CHAPTER 12

As early afternoon light touched her eyelids, the sleeping girl moaned and buried her face in soft black oblivion.

Her sheets and pillowcases had been plain white cotton until last week, when she had run them all through the washing machine with six packages of black Rit dye. Now they were a flat bluish-ebony color that stained her skin on hot nights. She nestled deeper into her inky bedclothes and flung an arm across the mattress. Empty space. No warmth or scent except her own, no reassuringly live flesh to press herself close to. The empty bed brought her awake with a jolt, and for a moment she panicked. Waking up alone robbed her of her frame of reference; she could barely remember who she was.

Then she saw the room around her, the posters on the walls, the paint-smeared easel, the clothes heaped on the floor of the big walk-in closet. Across the room she saw herself in the mirror of her vanity, eyes round and startled, pale face framed by tangles of long red-gold hair. She settled back with a sigh. She was Ann Bransby-Smith, and she was in her own room, safe in her own bed, and never mind the sick feeling it still gave her to wake up alone. Not until she rolled over and hugged her pillow close to her did she realize that she had been thinking of waking up not with Eliot-even though she had spent most of last night with him-but with Steve.

Even the thought of his name made her heart twist. After all that had happened between them, Ann still sometimes wished she could wake up with him, see his dark hair straggling across the pillow and his intense face softened in sleep, reach over and glide her fingers along the muscles of his back. God, but he had always felt good beside her, on top of her, inside her.

Well, almost always.

Well, except when he made her hurt like hell.

That was how she had started cheating on him in the first place: she'd wanted to have sex with someone who didn't leave her sore the next morning. Once she had loved the sureness and strength of Steve's touch, but drinking turned him rough and seemed to make his bones sharper. Ann woke with gnawed nipples, bruised hipbones, a throbbing ache in her crotch that turned to raw agony when she pissed. It was only good for an argument if she mentioned it, and she still desired him, so after a while she shut up.

And when she was honest with herself, she knew the rough sex wasn't the only thing that had driven her away. It was the music as well. Steve had already started playing guitar when she met him, and at the time she had liked the idea of having a musician for a boyfriend. She was happy for him when he started getting good and excited when he, Ghost, and R.J. decided to form a band. R.J. had never wanted it as badly as the other two-he'd always been a serious kid, and Ann thought music was just too frivolous a calling for him-and had dropped out early, but he still sat in with them sometimes.

All that had been fine. But when it got too heavy, when it started to appear that Steve and Ghost wanted to make Lost Souls? their life's work, Ann balked. She didn't want to be a musician's wife, spending months alone in Missing Mile while he toured, worrying about money during the lean years and groupies during the good ones. When they had started recording their tape, the final wedge was driven in. The all -night sessions, the hours upon hours Steve spent in Terry's home studio talking about levels, tracks, spillage, and other incomprehensible things he never bothered to explain to his lowly girlfriend. He had never felt so intensely about her, Ann was sure.

At any rate, she had known Eliot would make a gentler lover from the first time she met him.

At first Eliot had seemed exotic: twenty-nine to Ann's twenty-one, divorced, with a real job as a junior-college English teacher and half a novel sitting on his, desk. He was a regular customer at the Spanish restaurant where she waited tables. He always sat in Ann's section and started leaving her giant tips. Eventually he asked her out. "You disturb me," he had told her, "but you intrigue me."

The line sounded stupid when Ann thought about it later, but by then she had already slept with him and had mistaken his tentativeness for tenderness. At least when Eliot went down on her, her clitoris didn't feel as if it were about to be sucked out by its roots. At least when Eliot's penis (she could not help noticing it was thinner and much pointier than she was used to) was inside her, it didn't feel like an angry fist battering her cervix. At least Eliot waited until she was wet. These days, such things were luxuries.

Also, Eliot had had a vasectomy. He was very proud of it and sometimes wore a bright orange button that said I Got Mine! If you asked him about it, he would launch into a speech about how None of Us Have the Right to Bring More Children into This Cruel, Overpopulated World. Ann didn't care for the button or the speech, but it was nice being able to go off the pill. Her sleep patterns and her depression patterns were so erratic that she had been forgetting as many as she remembered.

