We Are the Ghosts

by Vicky Skinner

  “It was because of Luke,” I say, even though he didn’t ask.

  “What?” he says, his voice a whisper.

  “Luke was the reason there was never another date. He’s the reason I couldn’t face you after that night.” I know it’s not really the truth. Luke can be blamed for a lot of things, but he can’t be blamed for the choice I made to let Cade go. But his leaving, it did something to me, and it was enough to make me feel like I wasn’t living a life that Cade could be a part of anymore.

  “The night we went to the drive-in, that’s the night that Luke left. He went while I was gone, and when I came back, I don’t know, it’s like everything changed. I couldn’t even imagine trying to be happy after…” I shake my head because it sounds so stupid when I say it out loud. Why was it so hard for me to go back to life after that? Why did I have such a hard time remembering who I was without Luke?

  “I kept telling myself that if I hadn’t stayed out so late that night that I might have been able to stop him. I know that’s not true, though. But it was hard to look at you, to remember where I was that night and what Luke was doing, and I was blaming you for something, which is just idiotic. So, I’m sorry.”

  Cade’s eyes are still moving over me, and he finally takes a deep breath and says, “I always kind of suspected that might have something to do with it.” He shrugs. “I knew you needed time, but I also knew that if I could reach you somehow, maybe I could show you that, I don’t know, that I’m still here. That I’m fine with waiting. That you’re still the girl I’ve always liked, the girl I asked out to the drive-in, and I still want to be with that girl.” He points at me. “This girl.”

  I drop my face into my hands. I was someone else before Luke left, always chasing Wes and Luke around, always wanting what Luke wanted and doing what he did, just like Cade said in the treehouse. “I already told you, I don’t think I’m that girl anymore.”

  He pulls my hands away from my face. “Of course you are, Ellie. You’re still you. Things are just a little different. Things change, people change, that doesn’t mean you’re not still you.”

  “I never should have pulled you into my shit.”

  “I’m pretty sure I pulled myself into your shit.” He still has a hold of my wrists, and he runs his thumbs back and forth across my skin. “I know things are weird right now, but I’m not going anywhere. I’m here.”

  I tug my wrists from his hold, put a hand behind his neck, and rise up to kiss him. I’m afraid he’ll hesitate, afraid he’s not ready for this, but he kisses me back, soft and gentle and just the way it should have been that night on my front doorstep, one last good thing before everything fell apart.

  I sigh against his lips, and then he’s kissing me so completely that I grab his face, just trying to catch up to him. I feel flames across my skin. I wish I could absorb this moment, let this feeling swallow up everything.

  A sound outside the room breaks through, like a wall between us, and we pull apart just as the door swings open and Gwen and Wes come into the room, talking loudly. It’s as if we don’t exist as the door slams shut and Gwen and Wes continue laughing about something. I take advantage of their inattention, climbing into the bed I’ll share with Gwen and hunkering down under the covers. Maybe I can even pretend I’ve been asleep this whole time. Hear you come in? No, I was fast asleep as soon as we got to the hotel.

  I close my eyes, listening to the rustling of clothes and discussion over who will take the first shower, and then the bathroom door closes, the water running again, and I peek. Wes sits on the edge of the bed beside mine and looks down at the phone on the nightstand, still playing Sufjan Stevens.

  “What the hell is this?” he asks, looking down at the screen.

  From the other side of the bed, over by the window, as far from me as he can be, Cade says, “It’s just some music to help us sleep. The city is loud.”

  “Whatever you say, man,” Wes says and then I hear the blankets rustle, and the next time I peek, Wes and Cade are both in bed, the blanket up to their chins.

  I listen for a long time, until I hear the soft sound of Wes’s snoring and Cade’s deep breaths. And then the bathroom door opens, and Gwen emerges in a cloud of steam. I don’t pretend to be asleep anymore. I sit up and watch her as she puts her old clothes in her bag and unwraps the towel from around her hair. She meets my eye as she shakes out her wet hair, but she doesn’t say anything. She gets into the bed, but she keeps her back turned toward me, and I can’t help but wonder why Wes is back in her good graces but I’m not.

