The Gone Away Place

by Christopher Barzak

  It was a long article—the cover story of the print newspaper, which I drove into Cortland the next morning to pick up at a convenience store. A large photograph of a devastated Newfoundland cemetery took up a quarter of the page. The headstones in the picture leaned toward one another like crooked teeth, and the head of a cherub lay at the base of a marker that had been broken in half like a wafer. I knew that cemetery. It was on the north side of town, near the lighthouse; it was where the Cadys had waited to bury Noah once the cleanup and repairs to the cemetery had been taken care of, and new grave beds could be excavated for those who had died in the outbreak.

  The people featured in the article were all anonymous, but if you were a Newfoundlander (and, in particular, a Newfoundlander who paid attention to others), you could easily guess who some of them were. And as I read, I guessed at the identities of three of the interviewees, just by noticing certain details the reporter included.

  One, I thought, was our school librarian, Mrs. Sparks. The library was on the east side of the high school, and while some photos I’d seen online showed it looking a wreck—with shelves turned over and books scattered across the floor, their pages fanned open, as if they’d all been shot—it had been mostly untouched by the storm and the explosion. At least, compared to the west wing of the building. The interviewee I thought was Mrs. Sparks was quoted as saying, “I keep hearing their voices. The kids. The students. They keep asking me questions. Where they can find certain things they need. How to use certain databases. I’ve tried to ignore them, though it hurts to do that. But as soon as one leaves, I’ll open my door and find another one waiting on my doorstep, wanting to ask me a question.”

  The second one, I thought, was probably Mrs. Hendrix. The woman was quoted as saying, “Every night, my daughter comes to me, and every night, we talk. It’s like she hasn’t died, not really. She’ll sit across the table while I sip my tea, and we’ll carry on a conversation as if nothing ever happened. No, I don’t feel afraid at all. I feel blessed, actually. Truly blessed. This is a gift from God, to make up for what was taken from me.”

  Leave it to Mrs. Hendrix, I thought, to make it seem like the creator of the universe had picked her out for special reparations.

  And as for the third interviewee: I guessed him to be Mr. Armstrong, the husband of our French teacher. She had reportedly shielded several students with her own body when the tornadoes began to rip the roof off the building. She’d hoped, it seemed, to be able to spare them if the roof were to cave in. In the end, though, they were killed, all of them. And I reasoned this was Mr. Armstrong because, in his section of the article, he was quoted as saying, “My wife speaks another language now, the language she loved most of all. The language of love, she used to call it. I don’t understand what she’s trying to tell me, but I listen and listen, writing down the words I can pick out, and later I try to translate them with a dictionary.”

  I sat in my car outside the convenience store, shaking my head, feeling both like the privacy of my friends and neighbors had been invaded, and somehow relieved that it wasn’t just me. That it wasn’t just Dad. That we weren’t in the same category of thinking as Mrs. Hendrix, who somehow seemed to gloat over her circumstances while others around her suffered. That we were, weirdly, the normal ones.

  I remember driving home that morning from Cortland, after reading the paper in private, and pulling into my driveway, planning to show it to Mom. To put it down on the breakfast table, where she’d be having coffee before taking off for her shift at the shelter. Here, I was going to tell her as I put the paper down in front of her. Look here. There are more than we even thought. More people like Dad and me. I instinctively wanted to drive the point home to her that sometimes there were no rational reasons for things, and that she’d simply been lucky not to have been haunted. Not to have ghosts knock on the door or sit across the table from her long after their bodies were broken and buried beneath the rubble.

  Instead, what I found as I opened the front door was Mom kneeling in front of the television, wiping tears from her cheeks. She looked over her shoulder as I came in and said, “Oh, Ellie, it’s worse than we even imagined.”

  And then, as I looked at the television screen beyond where she knelt on the living room floor, I realized the news of our ghosts had reached even further than the papers.

