The Gone Away Place

by Christopher Barzak

  I moved on from the viewing room to find seats for my mom and myself in the chapel, already feeling like a stranger. Already feeling like I was outside of the Cady family circle without Noah there to connect us. Nothing made sense anymore. This wasn’t supposed to happen, not to Noah, not to…any of them. I had learned what it was to lose someone I loved when my grandpa died, but all of this death surrounding Newfoundland like a black cloud, choking everything within it, made me feel like the world had suddenly become a wasteland.

  I found two chairs behind the first row, which was reserved for Noah’s family, and sat to wait for Mom, willing myself not to look at Noah’s portrait in the viewing room, trying to win at the I’m fine, really game, which I realized I was starting to play against myself. It was as if two versions of me were seated, and I could look over at the other chair and see myself looking back, saying, “You’re fine, really. Don’t think about any of this.” And as that me, the fine me, continued to try to persuade the other me, I reached over and took hold of the back of her chair, pushed it over in one hard heave, and watched as it clattered to the floor, empty.

  The Cadys and the minister turned to look at me from the viewing room, and I apologized, excusing myself while pulling the chair back up and into place. My face flushed, and I looked toward the foyer, where the front doors had opened and people had begun to enter, forming a crowd as they waited to sign the guest book.

  Piped-in organ music began to play in the background. I sighed, welcoming the distraction. Closing my eyes, I told myself to get it together. For just the next hour. And when I opened my eyes again, determined to do just that, a woman had appeared in front of the crowd in the foyer, as if she’d manifested by way of magic. She wore a little black dress that looked more appropriate for a cocktail party or a wedding reception, and her dark hair curled over her shoulders in long waves. Her eyes were lined with a dusty green color, and the only thing those eyes did was fix me in their stare from across the room the same way her daughter had done whenever I came across her in school hallways.

  It was Mrs. Mueller. Ingrid Mueller’s mother. Ingrid Mueller of the spooky, spaced-out, gloom-filled stare. Ingrid Mueller of the jealousy so palpable, it seemed to roll off her in waves whenever she saw me.

  Mrs. Mueller held my gaze for what seemed like an eternity, while I struggled to look away. But no matter what I told myself as I attempted to free myself from her icy stare, I remained frozen in my chair. It wasn’t until I felt a warm hand land on my shoulder that I was able to look up, and found my mom. She stood beside me, carefully returning Mrs. Mueller’s stare. “Hello, Calliope,” Mom said. “I’m so sorry for your loss. If there’s anything—”

  Mrs. Mueller shook her head, though, cutting Mom off with a grimace. Then slowly she turned to enter the procession to pay her respects to the Cadys, her neighbors whose son had devoted so much of his time to her and her daughter after the loss of her husband.

  “Don’t mind her,” Mom said afterward, even though I hadn’t said anything to make her think I might have been bothered. “She must be having a difficult time right now. First her husband, now her daughter. The poor thing.”

  “I wonder how Ingrid’s services were,” I said.

  And Mom said, “I hear it was a private service. Calliope wanted it that way.”

  As the line of mourners grew longer and those who passed through began to fill the seats around us, a group of girls came around the corner, heading in my direction. Girls from my class, girls I’d known since we were in kindergarten. Alicia Beckwith, Toni Kennedy, and Stacy Marsh. At first sight of them, I drew a sharp breath, worried I might be seeing their ghosts appear before me. But then I reminded myself that more than half of the senior class had survived. Had been in some safe part of the building or had been absent for some other reason, like me. These girls weren’t ghosts. They were alive, breathing the same air I breathed, crying tears I fought to hold back when they came up to me, saying, “Ellie, where have you been? We’ve been so worried. Why haven’t you texted? Are you okay? Oh God, this is so hard, isn’t it? He was so good. So good. I can’t believe it.”

  As their words swarmed around me, I started to feel suffocated by them. I shook my head, tried giving short answers, then apologized for not being in touch, anything to make them go away. Apologizing seemed to be the only thing I could do anymore. “I’m sorry I haven’t returned your texts,” I told them. “Yes, this is hard. He was so good. I don’t…I don’t know how to feel….I don’t know what to say.”

  I looked down at my hands in my lap, one of which my mom still held between her fingertips. My breath had begun to burn in my throat, and my eyes started to well up as the girls filled my sudden silence with more words, more memories, more reminders not to cut myself off from them. And with each word, each memory, each reminder, I could feel them tugging at me, trying to pull me out of myself.

  “You need other people right now,” Stacy Marsh insisted. “We all do.”

  “You need your friends, Ellie,” Toni Kennedy declared.

  And before Alicia Beckwith opened her mouth to add in her feelings, I squeezed Mom’s hand.

  Nothing more was said after that. At least nothing more by me. Because Mom stood immediately, pulled me up with her, and told the girls to please excuse us, she needed to talk to me in private.

  I took her cue and followed behind, heading for the foyer, where we pushed through the ever-growing throng, and left the funeral home before the memorial service could properly begin.

