Ophelia, Alive Read online

  Ophelia, Alive

  a ghost story

  Luke T. Harrington

  Copyright © 2016 Luke T. Harrington

  All rights reserved

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author. The cat might represent a real cat, though.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  ISBN-13: 9781234567890

  ISBN-10: 1477123456

  Cover design by: Art Painter

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018675309

  Printed in the United States of America

  for Julia

  healer, hero

  “Murder is a kind of love, a kind of possessing. (Is it not, too, a way of gaining complete and passionate attention, for a moment, from the object of one’s attentions?)”

  from the diary of Patricia Highsmith

  I’ve sorted through the world (the human heart);

  Encountered all its darkest crags and corners;

  I know the taste of blood (I’ve drunk my part);

  And yet—I count myself among the mourners.

  I know that feeble protest falls on ears

  Not primed to hear whatever tears I’ve shed,

  But though my teeth still taste of blood and tears,

  My enemy is Death, and not the dead.

  And so—while no apology I’ve made

  (Or ever make) could hope to set things right—

  Still, after the one (only) prayer I’ve prayed,

  I now can see why some hold fast to light...

  ...for with strange aeons, even Death may die.

  Till all is new, my soul remains. (I cry.)

  mon. jan. 10.

  1:32 pm.

  what’s past is prologue

  After almost five years of college, you start to realize that Christmas is a religion for you, and not in a religious way.

  Throughout that first semester every year, you run on the proverbial treadmill, week after week, faster than ought to be humanly possible. There are a thousand sticks behind you—the threat of failure, the threat of losing your scholarships, the threat of looking stupid—but there’s only one carrot. There’s only one tangible concept you can use to motivate yourself to keep running forward, and it’s Christmas.

  After four months of staying up all night several nights a week, agonizing over every word in every paper, trying to jump through every hoop they throw at you, you finally finish finals and you can finally drop everything for a few weeks and do nothing. So even if you never liked Christmas before, even if reindeer and Santa and the baby Jesus and Will Ferrell in that stupid elf costume seemed a little too on-the-nose, a little too cloying, Christmas turns into your carrot, your pie-in-the-sky hope of not having the entire world breathing down your neck for just a few weeks. And you start salivating for sugar cookies dyed carcinogenic shades of red and green, and visions of sugarplums start dancing in your head, and you find yourself listening to that radio station that plays terrible Christmas music 24/7, and tuning into all the godawful specials on ABC Family, because even when you’re in the depths of despair over that stupid Proust paper you can’t get right, you know that Christmas is still waiting for you with open arms.

  Three weeks ago, after the sun had set on the twenty-fifth, I was sitting in a ginormous leather recliner at my mom’s place, drinking hot chocolate and eating those red-and-green cookies and enjoying the only Christmas gift I had wanted, a new H.P. Lovecraft collection to replace my old, tattered one, reading that For centuries its lofty battlements have frowned down upon the wild and rugged countryside about, serving as a home and stronghold for the proud house whose honored line is older even than the moss-grown castle walls, while my older sister Sara sat in the recliner nearby playing Flappy Bird on her phone and my mother smiled at me from behind the twinkling Christmas tree, and the moment was almost too perfect, and of course by “almost too perfect” I obviously mean “literally too perfect,” because all three of us knew that it was about to come crashing down on me and chain me to the realities of the world I’d been doing my best to ignore for years.

  Literal years.

  Because eventually I looked up and my sister was gone from her chair, and my mother looked at me through the branches and the tasteful twinkling lights that lit up the snow just outside the two-story bay window, and she smiled. She smiled out of a desire to literally put the best face on the situation, which, by the way, is a saying that makes no sense. Situations don’t have faces, and even if they did, it’s not like making them smile would do a hell of a lot for anyone involved (“Let’s try to put the best face on this global famine!”). People who try to make situations smile are no different, really, from construction workers calling out Smile, baby, as women walk by; they’re just raping the situation with their eyes.

  But anyway, she looked up at me and smiled, and in retrospect it may even have been a real smile, brought on by seeing how lost I’d gotten in this book that she’d known I’d been wanting, and she’d even taken the time to track down the right edition and everything. But then she sighed and the smile was gone, and she said, Well, I guess we might as well have this talk now, Ophelia, since we’ve both been dreading it.

  And I sighed and I rolled my eyes, because as hard as I try to fight it it’s damn near impossible to go home to my mom’s place without suddenly turning back into a sulky teenager.

  (She doesn’t see me fighting the impulse, though—all she ever sees are the sighs and the eye-rolls.)

  (Damn it.)

  We had an agreement, she said. We had an agreement that as long as you kept your grades up and maintained your scholarships I’d cover the rest. And, well—

  I should have interrupted her; I should have broken in and pointed out that Mom, you know the reason that I got that stupid D was I was busy tracking down an internship and then after that I was reeling from being fired from it, and I can’t believe you’re cutting me off when your med-school-dropout daughter crashes here indefinitely and rent-free, but I didn’t say any of that because all I could do was sigh and roll my eyes like some idiot 16-year-old who just got told she couldn’t borrow the car tonight, because I suck at life.