So it didn't matter when she read the half a novel and couldn't think of anything to say about it. It was a study of a rural family in Virginia. It was Tough and Gritty, but Sensitive. The hero turned out to be the youngest son, Edward, who went to the University and became a teacher of English. Edward was also the only character who didn't talk in dialect-Eliot had written his doctoral thesis on William Faulkner, and had never really gotten over it. It didn't matter that Eliot talked sneeringly of her "redneck boyfriend"-whom he had never met and never would-and derived a perverse glee from hearing that Steve was a college dropout. It didn't even matter that underneath all her self-righteousness she felt like the lowest land of lying, betraying bitch. None of these things mattered to her in the slightest.

Until Steve found out.

Ghost knew about it first, of course. He had always been able to see inside her head, the way he could see inside Steve's head and almost anyone else's if he chose to. Ann had seen Ghost looking at her strangely, then looking away when she stared back at him. He would not question her or accuse her, but she knew he knew.

She had let herself into their house one day while Steve was at work. She stood in the doorway of Ghost 's room, watching him write something in a spiral notebook. When he finally looked up, he didn't seem surprised to see her. His pale blue eyes had been calm but guarded.

"Are you going to tell him?" she said.

For a long moment Ghost only looked at her, and she didn't think he would answer at all. Then he lifted one shoulder in a tiny shrug and shook his head no-but in those small movements Ann saw what pain it was causing him to keep such an ugly secret from Steve. All the guilt and the sorrow washed over her then, and she fell on Ghost's bed, buried her face in his musty-rose-scented heap of blankets, and sobbed out the whole sordid tale. Ghost patted her back and stroked her sweaty hair, and all the time she knew she was telling him things he didn't want to hear. But he listened anyway, because he was Ghost. Because he was good.

And of course Steve found out anyway. Whether he sneaked into her room and found her carefully hidden journal, or whether the unspoken communication between him and Ghost was so strong that he picked it up without Ghost having to say anything, Ann never found out. Everything happened so fast. Steve came over one night when her father was out, and he knew. He didn't come right out with it, though. He talked around the edges of it; he was manic, almost raving, then sullen. She could see in his eyes that he hated her.

"All right!" she shrieked finally. "All right! I fucked somebody else and I liked it! He's a better lover than you. He's smarter than you. He's not a goddamn drunk-"

She was just getting warmed up when his hand flashed out and slapped her hard across the face.

The blow had enough force behind it to throw her backward onto her bed. She lay there for a moment, her heart and mind stunned. Steve had never hit her. No one but her father had ever hit her. Her cheek and jaw went numb, then began to tingle. Steve would beg her forgiveness, surely. But he stood over her, his dark eyes blazing, and when she tried to struggle up he planted the sole of his boot square in her crotch and shoved hard. A lick of pain shot through her.

"You cunt," Steve said. His voice was quiet, inflectionless. "I know how to make sure you won't do any more fucking around for a while."

And Steve's hands went to his belt buckle.

Ann threw herself back against the wall. Suddenly Steve was on the bed with her, pinning her there, trapping her. She thrashed against him and felt him getting hard. Seeing him excited by her terror scared her worse, made her limp. She kept trying to push him away, but she was weak now, and he was so strong.

He yanked her skirt up, thrust two guitar-callused fingers into her vagina. They were dry and felt as if they would tear her open. Now he had her hips pinned beneath his. His jeans were down around his knees. His cock was shoving at her, battering into her. She felt it thrusting through her dryness up into the unwilling heart of her womb, and most of her did not want it there-but it was Steve, and he had always fit inside her so damn well, and almost before she realized it she was coming.

Coming against her will, coming in pain and humiliation, but coming hard nonetheless.

Steve mistook the throes of her orgasm for struggles and thrust her arms back against the mattress. His big hands were like vises around her wrists. Ann felt delicate bones grinding together; in a moment she thought they might snap. She threw her head to the side and sank her teeth into the ball of his thumb until she tasted blood. Now he was pounding into her so hard that he didn't seem to notice the pain-but his grip loosened a little, and then he was shuddering to his own violent orgasm, and the rape was over.

"There," he breathed, lifting his head to stare into her stricken face. "There. See how you like fucking your new boyfriend now."

After he had stormed out and roared away in his car, she wondered why she felt so dirty.

