by Megan Kruse
Lydia
Fannin, Texas, 2010
THE HALLS AT THE FANNIN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL WERE long and beige, and the things we’d rehearsed I said easily, but they meant nothing. I was nothing. I kept thinking I saw my father slipping behind the library shelves, kicking a ball across a field. I wanted to be erased. A chalkboard smudge. I pulled my coat tighter.
In the gym we sat on the cold floor and waited to be chosen for sides. When the girls came to sit beside me and ask me questions, I told them: I am Lena Harris. I am in the seventh grade. “You talk like a Yankee,” one of the girls said.
“Well, I’m not,” I said. Their faces were blank and blinking. I hated them all.
“You look like a Yankee.”
“What does that mean?” I asked. The eyes were a row of window shades, drawing closed, open, closed. The teacher called a name and when one ran off the rest scattered like a pack of dogs.
The classes were the same: a page of spidery numbers, of snaking words. I pretended I didn’t understand. I could see what the Fannin teachers thought, and it didn’t matter how I acted. They knew enough of our story to know that we weren’t who we said we were. “You’re going to be safe,” my mother said. “I promise that I will keep you safe, and so will all your teachers.” When I turned in my math test with rows of numbers that I’d invented, no one said a word.
In the cafeteria I heard them, from two tables away. “Fag,” one of the boys said to another.
In a second, I was above him.
“Shut the fuck up,” I said.
They looked at me. The milk cartons and trays shrank to points. One of them started to laugh. “Oooh,” he said. “Who’s this?”
I didn’t wait for what they would say next. I smashed my fist into his sandwich. “You go to hell,” I said. I didn’t wait to see what he would say. I went out to the front steps of the school. The opposite of life isn’t death, I thought. It was this. The sun was orange, burning through the sky, and I looked at it until I could see the burning of it on the back of my eyelids, the same color as I was inside.
The assistant principal caught me by the arm and spun me back inside. She steered me into the armchair in her office and gave me a square note with a line on the bottom for my mother to sign. I didn’t care. Lena Harris was braver than Lydia Holland.
My mother was asleep, and I didn’t want to tell her what I’d done. My grandmother was in the kitchen, pulling out the jars of flour and sweeping behind them with a rag. A cockroach shot past and was gone. “Shit,” she was saying. “Shit shit shit.”
“Grandmother,” I said, and she turned. The note felt heavier than the paper it was on.
She laughed. “Stop that, please,” she said. “Call me Grandma. Or Linda. Don’t make me sound ancient.”
“Here,” I said. “Would you sign it?” I put the note on the counter.
I picked up a pencil from the table and poked the point into the palm of my hand. She put down the rag and unfolded the note. I held the pencil tighter.
“Why don’t you tell me,” she said, looking at me, “why you got in a fight?”
I shrugged. I concentrated on the point of the pencil, needle sharp. It left a gray mark deep in my palm.
“Why did you get in a fight?”
I felt angry all of a sudden. Because I hate that school, and the people in it. Because I hate this place. “Maybe I got it from my dad,” I said, and I knew as I said it that I believed it. “You’re your father’s girl,” he liked to say, dragging his palm across my hair. I remember it felt like a curse.
My grandmother’s eyes snapped up at me. I dropped the pencil on the floor and started to walk away. I felt her move behind me and she reached out one hand and pulled me back. She held my shoulders. I looked past her at the wall. There was a picture of my mother, in a yellow dress, when she was eight or nine, and I wished she’d never left this town. I would have been born as someone else, maybe a boy, or maybe a girl who was more beautiful, who never smashed a sandwich in her life.
“Listen to me,” she said. “You didn’t get anything from him.”
“It was after I was born,” I said. “It started then.” I’d never said it out loud before. If I hadn’t been born, it would have been different. Whatever changed in my father would not have changed, and now I wouldn’t have to know that his anger could be inside me, ticking like a bomb.
“No,” she said. “It started in your father a long time before that. It was him, not you.”
“Still,” I said.
“Not still,” she said. “It was him.”