  * * *

  For the next hour, Mom and I watched as a local channel ran segments on Newfoundlanders telling their stories. Stories all about hauntings. All ghost stories. The paper from Cleveland was just the first to dig into the wreckage of our community and unearth the strangeness that we’d all been hiding behind closed and broken doors.

  They showed footage of our ruined cemeteries, of our half-collapsed high school, of the pile of rubble and pipes and wood that had been our town hall. They showed helicopter views of neighborhoods that had been wiped out completely, as if they’d never existed, and of the places where the woods that wove their way through and around Newfoundland had been reduced to fields of splinters. They showed footage of our funeral home parking lots packed tight with cars. Footage of people crying in shelters and in the housing units the government had erected at the county fairgrounds. And all the while, between these flashing images, they ran interviews with people around town who were being haunted.

  Toward the end of the hour-long report, they interviewed Dr. Arroyo, introducing her as a community-trauma specialist. She was sitting in the chair behind the old steel desk in her makeshift office, talking about the hauntings from a psychologist’s point of view. Granted, a psychologist who, as the interviewer noted, had been trained in Jungian psychotherapy—which is sort of old-fashioned, according to Mom—but it was that particular philosophy, Dr. Arroyo said, that provided her with the skills a community like ours needed at a time like this.

  “I’ve been speaking with people for weeks now,” Dr. Arroyo said, “who claim to be seeing ghosts. Young people, middle-aged people, the elderly. Men and women alike. There is no particular pattern to who is experiencing this phenomenon. It is the community as a whole that is being haunted, and that is not entirely unexpected, if you have studied other communities around the world that have suffered great losses. I have traveled to and have lived within communities that have been destroyed by earthquake, ravaged by tsunami, or affected by environmental disasters. In each of those cases, phenomena such as this are present.”

  “And what’s become of those communities?” the reporter asked next.

  “Some have moved on. Some are in the middle of rebuilding. Some are still afflicted many years later, if the community was unable to put itself back together.”

  “What do you think will become of Newfoundland and the surrounding towns that were hit hard, here in Ohio?” the reporter asked.

  For a second, Dr. Arroyo seemed to wince, but then, with a sudden air of conviction, she said, “I believe the people of Newfoundland will be able to move beyond what’s occurred here. People here are struggling, but it’s still early. And they’re already going about repairing various aspects of their lives. In the end, it will be a long process. A long struggle. Only time will tell the final story.”

  * * *

  Only time will tell. Only time will tell. I kept repeating those words in my mind like a mantra, as if they held the key to everything. The secret I’d been trying to uncover. A way to release my friends and family, to release myself and everyone, the dead and the living, from the gray embrace that gripped us. How to release us all from the gray area Newfoundland had become?

  Only time would tell. But how long would it take before it gave up the ending to Newfoundland’s story? And would it be a happy one, or sad? Would it be something else entirely? Or something in between, maybe, like the gray area we were in now? And if that last possibility turned out to be true, would those who died be cursed to stay here on earth forever, unable to attain whatever kind of heaven might
be waiting to receive them? And would it mean that people like my dad and me would be forever haunted?

  Only time would tell.

  But there might be others who knew something about it. Rose, I thought, who’d left me the search terms for Friend Pulling Day. Rose might know what I needed to understand. Becca had alluded to that in our conversation. She’d said that Rose was with her parents, being well protected. What did that even mean? Becca had seemed afraid to tell me certain things, had held back on revealing what she knew of the other side. She’d asked me to trust that there were things I shouldn’t know, because if I knew, I might attract the wrong attention.

  But maybe I was already attracting the wrong attention. Otherwise, I would never have seen a ghost at all. Or I would hope that I would have at least been able to attract the right attention. Like Noah’s.

