Chapter 7
By the time I get back to the house, I’ve convinced myself that I should confess to my parents that I have become completely unhinged, that I am having full-blown multisensory hallucinations and have lost touch with reality.
But then I cross paths with the delivery guy from Pontillo’s Pizza getting into his Civic, and suddenly everything feels so …
normal. I had forgotten it was Wednesday, which in our house means Pizza Day.
At last, something not shitty is happening.
I decide to go with it, as I am a firm believer that cheese cures most things.
I make a quick stop in the bathroom to wash my hands and get rid of any tear streaks on my face and then slip into my seat in the kitchen.
My dad is already at the table, waiting for buffalo wings.
Mom is bustling around the island with the to-go containers.
She’s busy and energetic all of a sudden. She clearly has an agenda.
“Nate and I have decided to watch that new superhero movie—I think it’s the Avengers team up with Batman?” she says, utterly failing at seeming spontaneous. “Why don’t you keep your dad company in here, Hatts?”
Before I can respond, Nate appears in the doorway, remote still in hand. “Mom!” he says, outraged. “How many times have I told you that you can’t mix the Marvel and DC universes?”
“I don’t know, I just can’t keep them straight,” she says, putting the plate of pizza, wings, and blue cheese next to my dad’s left hand.
“Wings at nine o’clock, babe, pizza at three.
” The clock system is how we let Dad know where the location of each food item is.
I’ve always relished its efficiency. “Now I’ve got to go watch Batman fight Iron Man or whatever.
” She laughs as my brother puts his hands over his ears like he’s hearing a deafening screech, and the two of them disappear into the den.
My brother makes my mom endlessly happy, with his simple needs and perfect vision.
It’s going to be all giggles and rainbows in the den, but the mood in the kitchen is severe.
I take a deep breath. We are clearly supposed to have “a talk,” though I’m not sure if Dad is in on the planning of this or not.
We each eat a whole pepperoni slice in silence, as if we’re hoping the grease will provide wisdom.
Just get it over with. “So I guess you heard,” I say.
“Yes,” he gets out, licking oil off his fingers and then wiping his hands on a paper towel. Now he’s ready, I guess. “I’m sorry, Hattie. It wasn’t a surprise to me, though. Since you were a little girl, we suspected something was wrong. You couldn’t see the stars.”
The basic truth of this sentence almost knocks me off my chair.
He’s right, of course. I’m flooded with my earliest memories of hearing nursery rhymes all about “star light, star bright” and flipping through picture books filled with sparkling illustrations of star-studded skies and wondering where those wonderful skies were.
Because when I looked up into the dark, even on our rural property untouched by light pollution, all I could make out was the moon.
At some point, I decided that the notion of stars in the sky was as made up as unicorns or the Tooth Fairy.
And even though by now I knew that stars were technically real, I hadn’t ever revised that comforting default belief in my mind.
“Did Mom know, too?” I ask.
“Well, you know I can’t speak for your mother. But I will tell you that I have a theory.”
“Uh-huh.” The word theory already has me inwardly groaning.
“I’ve thought a lot about this, Hattie, and I’ve found this helpful. I hope it might help you, too.”
“Uh-huh.”
He’s leaning forward, and I can tell he wants to make an impact on me.
But his gaze is missing the mark; he’s looking about two feet to the right of where I’m actually sitting.
I’m used to that—he’s guessing based on the location of my voice—but for the first time it sinks in that I’m going to do the exact same thing someday.
And all my friends will feel sorry for me as I look at empty air instead of at them.
“You and I are exemplary in a lot of ways. We are imbued with gifts.” My dad always talks like this. Not special—exemplary. Not filled—imbued. It’s like living with a Scrabble board.
“Okay.”
“So our diagnosis is here to keep us humble and human. It’s a blessing from God.”
I’m thrown. My family is a model Catholic family, so we never talk about God or spirituality at home. That is saved for Sundays, at church. Talking about God at home feels about as appropriate as talking about your period during English class.
“I don’t know, Dad. Feels like the opposite of a blessing from God to me.” Not that I’m even sure I believe in God, but I’m not going to say that to my dad. This conversation is uncomfortable enough.
“The good news is you are doing much better than I was at your age.” Then he launches into a story I’ve heard before that he always relishes, how he used to play baseball with his friends on summer nights at the park, how he couldn’t see the ball when it was pitched, so he would just swing at every pitch and would still get a hit every so often, and one time he got a grand slam.
I think he thinks the story highlights how athletic he was, but it makes me sad.
When he’s done, I clear the plates and excuse myself. He doesn’t protest, so I guess our big talk with all his great insight is over. He’s not surprised I have RP? Well, I’m not surprised he can’t make me feel better. So there.
In my room, safe from fake silver linings, I scroll through music to find just the right thing. Something that knows how stupid life is and how clueless people are. Billie Eilish. Overplayed, but in this sitch, perfect.
I dim the lights, make a nest out of pillows, and snuggle down. But instead of thinking about my depleted future and the canceled dreams that will go with RP, all I can think about is Mason. What really happened at the creek today, anyway?
I try to be analytical about it. It seems to me there are only three possible explanations.
The loudest one reverberating around my skull is that I have made contact with a legitimate ghost, that somehow Mason’s spirit is not yet at rest and is instead wandering our town, eerie but seemingly harmless.
