Spirits Read online

  Tori’s cheeks glowed red.

  “I’ve already told you. If I could stop drinking, I would. Only now …”

  She stared past Amelia into the sea behind them.

  “Only now what?”

  “I don’t know if I could even explain it. See, a year ago, when I really started drinking, everything got so much better, at least when I drank. I didn’t have the visions anymore. I could almost cope with the accident. It’s different now. I see things. Snakes, mostly. And I still have flashbacks about the girl. Only, now I’m having visions about someone else, another woman.”

  Her shoulders heaved with a big breath.

  “You probably think I’m cuckoo for Coco Puffs, and I wouldn’t blame you for kicking me out. Hell, if some drunk came into my house and screamed about seeing snakes, I’d probably do the same.”

  Amelia saw desperation in her eyes, deep inside the blue and green strands of her irises.

  “Just, please, give me the chance to get myself together. I won’t drink. I won’t. I’ll just stop.”

  Amelia had heard those words a million and one times from Bill, and she never believed them from him. She definitely didn’t believe them from a stranger.

  The sunlight that filtered into the room dimmed, and Amelia noticed the clouds gathered over the shore. A storm was coming. She just hoped she was ready.

  Tori was jostled from her plea by rattling from the screen door. A cold breeze swooshed through the foyer, and a few drops of rain licked at the eaves. A shadow passed by the picture window, and the door creaked. The streetlamps already glowed in the dark.

  Bracken popped his head in.

  “Anybody home?”

  Amelia jumped up from her chair behind the desk.

  “Come on in,” she said. “Tori and I were just chatting, but I think we’re done for now. Can I get you a cup of coffee or tea?”

  He held up a hand and shook his head.

  “No thanks. Tori and I are going to take a little walk. I mean, if she still wants to.”

  Amelia gave him a disapproving look, lips pursed and eyelids lowered.

  Tori’s head still spun with the horror she’d experienced in the bathroom. She still wasn’t completely convinced the snakes weren’t real, but perhaps the thing that scared her the most was the possibility that it hadn’t been real. If it was all in her head, what the hell was wrong with her?

  She considered canceling, but he stood there, smiling at her, and she felt the same awkward, wonderful, uncomfortable rush she’d experienced at the bar. Besides, getting outside, even in the rain, would probably be good for her. Clear her head. Get herself together.

  She stood, and he put his fingertips on the small of her back as he led her out the door and into the light, cold sprinkle.

  Droplets collected in her already-damp hair, and she brushed it back, pulling it to one side.

  They walked down the sidewalk and crossed the empty, sand-strewn street to the splintered boardwalk. The gray clouds rose up above the swelling ocean, gray against even darker gray. It seemed appropriate.

  Awnings over Victorian B&Bs along Beach Drive fluttered. The shadowy outline of a family on bikes passed them, speeding up, perhaps to escape the coming storm. Why did she agree to come out in the dark and the rain again? Had she been trying to be cute and flirty? Now, what she wanted more than anything, was to go back to her room and sleep and never dream again.

  They passed the Rusty Nail and the dainty B&Bs gave way to cheaper accommodations and motels with pools and free HBO. The dead end and the gazebo appeared in the distance. They walked, stiff and silent. The world’s last payphone stood, waiting for the one person in the world who didn’t have a cellphone––someone who might be her.

  The rain pelted down, cold and unyielding. Bracken ran ahead of her. She jerked forward and pumped her legs to keep up. Her sweater clung to her, and the pull of wet wool felt suffocating. She tugged at the neckline and readjusted her clothes. After a few seconds of inundation, she let the garments sag against her body and jogged faster.

  Bracken sat on a bench under the shelter by the time she arrived and had pulled out his phone and a set of earbuds. He rearranged the cords and motioned for her to sit next to him. She pulled her dripping sweater up so that it was square on her shoulders and wrung out the excess water at the hem. Wind whipped from the ocean. The waves heaved beneath them, spraying up to the gazebo. Seawater settled against her face.

  “This isn’t much of a shelter, is it?” she asked.

