About Morgan

Morgan Wright was a ghost. 

    That’s what everyone in Sequoia Heights said, anyway. I had no reason to doubt them; my neighbors, all of them older than I was, knew best. In all of my fifteen years there, I had never seen Morgan, and so all I knew of her was what everyone said. 

    Mr. Lansing insisted that Morgan was a ghost because she only came out at night. “She only travels in the dark,” he would tell me. “She waits ‘till the sun goes down and then she floats around all ghosty-like. Just hovers, right over the sidewalk. I see her goin’ past my window sometimes, when I get up to use the toity.” 

    The fact that Mr. Lansing called the toilet a toity never ceased to amaze me. 

    Ms. Hernandez backed up what Mr. Lansing said about Morgan floating around. “She floats, she does. I’ve seen her, oh yes I have. She just dances ‘round in the air, like she’s walking on it, she does. A few inches off the ground, she is. Passes by my house most nights, she does.” 

Sometimes Ms. Hernandez sounded a little bit like Yoda to me. Maybe it was just my imagination. Or I’d been watching too much TV. 

    Nana Lilly across the street knew more about Morgan’s nighttime escapades than anyone else. Nana would always get up at night and walk her dogs when she couldn’t sleep, which was quite frequently―I was pretty sure she drank too much coffee. 

“She always disappears whenever I get close,” Nana said. “Just turns right around and, zip, gone. She’s a tiny little thing. She’s always blurry, too. Just a faint outline of a girl. You could barely tell she was there.”

Nana Lilly, true to her name, loved flowers. She planted rows and rows of them, all different kinds: roses, azaleas, delphiniums, dahlias, sunflowers, pansies, peonies, and, of course, lilies. 

I liked to go and help in the garden sometimes, on the weekends, when I didn’t have baseball practice. Sometimes, after I had a rough game, I would come home, walk across the street, and join Nana Lilly in the garden. She always knew whether or not I wanted to talk. On those days, I usually didn’t. She didn’t mind. 

We would just plant and rake and water and prune in silence, and gradually, the world melted away.

My neighborhood, Sequoia Heights, was a completely separate world from the rest of my life. When I was at school, I was a baseball player, one of many. A good player, sure, but I was part of a crowd. It was the same with my friends. I was one of many, one of ‘the boys,’ in the middle of the group. But when I came home, I was just me. That was probably why I spent so much time with Nana Lilly. She made me feel like I was a person again, not just one of many. We would talk and laugh together, and she would ask the normal questions about school and baseball and the girls I liked, but she would also ask about the other things, like my art, or my mom, or my plans for the future. Things that no one at school would ask me. 

No one at school asked me anything, actually. Everyone was so caught up in their own world that they didn’t care. Nana Lilly cared. 

She was old, and she had seen a lot of this world. She was born and raised in San Fransisco, and had moved just down the coast to La Rosa when she retired from her job as a public defender. She had been married once, but she and her husband got a divorce when she was in her forties. They had no children, so I was like a grandson to her. 

I didn’t have any family, either. We were there for each other. 

We worked in the garden all the time. And as we worked, I would always look up at the Wright house down the block. From Nana’s yard, there was a clear view towards it, and I always looked.

It was two stories, with a shadowed front porch and a door so far back you could barely see it. The blinds in the dirt-stained windows were always drawn; the roof tiles were cracked; and the only car ever parked in front of it was a decrepit old Volvo with a flat tire that hadn’t moved in six years. 

Once, when I was about ten years old, I looked up from repotting one of Nana’s poppy baskets when I spotted a little flash of movement in a second-story window. I could have sworn there was someone there. That was the only time I ever saw a sign of life inside. 

I always asked Nana and Mr. Lansing and Ms. Hernandez what happened to the Wrights. There was a couple that lived there, in addition to their ghostly daughter, but they rarely came out. Sometimes I would see Ms. Wright walking, or Mr. Wright on his bicycle, but both of them were probably heading to work or the grocery store or something. They never came to neighborhood gatherings or asked to borrow lawn mowers or brought over brownies. I didn’t know how long they’d lived in Sequoia Heights before I got there, let alone where they worked or even their first names.

