by Natalie Lund
“Join us for lunch,” Eddie said as though it was the most natural thing to have his two lovers together.
“He looks busy,” we heard Carolyn say. There was panic in her voice. Standing there, between the two men, it had to be dawning on her: the nights Eddie didn’t call after her curfew, the sour sweat smell in his car, the frequent visits to the mechanic. Eddie was still smiling, but his brow was crinkled now, like he didn’t understand anything at all.
Without answering, Luke slid back under the car. This heartbreak—not even our own—was one of our last memories.
The impound lot doubled as a junkyard, with towers of junked cars along the back acres—a rusted skyline—and impounded cars sprawling like suburbs in neat rows toward the street. Some of the impounded vehicles were pristine, glistening—towed from Main Street shops and bars. Others were crushed and crunched, flagged with tape for police investigation.
Joshua pedaled slowly past the VW. It seemed a brighter, cheerier blue than it had in the cornfield. He would have guessed that someone had given it a bath—if it weren’t for the mud caked on the tires. The Pontiac was down the fence line, the lot pit bull snoring nearby. Joshua pedaled over, dropped his bike, and wrapped his fingers around the fence links. It was the closest he’d been to the car, and he thought of his grandfather, how he would’ve walked around it, whistling through his teeth.
Something moved inside. It was his neighbor’s head, just visible above the passenger seat. Joshua’s instinct had been right, and seeing the man in the Pontiac felt like everything was now in place. He thought of his sketch, of the ghostly outline he’d left in the driver’s seat. Was Eddie supposed to be there?
His neighbor’s eyes were visible in the cracked passenger mirror, and Joshua couldn’t tell if they were meeting his gaze, or if the fractures meant that the man was staring at the clouds or the blacktop or the yellow stone high school behind him. Be brave, Joshua told himself, and his mind flitted to Brenna, like she was whispering in his ear, hand cupped over her mouth to hide her teeth.
“Hi,” Joshua said. The man’s head jerked and he straightened in the seat. “I’m sorry. I thought you might be here. I just had a few questions.”
The man was silent, but Joshua pressed on.
“Is your name Luke Winters?”
“Yep,” he said.
Joshua’s skin felt like pins and needles—almost like it had before he’d fainted. “Were you in the tornado? In 1961? Did you—did you die?”
“Yes,” the man said softly—almost a whisper.
Joshua felt himself flush from his toes to his forehead. This was what a born-Mercerite like Joshua should have believed all along, and the truth felt like coming home, like waking to the sound of cornstalks, opening his bedroom door to the smell of his grandmother’s pancakes, of padding across the alpaca rug to the kitchen—sweet and familiar. As much as he hated Mercer, he loved the stories that had cracked open his imagination as a child, he loved that farm, he loved his grandparents and sister and mother. They were his home.
“I grew up on Orange Street. In that brick house with the green shutters,” Luke continued. The house with the cigar-smoking man who’d never waved at Ruthie and Joshua? “My father still lives there,” Luke said, as though reading Joshua’s mind. “Luke Senior.”
“Can he see you?” Joshua asked.
“Doesn’t seem to,” Luke said. “After you saw me, I was going every day, hoping. Not sure why I bother. He never accepted me when I was your age. Don’t expect he’s changed.”
Joshua thought of Lawrence, of the way he’d ducked out of rooms, but also of the way he’d squared his chest at Tyler’s father. Mercerites could change. Hell, he’d changed, hadn’t he? He was doing it right now.
“I have something of yours,” Joshua said, his heart rocketing against his rib cage. Luke might be furious when he found out Joshua had stolen the letter, but Joshua knew he had to return it.
Luke got out of the car and walked over so they were face-to-face, with only the links separating them. Joshua handed him the folded square of paper, and Luke stiffened, like he was willing all his muscles to hold his skeleton together.
Joshua understood then that Eddie was Luke’s eclipse, something bright and dark that he couldn’t look at directly. Maybe he’d even died before he had the chance to come out—a thought that made Joshua ache.
“This was Eddie’s car, right?”
