25. Deadweight
25
Deadweight
BY THE TIME I made it back to the bed-and-breakfast, I looked like a drowned rat and my teeth were chattering, but I didn’t really care. I felt okay again—better than I had since I landed at the airport. Like a weight had been . . . not lifted, no, it was still there, but it had gotten a little lighter. Dad was gone, and I was grieving, and it was going to be okay.
It wasn’t yet—but it would be. I didn’t know you could feel like that. I didn’t know
I
could feel like that again—okay.
Not good, but better.
“Thank you,” I told Ben once I latched closed the wrought iron gate to the inn, and started up the stone path to the front porch. There was a light burning in the foyer; Dana sitting at the desk reading. I paused inside the porch, so I was no longer getting rained on, and turned on my heels back to the ghost of my dead editor. I was almost eye level with him standing on the third step, though he was still a little taller.
“I should probably be saying that,” he replied, his hands in his
pockets, sleeves rolled up to his elbows to expose the tattoo on his forearm again. It was numbers. A date, I realized. From about five years ago. And half of a signature that looked familiar, but it was half-hidden by his sleeve. He looked less put together than he had a few hours before. The top three buttons on his shirt were undone, his tie lost somewhere in the netherworld between here and there.
He asked, “You always take ghosts to scream in the rain?”
I tore my eyes away from his forearm. “No, I only take people I like.”
“Then you like me?”
“I haven’t exorcised you yet.”
He barked a laugh. “Another talent of yours?”
“You should’ve seen the last ghost. Had to shoo him away with holy water.”
He laughed again, and shifted on his feet. We stood awkwardly. My heart hammered in my throat, and I curled my fingers tightly into my palms because all I wanted to do was reach out, brush his floppy hair out of his face. He needed a haircut. Then again, I liked his hair when it wasn’t gelled to perfection. It curled at his ears and at the nape of his neck, the kind of curls I’d wrap around my fingers and toy with.
This felt like one of those moments when I should’ve said something. Anything. How much I appreciated his help, and how much I liked him near, and how sorry I was that he was dead—
We were on a boat passing under a bridge, for a second in the shadow, a moment—
the
moment—like the moment I felt with Lee in that private library, when I accepted his hand and let him pull me toward places unknown, like the moment with Stacey in the college bar in SoHo, when he asked my favorite ice cream flavor, and Quinn when he offered me a stick of gum in civics, and John in high school, inviting me out to pizza with his friends after prom.
Small moments you catch, and keep in glass jars like fireflies, or you let go.
I couldn’t catch this moment; I couldn’t keep it—I couldn’t keep
him.
Better than anyone else, I knew what happened when I got too close to someone already dead, when I opened my heart and let someone in. It had happened before, and I found his murdered corpse on the Ridge three days later. A stupid, small part of me had thought he was still alive. But he wasn’t. He was a ghost.
Ben, too, was a ghost. Not alive.
Not
real
.
If I wasn’t careful, I’d make that mistake again.
And he knew it was a mistake, too, because we both let the moment pass, and found ourselves on the other side. He was meticulous. He thought things through. Of course he wouldn’t do anything, he wouldn’t say anything, he’d keep me at arm’s length for both of our sakes.
But then why was I so frustrated that he did?
He cleared his throat and nodded toward the door. “You should probably go inside before you catch your own death.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I replied, and quickly turned away from him and went inside.
Dana was sitting at the front desk, reading another book. An N. K. Jemisin fantasy this time. They looked up when they heard the bell above the door chime, and jumped off their stool. “You’re soaking wet!” they cried, grabbing a towel from underneath the desk, and coming around the side to hand it to me.
“Thank you so much.” I took the towel from them, and dried my hair before it dripped all across the hardwood floor. Then I wrapped it around myself and gave a shiver. “Damn weather tonight.”
“You’re telling me,” they replied, returning to their post. “The weather apps didn’t even give us a warning—”
“Oh, look, there’s our
famous
author,” came a voice from the living area. A chill curled down my spine. And there, sitting so properly in one of the IKEA chairs in the living area, was Heather Griffin.
Everyone had that
one person
who made their high school career unbearable, and Heather was mine. We had been friends for a brief moment, until she came to the conclusion that I was crazy after the murder case. She never believed that I talked with ghosts—she thought I was looking for attention. She was also one of the main reasons why the rest of Mairmont thought so, too.
