In the Echo of this Ghost Town

by CL Walters

  “Yeah. It shook me too. He’s all I’ve got.”

  I can’t help but look at her then. I search her face. This close in this light I can see she’s got a beauty mark just under her left eye. Her eyes have these deep blue striations and a splash of green in the left one. I’m drawn to the pretty pink sheen of her lips. They’re not smiling at me but downturned just a touch. Kissable. I can feel her eyes measuring me, too, and it feels a little reminiscent of that day in August, when she kissed me. Hope offers a tentative pulse inside of me. Could she still want to kiss me?

  “You have me,” I tell her.

  She looks away, turns so she’s sitting on the edge of the bed, and examines her fingers. Her nails are painted blue to match her dress. “I’m glad.”

  I realize even if she is still interested in me, she’d never be the one to cross the line of friendship. Not after what happened in August. I rejected her. Fear coils up like a snake inside of me, tight around the terror of ruining our friendship. Knowing me, that is exactly what I would do. I’ve left a trail of ruined friendships.

  She stands, moves away. “So, this is SK’s room.” She glances over her shoulder at me with a fun smile. Dimple.

  My belly responds, flopping about. I want to touch her, draw her back to the bed, kiss that dimple.

  She moves about the small room with her hands clasped behind her back. “This doesn’t look like a serial killer’s room.” Her voice is low when she says it, like she’s imparting a secret.

  “That’s because it isn’t.” I lean back on my hands to watch her move. “What does a serial killer’s bedroom look like?”

  Her upper lip quirks with one of those sassy smiles. “Oh. Full of all the news clippings of all their nefarious activities.” Her eyes sparkle as she says it.

  “Nefarious? Speak English.” I purposefully goad her.

  “I am. Sinister. Come on, SK.” She resumes looking around. “But there isn’t much here. I mean, it doesn’t really reflect you. Where are your posters? Trophies? Pictures of friends?”

  I sit back up and glance around. She’s right. There isn’t much of me in this room. “I took down the one poster I had.”

  “Oh.” Her eyes light up. “I bet I can guess what it was.”

  I raise my eyebrows to invite her to guess.

  She returns to the bed and sits next to me. “A picture of a hot girl in a bikini.”

  I smile. “Close.”

  “And a car.”

  This makes me laugh. “Closer.” I wish we were sitting closer.

  She smiles. “Why did you take it down?”

  I look around at the room, which suddenly feels like a stranger’s space; I don’t know who this person is, and there’s nothing here to tell me. It’s empty. “It just didn’t feel right anymore.”

  She hums a response. I don’t know what it means. It doesn’t sound judgmental.

  “Would you like me to take your sweater?” I ask her.

  “Sure.” She gets up.

  I stand, stepping up behind her—closer—to help her.

  She turns her head slightly, and I notice the way her lashes fan over her cheeks.

  My fingertips graze the bare skin of her shoulder.

  She stalls, and her eyes flash to mine.

  I freeze.

  Someone laughs in the other room.

  She shivers, looks away, says something about keeping the sweater, and shrugs it back on.

  I don’t catch all of what she’s said more cognizant of the fire burning from my fingertips straight to my center. “Max.” I don’t know why I say her name. I just need to. I can’t find my balance without saying it. I don’t reach out and touch her. I don’t move. I’m in suspended animation.

  She draws her hair from under the collar and turns to face me. “Yeah?” Then her eyes flick up to mine, and I know she can see all the feelings my features are telling her. While I may have been able to hide them from everyone else, I’ve never been very good at hiding them when it comes to her. She saw them the very first time she met me when she sat down at the table. She hadn’t even known my name.

  She steps closer.

  When she takes a breath, I can feel the shift in my shirt, whispering a caress across my skin.

  She tilts her head slightly to meet my gaze. “Griffin?”

  Griffin.

  Not SK.

  Griffin.

