I Woke Up Dead at the Mall Page 14

  A middle-aged couple, brightly lit, walked hand in hand. At first, I thought they were wearing costumes, because they looked like extras from The Great Gatsby. She was a flapper, and he was a tuxedo dude. How the hell long had they been dead?

  They didn’t seem to notice us. They were caught in a conversation loop.

  She: It wasn’t my fault.

  He: Yes, it was.

  She: It wasn’t my fault.

  He: Yes, it was.

  And on and on. Living people passed through the dead and even sat on them. A beautiful young (living) woman was sitting on a park bench, totally unaware of the disgusting pervy ghost whose lap she was on. She was talking on her phone while he laughed, enjoying the hell out of this situation. He had bad teeth and bug eyes.

  “I’ve sat on these benches a thousand times,” I said. “I wish I could take a shower right now.”

  “Hey!” Lacey shouted at the pervy ghost. “You! Move it! Leave her alone!”

  The ghost flinched and muttered and slunk away. The girl continued her conversation, still oblivious.

  We sat on a grassy knoll and watched the life and death surround us. I hugged my knees and tried not to worry about Dad or think about Nick (too much). (Welcome to my losing battle.)

  “Those ghosts, they’re stuck here,” Alice explained. “Forever.”

  “Why?” Lacey asked.

  “Oh, it’s all too easy to get stuck here,” Alice said. “Sometimes people don’t come back from their funerals. Sometimes people come back to haunt, but then they stay. Sometimes it’s easier, it’s comfortable, being stuck with what you know. Even if it’s not very nice.” She took a breath and added, “Not everybody wants to move on, you know.”

  “But you do. Right?” I confirmed with Alice. She nodded, but really I wanted something much stronger from her. After all, the girl had been dead for decades and she still hadn’t moved on. (Let me add this to my list of things to worry about.)

  A young woman sat down right next to us. She hugged her knees, just as I was doing. It took me a moment to see the halo light of death all around her. A fellow ghost.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hi, yes, hi. Hello to you! Hello!” she said with an upsetting level of eagerness. (Why had I said hello to her? I was a New Yorker. I should have known better. Besides, I really wanted to keep my eyes trained on my building.)

  “Did you come from the mall?” the girl asked. “Were you there? Were you? At the mall? Were you at the mall? You were. I can tell. You were at the mall.”

  She was manic and painfully, skeletally thin. If I had seen her like this when I was alive, maybe she wouldn’t have looked quite as frightening as she did tonight. Maybe I would have assumed she was a dancer. But seeing her in the blue glow of death in the night, she was particularly terrifying.

  “Yes,” I said, and then tried to start up a chat with Alice and Lacey. But the skinny manic girl wasn’t letting up, and she wasn’t open to hints.

  “I left. I left. I left the mall. I’m here now.” She repeated herself a few more times, and I tried to find a way to make a clean break from her. Lacey and Alice were no help, as they were staring at her protruding cheekbones and hollow eyes. I was hoping Lacey would come out with some smart-ass command to scare this ghost away.

  But then the girl rose. “Okay. Break’s over! I have to keep moving.” She began to jog in place. “I have to go. I have to go,” she repeated as she started to jog away. And then she added, “So close to my goal weight!”

  “Wow,” Lacey said. “Some people take their crazy with them when they die, huh?”

  Alice nodded vigorously. “This is the one thing that’s worse than mall-walking. At least I could wake up. Eventually. But these people…” She finished her sentence by shuddering.

  Back to my vigil. Watch for Dad. Watch for Dad. Focus. Where the hell was Nick?

  Off to my left, I recognized the guy in the shabby suit. Oh no. He was the one who screamed at people. All this time I thought he had just been a (scary) dream. I stared at him a little too long and caught his attention. Now he was heading right toward us, revving up for a big fat scream.

  “Look down!” I shouted to Alice and Lacey.

  “Why?” Lacey just had to ask.

  “Now!” I shouted back, and we were all staring at the ground. Mr. Scream went past us and found someone else to scream at when they made the mistake of looking at him.

