The Lonely Dead

by April Henry

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  For Wendy Schmalz,

  agent and friend over the course of twenty-five years and literally dozens of books

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 4:15 P.M.

  NOT MAKING SENSE

  Would anyone even hear me scream if something bad happened back in this wooded corner of Gabriel Park? Aside from the occasional dog walker, I rarely meet anyone on this path. A couple of months ago I did see a homeless guy crawl out of a dirty tent set up underneath a rhododendron, but I just walked faster and he didn’t make eye contact.

  It’s a bleak fall day, close to sunset. Cutting through the park is the fastest route from the city bus stop to the apartment I share with my grandpa. In Portland, only elementary and middle school kids ride school buses. Once you’re in high school, you have to take TriMet, the city transit system. Even if none of the stops are close to where you live.

  After crossing the small wooden bridge over the stream, I pick up my pace as I enter the trees. My footfalls are muffled by the hard-beaten earth of the twisty path, spotted with puddles from yesterday’s rain.

  This section isn’t like the rest of the park. No grass, no basketball courts, no paved paths, no playground equipment. Just towering evergreens, the way Portland must have looked two hundred years ago. The slanted late-afternoon light reveals a million shades of green and brown. Yellow-green ferns spring from the rust-colored needles blanketing the dark brown earth. The tree trunks are covered with velvety emerald moss, and the gray-green-needled branches of the trees slice the darkening sky.

  It’s hard to believe I’m in the middle of a city. This could be the fairy-tale forest where Little Red Riding Hood met the wolf, or Hansel and Gretel came across the witch’s house. Back here, I’ve seen coyotes slink into the shadows, and once I even spotted a black-tailed deer bounding away into the trees.

  As I round a corner, a girl calls out, “Adele?” Even though I can’t quite place it, her voice is familiar. I stop. I don’t see anyone, but I’m not nervous. I’m afraid of homeless guys, of drunk guys, of guys who might try to drag me into the bushes. Not of some girl who knows my name.

  “Adele?” she calls again.

  A flash of movement on my left. I squint in the gathering darkness. Through a gap in the branches, I see a girl sitting cross-legged under the green skirts of a tree, her back against the trunk. She lifts her hand and wiggles her fingers.

  Tori Rasmussen. And for some reason, she’s pretending she’s not mad at me.

  I start walking again. Whatever Tori wants to say, I don’t want to hear it. Especially not after what happened—what I did—Saturday night. I don’t want to be anywhere near her.

  “No! Don’t leave, Adele,” she calls. “Please! Talk to me.”

  Against my better judgment, I turn back and push my way through the branches. One slaps me wetly in the face. I stop about ten feet from her. As usual, I feel hulking next to Tori, who’s built like a sprite.

  “What.” I don’t phrase it like a question.

  “Adele?” Tori repeats. She looks both surprised and happy. Which doesn’t make sense. The last time I saw her, she was screaming at me to get out of her sight.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” Tori lives a couple of miles from here, up in the West Hills in a house that’s probably bigger than my whole apartment building. Why is she hanging out at the park? She wasn’t even at school today. I know, because I looked, ready to duck out of sight. I couldn’t avoid her friends, though. I saw the looks they shot me, the way they whispered behind their hands and rolled their eyes.

  Tori isn’t dressed like she’s been out running or walking a dog. In fact, she isn’t dressed for the weather at all. Now that I’ve stopped moving, I can feel the chilly November air even through my coat. Tori is wearing a peacock-blue halter dress that sets off her red hair and pale shoulders. Just looking at her bare legs and arms makes me shiver.

  The thing is, I know that dress. It’s the one Tori was wearing Saturday night. Which was nearly forty-eight hours ago. When I left her house, Tori and Luke were still fighting. Maybe they ended up in his car, driving around and arguing, and she eventually got out in a huff. And now she’s hiding out to teach him some kind of lesson.

  But for nearly two days? And how did she get here? Her bare feet are perfectly clean and white, her toes painted the same iridescent sheen as her dress.

  She tilts her head to one side but doesn’t answer my question. “You can hear me.”

  “Yeah,” I say slowly. She’s not making sense. “Are you okay, Tori? Aren’t you cold?”

  Her snub nose crinkles in confusion. “No. I’m not feeling much of anything.”

  So Tori’s drunk. Or on drugs. My breath is hanging in a cloud. If it isn’t freezing now, it will be as soon as the last light leaves.

  “Even though I’m still furious with you, I’m just glad you’re talking to me.” She presses her lips together and shakes her head. “I’ve been calling and calling, and no one hears me.”

  Only then do I see it. A gray rope of mist falls from the back of her head like a braid. The other end disappears into the ground where she’s sitting, a small rise of freshly turned earth surrounded by decades of reddish-brown pine needles.

  On the nape of my neck, the hair rises. Next to Tori’s thigh, a big toe is poking out from the dirt. The toe is grayish, and the nail is painted a familiar blue-green. The prickling spreads down my arms.

  That rise is a grave.

  And that grave? It’s Tori’s.

  She’s dead. But she doesn’t know it.

  MONDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 4:28 P.M.