That had happened more than a month ago, and it was the last time she had seen Steve. She knew he had tried to call a couple of times-or someone had called at 3:00 a.m. and hung up when she answered-but she did not care, could not care.

She made Eliot her refuge, her sanctuary. He was so good to her that she grew impatient with him, then completely sick of him.

But she could not let go. She was afraid of that empty space in her life. She was afraid she might let Steve fill it again, and that would kill her shaky self-respect forever.

She nestled deeper into her pillows and contemplated going back to sleep. These days it was not unusual for her to sleep fourteen or fifteen hours at a stretch. She was just drifting off again when the doorbell rang. She tried to ignore it. The sound lingered in her ears, made her heart pound. "Go away," she whispered.

The bell rang again. Ann swore, and as if in response it rang a third time. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, fought off a headrush that made the room spin giddily around her, and went with great reluctance to see who was at her door.

The boards of the old wooden porch shifted uneasily under Ghost's feet. The Bransby house was a Victorian monstrosity gone to seed, its paint peeling, its edges softening. He had not called before riding his bike over here because he was afraid Ann might refuse to see him, but he knew by her beat-up little car in the driveway that she was home. He also knew that her father was gone, probably to an AA meeting or to the library over in Corinth, the only places he ever went that anyone knew about. That was good. Ghost had always been a little scared of Simon Bransby.

He was trying to decide whether to leave or ring the bell again when he heard steps inside the house-slow, dragging steps, in no hurry to reach the door. Eventually Ghost heard Ann fumbling with the chain. Then the tumblers of the lock slid back, and she stood in the doorway, leaning against the jamb, her face half obscured in the gloom of the foyer.

At first Ghost thought Ann had two black eyes. But as she blinked at him, he realized it was only her makeup, smeared around her eyes as if she had slept in it. In fact, though it was two in the afternoon, she looked as if she might have just woken up. Her long autumn-colored hair was tangled. Her black dress was rumpled and hastily buttoned.

For a long moment Ann stared at Ghost, his rainbow-painted bicycle beside him on the porch, the colored streamers tied to the brim of his old straw hat. She looked as if she might burst out crying or slam the door in his face. But at last she moved aside and said, "Come on in."

Without another word, she turned and walked back down the hall, away from him. Ghost shut the door behind him and followed. To the left was the dusty parlor, where several weeks' worth of newspapers were strewn about the floor and heavy draperies were closed against the day. Ghost wondered who had drawn them-Simon? Or had it been Ann, who used to keep the house sunny and clean?

To the right was the half-open door of Simon's laboratory. Ghost tried not to look, but the dull gleam of sunlight on glass caught his eye-the test tubes, the aquariums, the vials of weird fluid. He'd been in there a couple of times with Steve, though Ann's friends were not supposed to go in the room. The contents of the aquariums were innocuous enough-toads and mice- but the laboratory felt like a place of pain. And there was a big refrigerator with a chain and padlock on it. Even Ann didn 't know what was in there.

Ann reached the kitchen table and propped herself against it for a moment, then collapsed into a chair. "Make some coffee, would you," she said. Ann's voice was hoarser than usual, nearly toneless. She curled her bare toes around the rung of her chair. Her red toenail polish was chipped and faded, as though she had not redone it for weeks.

Ghost found the coffee in the freezer and started making it. He used only his grandmother 's old Corningware drip pot at home, and he had already put water on to boil before he realized that the Bransby kitchen had an automatic coffee maker. It took him several minutes to figure out where the coffee went and where to pour the cold water in.

"You're not a part of the machine age, Ghost," said Ann. She lit a Camel and narrowed her eyes at him through the smoke. At last she asked, "Why did you come over?"

"I just wanted to see how you were doing."

"Oh? And how am I doing?"

"You look bad."

Ann gazed levelly at him. "Thanks. You look a little spooky yourself."

"You know that's not what I mean." Ghost pulled the coffeepot out from under the drip-spout too soon. Hot coffee hissed against the burner, and he hurriedly put the pot back. "You're beautiful, Ann. But you look sad. Twitchy. You look like those kids you used to make fun of at the Sacred Yew-black clothes, black eyes, dead white skin. What are you doing?"

"I'm in mourning," she said. "I'm mourning the death of a relationship." She got up and pushed him away from the coffee maker, expertly slid the pot out, and poured them each a cup. Ghost put lots of milk and sugar in his. Ann left hers black, which meant she was doing some land of penance. Ghost knew she hated black coffee.

