The Ghost on Platte River Access Road

Lou was weeks out of work and September was doubling down on the heat of the three months prior. Texas City was an oil slick over a melted asphalt road, and the last of the money had been spent on the phone bill and ice at the corner store, nothing left for how much electricity it would take to power the AC. He felt himself withering, waiting on a Tuesday afternoon for the last of the backpay he knew wouldn’t come.

The call from Cathy was a godsend and a surprise. Two weeks ago, Lou wouldn’t have answered without screening but he’d reached the point where he answered robocalls. Anything to break up the monotony of unemployment. Anyone but the dead.

“How’s the agency? How’s the dog?”

The dog had been gone for months, casualty to a parasite that laid its eggs in the animal’s heart. Lou was sure he’d sent his sister an email explaining the situation—the dog had been a gift from her husband, after all—but maybe he’d just intended to write.

“Agency’s not great.” From Lou’s vantage on the stairs outside his apartment, he could see the pool at the center of the complex courtyard, empty as usual, serene, save for the insects struggling to death on top of the chlorinated water. “I got in a bit of a situation.”

“Bit of a situation how?” In the background, Cathy’s baby was making the kind of mewling whine that would soon become a wail. Lou tried to imagine the scene more clearly: What did her new house look like? Where had she said she was moving to now? South or North of Fort Collins? One of those new-style cookie cutter homes most likely.

“Bit of a not working at the agency at the moment situation.” The US Mail truck pulled up outside the complex, idling at the curb as the carrier hopped out.

“Oh, well.” Cathy’s voice was distant from the phone as the baby sounds grew quiet as well. “Shame, I guess.”

“Hasn’t been great, that’s for sure.” Lou stood in anticipation as the mail carrier approached. Blue Springs Home Care Hospice Agency owed Lou $750, per the terms of the contract, but there’d been some debate about that contract’s legitimacy in light of Lou’s termination.

The carrier’s bag was almost limp against her body. She had on her red and black headphones and as she began to climb the stairs she made direct eye contact with Lou. Long, fake, gold lashes. She shook her head at him, already knowing. Lou nodded, stepping aside as she ascended to the post box.

Cathy was back in his ear. “How’d that happen, now?”

“The situation?”

“Yeah. ”

“Well.” Lou debated telling her the truth, trying to imagine what would happen if he outright said well, I lost the job because I got in a fight with a ghost at a client’s house so there’s a client pissed with me, so there’s a family pissed at me, a boss pissed at me. He couldn’t imagine it being well-received, given that Cathy had never believed him about the ghosts. As far as Lou knew, only other caretakers knew the ghosts to be real, and for his little sister, the obvious lie, which would appeal to her half-liberal sensibilities, was easier. “Well, I got found out. Texas, you know, not great about protecting employees like me and all that.”

“Oh.” A long pause. The baby’s sounds muted, Cathy attending to it. Did Cathy’s husband, Doug, decorate the nursery like he decorated the rest of his house? An elk mount over the cradle, a photorealistic painting of an eagle soaring with jet-planes on the wall, under the American flag? Cathy’s voice brought him back to his surroundings.“You’ve had a good run there, I guess.”

“I guess so. A few years, at least.” Lou watched the mail carrier finish her rounds, locking the multi-apartment box. Even from here he could see his slot was conspicuously empty. Five years, actually. Five years of service in this haunted town, and now nothing to show for it. “Longer than most.”

“How this time? I mean, you’ve been . . . passing. A while now.”

Shit. He didn’t have another lie prepared. Why wasn’t fired by transphobic management a sufficient enough falsification? “Oh, come on, Cathy.” He could hear his own exhaustion with perfect clarity. It sounded exaggerated, would have been funny if he didn’t have to keep living with it.

“You got your birth certificate changed, you got your license updated, you got all that shit taken care of, right? How’d you get found out?” Her voice soft again. “Or are you lying to me because you gave someone fentanyl again?”

The sun glinted off the pool, the onyx body of a cockroach the size of his middle finger floating upside-down. “Cathy, come on.”

“Yeah, okay. I guess it’s better for us anyhow.”

“How’s that?”

“Well. Dad, you know.”

“No.” Lou laughed. “How would I know anything about Dad?” The last time he’d spoken to Dad, been accused of driving Mom to her early grave, was the day he’d left the state twenty-eight years ago. “What’s going on with Dad?”