  And she said I’ve put up with a lot. I stood by you when the ed department turned its back, and I put up with that eleventh-hour major change, but we had an agreement, and I think I need to stick to it. Because if you don’t learn now, well—then when? And she sighed and said, But anyway, I hope this doesn’t affect the rest of your break. I want you to relax. And then she stood up and walked out of the room.

  And after that I couldn’t sit in that big leather chair anymore.

  I used to like the way it still smelled faintly of my father (booze and cologne) and the way that it felt like a giant, warm hug; after that, though, I just noticed the mom smell and the way it was swallowing me.

  But none of that matters right now.

  Because at the moment, I’m in a stiff, wooden chair covered in cheap fabric and a paper-thin cushion that forces me to sit upright whether I want to or not. And instead of my mother is my academic advisor, and instead of the glowing tree between us is a cheap desk where I’ve spread all the important-looking documents I could find. And after a long, awkward silence, she finally says, “Well, part of your problem is that you should have come in here years ago.”

  I tell her, “I know, I know, but please just tell me what to do.”

  She sighs and she bites her pen and says, “I guess that really depends on what yo
u want?”

  “I want my degree.”

  “Are you sure?” she says, skeptical. Chewing that pen like it’s delicious.

  “Why wouldn’t I be sure?”

  And typing away like a hacker in a movie from the ‘90s, she says, “Well, you have two-thirds of an education degree and half of an English lit degree. You’re looking at maybe another year before you can graduate, if you’re lucky.”

  I say, “Please. This is all I have left.”

  “This? An English degree? This is all you have left? You know the world isn’t exactly clamoring to hire English majors, right?”

  “It’s not about that.”

  “It’s not?”

  “It’s not,” I tell her.

  “So...what’s it about, then?”

  “It’s about...pride? I guess? It’s about not letting one more thing chew me up and spit me out? It’s about finishing something, for once in my life?”

  She says, “Well, I mean, here’s what you need to take,” and she highlights a few things on a page, and passes it across the table.

  I snatch the page and the fluorescent yellow streaks catch the light glinting off of her window’s melting icicles. “I know all this,” I tell her. “I just—”

  “You just what?”

  “I just need to figure out how to pay for it.”

  “You know I’m not a financial advisor, right?” she says. “I mean, I could refer you to one—”

  “Don’t bother,” I say. “I know what she’ll tell me.”

  “What will she say?”

  “She’ll tell me to take out loans. Does that seem like good advice to you? Like we just discussed, I’m not likely to recoup the cost of a loan within my lifetime. I need better advice than that.”

  “...get a job?”

  Part of me wants to throw a rich-girl tantrum right here and now. A loud part of me that smells like expensive mall body spray wants to stand up and yell My dad is a doctor. My mom lives in a damn mansion. If you think I’ll go flip burgers to earn a liberal arts degree from a state school, you’re...

  (...you’re probably right, and that’s what scares me).

  But that’s not me, and I don’t want it to be me, and if I did I would have joined Tri-Delt five years ago. I know that instead I’ll just slink back to my dorm and poke around on Craigslist looking for a help-wanted ad that’s not actually a clandestine casting call for porn, and when I finally see an ad for a floor sweeper position at Walmart I’ll spend the evening strategizing about ways to explain that I’ve never swept a floor, but I’m a team player and I’m willing to learn! just so I can get a job that probably won’t even cover my gas money. And then instead of actually calling I’ll get distracted by reading the history of brooms on Wikipedia before passing out and waking up late for class tomorrow.

  So I tell her, “Thanks anyway,” and I pick up my things and shuffle back into the hallway. And as I close her door behind me, I hear my phone buzzing.

  And as it comes out of my pocket, I see the name Sara.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, Oaf. You need a job, right?”

  (binge)

  tues. jan. 11.

  5:45 am.

  despair

  There once was this coed named Ophie

  Who wore her life’s goals like a trophy—

  But then lost her job,

  And got pinched by the mob,

  And was stuck with a choice just like—

  Something.

  I totally had a rhyme for a second there.

  Lately I’ve developed this habit of writing limericks in my head. Not dirty limericks, at least not usually—just simple ones to convince myself I’m not completely brain-dead yet. It’s a nervous habit, no different from cracking my knuckles, aside from the fact that it’s a huge waste of space in my brain. It’s weird to think about how much time and energy your brain wastes amusing itself—like if your computer had to be constantly playing solitaire in the background to keep itself from going insane while you worked on spreadsheets.

