Chapter 26 Ghosts
Ghosts
Josha
My dreams are sultry, subaquatic things, all tropical blue and tangled limbs. I twist in slow currents, relearning to breathe beside owls and octopuses. The water only burns on the first inhale, and I’ve forgotten how to fear.
Far above me, pale legs dangle, grown from fiberglass underbellies. They bump and fumble with mesmerizing grace, so sturdily unlike the boneless tentacles around me.
I want to touch them.
My hand reaches, and as it flattens against the pale surface, I marvel at the dark letters wound around my fingers in a language I don’t understand.
Have those always been there? The owl can tell me. But when I turn to call the question, only darkness waits below. Black water is wrong for breathing, so I roll to pitch my face to the sky and find myself alone.
Remember how to be afraid.
The cradle-sea turns arctic, and the aurora paints a neon apology across the sky. I drift, limbs numb and increasingly clumsy, until the saltwater ache in my throat becomes chips of ice, pricking at tender flesh, and I gasp awake.
Zombie is a warm weight on my chest, vibrating with his musical purr and kneading my neck with relentless affection.
“Ouch, you little menace,” I murmur, catching his paws to stop the torture while reality swims slowly to the surface. “Go bother your real dad.” But even as the words leave my mouth, a new chill frosts through me.
Although I can count the number of times we’ve slept in the same bed on my fingers, Gem and I have spent dozens of nights sharing a room. And not once in seven years, given the option, has our shared-custody cat chosen me as his preferred cuddle partner. Which means…
I turn my head, already knowing what I’ll find.
No Gem. Only rumpled sheets and a cold pillow.
Telling myself not to panic is pointless, but I try anyway, clutching at all the mundane reasons for him to be gone from the bed. As if I don’t know the feel of waking up to this empty trailer.
My heart pounds as I sit up, dislodging Zombie.
A few chewed, soggy bits of paper cling to my chest, and I brush them off with a grimace.
Lovely. I guess it’s better than the dead mole he left on my pillow last week or the half-eaten chipmunk I found with my bare foot under the covers that one time.
The little beast leaps from the bed with a hiss, affronted by my rejection of both affection and his offering, while I strain my ears for any sign of life—running water in the bathroom, a banging cupboard in the kitchen, the burble of the coffee maker.
The answering silence is horribly eloquent, and I curl around the sudden stab of nausea in my gut.
Don’tfreakoutdon’tfreakoutdon’tfreakout.
A quick scan of the room shows his saddlebags and backpack resting in the corner, and I suck in the first full breath since finding myself alone. His phone is missing from the nightstand, so I check mine for a missed call or text.
Nothing.
It’s only eight o’clock, though, and he’s never been an early riser.
Maybe he fell asleep doomscrolling on the couch?
Maybe he moved to one of the other beds?
I try not to let the latter cut too deep, reminding myself of how he wrapped himself around me last night with his lips pressed to the back of my neck and his fingers carding idly through my hair.
It hadn’t felt like goodbye. And he promised not to run again without warning.
Get up and look. You’re not going to find him by sitting here spiraling.
Ignoring the tremor in my hands, I slip from the bed and pull on a pair of sweatpants from the floor.
They’re mine, but they’re the ones he wore yesterday during Cheyenne’s explosive visit, and they smell like him.
And sex. Shoving down the images trying to force their way to the surface, I do a quick sweep of the trailer.
By the time I confirm he’s nowhere to be found, all I can smell is my own rising panic.
My truck is gone.
His bike is still in my shed.
I don’t know what it means.
Belatedly, I backtrack to the bedroom and grab my phone. His call from the other night is in my recents, so I stab it with my thumb, only to stare out the window, unseeing, while an electronic voice informs me that the mailbox is full. Navigating to the contact, I pull up our text thread.
The last message is from two years ago, barely a week after he disappeared, and it sucks all the air from my lungs.
Gem:
Je suis désolé
I’m sorry.
I’d almost blocked him when he sent it.
By then, Shilo and Hals had tracked me down at Penny’s and dragged me back to the Big Top lot in Calistoga.
They’d been talking about canceling the rest of the tour.