  “Well!” Lacey had her taking-charge voice on. “Why are we hanging out here? Why don’t we go someplace?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “My dad will be back soon. I hope.” That sounded a little too pessimistic. “I came here to save him. I can’t miss my chance.

  “Yeah, well, good luck and all,” Lacey said as she stood up. “Me, I want to go find the homes of famous people and see if I can catch them naked.” She was so proud of this plan she let out a little giggle.

  Minus Lacey, the park was amazingly quiet. My vigil continued, but my gaze drifted, just a little. I stretched out on the grass and studied the misty night sky. Then I turned onto my side and stared at the apartment entrance. Dad, where the hell could you be?

  “Do you think Nick is okay?” I asked.

  “Nick is the kind of boy who always manages to be okay,” Alice said. I decided not to say, “Except for when he ended up shot to death at sixteen.”

  I propped myself up on my elbow. “You’ve haunted before.” I said it as a statement, not a question.

  Alice nodded. “Yes. It ended badly.”

  “How?”

  Alice seemed to be climbing over some kind of wall to get an answer. “I…I nearly got stuck. I couldn’t stop screaming at Joe O’Hara.” I think she needed a moment to stop seeing or hearing it in her memory. “But Bertha grabbed me by the collar and took me back. I was so upset, I walked for twenty-three years. I missed World War Two.”

  “We won’t get stuck here,” I assured her. And me.

  “No. We won’t let that happen,” Alice agreed. “We’ll let go when the time comes. And let’s face it, Nick would never let us get stuck.” True.

  We let darkness and silence wash over us.

  “The sky is crazy beautiful,” I said.

  “Try not to love it too much, Sarah. It will end badly.”

  chapter twenty-nine

  clues to reveal total dysfunction

  Maybe it was his shoulders. Maybe it was his grin. Maybe it was the fact that he could cook and he liked to take charge. Something in me felt safe and okay when Nick was around, like I had just gotten a warm blanket wrapped around me. Any and all stomach knots untied. So when Nick finally came back to the park, I resisted the urge to yell at him and shake him for staying away so long and making me worry so hard. And it’s a good thing I resisted.

  He sat on the grass and ran his hands through his hair, turning his gaze to the sky. I felt like I could see him putting his story away. “Any sign of your dad?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “What happened to you?”

  He sighed and looked at the ground now. “It was rough,” he said with some finality, as if I’d let him say so little. Something happened, and it got to him. We sat on the grass as he told the story of his haunting.

  SOMETHING WENT WRONG WHEN NICK WAS TRYING TO HELP HIS MOM

  Okay, so he knew she’d be a mess, but he didn’t know she’d be a mess. He found her passed out in the living room with the lights on and the TV at full blast. The randomly scattered stuff everywhere made it look like someone had lifted the whole apartment and dropped it. He tried talking to her, but he didn’t know how to make himself heard. He tried cleaning up after her, but he didn’t know how to move objects here.

  He studied her, the apartment, and he put together a list of the clues that it offered.

  The Lean Cuisine boxes: Okay, yes, she was eating, but did she have to go for this frozen, processed crap? Did she learn nothing from him? He used to talk about what he was cooking while he was cooking it and then i
nterrogate her about it while she ate. Right now it looked like she hadn’t been listening at all.

  The half-consumed Smirnoff bottle by her side, the empty one on the floor, and the full one on the kitchen counter: She was drinking way too much, drowning her grief. When Nick was alive, he had witnessed much smaller-scale bouts, usually after a bad breakup. But this one already looked worse than all of them combined.

  The absence of makeup on her face: She wasn’t back at work yet. When Nick was alive, he was sometimes annoyed at the time she devoted to her elaborate hair and makeup routine. “I don’t go outside without my face!” she would insist. Right now she had no face.

  The TV tuned to NY1, the all-day New York news channel: She was focused on finding more news about her son’s murder. When Nick was alive, she only ever watched the news for the weather report, then turned to her favorite reality shows.