“Once,” I told her, “I tried to kill him.” The glint of glass lit the worst of my dreams, cutting through the dark, a bright and warning knife. How I couldn’t do it. How I was too afraid.
She looked at me for a long time. “You need a little place,” she said.
“What kind of place?”
“A place of your own,” she said. “Follow me.”
She led me out of the house, down the gravel road, out toward the river. Against the bank was a little shelter, a lean-to of wood, bleached from the sun. It looked like bones, like a house of ribs. I thought of the fires Jackson and I used to make in our little forts. We tended them so carefully, but in the wet forest they would never take for long.
I looked at her. She didn’t look like my mother. I wondered if she looked like me. “Did you build it?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” she said. “But someone did. Some kids, maybe. I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t here.” She brushed her hair out of her eyes. “If you want it,” she said, “it’s here.”
I climbed inside and she followed me, squatting on her heels like a bird on a nest. It was dark and cool inside. I picked up a stone and it felt good in my hand, round as an egg and heavy on my palm.
“You know, I thought about you every single day since you were born,” my grandmother said. “I waited and waited to meet you. I wondered who you would be.”
I felt a tightness in my chest like I might cry, but I wouldn’t. If that was true, I thought, she would have come for us. She would have helped us. She would have come. I didn’t say anything, just squeezed the egg stone tight in my hand.
“I did,” she said. “I hope you’ll believe that one day.” She pointed across the river, where a tree dipped its branches low over the water. “I saw a cottonmouth right there once,” she said. “It’s why I don’t swim. I hate snakes.”
“Will you sign my note?” I asked. I watched the place where the snake had been and the hard shine of the water.
“If you don’t fight anymore,” she said. “Let’s not tell your mother about the note this time. And I’m still going to call you Lydia,” she said. “When it’s just you and me. Is that okay?”
I nodded, but I didn’t smile. I knew what she was trying to do. You should have come for us, I thought again.
“Your grandfather,” she said. “He loved this river. He used to swim for hours.” She sighed. “We would come here, when we were young. When we were first together. I’d sit here and watch him and be dumb and in love.” She smiled.
I thought of him in the water, splashing, young as my brother.
“You know,” she said, “your family doesn’t begin or end with your father.”
We sat in the slatted shadows for a while. I didn’t ask her any questions. I watched the spot where my grandfather had been, diving and surfacing like a fish, the water beading off of him, not knowing that one day I would be here, and I would think of him.
Jackson
Tulalip, Washington, 2009
HE REMEMBERED BEING SMALL AND HOW FIRETRAIL HILL had seemed impossibly long and treacherously steep, pulling cars like ants slowly skyward until they disappeared into the treetops. Now, standing in the ditch in the dusky light, it felt just as dangerous. Froth of wings in his stomach, vertigo. “Okay,” Randy was saying. “This is base.”
Jackson kept hold of Lydia’s hand even though she was getting too old for that. She had
wanted to come, and Randy insisted. “She’s got a good sense,” he said. “I can tell. She knows things.”
They’d gone to Randy’s after school and he’d borrowed his dad’s car to drive them up here. Afterward, he’d take them home, but Jackson still felt a buzz of alarm when the cars drove by. It wasn’t terrible, what they were doing, but he didn’t want to explain to either of his parents why they were waiting in the underbrush for the sun to go down.
“If we want the Society to take us seriously, we have to make sure our methods are sound,” Randy said. He spread out a tarp in the ditch and it rose up in peaks over the tall grass. He stepped on it to flatten it.
“What’s that for?” Jackson asked.
“I’m making a base camp,” Randy said. “For the equipment.” Jackson tried not to laugh. The equipment was an old Sony tape deck, a bag of chips, two flashlights, and half a dozen Hostess cupcakes, but what the hell, he thought, wouldn’t doubt spoil it? Besides, he liked it when Randy got serious.
“These guys are very experienced in case investigation,” Randy said. “We’re talking metaphysicians, engineers, researchers. And sensitives, of course.”
