Breathing Ghosts Read online

  She doesn’t even ask about my face or about the bloodstained clothes sticking to my skin. Instead she just hands me the damp washcloth hanging at her waist, the one she probably just used to dry the dishes, as if to say you can wash the blood and death off of you later, Jack’s sleeping.

  She disappears around the corner and I twist the rag in my fist, tightening it around my knuckles until I hear a faint tear. I’m not going to wear Julian’s blood for the next couple of hours like some kind of morbid war paint. Suddenly every inch of me starts to itch, my skin writhing against the dampness of my clothes. I step into the bathroom and I can’t peel them off fast enough. I toss them in a heap on the floor before locking the door behind me and twisting on the shower.

  I hesitate, one foot in the clouded stream, the other braced against the side of the tub before I lean in, washing one wound at a time. I dry off just as carefully, dabbing the bruises along my chest and back, and that’s when I hear Jack’s fists rumbling against the door, the brass knob shuddering.

  I slip on my clothes, brush the steam from the bathroom mirror and check my eye in the reflection. Dark shadows bleed out from the bridge of my nose, settling in a welt just under my eye. I’m pretty sure it’s broken and mist forms at my lash line from just looking at the awkward slope of it protruding beneath the skin. But I can’t bring myself to touch it to make sure.

  I stare at Jack’s shadow as it swells beneath the door and my nose starts to throb, its vulnerability painfully obvious. But I finally open the door, catching a glimpse of my mother at the end of the hallway before meeting Jack’s eyes.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” he says.

  I knew I was late before I’d even left the church. I couldn’t tell him I was going to Nia’s funeral. They didn’t know about Nia. They didn’t need to. So instead I’d told him I needed the truck to cover the end of someone’s shift at the hardware store and would only be gone for a few hours, definitely back in time for him to start making his runs at noon. But noon was almost two hours ago.

  He takes my chin in his calloused fingers and I flinch, a hiss sliding between my teeth as I knock his hand away.

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “What did you say?”

  He shoves me against the wall, eyes dark beneath the black bill of his hat and I’m on fire again. I shove him back and he loses his grip on me.

  “What the fuck?” His voice catches then trails off.

  My mother’s face, placid and the color of stone is the last thing I see before I slam the door closed behind me and lock myself in my room.

  My room is just as decrepit and grey as the rest of the house, decorated the way you would a cell in the county jail or somewhere else you don’t plan to be for long. And I hadn’t. Up until a week ago I was counting down the days until my eighteenth birthday, Nia and I spending Sunday afternoons with our fingers covered in yellow highlighter as we searched the classifieds for cheap apartments. But then she…and now I can’t move.

  My backpack, one of the straps missing, sits in the exact same spot where I tossed it on the last day of school three weeks ago. I’d finally graduated, barely, and I should have burned the damn thing in some kind of ritualistic ceremony but I hadn’t even managed to lug it to the trash.

  I sit on the edge of my bed, fingers inching toward my nightstand, the only other thing in my bedroom besides a swollen clothes hamper, an ironing board, and an Xbox.

  I open the drawer, fumbling around for the pills before twisting off the cap and shaking one into my palm. It lays there, bright and unintimidating like a piece of candy or one of those chewable vitamins shaped like the Flintstones. But I know it’s not.

  What I really need is some fucking morphine or even just a joint. If I could just smoke a fucking bowl right now. I let the pill slide back into the bottle, the tiny initials printed on the side coming off on my sweaty hand, and lay down on the bed.

  I try to close my eyes, to sleep, but my brain is on hyper drive sifting through all of these memories, all of these moments and tastes and sensations—the last time I pressed my lips to Nia’s, her back bent over the front console in her car, the way her hair smelled like sugar and pine-sol, the ribbing along her fingernails where she used to chew them.

  I remember the first time I ever saw her, her hair in a ponytail directly on top of her head, a streak of psychedelic colors across the playground. She’d sail by, dropping notes at my feet while I spent recess against a brick wall, in trouble for stealing some scrawny kid’s basketball or calling some brace-faced chubby girl ugly.