“Well, he’s dying.” Cathy was her own type of comically exhausted. Her voice lapsed for a moment into their mother’s thick Minnesota accent. “And he’s not going gently. So if you’re in the market for a job, maybe one not strictly up to standard under all the laws about care and all that . . . ”

Lou figured the law was going to be the least of the trouble with a family job. Declining old men manifested the ghosts of their lives around them with the confidence they’d owned before their diagnoses. “How’s the pay?”

“All under the table, and Doug’s still with First National. Wouldn’t be more than a few weeks, I imagine. And he wouldn’t know. He wouldn’t know it was you, I promise.”

“Oh, I believe you.” Beyond the complex gates, the mail truck drove away. The exhaust lingered grey in the air. Except for the sounds of 36th Street in the distance, that ocean-wave mimicry of wheels on concrete, it was silent. “I’ll just be whoever he thinks.”

“That’s all any of us is. You need help getting up here? Got a car still?”

“Gonna have to break the lease. Is that something your husband considers a cost of doing business?”

“Sure, sure. And, you know, if we want to keep it in the family . . . ” Was she imagining a winter ski lodge, a summer home to keep horses at? Maybe she’d tell him, maybe not. He didn’t ask.

“We’ll see about that, I guess. Once I’m up there.”

“How soon can you come?”

Lou looked up at his apartment, the door open. An empty mouth. What did he have that he couldn’t leave to the neighbors? A laptop, a phone, a bag of needles and prescription testosterone. “I’ll start driving tomorrow. Be there in three days at the most. Don’t let it snow before I get there.”

“I can’t make any promises.”

“Well,” Lou closed his eyes and inhaled deeply through his nose. Crabgrass, chemicals, loam. “You’d be a liar if you tried. I’ll see you soon, Cathy.”

*

Cathy’s baby eyed Lou with the kind of suspicion that most animals regarded him with. They could all sense it, the way the dead lingered around him. He’d tried all number of deodorants and crystals, but couldn’t seem to unstick it. He figured it was the years as a hospice aide. Dying people expelled all sorts of substances and energies from their bodies. Some washed off, some didn’t.

They could all sense it, the way the dead lingered around him.

“So it’s $150 a day from Medicare because of the certification of terminal illness,” Cathy was explaining, mashing up a banana with her fork in one hand and rocking the baby in the portable car seat with the other. They were sitting in the restaurant at the Wood’s Landing Resort, whose title was fancier than the collection of faded cabins around a partially frozen stream could ever hope to be. Outside, the morning frost had yet to melt. Inside, the smell of bacon and chili, the sticky sound of dirty shoes on laminate, the dark decor of an old log cabin. Cathy looked tired, her face blotchy like she’d started and not finished her makeup. “And $150 from Doug and me, all paid out at the end in cash.”

Lou nodded, deciding not to ask how they’d gotten away with this, how they were getting Medicare to pay out to Doug instead of a contracting agency. Instead, he drank his coffee and watched out the window as a storm began to grow over Sheep Mountain. “So he’s got six or fewer months for sure?”

The long silence that followed Cathy’s eye-contact was filled only by the background noise of an elderly pair of ranchers, sitting across the restaurant, talking to each other about the new water-heating system they were going to use for their barns. Lou nodded slowly, sick with comprehension. He’d taken his first job like this one years ago, when he’d been living in Colorado, and hadn’t found it agreeable. Once more in New Mexico, again, unpleasant. The agencies in Texas had removed that particular opportunity, or had at least heavily de-incentivized it, and it had been at least five years since anyone had asked Lou to kill their ailing family member.

“The will’s been taken care of for a while,” Cathy added, feeding her baby despite protestations. “You and I split the house, the life insurance, everything.” She looked at him again, and he could see her the way she’d been when he’d left. Seven years old: determined, red-faced, unwilling to shed a tear and shaking from the effort. “If you’re amenable to that.”

“I can be amenable to just about anything for the right price.” Lou smiled, like she didn’t already know. Like it wasn’t clear to him now that she must have been thinking about this, the logistics and the payouts, since he’d told her about the first man he’d killed.

She’d been a nurse then herself, barely out of college when she tracked him down on MySpace and sent the message, “hi, i don’t know if you remember me but i need a safe place to stay for awhile can i stay with you.” Like he could have forgotten or turned away his little sister, another Wyoming girl in need. When she was living with him in Las Cruces not a week after the message he’d tried to explain about the ghosts, about the energy the dying manifested around them, about the families who suffered from the hauntings, and all she’d said was, “Some people always outstay their welcome.”