Randy was hoping to gather data that would earn him entry into the Washington Ghost Society, which, from what Jackson could gather, was a bunch of pale and mentally unstable guys listening for poltergeists and wearing tinfoil hats.
“Sensitives?” Lydia asked.
“Psychics,” Randy said. “Mediums. It’s necessary. You do everything you can with science, and you combine that with the science we don’t yet understand.”
It was Jackson’s father who first told him about the Firetrail ghost. “You’ll be driving up the hill at night,” his father had said, “just minding your own, and – bam! – he’s beside you, running. Just running like hell, looking in the window of your car.” Over the years kids at school had added to and amended the story: He was old, or he was young, he had a weathered face, he had sad eyes, he ran beside your car at night, or you’d look in the rearview mirror and he’d be sitting in the backseat. He was looking for the people who’d murdered him, or he was young and lonely. He’d torture and kill you, or he’d put one cold hand on your shoulder. He was good fortune, or death.
“So, what do we do?” Lydia asked, folding her arms. She was wearing a sweatshirt that was about six sizes too big for her, and she kept her hands tucked up in the sleeves, but her tone was all business. Jackson had the feeling that he was the tagalong here, that this was really about Lydia and Randy. Lydia was twelve, young enough to still believe in magic, and Randy saw UFOs in the glow of streetlights; the fog was a ghost whipping her hair.
The objective, Randy explained, was for the ghost to feel at home. To run with them. They would all take a turn, according to Randy, but Jackson had guessed from the start that Randy’s bet was on Lydia, that he thought that she would be the one to see the ghost. She was small and wiry, and Jackson understood that in some ways she was braver than him. And it wasn’t a stretch to imagine a ghost wanting to talk to her. She did know things, he thought. She didn’t get good grades, but it wasn’t because she wasn’t smart; she just didn’t care what people thought. She didn’t have any friends, but she knew when things were going to swing good or bad, when to enter a room or when to hang back. She reminded him of a cat, every sense alert, skirting trouble, landing on quick and gentle paws.
“We run,” Randy said. “We do what he does. You start when you press the tape, and if you see or feel anything, you say it. Shout it while you run. That way, we have a record of the time, a record of what you heard, and any noises from the ghost get recorded, too.”
Even as stupid as this Society business sounded, standing on the hill Jackson started to feel the vertigo shift into a manic excitement. Chris had given him some pills and he’d taken one and it was making him feel full of air and also warm toward Randy. They could get Randy into the Society, and what would that mean to his only friend? Everything. More than everything. All those big dreams, and here they were running in the blue light on this nowhere hill. The poignancy of Randy was that he wanted so little.
“If we can get some raw data,” Randy said, “they might get interested. And if they get interested then that’s the go-ahead to start obtaining better equipment. I’d like to get a video camera and of course better sound equipment. But this is it for now.” He stood on the tarp. “So, who wants to go first?” Randy said. He opened one of the packages of cupcakes and took a bite of one.
“Maybe you should show us?” Jackson asked. He really did want to see what Randy wanted, but he felt bad at the same time. Randy wasn’t a runner. He was the perfect director of his own movie.
Randy nodded. “All right,” he said. “But you guys don’t laugh.” He put down the half-eaten cupcake and shrugged out of his trench coat, dropping it on the tarp. He started toward the side of the road.
“Wait,” Lydia said. She fumbled for the tape recorder, ejected the tape, and pressed it back down again. “Here.”
“This is just to show you,” Randy said, but he took the recorder. “You’re going to run as fast as you can up the hill – press play when you start. And if anything happens – if you hear anything – then you should just say it. Shout or something – Ghost!” He grinned. “Or, Now! Anything that indicates that you’ve made contact. Got it?”
Jackson nodded. “Got it.”
“Okay,” Lydia said. “Show us.”
“First,” Randy said, “I think it’s important that we invite him in.”
“Invite him in?” The pill was softening the edges of everything. Jackson felt like he was watching something elaborate and silly. A puppet show. Invite him in. Have him over for a nice dinner.
“Tell him that you’re good, you know. So he feels comfortable. If it’s a he.”
