Liz said, “His dad’s in jail. Probably forever. His mom OD’d a little over a year ago and died. He doesn’t like talking about it, but he ended up telling Samantha the whole story.”
“Samantha?”
“The intern who was here before you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
Billy shook his head. “Poor Lee.” I nodded and thought of his broken finger, his moment of fear. “Night, Mila,” Billy said.
“Good night,” I said.
And then he opened his door and Liz followed him in. I remembered the laughter from the night before. I wondered if they were together or if they were only friends. It didn’t matter. Either way I was not one of them, despite the kind things they had said.
I continued a few paces toward my cabin but soon stopped again. A glow appeared in the distance, beyond the house. The dancing ghost, I thought. But as it came closer I saw it wasn’t one ghost, but several.
They assembled in the center of the field. They clasped hands, formed a circle. One of them darted into its center and then back out again. They broke into a line.
They were playing a game. Clasping and unclasping hands, following rules I couldn’t make sense of. They were wondrous and I was unafraid. Under the steady moon, the fog moving across the sky like a living thing, I watched for a long time, astonished by how lucky I was to have been chosen. How incredible it was to be there in that strange, incomprehensible place. I saw the glow of a new ghost approaching, and something shadowy, too. Something there and then gone.
I half slept in Blake’s skeleton house under the eucalyptus trees.
Wind through the dry leaves.
An owl’s hoot, a cat’s yowl. A scampering. My mother’s moan.
Once it was light I rose to my feet, bladder full, and found the hole in the ground Blake used as a toilet. He’d told us about the ashes he poured over to get rid of the smell, but I smelled it anyway—pungent enough to turn my stomach. I squatted, held my breath. When I had finished, I rinsed my hands at the spigot. I washed my face and my hair, too, used a bar of soap because it’s all I could find. I wrung my hair out, water dripping onto the dirt, and went to find my mother.
There she was, sharing a bench with Blake by the firepit.
He looked at me with his green eyes, his smile that had never been friendly, not even the first time I’d met him. His arm was around my mother, holding her in place.
“Good morning,” he said.
* * *
___
My best friend, Hayley, the only friend I spent time with outside of school, was away at camp with no cell service. I left her a message later that day, telling her to call me as soon as she could. But that evening, before she’d called me back, Blake took my phone away.
“We don’t need these,” he said. “What we need is human connection.”
He was standing in fur-lined slippers on the concrete foundation, the frame of the house towering over him, the last of the evening light filtering through the place where the roof should have been.
My mother had just left for work. She would be gone all night.
“I want to show you something,” he said, slipping my phone into his pocket. “Follow me.”
I followed him to the space he called his room. There, tarps hung as walls with blankets lining them for insulation. Layered carpets spread over the concrete, and on top of some of them was his mattress. He opened a box and dug through it for a velvet pouch. Inside was a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses.
He handed them to me. “These can be a lot of fun,” he said. “The old-fashioned kind. Let’s fix some dinner and you can see what you find when you take the time to really look. You don’t need screens. You need real life.”
While he grilled vegetables on a barbeque outside the house, I gazed through the glasses at the sky. I saw the stars and the moon. Some birds flew by and I lost sight of them, then scanned down and there they were, on a telephone wire.
And below them was a window, lit up, with a family in the living room working a puzzle. I watched the father slip a puzzle piece over to a kid who was a little younger than me. I could have watched them for a long time, but it felt like spying. I knew I wouldn’t want some strange girl peering in on me when I didn’t know about it, even if she was only curious and didn’t mean any harm.
I turned the glasses downward and that’s when I saw her. A woman, ancient, with vacant eyes. She stood in a nightgown on the street. In one hand, she held a bouquet of oversize, plastic daisies. In the other, she held what looked like the gnarled roots of a tree. She was on the sidewalk, alone in the dark, staring at nothing.
“Blake,” I said.
He was carving into wood with a pocketknife while he waited for the food to cook. “Mm-hm,” he answered, eyes fixed on his project.
“Look at that lady,” I said. He kept carving for a moment and then saw I was handing the opera glasses to him. He took them and I pointed down at the street. “What’s she doing? Do you think we should help her?”
He lifted the glasses to his eyes and shifted the focus. He remained turned toward where I had been looking for a long time. I could see her even without the glasses, standing perfectly still, then swaying back and forth before growing still again.
“What lady?” Blake asked.
But he had been looking right there. He was still looking. And there she was.
“The old woman.”
“I don’t see an old woman.”
“Right there,” I said. “With the fake flowers and that other thing.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “You must be tired, you should go to bed.” He folded the opera glasses and dropped them back in their velvet pouch.
“But I haven’t had dinner yet. It’s still early.” I couldn’t tell how early it was, though. I didn’t have my phone. I didn’t own a watch.
“You’re so tired you’re seeing things,” Blake said. “You don’t feel right. Go lie down.”
I did as he told me.
* * *
___
“You know . . . ,” he said the next morning. We were warming water over the fire for coffee. “I had a thought about this so-called woman you saw last night.”
“She was right there,” I said. “It’s so weird you didn’t see her.”
“I’m wondering—was she by any chance wearing a nightgown?”
“Yes!”