CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Tab’s hospital room was not a prison. Nor was Tab a prisoner. That didn’t mean he didn’t feel a twinge of misgiving about not staying put. The nurses in the children’s psych ward had been sweet enough to him, even if one nameless doctor had been somewhat dismissive. Tab pressed his ear to the door, listening for footsteps or carts rolling the hallway outside. Nothing.

He had stopped the clock on the wall in his room with a drawing. It was functional again, but he had no idea how much time had passed. He’d had no word from his mother since the nurse brought him dinner. His dad had returned to oblivion, or wherever ghosts went.

He opened the door a crack, enough to peer into the brutalist, fluorescent-lit hallway beyond. The starkness of the places adults trod was not lost on the boy. It filled him with new dread of growing up. Why did grownups, men especially, insist on bland lives of furor and stress?

In the distance lay the nurse’s station. The stern woman who had greeted him sat behind the glass, her back to him. Outside the station, also with his back to him, a janitor clad in short-sleeve gray coveralls swept a mop across linoleum. A wheeled bucket of cloudy, nasty looking water dragged behind. The man slung his mop past the nurse’s station and whirled out of sight. Tab had a minute tops before the janitor completed his circuit. He had to move now.

He pressed a hand against his back pocket. The half a pencil and composition notebook were secure there. He’d had to fold the notebook in half to fit it but fit it he did. He feared the resultant crease might affect the magic he and his dad had discovered, but it was necessary. He’d have to lope on all fours past the nurse’s station to prevent her from spotting him. If he walked upright, they’d lead him right back to his room on account of his mom and brother couldn’t be bothered right now.

Tab considered fighting Roy from the solitude of his hospital room, but something there didn’t feel right. Roy was stronger without Jeremy (and, by proxy, Tab’s dad) around. If he waited, fought Roy on his terms in the presence of his mother, his brother, and his dad’s ghost, he would be fighting a weakened, more nervous Roy. Advantage: Tab.

The nurse hadn’t budged from her position at her station. She must be working on her computer, or surfing the web, or playing Solitaire. Whatever. It held her attention.

Tab collapsed into a crouch, then pulled the door open enough to slip through. A couple of quick glances left and right revealed he was alone on this part of the floor. He allowed the door to close behind him but kept a hand on it to ensure it didn’t slam.

A sense of vulnerability crept in now that he was outside the shell of his room. It was cooler out here. Every shadow cast on the floor he perceived as a threat. After two leaps forward, making minimal sound and with no reaction from the nurse or the shadows, his confidence began to grow. He grinned. He was James Bond now, one of his dad’s action movie heroes. The thrill of secrecy and remaining undetected intoxicated him. He wondered if ghosts like his dad and Roy must feel this way around people who can’t see them.

“Maybe we do and maybe we don’t,” a gravelly voice on his left said.

Tab hung his head, exasperated. Roy. Fucking Roy. Goddamn fucking Roy was here and honing in on his thoughts again.

“If you gonna fight me, boy, do it here. You chicken?”

He didn’t look at the ghost. Except for the quiet sigh that escaped before he could catch it, Tab didn’t acknowledge him at all. He closed his eyes, clearing his mind. Abracadabra and presto! The hospital air created chilling sensations on his forearms. He felt the pressure of the smooth floor tiles against his fingertips. He curled his toes at the ends of his shoes.

Lurching forward, he pressed himself as close to the wall as possible. He dodged adjacent door facings, his fingertips supporting his upper body. Most of his “walking” was on crouched legs. In school, they called it a duck walk, but Tab always felt more like a frog. Whatever they called it, it seemed to be working.

“What d’you think that’s gonna do, boy?” Roy said, more behind him than beside him now. “What d’you think you’re gonna do when you’re out of here?” His voice grew louder, more enraged as Tab departed. “What do you think you’re gonna do? I hope you’re going to your mom! I hope you’re gonna go to your brother! You know why, you little shit? Because if you’re there, I can kill him! I can get rid of your dumbass fake dad forever! All I gotta do is kill the last remaining drop of blood he has on this Earth and he’s gone, Tab! He’s gone!”

