Ghosted: A Novel

Ilay in Jenni’s spare bed, listening to Javier loading his truck outside. On his radio a man spoke in rapid Spanish about the wildfire roaring across the dry hills of California. El fuego avanca rápidamente hacia nosotros, he said. The fire is coming at us fast. When he said the word “fire” his voice slowed right down, caressing each syllable like a new flame licking through paper. Fu-e-go.

Jenni was playing Diana Ross in the shower, although she wasn’t singing along. The boiler was groaning. Next door’s cat was making childlike wails, which meant Frappuccino was out in the yard.

I rolled over onto my back and rubbed my belly.

There was a man out there, somewhere, a nameless man I’d been thinking about for nineteen years. I didn’t know his face or his voice, had nothing to go on beyond his surname, but I’d always known I’d recognize him when he found me. I would look him in the eye and I’d just know.

Which was why Eddie David couldn’t be that man, I told myself. Despite the fact that his surname was wrong, I’d have sensed who he was the moment I met him. I’d have known.

The fire is coming at us fast.

Without warning I got up and ran to the toilet and threw up.

•   •   •

“A school-night hangover!” Kaia held a smile in those pleasant eyes of hers, so I’d know she wasn’t judging me. “You’re making me feel old, Sarah.”

I crouched in front of our little fridge, crammed with salads and wraps, and closed my eyes. I couldn’t eat my lunch. I couldn’t face even finding it. “You shouldn’t be impressed,” I said. “You should judge me. I deserve it.” I pulled myself up.

“We’ve all been there,” Kaia said. She was huddled over something by the kettle, as if to shield it from my view. I peered miserably over her shoulder and saw, as expected, a perky salad.

I wish she weren’t so good at handling me, I thought. Or so bloody thoughtful. She was only hiding that salad so I wouldn’t feel bad about myself. Above all I wished she weren’t here in our office. Yesterday her excuse for coming had been that she had some insight to share from a recent fund-raisers’ meeting at the Children’s Hospital, but today there had been no explanation. She’d just wandered in at ten and sat at a computer. Even Jenni was annoyed.

I went back to my desk with a glass of water in one hand and a tremor in the other. Reuben and Kaia went out onto our little roof terrace for lunch.

I tried to read my e-mails, but once again the words were shapeless and floppy. I tried to drink the water, but my stomach wasn’t having it. Ice! it told me. The water has to be iced! I dragged myself back to the kitchen, only to find the ice tray in the freezer empty. I sat back down at my desk and watched my husband and his girlfriend canoodling outside. Kaia was sitting in the crook of Reuben’s arm.

“I can’t do this,” someone said.

Me, I realized, after a pause. I had said it.

I almost laughed. Here I was, shaking, nauseous, dizzy, now talking to myself at my desk. What next? Animal sounds? A nude streak?

Then: “I can’t,” I heard myself say. My voice was coming from a part of me I couldn’t control. “I can’t do it. Any of it.”

I escorted myself quickly into our meeting room.

Stop this, I told myself, closing the door behind me. Stop this immediately. I wandered around the table, pretending to text someone; looked at them again. Kaia kissed Reuben’s forehead. A stray cat watched them from the roof of a neighboring Botox clinic. Behind them rose the straggle of high-rise buildings over in Downtown.

“I can’t do this.”

Stop it!

Anyone would feel unsettled watching her ex-husband fall in love again, I reasoned. It was okay to feel upset.

Only it wasn’t about Reuben and Kaia.

The fire is coming at us fast.

I tried to stop the words worming their way to my mouth but hadn’t the strength. “I want to go home,” I said.

The meeting room hummed quietly.

“Stop it,” I whispered. Hot tears prickled. “Stop it. This is your home.”

No, it’s not. This was never more than a hiding place.

But I love this city! I love it!

That doesn’t make it home.

Jenni slid through the door. “Sarah,” she said. “Sarah, what’s up? You’re talking to yourself.”

“I know.”

“Is it about Reuben? I can ask Kaia to leave, if you want. They shouldn’t behave like that.”

I took a long breath. But while I waited for the right words, Jenni marched out of the room. I stared stupidly at her back, realizing only too late what she was about to do.

Kaia and Reuben looked up. Jenni said something; they smiled, nodded. Reuben was whistling as he came through the door, but there was something about his face that told me he knew what was coming.