Now, Lou let her get the tab. She paid with a crumpled bill worth double the cost of their breakfast.

*

In summers, the Medicine Bow range stretched green into the sky. Lodgepole pines wound their way around each other up over the passes, turning thin and brittle where the oxygen was sparse, growing needles only on their downwind sides. But in the winter, the air became solid. Breath turned to steam and then to ice. Every year, truckers crashed in the first storm, cars flipped, snowmobilers were lulled into false security and died violently in the frost—misled by the blinding white that flattened the ascents and deep rivulets of the forest. Thousands of common dead littered the landscape of the range’s history. Men, women, and children froze feeding cattle, building fires, in their sleep.

And there were more signs of winter, its inevitable, impersonal tyranny, on the way up 230 to the unmarked turn. Snow on the ground in the shade, the air grey with anticipation, the distant peaks already white. Lou, following Cathy in his own car to the turn where asphalt gave way to gravel, knew he could get stuck. The roads would close in a month, and if Dad wasn’t dead by then, it would just be the two of them and the bomb-shelter canned goods in the crawl space. Had Doug and Cathy thought about this? Had they bought enough groceries for the end of days, or were they expecting Lou to go ahead and do the work within the first week?

The house looked the same. Lou parked his car next to Cathy’s in the drive, next to three rusted out Broncos, and found he couldn’t move. There it was. The cabin logs, the dark green door, the twin smokestacks and the pillars that propped it up into the side of a hill, the semi-circle of aspens around the front. Pine beetles had gotten to the forest out back, dead trees now like kindling covered in grey snow. Lou couldn’t move. Couldn’t blink. There, in the far bedroom window, a figure in an A-line dress. A figure that shouldn’t be. And then wasn’t. Cathy was knocking on the window, baby left strapped in the backseat. She said nothing as they walked to the door together. Her face was set with grim determination. Lou imagined their mother’s had looked about the same all those years ago when she walked herself out into the forest in a rage and froze.

There, in the far bedroom window, a figure in an A-line dress. A figure that shouldn’t be. And then wasn’t.

*

Lou was forty-five but looked younger, which meant that the dying old white men who were often his clients by assignment often mistook him for their own boys. But Dad never had a son. When Cathy opened the front door, revealing Dad in his frail glory sitting on the sofa, he looked at Lou and then through Lou, like Lou was nobody at all.

“Annette?” Dad’s voice had the creaky quality of disuse that the door hinges had, the mumble that could have come from a neurological episode. “What brought you back from Portland?”

Cathy looked nothing like Aunt Annette, but that didn’t matter. And Cathy’s response, too frustrated to be effective—“Dad, it’s me, Cath,”—didn’t matter either. Lou had seen this dance before plenty of times, knew all the moves. But he wouldn’t step on Cathy’s toes as she did her best. “Lou’s gonna be taking care of you for a while, okay?”

“Nah,” Dad stood, steadying himself with the arm of the sofa. The living room was littered with newspapers and folded up Schwan’s delivery boxes. “Nah, nah, that’s all right. Maggie or Lena’ll be coming around. Just stepped out for a bit.”

Cathy’s neck popped audibly as she twisted her head quickly to look at Lou with an expression of concern. He met her eyes with confusion before realizing that Dad was talking not just about Mom but also about him. Him, but not him. Him from an outdated birth certificate, a him that nobody could prove existed but that Dad seemed to expect. Lou’s stomach dropped as he watched Dad step delicately towards the kitchen, his bare feet dark with grime.

“You see what I mean?” Cathy asked, her voice low as Dad passed by them without paying any heed. He oozed the musky smell of sweat and pressure sores, though it could also have been the rotting food sitting on the kitchen counter, dark stains growing on flimsy cardboard boxes. “So, are you all right for this?”

“What’s the alternative?” Lou watched his client, his father, stand still at the sink. “You’ll hemorrhage all your cash on a home if you try taking him somewhere. Lose the house, have to get a second mortgage. I’ve seen it all before. For what you’re offering, this is more than fine.”

The relief on Cathy’s face was obvious. “Okay. Don’t draw it out, you know. He’s . . . ” She gestured at him, where he stood with his hands gripping the edge of the sink, his mouth moving without sound. “Not great.”

Dad had never been great, but it seemed like an insult to point that out. Why bother rehashing their father’s various failures, his ineffectual position as diplomat of their mother’s dictatorial home rule? But then, Cathy had lived with him after the funeral. Maybe things had been different without Mom. Lou didn’t really care to consider. “Well,” Lou put his hand on his sister’s arm and directed her to the front door. “Don’t trouble yourself about it, Cathy. I got it under control.”