The stretch of hallway he traversed ended in a T. To the left was the nurse’s station and the hallway in front of it. To the right was a shorter hallway ending in the double doors through which he’d been shoved in the wheelchair. Tab allowed himself one glance behind. Roy was gone, if he had ever been there. In her station, the stern-looking nurse remained glued to her computer. She coughed once, turning her head when she did, but without enough periphery to catch sight of him.

Tab dashed around the corner. He imagined a mouse skittering through a kitchen at midnight. A few more frog-leaps, and he stood upright. He slapped the rectangle to open the doors, ran through them in a flash and was suddenly power-walking a new section of the floor to—where? He didn’t know.

He skirted a corner and was greeted by a series of signs, one of which pointed to the elevators. A glance at the number on the closest room revealed he was on the first floor. Jeremy was on the third. Room 314.

Another janitor, his back to Tab, stood between him and the elevator niche. Tab tried to bypass him on the left, but the silver-haired, coverall-clad old man swept his mop that way as soon as he did. Tab veered right, but the janitor performed the same maneuver. He waited for the man to sweep left again, but he didn’t. Instead, he paused in his work to pluck an iPod from his back pocket. He leveled the device in front of his eyes and began to poke at it with one damp, smudgy finger.

“Excuse me,” Tab said. “Excuse me. I need to get by.”

No answer. Tab again ran left. Just then, the man swung the mop handle around, connecting with Tab’s shins. The boy lost his balance and sprawled on the floor slicked with mop water, his hands and legs outstretched. He rolled onto his back to find the janitor glowering down at him, menace in the hazel eyes behind his rectangular wire-rimmed grandpa glasses. In a moment, those eyes collapsed into the man’s head, and Tab was again face-to-face with Roy.

“I can’t stop you from going up,” he said. “Even if I wanted to, I can’t. I don’t know why. Something won’t let me. But I can force you to do what I want when you get there. I almost did it before they sent you to the looney bin.” He sighed through his nostrils, leaning forward on his mop handle. “I’m sick of these games. All I want is some justice, son. You’d think my own blood would let me have that.”

“Don’t call me ‘son,’” Tab said. He scrambled to his feet and dashed to the elevator. After punching the Up button harder than was necessary, he glanced back from where he’d come. The janitor was gone, and so was Roy. The old man had been another disguise. Not real. Most likely a visage adopted by Roy from someone he’d seen that night.

The location lights above the elevator announced the box was stopped on the eighth floor. Tab snatched the notebook and pencil from his back pocket, grateful they weren’t lost in his tumble, and turned to a blank page. He drew a quick and dirty sketch of Stinkeye Roy in the form in which they’d first met: the coveralls, the missing eyes, the scruffy round face, the baseball cap. The Roy figure stood in a symmetrical pose, his hands at his sides and his feet together as if at attention.

When the figure was finished, Tab sketched outlines of other figures surrounding him, near but not touching. He fashioned empty silhouettes that could be interpreted as masculine or feminine, young or old. He even outlined a small dog and cat, anything he could imagine that Roy might imitate. In the spaces between the figures and Roy, Tab drew small squiggly arrows, a shorthand that these were other identities Roy might assume.

The elevator chime sounded. Its doors opened. Tab stepped inside without looking up from his drawing. He glanced at the control panel to ensure he was pressing the correct floor number and then swapped the pencil’s point for its eraser. His chisel. He closed his eyes, ready to concentrate. Suddenly, a new voice spoke to him. Young. Feminine.

“Well, look who it is.”

He swiveled his head to the left. There stood Ashley Reardon with her right arm in a sling. She snuggled a crutch in her left armpit. A malicious sneer spread across the lower half of her face, teeth clamped behind pulled lips. Her eyes glistened with hate.

