The Gone Away Place

by Christopher Barzak

  Despite not having been downtown in several years, I walked through those ruins like it was something I did every day. It was a show for some of the Newfoundlanders whose paths I crossed, I’m sure. The county road crews as they attempted to clear up and to repair what remained, a few of the local business owners who had come out to set up shop again and were now forlornly waiting to see how long it would take for customers to return. I hadn’t been seen beyond my own property lines in a long, long time at that point. Even when it came to things like parent-teacher conferences, I’d phone the school to talk to Ingrid’s teachers instead of meeting them face to face. They all understood. They all let me make these kinds of arrangements after my husband was killed. And though it had been nearly a decade since that occurred, they still left me alone like I wanted.

  It took me just over an hour to walk the three miles home, but it was uphill, and there were no sidewalks once I left the downtown square, and there were still places where the road crews were clearing debris or cutting up fallen trees. Whenever I came across a work site, I headed into the woods on either side of the road to avoid them, and returned only after I’d moved far enough past them, hidden within the shadows of the trees.

  I’d only gone downtown because of the email, and then the phone call, that had come from Dr. Arroyo’s assistant. She was trying to see as many residents as possible individually, so she could “address our needs as a community.” I didn’t know what to expect from a therapist sent in by the state, but I decided to get the session over with, or else one day there’d be a knock at my door, and when I answered, she’d be on the other side, wanting me to invite her in for a cup of tea or coffee. Maybe just a glass of water, if she was the type who didn’t want caffeine to sully her health. She seemed like that type.

  That was never going to happen. My home is my sanctuary. I don’t let anyone in unless I have to. For years, it had been only Ingrid and me, other than the occasional postal delivery or when Noah Cady came over to fix things—even when I knew how to make the repairs—because having him around made Ingrid happy. If she hadn’t had those times to interact with him without feeling the eyes of everyone in school watching, she’d probably have become even more sullen than she already was. And that would have been too much for either of us to bear for very long, let me tell you.

  It was a cross for Ingrid, really, living in the way I demanded: solitary, removed from the kind of normal, daily life others led. And by normal, they meant marriage; children; attending school concerts; taking pictures with sons and daughters in their rented tuxes and the fancy dresses they purchased from the discount dress store over in Sharon, Pennsylvania, as Newfoundland tradition demanded; then watching their kids drive off to homecoming or prom before going back inside after all the photo-taking was over, to sit in the living room and reminisce about their own lost youth.

  That wasn’t the sort of thing I’d ever wanted. But like a lot of girls in Newfoundland, I made mistakes in life before I knew those mistakes were there to be made. I’d started dating August Mueller during my senior year of high school, and despite being valedictorian, with grades higher than Mount Everest, I ended up following my mother’s advice when I found myself in a “predicament” (her word), and her advice had been for me to drop out after completing only one year of college so that I could have the child I carried.

  I don’t regret having Ingrid, but I do regret marrying August. There wasn’t anything wrong with the man, but I realized early in our marriage that I didn’t love him. We were too different. I read novels, dug into history books as if they held the car chases and explosions of blockbuster movies, and I painted with watercolors, which my mother had taught me how to do. August fixed cars for people around town, right in the old barn behind our house, hunted any animal in any season that wasn’t illegal, collected firearms, and fell asleep watching sports after drinking five or six beers. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that opposites attract. That’s a true delusion. Opposites repel. I learned that in a psychology course, right before marriage and motherhood took me out of the world of ideas and returned me to Newfoundland, the land of consequences for bad decisions. It was only after August was gone that I decided it was time to give myself something I wanted again. And that was a life lived away from other people.

  So when I finally arrived at the foot of my gravel drive after my session with Dr. Arroyo and saw an unfamiliar car there and someone standing in front of my home, I stopped, trying to make out who it was who planned to disturb me right after I’d gone out of my way to alleviate the concerns of the state-appointed shrink. And when I finally recognized the person, it wasn’t anyone I’d have ever thought I’d see waiting at the foot of my front porch.

