That evening in my room, I went over the afternoon’s events with Zach.
“I reckon y’put the skeer in her back there.”
“Put the what?” I asked.
“You skeered her; frightened her.”
I flopped back on my bed. “Ah, I scared her. Yeah, I did that. I was brilliant wasn’t I? Next time she sees me she’ll probably just call the cops.”
Zach shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. The girl’s skittish, sure, but give her a night t’think on things and I reckon she’ll come around. She recognized your description of that ghost and that’s bound t’rouse her curiosity.”
I looked down at Amy’s backpack lying open on my floor. I’d found a phone number on an ID tag inside. Tomorrow would be Saturday. I could give her a call…
“Yeah,” I said, “you might be right. Besides, she has to go through me to get her backpack.”
By the time I got up on Saturday morning, the apartment was empty.
Dad was spending his Saturdays at his office, madly translating Eugnosis of Alexandria, and Mom was working the day shift at the Shop Rite.
It took awhile to work up the nerve, but I finally called the number I’d found in Amy’s backpack.
The phone rang four times before anyone picked it up.
“Hello?” Her grandmother…
“Hello. Could I please speak to Amy?”
The voice sounded surprised. I guessed that Amy hadn’t been getting all that many phone calls lately. “Amy?” she paused. “Amy? Yes, she’s here. Just a moment.”
I heard her call out, “Amy, telephone! There’s a young man who’d like to speak to you.”
Jeez.
Amy sounded wary. “Hello?”
I jumped in before she could hang up on me. “Amy, it’s me, Marc. Look, I’m sorry about yesterday…I…well…I’ve got your backpack here and I want to get it back to you, and…”
She cut me off. “No, it’s okay. I’m sorry. I freaked. I…oh God I hit you, didn’t I?”
“It’s okay, I’ll live.”
“I’m so sorry. I…well…people are so mean, I just thought that you… Anyway, I thought about it last night. I…I didn’t sleep much. I think I trust you…I just…”
I interrupted her. “I know this is freaky stuff I’m telling you, but…look, can we meet somewhere? I don’t want to talk on the phone. Where do you live?”
She gave me an address on the other side of town.
“Can you meet me in front of the library at Gierman College? Say, in an hour?”
Amy agreed.
As I headed for the library it started raining.
Great.
It didn’t look like we would be doing any reflecting and contemplating on Henry Clay’s bench that afternoon.
Amy was already waiting under the overhang at the entrance to the library when I arrived. She must have left right after I hung up.
She had added a huge army surplus overcoat to her usual ensemble. It wasn’t very stylish, but it looked like it kept her dry.
I decided to try to be casual. “Nice day, huh?”
Amy gave me an ironic smile. “If it don’t rain.”
Humor! Always a good sign.
I said, “Looks like that bench we were at yesterday isn’t going to work for us today. We can go to my place; nobody’ll bother us there.”
Amy looked like she was going to say something, then thought the better of it. Instead she just shrugged. “Okay.”
We walked across campus in silence until we arrived at the married student housing complex. Then, standing on the porch outside our apartment, I pulled off my coat and fumbled for my key.
Amy silently shrugged off her raincoat as I opened the door.
I took it from her and hung it up. “Be it ever so humble…”
We stood in our tiny living room and Amy looked around. “Your folks have a lot of books. Are they students?”
I gave her the short version. Dad’s life as a gypsy professor, Mom’s career as a minimum wage Jill-of-all-trades. I left out Eugnosis of Alexandria and just said that they were both at work.
“A professor,” Amy said absently. “That’s nice.” She pulled a strand of wet hair out of her face. “I mean, it must be interesting to have a father who’s so smart and…I don’t know.”
She didn’t seem all that strong in the finished thoughts department.
“So what does your dad do?”
Suddenly Amy’s face went all hard. “My dad? My dad says cruel things, slaps people around and then leaves the family when I’m six years old.”
O-kay, wrong question.
“That doesn’t sound like a very promising career path. Sorry I asked.”
Amy gave me another one of her half-smiles. “No, it’s okay. He was a jerk. I don’t think about him that much.”
I sat down in Dad’s reading chair. I knew there was no point in waiting for the subject to introduce itself, so I just took a deep breath and asked, “And your mother…I mean if it’s okay my asking…what happened to her?”
Amy’s face clouded over again. “To Mama?” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “She died. She got in a car wreck. She…they said she’d been drinking.”
Jeez. It looked like the Shop-Rite gossip mill had the basics of the story down.
But I wanted to hear Amy’s version.