    I tried often to ask what happened to Morgan. If she was a ghost, how did she get there? How did she die? But no one seemed to know, or no one would tell me. Whenever I asked Nana, she just started humming to herself and ignored me, or she was vague, saying, “It was a long time ago. Pass me that trowel” or something like that.

    I always wondered, though: If Morgan really was dead, what was keeping her in this world? Why was she restless? 

    I wanted answers. 

There I was, fifteen years old, and I still had never set eyes on Morgan Wright. It was the dead of summer, and I was bored, and I was tired of the ghost stories from all my neighbors; I wanted the truth. So I decided to ask the one person that I knew for a fact didn’t believe in any kind of superstition, someone who would give me a straight answer for once in my life. That would be my mother. 

She wasn’t around much. Her job at a tech company caused her to be constantly traveling to San Francisco, and when she was home, she was either sleeping, at the gym, or taking conference calls in her office. 

My father had long since been out of the picture, and I didn’t have any siblings, so I spent most of my time with Nana Lilly when I wasn’t playing baseball or at my friends’ houses. When I had to get to games or practice, my friends’ parents would usually drive me. Mom came to some of my games, when she could. It didn’t bother me all that much, because it was just the way it always had been. 

I had also never asked my mother about the Wrights. We just didn’t talk that much, or she was too busy, and I didn’t want to bother her. But she had lived here a long time, and I knew she must know something. 

When my mother got home from work one night and we were sitting at the table, eating spaghetti, I asked her, “What’s the story of the Wrights?”

She looked up sharply. “The Wrights? Down the street?”

“Yeah.”

Mom sighed and leaned back in her chair. “Huh. Um...I haven’t thought about them in awhile. Let’s see. I guess it was a couple years after your father and I moved here, so maybe four years before you were born. Hmm…” She pushed a lock of dark hair behind her ear. “They were just normal folks. Got pregnant, had a baby girl. Morgan, I think, was her name?” 

I nodded.

“They were really happy. But right before you were born, when the girl was about three, she got diagnosed with cancer. She died…” My mother bit her lip. “Actually, I don’t remember. It was before you were born, though.”

I swallowed, hard.

“It was difficult for your father and I, because we were so happy, and then we were also so sad that our neighbors had lost their child. The Wrights really retreated away after that. Never had more kids. I’m surprised they stayed together, after going through something horrible like that. I―” I glanced up to see an expression of confusion on her face. “For the life of me, I can’t think of why I never told you that before.” 

She stood up, taking her bowl into the kitchen, still muttering to herself. 

I usually fell right to sleep. I had never slept badly in my life. Every night, I would fall asleep right at ten-thirty, and wake up at the same time: six on school days, seven-thirty on weekends and in the summer. 

But that night, I couldn’t fall asleep. 

I got up and did a set of pushups and situps, then got back into bed. I still wasn’t tired. I picked up the most boring book on my shelf and tried to read myself to sleep. No luck. 

So I decided to try Nana’s technique of walking. I crept downstairs, past my mother’s bedroom, slipped on my shoes, and went out the front door. The night air was heavy, like a warm blanket, a light breeze ruffling my hair, the scent bringing the promise of night rain. 

I walked. 

It was around two a.m. and no one was out. All the houses were dark. No sign of Nana and her dogs. The neighborhood was eerily quiet at night, I noticed. Everything that night was eerie. The silence, the darkness, my lack of sleep...and Morgan Wright. 

Morgan Wright. 

I was standing in front of the Wright house, and up ahead of me was a shape. It was blurry at first, but approaching me, and after a moment, I could make out that it was a person, a small person, a girl. She was hovering above the ground. She was floating. 

My feet stopped. I was frozen, because it was true. 

All the stories were true. She was real. She was really a ghost. 

    But she didn’t disappear. 