  It was Ellie Frame, the girl who had stolen the boy my daughter had loved for years. I’d only seen the girl in person a few times, before August died, when she was just a child and I still went out into the world. And, of course, in the school yearbooks Ingrid brought home over the years. I’d seen her at the memorial for Noah Cady, where the girl was obviously shocked by my presence, not that any Newfoundlanders weren’t surprised to see me. The only things I really knew about Ellie Frame were that her mother was a local real estate agent, her father worked for the power company, and that Noah Cady changed how he did his hair and came around to visit Ingrid and me less after he started dating her.

  “Hello, there,” I said as I walked up the drive and met her at the foot of the porch steps. I gave what I hoped was a somewhat friendly smile, but cocked my head to the side to show how I thought her appearance here was curious. “Can I help you?”

  “Mrs. Mueller,” she said, with a manner that approached Dr. Arroyo’s level of professionalism. Oh, dear girl, I thought, you’ll either get far with that attitude, or else you’ll dig yourself an early grave. “You don’t know me. At least I don’t think you do. My name is Ellie Frame. I was in your daughter’s class.” Then the girl abruptly stopped her self-introduction to blink over and over, as if she’d forgotten what she’d planned on saying next.

  “I’m familiar with your name,” I said, nodding, but offered no details as to how or why I knew it. “Is there something I can do for you, Miss Frame?” I thought she’d like being addressed that way, since she was in the business of being so serious.

  The girl’s face fell after I said that. It broke like a dam. Tears poured out of her almost instantaneously, and she quickly brought her hands to her face to wipe them away.

  “I’m sorry,” she said a few moments later, after she’d collected herself. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Mueller. I didn’t mean to come here just to cry in front of you.”

  “Well, even if you did,” I said, “that’s okay. But why don’t we at least go up on the porch in the shade?”

  She smiled briefly and nodded, perhaps grateful that I hadn’t turned out to be the strange and abrasive solitary sort or the sad widow type, which I imagined were the only two roles people had cast me in over the years. “Thanks,” she said, and followed me up the creaking planks of the stairs, onto the creaking planks of the porch, to sit across from me in one of the two cane chairs I kept out there for me and Ingrid.

  “Now,” I said, once we were settled in, “I imagine this has something to do with what’s happened recently.” The girl’s eyes went wide after I said that, surprised like she thought I’d just read her mind. Poor thing. Her emotions were painted all over her face, and she hadn’t yet learned a way to hide them. “With the storms and all,” I added, to see her reaction, which was to furrow her brows in disappointment. I knew that she hadn’t wanted me to mean the storms. She’d wanted me to mean the ghosts.

  “It is,” she eventually managed to say. “I mean, sort of. I mean, yes, it’s about what’s happened recently. But not just the storms.” She stopped then and pulled her bottom lip between her teeth, while through her clear blue eyes I watched the gears of her mind move and creak. How to open th
is conversation? That was what she was trying to figure out. It was a great difficulty to her, I could see, especially since we were essentially strangers. And probably even more difficult because—if I knew Ingrid and how transparent her feelings could be—this girl probably knew Ingrid had been jealous and brokenhearted over her having taken Noah Cady away.

  “What else is it about, then?” I asked, giving her an opening, already knowing her answer.

  “The ghosts,” she said, and her voice came out as thin as a whisper.

  “The ghosts,” I said, and cocked my head to the side again, pursing my lips in the way Dr. Arroyo used to show her concerned skepticism. “Ah, yes, the ghosts people claim to be seeing.”

  Ellie Frame narrowed her eyes a little at that. “You mean…” She paused for a second before continuing. “You mean you haven’t seen anything like that?”

  “Call me Callie,” I said, imitating Dr. Arroyo again, whose familiar approach to people was something I figured would probably work with a girl like Ellie Frame, a girl too open—too vulnerable—for her own good. “And no, I haven’t seen any ghosts. At least not yet. Why? Have you?”

