Half an hour later, Ewan and I were sitting in the living room of his mother’s apartment. It looked the way you’d expect the dad’s apartment to look, if the parents are divorced. A half-eaten muffin had left a trail of crumbs to a cup of coffee on the low table in front of the sofa. Piles of magazines sometimes topped off by books lying on their faces to mark a place covered the rest of the surface area. I noticed a pair of socks, and a wineglass with a bead of dried-up red wine at its bottom. Ewan’s mother’s shoes were heaped under a small table by the window. A door behind the couch led to Ewan’s bedroom, which was just big enough for a bed and a desk, which in turn was just big enough for a gigantic computer. The computer was covered with magazines and books, just like the coffee table in the living room. There was no TV.
“Where does your mom sleep?” I said, and instantly wished I hadn’t asked the question, because his face went red. “Here,” he said, and I realized that the couch pulled out. His mom didn’t even have her own room. “It must be nice, not having any annoying older sisters around,” I said, hoping that would make up for hurting his feelings.
“I cut classes all the time,” he announced.
“Really?”
“I started doing it about a month ago. I guess because I’m new, no one remembers if I’m there or not.”
He could see that I didn’t believe him. “Think back to the last class you had with me,” he said.
“Art, duh,” I said.
“Okay, before that.”
“History.”
“Right, history. How do you know I was there?”
“I don’t know. You probably said something, got called on, gave an answer—I don’t know.”
“I wasn’t there.”
“You weren’t?”
“I was home,” he said. “Sitting right here, eating that muffin, and starting this book, which I’m about to finish.”
“Doesn’t your mom find out? Won’t she catch you?”
“She’s working,” he said.
“When does she come home?”
“Late,” said Ewan. “When I don’t have work study, a babysitter comes to pick me up at school at dismissal, and she makes dinner for me. So I have to be sure to get back there by three.”
I thought of the space in our apartment—the living room where Julia runs through her ballet routines next to the shining black piano, the foyer where Mom puts up a Christmas tree every year even though we’re technically Jewish. We have so much space, and Ewan has just enough room to read in. His mom doesn’t even have a place to put her shoes.
“So,” Ewan said, adopting a businesslike tone. “Your grandfather. You must have been very close to him.”
“No,” I said, and I explained how I hardly knew my grandfather, how we stopped visiting.
“Do you have any of his stuff?” Ewan asked.
“Like what?”
“Something he gave you—his watch, or a handkerchief, anything that was close to him, anything that might even have smelled like him.”
“I wouldn’t want anything that smelled like him.”
Gus and I would have laughed at that, but Ewan acted like he didn’t even know I was joking. “So you don’t have any of his stuff.”
“No,” I said.
“That’s unusual,” said Ewan. “A ghost needs something to connect to. Something that he loved, or even just knew very well. That’s why people always see ghosts in houses where the dead person lived. Or sometimes, when people are murdered, they have a strong connection to the place where they were killed.”
“How do you know this stuff?”
“Books,” he said. “I told you.”
“But aren’t they made up?”
“Kind of,” Ewan admitted. “But I think they’re based on stories that get told and retold, and that have some relation to things that actually happened at some point. They all end up being the same story over and over.”
“Is it because of your dad?” I said, feeling stupid for even asking, because duh, why else would he be doing this? What I was really wondering was something different. “Have you—you know—” I knew Ewan believed in this stuff, but even so, I felt like he was going to think I was an idiot. “Have you seen your dad? Since he died?”
Ewan was biting his nails. “No,” he said and put his hands in his lap, as if he’d just noticed he didn’t have any nails left to bite. “Well, sort of. I’ve had a couple of dreams. I guess you only get to see the dead if you’re really lucky. There has to be something about you. An openness. I thought I might have had it. The dreams are kind of like that. It’s like, he’s in my room, or with me at school, and I’m showing him around, and…”
“And what?”
“And when I wake up, I don’t feel sad. I feel like I’ve actually seen him. It’s like, when we lived in New Hampshire, sometimes he would pick me up at school. When I came out of the front doors, I’d see him, leaning on his car, waiting, and that’s what the dreams are like. I wake up with the feeling that he’s waiting for me, if only I could catch up.”
“Wow,” I said, because everything else I could think of—like, “That’s so sad”—would have come out sounding sarcastic.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Ewan quickly. “I’m fine.” And then he changed the subject so fast, I knew just how weird it was for him to talk about his dad even that little. “Your grandfather,” he said. “Do you think he could have been murdered? Didn’t you say he and your dad didn’t get along?”
“My dad didn’t murder him,” I said.
He started to bite his fingernails again. “I just don’t get it,” he whispered to himself. “How did your grandfather connect?”
I remembered something Grandpa had said. “I have my grandmother’s eyes,” I said. “That’s what he told me, that I have her eyes, and that they were familiar to him.” I thought of something else. “I first started to feel him after my dad and I were fighting.” I didn’t tell Ewan that I’d told my dad I didn’t think he cared that Grandpa was dead. It wasn’t something I wanted anyone else to know. “And he said that he has to push through tunnels of his memories, that that’s what it’s like to be dead, but that when I was there, he got to talk to me, and he could start breathing, which feels good. He looked really bad when I first saw him, but by the end he looked better.”
“Better?”
“Like, healthier. You know, his skin was pinker.”
“Oh my God,” said Ewan. “This is huge.”