  I’m still not sure why it’s always limericks—why not sonnets and villanelles? If I’m honest, though, I think seventh-graders are to blame. If you tell a seventh-grader to write a poem and you give him a list of formats to choose from, he always decides to write a limerick, unless haiku is an option. If haiku is an option, he obviously picks haiku. But the point is that they always pick something short, because kids think if something is short then it must be easy.

  They’re wrong, obviously. But then, they’re wrong about everything. Because, they’re kids.

  There was a time when I probably would have bought into the “short is easy” thing, but I’m starting to see now that short things have to be punchy, and punchy doesn’t come easily for me. I always, always, always have trouble with that last line, because the last line of a limerick is supposed to be a punch line, and the thing is, life doesn’t have punch lines. It just keeps going, long after it gets stupid.

  Which, of course, brings me to why I’m standing here.

  I’m standing at the back door to a hospital—the one Sara works at—and somehow it’s falling apart a bit more than I expected. When someone tells you Come work at my hospital, you’re hoping it’ll be more Mayo Clinic than Danvers State, but I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised about my rotten luck, especially given my last few months. It’s all true, by the way—all that stuff in my limerick—except, obviously, for that pinched by the mob part, and I don’t even really know what pinched by the mob means, to be a hundred percent honest—I was just looking for a rhyme, and it sounded badass.

  And speaking of my ass, squeezing it into these bright green scrub pants just might have been the Ninth Wonder of the World (the Eighth being King Kong, obviously). It was only when I tried to put them on that I realized the jeans I’d been wearing every day for the last couple of years were actually my fat jeans back when I bought them. When you spend every free moment sitting on your butt in your dorm room reading, you don’t really notice the weight gain, I guess.

  Although now that I think about it, it’s possible that Sara brought over pants that were a size too small just to make me hate myself a bit more. That actually sounds like something she’d do.

  So...welcome to the exciting world of patient transport.

  I’m picking at the temporary ID badge Sara gave me, the one I’m holding in my pocket right next to a tattered copy of Hamlet. Each time it stabs under my thumbnail it feels more real, until I feel that I’ve done enough thumbnail penance and it’s finally real enough to use, and I pull it out and jam it through the magnetic scanner that hangs (floppy) next to the door.

  It takes a couple tries to get it to scan right.

  The thing’s hanging by its wires and it’s at a weird angle and honestly my hand is shaking pretty hard. It actually takes two hands, one to hold the card and one to hold the scanner, and the scanner’s to the right of the door and I was holding the card in my right hand, and for some reason I grabbed the scanner with my left, and now my arms are crossed over each other, and even as I wince with pain from my wrists clashing together it doesn’t even occur to me to switch hands, because I’m smart like that. But then I hear the telltale click and the door’s unlocked and I pull it open and there’s nothing in front of me but endless linoleum tiles and sparkling pools of fluorescent light. Stepping inside from the cold, I almost trip over a wastebasket that’s overflowing with used gloves, facemasks, and hairnets—which probably tells me all I need to know about this place. (Isn’t that a biohazard? Does anyone care? Apparently not.)

  Down the hall and to the left.

  That’s what she told me yesterday after an awkward phone conversation—You need a job, right? she said, and I told her I did. My place needs patient transporters. They’re basically desperate. It pays well. Can you start tomorrow?

  Uh.

  But now here I am, which probably says something for her powers of persuasion. Or at least about how desperate I
am, since I would have taken a job scrubbing toilets if it would have kept me in school.

  You know the world isn’t exactly clamoring to hire English majors, right?

  Yeah, student advisor, I know that. That’s why you’re stuck in grad school and working this student advisor job to cover your tuition when you’d probably rather be writing a book. Majoring in English is a limbo no one ever escapes from, a way of corralling those of us who are of no value to the real world into academia so that we can’t escape and hurt the egos of productive people, sort of like how the lottery keeps stupid people from ever having too much money. A fool and her scholarships are soon parted.

  But like I told her yesterday this isn’t about employability. It’s about being told Don’t major in English by my mother who’s never had a job in her life and my sister who couldn’t hack it in med school and (indirectly) by the father who hasn’t been in my life since fifth grade. It’s about previously compromising with an education major (because that pays so much better than, y’know, nothing) only to have my ass handed to me on a silver ass-platter. It’s about not retreating just because they all told me to retreat and I’m sick of retreating.

  In other words, it’s about pride (I guess).

  But now here I am, standing outside of a room that’s half office and half lounge. Some card tables and an Elvis dartboard and a half-finished solitaire game, plus a tangled jumble of gurneys. It smells like gym socks.

  “You’re late.”

  I might as well tell you now that the man standing in front of me is absolutely gorgeous. I know that sounds shallow, but what can I say, I’m human. It’s those thick, powerful arms that grabbed my attention first, but as my eyes track up past his broad shoulders and perfect half-slouch to his boyband-worthy stubble and shy eyes, I feel my knees trembling just a little. God, what am I, thirteen? Has it really been that long since I got laid?