The Moss home, Braintree, MA, November 8th
Laura Moss pulled up to her parents’ homestead in her rented Chevy Cobalt and concurrently breathed first a sigh of relief and inhaled with dread at what Adam might present. She had nothing but her Mom’s word to go on and it seemed every time she called her brother was either asleep or out of the house. They had to walk a fine line between sheltering him and letting him get back on the horse or skateboard as it were. They all knew that he was visiting Clarissa’s grave every day and it broke their hearts to see the poor boy pining for her. Yet they also all knew that unless Adam stopped mooning over Clarissa’s plot, someone would have to read him the riot act and tell him to stop his obsessive/compulsive behavior.
She continued texting him while she could on the plane and, as always, could never get through. At Logan Airport, she called home and Mom said he was sleeping. He hadn’t gone back to school yet and his depression was really starting to worry his family. So when Clarissa marched up the walkway she had no idea if Adam was still in bed or out. The sun was just beginning to set. Since Iraq was eight hours ahead of the eastern US, there was jet lag with which she’d have to contend but not tonight. She was too keyed-up worrying about her baby brother.
She walked right in without knocking and announced herself. Why should she? This was the house in which she and Adam grew up and for the few days she’d be here, she wouldn’t be “Elle” but Laura. Mom came out from the kitchen after a second or two, wiping her hands on a towel then broke into a full sprint. Wrapping her daughter in a hug, she began sobbing. Laura hugged her mother back and only realized it had been over a year since she’d last been in her childhood home. Still, Jewish mothers, she thought, were overly emotional when it came to their children. She’d had no choice but to adopt a stoic attitude in her line of work but Laura conceded that perhaps her Mom had a right to emotionalism since she was a Mom and Laura wasn’t.
Her fingers smelled of gefilte fish, which she always made homemade. Adam couldn’t stand it and he was always the closest thing the family had to a gentile. For Mom, matzo ball soup and gefilte fish was her comfort food like mac and cheese with hot dog pennies was always Laura’s. Come to think of it, no one else in the family liked Mom’s gefilte fish and even Rabbi Green, when he’d come over, always tightly smiled during such dinners as if he was circumcising an elephant. Mrs. Moss was probably the only wife and mother in the entire Judaic world who couldn’t cook.
“Oh my God, Laura, I was beginning to think we’d never see you again!”
“Mom, I’ve been busy, not dead.” She gently separated from her mother and looked at her. She cut her hair again, which was always a mistake with her physiognomy. With her hair short or pulled-back, her moon-shaped face always looked as big around as a hub cap.
“I like your new haircut,” she charitably said.
“Thanks. Adam’s still upstairs. I imagine you’d rather see him than me or Dad right now. We’ll have time to catch up, later.” She wiped her eyes dry and walked back into the kitchen.
I twitched when there was a knock at my door. Yeah, sometimes, they actually knock just before they haunt you. Sometimes they knock on other things. It’s like even after people die they take their manners to the grave and then bring them back when they come calling.
“Who… who is it?” I asked in a tiny voice. The blankets were already up to my fucking chin. I jumped out of bed and tore open the door when Laura answered.
I wrapped her in a huge hug and pulled her in and, believe it or not, my sister the Ice Princess was actually sobbing.
“Didn’t you get my messages? I was going crazy trying to call and text you!” she said with half anger and half love.
“I lost my phone,” I lamely explained. I never had the guts to ask if I could look for it in Clarissa’s Range Rover. I tried calling it from the house but no one ever answered it but an automated message saying the user was unavailable, yada yada. I figured maybe it got thrown out and smashed when the car tumbled.
“Oh, kiddo, I’m so sorry about Clarissa!” She hugged me again.
At the mention of her name, tears I thought were long cried out started pouring down my face and suddenly we weren’t secret agent and Emo boy but just two siblings who just hadn’t seen each other in way too long. I gladly hugged her back and tried my damnedest to ignore the pale man in the far corner of my room.
Laura couldn’t understand why Adam kept glancing at a corner of his room as if self-consciously mindful of another person observing their private moment. Mom had told him that Adam claimed to have seen Clarissa at the hospital days after she was killed and both she and Dad had dismissed it as either a dream or as one of Adam’s “glimpses.” The way he’d once explained it to her when they were still growing up, he said seeing a ghost was like getting a glimpse into another environment, like you would catch a fleeting glimpse of the interior of a passenger train as it sped by. Their baby brother who’d died seven years ago was just the first one he’d claim to see but certainly not the last.
Finally, when Adam opened up his wrists two years ago (Thank God he made the same mistake as many others, cutting horizontally instead of vertically), Adam said a ghost had told him to do it. They feared that he was schizophrenic until the psychiatrist at the hospital had the chance to examine him and rule out that diagnosis. The doctor said that Adam was suffering from paranoid delusions but certainly not schizophrenia, which was a much rarer malady. Then he met Clarissa and the two of them seemed to thrive and even depend upon each other. They both made a mutually miraculous recovery and Adam was discharged two days after her. They’d been almost inseparable ever since. When Laura got word that Clarissa was killed while Adam was with her, she feared her death would make her brother relapse.
