Even though Kent State University was only thirty miles from Canton, it felt like a different planet. There were a few kids from my high school who went to Kent as well, but I was about as uninterested in them as they were in me, so I just started my life over again, from scratch.
Despite the freedom to start over, I really had no clue of where I wanted to go or what I wanted to do there. I was content to just begin. My new, fresh life really wasn’t that different from my old one, minus the substance abuse and dead children following me around.
After I moved to Kent, my Little Girl dreams and feelings seemed to come to an end, much like they began: slowly, in fits and starts and pieces and fragments. Then they weren’t there anymore. I really hadn’t noticed this happening at the time. I was in a new place, around new people, and living a new life. For the most part, I was just happy not to have to deal with it; I wasn’t terribly concerned with why. I was ready to move on.
I would, occasionally, reflect on what had happened, seeing if time and distance provided any insight. They didn’t. But I didn’t want to press my luck either. This is what really led me to the fear of ghosts that stayed with me throughout my life.
While Little Girl no longer seemed part of my life, ghosts, in general, seemed to sneak in to take Her place. I was so worried about provoking Her presence that I would end up avoiding unfamiliar or spooky-feeling places where I would be alone or in the dark. I’d also stay away from closed doors. Evading any potential Little Girl–friendly location eventually evolved into going out of my way to dodge anything even remotely rumored to involve ghosts. I would walk blocks out of my way to steer clear of a house that looked or felt particularly spooky. I’d suddenly change the topic or walk out of the room during the occasional late-night ghost story exchanged during the last smoldering embers of a party. I begged off watching ghost movies—even stupid stuff like Poltergeist or Ghostbusters would cause me to suddenly find something else to do somewhere else.
Whenever I was around a creepy or supposedly haunted place, I’d get this slightly sick, overwhelmed feeling. Then I’d try “calling out” to the ghost. Sometimes it made me feel better; sometimes I just lay, sat, or stood there in terror until I could get away.
Once I got settled into school, I signed up for a shift at the college radio station, WKSR, which was a step up from WKSC but not that much of a step up. It was an AM station, but it was carrier-current (which meant that it had about a dozen small transmitters stashed around the dorms on campus, each with a range of about thirty feet). But WKSR had a staff of hipsters and its own record collection (which the staff pilfered on an almost daily basis) and new record service from record labels (which the staff also routinely stole, often before they’d even been removed from their shipping packages).
I took classes—and actually attended them—and did a modicum of the required work. I got a part-time job painting lines on the football fields (which felt like a tremendous step up from cleaning toilets). I lived in the dorms and seemed to take pretty quickly to college life. I even made some friends.
Most of my friends were musicians and artists—or, more specifically, students who liked to think of themselves as musicians and artists. The big difference was that none of them sold drugs—or really took drugs, for that matter. Music was the currency in this crowd, so there were a lot of bands formed and disbanded, sometimes in the course of the same evening. We’d be sitting around, bored and watching television, when someone would say something like “Hey, we should start a band where we dress in Viking costumes and all our songs are about cheese.”
Then someone else would pipe in: “Yeah, we could call ourselves Omelet du Fromage.”
A few weeks later Omelet du Fromage would be rocking Kent, Ohio.
There was a never-ending stream of these bands. If we weren’t playing heavy metal while wearing wizard costumes, we were covering Barry Manilow songs in our underwear or playing funked-up children’s songs by candlelight. We thought that the abstruseness would delight our small audiences. More often than not, the novelty wore off by the third song. After some initial smiles and giggles, even our closest friends would start shifting around in their seats, staring at the signage on the walls, or picking at the worn laminate on the tabletops.
My first introduction into this world was also my first “serious” (read: actual) band, called Not Made With Hands, started with John, a guy I befriended in a film class. Shortly after we started practicing, we somehow managed to talk our way into opening for a touring band in town for a night. It was our first gig. I was a nervous mess.
By the time we were supposed to start, I was sweating, shaking, stammering, and feeling nauseous. Right before we went on, our drummer, Adam, handed me a tambourine and told me that it might help. The second I walked onstage, I started banging the tambourine. Of course, I had forgotten that I had a beer bottle in my other hand and ended up spraying beer all over the stage. John took this as a cue and started up our first song.
Our set got better from there but not that much better. It felt a lot like having sex for the first time. By the time I got my sea legs, it was over. We’d played eight songs in thirty minutes, but to me, it felt like the whole thing was over in about twelve seconds. I was tired, sweaty, confused, humiliated—and I couldn’t wait to do it again.
