—most of all to myself.
I look at her, half-hidden in the dark, and find myself telling her what’s brought me here: all the messy baggage that I seem to drag around with me wherever I go. I have to laugh at myself as I’m doing it. In the stories, it’s always the ghosts that unburden themselves.
“What makes you think hiding’ll make it all go away?” Ellie asks when I’m done.
“It won’t, I guess. There’s a lot I’ll have to face up to when I get back. I know that. But at least I’ll be able to do it with a little self-esteem.”
“Seems to me you’re just going to the other extreme,” she says.
Like she knows me so well.
“You don’t know what I’m like,” I say. “You don’t know how hard it is, just trying to be normal. To fit in.”
She seems to consider that. “It’s easier when you’re my age,” she says finally. “Nobody expects you to be pretty or fashionable. You can be
as pushy or as cantankerous as you want, and they don’t blink an eye.”
“I suppose.”
“It was easier when I was younger, too,” she goes on. “Oh, we had movie stars and singers to look up to, the pretty girls in the Coca-Cola adverts and all, but there didn’t seem to be as desperate a need for a girl to make herself over into one of them. We all wanted to, but we didn’t have to, if you get my meaning.”
I shake my head.
“You didn’t have to be pretty to land yourself a husband and raise a family. You just had to be a good person.”
“Like the best looking girls didn’t get the best men,” I say.
“If you think the girls you see as pretty are any happier than you are, you don’t know much about anything.”
“Yeah, well—”
Ellie doesn’t give me a chance to speak; she just barrels along over the top of what I was about to say.
“What you don’t understand,” she tells me, “is that all these problems you’ve got—none of them are your own fault.”
“Oh, right. The old cop-out: Society’s to blame.”
“It is, girl.”
“Brenda. My name’s Brenda.”
I hate the way she keeps calling me “girl.”
“Society makes you get all these expectations for yourself and then, when you can’t meet up to them, it screws up your life. You spend money you don’t have because you’re trying to comfort yourself. You smoke because you imagine it relieves your stress. You lose weight, not because you need to, but because you think if you can look like some woman in a magazine your fife’s suddenly going to be perfect. But it’s not going to work that way.
“First you have to accept yourself—just as you are. Until that happens, nothing’s going to get better for you.”
At least she’s not going on about my father, the way the therapists always do, but it still all sounds so pat. And how much did she make of her life? Working her ass off trying to keep her business afloat, having to declare bankruptcy, probably dying broke in some alleyway, one more burned-out baglady.
“What would you know about why I’m doing anything?” I say.
“Because I’ve been there—” she hesitates for a moment “—Brenda. I spent too much of my own life trying to be somebody that everybody else thought I should be, instead of who I am. If there’s anything I regret, if there’s anything that really gets me riled up still, it’s all those years I wasted.”
Is this my future I see sitting in front of me? I wonder. Because I know all about that feeling of having wasted my life. But then I shake my head. There’s a difference. I’m doing something about my problems.
Still, I think maybe I know what’s keeping Ellie here now. Not vengeance, not any need. Just regret.
“You really are dead, aren’t you?” I say.
“Land sakes, girl. Whatever gave you that idea?”
I’m not going to let her put me off this time.
“I know you’re a ghost,” I tell her. “No different from the voices in the well.”
“You’ve heard voices in the well?” she asks.
“First the voices,” I say, “and then the ghosts. I dream about them. I started wondering what they looked like—the people those voices once belonged to—and now I can’t get them out of my head. They’ve been getting stronger and stronger until now—well, here you are.”
It makes sense, I think as I’m talking. The closer I am to the well, the stronger an influence the ghosts would have on me—so strong now that I’m seeing them when I’m awake. I look over at Ellie, but she’s staring off into nowhere, as though she never even heard what I was saying.
“I never considered ghosts,” she says suddenly. “I used to dream about spacemen coming to take me away.”
This is so weird, it surprises a “You’re kidding” out of me.
Ellie shakes her head. “No. I’d be vacuuming a room, or cleaning the bathroom, and suddenly I’d just get this urge to lay down. I’d stare up at the ceiling and then I’d dream about these silver saucers floating down from the hills, flying really low, almost touching the tops of the trees. They’d land out on the lawn by the wishing well here and these shapes would step out. I never quite knew what exactly they looked like; I just knew I’d be safe with them. I’d never have to worry about making ends meet again.”
I wait a few moments, but she doesn’t go on.
“Are there ghosts in the well?” I ask.
She looks at me and smiles. “Are there spacemen in the hills?”