“Yes,” the man said, still staring at the letter in his palm as though it might explode.
“And you loved—the car?” Joshua asked, hoping the implication was clear.
“Yes,” he said.
“But then the tornado?”
“I don’t remember much about that night. I thought being in the car might help me understand why I’m back.”
“And has it?”
Luke met Joshua’s eyes, and the contact didn’t feel animal-skittish now, but direct and meaningful—like it was the only way Luke knew how to say: You. I’m here because of you.
The attendant monitoring the gate to the lot slid open his booth window when Callie pulled up.
“Tell him we’re here to get the 1957 Chevrolet Coupe,” Mrs. Vidal said.
Callie repeated the message to the curly-haired man in the stocking cap. He never even glanced past Callie at the woman in the passenger seat. “One moment,” he said, frowning at his screen and sliding his window shut again.
Mrs. Vidal raised her eyebrows and smiled at Callie. “It seems we wait,” she said. “Do you have any questions?”
Mrs. Vidal probably meant questions about the fact that she was a spirit, but it was the same thing Callie’s mother had asked her on the day her kidneys failed. Now Callie was with someone who knew what it meant to die, someone who wasn’t her mother.
“What will it be like? The dying, I mean,” Callie asked.
Mrs. Vidal nodded sagely. “It’s different for everyone.” She cleared her throat. “For me, it was fast—a stroke. My vision went blurry, my limbs went numb, and when I called for help, I couldn’t make the word, couldn’t put the sounds in the right order. I don’t remember feeling pain. Just being in the Chevy one moment, and then being part of the others the next.” She gestured vaguely at the space around them, as though the spirits were everywhere. “Frederic’s death was slower. He stopped eating. His skin looked so yellow and tight, I thought it was going to pop and all his tumors would spill out. He was in pain, so they kept him on his side and turned him over every few hours. He’d wail each time, like he was being tortured. I tried to help him drink water, but he usually threw it up. I’d have to blot the mess off the pillow. He wasn’t conscious much at the end, and when he was, he’d ask confusing things, like where the people on TV were. He thought they were real, that they were relatives from France who he was supposed to remember and didn’t.” It was brutally matter-of-fact—how Mrs. Vidal talked about her husband. Her sharp gaze was directed at the gate, the cars beyond. “There’s this point when they’ll tell you she’s actively dying, which is a hoot because we all are—dying, I mean. Even you, young as you are. Your cells are at it right now.”
Callie followed Mrs. Vidal’s gaze, trying to see past the cars that were flattened and stacked along the horizon. If Mrs. Vidal could be here, right now, talking to her so frankly years after her daughter’s death, after her husband’s, Callie could sit at her mother’s bed and hold that icy hand and be the daughter her mother deserved.
“And after?”
“After is the hardest part for the living,” she said. “After Celeste, I stopped eating. I didn’t go to the funeral. I sold the house where she’d grown up, where I’d grown up. It took me years to realize that, in pushing the pain away, I was pushing her away—everything I had left of her. You have to preserve. You have to do work—to think of the person and remember, to reread the essays she wrote for class, to cook the foods she loved, to look a
t the photos you took. And as a town, we have to do that too. That’s why I started the society. It’s the history of this place that keeps it alive.”
“Why didn’t you register the house as historic back then?”
“The Gallaghers didn’t want me to. They thought the state would meddle if they tried to make changes to the property. And then your mother bought it, and I knew it was in good hands.”
Thinking of her mother, Callie was about to ask what the afterlife was like for the dead, but the attendant slid open his window again, interrupting Mrs. Vidal. “You own the car?” he asked.
“No,” Callie said. “My grandmother does.”
“Do you have the title or other proof of ownership?”
Callie shook her head.
“Sorry,” the man said. “No dice.”
“See if he’ll at least let us go look at it,” Mrs. Vidal said. “Maybe we can break it out of here.”
Breaking the car out and selling it was not remotely an option, but Callie was curious and Mrs. Vidal was set on going inside. “Can I check and see if my grandpa’s pipe is in the car? He really loved that thing, and he just passed.”