    Morgan Wright floated and floated until she was just a few feet in front of me. Right there, I could see that she wasn’t a little girl after all. She couldn’t have been more than two years older than I was, and beautiful, with waves of caramel-colored hair and big brown eyes and freckles across the bridge of her nose. Then she smiled at me, and I couldn’t breathe. 

    You grew up, she said. 

    “I don’t know you,” I choked out. 

    But you do. Morgan reached out and touched my cheek, and that’s when I remembered.

Playing on the sidewalk. There is a girl, a shaved head and big brown eyes. She holds up a stuffed cat. His name is Bootsie, she says.  What’s yours named? 

    He’s Ruff, you say, holding up your dog. ‘Cause he goes ‘ruff.’ 

    They can be best friends! says the girl, smiling. 

    You smile back. Yeah!

    Two women stand nearby. One of them has the same big brown eyes as the girl. She is smiling and laughing with another woman, who is your mother. They are delighted at seeing their children playing together. 

He needs friends, your mother says. I’m so happy for them.

She can have a normal childhood, the brown-eyed woman says. I’m so happy for them.

    Fast forward. You and the girl are older. You are on a tee-ball team. Her hair is down to her ears now. She hits the ball and runs carefully, and you cheer for her. She smiles at you from first base. Her brown eyes sparkle. 

    Again. Elementary school, and you want to sit with her at lunch. Your friends laugh and say, You can’t sit over there, girls have cooties! Her brown eyes catch yours, but you look away. You sit with your friends. 

    And again. Sitting on Mr. Lansing’s front porch. Her hair falls past her shoulders. I was readin’ this real interestin’ magazine on the toity the other day, he says. You meet her eyes, and they are full of laughter. You share a smile. 

    Once again. The late afternoon is dark with a storm. You look at her, riding her bike next to you as you are on a skateboard. She is older now, and you don’t see her as much anymore. 

It’s going to rain, she says. 

Yeah, you say. 

Looks like lightning, too, she says. 

Yeah, you say. You never know what to say to her anymore. She is too beautiful. 

The first drops of rain begin to fall, spotting the pavement. She starts to cough. 

Are you okay? you ask. You are worried. She waves it off, says she is fine. Let’s go home, you say. She insists that you make it to the ice cream shop, says she will make it home on her own. You nod. I’ll bring you back some. She smiles. You can barely breathe. You see her turn and ride away. You keep going.

You buy yourself a cup, and get her favorite: cookies and cream. You hold one in each hand as you push home on your skateboard, dodging the fast-falling raindrops. 

You are almost home when you see her. She is slumped in the middle of the road, her bicycle to one side, her caramel hair colored dark with the rain. The ice cream falls from your hands. You run to her side, and you scream, and you scream, but no one is coming. Her eyes are closed. Where is everyone? Why didn’t anyone see her? Where are the cars? Where are the people? She is so, so pale. You sob. You don’t want her to go. If she goes, you are all alone. You don’t want to be alone. You are alone. You are

You are not alone. 

My eyes fluttered open. Morgan was still cupping my cheek. Her brown eyes were wet with tears, and so were my cheeks.

“I remember,” I breathed. “I remember you. How-how did I forget?”

She smiled softly, sadly, but didn’t say anything.

“Wh-what happened?” I whispered. “That day. Where was everyone? Why didn’t I remember you?”

Her smile faded. Her face was swimming in and out of focus, and I didn’t know if it was the tears or if she was actually going away. I reached up and touched her hand, making sure she was really there. It was cool and soft. Nothing is right, she said. It’s wrong. I don’t know where everyone is. 

“You mean...where everyone was?” 

No. She looked around.Where everyone is. 

I turned my head. The neighborhood was silent. The streets were bare. There was no distant traffic noise, no midnight owls, no creaking of the wind in the trees. 

“Morgan…” My voice trembled. “What’s happening?”

She shook her head, brown eyes wide and scared. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I don’t know what’s happening. 

The wind rustled through the trees. It was the same breeze as before. I clutched Morgan’s hand, and she held tightly to mine. 

Together, we looked up. A storm was coming.