We Found a Ghost Life (Part 2)
[Part 1]
My daytime walks with John the ghost began because I was feeling nervous about how much time Tom had been spending with him. I needed to investigate. The kids were at their new school, and I was planning to walk in the morning anyway, to get my steps in. That first time, I found John doing stretches in an empty lot at the end of the street. I asked him what he was doing out there.
“This is where my house used to be,” he said. “Before it burned down. The land was left to my cousin and she decided to keep it and leave it be. I think maybe that’s part of the reason why I’m here.”
“You’re looking for your home?” I was confused but I could tell he wanted to talk about it.
“Yeah. That and if someone put another house here it might suck all the energy up. Then I’d just drift away.”
He gave an incredibly sad, sweet smile.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you and your family.”
“It happens every day,” he said. “We had a really good life.” He stooped and brushed the dirt from his sweatpants. “You want to take a walk?”
We made three loops around the neighborhood that day and talked mostly about my kids. He said he had been going to stop Lily and tell her she was headed the wrong way, that day when she got lost and ended up at the pond, but didn’t want to startle her. “I may be a ghost but I’m still also a six-foot stranger. Don’t want to get kids used to talking to anyone like me. Not even around here. There are sickos everywhere.”
How much did he know? How far could he see into the lives of the neighbors? “Are there any sickos around here?”
He didn’t answer me for a moment, as if he were sorting it out on the spot. “Morris Bellinger is a dirty old man. He lives two streets over. The blue house on Hickory Lane. He raped a woman about forty years ago. But he’s grown meek. He’s eighty-seven. He’ll die soon. You don’t have to worry about Morris.”
“Can you see into the future?” I asked him.
“I can see everything.”
“Then why don’t you give Carl the lucky number for Powerball? Let him splash some cash on that pool he wants to put in and a new tractor.”
“I don’t work like that. I don’t like to meddle in people’s lives. Unless something bad is happening.”
There was something else. John was holding back. I let it go because I didn’t want to dive too deep into the drama of our new neighborhood and I assumed that if there was something relevant to me, John would bring it up.
“Just let me know if my family is ever in danger,” I said, before changing the subject. John gave me a thumbs up.
After a couple weeks of morning walks with John, I decided I had to tell Tom about all of the time we were spending together. I mean, Tom was basically spending the same amount of time with John at night as I was during the day. So what was the problem? I put on a movie for the kids and went out to meet Tom in the garage.
“I just want to let you know, I know you’ve been spending a good bit of time with John, but I think he’s been a good friend. For both of us. I’ve gone on a handful of walks with him and have found his perspective really refreshing.”
Tom froze and leaned against the wall. “He didn’t tell me anything about that,” he said.
“Well, maybe he didn’t think it was a big deal. Because it’s not a big deal.”
Tom shook his head. “Yeah, he’s great. He really knows how to relate, doesn’t he?” I smiled and nodded, relieved that Tom wasn’t moody about it. “Maybe he can babysit the kids, so we can have a date night,” Tom mused.
For some reason, I didn’t want to invite John into our house. After talking it out with Tom, he agreed. We’d keep hanging with John outdoors, but no home time with the ghost. We didn’t want him drifting in unexpectedly, or lingering in the shadows after we thought he was gone. I put the kids to bed and Tom headed out to meet John for some stargazing. “Cassiopeia is ascending, you know.”
I fell asleep curled up next to Jason and when I woke up after midnight, Tom wasn’t home. I grabbed a flashlight, locked all the doors and headed down the trail behind our property to the field where Tom usually hung out with John. There was no sign of either of them. I took a different route home, cutting through a section of forest that led to the road. When I was nearly to our street, Tom called to me from above. “We’re up here!”
I shined the flashlight into the treetops and found Tom, lounging on a branch with a beer in his hand. “I don’t see John,” I told him.
“Can you hear him?” I couldn’t. “Maybe it’s the flashlight,” Tom said and I turned it off. He kept talking and laughing, but I could only hear my husband. After a few minutes I told him to come home with me. He dangled down by his arms and dropped a good seven feet to the ground. When he landed his knee gave out, and he slammed into the dirt. He shouted up into the tree, “No, no. I’m fine. Yeah, it’s just a mere flesh wound. Haha!” I trained the light over the trees one last time, but still there was no sign of John.
On the walk home, Tom said, “Have you noticed something different about John? He let me go really awkwardly from the tree just now. It’s lucky I didn’t get hurt worse. He’s been distant and kind of, I don’t know, mysterious with me lately.”
“No, I haven’t noticed that,” I said.
“I just feel like he’s holding back or not super into being friends anymore.”
“Did you try to talk to him about it?”
Tom shook his head, “How am I going to talk to him about that?” He changed the topic. “Fuck, I think I really messed up my leg.”
By morning his kneecap was purple and he couldn’t stand. I drove him to the doctor’s office. I had to skip my walk with John. After lunch, I headed to the field, but I didn’t find John there either. I knocked on Carl’s door and he invited me in for coffee.
I explained how I had gone out to find Tom, but when I did it looked like he was alone and talking to himself.
“That’s how John works,” Carl explained. “He only appears to one person at a time. If both of you are trying to commune with him, he’ll only show up to one of you. Or not at all.” I keyed into the word that Carl had used, commune, and asked him what he meant by it.
“That’s what you do with dead spirits. You commune with them. You tell them your problems and they help guide you. John just does it in a very mellow, conversational way. So that you feel like you’re talking with a friend. He doesn’t talk about his life much, does he?”
John really doesn’t. Not since that first walk. I always felt too bad to bring up the tragedy of his death. “Only when I ask about it, which I don’t really do,” I said.
“He’s good like that. He’s a heck of a listener.” We sat quietly and sipped our coffee. “If you need help with emotional things, or personal things, he’s great with that stuff.”
It made sense. I had gotten so used to doing all of the talking that I hadn’t stopped to realize how one way our relationship was. And John seemed genuinely interested in my challenges and issues. I had told him how I felt lost in my career. How I didn’t think I was being a great mother most days. How all the time I spent working a corporate job in the city had kind of sapped my soul and left me some weird automaton, fixated on work things that weren’t lasting or very important. How I was scared to die like my father, a workaholic who never seemed to enjoy anything. How the transition to the countryside was hard, because I didn’t know how to connect with nature. I pretended I did, but really I was just a lost post-yuppie who didn’t know how to clean a gutter or fish a stream.
It was a lot. John helped me unravel most of it. He’d tell me to “Embrace adversity and find ways to have fun learning a new life. You’ll figure it out, if you take it one thing at a time.” That was pretty good advice. After a month of walks, I was feeling more grounded and connected to myself than I had since college.
We never talked about Tom. I just didn’t think it was appropriate. Didn’t want to go there. John was careful to avoid the topic of my marriage. Though if I had to be honest, I would have told him that I thought my marriage was slowly failing. That I’m not sure I even believed in the institution of marriage. Tom and I had compromised so much to be in this never-ending partnership, I’m not sure either of us felt like we were the truest versions of ourselves.
We were doing it for our kids. Which was reason enough. “They’re good kids,” John told me, whenever Lily and Jason came up. “They’re going to do amazing things.”
I didn’t want to see into their future. I wanted it to be a surprise. So whenever John would make mention of all the great things they’d do, I just left it at that.