But, like 99.9 percent of bands, Not Made With Hands eventually imploded, a year later. It was never meant to go anywhere, which is exactly where it went. Playing music would be part of my life in fits and spurts. At the time, I thought every project was amazing and a gift to the world. Years later, I’d realize that none of my bands and musical efforts were really very remarkable at all, but that didn’t matter. There is no sensation in the world like playing music, loud music. Slamming your hands down on a guitar and hearing it emit noise. Singing out into a microphone was almost like a religious experience and orgasm wrapped into one. I’ve found many other ways to capture that joy, but at the time I couldn’t imagine anything making me any happier than playing in bands.
I only saw Laura once during my reimmersion into the world at large. Since the first postcard, I had received only a few cryptic letters from her in New York, talking mostly about the job she’d gotten at a bookstore and a few concerts she’d seen. In all fairness, I only stayed at that first dorm for a semester and moved without telling her. Every holiday or break, we’d try talking on the phone or make some effort to connect while we were both in Canton. The conversations were always weird—there was always a lot of uncomfortable silence. I’d always have some excuse for not trying harder to see her: She owed me a letter; I had tried to call her during the last break, so it was now her turn. We spoke on the phone briefly on Christmas, but we both were heading back out of town the next day. Next time, we promised each other. Next time.
On one hand I was desperate to see her; on the other I was desperate to avoid it.
Talking with her, writing to her, receiving something from her, or even thinking about her, frankly, hurt. It hurt more than not hearing from her. Seeing her scratchy handwriting or hearing her voice made me think about how much I missed her. How periodically lost I felt without my best friend. Even hearing a great new band bummed me out, because my instinctual reaction was to want to tell her about it.
She and Cassandra (the girl who had called to get me to talk to Laura when she first returned from Finland) came to a Not Made With Hands show that coincided with a trip home from New York. By that time, our occasional phone calls were becoming less tense, less as if we had something to prove to each other. We planned on hanging out beforehand, but Cassandra and Laura were hours late. They showed up just as we started. I could see them walk in and sit. Because of the stage lights blaring into my face, I could only see her outline, but I knew it was her. As we played, I just looked at her, trying to pick up any possible detail. They stayed for about half our set. Then the two of them walked up to the stage between songs and said they had to leave. Laura had to get back to New York the next morning.
Her hair was long, grown out past her shoulders. It was covered with a bandana and hung straight down her back. Her face looked exactly the same. Whatever had happened to her since moving to New York, she wasn’t showing it in her eyes. She was just as beautiful, just as reserved. Standing at the foot of the stage, she was less than two feet from me, yet felt so distant. That’s really all I remember about the encounter: her stepping out of the shadows to say hello and goodbye.
It was the last time I’d ever see her.
A short time later I was moving from one shithole college house to another shithole college house when I came across a manila envelope marked “Laura.” It contained most of the letters, cards, pictures, and scraps of paper she’d given me during our friendship. The only thing missing from that envelope was the Mystery Poem. It had disappeared during some previous move, covered and forgotten under some other debris and clutter from my life. It was just one of those things that always seems to be around until one day you notice it’s not—and you have no idea when the last time you saw it was. Yet I remembered it vividly. I could quote it verbatim, having committed it to memory while reading it over and over. I still had no idea what it meant.
“Just think about it for a while. You’ll eventually figure it out.”
Someday it would dawn on me—or I’d just wait until we were friends again and pester her into telling me. A moment would come and all the pieces would fit into place. But when that would be was her choice, wasn’t it? Not mine. She’d gone to New York and pretty much forgotten about me. Despite her promises to the contrary that night at the gas well, she was gone.
The whole envelope went into the trash.
Over the following year, I was still struggling to figure out who the new me was going to be. I started drinking again, though it never came close to what I had been doing in Canton. I was still playing in bands, hoping to become a rock star. But just in case that didn’t work out, I decided to major in political science. I was fascinated by public-opinion research and polling, understanding the difference between what people say and what they mean. I’d gotten a summer job working at the local public radio station and found a terrible attic room in a house for the summer. I had some friends. I pursued some girls with occasional bits of luck. I had a cat that I took care of. It wasn’t an ideal life, but it was something. Something that felt like a start.
• • •
Clearing. Picnic table. Wolf costume. Woods. Little Girl in a Blue Dress. Gibberish.