  He shrugged, and the sides of his lips curled.

  “It’s only water.”

  Her laugh, throaty and loud, caught her off-guard. She couldn’t remember having had occasion to laugh about much these past several months. The vibrations behind her ribs felt good, but that sensation soon gave way to a writhing terror that wormed around in her gut. She tried to push it down and forget it.

  She sat, and he offered her the right earbud, which she placed inside her ear.

  The dreamy, dramatic guitar of Bryan Ferry’s Windswept hummed in her ear. He’d been her fifth-grade crush. She’d seen the video for Roxy Music’s More Than This on MTV, and thus was born her type. Tall. Dark-haired. British. More than a little smarmy and smug. Decidedly not the man who sat beside her sharing his music on Pandora. The brassy, sultry saxophone wailed, windswept on the air.

  She saw him out of the corner of her eye. Not tall, not British, not dark-haired. Not smarmy. Not that she knew a hell of a lot about him. He may have been a nasty jerk who tortured small animals while cackling with glee. But she doubted it. And she silently wondered if that didn’t fit better with the types of men she typically chose.

  The song swelled along with the tide. They could’ve been waiting out a storm on the Mediterranean, soaked and breathless in each other’s arms. Instead, she picked at a hangnail and looked out at the squall. The waves rose up and smashed against the black jetty.

  The music faded out, and she felt his eyes on her. She turned to him and pulled the earbud from her ear.

  “Thanks for letting me share your music. You think this is going to blow over soon?”

  He smiled.

  “It’s the season. You never can tell. So, tell me. Why on earth don’t you have a phone? I was kind of thinking back at the bar that maybe you were just trying to blow me off.”

  She sighed.

  “Oh, boy. That’s a long story that’s probably going to make me sound crazy. I’ll give you the short version. I got fired. I decided to come down here, maybe get some rest, a break from the hectic pace––and some other things. I turned off my phone and drove down here. I turned my phone back on and found messages from people who weren’t really my friends. These folks just wanted to hear some juicy gossip they could pass on, some little tidbit about me losing my shit that could act as an icebreaker and help them land a deal or woo a client. It was just too fake.”

  She held out her hands and shrugged.

  “So I threw my phone in the Atlantic,” she said, motioning behind them.

  He nodded.

  “Yeah. I can understand why chucking it all in the ocean might make sense. I wish I could do that some days. Only thing is, I’m kind of connected at the hip to this thing. The bar is funny these days. We still get a flock of tourists from time to time, and I never know when I’ll be asked to come in. Still, some people …”

  They both chuckled now. She felt at ease, and she opened her mouth to tell him about the strange experiences she’d been having but shut it quickly, determined not to send him bolting into the sea.

  “Tell me about Chris Silver and that fight again,” she said, leaning a little closer, fascinated and confounded by the tale.

  “What’s there to tell? He was at the Nail back in, oh, I guess it was July. Height of tourist season around here. And there’s this Staten Island asshole with his wifebeater on, tattoos up and down his arms, douchebag Pauly D hairdo. And he starts wailing on his girl. Knocked one of her teeth out and put a
knife under her chin. I mean, I guess Chris did what anyone would’ve done. He gut-punched the motherfucker, and he swiped Chris across the face with the knife.”

  It was so matter-of-fact, as if this sort of thing happened in the bar every day. She suspected he was being clever. Perhaps his wit was drier than she gave him credit for.

  “What you’re telling me is, this guy is batshit crazy?”

  He nodded slowly, staring into the swirling sea.

  “That would be an understatement.”

  He turned to face her. The sparkle of his blue eyes made her breath catch in her throat. He put a hand behind her neck and pulled her toward him. His scruffy, rough lips pressed against hers. The stubble scratched her face, just beside her lips. His tongue poked into her mouth. There was something reptilian and wrong about it. She pushed his shoulders away.

  “I’m sorry, am I moving too fast? It’s just that …”

  She watched a snake wiggle just above his tongue. The tubular outline inched forward, twisting back and forth seductively. A scaly belly jutted out from between his teeth and onto his mouth.

