As the cold inside the river of the dead froze deeper into my body, I pushed through more of Grandpa’s memories. I was sitting in an office, at night, with a deli sandwich, unwrapped and half-eaten, pushed off to the side. In a circle of light made by a small desk lamp, I was checking columns of numbers to make sure they’d been added correctly. I could feel the numbers clicking together like I was stacking dominoes inside a case.
Then I pushed through to another table, lit by a different lamp. I was working a crossword puzzle. I found the “down” words ECHO, ERA, REDUCE, ET, and suddenly I gave a little grimace of a smile to realize that I could connect them all with an “across” word—CLANDESTINE.
I felt safe inside these memories, but also I felt sad, like I’d swallowed a piece of the cold that surrounded me. The tiny bit of light coming from the desk lamps was fading. I squinted at the crossword puzzle, but I could no longer make out the letters.
It was fully dark now, and I switched to a new memory. I was in a movie theater. I was the boy again, the boy who had laughed at the cartoon, but this time the movie was over, I wasn’t laughing, all the rest of the people had gone home, and I was waiting for something to return to the screen to take me away from the sad feeling waiting to creep back into my body, where it always seemed ready to come alive.
Then all was light, a blinding, bright sky. I was looking down at the lake from a mountaintop, leaning on a walking stick, gnawing on a piece of salami and sucking cool water out of a canteen. My hips were aching from the hike, but I didn’t care. The salami was salty, the wind was pushing clouds across the sky like the sailboats on the water below, and my chest was full of fresh mountain air.
The memories began to speed up, and the cold inside the river of the dead grew tighter, but I didn’t let myself pass out. Even though I couldn’t breathe with all the pressure on my lungs, I tried to stay awake. At the point where the pressure, and the cold, got so I could feel my eyes rolling back into my head, and everything was growing dark, and noises were distorted as if I’d gone underwater, I cracked open my eyes and saw at the end of a long tunnel of blue light what looked like a miniature drawing of a row of school lockers.
Some of the lockers were open, and one of them had a black sticker with a skull and crossbones on it. I knew these lockers, but I couldn’t place them. Then I remembered. They were in the boys’ locker room at school. Though they were very far away, I could see them in detail, down to the way the vents on the far left were dented, and the metal was starting to rust.
As soon as my brain understood what I was seeing, the pressure holding me down lifted, and I was catapulted forward. The lockers rushed toward me so fast, I was sure I was going to slam right into them. I put up my hands to protect my face, and then I was lying down on the cold tile floor of the locker room. I felt as though my stomach had been compressed into a walnut. I was shaking from the cold.
I closed my eyes, and the rushing sound receded. I could hear voices.
“All I’m saying”—it was Julia speaking (Julia? In the boys’ locker room?)—“is that I’m calling the nurse.”
“No, wait,” Ewan said, and I didn’t know what he was doing there either. “See the color coming into his face? Just let me take his pulse again.” I felt his fingers on my wrist. I opened my eyes. Ewan was kneeling next to me. Julia was standing behind him. Her eyebrows were furrowed, and she looked like she’d swallowed something sour. I turned my head to the other side, and there were Gus and Trip, standing. Trip had his head cocked, like a dog listening to a high-pitched whistle. Gus was watching me with the same glaze of concentration he gets on his face when he plays Game Boy.
“He’s awake,” said Gus.
“Oh, thank God,” Julia breathed.
“Are you sure?” Trip asked. He sounded angry.
My lips were dry. “Why are you—all—here?” I managed to get out.
They started speaking at once, then stopped, and Gus pointed to the floor. “After I got you in here, you passed out. Then suddenly Ewan rushes in—”
Ewan interrupted, “As soon as I started researching slipping, Michael, I realized you weren’t safe, even at school, even at basketball practice. I came to find you right away.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by safe,” Trip said. “But everyone was running sprints except us three, so I came in here to find you guys, and Brainiac’s making us drag you away from the lockers so no one can see that you’re passed out. The whole time you were going crazy.” Trip made his body shake and rolled his eyes up in his head. He stuck his tongue out. Was that what I looked like?
“Stop it,” said Gus.
Julia turned to me in her I’m-telling-on-somebody voice. “Michael,” she said, “Gus and Trip were trying to convince Ewan to go get Coach Ball, or a nurse, or someone, and Ewan wasn’t letting them, and I heard this whole conversation through the vent that goes into the girls’ locker room. Coach Ball stuck his head in the room to make sure you were okay, and Trip told him you were in the shower. As soon as the rest of the team cleared out, I came in.”
“There’s a vent?” Trip said. His face was turning red.