  After we’d put ourselves back into the car, Mom took hold of my chin between her thumb and forefinger, turning my face to hers. “Ellie, love,” she said. “We won’t be going to any more of these, okay?”

  I nodded, wishing I could have gone through with it the way I’d hoped I could, as the tears I’d been holding back started to stream down my face.

  “Also,” Mom added as she used her thumb to wipe the tears away, “I think you should see someone. Someone special.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, helping her wipe the tears away now.

  “There’s a woman, part of the team the governor sent to Newfoundland,” Mom said.

  “A woman?” I said, squinting.

  “A psychiatrist,” Mom said. “Someone who specializes in trauma in communities like ours. I’ve already had some exchanges with her and some of the other counselors. I think you should see her. I think you’re exactly the sort of person she’s been sent here to help.”

  The girl who sat slumped over in the metal folding chair in front of me wasn’t sure if she wanted to live or die. She couldn’t articulate her problem in those words, but after two decades of treating people who’ve suffered sudden catastrophic loss, I find it easy to recognize the signs. She’d survived when Death came on dark wings and slid his sword through the earth around her. And though she’d survived, she didn’t understand that the sword had cut a wound deep inside her as well, in the most sacred of spaces, where, unless we could help her, it would fester for a long time.

  “Eleanor,” I said, after her mother left my makeshift office in a two-story downtown building. It was the only space this devastated town could offer my team to construct a community center. “Is it okay if I call you Ellie?” I asked.

  The girl nodded, but she had yet to speak a word, other than when her mother said she’d be right outside the door, and then the girl had simply said:

  “I’ll be fine, Mom, really.”

  Despite her blond hair and blue eyes, the clear white skin, she reminded me a bit of my daughters back in Columbus. My oldest was only a year younger than her, and from what the girl’s mother had said over the course of our initial phone conversations, Ellie Frame and my oldest daughter both shared a devotion to their friends. “She has a lot of friends,” her mother had said, and then started to tell me about the girls who had made up her daughter’s circle before
she suddenly went quiet. “Had,” she corrected herself a moment later, sounding embarrassed. “She’s lost the best of them, as well as her boyfriend.” And I had promised that I’d do my best to help, however I could.

  On the outside, Ellie looked fine. She was still taking care of herself, washing her face, doing her hair, selecting clothes that weren’t the sort she could hide inside of. Sometimes, people who are disturbed fail to maintain even the basics of caring for themselves. Where she wasn’t fine was in her silences, and in her eyes, which told a different story. I knew she’d taken refuge far back inside herself, as though her body were a cave. You could see her peering out of those eyes with fear and uncertainty. When she looked up from her lap to say, “I’m fine,” her eyes betrayed her.

  “I’m Dr. Arroyo,” I said. “But please call me Eva.”

  “Eva,” she said, testing the name, nodding slightly.

  “Your mother told me your story, Ellie,” I said, “but I don’t believe anyone can know our stories as well as we can. Our stories belong to us and us alone, and others will always have a different understanding of us, even the people who love us. So. I’m wondering if you’d like to tell me your story yourself?”

  She squinted then, as if she didn’t understand what I was asking, but she sat back in her chair, rather than slumping. “I don’t have a story,” she said, shaking her head. Just that. She didn’t even ask me to clarify.

  “I could start with what I know from your mother,” I said, “if that’s okay?”

  She pursed her lips, but nodded. This was how her spirit was responding to what happened, I realized then. She was letting the world move around her now, instead of moving within the world.

  So I began to tell her story to her, based on what I’d already been told, beginning not with the day of the outbreak but with other details her mother had provided. About her past. About the daily rituals of her previous existence. The fact that she was about to graduate, that she was the editor of her yearbook, that she loved writing stories and taking photos for the school newspaper, that she and her friends had spent the last three years planning to attend the same college so they could stay together after high school, and that she was in love with Noah Cady, a self-described geek for video games and comic books, who was also a member of the soccer team. I told her I knew she planned to pursue photojournalism in college, and that she’d been awarded a partial scholarship. “Your favorite photographer is Steve McCurry,” I added at the end, “who’s known for the Afghan Girl photo made famous in National Geographic, and who’s best known for saying about photography and storytelling that—”

  “ ‘If you wait,’ ” Ellie interrupted, “ ‘people will forget your camera and the soul will drift up into view.’ ”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling, glad that she’d decided to join my version of her story with a bit of her own. It was a good sign: she was still in possession of herself, even if her grasp of that wasn’t steady. “I’ve always loved that quote. What draws you to it?”

  She looked just past my shoulder, as if she’d seen something through the window behind me, though I knew there was nothing to see out there but broken concrete, twisted metal, and the remains of a vehicle still wrapped around a telephone pole, waiting to be hauled away to a salvage yard. I wondered if this looking away was normal behavior for her, or if it was an avoidance tactic that had only started since the disaster. Finally, though, still without meeting my eyes, she answered.

  “It’s about people, I guess,” she said. “I mean, it’s how I’ve always felt since I started taking pictures and writing. That there are ways to really see people, to connect with them in a way that allows you to see their real selves. To witness their most vulnerable feelings. Taking pictures and writing does that for me.”

