Strange Ghosts Read online

  He smiled at me. "There's nobody better than you, Dr. Tom."

  "Thank you, Danny. That means a lot."

  "Nick wants to know when you'll come back?"

  "I don't know." I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. "I'm going to be honest with you, Danny. I may not come back. I may decide to do something else."

  "Oh."

  There was a moment of silence. Out in the reception area, I could hear Phil, Danny's foster father, talking to my receptionist.

  "Well," I said, leaning forward and smiling at Danny. "It's time for you to go, I think."

  "Okay," he said, his face downcast. He looked at the empty bean bag chair. "Nick has a question."

  "All right."

  "He wants to know . . . He says something bad might happen to me, and he wants to know if you'll take care of him if it does." Danny looked at me, his eyes watery. "Can you look after Nick if something bad happens to me, Dr. Tom?"

  The question made me hate myself for doing this. I considered briefly just seeing Danny and quickly dismissed the idea. A clean break was what I needed.

  I stood, then helped him to his feet. I put my hands on his slim shoulders and gazed down into his eyes.

  "Listen to me," I said. "Nothing bad is going to happen. You're going to see a very nice man named Doctor Edward."

  "I know . . . but can you still promise? Nick wants you to promise. He doesn't like being alone."

  There was a tap on my door. I glanced at the smoked glass, saw Phil's silhouette, then looked at Danny. This line of questioning was bothering me. I would have to tell Edward about it.

  "Promise?" Danny said.

  If I had more time, I would have probed deeper, trying to find out why Danny was persisting on this idea of something bad happening to him. But I felt tired, defeated. In the end, I just wanted him to leave happy.

  "I promise," I said.

  * * * * *

  The snow was gone in a matter of days, but then the onslaught of rain began. Snow never stayed long in Rexton, a medium-sized town in the lush Willamette Valley, but rain was another matter. That winter, it rained nearly every day from December until March, not a hard, brief pounding, but a steady drizzle interrupted by the occasional glimpse of sunshine. I spent most of those months holed up in my riverside condo, watching cable and listening to the rain tap against the metal roof. And it was raining the night I got the call from Danny's foster mother.

  "Oh God, Doctor Morris," she said. "It's Danny. He's missing. He never showed up for school and we can't find him anywhere."

  To hear the panic in her voice, you would never have guessed that Danny was not her biological son, or that he had only been in her care a year. On my muted television, a few burly security guys on a late night talk show were preventing two women from tearing each other's hair out.

  "Calm down, Mrs. Clark," I said, rising from the couch. Even as I gave her this advice, I felt my own panic rising. All I could think was: He was right. Dear god, he was right.

  "It's just not like him," she said. "He's a good boy. He always calls—"

  "When — when did you last see him?" I asked.

  "This morning. He walks to school." She started crying. "It's only a block away. We just never thought—"

  "And you called the police?" I glanced at the clock in the kitchen. It was a quarter to nine.

  "We called everybody. Oh Jesus. I just thought, maybe you would know. He really liked you. Maybe you would know a place, you know, where he would go if, if, if . . ."

  "Did you call Dr. Johansen?"

  "Yes. He hasn't seen him either and he has no idea where he would go. Oh God, what if . . . what if somebody—"

  "There's no point speculating on what-ifs," I said, though my own mind was racing through those very possibilities. "Perhaps he's hiding. Sometimes children do this. I'll wander around the school and some other places. Maybe if he sees me he'll come out. But you keep calling around, all right?"

  She thanked me profusely and we hung up. I'd put on a brave front, but the truth was I wasn't at all confident in my theory. She was right. Danny just wasn't the type to disappear.

  Still, I had to do something. I put on my overcoat and my fedora and headed outside to the parking lot. The rain, a fine mist, was visible only in the yellow bubbles of light surrounding the street lamps. The moist air dampened my cheeks.

  I was halfway to my Acura when I saw the boy leaning on the pine tree near my car.