My dad was still three weeks away from wrapping his car around a tree less than five hundred yards from our driveway, and I hadn’t left the bunk in the Airstream for anything other than the bathroom in days.
I also hadn’t yet found my way to the bottom of a bottle, but I’d been teetering on the edge, desperate to escape the flood of guilt and shame besieging me.
Because I’d known it was a bad idea. I’d known he was wasted and in a dark place. I’d been so, so selfish to think “maybe” and “finally” and “fuck it, I just want to know what it’s like,” and his family was paying the price all around me.
And then he sent the text out of nowhere, only to me, and the relief nearly strangled me before the fury that followed.
I didn’t want to forgive him. To excise the part of me that blamed myself, I needed him to stay the villain.
And I hated—absolutely despised—that in spite of the rage and the relief and the misery, I couldn’t completely cut him loose.
He was metastasized into my bones, and there was no cure that wouldn’t kill me.
So I didn’t block him.
Instead, I changed his contact name to “Asshole” and sent a single, two-word reply:
Josha:
Fuck you
The old words swim in my vision as my limbs come back online in staticky bursts. It takes me three tries to decide what to type.
Fuck you.
You promised.
In the end, I settle for “Where are you?” and hit send with a numb finger before hurling the phone against the wall.
It’s too early for him to be at a bar, and the liquor store doesn’t open until ten, but Mendoza’s and Safeway will already be selling alcohol.
Scrambling to my feet, I head back to the kitchen.
I check the fridge first, finding the last two bottles of the microbrew I stash in the crisper and dumping them down the sink.
Next, I open the cupboard above the fridge and start emptying its contents.
A decades-old bottle of dry vermouth that somehow escaped the memorial purge; the Shiraz I sometimes use for cooking, half turned to vinegar; the tail end of the Christmas bourbon.
My eyes burn, and the whole room reeks like a dive bar by the time my hand finds the Grey Goose Hannah’s husband brought over for a martini night that never happened. It’s unopened, because even Rachael won’t touch vodka unless it’s the only thing on offer. None of us will.
Except sometimes when I do.
When I’m feeling truly masochistic, and the only way out is through the subterranean tunnels I keep boarded up most of the time.
Even over the fumes wafting from the sink, the smell hits me as soon as I unscrew the cap—syrupy-sweet and sticky with demented nostalgia.
The specters of my childhood crowd the kitchen and haunt the hallways, drawn to orbit my demise.
Not for the first time, I wonder why I didn’t tear the whole place down the minute it was only mine.
I could have thrown up a yurt, or one of those tiny houses that come in a kit, and had plenty of room for myself and Zombie during the off-season.
Even in winter, I spend more time at the tent than here.
But Gem climbed through the back window and cried beneath this roof.
We danced in the living room and played Monopoly and Hearts and Cards Against Humanity with my siblings at the table behind me.
There’s a dent in the hall, made by his shoulder from the first time we dropped acid, and a mark behind my old bedroom door, where we let ten-year-old Jeremy carve our heights into the frame.
How can he be everywhere and gone at the same time?
The first swig goes down caustic, burning with irony.
The second one tastes like revenge.
I take the bottle to the porch and sit down on the steps to wait.
By the time my truck rolls up the driveway, I’m halfway to drunk and all the way out of my mind.
His old surfboard sits loose in the cargo bed, propped sacrilegiously on the tailgate—the fucker never could be bothered to properly strap it down. He climbs from the cab still in his wetsuit, the black neoprene unzipped to the waist and hanging from his painted hips.
A grin lights his face when he sees me, all popcorn and power drills and staggeringly boyish—the captured moment when mischief spills over into delight. The morning sun slants hazily through the trees, catching along his sharp cheekbones and glimmering in the salt-dried velvet of his hair.
My selkie.
In the wake of too many conflicting emotions, his beauty is a lethal thing, detonating the tectonic layers of my fear until the fragments coat my skin. I’m rendered raw and reeling, and from the haze of vodka and betrayal, three thoughts emerge with startling clarity:
He came back.
I’m going to fuck him in that wetsuit.
We’re not going to make it to the bedroom this time.