  JUST A LIE

  No. I blink, rub my eyes, and look again. The grave is still there.

  Only it can’t be. That can’t be a mound of fresh dirt. And Tori can’t be sitting on top of it, talking to me.

  Grandpa warned me this would happen. He said if I ever stopped taking my pills, I would go back to being delusional.

  In my mind, I hear Dr. Duncan’s soothing voice, the kind that invites confessions. The first time we talked, he said, “Adele, have you ever talked to a person no one else can see?” I was so young that I didn’t realize it was a terrible idea to say yes.

  Seeing things that aren’t really there, hearing voices say awful things—the doctors and my grandpa all agree these are signs of my mental illness. I’m schizophrenic, just like my mom and grandma were. Both me and my mom were prescribed antipsychotics. Unlike her, though, I’ve been taking my meds. At least until two weeks ago, when I accidentally missed a pill. The next morning, I woke up feeling so alive. And then I decided to keep skipping them and see what happened.

  The answer is Tori. Tori happened. And the reality is that she’s not dead and I’m not talking to her ghost or spirit or whatever. She’s just a lie that my broken brain is telling me. Just because she wasn’t at school today doesn’t mean she’s dead. My mind’s trying to make me feel bad, conjuring up a dead Tori to pun
ish me for what I did Saturday.

  The talking Tori, the grave I think contains a dead Tori—none of it’s real. I make myself turn away from the hallucination. Make myself stop talking. Tell myself to stop listening. By acting as if all this is real, I’m giving it power.

  “Adele?” Tori says anxiously. “Where are you going?”

  Pain pricks behind my right eye. I have to get home before someone sees me talking to no one. If Grandpa ever finds out …

  With one hand raised to shield my face from branches, I start to push my way back out.

  “Wait!” Her voice turns frantic. “Adele! Please help me. Something’s wrong. I keep trying to leave, but for some reason I can’t.”

  “Shut up. Please. Just shut up.” I pause but don’t turn around. “You’re just in my mind. You’re not real.”

  I’m breaking Dr. Duncan’s rules, the ones I kept until the medication made the hallucinations go away. Don’t interact with them. The more you do, the more you’ll fall into the abyss of your own insanity. Remove yourself from the place where you imagine you see the dead. If you can’t, ignore them.

  “What do you mean I’m not real?” Tori forces a laugh. “I’m right here. Adele. Please.” Her voice breaks. “Please, please, please. I know I haven’t been that nice to you lately, but—”

  Forgetting the rules, I whirl around and cut her off. “What do you mean you haven’t been that nice to me lately? You haven’t been nice to me for years!”

  Our friendship began the first day of kindergarten, when we were seated next to each other. When you’re little, you can become best friends just because you both like Oreos and SpongeBob.

  Back then, it didn’t matter that my clothes came from thrift stores and hers from Nordstrom. It didn’t matter that with my dad in college, my mom paid for groceries with food stamps while her mom had a housekeeper who did the shopping. For her sixth birthday, I gave her a SpongeBob squirt gun I had gotten from a cereal box, and she said she liked it more than all the expensive toys she received.

  But as we got older, we began to pull apart. First there were my secrets, which I learned never to share. And as Tori got older, she got busier. Her parents enrolled her in a million after-school activities, like gymnastics and horseback riding. Things there was no sense in even asking my parents about.

  At least back then I still had parents.

  Then in second grade, my dad got what he thought was the flu but was really meningitis. That morning he’d been laughing as he gave me a piggyback ride to the bus stop. That night, feverish and nauseated, he went to bed early in the guest room, complaining about a pounding head and stiff neck. When my mom tried to wake him the next morning, she found him cold. I woke to her screams. She was never the same. Two years later, she was killed in a car accident and I had to move in with my grandpa. When he discovered I thought I could talk to dead people, he hustled me off to a psychiatrist. The pills Dr. Duncan prescribed took away my hallucinations but left me slow and anxious, unable to concentrate. Not exactly top-shelf friend material.

  When we started middle school, Tori made new friends. She became one of the popular people, and I became the kind of girl no one much notices. Now it’s like we were never close.

  “You have to admit that you were always a little weird, and you’ve only gotten weirder.” Tori quirks one auburn eyebrow. “Remember how you tried to convince me there was an invisible bird in my basement? You’d even hold out your finger and claim it was landing on it.” She rolls her blue eyes. Here in the shadows, I shouldn’t be able to see her so clearly. My imagination must be coloring in this hallucination more vibrantly than real life.

  Just like it did the parakeet in her basement. It had a sky-blue chest and back, with a white-and-black-striped head and wings. It could flutter four or five feet in any direction, but the thin tether of mist that ran from the back of its head to the concrete floor prevented it from going too far. A few weeks ago in Western Art, we saw a photo of The Goldfinch, a famous painting of a bird chained by its foot to a bird feeder. I gasped. Tori looked over, and I knew she remembered too.

  Back then, when I told my mom about the parakeet, she said it must have been buried under the concrete basement floor. And she warned me to stop talking about it, even to Tori. But later Dr. Duncan told me that all the dead and buried things I’ve seen acting like they’re alive—dogs and cats, parakeets, and occasionally people—are all in my head.