  The girl leaned back in her chair and sighed, though I couldn’t tell if it was a sigh of relief to hear that, or a sigh of frustration, like she’d wished I had. She looked down at her hands, which she’d folded in her lap, nervously twining her fingers together. When she looked back up, she pushed a piece of her corn-silk hair away from her face and said, “I have. I’ve seen some.”

  Here we go, I thought. We’re getting to the crux of what the girl had come for.

  “Who?” I asked. “How many?”

  “A few,” she said, suddenly pulling into herself a little. “Friends of mine,” she added. “Friends who were in the wing of the school that collapsed that day.”

  I closed my eyes and shook my head slowly. “I’m so sorry for that, Ellie,” I said. “It’s a lot to take in all at once, I know.”

  And after a long pause, during which the girl’s lips moved a little, trying to get the words out, she said, “And, from what they’ve told me, Ingrid was with them.”

  I opened my eyes wider when my daughter’s name left the girl’s mouth. It set me off, hearing her say Ingrid’s name, even though I knew we’d eventually have to talk about her.

  “Yes,” I said. “I know that. Ingrid was in that wing of the school, too, I’m sorry to say.”

  “No,” the girl said, shaking her head briefly, her mouth still parted slightly in this way that spelled out just how much she didn’t want to admit what she said next. Which was: “Mrs. Mueller. I mean, Callie. My friends. The friends I’ve seen recently. The ghosts of my friends, that is. They said Ingrid had been with them. Not just during the collapse, but afterward. Still here. Still alive, sort of. Just…”

  “Dead at the same time?” I offered, to put the girl out of her anxious misery.

  Then she finally closed her fool mouth and nodded.

  I took a deep breath and felt my heartbeat quicken, even though I’d known this was what the girl had come for. “So these friends of yours—their ghosts, that is—have told you they’ve seen Ingrid as well?” I managed to say. I just repeated what the girl had already told me, to keep myself in check, to try to remain neutral.

  The girl only swallowed a lump in her throat and nodded.

  Then I sat back and looked away from her to stare at my front lawn, which was overgrown with weeds and dandelions now that Noah Cady wasn’t around to mow it for me. All those puffs of white seeds, the former heads of bright yellow petals having fallen into the weeds. Mr. Cady had come over once to mow it for me after Noah’s funeral, as if he was taking over the duties his son had so generously performed over the years, but then, soon after, he and his wife had left to visit her sister in Arizona. He’d said he wanted to get her out of Newfoundland for a while. Otherwise she wouldn’t stop thinking about Noah. I could understand, and said as much.

  As I stared at that weedy, dandelion-ridden lawn, I chewed on my bottom lip like what the girl had said truly worried me. Then, eventually and with an amount of seriousness to match her own, I turned back to her. “I’m afraid I haven’t seen her, Ellie,” I said, shaking my head slowly, adding a second later, “for which I am very grateful. And I’m sorry that you’ve had to witness things of that nature. Grief is a powerful force, it is. But tell me. Why is it that you want to find Ingrid? Were you friends with my daughter?”

  The girl opened up once again like a book, tears spilling fast and hot, no filter to keep them back from people who might try to take advantage of her feelings, and said, “Because I can’t find Noah. He was my boyfriend. You probably know that already. And I need to see him. I need to tell him something. He’s out there, too, I know. Others have said as much. But he’s…he’s avoiding me, I think. And I think he’s with Ingrid. And I was hoping that, if I could speak to Ingrid, she might know how to find him. They were good friends, after all.”

  This girl, I thought. I’ve had enough of her. How could she sit there and cry for a dead boyfriend whose ghost wouldn’t come to her, when she sat in front of a woman who’d lost a daughter in the same way? How could she be so worried over her own feelings, when her former boyfriend and my daughter were dead? Who cared if they were spending their time together in whatever afterlife they might have had after dying? If this was how selfish the girl was in general, it’s no wonder she took Noah away from Ingrid without giving her a second thought.