  “So you are the real deal,” I told her, and she swung her gaze back, suddenly at attention.

  “What do you mean?” she asked, looking suspicious, entwining one of her fingers with a lock of hair that lay across her shoulder.

  “I mean that you aspire to be a real artist. Taking pictures and writing stories for you are meaningful activities, not just hobbies. You do them because you’re driven to, not just because they’re fun. Right?”

  “That’s right,” she said, not breaking away. Finally, I had her in the room with me, not floating somewhere between past and present, between here and wherever else her occupied mind kept going to.

  “And have you been taking pictures or writing any stories lately?” I asked.

  She was silent for a long time after that question. “No,” she eventually said. “I haven’t felt up to it.”

  “I can understand that,” I said slowly, and I could.

  “I guess,” she started, “I guess I’ve just not been myself lately. I’ve been, I don’t know…distracted.”

  “By what’s happened here, surely,” I said, assuming that her reason would be the most likely one, the one in which she described how scattered she’d been since discovering her friends had died in the school without her, and how attempting to go to their funerals had proven to be too much, too soon.

  She shook her head, though, said no. And then the answer she gave surprised me.

  “I’ve been distracted by a ghost,” she said, her voice weakening a little on the last word.

  “A ghost?” I said, trying not to betray any feelings I might have on that subject, so that she could continue to speak freely.

  “Timothy Barlow’s ghost,” she said. “He was the boy who lived next door to us.”

  “I’ve heard his name,” I said. “I’ve heard his story.”

  “The story about how he died?” Ellie said, looking at me, and I nodded for her to continue. “Yeah, well, like you said. No one can understand your own story like you do. But right now I can say with confidence that Timothy Barlow isn’t dead. Or at least he’s not all the way dead, the way people think he is. I’ve seen him four or five times in the last few weeks.”

  I asked for more information, and she continued to elaborate, guardedly. Were there patterns to when or where she saw him? Just the area surrounding his house, but mostly on the back deck, when he was listening to music. Did she have any interactions with him? Yes, she’d gone up and spoken with him on the day of the two funerals. None of this really surprised me. People who have lost loved ones—even those whose deaths weren’t unexpected—often report hearing or seeing the person for weeks, months, sometimes years, after they’ve died. I told Ellie all of this, trying to reassure her that what she was experiencing wasn’t unnatural.

  “I kind of thought the same thing,” she said, nodding in an almost agitated way. “But then something else happened that day. At Becca’s services. Her mother was trying to calm me down, because I’d started crying so hard, and while she was hugging me, she told me that she’s seen Becca almost every night since the outbreak.”

  “So she’s been confronted by her own grief as well,” I said.

  “Yes,” Ellie said, “but no. I mean. Here’s the thing that keeps getting to me. The thing that won’t let me sleep. I’ve thought about it, and it makes sense for Becca’s mom to see her. Becca’s her daughter; that kind of bond is supposed to be strong. But I’m going to say something that might make you think I’m a terrible person. And I have to do it because it’s the only way to explain why it doesn’t make sense for me to see Timothy Barlow. I mean, I feel bad for him and his family, I do. I feel bad for everyone right now. But the idea of being haunted by someone seems like it only makes sense if it’s someone you had a super-intense relationship with. A relationship that you can’t accept is gone. And I’m sorry, but for me that wasn’t Timothy Barlow.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” I said. And I confess, in that moment, talking to her about ghosts, I couldn’t help but think about my daughters back home, and about the child who had come before both of them:
a son I brought into this world when I was just twenty-three, married for only a year. He’d lived for five months until the night he suddenly stopped breathing.

  I could suddenly feel tears behind my eyes, as fresh as if it were that day again, over two decades ago. I put my fingers to my temples to rub them a little. That time—the time that came after his death—was the worst in my life. For nearly a year afterward, I would wake each night, hearing him cry, calling to me. And then I’d stumble out of bed and down the hallway, only to find his crib empty in a room I could not bring myself to touch after his death. It eventually came between my first husband and me, my inability to move on, my belief that our child was still with us in spirit. A year and a half after his passing, we divorced, and it was only then that I entered into therapy, as well as into college, and decided to study psychology.

  “I also understand how you feel,” I simply told Ellie now, after I pulled myself back into the time and space we shared. “You have a place inside you that has been hurt. Or maybe destroyed is how it might feel. A gone away place. A place you must heal. A place you must fill again. There are only two ways to do this that I know of. One is to remember the story you were a part of before the place inside you was destroyed, and begin to live within that story again. Or, if that doesn’t seem possible, you must start a new story to live within. And the only way to do either of these is to begin talking. To begin telling your story, even if you’re unsure of it at the beginning.”

  “Tell my story?” she asked, with her head beginning to tilt to one side, curious.

  “Yes,” I said. “Tell it as many times as you have to. To me. To your mother. To your father. To whoever you want to tell it to, really. You’re existing without a story at the moment. Or you’re existing in a story that no longer makes any sense. Without a story to live within, life feels meaningless, without purpose. It isn’t where you want to stay for very long, I think, that gone away place.”