  For a moment, I thought it was Danny and I pulled up short. As he stepped out of the shadows onto the asphalt, standing at the fringes of the light from the street lamp, I saw it wasn't him. He looked like Danny — skinny, blond, wearing shorts and a t-shirt — but he was taller and broader. He had strange proportions, with a head too large for his body, and hands and feet the size of a man's even though he couldn't have been more than ten. He walked toward me.

  "Hello," I said, "can I—"

  That's when I realized the kid wasn't all there. At first I thought he was hard to see because of the mist, but that wasn't it. The kid was fading in and out as if he was cast onto the air by a flickering projector. I blinked away the moisture in my eyes but it made no difference. The cars and the trees were dimly visible through his body.

  "Doctor Tom?" he asked.

  His voice made the hairs on the back of my neck rise. He sounded just like Danny. He stopped a few paces away from me, close enough that I could see a phosphorescent blue halo surrounding him. A wind picked up, shaking the trees, and his body rippled away before returning again.

  "Yes," I said.

  "We need to get Danny," he said

  "Yes."

  "He's all alone."

  "Where—where is he?"

  He stared at me. His eyes, too, were out of proportion, nearly twice as large as a normal person's. He didn't blink.

  "He's all alone," he said again.

  I was trying to think of what to say next when the kid turned to my Acura. He circled around to the passenger side and looked back at me. Slowly, I walked over to the driver side, staring at him over the roof of the car.

  "Who are you?" I asked.

  "Nick," he said.

  It took a moment for the name to register, and then I remembered: Danny's invisible friend. When I spoke again, my heart was beating loud in my ears.

  "Where do you want to go?"

  "I'll show you."

  As I unlocked the door, the keys jangled in my shaking hand. I was going to unlock the passenger side when I glanced over and saw that he was already sitting on the leather seat, the door visible through his body.

  "Go," he said.

  He never gave me an address, but as we drove he told me where to turn. Ten minutes later, we were on an old country road, my headlights cutting through the inky blackness. The windshield wipers squeaked across the glass. The car jostled from the occasional pothole.

  "Turn here," he said.

  We turned onto a narrow gravel road that weaved its way through an apple orchard. The trees looked like they hadn't been tended to in years. At the end of the road there was a dark, tiny farmhouse with broken windows and a gaping hole in the roof. Next to this was a depilated barn missing its front doors. I turned to Nick for confirmation and saw that he was already outside, standing in the beams from the headlights.

  I grabbed the penlight out of my jockey box — the only flashlight I had on me —and trudged over muddy ground. I followed him behind the barn, where the stink of manure and rotting wood was in the air. The batteries in the penlight were dying, and the pale, thin strip of light was just enough to keep from tripping on the lumpy terrain. Nick, however, was growing brighter as we walked, so that when we finally stopped by a pile of junk — rusty folding chairs, bicycles missing wheels and seats, aluminum window frames — he looked as solid as me.

  He pointed at the ground.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  "Here," he said.

  "What do you—" I began, and then I realized what he meant. S
hining my light where he was pointing, I saw that the mud there had been freshly tilled.

  "Are you . . . Are you saying . . . ?"

  Nick stepped up close to me, his blue halo glowing. Without a word, he suddenly thrust both his hands straight into my chest, his arms disappearing up to his elbows.

  A burning pain swept from my stomach to my fingers, making my ears buzz and my hair stand on end. The world went temporarily white, then images and feelings surged through me, hot and electric, one crashing on top of another in a kaleidoscope of memories — Danny talking to me, Danny pointing a green squirt gun at me, Danny smiling at me on top the jungle gym. I saw and felt it all as if I had lived it myself — Danny's whole life from whenever he created Nick, the funeral for his father, the hospital with his mother, happy times with his foster parents, talking with kids at school, talking with me, talking with my colleague, Doctor Johansen. Every secret wish and painful longing he had ever shared with Nick was now my own and it all came in one furious rush until the last memory, the one that was brighter and hotter than all the others: Danny, bound and gagged with duck tape, next to this very barn, kneeling next to a hole in the dirt. Though the night was black, I could see it all in chalky outlines as if it was a still life rendered on dark paper with a white pencil. Now I was no longer standing next to Danny, I was Danny, afraid and alone, and I gazed up into a night sky, blinked away the rain and saw the man standing there, leaning on a shovel, sleeves folded up to his elbows, a small flashlight clamped in his mouth.

