The Visitors

This is sort of a rough beginning for something that was always meant to be more. I hope to one day soon be able to pick this bit of the bigger picture up and flesh it out some...

 

                I’d been thirteen years old for a mere twenty-five minutes when I saw my first ghost. It had been a little boy, perhaps a few years younger than me, and he’d been dressed in a dark blue suit with a thin wisp of a tie knotted around his neck. He had appeared suddenly, from behind one of the old, sap-encrusted pine trees in the darkest corner of the acre-wide back yard. I’d thought he was a neighbor, and we’d spent the afternoon playing. It was only when my mother had appeared and asked, “Who’s that you’re talking to Anamaria?” that I’d begun to realize no one else could see him.

                “His name is Seamus O’Flannahan, Mama. We’re talking about his family.” I had furrowed my brows at my mother then, not understanding why she asked such strange questions.

                “Aren’t you a little old for invisible friends, Ana?” My mother had given me a strange, slightly stern look, settling her hands on her bony hips as she tried to make sense of what I was saying.

                “He’s not invisible, Mama. He’s sitting right here. Can’t you see him?”

                “No, precious, I can’t.”

                Parents not understanding their child at thirteen is typical. What’s not typical is having that child committed because you think she’s insane. What’s even less typical is having that child prescribed a veritable smorgasbord of antipsychotic medications, and then sending her home four months later a drugged-up drone of the happy little girl she’d once been.

                I wasted a year of my life on those medications. I remember that time as a haze – everything slightly cloudy around the edges, the details a little wavy, like I’d lived the year underwater. In a sense, I had. I’d been swallowed by the tide of prescriptions they’d given me. I was tossed around under the surface for a year before my mother couldn’t take it anymore and stopped feeding me the pills as she’d been told to.

                I came to on July 22, 1998. I was fifteen. I say I “came to” because that’s exactly what it was like. It was like slowly waking from a dream, and realizing that the person I’d been acting as was not me at all. Essentially, I’d been running on autopilot for a year, a mere shred of the person I truly was. I remember sitting at the breakfast table, and realizing how old my mother looked. How tired she seemed. Her eyes had dark, guilty circles under them; her complexion was pale, almost yellowed. She’d lost weight, and until that day, I hadn’t been able or allowed to notice. As she set my usual bowl of cereal before me, I reached out and snatched up her wrist. As she turned to look at me – which was something she had tried so hard to not do anymore; it only caused her pain to see the shell of her daughter there, spooning cornflakes into her mouth like a silent automaton; a robot daughter eating breakfast in silence – I looked up at her with clear, wide green eyes and spoke; my first real, full sentences in a year: “Mama. What happened to you?”

                She gasped, burst into tears as she looked into my eyes and saw me again, looking back out her with obvious coherence. She wrapped me into her arms and blubbered apologies. I hugged her to me, murmured forgiveness, and let her sobs shake the both of us until she could cry no more. For a moment, it was hard to tell which one was the adult and which one was the child; but there is a sacredness between a single mother and her only daughter that allows for these lapses – these grey areas – occasionally. She was only human, and she’d made a mistake. I loved her, so I forgave her.

                After that, I didn’t tell my mother about the visitors anymore. I didn’t tell her that they talked to me – asked me for favors. I didn’t tell her about the horrible things that had happened to some of them, or the joyful lives that some of them had lived. I simply went to school and did my homework and appeared to anyone giving a cursory glance a fully sane, normal, fifteen year old girl. So what if I was running errands for the undead in my spare time?

                The errands were usually easily remedied, consisting of telling a loved one something that needed to be said; some declaration of love, some apology, or some bit of information that solved some conflict. I scared a lot of the people I visited on those afternoons, after school and before my mother would return home from her job. I can only imagine how eerie it was to get a message from the afterlife from an innocent looking, blonde haired, green eyed little girl. Downright unsettling, I’d think. Most of the time I got them to believe me, by telling them something that I couldn’t have possibly otherwise known. Occasionally I got turned away. I always did my best for those that visited me. I felt I owed them one last request. I pitied them.

                By the time I was eighteen and headed off to college, I had the process down to a science. I managed to not only hold down a full class load, but also continue my Good Samaritan work for the undead. I was majoring in psychology, and planning to eventually get my doctorate and practice clinically. Secretly, I vowed to never let what had happened to me happen to any other misunderstood children. Subconsciously, I think I wanted to assure myself that I wasn’t insane, even after all of those years of acceptance of my gift.

                But like so many good intentions, my well-laid plans went awry my sophomore year. Like so many women, I made the mistake of involving myself with the opposite sex. It sounds cliché, but it really was my undoing to get involved with men. His name was Owen, and he was on the school’s football team. Yeah, I know. The clichés are getting a*s-deep, but really; it happened. We met at one of the occasional parties I attended. I tried to go to them once in a while, to keep up the appearance – a semblance – of normalcy. Besides, it had been a tough week and sometimes drinking kept the visitors away. I’d never really had much to do with the jocks of Alpha Kappa Lambda. I didn’t really think fraternities or sororities were all that great of an idea, and I was rather happy with my dorm room on the other end of campus. It was quiet and cozy.