  The wind swept her hair as she ran. Her shoes slapped the puddles on the boardwalk. A flagpole clanged over and over as a wrapped flag whipped around. It rang like an alarm going off in her head. Someone called over her shoulder, a desperate plea for her to slow down and come back, but it was muffled by her own heartbeat and the constant thrum of rain around her.

  A block away from the Seaside, she veered off the boardwalk and down a set of steps back to the street. A car was just pulling away from a red light, but she dashed across anyway. Safely on the other side of the street, she looked over her shoulder. Bracken was nowhere to be seen. She sucked wind and pressed her hands on her knees. Her breath came in shuddering heaves, but she had to compose herself before going upstairs.

  Thudding feet against the boardwalk planks made her stand upright. Bracken made his way down the steps. She ran up to Seaside House’s porch. The front door was closed now, blocking out the torrential downpour.

  Amelia wasn’t at her desk, so she darted upstairs and sealed herself up in her bedroom.

  The hem of her sweater now drooped clownishly around her thighs. Her feet squished around in her shoes, so she yanked them off and kicked them across the floor. She pulled off her sweater and slipped out of her soaked jeans. Amelia had replaced the towels in the bathroom, a small gesture for which she was eternally grateful. She wrapped her hair into a turban and clunked around in the armoire for her terrycloth robe.

  She sat in her disheveled bed, wondering how she could make all of this stop. Was Amelia right? Was it a matter of just not drinking? Was this related to drinking at all? It was possible the stress had finally gotten to her and caused some sort of psychotic episode. A lot of things were possible. Speculation was not something she indulged in frequently. Her livelihood depended upon proven strategies and hard data, not Kentucky windage. She had to do something.

  The windows were still open, and rain pattered on the sill and the hardwood floor just inside. She got up, crossed the room in a few strides, and slammed them shut hard enough to rattle the panes.

  Just beyond the droplets on the glass, Bracken came into view, drenched and holding a hand over his eyes. He stood, soaked to the bone, and waved at her. The defeat in his face tugged at her, but she couldn’t ignore what she’d seen. Dragging someone else through her problems, whatever they might be, seemed like the cruelest thing of all. Tori drew the feather-light curtains and walked away.

  She flopped down on the bed and tried to think of other things. What she really wanted, what she really needed, was a drink. That desire to block all of this out, to numb it so completely that it was a black tarp over the pain, was etched on her bones. The tremor in her hands worked its way up to her shoulders and into her torso so that every part of her trembled and quaked.

  Tomorrow. She decided tomorrow would be the day she’d seek out some help. Maybe she could get Amelia to help her find a meeting. If Amelia was right and these visions, these terrors, she was experiencing were down to her drinking, it was time to kick the habit for good.

  She pulled her robe tight around her neck and relished the comfort. She slid beneath the sheets and listened to the rain tap the roof until her eyes drooped. She sank into the lumpy mattress, embraced by the lull of sleep.

  It seemed like no time had passed at all, but sometime during the night, her eyes snapped open at the sensation she was being watched. The lamp by the bed still glowed, and she felt disoriented from waking up in a strange room with a strange light.

  The curtains swayed and danced in some sort of invisible wind. The windows remained shut. The storm had abated, and only drips from the eaves and the awning remained. A face appeared from the folds and lines of the cloth. A slit of a mouth offset two evil eyes. The eyebrows were pressed together in hatred. The curve of the cheek was familiar, that of the girl in the nightmares she had so often.

  She pressed her knees into her chest. The breeze picked up until she had to wrap herself in the blanket to stop the squall from freezing her through. It was as if someone cranked the air conditioner to the coldest setting and put it on full blast.

  A gravelly voice echoed in her head: Go to the phone. It’s for you.

  She glanced at the antique telephone on the nightstand, but she knew––how did she know ––that wasn’t the phone the voice meant. The shakes eased, and she threw off the blankets. The room was still frigid, and her feet seared against the wooden floor as she stood. The now-familiar stench of alcohol-tinged sweat filled her nose, and she realized it was her own. The booze seeped from her pores.

