The Gone Away Place

by Christopher Barzak

  Because I did need protection. I’d realized within the few days as I’d wandered through the Newfoundland countryside that my grandmother had been right.

  There were dangers in the afterlife. There were things—I don’t even know what to call some of them—that wanted to hurt me. It made me wish I had listened more carefully to my grandmother’s old tales—stories of ghosts and demons—whenever I visited her during the summer.

  Please, Dad, I kept saying as he brushed off my grandmother’s instructions. Please! Listen to her!

  But of course he couldn’t hear me. Not then. Not that early.

  It was only after my father actually did something my grandmother had mentioned during that first phone call. It was only after he went over to the family shrine—the kamidana, it is called, which means “the god shelf”—and closed its doors, covering it with a piece of white paper afterward, that he and my mother were able to see me.

  My grandmother had given us our god shelf. It’s a traditional thing in most Japanese houses. She’d brought it with her on her first visit to America, when I was four. I can still remember her unpacking its various parts in our living room, then setting it up on the mantel over our fireplace. It looked like a dollhouse to me, but in a Japanese style. It was a wooden box, really, with shelves that held little statues of foxes, tiny porcelain bowls of rice, and miniature vases with dried cherry blossom twigs poking out of them. Its two doors were always open to display these items, and with those items on its shelves, it reminded me of the shadow boxes my mom sometimes made as a hobby, filling the niches with trinkets that meant something to her.

  My grandmother had filled our god shelf with traditional items, as well as some she said we should include since we were so far away from my dad’s homeland. One of those items was a rock that could fit in the palm of my hand. It was speckled with some kind of crystal, and my grandmother let me examine it before she placed it into the god shelf, saying, “Rose-chan, after I put this into the kamidana, you should not touch it.” The rock held, she said, a household god that protected our family. And she told my father that when the day came that she died, he should close the doors of the god shelf and cover it with a piece of white paper in order to keep out evil spirits and the spirit of death itself.

  As usual, my parents had nodded and smiled, humoring my grandma even then. But in the days that followed the news of my death, my father must have decided to listen to her. For what reason, I couldn’t tell. Probably out of nostalgia for the things he remembered from his youth, or maybe out of a lingering sense of family duty. Grief is a powerful emotion. It makes people do things they’d usually never think of. And as I stood watching my dad close the doors of the god shelf on our living room mantel, covering it with the traditional white paper, I felt a strange and powerful feeling of relief wash over me.

  “Thank goodness,” I said, closing my eyes and sighing.

  My father spun around then, his mouth hanging open, eyes wide, and after a moment, said, “Rose. Rose? Rose! Amy, come here! Amy!”

  My dad had heard and seen me, and when my mom came running downstairs to the living room, she did, too.

  It was a surprise to all of us, really. I hadn’t expected anything like that to happen. I’d mainly been hiding in the house, waiting for whatever was supposed to happen next, pulling aside the curtains in the windows just a sliver to peek outside from time to time, hoping I wouldn’t see any of the strange, shadowy figures I’d seen with Becca as we’d wandered the fields and woods, trying to find our way back home. And I especially hoped I wouldn’t see Adrienne and Ingrid.

  The last time I’d seen them, Becca and I had come across them by accident, while trying to get back to our houses. Noah had been with them at that point, too, but he seemed shy and somewhat skittish. Adrienne did all of the talking. And she talked a lot, fast and rambling, telling me and Becca all sorts of things she and Ingrid were figuring out, now that they were dead. I didn’t like some of the things she said. Like how she figured we could, as a group, collectively take over a human dwelling (she used those exact words, which made me shiver), if we wanted to stay on earth. Or how we could feed off the energy of the living. Becca and I had glanced at one another, recognized the fear in each other’s eyes. This wasn’t our old friend Adrienne. Death had done something to…change her.

  I’d been hiding in my house ever since, hoping and praying that they wouldn’t come looking for me. I didn’t want to go back out into that world of shadows and strange beings I had no names for. I wished that I had listened to my grandmother when she tried to tell me about them as a child. Home was safer than anywhere, I figured. And the one time Becca showed up to see me, I told her she should do the same thing, go home, hide, even if it meant she had to put up with her mother. The gray area Newfoundland had become, and everything within it, wasn’t safe for innocent spirits.

  My dad called my grandmother a second time, after I’d appeared to him, and this time he took notes. After they hung up, he immediately began to do things. He made a paper lantern, painting Japanese characters onto it before hanging it on our front porch. He set up a table next to my bed, and placed things on it, like a candle, a vase of flowers, incense, and a small knife that he found in a box he’d brought with him when we first moved from Japan. He looked up several Buddhist sutras online that my grandmother recommended, and even though he wasn’t a priest, he recited them over my bed every night.

  I don’t know if any of the things my dad did were of any real use, to be honest. But I took some kind of relief in him doing them, all the same. It was like how I felt in life whenever I got sick; it was a relief just to have a doctor suggest different things to make me well again. We were doing something, at least, and I felt less lonely being able to see and talk with my parents on occasion.