"Steve told me he hadn't seen you for over a month," he said. She flinched at the name, but he made himself go on.

"Things must not be too good with your new guy if you're still in mourning." It was out: he had crossed over into territory that was officially None of His Business.

"Look, Ghost." Ann swung around in her chair, faced him. "I worked last night, okay? I was at that shitty restaurant until midnight. Then I drove out to Corinth to see Eliot-more precisely, to fuck Eliot. We fucked until four in the morning because that's about all we can do together anymore. Then I had to drive back here because Simon usually wakes up around six, and he gets crazy if I'm not home. So I've spent the last twenty-four hours doing two things you don't know much about-working and fucking. I'm tired. Now lay off me."

"Okay," Ghost said quietly. The attack on his areas of ignorance didn't sting much, but the reference to fucking Eliot did, because he knew it would drive Steve up the wall. "I'll leave if that's what you want. I brought you something, though." He put a cassette on the table next to Ann's coffee cup. The words LOST SOULS? were printed in multicolored crayon on the liner.

Ann stared at the tape, then up at him. Her tough composure wavered. Her carefully arranged expression began to crumble. "Oh, Ghost..." She picked up the tape and pressed it to her lips. A couple of stray tears made crystal tracks through the smudged black makeup. "I miss you. I even miss Steve. But I can't go back."

"I know." He knew some of what had happened between them, not all. Steve hadn't told him everything, but most of it got through anyway. And the rest-well, he guessed he could see it now, in Ann's deathly pale face, in her smudgy, haunted eyes.

She and Steve had always been stormy together. Steve had blithely dated his way through high school, getting laid but never quite getting involved. His tastes were diverse. The only girls he couldn't stomach were the ones who seemed to make themselves up according to some redneck template, with the bleached-blond bubble hairdo, the feverish streak of blush across the cheeks, and the eyeshadow of colors never seen in nature. He had casual girlfriends of all other types: hippies who liked to get stoned with him, preppies who thought him wild and slightly dangerous, smart girls who appreciated his compulsive reading habit.

But Ann was the first one he had fallen for. In her way, Ann loved Steve as fiercely as she loved her weird father, and Steve wanted her more than he had wanted anything since he had learned to play the guitar. But one of the first things that had drawn them to each other was also one of the first things to start tearing them apart. They both pretended to be so tough and cynical that there was no room left to give each other the gentleness they both really needed. Steve had always been like that, and Ghost knew his way around it; there was an honesty between them that surpassed any facade Steve could put up. But Ann wouldn't play that game.

Ghost took a sip of his coffee. It was cold and too sweet even for him. He drank more of it anyway, because he didn't want to ask the question that had come into his head. But it wouldn't go away; it had worried him ever since Steve had come home that night, his shirt untucked and his eyes wild and a bite mark on his hand. So finally he spoke again. "That was a shitty thing Steve did to you. You could have called the cops on him-or told your father. What stopped you?"

Ann laughed. It was a humorless sound. "Right, Ghost. The cops. 'Officer, my boyfriend-the one I've been sleeping with for four years-he raped me.' " She made her voice deeper and spoke in an exaggerated redneck drawl. " 'Sure, little lady, we understand. You been givin' it away, and now you want to take it back. Why don't you come on down to the station and maybe you can show us exactly what he did to you.' I don't think they would have been too sympathetic. And Simon- well-" The bitter smoke from her cigarette swirled around her head, obscuring her eyes. "Simon would have killed him."

Ghost believed her. But she still hadn't told him what he really wanted to know. "How come you did it, Ann? You loved Steve. Maybe you still do. How come you wanted to go running to that guy over in Corinth?"

For a moment Ann only looked at him with something flickering far back in her eyes, and Ghost thought she might throw her cup at his head. But then she looked at her burning cigarette as if she had just realized it was there in her hand, and she sucked smoke deep into her lungs, coughed a little, and answered him. Her voice was hoarser than usual. "I believe in whatever gets you through the night," she said. "Night is the hardest time to be alive. For me, anyway. It lasts so long, and four a.m. knows all my secrets. And when I was lying in bed next to Steve feeling like I was about to fly apart and he wouldn't hold me because we'd been arguing about some damn stupid thing-well, I went looking for something to get me through the night a little bit better."

