The Gone Away Place

by Christopher Barzak

  All easily taken away in the passing of a day.

  “What’s so funny?” Dad called from the living room, and I turned to peek around the corner, finding him sitting on the couch, wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates jersey and gray sweatpants, his steady uniform for days off, when he made no plans to do anything but lounge. He held the TV remote in one hand and muted it as he waited for my answer.

  “Nothing, really,” I said, shrugging.

  Dad lifted one side of his mouth, giving me a half smile of disbelief.

  “Okay,” I said, trying harder for a satisfying answer. “Life? Life is funny, I guess.”

  “Funny good,” he asked, “or funny bad?”

  “Both,” I said, nodding in a defeated sort of acceptance.

  “I hear you,” he said, sighing. Then he patted the couch cushion beside him. “Want to talk about it? I’ve been working so much lately, I feel like I don’t get to see you anymore.”

  I went over and sat down, leaned my head against his shoulder, my arm against his arm. We didn’t actually talk for a while. We just stared out the picture window, at the abundance of bright sunlight, the watercolor-blue sky, and the clouds that coasted over Newfoundland like phantom ships. It was so damned beautiful. It was so damned beautiful, in fact, that I couldn’t believe what Becca and the others had told me: that a gray area was domed over us, like some kind of strange, spectral weather phenomenon, keeping the dead from moving past it, keeping the living clinging to their dead.

  “I don’t know,” Dad said, after we’d sat like that for a while.

  “You don’t know about what?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if life is funny good anymore,” he said.

  I pushed my arm harder against his, took his hand in mine, and said, “I know what you mean. I think I’ve laughed all of once or twice in the past month, and both times I laughed mainly out of panic.”

  * * *

  Across the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, the Pirates were scheduled to play that day. And when the game came on a little while later, Dad snapped out of his sad spell and unmuted the TV. I had the weirdest feeling, seeing him get excited about something as normal as a baseball game, and I watched him watch the game for a little while, just to see him so happy about something so ordinary. Eventually, I got up and left, still hearing the crack of bats and the sportscasters commenting on plays behind me as I went up to my room, where I threw myself on my bed and stared at the ceiling, wondering what I could possibly do next. Wondering how I might still find Noah.

  The dead end I’d arrived at? I couldn’t accept it.

  As I stared up at the ceiling, my eyes tracing the perimeter where it met the walls, I tried to go over everything from my conversation with Mrs. Mueller. Call me Callie, she’d said. And no, I haven’t seen any ghosts. At least not yet. And how, to almost any question I asked her, she’d just answer me with a question of her own.

  It occurred to me now as I lay there tracing and retracing the perimeter, recalling the visit with a more analytical eye, that while she’d been nice to me—while she’d gone out of her way to make me feel at ease—she’d also seemed cold. Too eager to shut down my questions, as if she was hiding something. And one thing I know about politeness from living in a small town is that it’s often just a cover for not-so-polite inclinations. What Mrs. Mueller had wanted, I realized too late, was to get rid of me as quickly as possible.

  Which made me wonder about what she really did know and who she might have actually seen in the wake of the outbreak. And why she’d want to hide what she knew from me.

  My phone buzzed beside me then, breaking me out of my thoughts. It was Mom. She was at the shelter and was texting to say she’d be home a few hours later. I’ll pick up something easy for us to eat on my way back.

  By easy, she most likely meant pizza. Nothing she had to make herself. Every day she worked at the shelter was a day she’d come home exhausted, sometimes looking as if she was on the verge of tears from subjecting herself to a constant view of tragedy. People who had lost their homes in the outbreak. People who had lost a spouse, a parent, a child, a friend. People who had lost everything except for their heartbeats and the breath that still filled their chests. I’d begun to suspect that, for Mom, volunteering must equate to some kind of penance for having survived the outbreak, and for having lost so little in the process of surviving. And even though she said she’d cut back on her hours, I think she may have actually signed up for more than usual.

  I could cook for us, I texted back, even though I knew I was exhausted in a different way from Mom. Exhausted from my own thoughts. Exhausted from not finding what I kept looking for. I’d seen something at the Cady house, but I knew it wasn’t Noah so much as my mind melting down momentarily. You don’t have to do everything, I texted Mom. Just tell me what you’d like, and I’ll go to the store.

  Oh, honey, she replied a minute later. You’ve got enough going on.

  I did have enough going on, most of which I didn’t tell her about so that she could keep her own grip on things. Someone in our family shouldn’t have to deal with ghosts, I figured. She could deal with the living, while I dealt with the dead as best as possible.

  If you don’t suggest anything, I’ll just come up with my own idea.

  Okay, Mom said, giving up. Lasagna?

  You got it, I wrote back, sending her a heart emoji with the message. Then I pulled myself off my bed to ask Dad if I could pick up anything for him while I was out.

  “A candy bar,” he said, not looking up from the game on the television.