  My heart is in my throat, filling it with its mass rather than words because I don’t know what the words are. I just know there are flashes of lightning electrifying me. I notice her breathing—it’s erratic, faster than a moment ago. These tiny observations make me think that maybe she wants me to kiss her. That whatever happened last August is still between us, that all the tension I felt at her dorm wasn’t just me.

  I’m afraid.

  “Me too,” she says.

  “I said that out loud?”

  She offers a tentative smile, nods, then leans toward me as if to tell me she’s willing to meet me halfway.

  I reach out and pinch a strand of her hair between my fingers, afraid to touch her, but she tilts her head so that her cheek presses against my hand holding the strand of silky hair. I release it and lay my open palm against her cheek.

  “I want to kiss you,” I say, but the words barely make a sound.

  “Hey!”

  I straighten, and Max whirls around at the sound of Phoenix’s voice.

  Standing in the doorway, his eyes darting between us, Phoenix smiles a toothy grin, which makes me want to punch his face. “Dinner,” he says.

  “Okay.” I offer him a frustrated look.

  He winks at me before he disappears, and I grind my teeth together.

  Max, who is suddenly intent on looking at the stuff on top of my dresser, has her back to me.

  “Ready?” I ask.

  She turns, her cheeks pink with a blush, and nods. “Starving.”

  I wonder if she’s talking about the meal. The thought excites me that she isn’t.

  4

  Thanksgiving, or rather that moment right before dinner in my room, has replayed in my mind like a fevered dream. I imagine the moment as it was. Then I rewrite it to include a kiss. I imagine more that includes hands and other body parts. I’m feverish with it, ill at ease with wondering if the moment was all my imagination and hoping it wasn’t. Dinner went better than I suspected and included a prayer said by Phoenix (which surprised me but shouldn’t have considering his Twelve Steps), delicious food, and easy conversation. My concentration on said conversation was shit, however. I couldn’t tear my focus away from Max.

  When I open the door the following morning for a run, it’s cloudy, cold, and muted with coming snow. I layer on an extra sweatshirt and find solace in the heartbeat of my feet against the pavement. I’m not cognizant of my direction until I’m almost to Custer’s store, the same one where I met Max for the first time. I stop in the parking lot, hands on my head, clouds of steam making me the dragon I feel like most of the time. I stare at the table where she sat down with me, asked me if I was a serial killer, then walked away with a smile. More than the fight with Tanner, more than Danny’s real talk, more than Mom’s appeal to me to change, it was that moment that stands out as the moment an after began. Max. Brazen and brave, sitting with a jerk drinking water and sullenly pouting away his life.

  I turn around and run back home.

  When I get there, Phoenix is up and drinking his coffee. He looks up from the cookbook he’s reading at the table when I walk in. “How was it today?”

  “Cold. You should join me.” I flop on the floor near him to stretch.

  “Hell no.” He takes a loud sip of his coffee. “There’s a fresh pot.”

  “Thanks. I need a shower first. Mom still here?”

  “Left for the hospital while you were out. She’s got a date with Bill later.”

  “Bill.”

  He chuckles. “Okay. So, I don’t hate the guy, but he’s not what I would have expected.”
/>
  “Which would be?”

  He shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe someone more like dad.”

  “That guy is the furthest thing from our father.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “And maybe that’s why she likes him. Our dad didn’t offer much beyond us.”

  “And look at us.”

  Ouch, I think, but realize he isn’t wrong.

  Phoenix takes another sip. “I’m thinking about meeting him.”

  After hearing they’ve been talking, I expected this, though the idea pisses me off. I also recognize it isn’t my place to be pissed off at what Phoenix wants to do. “Twelve Steps?” I ask instead of allowing the anger.

  He nods. “Sort of. It wasn’t like I wronged him.”

  “The other way around.”

  “But–” he ignores me– “maybe an origin for all of my shit.”

  I notice he doesn’t say “hurt” and wonder about it. We sit in our own thoughts for a while. I’m contemplating the idea of hurt and why it makes me feel like I’m backed into a corner. The thoughts are like a vat of acid eating through my skin and settling into my bones.