  Where was he? Why wouldn’t he show himself to me? The question continued to linger, especially after my dad told me that he’d seen Noah standing at the edge of the woods behind our backyard. I would have even taken some kind of invisible communication from him. Anything at this point, really. Why wouldn’t he brush his hand against my cheek, making me look in his direction? Why wouldn’t he whisper something into my ear during a sleepless night, something only I would understand, while I stared across my room at a bookshelf I’d lined with framed photographs of him and me?

  Becca might have thought not telling me everything would protect me, but I didn’t feel safe at all. Not when, no matter where I was—in my bedroom, in the kitchen, as I drove my car into Cortland to pick up groceries for Mom, walking in those aisles of canned goods and boxes of crackers—I could feel the presence of invisible others surrounding me, their fingertips practically brushing against my arms and shoulders, lifting a lock of my hair for an instant, letting it fall before I could catch sight of them.

  No, I thought. Not knowing wasn’t a form of protection.

  So I decided to visit Rose.

  * * *

  The Sano farm lay on the outskirts of Newfoundland, on an old back road called Messenger Run, which was named after Mrs. Sano’s family. My mom always said that the Messengers must have been among the first settlers of Newfoundland, as the farmhouse had looked ancient even when she was a kid, back when my grandparents moved to Newfoundland in the 1960s, when it seemed like it might be the sort of small town to invest in before it grew into a suburb. The Messenger family, Mom said, went back and back in the town library’s historical records. The records had probably been lost in the wreckage of the town library, at least the original documents, but hopefully one day they could be resurrected if the librarians had begun to transfer them to electronic files.

  The Messenger farmhouse was white with forest-green trim, and it sat behind the wide, arcing loop of a gravel drive. On either side of the driveway, towering pine trees stood like guardians, and surrounding the farmhouse itself were far-ranging fields, where Rose’s dad, Mr. Sano, grew soybeans and corn. It was such an old-fashioned kind of place that whenever I’d come over to visit or stay the night as a kid, it felt like stepping back in time. Rose and I would play Little House on the Prairie after we’d read the books, because the farmlands surrounding the house seemed straight out of the stories.

  Standing before the front porch now, I could still see Rose and me as little girls, playing with dolls I’d brought over, eating the unfamiliar treats her grandmother in Japan would send to her, like green-tea chocolates and moist cakes that tasted like melon. I was always in awe of Rose’s life, even though I knew she felt like she didn’t fit in because she was one of only a handful of Asian American kids in our town. But to me, it always felt like she had access to another world, a much bigger world beyond our small-town life. During the winter break each school year, she and her parents would fly to Japan to visit her father’s family, and each summer, her parents would send her to stay with her aunt Miyuki and uncle Ren, who lived in the house where Rose’s father had grown up and still took care of Rose’s grandmother. When she was gone, Rose would email and text photos from Ibaraki, the prefecture where her family lived in Japan: Rose standing in the middle of an arched red bridge with a waterfall behind her; Rose wearing a midnight-blue kimono patterned with cherry blossoms, a festival of orange lanterns and men twirling fire sticks in the background; a cooked fish with its silvery scales still on, and small bowls of rice and pickled vegetables surrounding it; Rose with her grandmother standing beside her, smiling, so proud of her American granddaughter, which Rose once told me was how her grandmother would introduce her to the other people in the rural village where they lived: “my American granddaughter.”

  I saw us up on that front porch, playing, eating treats from faraway Japan, and tears sprang, hot and prickling, into my eyes. I looked away, but wherever I turned, there was another memory waiting for me, and one in particular nearly made me drop to my knees. A memory from just a couple of months ago: Rose and her prom date, Danny Trier, on one side of me, all of us laughing as Rose struggled to pin his boutonniere on. Noah standing beside me, wearing a crisp tuxedo, the boutonniere I’d pinned onto his jacket an hour earlier, at my house, tickling my chin whenever I leaned in to hug him. Mr. Sano and Mrs. Sano taking pictures of us on the lawn, with the towering pine trees behind us. Noah leaning down to whisper, “You’re the prettiest girl at the prom,” and me saying, “We’re not there yet,” and him saying, “I’m psychic. Just wait. You’ll see once we get there.”

