Ghosted, page 1
Ghosted
A Short Story
Linda Niehoff
Copyright © 2023 by Linda Graziano-Niehoff
Cover design copyright © 2023 by Linda Graziano-Niehoff
Cover art copyright © zeferli@gmail.com/Depositphotos
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All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Contents
Ghosted
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Ghosted
When Caitlin first came to my window, I was expecting her. I know you won’t believe that. She’d been dead for three days by then. She was lying down at Gladstone’s Funeral Home, and as far as I knew, she was still right there in the visitation room by the window.
When you go by Gladstone’s at night, there’s always a light on. I never knew which room it came from until two days ago. I’d never been inside before. And then all of us, me and the boys, were standing in there with everyone else from school in that horrible room made up of wood paneling and berber carpet. You at least expect a funeral home to look expensive. I don’t know why.
Maybe because you don’t want to send someone off from somewhere shabby. Hospitals have their clean white walls and lounge areas and everything is pristine. Nothing worn or dusty. Or airports with their high ceilings and chrome polish and colorful tile.
I shouldn’t have noticed the décor at a time like that. I’d cried my eyes out when I first heard but then just felt numb when I was actually standing there. Like I couldn’t breathe. Like everything hurt. I couldn’t even look at her.
But then I saw the window. And thought about how outside of it, life was still going on as normal. Or at least close to it. Someone was walking a dog. A car drove by. That’s when I noticed the lamp sitting unlit on an end table next to a high-back chair and thought that must be the one that’s always on.
I decided to go out that night and look. See if I was right. Was obsessed with it. Thought about it so hard that afternoon, I was practically shaking. Told my mom I was going to bed early and then climbed out my window even though it was only eight o’clock and I was almost eighteen. I didn’t have to sneak out.
The funeral home’s a block off downtown. The sky wasn’t all the way dark since it was summer. It was that rich blue. That almost dark color. The kind that when it comes makes you wish it could stay that way forever. I walked along the sidewalk, glad for the tall trees overhead that kept me in shadow.
On my left were houses with gauzy curtains drawn. The flicker of blue TV screens. At one house, there were people out on the porch. I didn’t look up. Didn’t say hello. I kept my head down. My hands shoved into my pockets.
On my right, just up the block, was the funeral home. The black swirling letters of its name were lit up with flood lights. All the windows dark except for that one, making you automatically think of all the things funeral homes try to hide.
Somewhere inside was a room with steel tables and tubes and smells of rubbing alcohol and antiseptic. Or so I imagined.
And somewhere inside was Caitlin.
And there against the window was the golden glow of that lamp I’d seen—now lit—making a soft yellow circle.
I wanted to cross the street, cup my hands against the glass and look in. Did they move bodies around? Keep them in other places when they weren’t on display? I imagined a waiting room of sorts. Everyone waiting for their turn. I wanted to find out, look through the window to see if she was still there. But I didn’t think I was tall enough, and besides. Those floodlights.
The whole town knew what happened to Caitlin anyway. Would it have been that crazy? People seem to understand the kind of crazy that comes from grief.
And Vinter, Kansas is small enough that even though people were walking their dogs and driving by on the streets and watching the blue flickering squares of their TVs inside all those windows, there was a kind of pause to everything.
The grain elevator at one end of town and the silver water tower at the other seemed more somber somehow. More shadowy. More knowing. The cornfields seemed like they were whispering. Hiding things they knew. Everything was a little more sinister.
Even that golden light in the window. And knowing that only some plywood and insulation and drywall separated me from her.
Or at least the outline of her.
Because that’s all that was left, and barely that.
Standing hours earlier in the visitation room, I’d felt gut punched when I first saw her. How familiar that profile. There was no mistaking her. Even if I didn’t believe it at first. That profile could only be hers.
And yet, it was all kinds of wrong. Not her at all.
For one, there was that ridiculous pancake makeup that was so thick you could see smear marks. And for another, there was something wrong about her face itself. She didn’t look like she was sleeping. She didn’t look like any kind of anything anymore.
That’s why I’d turned away. And saw the end table that held the lamp.
I’ve driven past the funeral home at night plenty of times on my way to somewhere else, and only ever glanced at it, seeing the lone lamp in the window. Not giving it much thought other than to note that it looked creepy. How they tried to make it look welcoming, the very place where you didn’t want to be welcomed.
Ever.
There was something about standing out on the sidewalk in the blue dark and looking at that lit window. I could hear voices down the street from the porch I’d passed. A car driving somewhere nearby, the whoosh of it, like a wind coming. I could smell the thick velvet scent of someone’s rose bush. How it smelled heavy and red.
Caitlin was probably still right in there, or at least the horrible outline of her. It was that thought that made me afraid of her.