“What are you doing here, homie?” she asked. “Or should I say ‘homo?’ You never did answer me when I asked you which way your thing swings.” She caught him looking at her busted arm and leg. Had she broken her leg, too? Tab’s mother hadn’t told him that. “You did this to me, didn’t you, you little shit? You and your drawings. I always knew you were a freak.”

“I—” Tab said, but snapped his mouth shut. As far as he knew, no one but his mother, his brother, and Dr. Clifford knew about his drawing of Ashley. Unless Dr. Clifford had betrayed him to the girl and her mother, but he doubted that. The elevator doors opened on the third floor and Tab stepped out with Ashley right beside him, glaring at him, inching her face closer to his. Closer to his bump.

She wasn’t real. Tab shut his eyes and leaned his head back. The calm state came more easily than it had the first time. He concentrated on the sensation of the pencil between the fingers of his right hand and the texture of the notebook in his left. The buzzing of the lights overhead drowned the doubts and other voices in his mind. Abracadabra and presto!

“You aren’t gonna get away with this,” the “Ashley” entity whispered in his left ear. On that, he stabbed the drawing he’d been working on and rubbed the eraser in small circles until he’d formed a larger void around the figure of Roy. The eraser chiseled away the middles of the arrows he’d drawn between Roy and the other figures, leaving gaps of blank page between their starts and ends. When he was done, he opened his eyes. Ashley Reardon was gone, replaced by a furious Roy. Tab had severed his ability to don disguises. Temporarily, at least.

“That’s CHEATING!” Roy roared. “You’re a LITTLE CHEAT! Come here, you little cheat! I’m going in. From here on out, you’re mine.”

Tab ran, although he knew full well running from a ghost was useless. Roy could disappear and reappear anywhere he wanted. It didn’t matter how much distance Tab put between himself and the apparition. But when fight or flight takes over, as Dr. Clifford had written in his book, the rational mind checks out. His legs wanted to run. His arms wanted to pump. So he let them.

A sign at the next T pointed him to the right for rooms 300 through 315. Tab took the turn at full speed. The tips of his sneakers squeaked to a halt at the change in direction, nearly costing him his balance. He righted himself and kept going, but there was a new twinge in his left ankle. The last few feet to Room 314 became a fast limp. He was still looking at his feet when he butted head-first into the belly of a nurse in pink scrubs who blocked the door of his brother’s room.

Tab steeled himself and stared directly at her face. “Are you him?” he asked, his voice flat, less James Bond and more Harry Callahan. Another of his dad’s heroes, although Tab had only ever seen one or two famous clips from the Dirty Harry movies. His mom had always refused to allow his dad to show those movies to him and Jeremy. Tab asked often but was always disappointed. He’d heard about the little dog named Meathead ripping a fart. That would be a hilarious thing to see.

“Am I who?” the nurse asked. She bent at the knees, resting her palms on them so her face drew near to his.

Tab checked his notebook. The image he’d drawn of Roy surrounded by other figures was still there. The gaps in the middle of the arrows looked narrower now but were not healed. His power couldn’t hold off Roy’s ability to assume other shapes forever. Roy was a ghost, like his dad, but the fact that there remained gaps on the page was a clue that his shapeshifting abilities hadn’t returned yet.

“My brother is in there,” Tab said. “So is my mom.”

The nurse’s green eyes brightened, contrasting brilliantly with her reddish orange mane and pale skin. “Are you Tab?”

He nodded.

“Oh, sweetie, you’re not supposed to be down here right now. Your brother’s sleeping and your mom’s trying to sleep. Let’s take you back down to your room on One, huh? We can give you anything you need down there. You don’t need to bother your brother or your mom for it.”

Tab snarled. “I don’t need anything. Except I need to be in there with them.”

The nurse straightened up. Confusion, offense, and then resolve replaced the patronizing helpfulness in her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but it’s past visiting hours. Only one family member is allowed inside at a time until nine o’clock tomorrow.”

