“That’s easy enough,” Ingrid said, casting her eyes down at the floor again briefly. When she looked up, she pushed a few strands of hair away from her brow and sighed, then said, “If you’ll do it, too, Noah, I guess it’s okay. Are you ready?”
I took my phone out, switched the camera on, then held it up, listening to her talk until eventually I saw her appear on my screen.
* * *
“Remember that time you took me to dinner at Giancola’s, Noah? It was where everyone going to homecoming that year was eating beforehand. You knew my mom would never be able to buy a dress for me, and it’s not like I had a date anyhow. So you just said, ‘Homecomings and proms are stupid,’ trying to make me feel better about not going. But you never asked anyone to go with you, either. You said, ‘Hey, Ingrid, why don’t we just go to Giancola’s anyway?’ And when I said I didn’t have anything nice to wear, you said, ‘Anything you wear is nice. Don’t let that stop you.’ So I found a dress in my mom’s closet, this old dress from the nineties that I’d never seen her wear. It was crushed green velvet, with these straps crisscrossing the open back. I’m taller than my mom, so it wasn’t a perfect fit, but it was the best thing I’d ever seen in person, so I wore it. When my mom saw me come into the living room wearing it, she gasped and actually smiled—you know how she hardly ever smiles—and she said, ‘Ingrid, baby!’ in this way that made me feel like, for the first time since my dad was killed, she’d finally seen me, recognized me, and loved what she saw. That was probably the best day of my life. That moment when putting on a dress was like a magic spell that could make your mother see you and love you in a way that she hadn’t been able to do before. Or like a spell that could make the boy you wanted to notice you fall for you in the way you wanted.”
“Ingrid…,” Noah began.
I shook my head at him, though, and he stopped, understanding.
And Ingrid kept telling her story.
“The meal at Giancola’s was decadent, compared to what Mom and I usually ate. You said you’d been saving up money, and to order whatever I liked. I didn’t know what half the stuff on the menu was, so I just went with the spaghetti and meatballs to stay safe. I remember you laughed and said, ‘Really? You don’t want to try something different?’ So I asked you to choose for me, and you ordered that dish of little pastas shaped like purses, and inside were four different kinds of cheese and pieces of pear. I’d never thought of fruit being inside of pasta, but it was the second-best thing I’d ever eaten in my life. The first was that roast chicken and vegetables your mother brought over after my dad died. Nothing will ever beat that one.
“That night, I thought I’d walked through a portal into a magical world where suddenly I’d become the person I’d always wanted to be. The person you’d want to be with. But no. It was a short-lived fantasy. Those books and movies where stuff like that happens should probably be banned, because they only set people up for disappointment. Because the magic was only for that one night, and even then, when you took me home, there was no good-night kiss on my front porch, even though I was hoping there would be. I watched you go into your house afterward, and a few minutes later, I saw your silhouette through the window shade as you took off your shirt, and then a moment later the light went off again. I realized then that nothing from that evening was going to keep you up all night, thinking about me. Thinking about us, the possibility of us.”
Ingrid turned away from the lantern-room window to look at Noah with a sad smile. “I don’t blame you. You were just trying to be good to me. In the end, I don’t blame anyone for anything, really. For how alone I’ve felt. For any of my sadness. I just wish—”
Ingrid made a funny face then, and she put her hands on her arms, patting and squeezing them a little, almost as if she was checking to see if they were still there. If she was still there. “Something’s happening,” she said, a little breathless, smiling, but unsure. “Noah? Is it happening to you? Do you feel it, too?”
And then, a moment later, before Noah could say anything, Ingrid Mueller’s soul drifted up into view.
I let the video on my camera continue to run, even after Ingrid disappeared, leaving behind only dust motes spiraling through a shaft of amber lantern light where she’d been standing. I was still crying, had never really stopped, but this time the tears weren’t coming for the same reason they did when I heard Noah say he loved me. These tears were for Ingrid Mueller. Not for that girl who’d seemed to hate me, the one who’d confirmed all of the fears I’d had since Noah had died. These tears were for the girl who’d just shown me how sad and fragile and beautiful she’d been in life, even though only a handful of people had ever seen her for who she was, for who she could have been, if given the chance. She’d been closed up all her life, like a door that’s always been locked, no one ever coming or going from it, so that even as people walk by, they forget that it’s there to be opened.
I was crying for her. I was crying for that girl.
“Is that how you’ve been doing it, Ellie?” Noah asked in a hushed tone, and I looked away from my phone to face him where he stood beneath the arch of the entrance. I nodded, then turned the recorder off.
Then it was just the two of us in there, looking across the expanse of smooth gray stones we used to sit curled up on, my head on his shoulder, watching through the lighthouse windows as the stars blinked to life in the night sky over Newfoundland.
“How…,” he said, pausing for a moment. “How does it work?”
I shook my head, bit my bottom lip for a second, then said, “I don’t know for sure. But it has something to do with telling stories. With telling your truth to someone who can bear witness. Someone who can hear it. Someone who can see you.”
