Breathing ghosts, p.3
Breathing Ghosts, page 3
I see blurry flashes of my arm, a leg, the back of my head—Nia’s attempts at getting a shot of me when I wasn’t looking. I flip through a few more of her slipping into the shot—a goofy face, a strange pose she’d manufactured in that split second when I had my head turned. I almost laugh, but it tastes strange, wrong.
But then I flip to a photo of me standing in the women’s intimates’ aisle of the Wal-Mart on Colonial, a pair of silky underwear pulled up over my jeans, arms strung through the straps of a triple F sized bra. And I don’t want to but I can’t help it. A laugh starts in my gut and I can’t swallow it back down. Jesus. Nia’d dared me to walk to the register with them on but I couldn’t make it past the sock aisle.
There are others. Me with my arms around Nia’s waist. Me with my lips resting against her cheek. Nia with her head on my shoulder. My hands in places I will never brush again, pieces of her I’ll never hold.
I set them aside, trying to trap this feeling in that torn plastic bag, the heat smothering it like everything else. But then I see the smooth cream shadow of something just as devastating and familiar.
I pull out Nia’s map, the ends unbound and curling against my leg. I trace the crisp lines of continents and miniature landmarks, tiny, almost invisible pinholes spilling down like a mane.
I remember how it used to hang behind her bedroom door, my eyes always being pulled to the neon sticky notes fluttering along the bottom when I would climb through her bedroom window at night—scribbled notes and doodles reminding her to add some new destination.
My heart sinks into my lap, the weight pinning me to the seat. I see the long fin of Florida and trace a line of tiny holes trailing the southern coast—New Orleans to Austin and then up to Tucson—and then I’m drawn to a flurry of tactile markers sprawling like a snowflake from Venice to Paris to London—mapping a journey, a life confined to one-dimension because the body is no longer here to give it shape.
I glance back at the sliding glass doors of the hardware store, sunlight glinting off the surface making them shudder like a mirage. The same doors I’ve trudged through for almost two years, feet always tripping over the rubber mat in the entryway, a subtle indication of the rest of my day—unloading trucks and counting inventory, sweeping up spilled fertilizer and broken glass. The same meaningless shit stuck on repeat, save for those moments when I can sneak out early or convince the stoners to let me take a hit of one of their cheap joints.
I hate it but the truth is, it’s easier to go through the motions here than to waste time looking for something better. Especially when I know I’ll never find it. Especially not now.
I keep watching the door. I don’t see Steve’s slimy grimace but I know he’s probably noticed I’m gone, peering over bathroom stalls, searching every storage closet for me and growing giddier by the minute at the idea of trimming my check for ditching.
I roll the map, careful not to leave any creases or lose any of Nia’s notes. My sweaty hands leave a shadow along the thin paper and I rake them across my pant legs before I touch anything else.
Back inside I slip into one of the aisles, fiddling with a few price stickers peeling from the metal shelves and trying to look busy while I wait for Steve to come creeping around the corner, frozen in disappointment when he sees I’m still at work. And as if the universe couldn’t wait to see it either, he appears, forest green vest limp over his knobby shoulders, one hand hiked up on his frail hip.
“I’ve been looking for you all over the place,” he says, voice ringing with disdain.
“Not hard enough, I guess,” I say just to be an asshole. I can clearly see the poor guy’s winded.
“I need you to clean something up in the back.”
I see the tight end of his mustache fighting the urge to curl into a smile and I immediately think of the time someone imploded all over the men’s bathroom, shit missing the toilet completely and somehow managing to be smeared across the walls of the stall spelling out the words FUCK FORESTRY.
I never saw it with my own eyes and therefore (thank God) wasn’t the one to have to clean it. But ask any of the potheads who work here and they’ll recount every disgusting and horrifying detail with both a crippling fear and unwavering awe which would only be reserved for the most haunting and undisputable of legends.
I follow Steve to the back of the store, practicing breathing through my mouth, my limbs dragging as nausea looms. But instead of leading me down the dank dimly lit corridor to the public restrooms he takes a left past the rubber and fiberglass double doors that read employees only.
I see Malcolm, another part-timer who looks like he’s barely out of middle school. He’s crouching next to a cardboard delivery box, elbow-deep in screws.
“There was a problem with the delivery,” Steve says.
Malcolm glances up for a second and just rolls his eyes.
“The screws weren’t separated out by size beforehand so now we have to do it.”
Malcolm lets out a sigh and I’m assuming it’s at Steve’s use of the word we. It’s a term he uses to build camaraderie but I’m pretty sure he abandoned the concept the second he became manager.
“There’s about six thousand; four different sizes, and they’ll also need to be counted for inventory purposes.”
He pats me delicately on the shoulder and I instinctually swipe at him as if he were a fly.
He flinches and then turns on his heel to go. “I’ll just leave you two to it.”
I circle the box, taking in its girth. I peel my shirt from the back of my neck as I remember that there’s no air conditioning back here.
The second the door falls closed Malcolm rolls onto his back and moans, “This fucking sucks.”
