I took my steps up the gravel driveway slowly but steadily, willing myself to put one foot down and then the other. And eventually, after what seemed like an eternity—the way running stretches out in your dreams and nightmares—I made it to the tower, where the lantern light made an amber-colored flicker in the window above me, a rectangle of warmth set against the gray stone of the lighthouse and the black sky behind it. Goose bumps rose on my arms, but I rubbed them away, reminding myself that I was finally going to see Noah. To really see him.
The lighthouse door’s hinges squealed as they always had, followed by the familiar rattle of the old bolt settling into the slot of the door frame as I closed it behind me. Then came the familiar scent of dust and the glint of a spider’s web growing in a nearby corner. Then the soft echoes of my steps as I climbed the staircase to the lantern room, the place I’d been hiding when the tornadoes descended on Newfoundland. The room where I’d watched three twisters race back and forth across the downtown area, mowing down or ripping up building after building, as well as the lives that breathed within them.
At the doorway to the lantern room, I stopped and put my hand to my chest, felt my heart beating hard inside my rib cage, so hard, it seemed like it might explode. I took a deep breath, then another. This is what you wanted, I told myself. Don’t mess it up now that he’s here, waiting for you.
I took two more steps up after that, and passed through the stone archway into the lantern room.
“Hi, Ellie.”
These were the first words I heard, but I didn’t recognize the voice that spoke them. I looked around the room, at the stone walls flickering with shadows thrown by the lantern fire, and at first, I couldn’t see anyone there with me.
A moment later, though, a figure stepped out from behind the lantern pillar. A figure who still wore an old blue-flowered gray dress, belted at the waist, which she’d worn the last time I saw her. A figure with uneven hair, which might have looked cool on some girls, but looked only sad on Ingrid Mueller, since we all knew she cut her own hair. She grinned, her teeth flickering in the lamplight, and said, “Aren’t you going to say hi back? I know that was something that always annoyed the hell out of you when I didn’t say hi to you at school. At least that’s what Noah told me.”
“Ingrid,” I said, unsure of what else I could or even should say.
“Not who you were expecting,” Ingrid said, smirking just a little. “I know. But Noah was busy today, so I decided to come see you instead.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, shaking my head, feeling like I might pass out from the surprise.
“You wouldn’t,” Ingrid said, laughing, short and sharp, with a gleeful sound I’d never heard her make before, not while she was living. “You were always pretty dumb, Ellie. Or maybe you were just good at pretending to be pretty dumb whenever it suited you.”
“Listen,” I said, although I wasn’t sure what I had to say. She’d tricked me into coming here. Things I’d been thinking about all day, things that had been mysteries to me hours ago, all came into a sudden, crisp clarity for me. What I’d sensed Mrs. Mueller lying about, but couldn’t put my finger on at the time, was that she’d seen her daughter’s ghost, despite telling me otherwise; that she knew where to find her, had possibly even been hiding her somewhere in that rambling shack they lived in. She probably also knew where Noah was, even though she told me she didn’t.
“Listen,” I said again, still unsure where I was going to take this conversation.
“No, you listen, Ellie,” Ingrid said, stepping toward me with a raised finger. “It’s my time to talk. It’s my time to tell you all of the things I always wanted to say to you back when I was alive, back when you didn’t give me the time of day, except after you started dating Noah.”
“I’m listening,” I said, my voice even. I wanted to back up a few steps, to spin around and run down the stairwell. But I kept still, remembering how quickly Becca had appeared to me in her room, seemingly out of thin air. Remembering how Timothy Barlow would appear on the back deck of his house and how he would disappear just as suddenly. I wouldn’t be able to run from Ingrid. She’d be able to appear wherever I ran to next. So I needed to buy as much time as I could, hoping I might be able to either reason with her or figure out some other plan.
“Good,” Ingrid said. “I’m glad that I have your attention. Maybe after I’m done here, I’ll go back to your house and type up an article and post it on the school news site, a sad yet inspiring eulogy for Ingrid Mueller.”
I felt my eyes narrowing as I tried to understand what she was saying. “What are you talking about?” I asked.
“What I’m talking about,” Ingrid said, “is what I plan to do after I’m you. I’m talking about how I’ll use your body as my own.”
Ingrid folded her thin arms under her chest, and her face changed from anger back to that smirk of self-satisfaction she’d flashed a few minutes before, and it was then that I realized why Noah had not come to see me all this time. Why he wouldn’t come even when I tried to call him to me. I remembered what Becca and Rose had said about Ingrid, how she seemed different in death from how she had been in life. And I remembered Adrienne talking about the animals she and Ingrid had possessed, how much delight they took in it. Noah, I realized now, had simply wanted to keep them away from me.
“Ingrid,” I said calmly, “you don’t want to do that.”
“Don’t tell me what I want and don’t want,” Ingrid said, her gray eyes flashing in the amber light of the lantern.
“I mean, you don’t need me,” I said. “The gray area here, it’s going to lift one day soon. It’s just a matter of time. Rose is certain of it.”
Ingrid laughed and rolled her eyes. “Rose Sano,” she said, almost hissing Rose’s last name. “The girl who’s been too scared to leave her house since she died.”
