Chapter 5 Collins
Collins
It didn’t take long for me to get my stuff up to the apartment. All I had was one large suitcase, a carry-on, and a small duffel. My entire life was easily condensed into three bags.
If I thought about that for long enough, it might make me sad.
I liked things—objects that I collected like trinkets and clothes and things like that.
I had brought a few with me—some matchboxes, pins, and postcards—but there used to be more.
When I started to feel like I was getting attached to things, I would leave them behind when I bounced to another place.
It used to make me feel good—like there was nothing that owned me, that I could drop everything, move on, and not look back.
Lately, though, it was mostly a reminder that I didn’t really own anything, and I had nothing to look back on—just things to miss. I decided not to think about it.
Instead, I thought about the fact that somehow, I’d ended up in the one place in this entire town that was apparently nearly just as ghost-friendly as Toades.
In the last nine hours, I’d spotted seven ghosts. Seven. And it could’ve been more, but I was choosing to believe it was the light playing tricks on me.
I don’t remember a time when I couldn’t see them, so I assumed that it had been this way since birth for me. If there was ever a time I couldn’t hear them—besides now—I didn’t remember. Clarke says she always remembers hearing them but didn’t start seeing them until she was six or seven.
Neither of us registered that we were seeing and talking to things that weren’t there until our parents brought it up.
We were like the quintessential kid in a horror movie who gives everyone the creeps because they’re talking to nothing and somehow have befriended or been possessed by the Great Big Bad.
I was just friends with the ghosts, though. I’d never been possessed—that I knew of, at least.
Outside Sweetwater Peak, I usually just saw orbs or impressions of something that vaguely resembled a translucent human.
It was partly up to them and partly how far away they were from their anchor point that determined the intensity of their appearance.
Anchor point wasn’t an official term, but that’s what Clarke and I called it.
It didn’t have to be where they died—just a place or a thing that was significant.
That’s why there were a lot of ghosts in the antique shop—they were attached to furniture or knickknacks or throw blankets.
That was where I had first met Elda, the ghost anchored to the silver watch that I still wore every day.
The watch had come to the shop before our fifteenth birthday.
We got a lot of jewelry. Half of it ended up being costume jewelry, but every once in a while, we ended up with a special piece like the watch—an expensive piece.
It fell out of a vanity table that my mom was stripping the paint off of.
She didn’t even notice it—I found it on the back porch of the shop a few days later.
My mom polished it up and put it in the jewelry case, and I stared at it every day.
Sometimes, if I was the only one there, I’d carefully take it out and put it on. It fit perfectly.
On my birthday, I noticed it was gone, and my heart fell. I thought that someone had swooped it out from under me, and I wished I’d hidden it. That night when I went to bed, a velvet jewelry box was on my pillow.
It’s lived on my wrist ever since.
Elda didn’t make herself explicitly known until later, but when she did, I saw her whenever I slept through my alarm—which was a lot.
I’ve always been more of a night owl, so getting me out of bed to go to school was a challenge for everyone in the Cartwright household—including Elda, but she persevered.
She would sing off-key, slowly pull my comforter off me, or spill the glass of water next to my bed.
She didn’t necessarily talk a lot, but she did a lot.
She would shout if I didn’t look both ways before crossing the street.
Once, she told me to slow down when I was speeding down a back road.
A deer darted out in front of me a few seconds later.
If I hadn’t slowed down, that deer and I would’ve become acquainted in a way that wouldn’t have ended well for either of us.
Elda annoyed the hell out of me. Her antics didn’t stop when I left Sweetwater Peak.
She was always there, like a guardian…ghost, I guess.
She reminded me to take the most well-lit way home, and would give me unsolicited input on dates I went on, and she even told me to call my parents every once in a while.
I didn’t usually follow through on that one.
Over the years, I learned bits and pieces about her life. The watch belonged to her daughter, who died before Elda did. Her chosen way of interacting with me made sense after I learned that.
From what Clarke and I observed throughout our lives, ghosts could pretty much show up however they wanted.