The man frowned, but perhaps Callie looked tragic enough that he nodded. “All right. You can go in now, but you’ll need to come back with the title and what you owe to get the car off the lot.”
The attendant gave them the spot number and pointed. Callie parked on the street and Mrs. Vidal took her arm as they crossed into the lot. Callie expected her to lean, but Mrs. Vidal remained upright and steady, almost dragging Callie along.
Up close, the damage was even worse than Callie had first thought. The taillights were shattered. The rear end crumpled.
“It looks like it’s going to be harder to sell than I thought,” Mrs. Vidal said, stroking one of the fins. Callie had expected this, and still the disappointment flooded her. How could she save the house?
“You know, it was at the drive-in that night,” Mrs. Vidal said. “My daughter took it to work. I never saw the damage. Frederic kept it in a storage facility. I was a lot more nervous back then, and he was very protective.”
“Why didn’t he just sell it?”
She shrugged. “I guess he kept it for the same reason I couldn’t keep the house. Because it reminded him of her. He’d work on it on the weekends. Trying to restore it. I didn’t go see it until after he died. I thought I’d sell it then, but I couldn’t help climbing inside. It reminded me of all the places we’d go as a family: church, the grocery store, Starved Rock State Park. I started visiting it regularly after I moved into St. Theresa’s. I even wrote it into my will, so the historical society could sell it for operating costs. I was inside it, thinking of Celeste and Frederic, when I had the stroke. And then there I was the other day, inside it again during this terrible storm just like the one when—” She closed her eyes and shuddered. “When it was over, I drove it into town. I kept having this feeling that I needed to look after the house, make sure it would be preserved, and look after you, too.”
“Why me?” Callie managed to ask, but she sounded winded, like she’d just finished a run.
Mrs. Vidal stared at Callie, the lines in her forehead forming Vs, like flying geese. Then she spoke slowly as though she were discovering each word, tasting it for the first time. “My memories are tangled. Some are mine and some seem to belong to the others. But I do remember watching you grow up. And you’ve been worrying me lately; you’re buried deep down.”
Callie imagined herself in a hole, pulling down handfuls of dirt, scraping until it cascaded like a shower. It was safer in the suffocating dark. That was why she’d collapsed to the pavement after her father wrenched her and her feelings to the surface in Giovanni’s parking lot. Underground, she’d forgotten how to breathe.
As Brenna neared the impound lot, she spotted a shock of red hair. It was Joshua, leaning against the fence near the Pontiac, talking as though there was someone on the other side. His ghost? Brenna threw Golden Girl in park and beckoned Dot to follow her.
“Hey, Josh. I want you to meet Dot.”
He turned, and Brenna watched him scan the air beside her without finding Dot.
“Nice to meet you,” he said anyway, and gestured toward the Pontiac. “This is Luke.”
Brenna smiled toward the Pontiac, hoping that Luke—wherever he was—knew she was glad to have him there. “Do you guys know each other? Can you see each other?” Brenna asked.
“I don’t see anyone except the redhead,” Dot said. “But I have this familiar feeling, like when you’re with someone you’ve known your whole life, and you don’t have to say anything to understand each other.”
“I wanted to show Dot the VW,” Brenna said to Joshua, and she pointed toward the end of the lot that was closer to the cemetery. Dot was already marching to where the blue VW leaned on its flat tire on the other side of the fence, the chrome still glinting. Brenna followed, Joshua trailing her, and possibly Luke, too. Before Brenna realized what was happening, Dot bent and dug into the grass along the sidewalk, ripping up a fistful of soil and sod. She chucked it, but the dirt diffused in the air before it hit the bus. That didn’t stop her from grabbing another fistful. And another. The pit bull waddled over, wagging his tail, and snapped at the flying dirt clumps like he was trying to catch tennis balls.
“I shouldn’t have accepted it from him,” Dot spat. Brenna stopped mid-step. Behind her, Joshua did the same.