  Every day it was something new—a chaotic underwater mural complete with anatomically incorrect mermaids and one-eyed sharks or aliens wearing tutus—and every day I was racked by a new riddle of her, this strange and colorful girl who seemed almost as intrigued by me as I had been by her. Until the day they stopped.

  That first year of middle school, the year without Nia, was insufferable and grey. No more bright neon socks or obnoxious ponytail or ink stained hands. Instead she was replaced with six-foot eighth-graders slamming me against the lockers, spit wads and Indian burns, and lunches alone on the back steps near the gym.

  But then the mild fall was snuffed out by the heat of summer again, hurricane season ushering in the new school year and there she was.

  She’d looked up from her schedule just for a second, eyes trolling the door numbers stamped near the ceiling when she saw me staring at her. And then, before I could look away, before I could fall back into the buzzing cluster of backpacks and morning chatter and pretend like I hadn’t been waiting for this moment for an entire year, a smile cut into those familiar fourth grade dimples and I smiled back.

  The next day when I opened my locker, a piece of notebook paper was wedged between the steel vent. She wanted to know when I had lunch. Trying to concentrate on anything else that day, especially U.S. history, seemed moot and I spent every class period doodling Nia’s old sketches by memory, trying to replicate every layer perfectly, down to the stray marks and smudged shadows of her fingerprints.

  On the way home my mind was still reeling from the sight of that little piece of paper and I almost didn’t notice Jack’s truck in the driveway, the hind end on the grass, or my mother, one knee tucked into her chest as she lay on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. My bag fell in a slump at my feet.

  “Mom…?”

  But before I could swallow the word, choke it back down the way I was supposed to, it slipped from my lips and Jack’s knuckles were grating across my face. I stumbled against the front door, bracing myself against the knob.

  “Go to your fucking room,” he said.

  And I did, peeling my bag from the floor and disappearing from the living room in one silent beat. Then I’d crawled into my bed, braced the pillow over my ears, and waited for it to be over.

  When I woke up the next morning, my cheek was bruised and swollen. I’d always been able to hide the others, the dark shadow of his fingers across my forearms, the welts along my backside. But this everyone would see.

  Jack hitting us, me and my mom, it wasn’t necessarily a regular thing, not as regular as say buying groceries. But it wasn’t really an irregular thing either. We managed to sidestep his drunken rage most of the time but every once in a while it wouldn’t matter how careful we were.

  I couldn’t handle the thought of Nia seeing my face so I avoided her all day, skipping lunch altogether and waiting in the locker room for nearly an hour for the rest of gym class to trickle in.

  I thought about her in that crowded lunch room, scanning the empty seats for the one next to me, then noticing me not there and immediately writing me off for good. And I decided in that moment that whether or not the swelling went down, whether or not my face still looked broken and pathetic, I would be there to meet her the next day.

  When I slid in across from her, the metal legs of the chair scraping across the linoleum the only hello I could manage, she was scribbling in a notebook not looking at me.

  “Where were…?” Then she stopped, her gaze a hot voyeur as she examined the bruises on my face. “What happened?” she said.

  I shook my head. “Nothing…” But the word trailed off more like a question, the last syllable wavering as it fell from my lips.

  “Who did that to you?”

  As she spoke, her face didn’t change, eyes never fluxing from surprise to worry or anything in between. Instead she just watched me, eyes still tracing each bruise as if I wasn’t even there, as if it didn’t obviously make me uncomfortable.

  “No one,” I said, digging for some invisible distraction in my bag, turning to face the empty pockets and folds rather than face her.

  “Did your father do it?”

  I felt my lip trembling and I bit down on it hard. “I don’t have a father,” I said, hoping that morbid fact would somehow terminate the conversation.

  But then she said, “I don’t have one either.”

  And I had to look at her again, to see how those words would reshape her face. But she was still, unchanged save for the finger stroking the arch of her eyebrow as she continued to speak.