She let herself be led, then moved passed him. He stood on the porch, watching her climb in, start her car, and wave at him with a half smile that said glad this is out of my hands. The Land Rover made a three point turn out and he watched it roll over the gravel of the driveway, air crunching around the tires. Only when it crawled over the hill at the end of the drive did Lou see the ghost at the edges of the aspen grove. A flash of golden hair, that green sweater that looked so much like one his mother used to wear, one that she had made in replicate for Lou and Cathy. She flickered nearer, bright in the winter aspens, and Lou felt every hair on his neck stand on end. Before she could reach him, he turned around and stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

For a moment, he was alone in the house. The piles of trash, the smell of dust and piss and rot, the back windows overlooking the pasture and brown evergreens, the single long hallway where family photos used to hang and where now only faded outlines of the frames remained. Then, a knock on the door.

From the kitchen, Dad called out, his voice a dull blade in the stillness. “Who’s there?”

Lou didn’t dare turn around as he approached his father. “Mr. Markus, my name is Lou. I’m here to help around the house.”

Dad shook his head, white hair fluttering. “We got a hand already.”

They hadn’t had a ranch hand in years because they hadn’t had a ranch in years. As far as Lou was aware, the last goat had been sold sometime after Mom’s funeral. Still, he kept his voice calm and level. “I’m taking over for him.”

Dad stared through him again, moved passed him to the sofa where he sat back down in a well-worn divot, resting his chin on his hands and his hands on his cane. “Sorry you went to all this trouble, young man. Don’t need extra help. My family’s due home any time now.”

Every old man was the same kind of cowboy sad, as though they had practiced their loneliest lines for the moment someone was there to hear them. Lou stood still in the space between the kitchen and the living room and hesitated, trying to imagine the last twenty-eight years of his father’s life and coming up blank. “Well, Mr. Markus,” he said, beginning to fold up empty food boxes for the trash, ignoring the knocking, now at the window, “I’ll be here till they get back, then.”

Every old man was the same kind of cowboy sad, as though they had practiced their loneliest lines for the moment someone was there to hear them. 

*

The day looked like this: Dad played some semblance of chess with himself in the living room, watched birds, slept. Mostly slept. Projects, largely model planes and auto parts, lay abandoned around the house. The familiar layout had become distorted with clutter. The guest room, which had once been Lou and Cathy’s bedroom, was the only unbusy space, left full of dust. Lou could see, now, why it had been easy for Cathy to get the false stamp of terminal illness. Dad was thin and brittle, his limbs merely bones covered in flesh-colored cling-wrap.

Feel more about this, Lou chided himself throughout the day as he cleaned first the halls and then Dad’s messes, bathed him, cut the food he didn’t want to eat into manageable bites Feel more about your goddamned father, come on. But he couldn’t manage it. He’d become an aide for that reason. The rote action of caring replaced any organic ability to feel anything about that care. All the emotion that was left was spent on wondering when the ghost would re-appear. And when she did, he wished she hadn’t.

She woke him in the night, her footsteps just outside his bedroom door. Lou lay awake in the darkness so thick that he could hardly see his hands and watched as the hall light flickered on, then off. The sound of Dad’s door opening and, for the first time that week, Dad’s voice. Laughter, so immediately familiar that Lou was startled. And then the ghost’s voice, familiar, too, in its own way, a way that sent a cold shock through his scars. What they were saying to each other was lost in the empty stillness of the night.

Lou forced himself to close his eyes, visual snow thick behind his eyelids, and how long passed he didn’t know when the door of his room opened. He didn’t look at her. Ghosts were just part of the job. Like cleaning, cooking, feeding, washing, dressing, reading, orienting, pills. None of these things were easy, that’s what he got paid for. The ghost drew near, stood at the foot of his bed. Her presence was a weight on his chest, a cold breeze under the blankets. He repeated I’m getting paid for this over and over, breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth, the way he had practiced for as long as he could remember, until at some point he fell asleep. If she stayed with him, he didn’t know.

*

He thought about leaving, abandoning his father and the ghost. But after the first snow there was no meaningful escape route. 230 closed entirely, and the small town just down the road retreated fully into itself, the grocery store closing, the bar shuttered. Lou tried to remind himself that it was temporary, that in another few weeks, once there was enough snowpack, there would be snowmobilers and backcountry skiers. He wouldn’t be alone with a dying man conjuring a dead woman in a cluttered cabin forever.

