by Misty Simon
“Becker, let’s go. I don’t think this is the right place for this to happen.”
“Got it,” he said. “Wave and smile as we leave, so Mrs. F doesn’t think there’s anything wrong.”
“I’m on it. See you, Mrs. Featherworth.”
The woman waved from the porch. “Come back, and don’t forget that book you borrowed. I don’t want to have to charge you a late fee.” She laughed and pulled her housecoat more firmly around her curvy figure.
And just like that, the squeaking turned to the scream of an awakening. Could one spirit go through two different awakenings?
“Home now,” Mel said. No other words were necessary as Becker threw the car into gear and pulled away from the curb.
****
They made it back to the junkyard in record time. Mel was thankful the police were not out checking the roads today, and there were no strays to stop for. Right as they turned into the driveway, the girl ghost flew out of the car to sit on the side of the road. Dougal went after her as Becker jerked the car to a stop.
“What now?” he asked.
“Now we give Dougal a couple of minutes, and then we go see if we can help. I’ll be honest—this is all very new to me. I’ve been around this place for years and have never had this happen before.”
“Well, this is all new to me in total, so I’m not sure what to do. I’ll tell you I don’t particularly relish that feeling.”
Mel patted his hand, then held it for her comfort and his. “You and me both. I appreciate you sticking around. Everything is better when you’re here.”
He held her hand in the car while they both looked in the rearview mirrors. Dougal crouched next to the poor girl. He floated a hand near her face and made a motion as if to wipe away her tears. Did ghosts cry? Mel didn’t know, but she appreciated having Dougal here to help.
Mumford barked in the back seat, then scrambled forward through the gap in the front seats. Because of his girth he got stuck, so Mel maneuvered him through, only to have him plop into Becker’s lap. He sat there pawing at the steering wheel, his tongue hanging out.
“This guy needs to go out, I think,” Becker said.
“You take care of that, if you don’t mind, and then go on up to the house. I’m going to see if it’s time for me to offer some assistance or reassurance or something.”
All three exited the car at the same time. Dougal looked up at Mel as she approached, and his eyes were sad.
“I don’t understand what she’s saying,” he told Mel. “It's something to do with family ties and missing them. I don’t know where her family is, and she can’t seem to find the words to tell me. She just keeps repeating something called Keaton. Do you think that’s her last name?”
“I suppose it’s possible.” Mel crouched down with them. “Sweetie, how can we help you? I know you had a hard time when Mikey asked about someone hurting you. Do you remember what happened?”
“I can’t remember what I ever did before,” the ghost girl said.
Why did that sound so familiar?
“I can’t remember what I ever did before. My family ties. I missed it.”
And still it felt so familiar, but like it should be different. It was almost like she was singing. And then it hit Mel. “Family Ties? The TV show?”
“Family Ties is on tonight. I was so looking forward to it. That Alex Keaton is so dreamy.”
Holy moly. There would be no fresh body for the police to find if this girl thought Alex Keaton was dreamy and was sad she’d missed the episode of a TV show that had run in the 1980s.
“Why don’t we go in, now?” Mel said gently. “I think I might be able to help you more. That’s good information, and we’re close. Are you ready to find out what happened? Who you are?”
The ghost girl looked up with tears standing in her eyes. Ghosts could actually cry. Interesting. “I want to know.”
“And I promise, once we’re done, I’ll get you all the Family Ties episodes you want. You can watch them for hours on end.”
She perked up at that. “But how? Do you have them all on tape? I hope you have a good VCR. They’re expensive, so we couldn’t have one, and when I was babysitting I didn’t like to watch TV, so I had to miss my favorite shows on those nights. It was okay, though. I had to help my mom and dad make money.”
Poor girl. “Let’s get inside where we can talk about the rest of this.” There might be very little traffic on the main road connected to her house, but there were still farmers who drove by with their tractors and wagons. Mel didn’t want to look any stranger than normal, standing at the end of her driveway, crouched and talking to the post her father had put in years ago to hold the mailbox.
****
“What’s the plan?” Becker and Mumford met Mel on the porch. “Do we have more info?”
“Oh, yeah, but this is going to be a weird one. I might have to do some more research. The things she’s talking about are from decades ago.”
He shrugged. “You talk about things from decades ago, too. How is that weird?”
“Because I think the last thing she remembers is a TV show she wanted to watch in nineteen-eighty-something.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“What can I do to help?”
Mel pulled on her bottom lip, then tapped on her chin with one rounded fingernail painted with purple sparkle nail polish. “I think what you can do is go download every episode of Family Ties you can find. Then get ready for some binge watching like you’ve never seen before.”
After entering the house, Mel opened the downstairs parlor doors. They didn’t often use this room, since it held all her mother’s china and a pretty extensive collection of antiques, and Mel didn’t want anything disturbed. While Mel liked her history, she liked it a little more current in her own house than couches stuffed with horse hair. But she loathed the thought of changing anything, because it had been her mother’s favorite room before she died.
