The Gone Away Place

by Christopher Barzak

  The psychologist told me that I shouldn’t be concerned about what I’d seen. She said that, under the circumstances, it was completely normal to experience something so extraordinary. She told me it wasn’t just me. Others in Newfoundland had been seeing things of this nature, too, she said, and she was trying to figure out a way to organize a group where people might come together to talk, to help one another move through those experiences and back into their regular lives. I nodded, and thanked her for telling me all of that. It truly was a relief to know it wasn’t just me. But I’m not one for group therapy, either, I told her, and she nodded and said she understood, and that she’d make sure to let me know about whatever happened, in case I changed my mind.

  When I was standing at the door of her makeshift office in the ruins of downtown Newfoundland, about to leave, I paused and looked over my shoulder. “I don’t know if you can answer this,” I said, “but you talked to my daughter not too long ago. In your opinion, is she okay?”

  And the doctor gave me a brief smile before saying, “She is as okay as you are.”

  That gave me some relief as well, and I thanked her again before leaving.

  It wasn’t until I came home from work one afternoon, a week or so later, that I realized maybe that doctor had been trying to tell me something else when she said Ellie was as okay as I was. Because when I opened the front door, Ellie was waiting for me in the foyer with her arms crossed, her eyes seeming to spark like blue gas flames, and what she did next was say, “I know what you saw, Dad.”

  At first, I tried to play it safe, to pretend like I didn’t know what she was talking about, but she continued. “Becca and Rose,” she said, not moving from her spot in front of me, blocking my way to the kitchen. “You saw them.”

  I knew right then she’d somehow found me out. And I knew as well that if my daughter was anything like her mother, I’d have to tell her everything—every last detail, down to every single feeling I had in the moment—before she’d let me be, and let me put my days of seeing ghosts behind me.

  Before she disappeared—right as she started to develop that strange aura I’d seen around Timothy Barlow’s ghost while I recorded him—Becca said, “Oh my God, Ellie. It’s so beautiful. So beautiful. You won’t believe it.”

  Then she rose up and up, seemingly passing through the ceiling, passing through the attic and the roof, and I went to her window to watch as she continued to rise up into a sky so blue, no gray wall could ever keep her out of it.

  Then Becca was gone, and I was alone in her room again, holding my phone, the camera still running. There was nothing for it to record, though, except for the desk chair where she’d been sitting the moment before. I almost couldn’t believe I’d done what she’d asked of me, and for a moment I wished I had refused. Then I felt horrible for having that feeling, because in that last second before she rose up and went to wherever it was she felt she needed to get to, she had smiled with happiness and relief, a smile like I’d never seen her truly wear before.

  Reluctantly I turned the phone off and slipped it into my pocket, then carefully put everything in the room back into place so Becca’s mom wouldn’t see the black rose behind the shelf of fairy-tale books unless someday she decided to pack Becca’s things away.

  Afterward, I crept down the creaking stairs into the kitchen, where Mrs. Hendrix was sitting at the table, drinking a fresh mug of tea. “Well?” she said, smiling her weirdly excited smile, clearly waiting for me to report in detail on my experience with Becca. “How did things go?”

  For a second, I thought about telling her the truth. I thought about telling her how she’d been right. That Becca had come to me. That we’d talked. That it had made me feel better to be able to do that. That it had given me some kind of relief to be able to say goodbye to Becca properly, instead of feeling locked up in my guilt for not having been there with her and the others that day. But also that I’d been able to help Becca find peace. As I stood there, though, looking down at Mrs. Hendrix, knowing that I’d released Becca from her mother and from the gray area Newfoundland had become following the outbreak, I realized Mrs. Hendrix would probably resent my having done that. She’d been calling Becca to her every night for weeks now. Like Becca had said, her mother’s need for her was strong. I didn’t want to face any reaction Mrs. Hendrix might have after learning that Becca was free of her now.

  So instead I said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Hendrix. It didn’t work for me.”

  She squinted, hearing this, as if she couldn’t believe Becca hadn’t come to see me, and said, “Wh-what? Are you serious?”

  “I tried,” I said, nodding. “I tried to call her to me like you said. I even tried talking to her as if I believed she was in the room with me. But she never came. I’m sorry. I wish she would have.”

  I could see Mrs. Hendrix working through all of this information, trying to come up with some kind of reason for why I hadn’t been able to call Becca to me like she could. And very quickly, she must have arrived at an explanation for my failure, an explanation that simultaneously made her happy, I could tell, by the return of her blissfully obsessed smile.

  “It must be because she’ll only come for me,” she said, twisting her smile into a sort of pout that made it seem like she felt bad for me, but you know what they say about a mother’s love. It’s stronger than any other. I could just imagine what she was thinking: It’s because of our special bond, the reason Becca only comes to me. And while she was right, in a way, I remembered what Becca had said about her name, how it was a braid her mother had knotted around her, to hold her down, to keep her like a pet on a leash. That’s a kind of bond, but not the sort Mrs. Hendrix could ever fathom her daughter felt about her.