It could be subtle or not. And unlike the movies, it didn’t matter what they looked like when they died.
Nearly every ghost who I knew or interacted with that died later in life usually chose to appear younger.
Also, there’s this misperception that ghosts have some sort of unfinished business and that the reason they’re hanging around is that they’re not at peace or whatever.
But that hasn’t been the case for any of the ones I’ve interacted with.
At least not from what they told me. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve talked to the ghosts.
I enjoyed it. And most of them just wanted to hang out with their loved ones or be in a place they missed or explore something they never got to while they were alive.
They had far fewer rules than the living.
But eight months ago, their voices started to get muffled.
Then, a few weeks later, I heard nothing at all.
I could still see them, which in some ways was a relief, but it felt like torture: no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t communicate with them.
I tried to talk to Elda, my most consistent companion, but I got nothing—not even when I took a scarier walk home or hopped on the back of some random guy’s motorcycle, which was very Bella Swan of me, I know, but unfortunately, there were no hallucinations for Collins.
Just silence.
It had been almost a year since I’d seen her, and every day I looked down at my wrist and wished for her to stick her nose in my business one more time.
There was a point during the last year that I didn’t get out of bed for days; I hoped eventually she would at least come to wake me up, tell me to get dressed, but she never did.
Not seeing her hurt enough that at one point, I took off the watch and intended to leave it behind at a coffee shop.
I only made it a few blocks before I ran back to find it.
My life had never been so quiet, and I had never felt so alone.
But I didn’t know what to do about it. So I just kept going and tried to ignore that it felt like an integral part of me—that used to feel like a symphony—had gone mute.
And now I was here.
In an apartment crawling with ghosts who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—talk to me.
But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t annoy the hell out of me.
Like the one who hid in the corner while Brady was here and kept giving me a creepy smile until she started laughing.
At least, that was what it looked like. I couldn’t hear her.
When he left, I told her that wasn’t funny—not that she acknowledged me at all.
Other than that, though, it was a good day. Easy. The exact kind of day I needed before seeing my parents.
I walked toward Toades—careful to avoid the cracks that were basically canyons that littered the sidewalk along Main Street. The residents of Sweetwater Peak preferred a…slower-paced life, so at five-thirty, Main Street was a ghost town—no pun intended.
My parents’ shop wasn’t in a storefront like Brady’s.
It was in a house, one of the oldest structures in Sweetwater Peak.
It was a white-and-brown farmhouse with two stories (and a basement and attic).
The front porch had two rocking chairs and an assortment of herbs hanging from the railing.
A wooden sign in the front yard read Toades: Wyoming’s Premier Antique Emporium.
It looked just like it did when I left it, and that was comforting. Winds would rage, rain would pour, and the snow would pile up—businesses in Sweetwater Peak would come and go, some years would be bad and some would be good, but no matter what, Toades would survive.
Unless some asshole developer bought the block and tore the whole thing down.
A breeze made my mom’s extensive collection of porch wind chimes do their thing as I walked up the steps and opened the front door.
Toades, like most other antique shops I’d been to, had a very distinct smell. But it wasn’t musty or dank. It mostly smelled like lemon furniture polish and wax and just kind of…old. It was comforting and familiar.
I kind of wished I could bottle it to spray on my pillow at night. Maybe then I could get some sleep.
Toades was furnished like a house—but with multiples of everything and things shoved in every corner. Clarke was dusting off a credenza in the entryway when I walked in.
“Hey,” she said. “How was your day after lunch?”
“Good,” I said.
“Everything went okay with Brady?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s like working with a mannequin.”
“I don’t know quite what you mean by that, but I don’t think it’s very nice.”
I shrugged. “He’s just boring—not a lot of conversational flow,” I said. Other than the stuff about his grandfather. “At least he’s nice to look at.”
“He’ll loosen up a little once he gets to know you, I’m sure,” Clarke said. “Maybe you intimidate him.”
“Right,” I said with an eye roll. “Also, that place is ghost fucking central.”