  Tiny hairs stood on end at the back of her neck. She was overcome by the feeling of someone charging at her. This threatening thing propelled her out the bedroom door, down the stairs, and out into the chill of the October night. Her bare feet froze against the rain-drenched grass, but she ignored the shooting pain that went up her legs and walked, arms pumping and legs burning, across the street and down the boardwalk. The threatening presence lurked at her back. It felt so real, she looked over her shoulder, only to find the glow of streetlamps and the outline of cars parked at the meters on Beach. That reassurance did nothing to stop her feet from moving, nearly running now, splintered and bitten.

  The trill of the payphone rang out as she drew closer to the dead end, a bright jingle at first. Breathless anxiety tightened her chest as she approached, and the peal turned into an angry reverberation.

  She extended her hand and felt electricity course down to her elbow. The glossy black plastic felt like a chunk of ice in her fingers. Her mouth went dry, and she coughed hoarsely to catch her breath. A crackle sizzled from the earpiece. She pressed it to her ear.

  How does it feel? How does it feel to be haunted every moment of the day, every second of the night? You can’t just drink your problems away anymore, Victoria.

  The voice dripped with contempt when it said her name. A shock went down her spine as she listened.

  You took my girl from me. She was everything in the world I had, and you ripped her out of my arms. Now she’s lying in a cold box in the ground instead of smiling and laughing and going out with her friends. How does it feel to know you’ll never be able to run away from that? You can’t erase her with a bottle.

  The phone went silent for a moment, and she pulled the phone away.

  Victoria. Victoria.

  The voice was insistent. It was not done with her yet.

  Victoria? Victoria? Are you there? It’s Mom. Honey, are you there?

  “Mom? What’s the matter? How can you be calling me here? You don’t even know where I am.”

  The sound of her own high-pitched, tear-swallowed voice irritated her.

  Victoria? It’s your father. Oh, God, how can I even tell you this? He’s dead. Honey, Dad is gone.

  “Dead? How? What happened? Mom? What’s wrong?”

  The line went dead. The earpiece gouged into the flesh of her e
ar, and she listened to the drone of the dial tone until a robotic voice said, “If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try again.”

  Her knees crashed onto the concrete, and a wave of tears rolled up and out of her. Every part of her, from the strands of her hair to the bottoms of her feet ached. She envisioned her father, yellow and bloated, his eyes closed in death’s repose. Was it real? Was anything real? She wailed, fists scraped and bloody as she pounded them against the sidewalk, wishing it all away with every strike, hoping somehow beating the hell out of herself would make it false.

  Boop-boop-beep. If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and try …

  A pair of arms hefted her up. Tori swung around, legs wobbling and unsteady, ready to use what was left of her waning strength to either fight or flee.

  Amelia held up her hands. Tori fell into her warm arms and buried her head into her chest.

  She pulled back a moment and wiped snot from her nose with the back of her hand.

  “I want help,” she whimpered. “I need help. Will you help me?”

  Amelia’s chest heaved in a deep breath. She closed her eyes a moment, and when she opened them again, she nodded.

  “Come on. It’s freezing out here. I’ll start a fire.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Amelia poked the glowing logs farther back and tossed two more onto the popping fire. It rose up, casting long shadows on the sitting room. The armchair Tori curled herself into loomed ominously in the glow.

  Amelia went to the closet at the corner and rifled through some papers in a box. She retrieved a pile of pamphlets and business cards. Tori clutched her mug of tea and looked puzzled.

  She shoved the pile at her, and Tori took them, glancing over the titles. Amelia knew them all by heart. “AA and You,” “AA for the Woman,” “Do You Think You’re Different,” “Inside AA,” and “Is There an Alcoholic in Your Life?”

  Yes. There was an alcoholic in her life, and it wasn’t the first time. She’d packed all those things into the closet after Bill died, and she’d never wanted to see them again. But she couldn’t turn away someone in need. She already felt like she could have done more to stop Bill from the slow suicide he chose.