  So I said, “That must be it,” and nodded, glad that we could part ways on this note. And when I eventually left a few minutes later, I looked back just once from the end of the driveway. I could hear Mrs. Hendrix calling for Becca. “Becca? Becca, love?” she kept saying. Her voice climbed higher each time Becca didn’t come to her. “Becca, where are you, sweetheart?”

  Hearing her like that, her voice so full of need, made me feel bad, but my sympathy for Mrs. Hendrix wasn’t as strong as my relief for Becca, who had finally been able to fly away, the way she’d wanted to, free as a bird on the wing.

  * * *

  At home, I paced around my room the way I’d done after helping Timothy Barlow’s ghost. I kept thinking about my dad. I kept thinking about how Becca said she and Rose had seen him a few days after the outbreak, when he was out with his crew, working overtime to aid in the relief efforts, to clear the roads of trees and downed power lines. He’d seen them. He’d seen the ghosts of two of my best friends, and he hadn’t told me.

  I wanted to shake him, to scream at him for keeping quiet. But I knew that would just make me a hypocrite. I hadn’t told Mom or Dad that I’d seen ghosts, either. I had to remind myself of this as I paced, clenching my fingers into the palms of my hands, my nails digging crescent-shaped red marks into my flesh. I had to remember that anyone who’d seen a ghost might not want others to know. Except, of course, Mrs. Hendrix, who clearly felt seeing Becca made her special. She was, after all, the same woman who claimed that God had turned the tornadoes away from her house in order to protect her. She wasn’t the most thoughtful person, obviously, and that’s probably why she was the only person in Newfoundland talking about something others hoped no one would ever discover.

  So I let my anger go. I shook it off by flicking my fingers toward the floor, as if my anger were drops of water. And by the time I heard Dad’s car pull into the driveway, I was mostly calm again, and I went downstairs to meet him as he came through the front door.

  My dad is a big guy. Tall. Broad-shouldered. He has wavy black hair and blue eyes, with just a few recently acquired worry lines radiating from their corners. Sometimes my mom calls him Superman, and based on pho
tos of my dad when he was young, I agree he looks like him, at least a little. He has no awkward Clark Kent features, though—just the Man of Steel swagger. He’s the sort of guy who immediately comes to the rescue when he hears someone in trouble. So when I confronted him in the living room before he even had a chance to pull off his work boots, demanding he tell me why he hadn’t mentioned seeing Becca and Rose weeks ago, and tears fell down his stubbly cheeks, I gasped. I was horrified to discover that my superhero wasn’t invulnerable. That I actually had the power to hurt him.

  We talked for a while in the living room, sitting on the couch together. Dad had a hard time looking at me while he told me about the day Rose’s and Becca’s ghosts cut across the road his crew was working on as they headed toward Rose’s house. He seemed almost embarrassed to admit it, as if there was some kind of shame in what had happened. And he admitted that he’d even gone to see Dr. Arroyo about it, because he knew Mom had taken me to visit her, and Mom had told him she was more at ease about how I was doing afterward. “I guess that’s how you found out, huh?” he eventually asked.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “Dr. Arroyo,” he said. “She told you what I said in her office.”

  “I haven’t seen her in a couple of weeks,” I said, not thinking my answer through completely, because Dad looked confused and asked, if not Dr. Arroyo, then who? He hadn’t told Mom, so how did I know? Was it one of his crew?

  It was time for me to confess some things myself, I realized, especially after Dad had been so open with me. So I told him about Timothy Barlow, and I told him about seeing Becca, too. I didn’t tell him every single detail, because I was still having a hard time understanding everything that was happening to me, that was happening to Newfoundland. And I especially had a hard time keeping my thinking straight when Dad turned to me and said, “I saw Timothy and Noah, too.”

  My skin shivered and my breath caught in my throat when I heard that. My hands began to tremble in my lap, and my face must have looked how I felt, because Dad said, “Ellie, what’s the matter? You’ve turned white as—”

  “A ghost,” I said for him, still unable to stop my hands from trembling, even though I clasped them together now, trying to hold them steady. After a long pause, I faced him again and said, “You saw him? You saw Noah?”

  Dad blinked. “I think it was him,” he said. “He was standing at the edge of the woods out back. I didn’t get a good look at him, but I saw the seven on the back of his shirt as he walked away, so I figured it was him. Why? Haven’t you seen him?”

  I shook my head, unable to even say no. My entire body felt as if it were ice or stone at that point. I felt colder and heavier than I had even in the first week or two after the outbreak.

  “It might not have been Noah, then,” Dad said quickly; he was clearly trying to make me feel better. “I probably didn’t see anyone at all that day. It was so fast, more of a flash. Not like when I saw Rose and Becca.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head again. “It was him.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because,” I said, “Becca told me that others have seen me. That they’ve kept their distance but have looked in on me.”

  “Honey,” Dad said, putting one of his big hands on my clasped-together hands. “We probably shouldn’t mention any of this to your mom. She’s already been worn out by all of the volunteer work she’s doing at the shelter. I don’t want her to worry about us on top of that.”