I crouch across from him, unsure of where or how to start. “How long have you been doing this shit?” I say.
“More than an hour. My brain is shot.”
I can see the back of his shirt is soaked and I can’t imagine doing this for an hour, sifting through screws while I bake in this concrete oven. So instead I just sit there, one arm flung over the side of the box, fingertips grazing the rough necks of each screw, my eyes on the ground. Even Malcolm’s moaning starts to evaporate in the heat, every second churning my blood to a steady boil.
I trace the sloping lines of Nia’s map across the dark concrete floor, filling in the cracks with rivers and winding back roads. My vest starts to itch and I peel it off, flinging it on the floor beside me. I hear a faint crack and glance at the, I love forestry button to see a thin clear line cutting through the words and suddenly I feel the urge to laugh. But I’m too tired to laugh so instead I unfasten the pin, needle stiff in the shape of an L and lower my thumb onto its apex.
The sharp tip beds in the calloused skin, a hint of silver flashing beneath the translucent surface. Then, as it slips free, red bubbling from the wound, I think about how I’ve never even been to a fucking forest in my life, how I’ve never really been anywhere.
And I think about how that’s what she’d wanted more than anything. An adventure. To leave and never come back.
Sometimes I’d pretend I wanted that too. But then I’d think about the two of us just going and I wasn’t sure. Life isn’t just about being in motion. It’s about bills and sleeping in a shitty apartment, eating ramen noodles and stealing cable from the tenant upstairs. Doing laundry on Sunday afternoons. Arguing about whose turn it is to do the dishes.
Not having a plan doesn’t mean you can just skip through all of the hard parts. We’d have to stop eventually. We’d have to find jobs. We’d have to grow up. So I’d stayed. She wanted to go and I stayed. In my mother’s house. Working at the hardware store. Pretending like I knew what I was waiting for.
My limbs are heavy and I see Malcolm has slumped onto the floor, his shirt up over his head, trying to cool himself down. The door is only a few feet away, unlocked, its opening completely unobstructed and yet this dumb fuck would rather cook his insides, bitching through the entire process, than just get up and walk out. Or maybe it hasn’t occurred to him that he can.
“Hey kid,” I say.
Malcolm just moans in reply.
“The fucking door’s right there.”
I step over his writhing body, tossing my vest in a crumpled mess at his feet, and push through those double doors, the cold air waking every inch of me.
Chapter 4
Summer
Nia’d dragged me from my bed—a soft tap on my window, a note slipping in through the corner of broken glass. I unfolded it and saw a small map; a dotted trail leading from my bedroom window to the middle school I’d be prisoner to at the end of the summer.
It was just a few blocks away and when I reached the end of the street I saw Nia in the schoolyard. She’d run there on bare feet, her hair in one of those neon rubber bands, ponytail bouncing as she waved me over.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
She’d yanked on my arm, pulling me around the side of the building to the yellowed practice field. A breeze slipped in through my clothes, the warm night carving between the concrete walls.
“Hold out your hand,” she said.
I did and she handed me an empty toilet paper roll, a bright green twine edging out from beneath a glowing mass of construction paper.
“Now watch this.”
She scooped up the paper and started running, the string unraveling and growing taut. And then she let go, the kite spiraling into the air. It wafted there, sinking, but then a gust of wind tore out from between the buildings and it shot up again. It was a giant whale, its skin rippled and glowing.
“My mom had some paint left over from Halloween,” Nia said. “Do you like it?”
I let the string twist around my wrist, my thumb leading the whale into a fast dive before climbing up again, tail trembling in the wind.
“It’s so cool. You made this?”
She nodded and then reached for the other glowing mass at my feet. I held the spool and she took off running again, a star slowly rising into the night. It was bright green like the whale and it had a long tail, strips of tissue paper tangling into a braid as the star started to spin.
We raced across the field, star and beast engaged in an epic battle, our twine tangling and ripping free. Nia’s star got caught in one of the trees lining the building and I climbed to the tallest branch to free it. For hours she chased the night and I chased her, running until we were both doubled over and out of breath.
She collapsed in the grass, the kites still twisting above us as I sat down next to her. We lay there on our backs, spools clutched to our chests as the kites sank down, the breeze finally letting go of them. The whale settled against my knees, the star landing just above Nia’s head. I rolled up the string and tried to hand it back to her but she shook her head.
“You can keep it.”
“Oh, no. I shouldn’t.”
She looked at me and smiled. “But I made it for you.”
“For me?” I felt my skin grow hot.
She nodded. “Yeah, it’s yours.”
I knew I shouldn’t take it. I knew better than to try and save things. But when she smiled there was something about it that I wanted to take home with me, to tuck somewhere safe. And that kite—glowing, phosphorescent—was the closest thing. So I took it. I tucked it under my shirt and I took it with me, the whale growing dim as the sun chased me home.
Chapter 5
28.5° N, 81.4° W
I peel off my clothes, still damp and smelling of minimum wage, and toss them with the rest of my dirty laundry. My grand exit had lasted for a mere twelve seconds and then no one even noticed me, vest-less and headed for those double doors.