  “Ellie?” a voice said, freeing me from that moment in time, which threatened to freeze me inside it, like a figure in a snow globe.

  I blinked and looked back to the porch, where Rose stood, holding the front door open behind her.

  “You found me,” she said, smiling down at me, her black hair falling around her shoulders like silk ribbons. “I’m so glad you got my message,” she said, pulling the door open wider. “Quick. Come inside where we can be safe.”

  My grandmother once told me that when I was born, she added my name to a list at the shrine in her village, making me into what people in Japan call a “family child.” After I died, she told my dad on the phone that I was now a “family spirit.” Her voice was frail and shook as she talked. I could hear her because I was standing right next to my dad in the kitchen, leaning in to listen to my grandmother whispering across the airwaves, across the ocean, and across the continent, all the way from her village in Japan to our small town in Ohio.

  It was an old tradition, putting a newborn child’s name onto a shrine’s list. It was supposed to guarantee a person a warm welcome into the afterlife once they have passed on into that space that exists beyond the earthly world. It was my grandmother who taught me that your earthly birth—your incarnation in flesh and blood and bone—makes you into a family child. When you die and shed your earthly condition, you become a family spirit.

  After the outbreak, that’s what I’d become: a spirit that roamed the old farmhouse I’d lived in from the time I was three years old.

  I was lucky, really. From what I could tell, most of us who died in the outbreak had nowhere to go while we waited for the gray area to fade, to allow us to leave this world. Or at least nowhere safe to go to. Becca hid at her house, but it was just another kind of danger, a prison built by her mother. For me, though, I was able to reveal myself to my parents a few days after I found my way back. I was lucky that my dad knew things—things his parents had taught him about how to protect a person who’s died, when their spirit is vulnerable to the predators that roam the spirit world, looking for those newly born into it, who have no clue about how things work in the hereafter.

  After I died, and as soon as the phones were working again, the first thing my father did was call my grandmother in Japan. “Okaasan,” he began in a shaky voice, and then he told her about the outbreak and the horrible fate I’d suffered.

  My grandmother is a superstitious woman. The village where she lives�
��where she grew up and where I’d been born—still follows many of the old ways that most people in Japan had stopped believing in long ago. She had many superstitions, and she taught some of them to me when I went to stay with her and my aunt and uncle over the summer. Never stick your chopsticks straight up in a bowl of rice—that’s reserved for funeral ceremonies. Never whistle at night—it will attract the attention of evil spirits. When you see a hearse, hide your thumb in your fist, or one of your parents may die. Don’t sleep facing north, or you will have a short life.

  So when my grandmother told my dad that I was now a family spirit, his first reaction was to sigh and shake his head. My mom was sitting at the breakfast table in the kitchen with him, her hands wrapped around a mug of green tea. She shrugged as if to say, Don’t argue with her. Let her say whatever she needs to.

  That’s generally how my parents had talked about my grandmother for as long as I could remember. “She’s old,” my mom would say, whenever my dad grew frustrated with my grandmother’s superstitions. And my dad would raise his eyebrows and say, “Amy, she doesn’t think these things because she’s old. She believed these things when she was young, too.”

  My dad took my mom’s shrug as good advice, though, and let my grandmother tell him whatever she wanted to. And most of the things my grandmother told him were instructions he needed to follow to ensure my safety in the spirit world.

  He nodded as she talked on and on, saying, “Uhn, uhn,” over and over, a grunting sound that meant he was paying attention, like how when Ellie or Becca or Adrienne and I hung out and one of us was telling a story about something that happened to us that day, we’d say, “Uh-huh,” a lot as we talked. My dad, of course, was just pretending to listen. “Humor her,” my mom always told him, and that’s exactly what he was doing as I stood next to him in the kitchen, desperately wishing that, for once in his life, he would listen to my grandmother.