  “I was going to forgive him,” she says, still facing away from me, and it takes me a second to realize she’s talking about Luke, not Wes. After a long pause, she looks at me over her shoulder. “But he didn’t care if I forgave him.”

  I don’t know what to say to that, can’t even begin to understand how she’s felt for the last year, something so akin to what I’ve felt but also somehow the complete opposite.

  “What do you think we’re going to find in Dexter?” she asks, and while her voice isn’t exactly gentle, it’s not full of anger, either.

  “I have no idea.”

  She turns over and pulls the blanket up. I don’t lie down beside her, just watch her from where I’m sitting at the end of the bed. “No more secrets,” she says quietly, and I’m honestly so relieved to hear her say this—because it’s obviously a truce and because I’ve been so tired of the secrets—that I smile and agree.

  “No more secrets.”

  * * *

  I can’t sleep. I slept so much this morning, so much on the drive, and again at the lake, and now that I’m in an actual bed, my eyes are wide open, my heart pounding, every cell in my body attuned to the fact that we’re here.

  We’re in Ann Arbor.

  We’re in the same city Luke was two weeks ago, and even though I told Wes I don’t feel Luke here in Michigan, maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe I do feel him, or feel something, something that makes the hair on my arms stand up, something that makes the air seem heavier, something that is probably one hundred percent my imagination but still keeps me from being able to rest. I sit up and press my head to my knees, my skin clammy.

  For the last year, Luke has been this person that I knew was out there, somewhere, like a planet in the galaxy that some scientist tells you about but you don’t see with your own eyes, so it might as well not exist. For the first few weeks after he disappeared, I thought I saw him everywhere. Every time I turned a corner at J-Mart or even at Eaton High, I thought I saw him. I sat at a red light on Main Street long after it turned green, my eyes fixed on someone the same height as him, with the same pale skin and dark hair.

  And then, after a while, he became like a myth. Maybe he never existed at all. Memories started to feel like something I made up, like scenes in a movie instead of something we actually experienced in real life. Eventually, people stopped talking about him. He stopped being the name in everyone’s mouth. He wasn’t the one who could do the most shots without getting sick at all the parties anymore; he wasn’t the one who was charming all the teachers; he wasn’t the one who was winning all the track meets. He was disappearing from everyone’s minds, and it felt like I was the only one who still remembered.

  * * *

  When we get home from the Nova concert, I get straight in the shower, the way I do every time we come home from a concert. Concerts make me feel like I stink and like I’m covered in other people’s germs. Getting into my fresh pajamas after a hot shower after a concert is pure bliss.

  But when I get back to my room, Luke is sitting on the edge of my bed, his fingers laced between his knees, his head hanging low.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask him, shutting the door behind me and tossing my towel onto my desk chair. I sit down beside him, but he doesn’t answer my question. He sets his head on my shoulder, and we’re quiet for a long time.

  “You’re scaring me,” I say, quietly, and he just nods.

  “Could I sleep in here
tonight? I’ll shower first.” The way he looks at me is so strange. It’s not very often that Luke isn’t one hundred percent confident in himself. Every step he takes always seems to be a bold one, a sure one. It’s something I’ve always admired about him. But right now, his eyes shine, and he’s looking at me like he’s pleading with me.

  “Sure,” I say because I want him to stop looking at me like that. I want him to look like normal Luke again.

  He smiles and leaves the room, and a second later, I hear him shut the bathroom door in the hallway and start the shower. I turn off the light overhead and just leave on the bedside lamp as I crawl into bed. I have a queen, so it’s not like we can’t both fit comfortably, but when Luke comes back, in an old undershirt and a pair of basketball shorts, his hair dripping, he doesn’t lay down with the expanse of the bed between us. He lays right beside me, his shoulder pressing into mine, and we stare up at the ceiling.

  “When you graduate from Tate, I want to take you to Italy.”