Mel had decided not to use the living room as they normally did, because she needed an area where they could ask questions. Mel’s mom had recommended this room because it was bigger, just in case anything unusual happened. What her mom thought would happen, Mel didn’t know, but she took the recommendation. Plus, the ghost they were asking to help wanted a more formal setting for what he had planned.
Once Mel readied the room for visitors, she went back out to the drive, where Dougal and the girl ghost sat.
“You guys want to come in? I have to make a few phone calls, and then hopefully I’ll be back with some more information. No thought on what your name might be?” she asked the girl.
“Eileen. My name is Eileen.” And then she started to cry again. Dougal kept his hand on her head while she bowed it. Mikey, the recluse, came out of the junkyard, probably the first time in thirty years that he’d been this far away from his sinks, and joined the two of them to sit on the ground next to her. Or at least he looked like he was sitting on the ground, though being a ghost he really wasn’t.
“We’ll be up in a few minutes,” he said to Mel, then turned away again to talk between the three of them quietly.
Chapter Seven
Mel knew when to back off, and that’s just what she did when Mikey told her they’d be up to the house in a few minutes. Something was happening, but Dougal had it under control, and Mikey was helping. Now was the perfect time to follow up with those calls to people who were hopefully in the know.
“So you’ve never heard of a ghost awakening after almost thirty-five years?” she asked Belle in Utah over the phone.
“No, not at all. I’ve heard of the awakening, but it usually happens within seconds of the person dying. Let me know what you find out, though. Now you have me intrigued.”
Intrigued was a small word for what Mel was dealing with. She was on fire with curiosity to know what had happened to keep this spirit unawakened.
Her next three calls were more of the same. No one knew of stasis like t
hat for a soul. Where had Eileen been this whole time? What had triggered her reanimation?
Finally Esther answered her phone in Nova Scotia. Mel had called her first, but when she didn’t get more than an answering machine she decided to move along to get to the bottom of this.
“Oh, Esther, I’m so happy you answered. Do you have a minute?”
“I have a séance in twenty minutes, my darling girl, but I will make time for your precious inquisitiveness.”
That was one way to phrase Mel’s insatiable need to know. She realized that for most of her life, since her father had left, she’d only been marking time. She’d done what had to be done and not a whole lot more than that. Perhaps she was going through her own awakening, just on a different level.
“Thank you for picking up.”
“I knew you were going to call today but felt it necessary for you to reach out to others before I answered.”
Esther was a psychic who had worked for years in secret and more recently more openly. Due to there being more of an accepting nature for things outside the norm, she’d finally brought her talents to more than just those who knew from word of mouth.
“Well, thank you for feeling it was time to talk to me.” Mel was grateful for any help.
“It’s so interesting to talk with you,” Esther said. “I hear no censure in your voice, no anger that I didn’t answer earlier and help you as soon as I knew I could. Instead you just accept what is and then adapt. That is such as amazing ability.”
Even though she knew Esther couldn’t see her, Mel still ducked her head as she blushed. She cleared her throat. Played with a jelly bracelet. Straightened her ever-present bow behind her teased bangs. She had no answer for that. She didn’t know how to be any other way, and wasn’t that how you were supposed to be when someone did something?
Clearing her throat again, she soldiered on. “So I have this ghost that seems to have died in the eighties, but she just had her awakening.”
“Were you there for the awakening?” Curiosity and urgency coated the older woman’s voice.
“Yes, actually. She seemed catatonic, and then one of the residents asked her if someone had hurt her. She turned her head slowly, almost at a creepy pace, and then started screaming.”
“Fascinating. So few people see the awakening. You were blessed today, Melanie.”
Mel had to disagree with her on that. Her ears were still ringing from the noise. “I’d feel even more blessed if I could help her. Have you ever heard of something like this? No one else has.”
“Hmm.”
There was a beat of silence while Mel held her breath.
“I must warn you that it can be due to a significantly violent incident. It’s almost as if the ghost went into a coma for the brain to protect itself from the trauma. Did you take her around to see what triggered for her?”
Mel was grateful she could answer that with a positive. At least she’d done that right. “I did. She didn’t seem to recognize anything, but then she saw an older woman in town, and the screaming started again, and she remembered her own name. That’s something. Right?”
“Oh, that’s marvelous.”
It hadn’t felt marvelous when it was going on, and in fact it made Mel hesitate to do anything more. Was the screaming from pain? Not physical pain, necessarily, but mental, emotional? Mel never wanted to torture anyone.
“You won’t think it’s marvelous, but it can be. And it will be a release for her to tell her story, to know her story. If it’s left tucked away and hidden, then it could make it impossible for her to move on. Not everyone chooses to remain here on Earth. Some aren’t given entrance to either Heaven or Hell because they are blocked by their own misdirected energies.”
Mel sank into a chair. So she’d have to hurt her now, but then it would make it better later? She tried to think of it like the surgeries Becker did on dogs. If they had fatty tumors in their bellies that were going to put too much pressure on their lungs, Becker would remove them. Which meant he was cutting them open and hurting them, even if they couldn’t feel it until after they woke from the anesthesia. But in the end they were healed and lived for many more years because the pressure had been taken off.