He crossed the room, and we sat on the floor, like old times. He put his arm around my back, his head nestling in the crook between my neck and shoulder. I put my arms around him then, too, and squeezed as tight as I could, breathing against him.
“You’ve been listening to others tell their stories for a while,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me something about yourself?”
I squeezed him tighter for a second, then pulled back a little to put my hand in his hair, just to feel it run through my fingers once more, and nodded.
I told him about how it had all started, just days after the outbreak had torn apart our town, the west wing of the school destroyed when the gas tanker exploded, the tornadoes leveling neighborhoods and cutting down woods until they were no more than fields of broken sticks. I told him how I’d seen the ghost of my neighbor Timothy Barlow, playing his saxophone on the back deck, even though he’d been killed in the school collapse. I told him how I’d initially tried to record Timothy so I could prove I wasn’t insane, if I had to, to someone like my mom and dad or to Dr. Arroyo. Or, even, to myself. But when Timothy’s soul drifted up, flying free, I realized something else was happening. That I’d accidentally stumbled upon a way for the souls trapped in the gray area to escape and go to wherever it is they felt compelled to go to.
When I was done telling him about how I’d done that for Timothy and Becca and Adrienne, when I was done telling him about how Rose and her family had their own plans and were following Japanese traditions, Noah said, “So things haven’t changed all that much, really.”
And I looked up into his face, ran the fingertips of one hand across his cheek, and said, “What do you mean?”
“You’re still watching us,” he said. “You’re still listening to us, even though you didn’t have to be there with us.”
An involuntary sob rose in my throat when I heard those words, but Noah pulled me against him, said, “I know what you’re thinking about. And I want you to know, I’m glad. I’m glad that you weren’t there. I’m so happy we had that argument, and that I was stupid and blew off your worries. I’m so happy you were strong enough and mad enough to leave and not come back to school t
hat day. The only thing I’m really sorry about is that I hurt you like that when I didn’t mean to.”
I still cried through everything he said to me right then, but I kept holding on to him, as tight as possible, wishing I could make him live again.
And when he was done saying what he had to say, I thanked him for it, pulled away to wipe the tears from my face, and began to apologize in the same way, telling him how awful I felt and how stupid I was, and how much I loved him, and how, on some days, it was hard to even see my own face in a mirror, to lean in close and see my own breath appear on its surface. I told him how I wished I’d been there with them. I told him how I wished he would have come to me sooner than this, and he explained that he hadn’t because he’d wanted me to be able to move on, not to be caught up in what had happened, not to live in a past I couldn’t fix.
After a while, I looked down at our laps, where Noah held my hands in his, softly running his thumbs over my knuckles. When I looked up again, he said, “Would you do it for me, too? What you’ve done for the others?”
I felt my face tighten, my jaw clenching so hard, my skin pulled against my bones and started to hurt. Fresh tears came, but I managed to let only one fall before I wiped it away. I bit my bottom lip, sighing, then nodded before I said, “If that’s what you want. But I don’t want you to go away. Not now. Not after I’ve finally found you.”
“I found you,” he said, giving me a slight grin.
“Thank you for that,” I said, leaning my forehead against his for a moment before looking up to kiss him.
“My pleasure,” he said, after we broke away from each other.
For a while after that, we rocked a little, back and forth, hugging, as I said, “Thank you, thank you,” over and over, into the crook of his neck and shoulder, trying not to cry any longer. “I love you,” we both said, over and over, until we’d said it so many times, we both understood and believed what the other one said was the truth.
And when we were quiet again, my chin still hanging over his shoulder, I whispered, “Okay, then. Let’s hear it. Tell me your story.”
One of my first memories is being a little kid, maybe three years old—four at most—and lying on my back on the floor in our living room, looking up at the ceiling. It has this decorative imprint in the plaster that looks like swirls and waves cresting. There are sparkles in it, too, which made it even more interesting to me, because depending on the time of day and on whether I tilted my head a little to the left or to the right, different sparkles would appear, flashing like stars above me. I think it might have been the first time that I had an actual, conscious memory. Like, you know, really conscious. No longer a baby with nothing but a split-second memory.
It’s one of the few memories I have from being that little, and it always makes me happy to recall it, because I can inhabit the memory so vividly that I can actually feel the texture and thickness of the carpet beneath me, and I can smell the cookies my mom’s baking, and I can hear my dad tapping at his laptop behind me, where he’s sitting in a recliner. Whenever I’ve been sad or mad about something, I’ve called up that memory, so I can live inside it again, and it always makes me smile.
The first time I recalled this memory, I was feeling pretty low. I was thirteen and I cost the soccer team a trip to the finals because of a crap shot I took, trying to show off. It didn’t even come close to the goal because the kick went so wild. I had no control. After that, the other team got the ball and basically kept it from us until the clock ran out.
Afterward, I spent the next few days feeling like an idiot because I hadn’t thought about what I was doing. I’d just acted impulsively, which you have to do sometimes in sports, sure, but in my case if I hadn’t been so eager to be a hero, we might have actually got a goal in and tied things up. But I didn’t think, and as far as I was concerned, not going to the finals was entirely my fault. And even though the coaches told me not to feel that way, I did.