  The absence of any signs of outside activity: She wasn’t going out into the world, Nick concluded. Not even a little bit. She was having her frozen groceries and her vodka delivered, according to the receipts on the kitchen floor. When Nick was alive they went out into the world every day. The air here was stale and sad.

  Poor woman. She was lost and alone. When Nick was alive he could have done something about this. Probably. Tonight he had to snap her out of this, even if it killed him. All over again.

  He kept watch by her side, and then, in the middle of the night, his mom got up and stumbled to the kitchen. She stood at the sink, fished out a glass, and rinsed it for a long minute, then filled it to the top with cool water. She took a slow sip.

  “Okay, Mom. I know you’re incredibly sad. But you need to take better care of yourself than this. Please. For me.”

  And then things went kind of wrong. His mom dumped the water back into the sink and reached for the vodka. She poured a tall glass and squinted at it.

  Nick watched her from the living room, half-wanting to give up and retreat out of the apartment. In all his living years, he had never ever seen her so self-destructive, so wrong, so incredibly stupid.

  “Stop this! Don’t do it!” he shouted, his own fury surprising him. She didn’t hear him, he was sure.

  She looked at the clear liquid in her dirty glass and muttered, “What’s the point?”

  “The point? What’s the point, Mom? You’re alive!” Nick berated her from across the living room. “And you’re wasting it. Your life really is going to end one day. And you’d better get yourself together before then. Go somewhere and be alive! That’s the point! Go out into this unbelievably beautiful world before you can’t do it anymore. Stop this!”

  She took a big swallow of her drink. She winced a bit as it went down. And now Nick had no pity for her, only rage.

  “Are you doing this because of me? Is this your tribute to me?” he shouted. “Is this what my life meant?” He kept shouting at her, ranting at her, tearing into her, pleading with her. All right across from her. And when she opened her eyes from her post-vodka wince, she saw him. She saw her dead son, tragic and angry, right in front of her.

  The glass slipped from her fingers and shattered.

  She screamed and ran toward him. “Nick! Nicky! My baby!”

  She reached for him, but just like that he disappeared. She stood in the middle of the room and turned in circles again, again, again. And then she stopped.

  “Jesus,” she said aloud. “Wow. This is bad.”

  She stood there, not speaking, just looking around her.

  “I’m sorry,” Nick whispered. “I didn’t mean to scare you like that. I better go now. Take care of yourself, Mom. Stop all this shit, okay? I love you.”

  His forehead was crisscrossed with worry. Was he trying to come up with a new plan? Was he regretting this one?

  “Wow,” I said. “You don’t have to stay here. Do you want to go check on her now?”

  “No,” Nick said slowly, shaking his head. “I’ve freaked her out enough for now. If she sees me again, I might push her over the edge. Besides, she’s sleeping it off right now. I’ll go back in the morning. When her head is clear.”

  Sunlight began to slice through the night sky. It made the ghosts blend in with the living, who emerged to begin a new day. Weary parents and nannies filled the playground behind us with running, stumbling, screeching children. They were all oblivious to the ghosts surrounding them. Good.

  Nick kept looking around, like maybe his mother was going to show up in the park any second now. Okay, anyone could tell that Nick wanted to break away from my soon-to-be-failed mission. (Who could blame him?)

  “Go. Check on your mother,” I urged him. “That’s what you came here to do. Something tells me that I’ve wasted my haunting.” I gestured toward my building. “At least one of us should get this right.”

  He stood up and tugged me to standing. When he kissed me goodbye, he transmitted his ever-present joy and excitement. “It’s all going to be okay! You’ll see.” He took a few steps, then hurried back and kissed me once more.

  “I promise,” he whispered into my ear. I captured the scent of trees and rainstorms. I felt like a kid, wanting him to pinky-swear that it would indeed be okay. Okay would be a miracle.

  He left the park, passing by two small children, a boy and a girl, playing underneath the big arch that welcomed the world to this park. He didn’t seem to notice them, immersed in their own complicated game.

  “You cheated! You opened one eye and saw me!” the girl accused.

  “Nuh-uh! I don’t know how to open just one eye!” the boy shouted back.