“That’s hard,” I mumbled. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged, staring at the floor. “Wasn’t your fault.”
Then she gave start, like she’d remembered something. “But you…you saw her! That dress! It was the one she was wearing when she…”
Another thought unfinished. “…and the necklaces! Gramp gave her those! He gave her the cross on her thirteenth birthday and that locket when I was born! How could you know that?”
“I don’t know anything. It’s what I saw. I didn’t even know she was your mother at first.”
It was time to come out with it.
I took another deep breath. “This is going to sound crazy, but…I can see ghosts. I don’t go around telling people this, because I don’t like the idea of living out my days in a psycho ward, but it’s true.”
Amy nodded.
It was weird. I guess I expected her to at least be skeptical, roll her eyes, give me a “yeah, right” or start making excuses and split. Instead, she just accepted my explanation as if it was perfectly natural.
I told her about my accident. The short version. She’d heard about near death experiences before.
I didn’t mention Zach, (whose presence I’d forcibly forbidden). I was trying to keep things simple.
When I finished, Amy sat silently, thinking. Then quietly, “And Mama? What do you know about Mama?”
I took long hard look at the floor while I tried to find the right words. “I saw her on my first day in English class. She was hovering right above you. I think…well, it’s like she’s calling out to you. Like she’s trying to find you or something.”
I described her mother’s actions, how it seemed like she was running but never getting anywhere, how she’d stop like she was listening to something, then how desperate she looked when she silently screamed, “Amy!”
As I described all this, Amy seemed to get more and more agitated. Her eyes grew wider and wider, slowly filling with tears.
When she finally spoke, her voice was so small, so distant, I could barely hear her. “It…it’s like the dream.”
I nodded.
It figured. I remembered what Zach had said about Henry Clay and the dreams he used to have as Zach whispered to him as he slept.
The events of the recurring dream she described fit right in with what I was seeing in English class. She described how she would wake up sweating and scared. “And the feeling…what I’m feeling…in the dream…it never really goes away. Sometimes I’m just sitting there and…it’s like a wave…it washes over me and…”
I nodded, thinking: Then there’s a ghost in the back of Ms. Peel’s classroom..
“I don’t understand any of this,” I said. “I don’t get at all what’s going on with your mom. I’m just telling you what I see. I don’t know why she’s calling for you, or why she can’t find you, or…” I ran out of words.
Amy nodded again. She sat on the couch like a statue, weeping silently.
Then she seemed to come to some kind of decision.
“We had a fight…” she said in that small, distant voice. “…Mama and me. Seems like we were fighting all the time back then. It wasn’t always that way. When my father left it was like this weight…well he was so mean and all. When he left and it was just Mama and me, we got so close. We were more like friends than mother and daughter. For a while anyway.”
She let out a sigh and went on. “But then…I don’t know when it started, really. She got laid off from her job, and that was hard. We never had any money. She got a different job, but then it seemed like she was always gone. That’s where she met Fred…”
Amy shuddered. “He was…I don’t know…he gave me the creeps. He always acted nice, but there was something…the way he looked at me…”
I was getting the picture.
Amy continued. “That night, she was going out again. With him. I didn’t want her to, but I didn’t want to say it, you know?”
I nodded.
“She liked him, or she acted like she did. I…I think she kind of saw him as a ticket out of the mess we were in. He was rich. Well, not really, but he acted like it. He had this Corvette he was so proud of.”
“She was supposed to meet him at some club. It was a big party, something to do with the company they worked for. She was wearing that dress, you know?”
I knew the dress.
“And I picked a fight. It was stupid. But I didn’t want her to go, and I didn’t know what to do. I really hated Fred and the thought of him as a step-father…”
He tears were really flowing now. There was a golf ball-sized lump forming somewhere just above my Adam’s apple. I didn’t trust myself to say anything, so I just nodded again.
“I didn’t know what to do. I don’t even know what started the fight, but I said things…” she sobbed violently. “Oh God, I said I wished she was dead.”
Jeez.
“And she…” Amy took a breath. “…she said, ‘Well that would make things a lot simpler for both of us wouldn’t it.’”
Amy didn’t have to say the rest. I could imagine it.
She didn’t have to say it, but she did.
Her mom drove home from the party alone; she didn’t go home with the creep. That said something right there, but I didn’t think Amy could see it.
All Amy could see was that she had wished her mother dead, and sure enough, come morning, the cops found her car at the bottom of a river.
She’d run right off the road.
They said she hadn’t even slowed down.