I refuse to let her throw me off track again.
“Are you a ghost?” I ask.
Now she laughs. “Are we back to that again?”
“If you’re not a ghost, then what are you doing here?”
“I live here,” she says. “Just because the bank took it away from me, it didn’t mean I had to go. I’ve got a place fixed up above the office—nothing fancy, but then I’m not a fancy person. I sleep during the day and do my walking around at night when it’s quiet—except for when the kids come by for one of their hoolies. I get my water from the stream and I walk along the railway tracks out back in the woods, following them down to the general store when I run short of supplies.”
I hadn’t gone further into the office than the foyer, with its sagging floorboards and the front desk all falling in on itself. That part of the motel looks so decrepit I thought the building might fall in on me if I went inside. So I suppose it’s possible….
“What do you do in the winter?” I ask.
“Same as I always did—I go south.”
She’s so matter-of-fact about it all that I start to feel crazy, even though I know she’s the one who’s not all there. If she’s not a ghost, then she’s got to be crazy to be living here the way she does.
“And you’ve been doing this for twenty years?” I ask.
“Has it been that long?”
“What do you live on?”
“That’s not a very polite question,” she says.
I suppose it isn’t. She must feel as though I’m interrogating her.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’m just… curious.”
She nods. “Well, I make do.”
I guess it’s true. She seems pretty robust for someone her age. I decide to forget about her being a ghost for the moment and get back to the other thing that’s been bothering me.
“I know there’s something strange about this well,” I say. “You told me last night that it’s cursed….”
“It is.”
“How?”
“It grants you your wish—can you think of anything more harmful?”
I shake my head. “I don’t get it. That sounds perfect.”
“Does it? How sure can you be that what you want is really the right thing for you? How do you know you haven’t got your ideas all ass-backwards and the one thing you think you can’t live without turns out to be the one thing that you can’t live with?”
“But if it’s a good wish…”
“Nothing’s worth a damn thing unless you earn it.”
“What if you wished for world peace?” I ask. “For an end to poverty? For no one ever to go hungry again? For the environment to be safe once more?”
“It only grants personal wishes,” she says.
“Anybody’s?”
“No. Only those of people who want—who need—a wish badly enough.”
“I still don’t see how that’s a bad thing.”
Ellie stands up. “You will if you make a wish.”
She walks by me then and pushes her way through the roses. I hear the rasp of cloth against twig as she moves through the bushes, the thorns pulling at her jeans and her shirt.
“Ellie!” I call after her, but she doesn’t stop.
I grab my candle, but the wind blows it out. By the time I get my flashlight out and make it out onto the lawn, there’s no one there. Just me and the crickets.
Maybe she isn’t a ghost, I find myself thi
nking. Maybe she was just sitting here all along and I never noticed her until she spoke to me. That makes a lot more sense, except it doesn’t feel quite right. Do ghosts even know that they’re ghosts? I wonder.
I think about the way she comes and goes. Did she have enough time to get out of sight before I got through the bushes? Who else but a ghost would hang around an abandoned motel, year after year for twenty years?
I get dizzy worrying at it. I don’t know what to think anymore. All it does is make my head hurt.
I decide to follow the railway tracks through the woods to the general store where Ellie says she buys her groceries. I’ll use the pay phone in the parking lot to call Jim. And maybe, if they’re still open, I’ll ask them what they know about Ellie Carter and her motel.
20
Jim picked up the phone when it rang, hoping it was Brenda calling. He hadn’t heard from her for a few days now, and Jilly’s odd call this afternoon had left him puzzled and just a little worried. But it was Scotty on the other end of the line.
“I thought you had a date tonight,” Jim said.
He carried the phone over to the sofa. Sitting down, he put his feet up on the coffee table and rested the phone on his chest.
“I did,” Scotty told him, “but she stood me up.”
“That’s low.”
He could almost see Scotty’s shrug.
“I can’t say’s I really blame her,” Scotty said, “if you really want to know the truth. I’m coming on so strong these days, I think I’d stand myself up if I was given the chance.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ah, you know. All I do is think with my cock. I should be like you—take it slow, take it easy. Be friends with a woman first instead of trying to jump her bones the minute we’re alone. But I can’t seem to help myself. First chance I get and I’m all over her.”
“Yeah, well don’t hold me up as some paradigm of virtue,” Jim said. “And besides, I get the feeling I’m getting a version of the old runaround myself.”
He told Jim about the call he’d gotten from Jilly this afternoon and how it had sounded as though she hadn’t known Brenda was away on business.
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