It didn’t make the nights any easier. Without fail, now unafraid of Lou’s presence, the ghost appeared each night at eleven. Why so specific, Lou wondered, did it correspond with something? Her death? Shit, could he remember his mother’s death? He could remember, clearly enough, the fight that had preceded it, the blizzard that caused it, the condition of her body in the Albany County Coroner’s Office, but not the day, not the time.

Trying to get anything from Dad about it was as fruitful as he might have expected. Over breakfast, the two of them sitting on the sofa because the hard wood of the chairs hurt Dad’s bones, Lou asked, “So, Mom coming around lately?” The response was a vacant stare. In Dad’s eyes, there was the reflection of the snow out the window, the bare bones of the pines. Then a long line of spittle as his lips opened, no sound, then closed. His expression was almost a smile.

Three weeks in, when the snowmobilers hadn’t shown up and Dad’s stool turned bloody and the saltines were running low, Lou decided it was time to walk into town. In the garage, he found a pair of snowshoes and a mouse-bitten duster coat that he pulled on over his sweaters. No snow goggles. He would have to risk the glare of the muted sun.

Maybe Dad would be dead by the time he got back. Maybe, he considered, as he began the long walk down the service road in the relentless bright light of the sun on the snow, he wouldn’t have to do anything at all. Maybe Mom would take care of it, just open a window or a door and let the cold in and Dad out, like the misbehaving cat Lou had loved as a child who slipped through the front door and was taken to heaven, or at least to the tree canopy, by an owl.

It was slow going. The access road sloped up with no sign of relenting, snow tumbling over Lou’s boots, the altitude making him dizzy. Even with the sun above, there was no relief from the chill in his fingers and toes, the numbness of his face. With the house out of sight behind him and no apparent end to the hill ahead, all that remained was the mountains and the forest. He tried to find peace with it. Instead, he felt nothing but a gnawing paranoia. Unseen eyes followed him to the collection of cabins that constituted the town, where the windows of the lone restaurant and bar were dark, a sign announcing CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS spelling out an unknown, isolated future. Shit. Nothing else to do, he turned around, back down the hill.

Alone with his body in the winter. Was it worth fighting your mother to death over it? he asked himself as the green aluminum roofs of Dad’s house came into view. Through the aspens, whose thin, gnarled fingers waved over each other in the gusts, the outline of the woman appeared on the front porch. Lou steadied himself. Ghosts could move fast, but they didn’t usually move far. She appeared again as a flicker of color and light, blonde hair and that green sweater, appearing in his bedroom window as he neared, keys in hand. Was she screaming at him for refusing to look, the way she’d screamed when he announced he was leaving, or was it a lion somewhere up in the mountains, mimicking?

Alone with his body in the winter.

In his periphery, she slammed her hand against his window as he placed his own on the front door. In his memory, she slammed her cast iron pan on the kitchen table and told him he’d never be her son and he held the carving knife and told her she’d never again be his mother. Little Cathy wailed in the back room and Dad tried to steady things and failed, and then Mom was out the door, still shouting: She thinks she can just get rid of herself, take my daughter away! She went out into the snow like her righteous anger would keep her warm. Lou closed his eyes. When he opened them she was gone.

*

Cathy called on the third day of Dad’s empty bowels now dark red, the consistency of coffee grounds. The sound of the landline ringing startled Lou so severely that he dropped Dad’s Audubon Guide to Birds of the Mountain West. The phone, built into the wall of the kitchen, was sticky. Lou held the receiver away from his face and realized he didn’t know how to respond to a call in this place. “This is the Markus family residence?”

“Lou,” Cathy’s voice was distinctly uncheerful. “What’s the news?”

“About what?”

“Well, he’s still doing all right?”

“Depends on what you mean by all right.” Lou looked at where his father was asleep on the sofa. In the light through small windows, his veins were worms after a rainstorm—thick and twitching under a thin film. “He probably ought to go to the hospital but . . . ”

Cathy exhaled loudly, her breath crackling in his ear. “Lou, it’s been a month and a half. You got more than enough to pay your debts by now, what’s the problem?”

“Fucking driveway’s blocked and the general store is closed for renovations.” Lou stood at the sink where hard water had caked the basin so much that it looked like limestone. “We’re just having a good time here.”