  I made sure to tell Ellie all of this when she found her way to me and I took her up to my room, including how I really wasn’t sure whether any of it was a true solution. I didn’t want to lie to her. I didn’t want to say, If you do this, you’ll be safe. Or, If you do that, you can protect yourself.

  Because I was afraid for Ellie. I had come to understand that it’s not only the dead who are vulnerable right after their deaths. The living, too, can be affected. Mostly by the grief they feel about the people they’ve lost. But also because, if anything Adrienne had told us was real, then the dead had the ability to do things to the living. If they knew how to. If they wanted to.

  We sat on the edge of my bed and talked for a while, Ellie and I. My parents were gone right then, Dad tending to chores around the farm and Mom running errands in Cortland, so we were able to speak freely. And at a certain point in our conversation, Ellie shared a secret of her own.

  “Rose,” she said, “I know how to do something, too. Something that could free you from all of this, if you want.” And then she went on to describe how she’d freed Timothy Barlow and Becca, just by using the camera on her phone to record them telling a story. She offered to do the same for me, to record my last will and testament, if I wanted.

  I sat on the edge of my bed, hands folded in my lap, and thought about it. The possibility was tempting; I didn’t want to be here, trapped between life and death. But at the same time, I wasn’t as afraid as I’d been at the start. No one and no thing had come looking for me in all the weeks that had passed since I died, like I’d originally worried would happen. And if my grandmother was correct, there was a period of time that I would have to wait until my spirit could leave this world. Forty-nine days, according to my grandmother. I was counting them eagerly. We were fast approaching the one-month marker since the outbreak, which meant I only had a few more weeks. Since I didn’t feel afraid and since being with my parents was a comfort to me, I decided to wait, to see if my grandmother was right.

  “But will you come back and check? Just in case?” I asked Ellie, and she nodded.

  “Let
me know however you can,” she said, “if I can help you, Rose.”

  “I won’t leave the house,” I promised her. “I don’t want to risk running into…anything out there.”

  “But you came to my house,” she said. “You typed the words Friend Pulling Day into my computer.”

  “I wanted to see you one last time. And since you weren’t there, I decided to leave that message. I knew you’d figure it out,” I told her. “But it took a lot to do that. I didn’t have Becca with me, and I was so, so afraid. I don’t think I can take that kind of chance again. Not now that my dad is doing things here to protect me.”

  We sat on the edge of my bed, waiting. I held Ellie’s hand between mine. We passed an hour like this, sitting and talking and trying to tell each other the things we wished we would have when I was still alive. And when it was finally time for Ellie to leave, I told her, “Wait,” and she turned back around in my doorway. “If you see any of the others,” I said, “try to ignore them. Don’t worry about trying to set them free.”

  “Why?” she asked, looking puzzled.

  “Because,” I said, “I’m not sure they want to be helped in the same way you helped Timothy and Becca. They might not want to be freed.”

  “But Noah…,” she started to say.

  “Forget about him,” I said. “I know it’s hard, Ellie. But, really, remember everything you loved about him. And after that, try to move on.”

  “Forget about him,” Rose told me. Almost the exact thing Becca had said. But after hearing everything Rose had to say, I found that forgetting Noah wasn’t possible. Not knowing that he might be in some kind of danger. Not after learning from Rose that there were other kinds of things on her side of the divide between the living and the dead. Things she had no name for. A shiver ran through my body as I drove away from the Sano farm, and it continued to roll through me on the drive home like waves, raising goose bumps on my arms as I gripped the steering wheel tighter, making my knuckles turn a sickly greenish white under the glow of the dashboard lights.

  When I got out of the car back home, I stopped halfway between the driveway and the front stoop to look around, searching the woods that bordered the back and side of our property for any signs of ghosts or other…things. If Rose was right—if it was true that things existed in the afterworld besides ghosts—then I needed to pay even more attention. It wasn’t just the spirits of my friends watching me, maybe.

  I saw nothing and no one skulking in the dark, even though I did feel watched. It was a feeling I’d started to have in general, but I told myself that I couldn’t trust it to mean that something or someone was actually watching me at any given moment.

  So I turned and continued on my way up to the stoop and through the front door, swinging it open to find my mom and dad on the couch together, holding hands as if they were on a date. It turned out, though, that their hand-holding wasn’t really a romantic gesture. Instead, it soon became clear they’d made some important decisions about how we should, as my mom said, “Go forward from here on out as a family.”

  I didn’t move from where I stood in the front doorway, my keys still hot and sweaty in the palm of my hand. “What do you mean?” I said, feeling I wasn’t going to like whatever my mom was going to say next.

  But just like I couldn’t trust the feeling that I was being watched, it turned out I also couldn’t trust some of my other feelings. Because what my mom said next made me understand that I possibly had the best and smartest parents I could ask for.

  “Your dad and I have been talking about things for a while now. About what he’s seen. About what you’ve experienced. About what it seems like so many people around here have been going through.” Mom paused for a second, looking as uncomfortable as she sounded, clearly not able to say words like ghosts and haunted. Finally, though, she made herself continue. “I know you’ve already gone to see Dr. Arroyo once, and so has your dad. So have I, to be completely honest, though I haven’t seen or heard anything like you two have. I’m still bothered by what’s been happening, though, and I’m even more bothered by how you and your dad have had to deal with this…other stuff. This stuff I’d rather you not have to go through.”