“When he wanted to get away from what we were looking at, he put his hands on my shoulders. I got really cold, but it sent us back into a tunnel, and that time I saw some of the memories we were pushing through. I think.”
“Wow,” said Ewan. He held still for a minute, forgetting his fingernail. “That is so cool.”
Ewan’s being impressed made me feel like a big fake. I remembered how certain Gus had been that I was making it up. “No,” I said. “It’s stupid. It can’t be real. I mean, really real. Isn’t it more possible that I might have made it up? You know, hallucinated.”
Ewan was staring at me, his eyes squinted in confusion. “Hey,” I said, “I’m just trying to be honest. A lot of people would never believe something like this.”
“Do you even know anything about ghosts?” Ewan was using the it’s-unbelievable-how-stupid-you-are voice he often slips into when giving the answers in class.
“No,” I admitted. “Except that I don’t really believe in them.”
“Look,” Ewan said. He stepped into his room, and came out with an armful of books. Ghostly Encounters, Surfing the Third Dimension, The Surreal Planet, Dr. Occult. He stepped in again and brought out another armful, and kept at it until a new layer of books was covering the tiny coffee table, and half the couch was littered with books as well.
“I’ve read all of these,” he said. “And I’ve been online. I’ve looked at every Web site I can find.”
I was starting to feel the way I did the month before, when Ewan and I had to write an oral report together about Brazil. Before we’d even had our research period, he collected all these notes on NAFTA (which is some kind of government thing that my dad couldn’t believe I’d never heard of). Ewan told me how NAFTA affected Brazilian people who couldn’t get money from the government to buy cisterns for collecting water. “Isn’t all the stuff about them in Spanish?” I’d said. “In Brazil,” Ewan had answered slowly, as if I were deaf or really, really stupid, “they speak Portuguese.”
Now he put a hand on the tallest pile of books and said, “Let me tell you something about ghosts, Michael. They come back for a reason.” His voice was cracking with excitement, which is totally embarrassing. Or should have been—Ewan didn’t seem to notice. “They only have the power to do things they really, really want to do. They don’t waste time. You’d think they would—they have forever—but they tend to be very focused on getting a particular thing, or reaching a particular person.”
“They are?” I said.
“Of course,” he went on. “There is a barrier between us and the other dimension, and it takes a lot of energy to pass through it. Everyone thinks of ghosts as wispy, smoky things that can walk through doors, but really, to them, their bodies are solid. Imagine what it would take for you to break through a brick wall.”
“I couldn’t do that,” I said.
“Well, you probably could, if you knew karate, and could focus your energy in the right way. And that’s like a ghost. They can only get through the wall if they build up enough energy and force to break something that seems totally impossible for them to break through. Although sometimes they don’t even know what it is they’re looking for.”
“But I don’t even feel him anymore. He’s not with me.”
“Yes, he is,” said Ewan. “Here, take my hand.”
“No way,” I said.
“Do you have to be so conventional?” he said.
I gave him my hand.
“Now hold on to me while I try to pull away.”
I held on, and he started to twist his hand and move his wrist.
“Do you feel that?”
“Yes,” I said.
His hand stopped moving. He kept it still.
“Do you notice that as much?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, I can tell I’m holding your hand.”
“What you felt with your grandfather at first was a struggle. He was struggling to connect with you. But now he’s not struggling anymore. The connection’s wide-open. That’s why you don’t feel it.”
I was starting to feel too warm, like maybe it was time to get out of that tiny, overheated apartment.
Ewan looked at his watch, which was black, big enough to be a calculator, and strapped to his wrist with red mountain-climbing rope. “We’ve got to get back,” he said, and I didn’t protest.
• • •
As soon as Ewan and I hit the cold air on the sidewalk outside his mom’s apartment, Ewan took a swig off his inhaler and started to run. I followed, my backpack bouncing against my body. By the time we got to the corner market where kids from Selden buy Pop Rocks, soda, and gum, my chest was burning from breathing in cold air, and my hair was sticking to my face. I felt better.
“Do you really think he’s coming back?” I said as we stood catching our breath.
“They always do,” Ewan wheezed. “What happened to you, I think it’s something called slipping. You talked about the river. Well, I think you’re slipping into the river of the dead. While you’re in there, the ghost is harnessing your living energy. It’s your body’s energy—combined with his very strong desire for something—that gives you the power to tunnel through the river. That’s why he looks better. He’s breathing through your body. And it’s why he needs to be touching you to take you back out. I think when you look at him in the mirror, when your eyes are touching, that gives you the energy you need to go in.”
“That’s cool,” I said.
“Slipping is very cool, but it is also extremely dangerous.”
“Dangerous how? Grandpa’s already dead.”
“It’s dangerous for you. Once you’ve made a strong connection to a ghost, it’s like driving in a car with no brakes. You can push the accelerator, but you can’t stop—he’ll just keep sucking and sucking until there is nothing left. Or at least, I think that’s what happens. There aren’t very many people who have slipped who remain alive long enough to report on it.”
“Remain alive?” I repeated. “As opposed to what?”
Ewan grabbed my elbow. “Don’t worry about that now. I’ll call my babysitter and tell her to meet me at home later, so I can spend some time in the library. I’ll try to find out more, but in the meantime, you have to remember this. You cannot look in mirrors, or at any kind of surface that might have a reflection. That’s all it could take, any reflective surface—” He stopped.
“And what?”
“You could slip again. And this time, you might not be able to come back.”