“So how do I go about getting her to talk, when all she remembers is an old TV show and her first name?”
Chapter Eight
About an hour later, Mel called Becker in from playing with Mumford and asked Dougal and Mikey if they could bring Eileen in for something she wanted to try. Well, she didn’t want to try it, but it might be the only way they could find out what had happened, and maybe give Eileen the freedom to leave this plane, if that was what she wanted to do.
Unlike when the guys had tried to conjure a spirit without setting up any protection, Mel had spent the last sixty minutes warding everything she could think of. Mrs. Hatchett had emerged from the kitchen to direct, and several other women had all clustered around, throwing out instructions. Mel finally had to ask them to back off or every single strand of carpet would have been marked with a symbol. There was no time for that.
Dougal came in first when she asked him to bring Eileen with him. Eileen was next, and then a ghost Mel didn’t know. Did she have another new visitor to figure out? Seriously, this was totally getting out of hand.
But then the ghost smiled. And though the teeth were still all broken in his mouth, Mikey had spiffed up considerably. His hair was trimmed, his fingers clean, his face shaved. Had someone helped him with all this grooming, or had he done it himself? And why had he done it now?
The answer to that was the way Eileen turned back to make sure he was floating in behind her. It was sweet, it was lovely, and Mel hoped it didn’t break Mikey’s dead heart if she was not all the things he thought she was.
Time to get this thing started.
“So if you’ll all come in, we can get rolling.” Mel stood in the center of the parlor, where her mom had led her through the procedure. They’d also brought in Jackson Elliott Farmington the Fourth, who had been a regression therapist before he fell off a bridge trying to coax a bird out of a tree. It hadn’t actually been a bird, for real, but a woman who thought she had lived a previous life as Marie Antoinette. She’d been so afraid people weren’t going to eat cake and would instead take her head from her body that she’d climbed into a tree next to the bridge. The woman lived to be ninety, running a shelter for battered women, while Jackson died that day, on the rocks below the bridge, after stretching out too far and only grazing her hand instead of gripping her tight enough to bring her in.
That was about all Mel knew of his story. It fascinated her, but she’d never taken the time to find out more, if he’d even tell her. Maybe it was time to do that, to figure out more than the line in the big book of the dead existing here with her. She didn’t have to ask why anyone had chosen to stay. She’d learned that lesson. Finding out more about each one could only help her. And maybe them.
“Don’t break concentration while they’re doing this, Mel, my love.” Her mom stood next to her in the parlor. “I see that frown on your forehead. You’ve done everything you can. You need to be careful. You’re working with what you know is a good ghost, and what you hope is a good ghost, but you have to be ready in case something happens.”
“I know. I just feel bad that I didn’t even know this person was here. We have hundreds of ghosts here. It’s sad to think I barely know about any of them. I feel like I’ve been asleep myself for years.”
“You’ve had a lot going on. A lot to work through. I know you’ve appreciated me being here, but I’m not really here, and you were left on your own to survive at a young age. I’ll never get over that loss. I’m so sorry.”
“I wish I could hug you.” Mel held back the tears as best she could.
“You can. In your heart you can hug me all you want. I know it’s not the same, but it can be enough.”
“It is, Mom. I didn’t mean to make it sound like I’m ungrateful. I’m just reali
zing how little I know about all this. I thought I’d done a good job keeping things running around here, and making it safe for everyone, but maybe I missed something by not opening myself totally to the experience.”
She definitely felt her mom stroke her hair this time, pressure just like when she was a small child with a skinned knee from jumping around the mangled remains of a playhouse with a little girl ghost.
“I love you, sweetie, and you’re opening up now. Maybe this is the time. We all have capabilities we don’t always use. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes the timing is crucial.”
Mel was going to go with that and be happy with it. She didn’t want to think that she’d been hiding this whole time. She hadn’t been, not really. Like a flower in the spring, she’d been blossoming under the soil, getting ready to poke her head out. This was her springtime, and she yearned for the sunshine. When they were done here, she was going to make sure Becker knew exactly how much she loved him and how much he meant to her. They lived together, and she’d been open with him on many things, but she realized there was still a part of her waiting for him to leave, and that was cheating both of them.
Jackson got ready as Mel was having her epiphany.
“We will begin now, yes?” he said from a chair she’d moved out from the wall. He wanted the experience to feel like real people doing real things. She’d been all too happy to accommodate him. Eileen lay on a chaise lounge, with Mikey sitting on the floor next to her head, within arm’s reach. Every few seconds she would reach over and graze his now-smooth face. That could mean all the difference to the new ghost, to have a connection.
“Let us begin.” Jackson perched on the edge of his chair, his monocle seated in his left eye. “You will move back through time, through space, and will remember all things. There is nothing that can hurt you anymore, no sadness, no pain that can touch you. There is only life and the ability to see. The ability to tell us what happened to you, so that we may find you and give you a proper burial. Now, where are you?”