Ghost couldn't say much to that. Her point of view still bothered him, but he knew that was just because no matter how much he cared for Ann, he would always love Steve more. So he talked about mutual friends Ann hadn't seen for a while-she had been afraid of running into Steve, and Eliot was apparently a virtual hermit with no close friends of his own and no interest in meeting hers. Ann hadn't been getting out much.

Ghost gave her the news, such as it was. R.J. Miller's supposedly male cat had a litter of seven kittens, six solid black and one a sort of green. Terry, who owned the Whirling Disc record store in town, had gone on vacation and left the assistant manager in charge. The guy had filled out the form wrong when making an order, and they received a huge shipment of Ray Stevens albums. When he got back, Terry started playing the records all the time as punishment. Twenty times a day or more they were treated to the annoying country singer performing classic numbers like "The Mississippi Squirrel Revival" or "Everything Is Beautiful (In Its Own Way)."

He told Ann these things and made her laugh a little. He didn 't tell her how much Steve was drinking, or that he had started robbing Coke machines again. She didn't ask how Steve was either. But when he hugged her goodbye on the porch and rode his bike away, he thought she looked a little happier, a little less pale and drawn. Not much, but a little.

A little worm of worry for her had already begun to gnaw in Ghost 's heart. He didn't count it as a premonition.

Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference between them and his ordinary feelings. But any friend of Ann's would be worried about her, seeing how she was now. If the worm kept gnawing, he would pay more attention to it.

He pointed his bike toward home. By the time he got there, the ugliest image he had picked up from Ann-Steve on top of her, shoving her down into the mattress-had almost faded from his mind.

CHAPTER 13

Nothing fingered the colored glass bubbles in the partition between diner booths of torn maroon vinyl. The Greyhound had taken him down through Maryland and northern Virginia suburbs, down along anonymous highways flanked by chemical processing plants, cigarette mills, housing developments and the dull blue and green aluminum walls meant to protect them from the noise and smell of the highway.

The scenery was boring and oppressive at first. It made Nothing wonder whether he might be travelling deeper and deeper into the dead world populated by his parents and teachers and the sad, desperate friends he had left behind. Surely these couldn't be the roads that led to home.

But now, deep in Virginia, the roadsides were lush and green, even in the middle of September. He was sitting in a truck- stop diner somewhere south of nowhere, watching the afternoon light fade, staring at the ripped vinyl and the greasy tables and the flashy jukebox that didn't have the decency to play green and mournful country music, but played the pop top twenty over and over by the hour. Nothing held his backpack close to him. The place reeked of hamburger grease and cardboard-flavored coffee. But the colored glass bubbles in the divider were as beautiful as anything back home in his room. He wished he could somehow steal just one of them. By this time he wished he could have put his whole room in his backpack and carried it away with him. He glanced through the window at the bus station across the parking lot, lit a Lucky, tapped it, and rubbed ash absently into the thin torn cloth of his jeans. The jeans were soft and comforting, decorated with black ballpoint swirls, a chain of safety pins, artistic rips. His hightop sneakers chafed each other, tapped together impatiently, wanting to get back out on the road. There was a hole in one sneaker, over his little toe.

He found the Lost Souls? cassette in the pocket of his raincoat, opened the plastic case, and took out the paper liner.

The liner was a grainy photocopy, a picture of an old gravestone dappled with shadow and sunlight, surrounded by pine needles and twining kudzu vines. Across the gravestone the words LOST SOULS? were printed in rainbow crayon. All five hundred copies were supposed to have been lettered by the band. He pictured the guitarist, hunched tall and awkward on the floor, pressing down too hard with the crayons and breaking them,- cussing and turning the whole project over to the singer.

The singer was surely in charge of the color yellow and with his fingers would have touched this paper, would have swirled in the question mark that kept the name from being stupid.

Nothing looked at the other side of the paper liner, at the photo of the two musicians. Steve Finn, sitting with his guitar between his knees, grinning with a certain easy cynicism, his messy dark hair shoved behind his ears and a can of Budweiser not quite concealed behind the pointy toe of his left boot. And the other one, the one who slid his eyes away from the camera, whose knobby wrists lay crossed in his lap. Whose patchwork clothes were too big and whose hair fell from under his straw hat as pale as tangled rain, half-hiding his face, obscuring him.