That made me afraid she would come for me.
What is it about windows and the dead? Why can’t they just use the door like everybody else? I’ve probably answered my own question with that last one. They aren’t like everybody else.
So the window it was.
I’d had that feeling like something was following me. That feeling I can’t quite explain.
The entire walk back to my house, I kept looking back over my shoulder. I didn’t yet know what I expected to find. Only that Caitlin had been one of my best friends—just last week. Four days ago even. One of my best friends and maybe would have been more. And now, she was the thing I was afraid of.
I finally started walking again, past the funeral home and its flood of lights and into a deeper dark where the homes didn’t have any lights on in the windows and no one was sitting out on the porch. I guess I’d stood a long time looking. It had gotten later than I thought. I couldn’t hear any cars on the street now or even a dog barking or children out playing, trying to squeeze out the very last moments of a summer night.
I had that feeling that I wanted to get home fast. I even moved off of the sidewalk and away from the shadow of trees and walked directly under the streetlights. But that just made the dark feel darker.
It was like I’d suddenly stepped into a different town or a different night or maybe simply a different hour that had gone quiet. And it felt like Caitlin was in every shadow. Like she was everywhere, some horrible essence of her.
Like she was the thick smell of roses coming from somewhere unseen. The slither of wind in the leaves or their shadows that moved over the quiet brick-lined streets.
Caitlin and I had been almost.
That’s all I can say about us. That word. Almost. So full of possibility and yet no matter how you spin it, it always falls short. Never crosses any kind of finish line.
We’d been friends for two years, talking most nights on the phone, all night sometimes. She dated plenty of guys and always told me everything. It wasn’t until I started to feel the bite of something sharp with pointy teeth deep inside me that I realized how I felt about her.
I was sitting on the floor, leaning back against my bed just three weeks ago. I remember the chill of the air conditioner and how I wanted to get deep under the covers, feeling the warmth of the blankets around me and her voice in my ear. But I didn’t move.
I had to tell her. And I needed the cold to do it, or so I thought. It kept me awake, alert. I remember how I started shaking, a small tremble at first, but then it moved up into my lips and made them wobble.
I laughed a little too fast, a little too loud, at things she said that weren’t quite funny. My voice shook when I said anything back. Nonsense things in response to whatever story she was telling. I don’t even remember it now. I remember feeling how my knees and elbows would come unhinged. Pull apart from me. How I felt like I was coming undone.
Finally, there was a pause but I didn’t rush to fill it. Instead I listened to it. How it sounded like a kind of night. Like the black of an open mouth that wants to swallow.
Then she said, “Gabe. What is it.” Not even a question. Her voice was low. She could get this growl when she wanted to. When it was late at night and she knew I couldn’t see her face and her voice was the only thing she had to show what she meant. When her voice got low like that, it made everything inside me twist up tight.
I pictured her. I pictured this electric connection between
She was out there in the dark, her long blonde hair resting on a pillow. Her nose sunburnt and freckly like it got every summer. My voice tracing the curves of her ear. Moving into her.
In that moment, I’d never known fear like that before. Not true fear. Every other kind seemed like nothing. My feet felt like they’d been dipped in ice water. I didn’t know how to speak. I didn’t know the words.
But still I opened my mouth and spoke. “I have to tell you something,” I said.
I didn’t go back through my bedroom window when I got home. Couldn’t. It was up too high. I was too embarrassed to say that I’d had to go on a walk, snuck out even, though who would have blamed me? Still I didn’t want to worry my mother.
She’d been hovering over me for days. On the phone with the other mothers, speaking in low murmurs. All of them talking about what a shame it was. I could’ve simply told her that I needed to be out in the night. That I needed to be alone. She didn’t need to know that I had to see that light on in the window at the funeral home. I didn’t even know why I needed to see it.
But when I reached the front door, it didn’t matter. My mother wasn’t there. No one was. The lights were off. Her and my dad had already gone to bed. They probably thought I was still tucked safely inside my room. I was sure they weren’t sleeping. They liked to watch TV until they fell asleep, letting the timer shut it off. I’d never understood why until now. Tonight. I still had that feeling of Caitlin all around me and I wanted the sound of voices, the bright flicker of a TV in a late night room to banish her.
I silently slipped inside.
I didn’t like the way the house looked.
I didn’t like how it seemed to be waiting for something.
The furniture looked ready to take a step forward. I can’t say just how I knew that. It was that stupid light in the window and then how everything had gotten so quiet so fast. How I’d lost an hour, maybe two, without realizing it.
I didn’t flip on any lights. I told myself I was being ridiculous as I moved through the living room and down the hallway to my bedroom, and to prove it, I made myself walk through the dark.