“Lou, I’m trying to be generous but come on now. $150 a day is a lot of money. Let’s get this over with and sell the house and all the shit in it, all right?” Somewhere in the background, her older child was calling for someone and the baby started to cry. “God, I’m sorry, I just . . . ”

Had she been the one taking care of him? It occured to Lou that he hadn’t asked for a history. He’d assumed Dad had lived alone until reaching the point where he wouldn’t speak, couldn’t walk, that maybe he’d had a stroke or something, but it dawned on him that Cathy must have been keeping an eye on him, never straying so far as to be out of reach. “It’s fine, Cathy, I’ll take care of it. I just . . . keep thinking about Mom.”

“Well, I’m sure he’ll appreciate the reunion. Just make sure it’s a good one.” The edge her voice took on was unplaceable but unmistakable. He didn’t know what it meant, didn’t want to ask her for fear that he’d tell her about the ghost.

“Okay. I’ll give you a call tomorrow. The county’ll come plow us out, I suppose.”

“You know they will. You’re in Foxpark, not Siberia. I don’t know if you forgot, living down south and all, but you’re still in civilization. People live here.”

“Well, not for much longer.”

She laughed for longer than might have been strictly appropriate and then hung up without saying another word. Dad was still asleep on the sofa. Lou paced the hallways, sorted through old papers and letters from the VA, looked for family photos and came up with nothing. Would it be a reunion to send this man to a wife he didn’t keep mementos of? Or was a ghost a better keepsake of a loved one than a photograph? Kneeling in the space between his room and Dad’s, he knew he could ask. It was just a matter of facing her.

*

More snow, so much that when Lou woke he was adrift in a grey-pink glow. The moon was bright behind the clouds and the light in the hallway was on. 11:05. He’d missed her arrival. Out his window, he could see the snow beginning to slope downwards on the driveway, tumbling over itself in the breeze. Beyond that, the peaks of the mountains were invisible. He pulled a sweater on over his pajamas, left his feet bare, and stood straight in the moonlight, reciting the Lord’s Prayer on Dad’s behalf, and crossed the threshold.

The two creaking doors, one after another, cut Dad’s laughter short. From his spot in the bed, propped up with three pillows, he stared at Lou in the doorway as though seeing him for the first time. His face creased in concern and he looked at the woman next to him, mouth open in shock. Lou was frozen in place staring at her, at her long hair and her tidy dress. When she turned, awash in the glow of the bedside light, her face followed her head. Eyes, nose, smiling mouth appearing only after a delay long enough for Lou to understand that they were his eyes, his lips, his freckles. That the ghost wasn’t his mother but himself, the version of him that had been left to die in this house, the version of him his father remembered. His ghost doppelganger reached out her hand. Time warped around her, the air visibly resisting her gestures.

Lou forced himself to take a step forward. Another. Another. Until he was at his father’s bedside across from the girl. They looked each other in the eyes and his whole body suddenly hurt like a raw nerve. Every inch of skin ached, needle-pricked. She kept smiling as she spoke but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Dad was laughing again and his slurred words were equally incomprehensible. Lou realized it hadn’t been the walls that kept the nightly conversations just out of reach; he was separated from them by dimensions. The girl kept her eyes on him, expectant, and the words appeared in his head like neon signs. Are you going to kill me again?

His skin was red now, he could see it even in the low wattage of the lamp. That was the problem with ghosts, they made the air around them poisonous, tucking themselves into people’s flesh like carcinogens, and the only way to be rid of them was to be rid of the source. He kept his eyes on his double as he climbed into the bed next to Dad and covered the man’s nose and mouth with his hands. It would take at least five minutes. He could bear it for that long. Already, the ghost was flickering rapidly, reaching out, trying to stop him, only to find her limbs melting as Dad’s brain lapsed, desperate for oxygen.

As many times as I need to, Lou thought, and knew she heard him, that he heard himself. As many times as it takes. He could feel Dad’s failing gasps turning to moisture under his palm. The ghost pulled at his wrist and his skin blistered from her touch but he wouldn’t relent. Her grip slipped, the top layer of his flesh following her now trembling hand.

He watched her watch him, her gaze on his unflinching grasp. Her mouth opened, made the sound of the wind outside shaking the hollowed out trees. Her features began to shake, twist, fold into each other and out again in a kaleidoscope of too-familiar flesh. She was Mom, she was not-him, she was Dad, she was Cathy, she was all of them at once and she was fading out as Dad’s breath grew more and more shallow. Lou remained still, watching her retreat through time and space against her will, trying to connect, burning fingers reaching for him but never again making contact. He was willing to endure any of it, all of it.

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