  I wasn’t able to respond right away, because my mind was still turning over the fact that my dad had seen Noah…and I hadn’t. Becca had told me not to expect to see him. She wouldn’t say why, said I had to trust her. And because it was Becca, I believed her. But now, knowing Dad had seen Noah, I couldn’t help but feel betrayed. Why not me, I kept thinking. Why won’t you let me see you, Noah?

  “Honey?” Dad said.

  And I snapped out of my daze, looked back at him, and said, “I don’t know if it’s a good idea not to tell Mom.”

  “Why?” Dad asked.

  “Because,” I said, “you and I have both seen ghosts and didn’t tell each other about it. What if Mom has, too? It might actually be a relief for her to know she isn’t the only one.”

  When Mom came home an hour later, Dad and I were both in the living room, sitting on the couch with what must have been the weirdest looks on our faces ever, because Mom’s brows immediately went up when she found us staring at her in silence. “Hi,” she said, looking confused. “What’s up, you two?”

  * * *

  It was a long night, with what seemed like endless discussion. It turned out my mom actually hadn’t seen anything remotely like a ghost, she said, but she’d met a lot of people at the shelter—people who had lost their homes in the outbreak and had no family to take them in afterward—who claimed they’d been seeing the dead, too. “I thought they were just traumatized,” she said.

  And I said, “Seems like we all are, even more than we thought.”

  “Yes,” Mom agreed. “We are. Some of those folks, Ellie, they’ve lost everything. Loved ones, their homes, everything. Some of them have nothing left but the clothes they came in wearing.”

  I nodded. It’s so hard to see outside of your own grief. It’s easy to feel as if no one is experiencing the smothering darkness of loss like you are. It was no wonder, really, that my mom was the only person I knew at that point who hadn’t seen a ghost: she’s the one person in my life who, no matter what, seems able to keep a mostly selfless perspective. She could move through her own grief without being blind to others’. She was able to put things in her own life aside in order to help other people get theirs back together.

  Suddenly I wished I could be more like her.

  Mom was good about hearing everything Dad and I had to tell her, but it was clear she was concerned at the same time. She’d already been worried about me, but in the middle of listening to Dad tell her about what he’d seen, she reached out to take his hand in hers and started to cry a little.

  In the end, Mom said, “I don’t want what’s happened to Newfoundland to happen to my family. We’re going to be okay. All of us.”

  After that, there was a lot of sighing and hugging, and I told myself that I needed to be more like Mom instead of just wishing I was. I told myself that I needed to stop thinking about what I’d lost or why I hadn’t seen Noah. I told myself to focus on what still remained: my family, my home, a future.

  It was a good realization, but realizations can be fragile when they’re still fresh. Which is what happened to mine not even an hour later, when I went upstairs to my room to find the screen of my laptop brightly lit in the dark of my room, with a search engine bar already filled with these words: Friend Pulling Day.

  I looked around, knowing that someone—the ghost of someone—had been in my room or might even be there still, invisible, not showing themselves, and wanted me to find this.

  So I placed the cursor over the magnifying glass icon, and pressed it to search for whatever meaning those words might lead to.

  Friend Pulling Day. In Japanese, it’s tomobiki. On the Japanese calendar, the days of each month that are considered “friend pulling” are clearly marked so that people can decide how to schedule weddings, funerals, and other important events. On a Friend Pulling Day, it’s good luck all day, except at noon. You can have a wedding on a Friend Pulling Day, but you should never have a funeral. Why? Because tomobiki literally means to pull your friends into the same spirit world or situation you find yourself in. Good for weddings, because you pull your friends into the spirit of love. Bad for funerals, when you could be pulled away from the land of the living and into the land of the dead.

  Or into a gray area, I thought as I looked away from the glow of my laptop. Just like Becca said Newfoundland had become after the outbreak.

  Rose, I thought. She must have
been here. In my house. In my room. Who else would leave me a ready-made search term that, with one click of a button, would lead me to information about a Japanese superstition?

  I was about to close my computer when my cell buzzed, notifying me about a new email. I didn’t bother looking at my phone and instead opened my email on the laptop, and what I found was a message from Alicia Beckwith, whom I hadn’t seen or heard from since Noah’s memorial service. Her message came with this subject header:

  Newfoundland is now famous for more than tornadoes.

  I thought about not even opening it up, which I’d been doing with most emails for weeks at that point, the same way I’d been ignoring text messages from people until they eventually stopped reaching out. But something made me pause. Maybe it was because I’d just been left a cryptic search term from the ghost of my friend, or maybe it was because the subject header itself spiked my interest. Maybe it was both of those things. Whatever the reason or reasons, I decided to open Alicia’s email, and what I found inside were three simple sentences:

  Guys, look at this. Newfoundland is famous. And you’ll never guess what for.

  They were followed by a link that swept me away from Alicia Beckwith’s email to an article that had been posted earlier on the website of the Plain Dealer. “The Haunting of Newfoundland, Ohio” read the headline, and the story that followed was an account of the aftermath of the tornado outbreak, detailing the lives of six Newfoundlanders who claimed they were being haunted by the ghosts of their lost loved ones.