ghosted

I would sit by the window and listen to bare branches scratch the glass- like they so desperately wanted in, while I so desperately wanted out. Sometimes I’d send a dish crashing to the ground, just to remind myself that I was still real, in some sense of the word. It was comforting to know that I could still influence things that were truly real. The days melded together seamlessly. I knew that I missed someone, but could no longer remember their face. I spoke to the paintings. I tried to figure out how to die a second time. Until they moved in. 

I behaved myself: no more shattering plates, no playing piano while the family was home. The last thing I wanted to do was scare them off. So I stood in the corner. Just watching. Their presence filled the cavity that had been deepening over the years, while digging it deeper still. It was both delicious and painful to have people so close, yet to still have no one. 

Watching a living thing can get boring. I remember, when I was flesh and bone, having a cat. I could pet her and watch her curl up and arch her back and yawn for ten minutes, maybe, before I grew restless. But the boy? I could watch him all day and all night. They call him Ethan. I willed myself not to love him when his family came to look at the house for the first time. I thought I was only so mesmerized because he was the first boy I’d seen since my passing. The day they moved in, I realized I had it all wrong. I was rightfully mesmerized.

He was the first to enter, holding the door open for his parents. He dragged his hands across the velvet curtains, traced the patterned wallpaper, drank in the entire room before standing before the piano. 

“Can we keep this?” His voice seemed too low for his pretty face. He belonged in one of the oil paintings on the walls. 

“Ethan, please, you have no idea how long that thing has been sitting there. It’s filthy.” His mother walked over and wrinkled her nose, looking to her husband for backup as Ethan sat down at the bench. 

“Relax, it’s just a little dusty.” And then he started to play, ink black curls falling into his face as his tall frame hunched over the instrument. My instrument. 

“You’ve gotten really good, kid,” his dad chimed in while kneeling down to inspect my piano’s chipped wooden legs. “You wanna go buy a new piano today? That keyboard of yours would look ridiculous in here.”

“I know it would. That’s why I said I want to keep this one.” I drew closer as his fingers caressed the ivory. How could hands be so lovely? They were adorned with rings, his fingernails painted a deep red. How did such a gentle touch produce such a massive sound? I wanted to sit behind him and lay my head on his shoulder. But what if he felt that? What if it hurt him? So I stood and watched him play, even as movers arrived and began placing furniture around him, even as the sun set, even as tears welled up in his dark eyes before he headed off to bed. 

I know it sounds terrible, but I followed him upstairs. I watched him inflate a bed with air and set it in the center of the empty room. He unplugged his earbuds, filling the barren space with Messiaen. He closed his eyes, his head moving to the music until he became water. And then his fingers began to dance, and then his arms, and then all of him. It was an infectious sort of trance. I mimicked his movements, spinning and swaying and melting into sound. His large hands conducted lazily, and as the music swelled in a way that made me want to sob, he chuckled. Even the way he peeled his sweater over his head seemed to be in time with the quartet, languid and graceful. Everything he did was artful. Except for when he burped, but even that was somehow endearing. I allowed myself a glance at the newly exposed curve of his neck before tearing my gaze away. Watching him undress was wrong. Without his permission, it would feel like a violation. Since I could never get his permission, I would never see all of him. I returned to the piano, trying to play that song of his with my eyes. I was scared that if I actually touched the keys, I would not be able to stop myself from playing for him. 

“Ready for your last-first-day of high school?” Ethan’s mother smiled at him, dumping another piece of soggy french toast on his plate despite the fact that he hadn’t touched his first. 

“No,” Ethan and I grunted at the same time. 

“Oh come on, why not? It’s a great school. I emailed all your teachers, and they-” 

“Maybe it is a good school, but it’s not my school. How could I be ready to walk in there and not know anybody? You knew I didn’t want to come here, so don’t pretend to care how I feel now.” Ethan’s eyes flitted to the floor. “Sorry. Thanks for breakfast.” He slung a comically empty looking backpack over his shoulder. 

“You don’t have to go. Stay with me,” I called. He stood at the marble counter for a moment longer, the air thick with tension and the sickeningly sweet scent of syrup, before abruptly leaving without another word. I gnawed at my lip. It used to bring a comforting rush of feeling, the softest sort of pain. It didn’t do that anymore, but it relaxed me nonetheless. He seemed so upset. What if he never came back? What if people were mean to him at school? If I could only accompany him, I’d make anyone who mistreated him instantly regret it. I pressed myself against the front door, willing myself to phase through the mahogany. Of course, it didn’t work. I wished I could at least feel the resistance of the wood against my skin. I wished I could bang my head against the door and shatter my skull all over again. The numbness hurt more.