  But sometimes I wonder. If I had somehow dug down through the basement’s concrete floor, would I have discovered a handful of tiny bones? So light you could hold them in your palm and not even tell they were there?

  Seeing that painting in art class must be why I’m imagining Tori talking about the bird now.

  “Okay,” she says. “You think you’re imagining me.”

  I nod. “I know that.”

  “You think you’re mentally ill.”

  “I stopped taking my meds.” I rub the spot on my temple that feels like it’s being impaled.

  “What meds?”

  I don’t answer her. Tori should know what I’m talking about, since she’s really me, or at least a splinter of me. I don’t like the way the drugs bleed the color from everything. How they make me feel dizzy and drowsy and sick to my stomach. I’m seventeen years old. Don’t I get to feel alive?

  “And for some reason, now you think I’m dead,” she continues. “Which is really crazy.”

  Great. Even my hallucinations are calling me insane.

  “You’re not real.” I close my eyes, put my hands over my ears. But I can still hear her.

  “Of course I’m real, Adele. And I’m definitely not dead.”

  The thing is, even though I know the Tori I’m talking to isn’t real, what about the grave she’s perched on?

  I open my eyes and drop my hands from my ears. For a moment, I decide to act like it’s all real, the living girl and the dead one. It’s the logic you use in dreams. Like when you suddenly find yourself flying with just your arms, or you can swim underwater without needing to breathe. You just go with it and see where it takes you.

  Maybe I could even be dreaming now. The thought fills me with relief.

  “Look down,” I tell Tori. “I’m pretty sure that’s your own self you’re sitting on. Check that out.” I point at the object sticking up out of the dirt. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a toe,” she says slowly, looking back and forth from her own toes to the one emerging from the ground. The nail polish is the same shade.

  “Right. Your toe. Just like up here someplace is your head.” I move to the other end of the mound and begin to scoop and scrape where the tether of mist disappears. Tori gets to her feet and watches, her hand over her mouth. The jumble of needles and earth is fresh. Someone has tried to tamp it down, but it’s still loose, easy to move. In only a few seconds, we both see it: the face of the dead Tori.

  Her flesh is waxy and pale. Her eyes aren’t completely closed. A rim of bloodshot white shows at the bottom. Dirt rests between her lips, like that time I got her to take a bite of a mud pie by double-dog daring her.

  Tori looks down at her dead self and begins to scream.

  TWELVE YEARS EARLIER

  IF THE DEAD ARE ALWAYS ALIVE

  I was five when I first learned I could see the dead. Even smell and touch and talk to them.

  My mom had brought me to her friend Pam’s house. She and Pam settled around the kitchen table with cups of coffee and shooed me out to play in the bright June sunshine. Not that there was anything or anyone to play with in the fenced backyard.

  I was drawing in the dirt with a stick—I was just learning how to spell my name—when I spotted the black dog. He was asleep between two rosebushes in the far corner of the yard, his nose resting on his paws.

  When I walked up to him, he raised his head. His muzzle was white, as was the fur around his rheumy eyes. But when he saw me looking at him, his tail started to thump.

  “Good dog.” I h
eld out my free hand, making a fist the way my mom had taught me. He sniffed, then licked the top of my hand with his warm pink tongue. When I scratched behind his ears, he sighed in pleasure.

  He smelled like wet fur and stale dog food, but I didn’t mind. Because this was a dog, and he wanted to be my friend! Our apartment didn’t allow pets. But just for this moment, I could pretend he belonged to me.

  I raised the stick in my hand. He whined, low in his chest, then slowly pushed himself to his feet.

  Turning, I threw it as far as I could. Which was only about six feet. But the dog didn’t move.

  I pointed. “Go get it, boy!”

  Even though he whimpered, he stayed where he was.

  Maybe he needed more of a challenge. I walked over to the stick, picked it up, and shook it. He let out a little woof. I threw it again. It was now about fifteen feet from him.

  This time, the dog gathered himself and started to move toward it. But before he reached it, he stopped with a jerk. A silver-gray rope ran from the base of his skull to the ground, tethering him. It looked filmy, like it was made of fog. He pulled, but it didn’t give. With a tired huff, he slowly moved back to his original spot and lay down.

  Behind me, my mom called my name through the screen door.

  I didn’t move. “Can’t we stay a little longer?”

  “Honey, we don’t have time. Sorry.”

  I squeezed the dog around the neck. His fur was rough against my cheek. I whispered goodbye before I ran inside.

  “They have a doggy, Momma.” I hopped up and down in the kitchen with excitement. “He let me pet him, but he’s tied up, so he can’t play fetch with me.”

  Pam’s eyes went wide. “We used to have a dog. But he died two years ago.”

  “He’s not dead.” I pointed out the window. The dog raised his head from his paws. “He’s right there.” He let out a yip. “Can’t you hear him?”

  “That’s where we buried Oliver.” Pam’s gaze went from me to the window. She took one step back and then another. Her hands came up as if to keep me away. “How does she know that?”