But she had no illusions about his paranoid delusions. Adam was legitimately seeing things. And she feared he was seeing something right now, something that he was desperately trying to ignore and not call attention to.
I really wished that dude had stopped looking at me, at us. The fucking assholes (Clarissa excepted) hardly gave me a breather since. The kid in The Sixth Sense used to piss me off in that he never seemed to be seriously freaked out about seeing dead people. Trust me, kids, that’s some shit you just never take in your stride. The ones that died in horrible accidents were usually the worst ones because they come back with their trauma intact. One thing I noticed during the one time I made contact with Clarissa was she seemed to be holding her head at an odd angle. So when that cop told me that she died of a broken neck, I put two and two together.
The dude in the corner was one of those guys, I guess. He had a humongous chest wound like someone tattooed him with a fucking shotgun or something. What creeped me out was that he kept making like he was reaching out to me but couldn’t move or talk. He just stood there, his left arm out, like the world’s most hideous panhandler.
“What are you looking at, Bro?” Laura looked at the corner where he was standing quietly spazzing out but of course she couldn’t see him. Seeing shit like that was, for some reason, my job.
“Nuthin’. So, how ya doin’, Sis? Working on anything interesting?”
“You know I can’t talk about that,” she said. I knew that’s what her answer would be. It always is. But I was so distracted by the dude in the corner that I didn’t know what else to say. When I looked back to where he was, he was gone. I breathed a small sigh of relief.
“I’m sorry if I freaked you out. I guess, since you were in Baghdad, you were there doing something important.”
“Adam,” she said. As she drew out the last syllable of my name, she almost sounded like she was whining. She hugged me again, “stop apologizing, Honey. It’s not like you were driving the car or anything.”
“No, Clarissa was.” And I was no closer to understanding why she did what she did than I was the moment I woke up from my coma.
“Do you remember…?” She stopped and re-gathered her thoughts. “Do you recall anything during your near-death experience?”
Mom and Dad and even one of my friends asked me the same thing and I was getting sick and tired of being treated like a freak. There’s being treated like a freak because of my Emo boy looks but this was something else entirely.
“Yeah,” I said in all seriousness. “There was this pinprick of light. Then it got bigger and bigger and I started to see shit on the other side. It was like, swimming in pure light. Then as this bright white light got bigger and bigger, I heard music and saw…” Laura’s eyes also got bigger and I knew I’d hooked her. “…I saw… Elvis sitting on a Laz-E-Boy with this big-ass remote, controlling the world.”
Laura slapped my shoulder, knowing that I got her for a change.
“You wouldn’t believe how loud Elvis’s farts are, Laura.” She slapped the same shoulder again.
“You fucking asshole. You really had me goin’ there. Just for that, I’m telling all your Emo friends you’re a Phil Collins and Genesis fan.” She laughed and pulled a strand of hair behind her ear and asked, “So you don’t remember anything, then?”
“Nah. I mean, I didn’t even know until after I got back and even then I overheard Mom telling one of her friends from the synagogue.”
“They didn’t even tell you you were clinically dead?”
“Fuck no. You know, because of my… history,” I said with exaggerated scare quotes. Despite the fact that while growing up we fought like rabid cats and dogs, Laura always gave me the impression that she was on my side. We drew closer together after our brother died because we knew Mom wouldn’t have any more after us. So, as far as siblings went, we knew we were all we had and were ever going to have.
“Laura,” I said while chewing my lower lip, “I have a confession to make.” She looked at me more closely. “They’re back, only there’re more of them. A lot more.”
When Adam got done talking, my jaw was almost touching my knees. He’d told me the stories of the ghosts he was seeing back when but it seemed as if, when he came back from the dead, he didn’t come back alone. What truly alarmed me was when Adam said they were coming in ever greater numbers. I believed him to the point that I was convinced they were coming to him for some reason. I wanted to protect my baby brother since I couldn’t or didn’t take it on faith they were all good but how the hell do you protect a loved one from insubstantial energy?
“OK, baby brother, since we’re making confessions like guilty Catholics, I got one for you. And you have to promise to not put it on your Myspace or Facebook pages, ya hear?”
“Waddya think, I’m retarded? I know you work for the government and shit.”
I then gave Adam a basic overview of what we did at our agency, the 17th one that’s never mentioned in the annual National Intelligence Estimate. Without getting too deeply into classified material, I told Adam what I did for a living because I was beginning to suspect more and more that in some indefinable way, we would need my employers to shield him.
I debated whether to tell him the real story of our Grandpa Bernard then decided to. I never thought it was possible for Adam’s huge eyes to get any bigger yet somehow he managed it.
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