I waited by the piano for hours, fingers ghosting over keys I ached to press. I’d roam around a minute or two, only to return to the instrument again. Time was always slow, but while waiting for Ethan, it stretched on and on until it ceased to exist. I watched his father scribble gin and frozen pizzas onto the bottom of the grocery list his mother had left on the counter before he rushed to the store. He seemed to have very little to do, and yet he did it all so hastily. With the house empty, I took the opportunity to play, barely getting a chord in before the door swung open. My heart fell to the ground- both because Ethan looked beautiful framed in the soft light filtering in from behind him, and because there was no way he hadn’t heard me. I knew he couldn’t see me, but I smoothed down my skirt nonetheless, pulled out pieces of hair to frame my face. As he approached the piano, I wished it was to greet me. I wanted to ask him how he was- it was only the middle of the school day. Had it been too horrible to endure any longer? Each step he took towards me would have made my heart pound if it was still beating. Finally, he sat on the bench- not in the center of it, but beside me. I didn’t dare move- my fingers still rested on the piano. Though I’d stopped playing the second I heard the door, the notes continued to ring in my ears. And then I realized that the notes really were ringing in my ears. The octave below, Ethan played the same chord- C diminished. I moved my fingers into another position, and Ethan did the same. I turned to face him, and could have sworn he was looking at me, not through me. 

“Play a G if you can see me.” I searched his unmoving face desperately for a sign, anything. It shouldn’t have come as such a crushing disappointment when he walked away without giving me one. 

Things carried on like that for days, weeks. He’d come home where I’d be waiting at the piano. I’d lay my fingers on notes, and he’d play them the octave down. Although it became routine, it was exciting each time. Even without organs, I suppose my mind remembered what butterflies and goosebumps are like, and recreated them for me. I was able to become breathless without breathing in the first place; It was like being alive again. I’d speak to him, not expecting a response at first. Stupid things- how I’d accidentally killed my fish when I was seven and so it was only a matter of time before phantom Goldie came to avenge herself, how I tried to eat his mother’s French toast but it fell right through me and was still sitting on the kitchen floor, how I was slowly forgetting the people from my life and his family was all that existed. I grew more and more desperate for him to say something, anything to me with each word I spoke. As the leaves began to grow fiery, I grew bolder. On Halloween, I slipped into his now renovated room and watched him smudge black eyeshadow underneath his eyes. 

“Can you see me? I know it’s easier for the living to see us today, but you must have been able to see me all along. That must be how you play the songs I teach you. Or is it just a feeling that you get, an inclination? Even if that’s the case, haven’t you ever wondered how you learned new songs without sheet music?” I hugged my knees to his chest as I sat on his bed, willing my body to dent the mattress. He let out a sigh before applying fake blood to his neck, letting it drip down his skin and stain his white button down. The red was far too bright to be believable. No one ever imitates death properly. “Ethan?” A glance in my direction, another sigh, no words. “ETHAN!” I sent his pillow flying to his feet. He was supposed to either respond or run out of the room screaming. But he laughed. 

“Stop that, you know I can.” He turned to face me. Having his eyes locked on mine made me feel as though my physical body had materialized. I wasn’t dead; I was just a girl. 

“Oh. Do I scare you?” Shock and horror and euphoria all muddled together inside me, a concoction so muddy that I hardly felt anything at all. 

“Of course not. I couldn’t be scared of you.” He sat next to me on the bed, leaving the pillow sitting at our feet. “Do you remember when you taught me to play La Cathédral Engloutie? And I didn’t play it the octave down, I put my hands on yours.” 

“I do. I was scared I’d accidentally possess you or something, or you’d get cold.” I would have blushed at the memory if color could rise in my cheeks. 

“It wasn’t cold at all. Your hands just… felt like hands. They were warm.” He reached out to hold them again. “I think about whether your lips are, too. I think about it a lot.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I moved so close to him that I could see the rings of gold around his pupils. 

“Because I knew you’d leave the moment I did.” 

The last thing I saw were Ethan’s eyes welling up with tears before I was torn away from him, burning and evaporating and dissolving until I was somewhere else entirely. After what felt like an eternity of begging the Universe, or God, or whatever held me in that house to please let me leave, all I wanted was to go back.