“If I hadn’t taken it, we wouldn’t have—” Dot grabbed another clump of dirt and grass. This time, some hit the bus and crumbled between its headlights. Brenna wondered what this man had done to Dot and what the VW had to do with it all.
“Here.” Though he couldn’t see Dot, Joshua held a small piece of broken concrete on his palm like he was feeding Mrs. Jenson. Dot took the concrete, and Joshua’s face bloomed with wonder. He grinned at his empty hand.
Dot launched the concrete over the fence. It bounced off the roof of the bus with a disappointing thud. Brenna found a larger piece of cracked concrete and levered it from the soil with a stick. She handed it to Dot, and this time, the projectile hit the windshield with a satisfying crack. Dot’s chest was heaving, and she bent over her knees to catch her breath.
Behind them, a car pulled up and idled. Brenna spun around, afraid it was a cop. How would they explain this?
“Hey, you guys.” Callie was in the driver’s seat. “I’m here with Mrs. Vidal,” Callie said, waving at the empty seat beside her. Brenna couldn’t help laughing, a gleeful, bubbling sound. Again and again, she, Callie, and Joshua were being pulled together, and now all three of them were here with their Storm Spirits in tow.
Maybe Mercer really was a magical place.
“I think it’s time we heard your stories,” she said. And as each spirit spoke, Callie, Brenna, and Joshua repeated so all could hear.
From Luke, a story of a forbidden life and love. Joshua’s expression was grave, for it was his history too—the fight to be seen, to take up space.
From Mrs. Vidal, a life of losses, beaded together. They dangled before Callie, heavy and near.
From Dot, unimaginable trauma and a cold, lonely depression that tugged at her like a moon. Brenna knew that moon, had felt it orbiting closer and closer. But for Dot, there’d been the relief of music and art and friends. Finally, now, Brenna felt that too.
FOR MANY OF US
For many of us, our worst day was October 7, 1961, when the tornado ripped through our town, our lives. But the day itself started out so ordinary. Bowls of creamed wheat with baked apples, a pancake glazed with melted butter and warm syrup, an egg or two with fried bacon. Then there was dusting, sweeping, and hanging clothes to dry. There were speech meets and babysitting. Homework and busing tables. Play rehearsals and apprenticing with fathers and feeding livestock. At lunch, many of us were together, drinking floats on the hoods of our ca
rs or the tops of picnic tables in the town square, under Eleanor’s watchful eye. We thought of the square as our place, never considering that our parents wanted that for us—the town’s heart to be ours.
After lunch, there were books to read, cars to wax, lawns to mow, cards to play, cash registers to balance. Most of us ate dinner with our families, filled our stomachs with pork chops and chicken thighs and beef shoulders, animals that were born and raised just down the road. We teased siblings. We were silenced by fathers’ stern gazes. Before the drive-in, we helped mothers soak pots and bathe brothers and read stories.
There’s such sweetness in ordinary, in the calm before a storm.
At the lunch table, Callie was pinching pieces of bread with her forefinger and thumb until the sandwich looked like it had been pecked by a flock of birds. Joshua found it difficult to watch her shrinking into herself, dense and dark like a dying star. It was another reason he admired Brenna; she could look directly at Callie, and at him, without flinching.
“I wonder why Mrs. Vidal, and not Celeste, is visiting me,” Callie said suddenly. “You two have visitors who were actually in the tornado. Mine had a whole life afterward.”
“Maybe she’s exactly what you need,” Joshua said quietly, almost under his breath. “Maybe that’s why all three of them are here. Because only they can help us, because we need them.”
Joshua could feel Callie’s need from across the table, could feel it pulling at him, at everything around them: his crumpled napkin and deli paper, the din of lunchroom chatter, the light.
What was it he needed? What could stoic, gruff Luke possibly give him? But Joshua already knew the answer. Don’t let them get you down. He had to do what he’d planned when he started high school: start the support groups, rally, date, go to prom—everything Eddie had turned away from and lost, everything Luke had needed too. Joshua wouldn’t run because people refused to see him, wouldn’t wait for another tornado to disappear inside. What he could do—what he needed to do—was make himself impossible to ignore.