“Who were you talking to outside, Florence?” Heather went on with an innocent look. She was accompanied by a group of women who looked like a book club, laughing behind their copies of Ann Nichols’s
Midnight Matinee
.
“I was just—you know—talking. To myself,” I mumbled. Idiot. I was an idiot to get so comfortable in Mairmont. I should’ve known better.
Out of the corner of my eye, Ben moved slowly into the lobby, his hands no longer in his pockets but on his hips. He stared in at the book club with pursed lips.
Dana, bless them, leaned forward on their stool and said loudly, “How’s your stay, Florence? Do you need anything? Towels, shampoo? Peace and quiet?” they added pointedly, darting their eyes at Heather.
She smoothed on a smile and poured herself a glass of lemon-infused water from the dispenser on the far side of the desk. “Well, I know when I’ve overstayed my welcome. It was nice to see you, Florence. Maybe we should catch up sometime,” she added, scrunching her nose with a grin, and clipped her way back into the living area, where book club resumed.
I sighed and leaned against the desk. “Damn. For two seconds I’d forgotten about her.”
“Lucky.” Dana laughed. “I could send you up with a bottle of wine? We’ve got a new red in from the Biltmore that is
gloriously
bitter.”
“Don’t tempt me! I still have Dad’s obituary to write. And I somehow have to find
wildflowers
.”
“There’s some growing in the back garden if you need them.”
“A thousand of them?”
They winced. “Yikes, sadly not.”
“See, that’s my problem. And wildflowers are so
vague
—never mind I don’t have a thousand dollars to spend on a florist to find me some.”
In the lounge, the book club tittered some more. I would be lying if I said I didn’t want to hear what they were saying about
Midnight Matinee
. Ben was leaning against the doorway, hands crossed over his chest, listening in on them. His face didn’t tell me anything, except that he was either bored with their analysis of my writing or he wasn’t paying attention to them at
all.
“Hmm.” Dana drummed their fingers on the oak desk, thinking. “You could try the Ridge, maybe? It’s become part of the state park now. You might find some there, if the season’s not too early.”
I winced. “Yeah, I’ve thought about the Ridge.” Hadn’t been back there since that day. Of course wildflowers would be there, the one place I didn’t want to look. But it turned out, I might not have had the choice. “Thanks. I’ll hike up there tomorrow and see it.”
“Great, and lemme know how it goes?”
“Sure thing. You’re a lifesaver.”
“Shucks!”
I grabbed one of the mints from the bowl and began to head up the stairs when my name caught my ears—a bare whisper, but there. From the living room. The women in the book club were
talking about me now, and if who they had been in high school was any indication, it wasn’t anything good. My shoulders tensed.
Dana mouthed that I didn’t have to go, but I did. I’d spent ten years running from these assholes, and I was sick and damn tired of it.
Ben warned as I passed, “Don’t pick a fight.”
Oh, I wasn’t.
Heather quickly righted herself in the chair with an air of innocence. She’d been bent in toward some of the other women, whispering over their bookmarked novels. I wondered if they’d even read it, or if buying romance novels to never read and gossip over them was the newest trend. Heather looked like I remembered her, pretty brown hair and pretty brown eyes and a pretty smile over soft pink lips. She wore a sleek black skirt and a paisley-printed blouse. I remembered Dad once telling me that Karen had hired her as a clerk at her legal firm in town.
She smiled with strikingly white teeth. “Would you care to join us? We’re big fans of Ann Nichols.”
I bet she was.
I swallowed the rebuke bubbling up in my throat and sat down on the fainting couch beside her. “I love
Midnight Matinee
.”
“Nichols hasn’t written a bad book yet,” said one of the other book club attendees happily. “I devour all of them the
second
they come out.”
“I hear there’s a new one this fall,” said another woman. She was older, with curly gray hair and in a leopard-print sweater. “Haven’t heard anything about it yet, though.”
I could
feel
Ben staring at the back of my head at that comment.
Heather asked me with a fixed smile, “What was that one book you wrote, Florence? We’d love to read it for our book club next month.”
I returned the smile, and it was a real one. “Seaburn said you already read it when it came out.”
“Oh? Must’ve forgotten . . .”
I was sure she hadn’t. I took a deep breath. Wrestled my emotions under control. I was an adult, and I wasn’t running anymore. “I know you don’t like me, Heather, and I know it was you who spread those rumors about me in high school—that I was crazy or a devil worshipper or whatever.”