  I smile up at the ceiling. “That sounds nice.”

  “We can walk around Venice and eat our weight in pasta and go to all the museums.”

  My eyes drift closed, and I imagine it, Italy with my big brother, with Wes and Gwen, too, probably, because they’re all attached at the hip.

  “We can ride in one of those riverboats and hike around the countryside. And we can visit the vineyards and eat pastries, and it’ll be so amazing.”

  His voice, deep and soft, sends me to sleep.

  * * *

  It’s four a.m. when I finally climb out of bed, my heart racing. I stand in the dark room for a minute, watch the rain crash against the window, watch lightning flash in the distance. It feels like the entire city of Ann Arbor is shrinking, compacting around me until there’s nothing but me in this hotel room, trapped.

  I take Wes’s car keys from the nightstand, stick Luke’s map in my back pocket, and sneak out of the hotel room. It’s raining outside, but despite the never-ending nightmares, the way my body turns immediately to fight or flight when thunder crashes, this doesn’t feel scary. It feels like a companion tonight.

  I stride out to the car, throwing myself into the front seat and slamming the door shut behind me. I can’t see anything out the front windshield. All I can see is the water sliding down the glass, waves and waves of it, so much water that it’s almost comical. I don’t turn the car on, even though it’s chilly, even though my hands are trembling and goose bumps have sprouted along my wet arms.

  I put my key in the ignition and then stop. I don’t know what I would do, where I would go. It’s the middle of the night, but I don’t know if I can stay here anymore. I reach into my back pocket and pull out the map. It didn’t get wet in my mad dash to the car, but my wet hands make the paper go soggy in some places. The corners are already bent, one of them torn a little, and I wipe my hands on my pants to try and dry them, but that only makes them wetter.

  I press the tip of my finger to the spot on the map where Eaton should be, our town so tiny that it’s not even a word, not even a dot on the map. You wouldn’t even know it was there, sandwiched halfway between Dallas and Austin. I follow the dark red line that Luke marked, from Texas over to Louisiana, up to Missouri and through Indiana to Michigan. From there, my finger starts to find other places, the spot where I put a star in New York because I’ve always wanted to see a Broadway show, the place where Wes circled a little island off the coast of Florida where he wanted to spend a week sunbathing, all the places that we marked because we never thought this would be real.

  The passenger-side door opens, the rain is loud for a split-second, and then someone drops into the seat beside mine.

  “Shit,” I gasp. “You scared me.”

  Water drips down Cade’s face. “What are you doing out here?” He looks from the keys in the ignition to the map in my hand. “What are you doing, Ellie?” he asks again, because Cade always seems to know what’s going on in my head, always seems to understand, even when I can’t.

  Cade’s not wearing anything but a baggy T-shirt and a pair of wet sweatpants. I start the car, switching the heat on because he’s shivering. It’s not nearly as warm in Michigan as it is in Texas. But he doesn’t seem overly concerned about the temperature. His eyes shoot from the map in my hand to my face.

  “Are you okay?” he asks.

  I look down at the map, my wet finger marks all over it, soaking through. The easy answer is to tell him that yes, I’m okay. The not-so-simple answer is that I have no fucking clue. I don’t know if I’m okay. I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay.

  My hands are shaking, and Cade reaches out to take the map from me. He holds it so gently, like it’s going to crumble in his hands. I feel like I’m drowning. I watch him fold up the map, all the words disappearing while I watch, and I feel the beast in my chest start to wake up, start to creep around, start to whisper things in my ear.

  “It was supposed to be all of us.”

  When the map is folded, Cade hands it back to me, and I hold it in my open palms for a second before dropping it into my lap. “What was supposed to be all of us?”

  I shake my head. “All of us. Me, Wes, and Luke. We made this map together. We were all supposed to go on this trip. We were all supposed to go together. Just because we forgot about it didn’t mean we didn’t want to go. He—” I suck in a breath, trying to steady myself. I have to let it go. I have to just let it go.