  It was the Boy. When they saw Alice and me, they stopped playing and ran to us.

  “It’s the pretty girl and the angry girl!” she squealed.

  “You’re here?” I asked.

  “Duh!” he said. “Yeah!”

  “Did you save your daddy?” she asked. “Are you a ghost hero?”

  “Almost,” I said. The boy and girl exchanged a knowing look. “I mean, my friends and I may have destroyed the poison. I just need to give a warning to my dad. Which reminds me: I’m wondering if I could have a bit more time here? Please?”

  “No way, José!” the boy Boy said.

  “You have just a little bit of time left! A li-i-i-i-ttle bitty bit!” the girl Boy said.

  “She seems nice,” the boy Boy said. He was pointing to the little strawberry-blond girl who had been singing yesterday. Little Elizabeth Anne. She was holding her mother’s hand, crossing through the park with a school backpack. She sang quietly to herself, and everything about this simple act was innocent and beautiful.

  Oh no. Did the Boy’s attention to her mean that Elizabeth Anne might die soon? (Oh please, please no. How many people can I save while I’m here?)

  “Look!” the girl Boy said. “Pay attention, dummy! He’s right there!”

  I spun around to look at the building I’d been staring at all night, and there he was. Dad. I blinked hard to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. I wasn’t. That was my dad. (My dad! Alive! Right there!) He was getting out of a taxi. With Karen.

  I raced out of the park over to his side.

  “You almost missed him!” the girl Boy reprimanded me. “Don’t be such a dummy!”

  chapter thirty

  never break a promise to a dead girl

  I made a terrible, sad sound when I got next to Dad. He had lost some hair. His skin was grayish, with a papery quality. He looked thin, and his eyes were sunken. He didn’t stand up straight, and he moved slowly. Oh, what I would give for the power to kick Karen into traffic.

  I shadowed them in the lobby, where Karen was explaining to Eduardo that Dad’s “cardiac episode was fairly minor. But we’re not taking any chances. Bed rest for you, mister!” she said with a (fake) smile.

  “Glad you’re feeling better,” Eduardo said. But Dad just shrugged. He opened his mouth to speak, but he was too slow.

  “He’s on some pretty powerful medications,” Karen said. “It’s making him a little loo
py.” She turned to Dad. “That’s okay. I’m here to take care of you!”

  Karen pressed the elevator button with pushy authority.

  “This is it,” I called to Alice as I floated upstairs and into the apartment. Here we go.

  As Alice slipped through the door, she assured me, “You can do this.”

  And then the key turned in the lock. Karen was chattering away. “Remember what the doctor said. Lots of rest. Healthy foods. Not too much salt. You’ve been under stress! I’m here to take care of all that. No more stress!”

  Dad nodded slowly. My heart fell to my feet now that I was really able to study him. How much longer could he last? How much was he suffering right now? He looked like a mere fraction of his full self.

  He slipped out of his shoes and thudded his body onto the couch. Taking hold of a pillow, he laid himself down.

  “Dad! Get up! Up! Up! Up!” I sounded like a dog trainer. “Don’t fall asleep here. Go outside. Now.”

  He closed his eyes.

  “I’ll just make you a nice pot of tea,” Karen sang out from the kitchen. “Won’t that be…” She paused, then marched back into the living room. She saw the damage we (Lacey) had done, and she looked pissed. Excellent.

  “Charlie? Who else has keys to this place? Did Eduardo let himself in? Or that night guy, Samson?”

  Dad didn’t answer. He was drifting away. Karen’s smile curled and expanded, like the Grinch. “Never mind,” she whispered. “Where there’s a will, there’s me!” She laughed at her stupid, sick, awful, not-funny joke. Dad was asleep. But not peaceful.

  Karen returned to the kitchen, singing to herself.

  “She’s bad, that one,” Alice whispered to me. “She scares me.” I had no time to comfort Alice. Not now. I crouched next to Dad and took a deep breath.

  Turn your face to me

  Turn your face and see

  (I felt like an idiot singing this song to him.)