  “I’m on it,” I said, saluting like a soldier, even though he didn’t see me.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, as I went through the store’s automatic front doors, I passed one of those two-way mirrors where someone on the other side can see customers coming and going, even though the customers can’t see them. Mom said the manager’s office was on the other side, and I’d always joked about the grocery store being Big Brother, sometimes making funny faces at whoever might be watching me as I came and went. This time, though, when I looked into that mirror, I almost didn’t recognize myself. My skin was paler than I’d ever seen before, probably from shutting myself away from the world so much over the past month, and the skin under my eyes looked almost purple. Not sleeping much was taking a toll on me, as well as seeing too many things I shouldn’t even be able to see.

  I walked the aisles with the fluorescent glare of the overhead lights making me feel even paler, bloodless. And I must have looked like a zombie to anyone else who saw me, too, because as I stopped and stared at the endless rows of pasta for a time that was probably longer than normal, a stock boy asked if I needed help.

  “Finding something, I mean,” he said, looking at me with a kind, questioning face.

  And I snapped out of my spell only then, realizing that I’d forgotten what I’d come to buy, even though it was right in front of me.

  “I think…,” I said, trying to collect my thoughts. “I think I need to buy lasagna noodles.”

  He nodded, but looked slightly weirded out by how much thought I’d been giving lasagna noodles. Then he leaned a little in front of me to choose a box off the shelf. Handing it over to me, he said, “This is the kind my mom always buys. I think they’re pretty good, at least.”

  We shared an awkward moment when I said, “Thank you,” and he said, “No problem,” and as he walked away, I said, “Thank you again,” making him look back over his shoulder with that same weirded-out, worried-for-me look on his face, as if he thought I might not be able to navigate the rest of my shopping trip without him.

  I wandered away in zombie-like fashion, gathering up the rest of the things I needed, then went to the cash register and nearly forgot to pick out a candy bar for Dad until the cashier had swept all of my stuff over the sensor and started bagging it. “Oh, w
ait,” I said, rising to break the surface of awareness again. Quickly, I scanned the candy bins on both sides of me, then settled on a chocolate bar filled with caramel, one of Dad’s favorites, and asked the cashier to ring that up, too.

  Outside, I carried my bags back to my car with the same sort of detachment I’d gone about gathering ingredients in the store. My mind was elsewhere, obviously. My mind couldn’t see anything in front of me because it was looking backward, into the past, into that time and place before the outbreak. And if my mind wasn’t focusing on the past, it was obsessing over the strange things that had occurred ever since the outbreak. My mind felt almost like a separate part of me at that point, as if that other me I’d seen in the chair at Noah’s memorial service really existed, taking up half my thoughts the way Adrienne had pushed herself into Couri.

  After I finished loading the back seat with the grocery bags, I loaded myself into the driver’s seat, as if my body was just another thing to be lifted and moved. I turned the key in the ignition, and told myself I really needed to snap out of this, because I still had to stay aware long enough to make the drive home. Then I inhaled deeply as I pulled out of the parking lot, shaking my head every now and then to see if I could rattle myself back into this time and place, into this here and now.

  And that happened, though not from any head shaking. Something else rattled me, rattled me so much that I truly woke back into full awareness.

  As I was cresting a hill just a few miles from home, I saw the Newfoundland Lighthouse in the distance. And though the sun was going down behind me, making the sky into a field of lavender, I swore I saw the lantern room light up.

  I slammed on the brakes and sat there, stopped in the middle of the road, my thoughts racing to ridiculous conclusions in the space of seconds—immediately thinking it was Noah, that he was there, of course he was there, that he was trying to send me a message—until the lantern room went dark in the next instant, and all of those thoughts crashed with it.

  I waited for a few more minutes, telling myself what I’d seen was just another symptom of being exhausted, but also wishing it had been real. And when I saw a car approaching in the rearview mirror, I gave up and continued driving.

  * * *

  After I got home, I immediately began making the lasagna. Boiling water, cooking the noodles the stock boy at the grocery store had picked out for me, layering the pan with the noodles, the cheese, the sauce, then sitting down, with my legs folded under me, in front of the oven to watch it bake through the window, as if cheese and red sauce bubbling over pasta were an amazing occurrence.

  But despite having all of that to distract me, the lighthouse still filled my thoughts, the lantern room beaming its light in my direction, over and over, calling me to come to it.

  When eventually the timer I’d set dinged, I was able to push the lighthouse signal out of my mind long enough to take the lasagna out of the oven. And soon after that, thankfully, Mom came home to find me slicing a knife through the cheese and noodles when she came in the back door.

  “Look at you,” she said. “I won’t even have time to sit down, you’re so ready.”

  I looked over my shoulder and gave her the smile I knew would make her happy. “Salad is in the fridge, keeping cool,” I said.

  Mom stood in the kitchen entrance, smiling back at first; then quickly that smile faded, and she started to shake her head and frown.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. It’s just good to see you up and about again, doing things like you used to. But it makes me a little sad, too, because it reminds me that you’re going to go away to school in another month or so.”