  Dr. Edward Johansen.

  Oh God, Edward, no . . .

  Then I was crying, not Danny but me, alone on my hands and knees in the dark. My nose was inches from the dirt. I was clutching the pen light but it had gone dead.

  I'd let him down.

  I'd failed him.

  Nick was gone and I didn’t need to look around to know this. He was inside me now. I would look after him. Oh yes, I would look after him for the rest of my life. What had once belonged to Danny and now he belonged to me.

  I cast aside the penlight and dug my bare fingers into the cold, wet earth.

  * * * * *

  Danny was definitely my favorite. I would be lying if I said otherwise. He changed my life before and after his death.

  After the police dug up Danny's body, after Edward's arrest, and long after the funeral, I was at the grocery store picking up a few cans of soup when I saw a barefoot black boy in blue overalls in the frozen foods section. He looked about seven. The melody of an old Beetles song played faintly above us. It was late, nearly one in the morning, and the store was deserted. It was the only time I left my condo. It was the only time I could stand to face the world.

  I knew at a glance what the boy was. The blue halo surrounding his short black hair. The transparency of his brown skin. I never thought I would see these signs again, but then I hadn't really been looking.

  I stepped up to him. He stared at me with a mixture of trepidation and longing.

  "Are you lost?" I asked him.

  "Yehsur," he said.

  "Where are you from?"

  "Missoura, sur."

  "That's a long ways. Where's your friend?"

  He looked at his bare feet as if ashamed. "He gone, sur. Long time now."

  I knew exactly what I had to do. I put my plastic basket on the tiled floor, then kneeled in front of him. "My name's Thomas," I said.

  "Tom," he said, shuffling his feet.

  "Nice to meet you, Tom. Do you want me to look after you?"

  He nodded. I held out my arms and he stepped into them, moving inside of me, bringing with him all the painful memories of a man who'd been dead for nearly fifty years.

  * * * * *

  Highway stretched before me, long and straight, nothing but open prairie and grazing cattle on both sides. The sky was blue except for the horizon, where a bank of gray clouds hovered over the distant mountains. I was somewhere in Montana.

  Everything I owned — everything I hadn't sold or donated — was in the motor home with me. I was done with therapy, at least the kind where I sat in a swivel chair and made notes on a clipboard.

  There were many more like Nick and Tom out there, some abandoned because the need for them was outgrown, some deserted when their creators died. I'd already found dozens on my way across Oregon and Idaho, wandering and alone, and I knew I would find dozens more. I would go on looking until I found them all. I would do it for Danny. I would do it because it gave purpose to my life, and having a purpose was one way out of despair.

  I still felt terrible pangs of grief now and then, both for June and for Danny, but it wasn't as bad as before.

  I was no longer truly alone.

  All my invisible friends were with me.

  The Enchanted Grove

  When I was twelve, my father bought an amusement park called The Enchanted Grove. He did this so we could see my dead brother again.

  Sheltered on all sides by the dense, dark pines that kept people cool even during the sweltering summer, the park had a fairy tale theme. Goldilocks, Hansen and Grettle, Paul Bunyon and the like. There was a roller coaster called Ice Hills, and a half dozen other minor rides that seemed thrilling then, but were actually pretty tame compared to what you find in California.