  “He was killed. It was a drive by shooting.”

  I felt the gears inside her tumbling, the thoughts twisting as she tried to construct coherency out of a memory that wasn’t even hers, but her older sister Mari’s, the only one out of the two of them who actually remembered sitting next to their father’s body when he died.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say.

  My father had just left, or at least I think that’s what happened. My mother never really explained it to me and I never really pushed her to. Nia used to ask me sometimes if I wondered about him the way she wondered about her own father—about
what he looked like, the sound of his voice, if maybe I had his eyes or if we cleared our throats the same way.

  Sometimes when things were really bad I would let myself imagine some stranger with my eyes and my laugh sitting in Jack’s favorite spot on the couch. I’d imagine his arm in a sports coat with cuff links my mother had bought him draped over the cushion instead of the scarred flesh inked with skinhead propaganda that was usually there.

  But the arm, the intense blue eyes, that was usually as far as I got. Not because I didn’t wonder but because I didn’t let myself. It took me a long time, years, until I finally let myself want Nia—I mean really want her. But that was only when I knew for certain that she wanted me back and that was a luxury I would never have with my real father.

  Nia and I had lunch together every day that year, and the year after that, and the year after that until we traded the cafeteria for the backseat of Nia’s car, and summer and fall started to bleed into one another, our time together no longer confined by something as unreliable as the weather, and the building blocks of our conversations were no longer words but tangible things—her fingers hooked around my thumb, legs sprawled across my lap, and my lips on her lips, tongues forming syllables words never could.

  Chapter 3

  28.5° N, 81.4° W

  I’d woken to the buzz of my cell phone. Someone had skipped his shift and Steve said that if I agreed to come in on my day off I’d make time and a half. So now I’m standing behind a power saw that I’ve never actually used before, about to give a demonstration to a customer interested in buying said saw while my manager looks on from his makeshift director’s seat formed out of old packing boxes, everyone awkwardly trying to avoid staring at my fucked up face.

  Everyone who works here is either a complete dick or a total creep, one genetic sequence away from being a serial killer or eating the head off a dog. I refuse to eat or drink anything when I’m here just so that I don’t have to get caught with one of them in the break room. Most days I can’t even piss without someone trying to start a conversation with me right there at the goddamn urinal.

  But for all of their social defects none of them have said a word to me today, not about Nia or otherwise and I can’t tell you how fucking relieved I am. Especially considering what day it is. June 16th. Father’s Day. Oh and my eighteenth birthday.

  I see a familiar blue sweater slinking through the crowd, disappearing and reappearing in flashes between the aisles and I almost cut off my thumb. She’s carrying something, the cardboard giving way beneath the weight, and she almost loses her grip on it as she tries to set it on one of the empty cashier counters.

  I excuse myself, leaving the customer to moan and groan about the lack of service in this place, and meet Mari at the counter. I see the ribbing, damp and warped along the outside of the box and wonder what the hell she’s brought me.

  “Mari…?” Her name slips out, foreign and frantic.

  I brace for venom but she just rests an arm on the counter, the other hiked up on her hip, catching her breath.

  “They’re Nia’s things. Some…well a few. I thought you would probably want them.”

  I freeze, glaring at Nia’s sister. Not because I don’t want her things. I do. But because I can’t believe they’re already going through them, clearing out the intricacies of her existence as if they’ve already accepted the fact that she’s never coming back.

  “It’s only been a week,” I say.

  “I know. But I have to get back to school soon and I wouldn’t be able to help my mom take care of everything until Christmas break.”

  Her head draws to a slight tilt as she waits for me to speak. But I don’t.

  “She didn’t want to be there, alone in the house, you know with her things like that,” Mari finally says.

  “What did you do with the rest?” I say, almost immediately wishing I hadn’t.

  My mind drudges up some menial graveyard full of everyday things—spoons and socks and old CDs and opened mail and Mari’s voice edges beneath the low hum of the air conditioner, the loud whirr of power tools, the dinging of registers, coins dropping into the plastic tray, and a million other sounds that I wish were the most important thing right now but aren’t.