All Nothing knew about the duo came from this picture and the cryptic liner notes ("I like to drink my watercolor water"), those things and the long trainwhistle music and the spooky, wistful words of the songs. But he imagined personalities for them, felt as if he knew them. Lost Souls? belonged to the crowd of spirits inside his head, the ones he used to wish he was squeezed against on Saturday nights when Jack's car went too fast around a curve and the others screamed for another hardcore tape.

Those, his old friends-with their leather jackets and their skull bongs, their Marlboro hard packs and their thwarted dreams- those were teenagers. Nothing knew he was either a child or an ancient soul; he had never been sure which.

He tugged at the drop of onyx and the tiny silver razor blade that dangled from his earlobe. He fingered a ballpoint pen in his pocket. Then he unzipped his backpack, dug for his notebook, and pulled a postcard from between the scribbled, singed, softly ragged pages. It was the postcard he had written while drinking his parents' whiskey, but he had not yet mailed it. The gold leaf caught the light as he laid the card on the table.

GHOST, he had addressed it, c/o LOST SOULS? 14 BURNT CHURCH ROAD, MISSING MILE, NORTH CAROLINA. He wrote no zip code-they hadn't included one on the tape case. Maybe Missing Mile was too small to have a zip code. But, thank whatever gods watched over him, he had remembered to put a stamp on it. He could hardly afford to buy one now.

He finished his cigarette, lit another, tried to make out the time through the layer of grease on the wall clock, glanced over at the bus station again. But it was no good. He couldn't get back on a bus even if he wanted to. The money from his mother's jewelry box had run out two towns ago. His stomach hurt, and he had thought of spending his one remaining dollar on a burger or some pancakes. But what if it was the last dollar he ever got? He had to save it for something he really wanted: a new notebook, a cup of expensive coffee, a black slouch hat in a thrift shop somewhere. He could always steal cigarettes. You had to spend your last dollar on something important.

He was going to have to start hitching. He'd never done it before-he'd tried to catch rides to Skittle's or the record store back home, but the young townie matrons only eyed his long raincoat, his lank black hair, and stepped on the gas. And hitching out on the highway, with the wide flat sky stretching away overhead and the great trucks like dragons screaming by- well, that was a different affair. Anyone might stop. Anything might happen.

He kissed the postcard and dropped it into a mailbox near the bus station, then crossed the parking lot and climbed a grassy embankment to the highway. Among the mosaic of dirty gravel and shattered glass on the shoulder of the road, he found a single long bone as dry and clean as a fossil. A chicken bone, probably, that somebody had tossed out a car window. But it might be raccoon or cat or even-Nothing shuddered pleasurably-a human bone. Maybe someone had been thrown from a wreck, or some hitchhiker like himself had been hit and killed here, and the policemen who cleaned up the mess had overlooked a finger or two. Nothing put the bone in his raincoat pocket and closed his hand around it. It nestled there, making a place for itself next to Lost Souls?

An hour's worth of cars went by, sleek and faceless, windows rolled up against the coming night. Colors melted across the sky; the sun died its bloody evening death. Out here, away from the lights of the diner and the bus station, the sky was a deep violet pricked with stars like glittering chips of ice. A night wind was freshening, and Nothing began to shiver. He had almost decided to go back and try to sleep in the bus station when the Lincoln Continental screeched to a stop beside him.

The car was unwieldy and enormous, salmon-pink splotched with great woundlike patches of rust. A rope trailed from the rear bumper, unravelling, its end stained dark. The car's interior, once white maybe, reeked of something rancid.

As he got in, Nothing saw the green plastic Jesus on the dashboard, but before he could reconsider the driver leaned across him and pulled the passenger door shut. Nothing realized suddenly what the rancid smell was: sour milk. It made him think of the Dumpsters behind the school cafeteria when they hadn't been dumped for a while.

"Where you headed?" After a moment's hesitation, the driver added, "Son?"

The green Jesus glowed faintly in the dimming light. Nothing dragged his gaze away from it and looked into the driver 's face, but not before he had realized that the eyes of the Jesus were painted red. "Missing Mile," he said. It was the only place he could think of on a second's notice. "North Carolina."