No, I thought weakly. Not this. This is not the problem. But Jenni had already kicked off. She stood squarely at the top of the table, talking in a voice I had heard three, maybe four times in our entire history.

“Kaia, we’re very grateful you’ve been helping us out, but I think we need to clarify exactly which projects you’re helping with, and whether or not there’s an unmanageable workload somewhere in our team. Because if there is, we’ll need to take a look at that. It’s not appropriate for you to be here, helping on a casual basis. Nobody signed off on it.”

Silence. Reuben’s eyes rolled over to mine, wide with shock.

Kaia’s face had paled. “Sure,” she began, although I knew she had no idea what to say next. “I . . . well, I’ve just been trying to help with a few things that Reuben needed off his desk . . . And Sarah’s deputy, Kate, seemed to . . .” She fiddled with the ring that sat halfway up her finger and I realized her hands were shaking.

This is neither the problem nor the solution, I thought. I was so tired. So desperately tired.

“I’m sorry,” Kaia said after a pause. “I didn’t want to be inappropriate. I realize I’ve probably been here a bit too often . . .” Her eyes filled with tears.

Instinctively, I stepped forward, but Jenni stopped me. “I’ve got this,” she said, passing Kaia a tissue. She didn’t put her arm around her. I watched in horror and fascination as my friend directed all of her rage and disappointment at the woman crying at our meeting table.

Reuben was paralyzed.

“I . . . lost a . . . It just really helps me to come here . . .” Kaia was backing off now; an animal half run over. “I’m sorry. It just helps me. I’ll stop coming. I . . .” She moved toward the door.

And suddenly I knew. “Kaia,” I said quietly. “Hang on a second.”

She hovered.

“Look, that story you told me, the day I met you,” I said, and her face slackened, became all loose and billowy somehow, like a tent with its poles removed. “The story about the boy on the oncology ward. Who our clowns cheered up.” The tent collapsed completely and there it was: a human being razed to the bone. “Was he your son?” I asked.

Reuben stared at me. Kaia took a slow, potholed breath and nodded.

“Phoenix,” she said. “He was my boy, yes.”

I closed my eyes. This poor woman.

“How did you know?” Reuben asked, stunned.

When I’d opened our mail this morning, I’d found a letter from a couple called Brett and Louise West. Four months after losing their son, they had finally managed to put pen to paper; said we were their first letter. Thank you so much . . . It vastly improved his last few weeks . . . Can we help your organization at all? . . . Would love to come and volunteer . . . Would be great to give something back . . . Make ourselves useful . . .

It had made me wonder again about Kaia, and why she was here. I wasn’t convinced it was just because of Reuben.

A few days earlier we had had a call to say that a child we’d been working with for months was in remission and ready to go home. Kaia, who had never met the child, had broken down in tears. “A second chance,” I’d heard her saying to my deputy, Kate, who’d announced the news. “A second chance at life. Oh, that is a blessed thing.”

And it was a blessed thing. We’d all cheered. But I had watched Kaia, long after everyone had gone back to work, and I’d wondered. Wondered if maybe there had been someone in her life who had not been given a second chance.

And as I watched her trying hopelessly to explain herself to Jenni just now, it seemed obvious that the little boy she’d told me about the day we met had been her own. She had lost her son, and with him an irreplaceable part of herself. And at some point, when she was able to get out of bed, to breathe, she had arrived in the nonprofit sector—just like the two parents who had written to us today; like me, and so many others—because it felt like the only conceivable way of forging good from bad. Of keeping going.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

She nodded. “Me too. And I apologize for having been here too much. My partner and I split up last year; we couldn’t get past it. So it’s been . . . lonely. Not that that’s your problem, but it . . . it just kind of helps, being here.”

I closed my eyes. I was so bloody tired. “I get it.”

•   •   •

I watched them leave. Jenni was slumped at the end of the table.

I walked over and put a hand on her shoulder. “Stop it,” I said quietly. “You weren’t to know.”

Jenni just shook her head.

“Look, Jen, I’m touched that you were willing to stick up for me, and for the team, the way you did. You were polite; you were nice; you handed her a tissue. What more could you have done?”

“I could have said nothing,” she said. Her voice was gluey with guilt. “I could have just let her be.”

I rubbed her shoulders, staring out the window. One of my legs started shaking and I sat down next to her.

“The worst of it is, we’re in the same boat, me and Kaia,” Jenni said dully. “There’s a part of both of us missing. Although she actually had a child, Sarah, and he was taken away from her, and . . . Oh, my God, can you even imagine?”