“What’s important,” Julia said, ignoring Trip, “is that I got here in time to see that Michael was having some kind of seizure…” She paused to let the word “seizure” sink in, reminding them how serious it was, and how neglectful they had been. Trip and Gus swallowed. Were they afraid of Julia? She continued, “And you were just sitting there watching!”
“We weren’t only watching,” Ewan said quietly. “I was tracking his pulse. I already explained this. If it went below fifty, I was going to call 911, but otherwise, we’d keep him out of doctors’ hands, because they’re not going to understand this, or help him. They’d only stick him in the hospital, which is the worst place he could be.”
“Michael,” said Gus, “that’s totally not true. We wouldn’t have let you just lie there. We were about to call 911.”
“Let me get this straight,” Trip said, taking a step closer to Ewan. “A kid’s passed out but you say we shouldn’t do anything about it because of stuff you read on the Internet? I’m no doctor, but—”
“I didn’t find out about the pulse rate on the Web,” said Ewan. “I found it talking to a psychic researcher in Australia.” He sounded as huffy as Trip. He wasn’t taking a step away from him either. “He told me some amazing stuff about slipping, Michael.” Then Ewan said to the others, “Michael was traveling in the river of the dead.”
“Who are you?” Trip said to Ewan. “Aren’t you in my geometry class?”
“He’s new,” Julia spat, as if “new” was such an ugly word she could hardly bear to say it out loud.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” said Ewan. “But if you know what’s good for Michael, you should stay out of my way.”
“Stay out of your way?” said Gus. “Michael is my best friend. And”—he pointed at Julia—“this is his sister. And—” He looked at Trip, realizing that Trip was really nothing to me. I guess “tormentor” wouldn’t be a very good way to make Gus’s case.
“I’m the captain of the basketball team,” said Trip.
“Yeah,” said Gus, sounding a little less convinced of the point he was making, then revving himself up all over again. “So what gives you the right to tell us anything?”
All three of them were looking at Ewan, and in response, Ewan just looked at me. “Tell them,” he said. “And let’s just hope they believe you.”
“Okay,” I said. I was sitting up now. “I know this sounds crazy, and this is what I tried to tell you the other night, Gus, but Ewan is right. He’s really smart and he knows a lot about ghosts, and it seems I have one. Grandpa,” I said, looking at Julia, who couldn’t seem to decide whether to open her mouth or close it. Gus was looking at me straight on, squinting through his hair. Trip was smiling, but in the way people smile when they’re finding out there’s a KICK ME sign on their back and they’re trying to pretend in the first seconds after noticing it that there’s a way in which they might have been part of the joke, instead of the butt of it.
“At first it was just little stuff,” I explained. “Like I said something that wasn’t me talking, or I was eating food that only Grandpa liked. But then I started to see him in mirrors, and when that happened, I started to be able to go into his head. Sort of. I don’t really understand it, but it feels like I travel through this tunnel made up of his memories of his life, and then I pop out inside a memory where I can see Grandpa as a ghost and talk to him.”
“Only a few cases of what Michael is doing have been recorded,” Ewan said. “It’s called slipping—he’s slipping into a place called the river of the dead. This researcher in Australia said that it’s very hard to know anything about slipping because the relationship between the living person and the ghost changes as they spend time together. It’s like any relationship—as the connection deepens, the channel that opens up between the two people expands.”
“We went swimming together this time,” I told Ewan. “But we didn’t get wet. Up until now, we weren’t able to touch each other—I’d just feel cold where his hand lay on mine. Except last time, I forgot, and tried. There was something there. I could feel him.”
“Really?” Ewan said.
“Is that bad?” I asked.
“I think so,” he said, his face pinched with worry. “I don’t know. This Australian guy said you should try to stop slipping. He said it’s not healthy. He said each visit will be more draining than the one before. And going to a doctor is only going to get you locked into a hospital where they’ll try to shock you out of what they see as seizures and give you drugs for epilepsy.”
“It’s not that bad, though,” I felt I had to say. “It doesn’t hurt when I’m actually with Grandpa.”
“The people it’s happened to always say that,” Ewan said. “It’s painful, but they start to like it. They start to be able to feel it coming, to control it themselves, sort of. They talk about a willed openness, whatever that means. And pretty soon, they go into one of those seizures like the one you had and they don’t come back.”
“What do you mean, they don’t come back?” I said, but I was glad Trip cut Ewan off before he could answer the question.
“If no one else is going to say this, I will,” Trip said. “This is the biggest load I’ve ever heard.” He snorted. “It’s crazy. It’s like, Tales from the Crypt crazy. My dad knows some pretty big-deal Hollywood agents. Maybe he could get you a job writing crackpot movies.”