I wasn’t looking for some kind of confrontation, though I would have liked to go off on Steve at least once. But I wasn’t even sure what exactly I’d just done. Did I just quit my job? Was I just blowing off steam by ditching out early? I haven’t decided yet even though I know being broke might force me back there eventually, which is a thought I just can’t bare right now.
I’d stuffed the box of Nia’s things under my bed, one of the lips jutting out from beneath the blankets. I kick at it with my heel, trying to wedge it out of sight but it won’t budge. I fall back onto the bed, exhausted, and I try to close my eyes, the lids burning red from the daylight still lingering outside my window. It’s almost two in the afternoon and I know I shouldn’t let myself sleep but maybe for once, just this one time I could let myself give in.
I’m trying not to think, to fill my head with the kind of emptiness sleep thrives on when I hear my mother, her steps light as she makes her way down the hall. She must have just gotten home from work—she’s a clerk at a grocery store—because I can hear her moving into the bedroom and slipping off her shoes, the rubber soles landing with a muted thud against the carpet.
I can see those shoes, the laces fading to a milky brown, soles smoothed from the wear of those squeaky linoleum floors. I can see every dark scuff and tear and suddenly there is an ache deep in the back of my throat.
My mother has had the same job for almost fifteen years, almost as long as I’ve been alive and all I know about what she does or how she feels about what she does is by the wear on her clothes and the way her face changes when someone mentions it.
I always try to ignore the shadows on her face. It’s a darkness I’ve always associated with Jack but really he’s only a part of it. I try to remember what it was like before, me and my mom in that one room efficiency, curled into each other on a mattress on the floor. Just the two of us.
I can remember the smells—cat piss wafting from the open windows of the tenant next door, my mother’s strawberry shampoo, the bleach and hot water she used to wash our sheets. But it’s like my other senses were numbed.
I see flashes of her hunched over, eyes closed, or leaning against the door and slipping on her shoes, standing in front of the mirror and throwing her hair into a tight bun. But she’s never smiling and she’s never looking at me.
The first time my mother overdosed I was fourteen. I’d gotten home late from football practice and found her face down on the mattress, legs hanging off the foot of the bed, one arm twisted behind her back as if someone had flung her there.
I’d climbed onto the bed, fingers digging into her shoulders, trying to wake her. I shook her and poked her and squeezed her and screamed her name. Then I saw the fraying corner of the sheet fluttering next to her mouth.
I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the telephone, chord snaking through the house as I dialed 911. Then all I could do was sit next to her body, mouth between the receiver and her ear as I waited for the ambulance to come.
I try to stifle that feeling, that fear, but it’s rising to the surface and fast. I feel it weighing me down and I stare at my hands, registering their size, trying to will my conscious to recognize that I’ve grown, that I’m different even if nothing else is.
But then I think about sitting on the school steps, the sun a thin burning line just past the trees, dead leaves sputtering across the empty lot. I think about my knees tucked into my chest, body shuddering as I tried to sleep with an empty stomach. I think about the studded silver buckle on Jack’s belt digging into my skin, my mother a still and silent shadow behind him. And then I finally fall asleep to the familiar sound of my mother, thumb poised over her lighter, and the flick flick flick of the flame coming to life.
***
My eyes open, trading one darkness for another. I glance at the alarm clock. 12:51 AM. Headlights swell behind my bedroom window, flashing against the curtain as someone pulls into the driveway across the street. But as my eyes adjust I see something next to my bed, something watching me.
I hear the click of her teeth first, a soft inhale, and then, “Riv?”
I’m completely still. Listening. She turns to face me, light flickering in her irises and my heart crawls into my throat. I see the map sprawled across the floor in front of her.
“Why do you have this?” she says.
“Nia?” My lip trembles and my spine goes cold.
“Did you take it?”
I watch where she presses her hands to the edge of the bed, blankets dimpling around her fingers. Her face is so close, every hair and freckle and eyelash fixed with divine precision exactly the way I remember them.
My hand inches across the space between us, fingers straining for her hand, for her skin, for any part of her that might be real. But before I can reach her, her voice stops me again, the words tangible as her breath mingles with mine.
“Did—?”
“No,” I say. “Nia, please.”
I don’t know what it is I’m asking for, why every word I think to say sounds like some kind of plea. But it’s like my body can sense the fragility of this moment and I can already see her fading. She slumps back down onto the floor and I want to crawl next to her but I don’t. I can’t move.
Her voice cuts through the darkness. “I’ll wait.”
Something sharp like relief catches in my chest. “What?”
“Don’t forget this,” she says.
But in the dark I can’t see if she’s holding the map or looking at me or pointing to something else equally as invisible.
“What do you—?” I start, but her voice absorbs the final syllable.
“When you go.”
And then the darkness folds in on itself with a shudder, my eyes straining on the invisible void where Nia just sat, and she is gone.
Chapter 6
Winter
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