  I kept myself together, though. “Ellie,” I said, leaning forward in my chair toward her, putting a hand on one of her knees. “Honey, I think you’re going through something real awful right now, I do. But I don’t think there are any ghosts out there, to be honest. Not real ones. Only the ones people are seeing because all of this is too hard for everyone to handle right now.”

  “You don’t believe what everyone’s saying, then?” the girl asked, seeming shocked that I didn’t.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t. Not in that way. I do believe they’re seeing things, but it’s most likely products of their own imaginations.” I remembered reading Henry James and Edith Wharton in my first year of college, and how ghosts in those books were just memories that had taken on lives of their own, haunting the protagonists of the stories in a way that was even sadder, because the truth of the matter was that no real ghosts existed. Just memories. Huge memories. Huge memories of the people they’d lost and couldn’t or didn’t want to forget.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, and stood up, flustered, embarrassed. “I’m sorry for coming here and for bothering you, Mrs. Mueller. I’m so sorry.”

  I stood now, too. “No, no, Ellie, you’re fine. No need to be sorry. Please. It’s okay, dear. You thought I might have answers for you. And I wish I did. I really do.”

  She frowned and bit her lower lip again, then said, “Thanks for talking to me. I do appreciate it.”

  She stepped down from my porch a moment later, and when she was halfway down the drive, opening her car door, she stopped to look over her shoulder and gave me a sad little wave. I waved back, a sad little wave like hers, for good measure.

  It was the only thing to do, really. To be warm to someone else in such a tragic situation, even to the girl who had brought nothing but heartache to my daughter in the months before the outbreak.

  * * *

  I went into the house only after the Frame girl had disappeared down the road, and locked the door behind me. And before I could even turn around to face the front room, with its dust-covered furniture and the piles of unopened mail, I heard the floor creak behind me. And then her voice softly pushed its way into the air of this world.

  “Is she gone, Mother?” Ingrid asked from behind me.

  And I turned to face her, my poor dead daughter, standing in the kitchen doorway, her mousy brown hair framing her face, wearing that awful old dress I’d
picked out at the Goodwill store on her birthday, the grayish one with tiny blue flowers decorating it. The cashier, I remember, had lifted that dress up to examine it before entering the price into the register, and had said that those flowers matched Ingrid’s eyes. I’d smiled to be nice, and stroked Ingrid’s hair once, not pointing out the fact that Ingrid’s eyes were gray, not blue.

  I nodded to Ingrid now, my poor dead baby girl, whose face was paler than the moon, whose eyes were like two black holes leading to another universe, and said, “It’s okay, baby. She’s gone. It’s just us now. It’s just you and me.”

  She sighed then, relieved the girl had given up and gone away.

  “But you’re going to have to do something about her,” I warned her. “She’s getting close, and I don’t think she’s going to stop looking for him.”

  At home, after I shut the front door, I paused in the foyer for a moment, my hand still wrapped around the knob, and stared down at the pattern in the braided rug Mom had thrown over the tiled entry. I don’t know what stopped me like that, in that particular place, but for some reason I couldn’t pull my eyes away from the rug. I was noticing each thread of color in the rug and each tile visible around the fringe—as if I were seeing these things for the first time ever.

  Maybe it all looked unfamiliar because I’d hit a dead end. Maybe it was because every path I chose, every step I took, only managed to get me nowhere. Because now, after I talked to Mrs. Mueller, there wasn’t anywhere left for me to go. It was all gone away now, everything I once thought I knew, it was all gone away from me.

  Except my house, this little bubble that seemed to be the only thing in my life that hadn’t changed in the last month. The place I’d hidden myself away in for weeks on end, not wanting to face what lay outside it. That ruined world. This, at least—what I had in front of me—had remained mostly unchanged, a safe haven I could rely on. I let out a small laugh just then, thinking back to how, only a few months ago, I’d taken so much for granted, including this place and the hard-to-keep promises a home holds out to people: constant shelter and a small world in which the people you love will always surround you.