That I can’t see what most people see, but instead I can see ghosts, or at least this ghost.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I can actually eliminate the second explanation.
I had been considering the possibility that he wasn’t actually dead, that he staged his own death so that he could run away and now he is trying to suss out if I am a safe ally while officially still keeping his undeadness a secret.
But that wouldn’t explain that weird inner glow, or how he could disappear and reappear somewhere else.
He was on the cross-country team, and he was fast, but he wasn’t that fast.
The last possibility is one that I really don’t want to consider but is definitely the most likely.
And that is that I am messed up in the head.
That I’m spinning out over my friend dying or my eyesight or both and it’s causing me to hallucinate.
Maybe I’ve always been mentally unwell, and the grief just woke it up.
I don’t feel crazy, but isn’t that exactly what crazy people say?
“Hey,” Mason’s voice says in the dark. “Is this okay? I know I was a lot before.”
I take that back. At this exact moment, I feel completely batshit crazy. Because right now, I am filled with relief that I get to make up with a ghost. I am so glad he’s here.
“Hey, yeah,” I say.
“Good. Billie Eilish? Jesus. Why don’t you just put on Rick Astley while you’re at it?” Mason took (takes?) his music very seriously, to the point that he was sort of a music snob. If more than three people on earth had heard of a band, that was too mainstream for him.
I turn the music down and the lights up a bit so I can focus on him in the corner of my room. He’s perched on top of my desk with his feet on my desk chair. It’s maddening how he manages to look extra attractive when he’s giving me a hard time.
“You showed up to mock me?”
“Never.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Why are you asking so many questions?”
“I’m sorry, I just … Indulge me?”
“Hmmph. Proceed.” He sweeps his hand out in front of him in an official sort of way to show that I have his full attention.
Now that I have permission, I’m not sure where to start. I try to organize my thoughts, going back over my possible explanations. “Are you really dead?”
“Yes.”
“Are you really here?”
“I mean, look, philosophically speaking, you could just be a brain in a vat with electrodes sticking out and nothing you experience is really there.”
“How about not philosophically speaking?”
“Then yes.”
“Do you think being able to see you makes me crazy?”
“Philosophically speak—”
“Don’t make me actually put on Rick Astley.”
“Ha!” A laugh escapes from him. He shakes his head. Then he says, “Murph, you might be the only one out there who’s not crazy.”
The statement rolls over me like a wave of oxygen. I feel reassured, and my muscles untense for the first time in many hours. I inhale. “Thanks, man.”
“I just call ’em like I see ’em,” he says. “Keep going.”
“Can you see the stars?” I hadn’t planned to ask him that, but what my dad said earlier is nagging at me.
“You mean, like, have I gone to heaven? Been one with the celestial bodies?”
Now I laugh. I can never anticipate what’s going to come out of his mouth. “No, no, I mean, like, can you see the stars in the regular way. Like when you were alive. Did you look at the stars ever? Go stargazing? That whole thing?”
“Uh, okay. Yeah, sure, sometimes. The lake house was good for that.” The mention of the lake house makes us both quiet for a minute. “Why do you ask?”
The safest person to confide in is probably a dead person. Still, I hesitate. “’Cause I can’t see them, and I was just wondering what the big deal was.”
“You can’t see the stars?” His voice is mild, conversational, but I think I might hear a hint of concern underneath.
“Nope.”
“Huh. Well, they’re not really a big deal for me, honestly.
I don’t know, there’s a lot of them? People like things that twinkle?
” He starts to pick up speed. “They’re these little points of light in the sky that look totally still, but you can also sort of feel them moving. Gets a person thinking, I guess.”
“Are you going to keep hanging out with me?”
“Even though you can’t see stars?”
“Even though you’re dead.”
“I suppose we’ll see.” The weight of the unknown hangs in the room, the awareness on both our parts that every word between us might be our last. It sparks something urgent in me.
“Okay, I only have one more question, but you might not like it.”
“Fire away.”
“Why didn’t you wear a life jacket in the boat?
” Saying these words out loud is precarious; I don’t want him to feel like I’m blaming him for what happened.
But I can’t help running through the events of that day over and over in my mind, wishing that something, anything, had happened differently to change the terrible result.
It just doesn’t make sense that a couple of random details could create such a massively awful outcome.
He fills his cheeks with air, then blows it out with force. Finally, he says, “Because I’m a dipshit.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Well, then I’ll have to mull that one over.” He’s not ready to tell me, I guess. Maybe I’m not ready to hear it.
But a whole new set of questions begins to form in my head from his response. Where will you do this mulling? Where are you when you’re not with me? Are you even experiencing, I don’t know, linear time?
But I said that would be the last question, and I don’t want to scare him away again.
Instead, I look through my phone for a musical choice that might pass muster with Mason.
Funk would be good, but that’s not the vibe here in the late-night quiet.
Ooh, here we go. It’s a throwback, but for Mason the older the better.
The sound of Simon & Garfunkel has an immediate hypnotic effect.
Mason slides into the desk chair and slumps low, his legs kicked out in front of him, his signature winter flip-flops splaying out at the sides. I settle back into my nest, and we let the music fill up the room and the air between us.
At some point, I fall asleep. I wake up hours later, close to dawn, and Paul Simon is still singing, still soothing, even though I definitely did not put that song on repeat.