“But I’m allowed in any time!” Roy said. The voice came from behind Tab. He was not startled by it. Somehow, he’d already sensed the ghost’s presence. A chill gripped him but was gone in a second. The same chill must have hit the nurse. Bumps rose all over her freckled forearms. Then Roy’s head and neck poked through the door of his brother’s room. He looked like Porky Pig bursting through the drum at the end of those old cartoons on Boomerang. Roy said in a mock stutter, “Ah-bedee, ah-bedee, ah-bedee, I’m inside, folks!”

Tab reached for the door handle, but the nurse was too quick. She stepped in front of it. “I told you, ‘No,’” she said. She pursed her lips together, the patience gone from her face. Grabbing Tab’s shoulders, she spun him around. “Back to One with you. I’m going to call security for escort. You can just sit on the floor until they get here.” She pointed at the wall opposite 314 and motioned to another nurse who happened to be passing by, whispering something to him. He nodded and walked back the way he came. Tab supposed he went to round up a security guard.

Rage swelled in his chest. He felt it press against the walls, bubbling until it boiled into his head. He wanted to explode at the nurse, to call her all kinds of names, to kick her in the shins, to do something to move her out of his way. He was tempted to shove her, but they would haul him away sooner for something like that. It might get him locked inside the little room they’d reserved for him in the psych ward.

He plopped down against the opposite wall and opened the notebook to the now blank page on which he had drawn his father. He scanned the nurse from top to toe, then sketched her standing in front of the door. The room number of 314 was visible to the right of her head. The name tag on her scrubs read MOLLY, so he sketched that as well. When he was done, he flipped the pencil and allowed the eraser to hover over the illustrated Molly’s head.

“I need to see my brother,” he said to the real Molly blocking the door.

She sighed. “I’m sorry, son. But no.”

“I’m not your son.” She rolled her eyes but did not reply. Tab shut his own. He drew in a deep breath and tried to swallow the rage. Abracadabra and presto! He was angry, yes, and anger is an emotion normal people feel. He didn’t want to hurt the nurse, but he did want her to leave. She was making it difficult.

His anger contained, Tab redirected it into his bump. The blemish filled with hot blood, pulsing against the thin membrane of skin on his temple. The third eye opened. “This is only temporary!” he shouted, then dropped his eraser onto the page and rubbed at the drawing of Molly the nurse. He rubbed until he heard the paper crinkle under the pressure of his touch. When he opened his eyes, Nurse Molly on the page was gone and so was the nurse at the door.

Tab flipped his pencil. Guilt stabbed him in the back of the neck. Where had she gone? He couldn’t answer, even if he was responsible for sending her there. He considered redrawing her, tracing the impressions of the lines he’d erased. Could it make things worse? His drawings effects on ghosts were temporary. His effects on humans so far had been unfortunately permanent. Nurse Molly had not been a ghost. Had he killed her? Or would the fact that he only wanted her to go away for a little while eventually bring her back? His mom and dad would call that intent. He didn’t have intent to kill Nurse Molly. If his intent mattered, and the erasure was only temporary, he might create two Nurse Mollys on accident if he tried to redraw her. Was intent enough? Maybe wait, find out if her erasure—what? Expires? It was the best word he could think of.

He buried the feelings. Wherever Nurse Molly had gone, he hoped she wouldn’t remember it when she came back again. If she came back again, his brain amended.

Tab braced against the wall and pushed himself to his feet. He folded the notebook in half and stowed it along with the pencil in the back pocket of his jeans.

“Murderer,” a voice said beside him. “You’re a goddamned murderer, Tab. You little shit. I saw what you did to the lady what didn’t do nothing to you. She was doing her job, Tab. Wasn’t no reason to send her into the beyond like that.”

Roy had appeared on his left again. Tab allowed himself a glance in his direction. The ghost of the man stood facing him, his shoulders slumped and his chin hung low on his neck. He shook his head, crestfallen.