  Cade is shaking his head, and my hands quake on the steering wheel, so I grip it hard. “He was supposed to take you with him,” he says, so gently, echoing the words I was thinking. “He left you behind.”

  I snap, slamming my hand on the console between us. “Stop it! If you think you’re helping me, you’re not. You didn’t know him, Cade. You don’t even know what you’re talking about. Luke was—”

  He cuts me off again. “He was human. He made a mistake. You can say that. It’s okay.”

  My hands tremble with whatever is creeping along just under my skin. I feel like any second I’ll burst, but I grit my teeth.

  “I know he made a mistake. I know he was human,” I say. Why is he talking like I don’t know what Luke did?

  “Ellie,” he says, and when I look at him, he’s looking down at my hands, where they’re curled around the steering wheel, so tight that my skin has turned white around my knuckles. I pull my hands away, my skin sticking slightly to the vinyl, and drop them into my lap.

  “I don’t know what—” I can’t even finish the sentence. There are a million words I could use. I don’t know what to feel. I don’t know how to deal with this. I don’t know if it’s okay to be … whatever I am. I take a deep breath, stamp down everything rising inside, just like I have for the last year, just like I have since the day Luke died, clamping it down inside until I can be unfeeling again.

  But it’s not so easy this time. This time, this thing I’ve been keeping inside just breaks through again, just demands attention. I gasp for breath. Why did he have to leave? Why couldn’t he call me? How could he just leave us all behind? Who does that to their little sister? Who just abandons them? Who does that?

  “I don’t know,” Cade says, and I realize I’ve said it all out loud. He’s watching me, his body turned toward me, one hand fisted against the glovebox and the other holding onto the console between us. “But it’s okay to be mad.”

  I’m already shaking my head. “I can’t be mad at Luke. I can’t be. He’s dead. I can’t be mad.” I keep saying it, over and over, like that’ll make it true. Whatever was burning inside me seconds ago fizzles out, a low simmer in my stomach. “I just want him to come back.”

  “I’m sorry,” Cade says, loud enough to be heard over the storm. “I’m sorry he left. I’m sorry he died. I’m sorry.” His voice breaks. “But it’s okay to be angry at him.”

  “He was my best friend,” I say, the words hitting the windshield and coming back at me, lifeless and flat. “We were going to travel the world together.
We were going to go to Tate and then move away from my parents together. He was always going to be there, always.” I know I should stop talking, that I should force all my words back down inside myself where they belong.

  But I can’t stop. I can’t stop moving, can’t stop thinking, can’t stop wanting the future he promised me. Wanting the life we were going to have. Wanting my brother back.

  I cover my face with my hands. “Why didn’t he want to be my brother anymore?” I say around the tears climbing up my throat. They won’t be contained this time, and then they’re everywhere. In my hands, on my shirt, coating my face and my chin and my neck. And when Cade reaches across the console to hold me, they cover him, too.

  I’m so angry. I’m so fucking angry. And it’s burning away everything in me until there’s nothing left. And it’s sadness that’s gnawing at every piece of my exposed flesh. And I can’t fucking breathe because I don’t understand why.

  Why he couldn’t wait for me to finish school so we could go together. Why he couldn’t call me from the road and tell me what was going on. Why we were best friends one minute and complete strangers the next. Why he moved to Ann Arbor and stayed and lived here instead of carrying on with the trip that took him away from me in the first place.

  And against Cade’s shirt, I start to scream. I don’t know where the screams come from. They seem to be coming from my brain and my rib cage and my kneecaps. It’s like my whole body is screaming, and I’m watching it happen from the outside, watching me squeeze my eyes shut and scream until my throat is raw and I can feel Cade’s fingers leaving bruises where he’s holding me too tight.

  I go limp when I’m finally empty, like being asleep while also being awake. Cade still holds me, but he doesn’t say anything, and I’m thankful for that. Nothing he could say would make it better, so he doesn’t say anything.

  And we sit there, the rain beating on the windows, harder and harder until the world around us disappears into an ocean.