“So, you admit you’re a Ghostbuster,” I say.
He scrunches his nose, as if the comparison pains him. “Don’t let Donny hear you call us that.”
“All you need are matching jumpsuits and you guys would look exactly like them,” I say.
“We have matching jumpsuits,” he says. “We just wear them under our clothes so we don’t stand out so much in the field.”
He says it so deadpan that I can’t tell if he’s serious, but then I catch the playful gleam in his eyes.
Oh, this guy isfunny.
“You’re messing with me.”
“I guess you’ll never know.” But his eyes are still dancing, and I notice for the first time that there’s a ring of cloudy gray aroundhis irises. It makes the green even more striking. I’ve never seen anything like it.
I clear my throat, which makes the rope burn flare up again. Good. I need the pain to focus. “Why could I see this entity?”
“Because you’ve died before.”
A couple of seconds go by before the words sink in, and my fingers find the deep scar under my jacket sleeve. It’s from the second time I tried to join my family. I almost succeeded. I was clinically dead for five minutes before they got my heart beating again in the ambulance.
I knew I shouldn’t have done it. My family wouldn’t want me to join them that way, but I couldn’t take being alone anymore.
My only living relatives were Mom’s estranged sister, who had too many mouths to feed as it was, and Dad’s cousin in Alaska, whom I’d never met. Dad always said he was a bit cuckoo crazy, so it wasn’t surprising when the court deemed him unfit.
My social worker struggled to find foster homes that could handle my grief. I was left with couples who only cared about the money.
I was good for nothing. I was consumed by grief. What purpose did I have to stay behind other than to suffer?
But after that second time, whenever I thought about trying to end it again, I would imagine Dad’s disappointed face, telling me through his eyes that I couldn’t give up. So that was my last attempt.
“Oh,” is all I can say.
Tall Guy nods, and I can tell he’s choosing his words carefully. “When people die, they go somewhere, and when your consciousness touches that place and gets yanked back… something changes in your brain. You can see the dead because part of you is still standing in that doorway.”
I’ve spent years feeling like I’m not fully here, like some essential part of me got left behind somewhere along the way. Maybe it did.
But that still doesn’t make sense. “If that’s all it took, why has it taken me five years to see a ghost?”
“Your brain was protecting you,” he says, and there’s something almost apologetic in his tone. “It happens to a lot of us. I started seeing them immediately, but I know a guy who didn’t start seeing them until ten years after he was revived. The human mind is good at rationalizing things away. Your brain found ways to explain what you were sensing without forcing you to confront it.”
So he died, too. Tons of questions rush to my tongue all at once, but I can’t ask any of them. That’s the kind of thing you can’t ask a stranger, no matter how curious you are.
“Donny has done brain scans on people like us,” he says. “There are structures in our brains that don’t show up in normal brains. The trauma of dying and coming back rewires a person. You’ll always be able to see them.”
The parking lot blurs at the edges. If I had a rewards card for traumatic experiences, I’d have enough points for a free sandwich by now. “Am I going to see more of them?”
“You’ll get used to it.”
“Will I really?”
He scrunches his face, which is answer enough.
I pull Dad’s jacket tighter around me, imagining he’s here, hugging me. “Do these things just show up randomly? Could one try to kill me again tomorrow?”
“It’s possible,” he says, and my stomach drops. “But there are things you can do to defend yourself. Salt is your easiest weapon. Iron also repels them. There are more technicalities, but that should get you out of a pinch.”
I’ll add them both to my shopping list right next to dog food and cheap shampoo. The second I’m done here, I’m walking into that Walmart and buying the biggest bag of salt they have.