“Your dad’s in jail,” said Julia.
“It’s not a jail,” Trip said, speaking low, as if he knew no one was going to believe him, but he had to say it anyway. “It’s a detention facility. It looks like an old people’s home. There’s an apple orchard.”
I couldn’t help sneaking a look over at Gus. He held his arms crossed in front of his chest, his eyes narrowed.
“Do you believe any of this is real?” I said to Julia.
“Come on,” she said. “It sounds crazy.” Then she took a deep breath and held it. “But…” She let out the air. “I believe that you think it’s true. I respect that.”
“Really?” I said. Somehow it was harder to imagine that Grandpa had come back from the dead than that Julia respected me.
“What about you?” I said to Gus.
“Honestly, I’m a little scared for you,” Gus said. “I definitely thought you were just making it up yesterday, but now I have no idea what’s going on.”
“Yeah,” said Trip. “The seizure didn’t look very good.”
“Okay,” I said, but before I could collect my thoughts, Ewan interrupted.
“Michael, you have to focus,” he said. “I don’t know how much time you have. The guy from Australia said he would hop on a plane and fly out here, but that we probably didn’t even have enough time for that. He said your best shot was trying to figure out what your grandpa wants, and then helping him find it before it’s too late. He said that you’d know what your grandpa wants, that it’s probably pretty obvious.”
“Um,” I said. “I guess I could ask him?”
“You don’t know?” As always, Ewan sounded like he was more baffled than angry. Baffled that he could possibly have underestimated my dumbness.
“Just think about it,” he said. “Weren’t there any clues?”
I put my head in my hands and tried to think for a minute, but mostly what I thought about was the fact that this wasn’t going to work. I’m not good at figuring things out. “It isn’t fair,” I said. I dug my hands into my pockets and looked at Ewan. He was the one who came up with answers, not me. “I’ve seen so many of his memories, but they don’t mean anything to me. I don’t know how I’m supposed to understand any of this. This whole thing is crazy. It makes sense that no one believes me. I wouldn’t believe me either.”
No one said anything for a few minutes. “Maybe we should tell Mom and Dad,” Julia finally said with a sigh.
“No—,” Ewan started.
“Maybe you are a little bit crazy,” said Trip, holding his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. He was trying to be funny, but no one laughed.
“Why are you even here?” Ewan sneered. “None of you believe Michael.” Trip took a step closer to Ewan, and I could see on his face what he was thinking: the smart kid’s gonna get a wedgie.
“I’m here because,” he started hotly, but I think he realized pretty quickly that he didn’t know. “Because,” he sputtered, “because I’m bored. And Gus is here. And because Michael just played awesome basketball. And… and…” Now he was starting to sound angry again. “And everyone knows you shouldn’t get medical information off the Internet.”
“I told you, it wasn’t through the Internet like on a chat room or something. I was e-mailing—”
“Can I say something?” interrupted Julia. “I think that we should tell Mom and Dad.”
Gus was talking over both of them. “Don’t do us any favors, Trip, I mean…”
For two seconds I listened to them all fighting. How long was this going to go on? And how was it going to help me?
That’s when I felt the raised letters of a business card rubbing against my fingers inside my pocket. Half remembering, I pulled it out.
“Stop it,” I said in a quiet voice that managed to get everyone’s attention. “Maybe this can help. Ms. Rosoff gave it to me.” I showed the card to Ewan. “It’s her psychic’s card. She told me to talk to her. Maybe she can help.”
“Most psychics are phonies,” Ewan began, but when he saw the name on the card, he snatched it out of my hand. “Oh my God!” he gasped. “Charlisse Hillel-Broughton. She’s famous! You can’t get her number anywhere. She only takes on a few clients a year.”
“There’s such a thing as a real psychic?” said Julia.
“She’s as real as you can get,” Ewan went on. “Her husband is this British lord or something, and for a long time they lived in India. Now she lives here in New York. I can’t believe you have her number.”
“And address,” said Julia, looking at the card over my shoulder. “Oh my God. She lives in one of those coops some movie stars can’t get into. They won’t even let you have a mortgage.”
“What are you waiting for?” said Ewan, opening my locker and pulling out my clothes. Ewan hadn’t lived in New York long enough to care about real estate. “Get dressed.”
I looked at Julia, Gus, and Trip. “Will you guys come with us?” I said.
“Yes,” said Julia. “I’ll give you three hours. But after that I’m telling Mom and Dad.”
“You want Trip?” said Gus. And then, more quietly, “You want me?”
My head was still pounding from the cold. “I’m not feeling well,” I said. “I can use all the help I can get.”