  My mom paused for another second. She didn’t turn away, but I noticed her eyes lower a little, as if she preferred to look at the floor rather than at me for the next part.

  “Mom, it’s okay,” I said. “Whatever it is, I know we’re all in this together.”

  Her eyes flicked up at that, and she smiled in that way that looks a little more like a frown. “Your dad and I want all three of us to see Dr. Arroyo together. To see if she has any strategies for us to move through this. To get the both of you…well, frankly, to get the both of you not seeing these sorts of things anymore.”

  I took a deep breath and sighed. It wasn’t what I’d expected. I think I’d been worried that Mom and Dad had decided to do something extreme, out of fear. Like packing up our things overnight and moving to another state or country. Like burning the house down before we even pulled out of the driveway. I wouldn’t have really blamed them for something like that, because what was happening in Newfoundland was scary. But I couldn’t leave, not yet. Not until I was sure Noah would be okay. Not until I could make sure Adrienne and even Ingrid Mueller—who I wished I didn’t feel some kind of duty to save for Noah’s sake—weren’t in danger of being stuck like they were, forever.

  “That,” I said, “sounds like a good idea to me.”

  And then my mom sighed, too. “Good,” she said. “I was worried you wouldn’t want to. I know this isn’t easy. We miss them, too, Ellie. Noah. The girls. It still doesn’t feel completely real to me, either. I just want them back with us more than anything. But I know how hard it is to accept things like…”

  She paused then, unsure how to complete her sentence.

  “Hard to accept things like the idea that I might be losing my sanity?” I finished for her. Her eyebrows lifted, as if she was surprised by my willingness to say that without freaking out, then she nodded.

  Dad beamed beside her, as if he wasn’t surprised at all. “You’re something else, Ellie,” he said.

  “Something else,” I said, snorting, “is exactly how I feel. I’d much rather go back to feeling more like myself instead of like something else.”

  Dad closed his eyes and nodded. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

  My parents were relieved and grateful that I was on board to see Dr. Arroyo again, but even so, I didn’t tell them everything else I’d committed myself to beyond that. I didn’t tell them that before I could go back to feeling more like myself—while I could still see what was ordinarily invisible, while I could still touch what was ordinarily untouchable—I needed to make sure Noah and the others would be okay.

  I left my parents in the living room the way I’d found them, holding hands, and went upstairs, not mentioning that I’d seen Rose. And by withholding that from them, I began to understand how Becca and Rose must have felt when they were clearly not telling me everything. I began to understand why they thought that not knowing something could be a form of protection. I thought the same, I realized as I sat on my bed, holding my bottom lip between my teeth. If I told my parents about Becca and Rose, about everything I’d learned, it could set them off in the extreme direction of pulling up stakes and running as fast and as far away from Newfoundland as possible.

  * * *

  My mom emailed Dr. Arroyo later that night to ask if she could see us as a family, and by midmorning the next day, Dr. Arroyo had responded. “ ‘Absolutely, Patty,’ ” Mom said, holding her phone up to read the email aloud to Dad and me at the breakfast table. Dr. Arroyo said she could see us after Dad got home from work that afternoon.

  I spent the rest of the day in a semihaze. Mostly because I hadn’t been sleeping well for the past month, and when sleep did come, my dreams were troubled. Not
nightmares, exactly, but something a few shades away. The kind that felt too real, that sometimes made me forget about everything that had happened.

  So I was exhausted enough from being up most of the night, before replaying my visit to Rose in my head, that I fell asleep right at my desk. One moment, I was typing random search terms about Japanese ghosts and demons into my laptop, trying to figure out something—anything—I might be able to do to help them. And the next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes and wiping sweat from the side of my face that had been pressed against my desktop for who knew how long.

  I was rubbing my eyes when I heard someone clear their throat. The sound came from behind me, and I turned fast to find Noah, of all people, sitting on my bed. Thank you, thank you, thank you, God, I thought in one quick instant, before either of us could say anything.

  Noah was smiling at me, just one corner of his mouth lifted shyly, and his head was tilted a little to the side, as if he’d been looking at me like that for a while, just staring at me in the way I’d sometimes catch him doing when he was alive and we were doing something ordinary, like watching TV. I’d turn to comment on a stupid character or a funny commercial, and find him looking at me like that—like how he was right now in my bedroom—smiling at me like I was more interesting than everything else, even when I wasn’t doing or saying anything remarkable.

  “Noah,” I said, just barely audible. I was afraid if I spoke too loudly, he might disappear on me.

  He kept smiling, but he didn’t say anything. And then, when I stood from my chair to go over to him, my knees turned weak and my legs gave out beneath me.

  That was when I actually woke up at my desk, where I’d fallen asleep at the laptop. I was leaning heavily to one side of my chair, about to fall out of it. When I realized what was happening, I quickly sat up and spun the chair around, only to find no one sitting on the bed behind me. No Noah smiling at me, watching me sleep. Nothing but my comforter and sheets twisted and rumpled into hills and valleys.