She went rigid and darted her gaze around the rest of the book club. A few of them went to high school with us. They knew. The others had a passing, vague recollection of what happened. It
was
a small town, after all. “It was hardly just me. It was Bradley and TJ and—”
“I forgive you.”
She blinked. “Excuse me?”
“And I forgive me, too,” I went on. “I was so wrapped up in what everyone else thought of me I didn’t recognize that I actually did something good.”
“You found a body, Florence,” she said dismissively, rolling her eyes. “It wasn’t like you
solved the case
of what’s his name—”
“Harry. His name was Harry O’Neal.” My mouth flattened into a thin line. “He was in our grade. He sat right behind you in math.”
She narrowed her eyes. Did she remember? Probably not. She probably hadn’t thought about the boy murdered on the Ridge in fifteen years.
“The thing is, Heather,” I went on, “I believe people. Even if it’s weird, even if it doesn’t make sense, I want to believe them. I want to see the good in them. I give my heart to everyone I meet and I put it in everything I do. And sometimes it hurts—often it hurts, actually . . .” And I glanced back to Ben, wishing I had taken that
moment on the porch and trapped it in a jar. “I can’t ever control how someone else treats me, but I can control how I choose to live and how I choose to treat others. And I’d worried about what other people thought and what other people wanted from me for
years
because I actually thought it mattered.” My eyebrows furrowed as I realized that I wasn’t just talking about Heather now, but Lee, too. People who had taken what they wanted from me, twisted my good intentions, and turned them into something sour.
“Florence, I don’t know where this is coming from,” Heather said, feigning shock, but the rest of the book club was quiet. Some had opened their books; others were scrolling through their phones. I didn’t know what they thought of me, but I realized I didn’t give a single fuck.
“So I forgive you,” I said to her, “because you don’t understand, and I’m not going to explain it to you. He liked you, though. Harry. Right up until the end.” Then I stood and took one of the cookies from the coffee table, and bit into it. “Have fun, y’all,” I added, and left the lounge area.
Dana gave me a weathered salute as I climbed the stairs and mouthed, “Holy shit.”
Holy shit indeed. I didn’t let myself pause until I was almost at the top of the stairs. My hands were shaking.
I let out a solid breath and dug around in my satchel for my room key.
Ben came up the stairs behind me. “Harry? He’s the boy you helped?”
“Yeah. When I was thirteen, Harry—his ghost—came to me one evening like you did, but I didn’t think he was dead because, you know, I’d
just
seen him that day at school. But he was. We didn’t know why he was still around. He couldn’t remember how he died, either. So I . . . helped him find out.” I tried not to think
about that year, the police investigation, the national news coverage, the rumors at school where people called me crazy at best, an accomplice at worst. “You know the rest.”
He said, a bit sadly, “You liked him.”
“I always have had to learn things the hard way.” I tried at a joke, but it fell a little flat.
He reached out, but then stopped himself and crossed his arms over his chest. His biceps strained his tailored shirt, not that I was looking. Because I wasn’t. Because he was so very off-limits.
The lock clicked and I shouldered the door open. “And anyway, thank you for tonight.”
“Sweet dreams,” he replied and pushed off the wall to leave.
A thought occurred to me as he made his way back down the hall. “Where do you go?” The question surprised him because he turned back around on his heels toward me. “I mean—ghosts don’t sleep, so . . .”
He shrugged. “I wander. Until I disappear, then I usually just come back somewhere near you.”
“And you still don’t know where you go?”
He shook his head.
“Well, you’re welcome to . . .”
Sit in my room
, but that sounded weird. It
was
weird. For all I knew I was inviting him to stare at me while I slept á la Edward Cullen. He said he was a romantic, so it was really a coin toss on whether he’d be flattered to role-play
Twilight
or aghast that I’d remotely consider it. I shook my head and said, “Never mind. Have a good night, Ben.”
“You, too, Florence.”
I closed the door and pressed my back against it, because I felt my heart beating—so fast it felt like it wanted to jump right out of my chest. He had been so close to me, so close I noticed the thin
scar under his right eyebrow, and the beauty mark above his lip, and the fine black hairs on his arms and—
“I am in
so
much trouble,” I said under my breath as I opened my laptop.
And not just because I was falling for—
I
wasn’t
falling.
I couldn’t.
I tried not to entertain the idea as I pulled up Dad’s obituary again, and stared at the blank document.
Then I took a deep breath, and remembering what my Mom told me earlier, I started with a simple story.
I started with goodbye.