I had just finished up earlier that day with a sobbing widow. It had taken me over an hour to convince her I wasn’t some nut, and then another forty-five minutes to answer all of her questions for her husband once I’d passed along his message. I hated it when they cried, which they usually did. I hated it even more when they clung to my forearm so hard that I sported crescent-shaped bruises for the next week from where their nails had dug in. But most of all, I hated it when I told them their loved one’s ghost had passed on, his task completed. Especially when they wanted me to make him stay. Frankly, I couldn’t have kept old Merle’s ghost any longer, and even more frankly: I didn’t want to. Merle, like all of the others, was destined for bigger and better things.

So I was nursing my keg-tapped beer in its frosted plastic cup, doing my best to look inconspicuous in the Alpha House’s emptiest corner. Things were starting to get a little fuzzy around the edges, and at the moment, no ghosts were afoot. Things were going well. Or so I thought.

“So, do you always look this excited at parties?” I looked up from my beer to find a pair of brown eyes staring at me. The eyes were set into a vaguely familiar face of decent proportion with a wide, slightly crooked nose and high cheekbones. His lips were tugged into a sardonic smile, displaying a line of ADA-approved white teeth. He was in my abnormal psychology class, but I couldn’t remember his name. He was wearing a nearly skin-tight red t-shirt, the chest of which was emblazoned with white Greek letters. Ah, so he was a house member. Just my luck.

“Oh yeah. I’m a total social butterfly.” I returned the smirk with one of my own, and added in a roll of my emerald-shaded eyes for good measure. Maybe, if I was crude enough, he’d go away and I could drink a few more beers and escape, relatively unnoticed.

He didn’t frown like I had expected. Instead he laughed, causing me to arch up both my eyebrows in surprise. “I can see that. People just flock to talk to you.”

“Oh yeah, you know it. In fact, you’re going to have to take a number since I’m a tad booked up. I think the current pull is number two-fifty-seven.” I kept my tone flat, unamused. But he wasn’t biting. He apparently thought I was being witty. Looking back, I think I sort of was. It wasn’t often that relatively adorable boys talked to me.

“And what number are you currently serving?” He arched a dark eyebrow, dropping his tone half an octave to load the sentence with obvious entendre. He then grinned to show he was mostly kidding. I say mostly, because you never make statements like that without being at least half serious.

I laughed in spite of myself, shaking my head. “Twelve.” I replied.

“Oh, that’ll never do. I live here. I figure I can cut in line a little. You’re in my abnormal psych class, right?” I nodded, a brief shake of my blonde head. “Right. Well, I don’t think we’ve ever officially met. I’m Owen.” He stuck out a hand in a rather chummy fashion, a kind grin dominating his attractive face.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was placing my hand in his. His hand was massive; it nearly encompassed mine. “Anamaria. Nice to meet you.” Somehow, he’d managed to get me to introduce myself, in spite of my best efforts.

Well played, Owen.

I’d like to be able to bury you further in cliché by telling you that from there on it was kismet – that we dated, and kissed, and had wild, crazy, amazing sex – but that’s more bullshit than I’m really willing to dish out. Those things all happened, but in the haphazard, accidental sort of way that most relationships happen. I’ll admit it; we were happy. But sometimes happiness can take a wrong turn, and after we’d been dating for steady six months I mustered up the courage to tell him about the things I saw.

I hadn’t wanted to really, but he’d been hounding me especially hard about where I was disappearing to all of the time, and after I’d managed to miss not one, but two surprise romantic-type date deals, I felt the need to fess up. He acknowledged my admission fairly well, actually. But not without asking me a whole lot of questions first, questions about a whole range of things, and it turned out he believed in the possibility of ghosts and things of a spiritual nature.

“So, you’re essentially telling me your psychic, right?”

“Something like that, yeah. But I only see ghosts, none of that other stuff.”

He nodded, running a set of calloused fingers through his chaotically-styled black hair. “Okay then.”

“’Okay then’? What does that mean?” It sounded defensive even to my ears, but it wasn’t a subject I shared with many people, so I was protective of what people might think about it. I eyed him, jutting my chin out slightly in a defiant manner.

He laughed slightly at my reaction. “What I mean is, you’re obviously not nuts. You spend enough time with psychologists and head-shrinkers that you can’t possibly have had a screw loose all this time and gone undetected. I can’t think of any logical way to prove you wrong, and honestly Ana, as long as you don’t keep missing dates what you do with your own time is your business.” He grabbed my arm and dragged me in for a hug, which I grudgingly gave him – a further show of defiance, though this one was for dramatic purposes only.