“How do you do that?” Lydia asked.
Randy arranged the tape recorder under his arm. “Just say – like, ‘Okay, here I am. I’m here in peace. I’m here to run with you.’” He cleared his throat and looked straight ahead. “I’m here in peace. I’m here to run with you.” He hunched down. “Ready – oh, shit,” he said. “I forgot.” He walked back to the base. “Okay, before you do it, you’re going to mark the time.” He held down the first two buttons of that old tape recorder and the tape started to turn. Would the Washington Ghost Society accept such archaic equipment? Randy’s face looked a little distorted and Jackson wanted to laugh. Lydia was so serious. She’d tucked her hair behind her ears and she was frowning. She had eyes like their father’s, deep-set, shadowy. Someday soon all those shitty commercials were going to start targeting her, trying to get her to buy shit for her under-eye circles. Jackson wondered a lot about what kind of grown-up she would be. It was hard to imagine her as some kind of femmey cheerleader, but she wasn’t a complete tomboy either, and he was pretty sure she wasn’t queer. She could stand there and be engrossed in Randy’s ghost chase, but she wasn’t the same kind of devoted dork. She seemed unformed, existing before all of that.
“Jackson,” Randy said. “Are you even listening?”
“Sorry.”
Randy held the tape recorder out again. “Okay, so one more time: you push Play and Record at the same time to get it to start recording. Then, you’re going to mark the time.” He pressed the buttons and droned, “Tuesday, September 23, 2009 6:53 PM, Firetrail Hill, Tulalip, Washington.” He stopped the tape. “Got it?”
They nodded. “Okay,” Randy said. “I’ll demonstrate.”
He ran a hundred feet up the hill, his T-shirt fluttering behind him like a flag, the tape recorder under one arm and the other in front of him, like a football player. A car driving down the hill honked and Jackson gave the driver the finger.
Jackson went next. It was chilly but bearable, the lukewarm edge of summer still in the air, and it hadn’t rained in two days. He recited the day and time to the tape and started up the hill. It felt like he was running into a green tunnel, the trees knitting together over
his head. He’d hadn’t run much since his freshman year, but still he didn’t expect to be as winded as he was, sprinting that stretch, the gravel spitting up under his shoes. He forgot to look for the ghost at all, and he supposed that made it a definitive non-sighting.
Jackson passed the tape recorder to Lydia and she wound herself tight, crouching low to the ground. “Time?” she asked, and they told her; she recited the date and time into the recorder and took off like she was built of pistons. She shot up the hill and jogged back down again. “Sorry, Randy,” she said. “Nothing.”
“Jack?” Randy asked. “You want to –”
“I want to go again,” Lydia said. She shrugged out of her sweatshirt and went back to the side of the road. “Time?” She ran again, tirelessly, hardly panting.
“Damn,” Randy said. “She’s fast.”
The light was fading. “Stay off the road!” Jackson called, but she kept going, two hundred feet up, loping back down, crouching on the shoulder.
“If this doesn’t work, it’s not because we didn’t try,” Randy said, sticking his lower lip out and blowing his bangs off his face. “Jesus.”
Jackson stopped paying attention at some point. It was like watching Chris swim; sometimes ten or fifteen minutes would pass with nothing to mark it, just the lap of the water against the sides of the pool, the silver beads of water raining from Chris’s fingertips as they surfaced and dipped. Lydia lighting up the hill, shrinking into the dim light, the trees, pivoting, descending. There weren’t many cars. He was watching the twin paths of headlights starting toward them from below when he heard her scream.
He was running before he realized it. He had been standing on the tarp in the ditch, and now he scrabbled and tripped his way up onto the shoulder, stepping on the bag of chips and exploding it under his boot, pounding up the hill toward her dim form. She had flown from the shoulder and into the overgrown ditch, almost a straight line from where he’d been standing, and the sound of that scream rang in his ears still, loud and ragged – was she hurt? He tripped back down into the ditch; she was on her knees in the long grass with her head in her hands. He leaned over her.