  “What if it doesn’t help? Like what if the truth just hurts worse?” I worry that coming face-to-face with the man who’s been the villain in my ghost town dreams might propel Phoenix into a ditch he’s already been stuck in and is trying to climb from.

  Phoenix makes a noise in his nose and sets his coffee cup on the table with a thud. “I’ve thought about it, and I think that’s giving him more power over me than he deserves. Like that prayer we recite at the meetings, ‘to accept the things I cannot change, to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’” He pauses. “I think that I can see Dad as he is now—just a guy who’s as fucked up as any of the rest of us.”

  I stand.

  “And, meeting him wouldn’t be for him. It would be for me,” he adds.

  The thought lodges in my chest. I hadn’t thought of it like that before. In my mind, my father, my memories of him, of the man I see through my eight-year-old eyes, has held all the power. Phoenix’s words swivel the image in my mind, change my perspective to see that perhaps I’m giving him all my power. I wonder what else I’ve allowed to take my power.

  “He invited us to his place for Christmas Eve.” My brother waits for me to say something, and when I don’t offer a “fuck that” must consider it a win because he adds, “Would you go with me?”

  I just look at him unsure how I feel about it. The way he’s asked isn’t about capitulating to my dad, but instead being there for my brother. Isn’t that what I have wanted all these years? “I’ll think about it,” I answer.

  He nods, accepting of that outcome. Then he grins. “So. The girl. Max,” Phoenix says into a book.

  I have to catch my balance against the wall.

  He chuckles. “You’ve got it bad.” He looks up from the book. “She’s cute. Nice.”

  I don’t know why his observations, that he can see through me, makes me want to pound his face in. I growl at him again.

  He laughs into his coffee cup.

  I leave him there to shower, thinking about the possibilities of being around my dad for Christmas. An inner battle between anger and curiosity tug on my insides. When I’m done washing away the run, I dress. My phone alerts me I have a message. With a swipe on the cracked screen, I see it’s a notification from Max and can’t keep from smiling.

  Max: When are you coming to get me?

  She sent the message almost an hour ago, while I was on my run.

  I answer her: Now.

  I send it, hoping I’m not too late, but when the bubble appears on the screen and she writes, dress warm, the joy expands in my chest.

  When I park in front of her house, and before I can turn off the car, Max walks down the steps. She’s dressed in a bright, green, bubbly jacket, a hat and mittens, scarf, carting a backpack and a cooler.

  I climb out. “What is all that?”

  “Surprise. Just open the hatch.”

  I comply, and she sets the stuff in the back.

  Then she turns toward me. “That doesn’t look very warm?” She nods at my hoodie.

  “I brought a jacket.”

  With a nod, she gets into the passenger’s seat like it’s hers, and maybe it is. She’s the only one, besides Phoenix, who’s ever ridden in it.

  With my hands on the steering wheel, I wait. “Where am I driving?”

  “The Bend.”

  I turn and look at her. “What? It’s freezing. And it’s supposed to snow later.”

  “Scared?” Her eyebrows arch up over her eyes with a challenge.

  “You know you can’t dare me like that. I’ll bite every time.”

  She smiles and looks straight ahead. “Let’s go then.”

  By the time we pull into the parking lot at the visitor center, it’s deserted, and there aren’t any tickets to buy since it’s winter.

  Wrapped in our jackets, hats, and gloves, Max carries the backpack and I lug the cooler. When we reach the switchback, the town looks like it did the last time, only in the cold of November, it appears more desolate than even in August, except more peaceful perhaps in the frozen world.

  When we get to the edge of the town, intermittent snowflakes are falling.

  “What made you think of this?” I ask her as we walk the main street. I know without question that we’re headed to the barn.

  “I woke up thinking about it.”

  “What about it?”

  She shrugs and keeps walking. “Let’s see if anything has been moved by the ghosts.” She grins.

  We stop and peer into the same house, then we stop to stare into the saloon once more. They all look the same. “Still frozen in time,” I say. With my hand cupped around my eyes and pressed to the glass, I look for something that’s different.