I was sitting upright in my bed, covered in sweat, not from the dream but from the temperature in my bedroom. It was the midst of a muggy heat wave. I had a tiny fan in the small window at the end of the alcove, which just moved the hot air around inside the attic.
Where the fuck did that come from? I wondered.
I was in that disoriented not-sure-if-you’re-still-dreaming-or-not state as I looked around the room, completely unsure of what was or wasn’t really there.
“I’m going to close my eyes,” I said into the hopefully empty darkness. “And if there is a ghost here, I will see it when I open them again.”
I closed my eyes tight, then quickly opened them.
Motionless darkness. Nothing.
I needed to get out of the house. I needed to go for a walk.
It was the first Little Girl dream I’d had in a long time. I hadn’t even thought about Her for months.
The house where I lived was just two blocks from the main strip in Kent—if a guitar store, four bars, a deli, and a butcher shop constituted a main strip. It was just before 1 A.M., so I figured there was a fair chance that at least a few of my friends would be stumbling from one dive bar to another.
As I headed around the corner onto Franklin Avenue, I saw a group of four or five people walking toward me.
One of them was Cassandra.
As her friends waited in a drunken state of impatience, Cassandra and I exchanged hugs and phone numbers. We were both a bit in shock to see each other. How weird, we both commented. How strange it is that we’d both be randomly walking down the street and run into each other, especially when she didn’t even live here. I was just going for a walk, I said. At one A.M.?, she asked, chuckling. Yes, at one A.M. We both laughed, while her friends looked more annoyed. They wanted to go to the bars, not stand around and watch us be blown away by our strange coincidental meeting.
A few days later I called Cassandra. I hadn’t given any more thought to our chance meeting, or its timing, or even the Little Girl dream that preceded it. It just seemed like an unexpected but still kind of normal set of occurrences. Whenever I tell anyone this story, that series of events is what I always feel I have to explain. No Little Girl dreams for more than a year—then suddenly, I have one. Then in the middle of that night I decide to dress and go for a walk. Then I run into an old friend who just happens to be in town barhopping, and we make plans to talk. Frankly, if I was listening to someone else tell this story, I’d find it hard to believe that things lined up so neatly. But they did. While it is hard to think that they might be connected, it is even harder to think that they aren’t.
When I called, Cassandra and I spent about thirty minutes talking about her life at college, her new boyfriend, and odds and ends of family news. I told her about life in Kent and my budding music career.
“When was the last time I saw you?” I asked.
“I think it was when Laura and I came to see your band,” she answered. I had actually been avoiding mentioning Laura during the call. I didn’t want Cassandra to think I was pumping her for information, nor was I sure I really wanted to hear whatever she had to say about Laura.
Then Cassandra was quiet for a moment.
“I wanted to ask you something before we hang up,” she said.
“I wanted to ask you how you are doing with this Laura stuff,” she said.
Pause.
“What Laura stuff?”
Pause.
“The situation with Laura,” she stammered.
“What situation with Laura?” I asked.
“Oh my God,” she said. “You don’t know?”
Pause.
“Don’t know what?”
“Oh my, you don’t know, do you?” she said. “Why didn’t someone tell you?”
Cassandra became very flustered, half thinking out loud what to do, half trying to avoid saying anything at all. She refused to explain further, her voiced filled with increasing panic.
“What situation?” I yelled at her.
“I can’t tell you,” she said. “Not like this, not over the phone.”
“Listen,” I said. “If you don’t tell me now, I’m going to get in the car and drive to your fucking front door and make you tell me to my fucking face. What is going on?!”
I could hear Cassandra exhale into the phone.
Fewer things are messier than learning about a tragic death after everyone else. They’ve just started to recover from their grief. They are able to talk about the deceased without losing composure. In short, they are moving on. Then you show up. You are back at square one. You are in shock. You are a blubbering souvenir of the pain and loss they are struggling to climb above.
Old friends who were normally reticent to talk to me in the first place were even more so now. A few phone calls were returned, a few details confirmed, a few new tidbits added to the mix. Most people I got hold of were willing to discuss things they’d heard. Almost no one wanted to talk about how they felt.
I’d managed to piece together some things.
Laura had attended Baruch as she’d planned, but it hadn’t gone well. She didn’t like the school, she didn’t like the students, she didn’t like the roach-infested rat hole they’d given her to call home. She eventually transferred to Hunter College and also took a few classes at Columbia before taking a semester off. Eventually, she decided to leave New York and return to Canton.