“With good reason, obviously,” I said, losing a bit of patience. Ingrid could say whatever she wanted about me, but not one of my friends.
“She’s just afraid,” Ingrid said. “Afraid of learning how to live on this side of things.”
“She doesn’t need to live on that side of things,” I said. “She’s waiting until she can leave on her own.”
Ingrid shook her head like I was the most ignorant person in the world. It was strange to feel so judged by her, a girl almost everyone in Newfoundland had looked at with the same sort of pity she was now applying to me. “Rose better hope she’s right,” Ingrid said. “Me, though? I’d rather stick to the things I’ve figured out since dying.”
“There are other ways,” I said, trying to get her to be reasonable. “If you’d let me, I think I can help you. There’s something I’ve figured out how to do, too—”
Ingrid scoffed before I could finish what I wanted to say. “What do you know about anything?” she said. “You’re not on this side of things. You may have talked to a few of us, Ellie Frame, but that doesn’t make you an expert on being dead.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head sadly, realizing she wasn’t going to see reason. “It doesn’t.” And she was right. Nothing I’d gleaned from my discussions with the dead could amount to anything my friends had experienced. Nothing.
Ingrid looked satisfied, however, now that I’d agreed that my knowledge of things fell short. And she must have felt like she’d won that battle, because soon she unfolded her arms from her chest and took on a less aggressive stance, letting her shoulders fall a little, releasing her hands from the fists she’d held them in.
“Instead of you telling me what you think you know,” she said now, “let me tell you what I know. What I know to be true. What I knew to be true even before I died that day.”
“Okay,” I said. “Tell me.” I wanted to hear what she had to say, actually. I’d wanted to hear what she had to say for the past few months, really. She just wouldn’t let me becom
e friends with her.
“You messed up,” Ingrid said, sounding like a parent trying to scold me.
“I know,” I said, nodding, even though no reason for my mess-up had been given.
“Do you?” Ingrid said. “Do you really know? I don’t think so. I mean, the day we all died, you were safe somewhere else. Why? Because you’d had a fight with Noah. A fight with Noah about me, of all people, Ellie. I was surprised to find out later that you apparently saw me as some kind of competition.”
She smiled then, clearly satisfied that she’d been able to tell me all of that.
“It’s true,” I told her. “I saw you as competition. I didn’t want to. I didn’t mean to. I just…I just didn’t understand Noah’s relationship with you.”
“I still don’t think you understand,” Ingrid said, taking a few steps across the room to come closer to me, her anger flaring again.
“What…,” I said. “What do you mean?”
“You weren’t there for him, Ellie,” she said. “I was. I was always there for him. To be an ear when he needed someone to listen to his problems. To tell him how well he played after his soccer matches. I was at them, too. I know you never saw me. I tried to stay out of your way. Sometimes it’s better to let someone like Noah realize the person who really cares about him was always there, right in front of him, after he came to his senses about the person who never really cared about him that deeply.”
“Ingrid,” I said, almost in a whisper. My hands were shaking, and my eyes pricked with hot tears. She was saying aloud everything I’d feared was the truth for the past month, after the outbreak, and maybe even before the outbreak, when I’d pushed Noah to talk about his relationship to Ingrid. It made me uncomfortable, seeing him take care of someone else in a way that I wanted to be taken care of, even if I didn’t need to be taken care of the way Ingrid did.
I was stupid, though. I wasn’t able to see through my own insecurities.
“What?” Ingrid said. “Nothing to say now that the truth has all been laid out in front of you?”
“That’s not the only truth,” I said, shaking my head, refusing to let her make her version the only part of the story. It wasn’t just her story, after all. It was mine, too. It was all of ours.
“What else, then,” Ingrid said, “would explain why Noah hasn’t come to you since he died?” She made a horrid face, a shaming face, raising her brows and grinning, as if she were a cat and I a mouse pinned in a corner.
“He loved me, too,” I said. “I know that. If he didn’t, we wouldn’t have argued in the first place. If he hadn’t cared about me, he would have ignored me when I complained about not understanding his relationship to you. He didn’t, though.”
“You can tell yourself whatever you need to hear, Ellie,” Ingrid said, taking yet another few steps across the room toward me. “But I know the truth. You pushed at him. The last thing you did before he died was start a stupid argument. And what did he do while we were all kneeling in the school hallway? He stayed with me. He comforted me. He protected me, and he’s done as much since it all ended. He hasn’t come to you, even though you’ve been looking for him. Oh, you seem surprised to hear I know about that. Well, I know because Noah himself told me.”
I could barely breathe at that point, listening to the heat of her words as she hurled them at me. Every single thing I worried about, every insecure thought, confirmed. And I stood there, feeling my legs start to weaken, the room beginning to spin around me. Run, I told myself, even though I knew I might only make it to the bottom of the steps, and by then Ingrid would most likely be waiting for me on the other side of the door, waiting to tell me more horrible things.
I buckled in the end, and fell to my knees, wishing I hadn’t been so stupid to come here, wishing I hadn’t convinced myself that Noah was the one trying to reach out to me, when it was clear all this time that he’d been avoiding me.