And that was really all we ever said about it. He asked me occasionally about the people I’d seen or done things for and I answered him – guardedly of course. I’d spent too many years hiding my gift – like it was something to be ashamed of – to suddenly change my old ways and start telling anyone who asked.

But you’re still wondering where it all went wrong.

The worst things in life always seem to come at an inopportune time. For me, it happened right in the middle of that wild, crazy, amazing sex I told you about earlier. The obvious things were going on – I don’t think we’ll go into the gory details – and at some point I lost focus with reality.

I don’t really know how else to explain it. It was like one minute I was there, in the moment, having one helluva time, and the next I was seeing Owen, dead. Needless to say, I screamed. More flashes: a car, Owen trapped behind the wheel, his door crumpled like aluminum foil. There was glass everywhere; it sparkled in the vague street light like tears on the pavement. I was still screaming when my vision cleared and I found that Owen had me wrapped up in his arms. I must have been thrashing about because the blankets were knotted around me and my hair was knotted up in a vast spider web-like network of tangles all around my face. I began to cry uncontrollably, and the very confused Owen just rocked me and mumbled soft, comforting sentences until I could manage to recount the whole story.

“What do you think it means?” I was sitting at the small table in the corner of my dorm, my fingertips wrapped around a mug of gratefully warm tea. I had managed to crawl into an oversized t-shirt. Owen sat across from me in his boxers. “It doesn’t mean anything, does it?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. You have to admit Ana, it’s a little nuts.” He drummed his fingertips on the tabletop in a somewhat annoyed fashion. In retrospect, I’d have probably been a  little annoyed too – to have my girlfriend tell me I was such a great lay that she saw me die – yeah, I think it’d make me just a little irritable. Having a girl scream and then burst into tears mid-coitus has got to be hard on a guy.

But I wasn’t in a position to understand him at that point. Instead I took things the wrong way and we ended up fighting. He left in a huff, and I slammed the door as he left.

God, if only I could take it back.

He’d been going fifty miles an hour when the truck came barreling through the red light. It hit him right in the driver’s side door, and he died three days later in intensive care. I held his hand the entire time, and when he took his last breath it was as if a brick had been placed on my chest. I couldn’t breathe. They tell me I had to be pried away from him – I honestly still don’t remember clearly.

I stopped attending classes at that point. I started getting “echoes” more and more often after Owen. I would touch something or someone and I could glimpse a shred of future. Sometimes I tried to change things, other times I couldn’t bring myself to. I stopped touching things that didn’t belong to me. I holed myself up in my room. I stopped talking to and helping the visitors. Everything hurt too much. Eventually my friends persuaded me and I went back home; I moved in with my mother, who took to mothering me like I was a wounded animal. Essentially, I was. It took me another six months to turn myself around. It was tough, but I managed to drag myself to the surface again, to cope with reality. Life had handed me ugly, bumpy, half-spoiled lemons, but somehow I managed to salvage enough to make lemonade. Sometimes I’m amazed at the human ability to cope with strange and painful situations.

Just be grateful you’re normal. Take it from me: It really is all it’s cracked up to be.

 

Author's Note

I know the ending sucks. It's always sucked. But that's what happens when you're forced to find a stopping point due to a professor's length and time limits. :P Someday I hope to expand this whole piece out into an honest-to-god book.

Reviews

[M. Andre Vancrown]

Mandie,

I know this was an assignment, but what struck me about this piece was more the awkwardness of tense (or time-sense) that hit me right from the get-go with the use of "had" (a narrative device which can get real clunky, real fast, and confuse you, the writer, and alienate your reader . . .)

Take a look at your opening here:

"I’d been thirteen years old for a mere twenty-five minutes when I saw my first ghost. It had been a little boy, perhaps a few years younger than me, and he’d been dressed in a dark blue suit with a thin wisp of a tie knotted around his neck. He had appeared suddenly . . ."

You pretty much establish that this is in the past as soon as you say you were thirteen when the event took place, so to belabor the point, well . . . it's a bent rim that threatens to rattle the whole thing apart before you even get us halfway out of the driveway.

Compare it to something like...

"I saw my first ghost at thirteen. A little boy, dressed in a navy-blue suit with a thin wisp of a tie knotted like a noose around his neck, who appeared suddenly, if not very unnaturally, from behind one of those creepy old, sap-encrusted pine trees that always seemed to thrive, out there, in the darkest corner of our acre-wide back yard."

Anyway, you get the idea. More than anything, I thought that attention to this detail, (making the tense/time-sense more subtle throughout), could really help to strengthen the overall narrative and make for a more engaging and enjoyable read.
I hope this helps in some way, and that it doesn't offend. I tend to be a workshop commenter, not one of the "festival of love" cronies.

Thanks for sharing this one!

Take care,

M~