  We hadn’t talked about my going to Pitt in the fall since the outbreak happened, but clearly now that I’d done the grocery shopping and made a meal for everyone, Mom was starting to hold out hope that I’d have myself together enough to make the leap out of the disaster Newfoundland had become and move on to what she constantly referred to as “better things.” I shrugged, as if I wasn’t so sure, not wanting to give her more hope than I thought realistic. Because the truth was, I still couldn’t see further than a few hours in front of me, let alone weeks or months or years. And I wasn’t sure if I could buy into the idea of “better things” any longer.

  “Well, we’ll see,” I said, and her face shifted, eyes widening a little in concern. “I mean, I don’t know. I might want to stick around here for a while. Maybe take some of the first-year classes at the community college in Warren or something. Then, just, you know, maybe I’ll see how I feel.”

  “If you’re worried about leaving your dad and me alone, Ellie,” she said, “you shouldn’t be. We can take care of ourselves. And it’ll give us an excuse to get out of town to come visit you.”

  I laughed lightly, moving to the fridge to take out the salad bowl, then put it on the table. “I’m glad to hear I don’t have to worry about you guys,” I said.

  What I didn’t say was how it was really me, not them, who I wasn’t sure about. Newfoundland, after all, was a gray area. And though I wasn’t one of the dead enclosed within it, I still felt as if I couldn’t move beyond that wall of fog and gray skies my friends had described to me, either.

  Dad came into the room just then, so Mom and I put away our conversation. “Dinner’s ready,” I said, and then she and Dad sat at the table to let me serve them.

  The meal was good, and when we finished, I made them both go do whatever else they wanted, insisting that I’d clear the dishes. Once the dishes were in the dishwasher and it hummed with hot water, I went into the living room and found myself—even to my own surprise—telling them that I had plans to meet Couri Long at the diner in Cortland, where her sister and I used to go with Rose and Becca on weekends after seeing a late movie at the mall.

  “I did what Dr. Arroyo suggested last time we saw her,” I said as they looked at me, clearly surprised to hear this. “You know, about building bridges back to others around me. I talked with her on the phone the other night. I think it was good for both of us to be able to talk about Adrienne.”

  Mom’s mouth opened, and I could tell she wanted to question me. But I knew she wouldn’t. As someone who went out of her way to help others all the time, I knew she’d understand what I’d wanted to do.

  Dad just said, “That sounds like a good start, Ellie.” Then he got up and came over to give me a kiss on the top of my head.

  “Well,” Mom said, tilting her head to one side, seeming to struggle a little about it. She could sense the lie, I knew, and I started to worry.

  “I won’t be out late,” I said, trying to keep one step ahead of her, to make things seem normal.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “I know you’re exhausted, that’s all. Just be careful driving.”

  And that was it.

  “I’ll be careful,” I said. “I promise.”

  “Love you, Ellie,” Mom said from where she sat on the couch, still looking a bit skeptical.

  And before I left, I leaned down to give her a quick hug and a kiss goodbye.

  The sun had long slipped below the horizon by the time I left the house, draping everything in a cloak of shadows. Many of the streetlights at busier intersections had been replaced by then, but even before the outbreak, the rural roads most of us lived on were tunnels of darkness at nightfall, and headlights failed to illuminate much of the road unless you switched on the high beams. I didn’t have far to go, though. Within ten minutes, I was turning into the gravel drive that led up to the parking area that surrounded the lighthouse.

  The gravel crunched beneath my car’s wheels, and right then it was the most hurtful sound in the world to me. Because it was familiar, because it was the sound I always heard when Noah and I went to the lighthouse to be alone.

  When the lighthouse came into view, I looked up at the sto
ny tower and shivered as silence rushed into the car like water filling the empty spaces of a sinking ship. The lantern was lit, just as I’d seen it flicker to life momentarily several hours before. He was up there, I thought. He had to be. Only Noah would light that lantern room to call me to him.

  I didn’t bother driving all the way up to the parking lot itself. Maybe because I wanted to leave my car there as an obstacle to anyone else who saw the lighthouse beaming from afar and decided to investigate. My mind whirred with the high winds of tornadoes, and my feelings had all been sucked up and out of my body. I was operating without knowing why I did anything at that point.

  After I got out of the car, I stood looking at the lighthouse on the hill, remembering the day of the outbreak and being inside the lantern room—being stupid, being immature, hiding from Noah after we’d fought about a girl he innocently paid attention to. A girl he’d been friends with since they were little. A girl whose dad had died in a hunting accident years ago. A girl without real friends, who needed someone besides her mother to care about her. And as I stood looking up at those lantern-room windows, my self-hatred rose once again to the levels it had reached in the early days after the outbreak. There were so many things I could call myself right then. Horrible things.

  I’d been lucky, everyone had told me afterward, not to have been at school that day. Not to have been there, crouched in the hallways, with my boyfriend and best friends alongside me. I didn’t feel lucky, though. Not even close. I just felt like I’d unknowingly cheated death. And because they’d all died without me, surviving didn’t feel very much like good fortune so much as a curse.