Noah, I thought as I knelt on that old stone floor and began to cry. It was supposed to be you. Where are you? Where are you?
“I’m here, Ellie,” he said, and I looked up to find him standing on the other side of the room, under the arch of the entrance I’d come through. I gasped for breath, as if I were just then breaking the surface of water, taking in air.
“Noah,” I said, “you finally heard me.”
He didn’t reply to me at first, but instead looked at Ingrid and said, “You need to stop this. You need to stop this right now, Ingrid.”
Ingrid crossed the room toward Noah, leaving me crumpled on the floor, defeated by everything she’d said. Yet as she moved closer to him, I began to feel stronger. Strong enough to lift myself back to my feet. Strong enough to stay quiet as Noah and Ingrid began to talk.
“Noah,” she said, just that, as if his name alone were a plea.
Noah looked past Ingrid’s shoulder to meet my eyes, and I mouthed the words thank you, not wanting to attract her attention again.
Ingrid must have noticed him staring past her, though, because her hands, which had been dangling helplessly at her sides while she was facing Noah, clenched into fists once again. “Why?” she said. “Why her? What is it about her, Noah? Why can’t you see that the person who loves you more than anyone, the person who knows you better than anyone, is standing right here in front of you?”
“Ingrid,” Noah said, gently holding his hands out, as if offering them to her to hold. “We’ve been through all of this already. You know I love Ellie. I love you, too. But things are different, now more than ever. You and me? We’re going to continue being together. It’s Ellie I have to say goodbye to now. You know that. Please don’t make this any harder.”
Hearing Noah say all of that, I felt tears slip from my eyes, and I wiped them away as quickly as they came. They were hot against my skin, but a smile kept weakly breaking through the tensed muscles of my face. He’d said the exact thing I’d been needing to hear him say, this last month.
Ingrid, though, clearly didn’t want to hear any of this. She raised her fists into the air and punched down at Noah’s outstretched hands, pushing him away at first, before she finally turned and seemed to almost deflate a little as she walked toward the window on the opposite side of the lantern room. In profile, she looked hunched over, as if in a split second she’d aged into an elderly woman.
“You keep saying that, Noah,” Ingrid said. “But I don’t understand how things can be easier. Not after everything we’ve been through. Not after everything you’ve done for me. I remember the first time you came over to my house with your mom right after my dad died. Your mom had made a roast chicken with all of these vegetables. I can still see them, still smell that meal. My mom hadn’t cooked in days. She and my dad had never been what anyone would call a close couple, but after he was killed, she just shut down. Stopped everything. She wasn’t even taking care of herself like a normal person. Your mom could tell because she took my mom’s hand and led her back to the bathroom, drew a hot bath for her. You told me not to worry. That everything was going to be okay. You asked me where everything was, and you set the table and served up the food on your own, while I stood there watching. You’ve always taken care of me, Noah. You’ve always been the person who loved me more than anyone.”
“Ingrid,” Noah said. “I’m still here, aren’t I? I still care about you. I’m still your friend. None of that has changed.”
“I want to keep all of those memories,” Ingrid said, looking down at her feet, seeming distraught, as if the memories she kept talking about were spread out around her and might be swept away at any moment. “They’re all I have of you. They’re all I had of you after you chose Ellie. Memories of how kind you are to me. They bring me warmth even now, in this godforsaken place we’re stuck in. Don’t take them from me. Don’t tell me not to remember.”
“Ingrid,” Noah said softly. He looked at me then, sadly, as if
he was about to give up reasoning with her.
That’s when I said, “You don’t have to give up anything, Ingrid. You don’t have to stop remembering. If you’ll listen to me, just for a minute, I can explain.”
Ingrid slowly turned her head toward me, and although she was wearing a faded scowl on her face, she gave me a quick and solitary nod to go on.
So I told her. I told her what I’d discovered by accident. The thing that let me help Becca and Adrienne leave this world, the way I knew Ingrid must want to leave as well. “It’s all too much,” I told Ingrid, “from what the others have said. The grief of your families and friends holding you here. I don’t know what it really is, the gray area they’ve all mentioned. I only know I’ve been able to get them past it.”
Ingrid looked skeptical, frowning a little as I went on. But eventually, she asked, “How? How do you do it?”
And I told her about the last wills and testaments, the ones the others had let me witness and record for them. I told her about how my friends had lifted up right in front of me and were able to leave this place the way they’d wanted to from the beginning.
“If you do it, Ingrid,” Noah said, “I’ll be right behind you. I’ll do it, too.”
Ingrid sighed, looked away, first down at the stone floor, then out the lighthouse window, as if she wasn’t sure she really wanted to give up everything she knew, even if she did feel some vague compulsion to depart this world.
Eventually, though, she turned back to look first at Noah, then at me. “How does it work?” she asked. “I mean, if I were to do it, that is. How does it work? What would I have to do?”
“Tell me a story,” I said. “Or tell Noah. Tell whoever you want to hear something real from your life. Something meaningful, something you wish someone else knew. Something you want to live on after you’ve left.”
The Gone Away Place Page 22