That is, until about the third or fourth day of telling myself how stupid and selfish I was. I was lying on the couch in the living room, watching a baseball game on the TV. I wasn’t paying attention to the game, though. Instead, I was looking up at the ceiling, not really thinking about anything other than what a crappy teammate I’d been, replaying that lousy shot over and over. Then suddenly a shaft of sunlight came in through the front window at just the right angle, and a section of those sparkles in the ceiling plaster glinted. And suddenly I was transported back to that moment when I was three or four, lying on the carpet, smelling cookies, hearing my dad tapping on his laptop behind me.
Before I knew it, I was smiling. And when I realized how hard I was smiling, I thought, Remember this. Remember to remember this moment.
I got down off the couch and onto the floor after that, and let myself sink into the memory even further. And when I got up a little while later, I didn’t feel bad about losing the game. Not even for a minute.
Since then I’ve used the same trick any number of times. When I’m down, when I’m angry, when I don’t know what to do about some problem and my thoughts just keep running around inside my head like some cat and mouse chasing each other. When I didn’t know what to do about you being mad about my friendship with Ingrid, which I admit I didn’t handle very well, but only because I didn’t know how to handle it at all. And when I didn’t know what to do during the outbreak, while we were kneeling in the hallway, and the ceiling tore back and all I could see was something large and dark swirling above me, but definitely not stars. And then later, too, when I woke up like this. Dead, but not dead. Somehow living, but somehow not alive, either.
But that trick didn’t do me much good after a certain point. Maybe I’d used it too often, or maybe I used it too much in too short a space of time after I died. Because I’ve felt more alone and more afraid every day, for myself but also for you, not wanting you to stop living. I’ve hated to see how alone you’ve been, despite having your parents to lean on. It’s gotten so that even that memory trick isn’t enough to make me feel better about anything.
Instead, I’ve started to think of something else to make me feel better. And that’s you. You and me. The two of us, together. I’ve started to think back to the first time we came here to the lighthouse last October, and how you told me the story your mom told you when you were a little girl. The one about the guy Ephraim Key, who founded Newfoundland, and how he built this lighthouse for the woman he married, because she was from a shipping family in New England and wasn’t used to living so far away from the ocean. So he built this lighthouse for her, in the hopes that seeing something that reminded her of where she’d come from would make it easier for her to feel at home in this place.
I’ve started to think of that night when you told me that story while I held you in my arms. You’d lit the lantern, even though I worried it would attract someone’s attention and we’d get caught. “We aren’t doing anything wrong,” you said, and we weren’t. And no one ever did come to see who was up in the lighthouse, even if they noticed that the lantern had been lit.
That’s the memory that’s gotten me through life after dying. And that’s the memory I want you to think of when you think of me. After I finish this story and we look at each other for the last time, at least for a long time. Please don’t ever forget that night, that story, every detail of it, because if you can recall it the way I can, Ellie, it should make you happy. And as long as you’re remembering it, we can be together whenever you want to. If you keep it alive inside you.
If you remember to remember.
I love you, Ellie. I wish things hadn’t happened the way they did. But they did. Don’t blame yourself for anything any longer. Don’t ever think that you should have been there with me, or with any of us. I want you to live, and I want you to live happily.
I love you, Ellie. So much. Please don’t cry. Now you know this isn’t really the end.
It’s a new beginning.
A new beginning.
After he was gone—when the last moment came and Noah began to shimmer as his soul drifted up into view, then flew away in the next instant—it didn’t feel much like a new beginning. But I’d nodded and promised when he asked me to think of it that way. For him. So that he could feel at peace about leaving. And despite the weight of longing for him pressing down on me even harder, I promised that I’d think of it that way for myself. I couldn’t hold up that much grief forever without crumbling completely. I knew that much, even then.
For a while after, I sat under the lighthouse window with my back against the wall, listening to my own breath go in and out of my body. I sat there and thought about him, thought about them all. I thought about Becca. About Rose. About Adrienne. I thought about Timothy Barlow and poor Ingrid Mueller. Along with all of the others whose lives were taken away the day of the outbreak. I wanted to gather them all up somehow, not just to carry inside me—though I will do that, like Noah said to do—but to carry them inside something more permanent. Something that will serve me well after years have gone by, like I know they eventually will, and when my memory begins to fail me. I didn’t want to misremember any of them at some point, the way my mom and dad will sometimes argue about someone they knew back when they were in high school, disagreeing on how something happened, or who was there. I didn’t want my mind to change details in the face of what seems to be the inevitable amnesia that happens over time to all of us. I didn’t want to make up anything about them. I just wanted to preserve them in their clearest light, however possible.
I looked down at my phone and realized that I at least had that. That I at least had their stories. I had their voices, their last frowns and smiles. I had their last words.
After a while, I pulled myself up, dusted my pants off, and decided to leave the lantern room. I opened the old door on its squealing hinges, and outside I found a dark expanse of sky, filled with stars. I imagined Noah’s ceiling from his childhood, the glitter imprinted in the plaster design, and I kissed my hand and lifted it up for him.
The Gone Away Place Page 23