  “We kept some things. The important things.”

  I tried to imagine how they would have determined that, what made one tattered sketchbook or photograph or paint-stained t-shirt more important than the next.

  “The rest we donated. Mostly her old school books and clothes, things like that.”

  I thought I heard a quake in her voice but then I realized it was me, a long breath catching in my throat. I thought about the bright green dress she’d worn to prom, the torso tight against her skin like fish scales cascading down her ribs. Had they given that away? Or that oversized power company t-shirt she’d worn to paint the fence at that daycare center on Semoran, the first work she’d ever been commissioned for. Or what about the denim cutoffs she wore almost every day, nine months out of the year when we made the thirty minute trek to the beach, the pockets full of beach sand and the fabric fading to a stark white from the harsh glow of the sun.

  I remember her guiding my thumb to the copper button just below her navel, my fingers pulling on the belt loops at her waist until they were on the floor and her bare skin was pushed up against me. Out of everything she’d ever worn, I would have kept those, summer eternalized in every hole and fraying seam.

  “River?”

  I see my name on Mari’s lips and wait for her voice to catch up.

  “Riv…” she says again, “I’m sorry.”

  I’m not exactly sure if she means for what happened to Nia or what happened at Nia’s funeral or for the past eight years and the fact that I have to grieve alone, totally expunged from existence. But then she turns to go, disappearing beyond the sliding glass doors and out into the grim heat of the parking lot.

  I scour the floor for Steve and spot him next to a fertilizer display, instructing one of the other employees where to stack the bags, lifting a finger only to point. While his back’s turned I slide my hands under the box and carry it out to the truck parked at the back of the lot.

  Three weeks ago when I had my own car, a battered white Pontiac, it would have fit in the employee parking spaces in the back of the store. But that was before I blew out the ignition and Jack’s truck is such a monstrosity that it won’t fit anywhere but across two sets of white lines near the street.

  He let me take it today only on the condition that I give him half my paycheck and that I make the rest of his runs for him that night. I’d agreed only to get out of the house for a little while, to clear my head, or if not at least fill it with things like drill bits and hoses and light fixtures, anything but Nia. If not for Mari, maybe it would have worked.

  I slide the box onto the seat, climbing in after it before closing the door behind me. I switch on the ignition, lowering the windows so that I don’t suffocate and then I eject the keys. But the heat swarms me anyway, sunlight licking at my skin, leaving me soaked. I brush the back of my hand across my forehead and then unfold the top flaps on the box.

  I pull out a large zip lock bag, crinkled and tearing, and I open it. The photos spill onto my lap, the film faces sticking to each other with the heat.

  I catch sight of a slant of my face covered by another photo, one of Nia peering at me from beneath a crocheted sunhat, hair in a long braid over her shoulder. The juxtaposition of her right eye narrowed against the sunlight, and my left, dark and brooding, somehow creates a new face I shouldn’t recognize but do.

  I realize now that’s what that ache is, besides the grief, beyond the anger. Pieces of me are unraveling because there’s nothing to patch up the holes that were there long before Nia was here, and nothing to re-stitch the fraying edges, a new kind of disfigurement I don’t know how to remedy yet.

  I flip through the rest of the pictures, fingers grazing the warped edges. Stills of every moment and every memory I’ve been either frantically sifting through or trying my best to avoid over the past week and a half now a tangible reminder, heavy against my palms.

  There’s one of us on the pier waiting in line for the zipper ride. It was six minutes of nauseating torture, twisting and spinning; Nia laughing and me trying not to puke. There’s one of the two of us in front of some crude sandcastle we’d spent an entire afternoon building. I flip to another picture of us, Nia leaning over the console, our cheeks pressed together as we wait at a stoplight. I can see the piece of electric blue chewing gum behind her wide smile, the camera reflected in the sheen of her neon sunglasses.