“Ben!” I shout. “Hey, wait a minute! Benjy! Can I please just talk to you?”
He keeps running. “I’ll be right back,” I tell Nora, and then sprint after him. In his heavy coat and falling-apart shoes, he’s not very fast.
Finally, he stops and turns toward me with his hands up. He’s trembling. “I’m not hurting anything.”
“It’s okay. Don’t be frightened. It’s just that I saw you at Terry Weeks’s funeral, and I want to ask you a couple of questions. You’re Ben Gault, right?”
He shakes his head. “The guy whose name’s on my birth certificate is dead.”
I blink. “But you are Ben Gault, right? You were friends with Terry Weeks and Naomi Benson?”
“Ben Gault, that’s just a noise.” His hands fall loose by his sides. “A sound. It doesn’t mean anything. Of course, the government comes looking for Ben every now and then, but that’s okay. I no longer have anything to hide. I don’t steal. I don’t even beg. I feel the eyes on me, though.” He makes a V with two fingers, points it at me, and then turns to tap it on his forehead. “I hear people talking about me.” The whites of his eyes are the only clean-looking part of his face. “That’s why I have the earplugs. So I can sleep at night. But the voices sneak in anyway.”
He’s clearly off. Mentally ill? Asperger’s? On drugs? But he doesn’t seem dangerous, and Nora considers him a friend. And he might know something about my mom. “Can I just ask you something? About Naomi?”
His eyes narrow. “Don’t look at me with those please-help-me eyes. Out here, you can’t be all nicey-nicey.”
I hold out the rose. “Did you leave this at Naomi’s grave?”
“I didn’t steal it.”
“I believe you. But why did you leave it?”
“She listens to me.”
The present tense makes me shiver. I repeat what Frank told me. “I heard that you talk to her gravestone.”
“I don’t talk to her gravestone.” His laugh is gently mocking. “I talk to Naomi. You think the dead don’t hear? You think they don’t talk back? Nora knows what I’m talking about.”
A sudden odd hope fills me. What if he’s right? When I leaned down to pick up the rose, if I had listened hard enough, would I have heard my mom’s voice? What would she have said?
“What does she tell you?” I ask, but Benjy just looks at me blankly. “What does Naomi say to you?”
The light is gone from his eyes now. “The dead leave you alone, unknown, bones, no phones, rolling stones. Only there is moss.”
His words make a kind of strange sense, even down to the moss. Many of the words chiseled on the old headstones have been filled in by lichen. “So Naomi doesn’t say anything to you?”
“She knows I’ll be there soon.”
I flinch. “Don’t say that. You’re still young.” He doesn’t look young, though. The dirt ground into his face emphasizes the lines on his forehead, around his eyes, bracketing his mouth. Maybe street years are like dog years.
A puzzled look comes over his face, and he takes a step closer. Involuntarily, I step back, but then he takes two, until he’s nearly close enough to kiss me. He smells like sweat and pee and mothballs, like something forgotten, rotting in a greenhouse.
“Naomi?” He tilts his head so far to the side it looks like it will come off his neck.
He’s not asking a question about her. He’s asking a question of me.
He thinks I’m my mom.
“No, my name’s Olivia. Naomi’s dead.”
“Naomi!” He grabs my hand so hard the bones grind together. It’s all I can do not to pull away. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
I force out the words. “What are you sorry for, Benjy?”
“You know.” He looks away, breaking eye contact. His mouth curls down at the corners as if he’s going to cry.
“I don’t. Tell me. Tell me what happened to Naomi. Tell me.” I have to swallow before I can go on. “Tell me what happened to me.”
“After, I looked for you.”
I interpret. “You were one of the people who looked for evidence. After”—I can’t bring myself to say my—“the body was found.”
“We were out in the woods, the woods, the trees were watching, so I watched, too. And I saw—I saw.”
“What did you see?” Which we is he talking about? Is he saying he was with my parents when it happened? Or does he mean the search?
He looks past me with unfocused eyes. “In the daytime, when I go outside, I used to show my friends what they hadn’t seen before. Like the hello, see you later, like the halo, when I was twenty, when I began preaching the truth.” With his free hand, he points above my head. “See, the light which is your halo.” He leans closer, and his sour breath washes over me. “You know, aura. That’s why everyone can’t see that. If you, if you got some of the drugs, maybe you can see, maybe you can’t.” His face twists with anguish. “I know what I saw. Everyone knows what they see. But I don’t know what’s for real or not.”
“What did you see, Benjy?” My blood chills. “What did you see?”
“Orange trucks suffer. Snow blood dogs hand in glove”—he looks up from our linked hands to me—“run. They say run!” He lets go, turns, and begins to run again, a broken stagger.
I watch him go, feeling as if I’ve been underwater, drowning, and now I’ve come back up for air. Come back to reality.
I realize I should never have left Nora alone. What if she’s fallen while I’ve been gone? Had a heart attack? What if the other homeless guy has come back for her? I break into a run.
I find her sitting on a bench. It’s a relief to see that her color is better.
“Sorry I left you.”
“You took off like your hair was on fire. How do you know Benjy? What did you want to ask him?”
“He was friends with my parents, and Frank says he talks to my mom’s tombstone. I tried to ask him about it, but he didn’t make much sense. About all I understood was that maybe he saw something in the woods back then. Or thinks he did.”
“He may not know, himself,” Nora says. “He’s gone in and out of reality for years. At least the reality we understand. To him, it’s always real.”
Where does the truth lie? Is Benjy terrified by what he saw? By what he imagines he saw?
Or could it even be by what he did?