  “Like us? Right now?” She’s looking at me.

  I map her features and nod.

  “Did you expect it to be different?” she asks.

  I draw away from the glass and see my reflection. The truth is I’m different than the last time I was here. “Yeah. No. I mean, I knew it wouldn’t, but it feels like it should look different.” Because I feel different. I look at her. It’s started snowing more consistently now, flakes collecting on her hat and her eyelashes, melting on her cheeks. The acoustics mute my words and makes everything silent.

  “I get it.” Her eyes rove over my face a moment. Then she nods before turning away and continuing down the street toward the barn.

  When we get there, the stillness of the space is insulated and warm. She draws a gray wool blanket from the backpack. “Here.”

  “What’s happening?” I ask.

  “A picnic.”

  “In November.”

  The shape of her look tells me I’m an idiot, which I know to be true, but then she smiles. “What did you think?”

  “You probably don’t want to know.”

  She stops moving a moment, just a fraction of a second, keeping her body busy. “Put the cooler here.”

  I follow her directions and sit down on the edge of the blanket.

  The darkness of the barn is punctuated at both ends by light. It makes it easy to see, and the hushed snow fall illuminates things in a way that makes it feel like we’re isolated in our own private, frozen universe. I turn to watch her. It’s preferable but also strange to study her with this newfound awareness and longing twisted up inside me. Like that opening at the other end of the barn, my inability to function as her emotional equal is glaring and burns brightly in my mind.

  When she’s set out all the food—sandwiches and chips, sliced carrots and celery, oranges, apple cider in a bottle and cups—she holds out her arms and says, “Ta da.”

  “Wow. You put my sandwiches last time to shame.”

  She grins. “But those were some incredible PB&J sandwiches. Best I ever had.”

  “Liar.”

  “Never,” sh
e says with a bright smile.

  I feel that smile weighted in my chest and find it difficult to get my lungs to work right. My mind slips back to the confines of my room with her silky hair between my fingers. I focus on the cups.

  “I woke up thinking about this place because I woke up thinking about your name.” She adjusts herself on the blanket, the food between us. “This is where you told me about it.”

  I look up at her.

  “I mean, to answer why here,” she says; the question on my face must have been obvious. She shakes her head and unzips her jacket, removing it. “Last time we were here, you told me your name meant ‘monster.’” She sets her puffy jacket aside, her mittens threatening to spill from the pockets. The rainbow yarn cap and matching scarf stay on, draped over her dark green sweater.

  “Yeah. That’s a weird thing to think about and not particularly confidence building for me.”

  She laughs. “I looked it up.”

  “You did?”

  She blushes, and it reminds me of last night.

  The want to kiss her bounces around in my head, but I stay where I am.

  “You know it doesn’t just mean monster, right?”

  I shake my head. I’m trying to focus on her words. Monster shmonster. Whatever. I’m looking at her lips.

  “Did you know that a griffin was considered a majestic creature in mythology? That really, in most articles, the griffin wasn’t really a monster at all, but a powerful guardian of priceless treasures?”

  I quirk my eyebrows. “Really?” I didn’t know this, more attuned to the monster myth. “A guardian of treasures, you say?” The thought makes me think about her and how I am ill-equipped to guard priceless treasures. Break them is more my MO, but I swivel the perspective. What if I made choices that reflected a guardian instead?

  She nods and hands me a cup of cider. “Yep.”

  I take it, take a sip, and set it near me. “That’s definitely better than a monster.” I pick up a sandwich and flip the wax-papered meal over in my hands. “And that’s what made you think about coming out here?”

  Her hands, I realize have been moving the whole time. She’s nervous, and I’ve never really thought of her as nervous—ever. She puts them in her lap, takes a deep breath. Then she looks at me, and that look on her face is the one I think of when I imagine Max. It’s calm and serene. Honest and forthright. Brave. “I thought about how I wished I’d told you about what I’d been really thinking last time. A do over.”