39
I link my arm aroundChase’s. No one is going swimming tonight, regardless of how many people it pisses off. Not after the dripping man’s appearance on the dock this afternoon. And the girl on the stairs in my bedroom. And the glass shattering in Mila’s hand has me nervous too. And the cellar door slamming. Something is wrong. “Help me in the kitchen, Chay. I need your strong man arms.”
Resentment flashes in Mila’s eyes, but she holds her tongue and Chase allows me to guide him through the French doors. I shut them behind him and lean against the cool metal of the refrigerator.
He hops onto the counter and looks at me expectantly. “I assume it’s my strong man ears you’re really interested in.”
I hedge for a moment, absently tapping an empty glass with my fingertips. Glasses don’t just shatter. It’s the sort of thing the dead do when they’re upset. It’s very hard to dismiss it as an accident. “I’m sorry about what Emily said. It was out of context.”
“I figured.”
“But you can’t go swimming tonight. Or ever without me. I have to be there.”
He rolls his eyes. “Yes, Mommy dearest.”
“I mean it. No waiting until I’m asleep and sneaking out. It’s dangerous.” An unsettling feeling creeps over me, and I place the glass quickly back on the drying rack.
Chase sighs heavily. “You used to be fun, Kennedy.”
That one hurts. “You used to be nice.”
We look at each other awkwardly for a moment.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says finally.
I should echo him. But I don’t. I don’t believe him. And I don’t believe he’s going to listen to me. That scares me more than anything else right now. This secret is wearing me down. It’s exhausting. I feel like a hypocrite keeping anything from Chelsea while holding a grudge against her for keeping things from me. She should be the first to know. But at the same time, that’s the reason I can’t tell her. She won’t come clean about Ryan. If only she would just tell me the truth.
But Chase. Chase is my oldest friend. Chase has always had my back. I would trust Chase with my life.
And if I keep this secret any longer, I will break.
I take a deep breath. “How do you feel about ghosts?”
Chase bursts out laughing. “Is my ghost story freaking you out? It was a joke. Dead is dead.” He reaches for Mila’s purse sitting out on the counter and pulls out a clove cigarette. I shake my head at him, and he shrugs and places the cigarette between his lips without lighting it. “Life is short and then you die.”
This is going to be harder than I thought. I close the kitchen window. It’s getting cooler outside, and the cold is slowly seeping into the house. “Sure. But after that. More things in heaven and earth. Et cetera.”
He flicks his imaginary ash on my nose. “There’s adifference between what has yet to be discovered—like the universe beyond what technology allows us to explore—and fairy tales. Infinite things that we can’t imagine exist because they’re beyond the scope of what we know. But ghosts aren’t. We can imagine them. We made them up. Theyaredreamt of in our philosophy. That’s all they are. A dream.”
“Cool speech.”
“But?”
“What if they’re more than that?” I feel a warmth surrounding me,theirwarmth. And for a moment I’m filled with hope. They aren’t always angry or upset. They used to be my friends. “You’re looking at ‘your philosophy’ as all of human knowledge. But all you really know is what you’ve seen for yourself. Peoplehavewitnessed things. YouknowI’m an evidence girl. But there are studies documenting cases of people showing cognition while their hearts are stopped, for example. Some scientists theorize our minds live hours after our hearts stop. They used to believe it was seconds. What if the line keeps moving? Science is a process of discovery.”
“You know better than to take anecdotes as global fact. And there are scientific explanations for the phenomenon of walking toward the light, life flashing before your eyes—it’s the process of the brain dying.”
“Well, what about the cross-dimensional theory? Ghosts could be a time-space glitch,” I say desperately.
“Maybe if string theory actually held up,” he says condescendingly. Then he eyes me curiously. “You’ve put way too much thought into this.” I have. I’ve spent years of my life researching every possible way to scientifically justify myexperiences. But nothing can explain the unexplainable. You can’t experience the brain death of another human being. If it were simply a phenomenal crossroads of remarkably similar coexistent universes, why do they look dead? How can there simply be a universe identical to our own in which the dead live? It sounds too similar to traditional notions of the afterlife. A story I’m telling myself to explain the unexplainable. To comfort myself about something truly unsettling. The fact is that I see things that are not there. There is no evidence that what I see and feel is real. People like me are placed in hospitals, given pills, and treated as defective. But I am not defective. I just can’t prove what I know to be true.
I draw a deep, shaky breath. It’s now or never. “If someone experiences something you can’t explain, you have three choices. You can take it on faith, rule it out definitively, or just accept that your reality isn’t theirs, and you might not know everything there is to know.”
He stares at me. “Okay. What is there to know? What can you personally vouch for? Because I don’t buy into stories, but I’ll believe anything that comes from you. I trust you, Ken.”
Say it.My grandmother’s cuckoo clock ticks in the hall.Say it.A moth circles the ceiling lamp.Say.Time slows down.Say.The air in the room grows warm and thick.Say.
He’s lying. It’s the same line my parents and the doctors and the social workers fed me to get me to talk in order to draw their various conclusions. Imaginary friends. Suppressed anxiety. Projections of trauma, the root of which couldn’t be weeded out. Everything but the truth. Chase doesn’t know what to do with the truth.