  It was located ten miles outside of Rexton, a metropolitan area with a population hovering around a hundred thousand. Why the original builders didn’t move the park fifty miles north to Portland was a mystery, because a larger city nearby might have saved the park from bankruptcy. Then again, if it hadn’t been near bankruptcy, my father might not have had a chance to buy it — and we never would have seen Tim again.

  Two years before he bought the park, I came home from school and rushed into Tim’s room only to find my father crumpled in the corner, his charcoal suit a stark contrast against the brightly-colored mural of a dragon Tim had painted on the wall. My father’s cheeks were flushed, the skin around his eyes puffy. He had Tim’s black Blazers cap in his hands, and he kept turning it over and over, as if he was roasting it over a fire.

  Tim had gone on a field trip to The Enchanted Grove that day with his sixth grade class, and I had been eager to ask him how it went. My father, the vice president of a local bank, usually wasn’t home until late.

  "Dad . . . ?"

  His glasses sat next to him on the carpet. "Laura," he said, squinting at me. "Laura, come here."

  "What’s wrong?"

  "Sit down next to me, dear. Sit down, I have something to tell you."

  My father was a stoic in the purest sense of the word, a man who prided himself on controlling his emotions. So when his voice warbled, I felt a knot form in my stomach. I sat next to him. He patted my hand and opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was a long exhale which sounded like air whistling out of a balloon.

  "Dad?" I prodded him.

  "Your brother," he began, and it was all he could manage until later. His head slumped to his chest.

  In bits in pieces, I learned that Tim's school bus had been involved in a freakish accident with an oil tanker. The inferno had burned so hot that the firefighters had been powerless to do anything. My father had heard the report on the radio, but when he arrived on the scene there was nothing he could do except retrieve Tim’s Blazers cap from the ditch by the side of the road. Both drivers and all twenty-four children perished.

  The hat had been from their last father-son outing, a trip to see the Blazers take on the Lakers a few months earlier. My father, a man of numbers and formulas, championed clear reasoning and logic. My brother, who won Lego building contests and peppered his walls with his drawings, chatted constantly about imaginary worlds. But they both had enjoyed the game and the time spent together. Tim wore that cap everywhere. When he died, my father clung to it as if it was the only memory he had of his son.

  My brother was a skinny kid with large feet and drooping ears, certainly no athlete, and far from being the most popular kid in school. But he had more imaginatio
n than anyone I knew. His countertops were covered with models he had built: F-15s, pirate ships, space shuttles, anything that caught his fancy. He was always drawing and he could draw anything. I was always sneaking into his room when he wasn’t there so I might look at his creations, and it was his constant complaint to our mother.

  "We don’t need locks on our doors, dear," my mother told him

  "But Mom," he said, "Laura won’t stay out of there. I want my privacy."

  "Oh, honey, why do you worry about it so much? She just goes in there because she admires you so much. Can’t you take it as a compliment?"

  If I caught him in the right mood, sometimes my brother would take me into his confidence. While he worked on some new creation with his Erector Set, he would tell me excitedly all the things he was going to do when he grew up. One day he wanted to be President, the next a great basketball player.

  "Whatever I do, I’m going to help people," he said.

  After he died, I spent my afternoons in Tim’s room, surrounded by his drawings. My parents joined a support group. I remember the long nights with my ear pressed to the heating vent listening to them in the bedroom below. My father’s voice was so low it was just a murmur, but my mother’s shrill squall carried clearly up to my ears. When he told her The Enchanted Grove had come up for sale, and that he wanted to buy it, she told him it would be the end of their marriage.

  So it was. While he cashed in his stock portfolio and bought the park, my mother filed for divorce. Those who didn’t know about Tim just thought it was my father’s mid-life crisis — a way to get out of the drab world of mortgages and interest rates. What they didn’t know was that my father had heard a rumor, a rumor that sometimes late at night the ground crew saw a boy in a black Blazers cap wandering through the trees, a boy who didn’t answer when called upon and who vanished without a trace.