Feeling it watch me.
Caitlin would turn into a ghost story. Of this I was sure. There’s a curve outside of town. For no good reason, there’s a sudden S while you’re going fifty-five. You’re supposed to slow down, but no one ever does. Every place seems to have one of these.
Call it Devil’s Curve or Rattlesnake Hill, call it whatever you want. Ours doesn’t even have a name. Just the number 1037 since it’s a county road. Even so. Every tiny town stuck in between cornfields with peeling paint and red-bricked streets and a cone shaped water tower that sits on spindly legs has one no matter what you call it.
A place that takes.
A place where you should curve but for whatever reason on whatever night, you go straight. Last thing you ever do.
A place that takes the best of us.
The prom queen, the football hero.
Or maybe we just think they’re the best because they’re gone. They are almost. And you might spend forever trying to figure out what that almost was going to be.
Those places take people and in the taking, turn them into a kind of forever.
Their faces get put on t-shirts. They get an entire yearbook dedicated to them with poems and pictures and doodles of roses. Their names get whispered in sleeping bags at slumber parties or told out by the lake around a campfire. Everyone glad it wasn’t them or one who belonged to them.
Such a shame, they all say. So pretty. So young.
But then it would turn. She’d quit being a sad story and would instead be a scary one. Her clothes would get dated, her hair. We’d all move forward and she’d stay frozen. Ageless. Dated.
Even now, I was already afraid of her.
Already, everyone was telling her story.
There hadn’t been anyone in years and so maybe the road, and the town, thought it was time. We need her, the road seemed to have said. We need a new story to tell.
And now she’d turn into something you’d see out of the corner of your eye. Something that was angry about what happened to her. About how so many people were able to follow the road, follow the curve, but she wasn’t. And now she would want to take you with her. Because everybody knows misery loves company. So why wouldn’t Caitlin want to take us all down with her? I was angry about everything that had happened. Why wouldn’t she be, too? Don’t all dead girls get angry? Want revenge?
Aren’t those the stories we tell about them?
Maybe that’s why the shadows that night scared me.
Maybe that’s why the night seemed to have gone all crooked, like that road outside of town. The road that takes and takes.
Maybe that’s why I was expecting her.
Caitlin didn’t say anything three weeks before when I told her.
After the darkness, after the heaviness of no words pushing through the night, through the dark like ripples in a night pond, after I waited, she said nothing.
Except, “Gabe.”
That one word.
One syllable.
It came out on a breath, an exhale. I never wanted to hear my name said like that, especially from her. And so I hung up the phone. And unplugged it so she couldn’t call back.
I guess that’s why I used the word “almost.” But really, we weren’t even that. We were a me that was alone on a dark hardwood floor shivering, and a her. One road going straight. The other road curving away.
What had I done?
She was my best friend. Sure there was Oscar and Dom and Kev. “The Boys,” we called ourselves. But Caitlin. She was the one I always called. If I liked a girl, if I flunked a test, if I was in trouble. She was the first one. The boys were for skateboarding and movies and driving country roads with the music turned up. The ones who tackled each other and raced each other. If I’d gone through a breakup, they moved me into a headlock, mussed up my hair, and said, “Let’s get this boy out,” and took me out of town. Built a campfire we could howl around. Throw rocks at until late.
But Caitlin. She was that soft voice in the dark that said, “Gabe. How are you? How are you really?” And when I couldn’t say, she put words to it for me. She’d tell it in such a way that I felt understood. She’d tell the story of me.
And now I’d ruined it. There are things you can’t go back from. You can’t put words back into the dark once they’ve come out. And you can’t turn after you’ve gone straight.
I’d spent three weeks not talking to her. Not calling her back. Not even when she’d left a note on my windshield: “Gabe.” (I could still hear the way she’d said it. An exhale. Pushing it out and away from her.) “We really need to talk.”
Last thing she ever said to me.
And then she went straight when she should have turned.
Me? I should’ve kept going straight, too.
The window was still open from when I’d crawled out even though the air conditioner was thrumming coldly.
I could hear low voices from my parents’ TV down the hall. The evening news was long over and some late night host was telling jokes. Every now and then I heard laughter rise up, fall way. Life moving on.
Outside the open window, the night was just as quiet as it had been when I was out in it. Quieter even.
Vinter was too small back then for any kind of subdivision or burbs. The closest we had was Fairfield Drive, a single curvy road with cul-de-sacs off either side. Most of the houses were identical ranch styles with an occasional split-level here and there for the people that had more money.
At this hour, there weren’t kids out riding bikes or people walking their dogs. The moon was on its way up, a low sliver. A kind of loneliness had descended as it so often does with the dark.