She’d gotten a job as a waitress and started taking classes at Kent Stark. In the four months that she’d lived in Canton, she’d let most of her friends know she had moved back, except one. Me.
One spring afternoon she rode her bike to the drugstore. As she was leaving, she crossed the intersection of Twenty-fifth Street and Fulton Avenue. She was wearing headphones and listening to her Walkman. She rode her bike into a through lane, was hit by a car and knocked down into the road. She died almost instantly of a head injury.
Laura died on a Thursday and was buried on a Saturday. None of my friends seemed to know or remember exactly where she was buried. Eventually, I figured out that it was the Evergreen Memorial Gardens, very close to where the Putt-O-Links had been. I’d heard that there was no marker to go by, so I asked the caretaker for some help locating her. After following his instructions, I came to a neat box of turned earth cut into the grass. I sat down in front of it. I said I was so sorry. I was sorry for what happened. I was sorry for being such an ass. I just kept repeating it over and over again.
“Say, ah … that isn’t your friend,” the caretaker eventually called out. “She’s one row back and a few spots to the left.”
I looked over. There was another neatly cut rectangle of dirt.
I moved over to Laura’s grave.
“I really don’t feel like starting over,” I said. “I’m sure you heard everything I told the other dead person.”
After staring at the dirt silently for a moment, I broke out crying.
There was no marker. No flowers. Nothing. It would be a few years before a headstone was placed there. I visited a few times and kept wondering why nothing was there. Part of me questioned whether this was perhaps a big mistake. Maybe Laura wasn’t dead at all. Maybe this was someone else they confused with Laura. I kept waiting for her to show up and explain how it had all been a big misunderstanding.
I’d like to tell you there’s more to this part of the story, but there really isn’t. It, like all death, was a sudden, harsh ending. There was no final climax, no big lesson or moral—it just ended there.
The only thing I clearly remember feeling was that I knew, even then, that I had come to another turning point in my life. I realized that I could use this as a reasonable excuse to do just about anything I wanted: completely freak out, be inspired to greatness, start taking drugs, live as a hermit in the back woods of Oregon—you name it, I had the perfect rationale.
Several years later, my friend Barry died. He passed away on his couch in an apartment in Columbus, Ohio. Several months earlier, for no apparent reason, Barry had abruptly walked out of his job and slowly started to cut himself off from his friends. And then one day I got a call, and he was dead. He’d just died—no obvious cause. While we’d theorized that it may have been drugs or AIDS, no one quite knew for sure. The only sure thing was that Barry, for some reason, had decided to stop living, then went and sat in his apartment until he got what he wished for. I was sad to lose Barry, of course, but then—and many times since—I’ve thought about how close I came to ending up the same way myself. One of those times was standing there in Evergreen Memorial Gardens.
In the moments that I wasn’t overwhelmed with grief at Laura’s death, I felt confusion and anger. Why had she never let me know she’d moved back to Canton? She was living there for months with me less than forty minutes away and never made an effort to let me know. I was mad because I missed her, but also because I’d worked so hard to build a life that would, someday, be worth her approval. Now that day was never going to come. Not only would we never get a chance to completely reconcile, but she would never see what happened to me. That I turned out okay after all.
Over the years, this has always been the part of this story I’ve struggled with most—wanting to understand why she never did anything—not a card, not a phone call, not a word passed through a friend. Was it out of anger? Out of spite? Was she embarrassed? Did she think I’d tell her that I knew all along that things wouldn’t work out in New York the way she thought? Was she waiting for something to happen or fall into place first? Even now I’m dumbstruck thinking about how much cleaner both our lives would have been with just one evening spent winding through the back roads surrounding Canton.
I stood staring at the loose, turned dirt above her grave. The person I’d wanted so much to be close to, and had missed so terribly over the previous two years, was right there. She’d always be right there. There was only a few feet of dirt separating us.
For some reason, I took a step forward so that I could stand on top of the dirt of her grave. I don’t know why, but it felt like I’d be closer to her if I was right there over her. Almost as soon as I’d placed both my feet on top of the turned soil, I started to sink. It felt like quicksand. It seemed in an instant I was in past my ankles. I scrambled, falling on my back in the soft grass. I hastily brushed myself off and headed for my car, leaving two fresh shoe prints at the foot of Laura’s grave.