“What do you know about the beyond?” Tab asked. He shouldn’t acknowledge the ghost. He knew that. But he couldn’t help himself. The accusations fused with his own doubts and pangs of guilt were too much. “All you ever do is hang around me.”

“I know enough,” Roy countered. “It wasn’t until your little third eye there opened up that I was able to break free of it, to see the world clear again, to move around in it like a goddamn normal person. Ain’t nothing in the beyond but fog, boy. Just empty, dank fog and the echoes of your own footsteps and sobs.”

Tab sneered. “For people like you, maybe. Bad people. Or you’re stuck. I’ve seen enough of my brother’s ghost hunting shows to know things like that can happen. Ghosts can get stuck here. Between here and there. Especially if they think they died too early to do whatever they were put here to do.”

“You think I’m the bad guy?” Roy scoffed. “You murdered an innocent person, you stupid little shit.”

“You hurt my mom. And you want to kill my brother!”

The ghost leaned in close to Tab’s face then, his nostrils flared and his lips pulled back in a demonic grimace. “I ain’t hurt nobody!” he snarled. “Your momma gave herself to me, and it don’t matter whether you believe it. Innocent until proven guilty. That’s what the law says. And there wasn’t no evidence, least there wasn’t after the sheriff’s department lost it.” He bellowed laughter at that. “And killing your brother is in self-defense.”

Tab balled his hands into fists. His forearms and biceps tensed, the muscles thrumming underneath his skin. “Just because they can’t prove it doesn’t mean you didn’t do it,” he seethed. “I’ll believe my mom over you any day of the week and twice on Sunday. She wouldn’t lie to me.”

“Oh, yeah?” Roy’s grimace transformed into a smirk. “She lied to you about who your dad was.”

Tab laughed out loud at him. “Tim Beard is my dad,” he said. “That’s all they told me. He raised me. He sent me to school. He taught me things. You were never my dad.”

“You got my blood!”

“If I do, I hate I do,” Tab belted. Had he had the presence of mind and words to say so, he would’ve added, “If blood is all that matters for a legacy, it’s a crying shame you have one when there are good men who don’t.”

“I’m a good man,” Roy said, although it was unclear whether he had somehow “heard” the more complex message Tab was trying to convey. “I’m a good man! Fuck you, kid. I’m a great man! It’s the rest of y’all who are broke. Ladies love me, boy. They just don’t know it when they first meet me.”

“Shut up,” Tab said. He leveled a finger at Roy. It was an impressive, intimidating command to issue from the mouth of a child. Perhaps to the astonishment of them both, Roy did indeed shut up. Maybe he saw the grownup resolve behind Tab’s glare. Maybe he’d run out of things to say.

Either way, Tab sensed a shift in the power dynamic as he locked eyeball-to-socket with the ghost who had tormented him for these many weeks. For the first time, Tab’s confidence did not wane. For the first time, he refused to be the one to turn away.

Roy, also for the first time, flinched. He took one step backwards, his brow and mouth downturned and his head tilted to the right. It was as if he was a dog trying to make sense of a high-pitched trill. Tab grinned.

“You know, Roy, I erased that nurse.” He held up the notebook page on which he’d depicted her. “The drawing hasn’t come back yet. Maybe that means you’re right about me. I am a murderer!”

Roy was agog. “So you admit what you did to her? There you go! Murderer! Like your dad!”

Tab’s grin widened. “You called Tim Beard my dad.”

Roy howled. Whatever brief power Tab wielded over him exploded in a flash of rage and hate. He took two more steps backwards, but they lacked the trepidation of the one before them. He was preparing to launch. “I’m gonna kill you, boy. First I’m gonna use you to kill your brother. And when your skin is covered in his blood? And your nostrils are full of his stink? And you’re deaf from his screams? Then I’m gonna kill you, too.”

He leaped.