When eventually she recovered, I told her I needed to go. “I think I need to go to the walk-in clinic. I’m not . . . I’m not functioning very well at the moment, am I?”

“No,” Jenni said squarely, and I almost smiled. “But how’s the doctor supposed to help? You’re not going to ask for medication, are you?”

I paused. “No,” I said. “I just need to . . . talk.”

She frowned. “You know you can talk to me, right?”

“I do. And thank you again,” I said. “For earlier. Your heart was in the right place.”

Jenni sighed. “Oh, I know. I’m going to bake her the biggest cake. Out of vegetables, or green powders, or something. It’ll be great.”

•   •   •

A few moments later the door to our building clicked behind me. I felt the muffled punch of a boiling July lunchtime, steadied myself against the doorframe. I wanted to sleep, only I couldn’t stand the silence of Jenni and Javier’s. I wanted to sit in cooled air, only I couldn’t go back to work. I wanted—

I froze.

Eddie. I wanted Eddie. But deep inside my brain, something had to be misfiring, because he was there.

There.

Right across Vermont Avenue. Waiting for the traffic lights to change. Looking straight at me.

No!

Yes.

I stood stock still. I stared at him. A long, red Metro bus snaked along between us for what felt like hours. Then it was gone and he was still there. Still looking right at me.

I felt numb as I looked at him. There was a strange quiet, suddenly, out of step with the thunder of traffic passing between us. The lights changed and a white pedestrian light invited me to walk toward him, but I didn’t, because he was walking toward me, and he was still looking right at me. He was wearing shorts, the same shorts he’d been wearing the day we met. The same flip-flops. They smacked across the boiling road, and above them swung the same arms that had wrapped me like a present while I slept.

Eddie was coming. Across the world, across the road.

Until he turned round suddenly and retreated to the other side. The pedestrian sign held up a red hand, counted down three, two, one, and the traffic resumed. Eddie looked at me over his shoulder, then he made off down the street.

By the time the lights changed again and I was able to run across the road, he had disappeared down Lexington Avenue. I stood on the corner of Lexington and Vermont, stunned by the enormity of my feelings. Even now, after weeks of humiliation.

Nothing had changed. I was still in love with Eddie David. Only now I knew—I could no longer deny it—exactly who he was.

I set off toward the walk-in clinic.

•   •   •

The sun was sinking low over the west of the city. Below me, silvery roads ran dead straight to the horizon, lost in trembling haze and smog. Helicopters shared the sky with birds of prey riding thermal currents; hikers beetled up and down the paths carved into the hillside like scars.

I’d been up here two hours. More, probably. Alone on my favorite bench near the observatory in Griffith Park. The tourists had mostly left, anxious to get away before darkness fell. A few remained, anxious to photograph a perfect sunset. And among them I had sat quietly, trying to forget what the doctor had said earlier, concentrating instead on my week with Eddie. Waiting for the clue to reveal itself to me. I hadn’t found it yet, but I was close. It was amazing what you could find, once you knew what you were looking for.

I’d combed my way through almost to the end and now, as the sun bled all over the unseen Pacific, I was thinking about our final morning together. The brightness outside, the sense of loss as we said good-bye, the excitement at what was to come. He was leaning against the newel post on his stairs. The window was open and I could smell the fusty sweetness of the hawthorn blossom, the clean tang of warming grass. My eyes were closed. He was kissing me, a hand in the small of my back. He rested his nose against mine, eyes closed, and we talked. He gave me a flower, took my numbers, added me on Facebook, gave me Mouse for safekeeping. He said, I think I might have fallen in love with you. Is that too much?

No, I’d said. It’s perfect. And then I left.

I imagined him turning away when I’d gone, climbing the remaining steps. Picking up the tea he’d left at the top. Maybe pausing to take a sip. He still had his phone in one hand, because we’d just exchanged details. Perhaps he sat on a chair by the window and took a look at my Facebook profile. He’d scroll down, maybe, and—

I reached for my phone.

I felt oddly calm as I searched my own Facebook page. And there, of course, it was. A friendly message from Tommy Stenham, on June 1, 2016.

Welcome home, Harrington! Hope you had a good flight. Can’t wait to see you.

I put my shoes back on. I walked back toward the observatory and ordered an Uber. While I waited for it to arrive, I got out my phone and started writing. I had my answer.