The Ghosts of Mertland (An Angel Hill novel) Read online

  “You’ll be working the first couple of weeks with Lynn,” Mr. Winters said. “She’ll train you, then you’ll be on second shift with her, Bea and Jane.”

  “Oh, so I won’t be here by myself,” Mandy said.

  “No,” Mr. Winters said. “There are just too many kids here, and the State says there have to be a certain number of workers per kids.”

  “That’s a weight off,” she said.

  Mr. Winters smiled, but Mandy felt there was something a little disapproving in that smile, as if he were suddenly regretting his decision to hire her. Well, she had the job now. All she had to do was prove to him she was the right person and he’d forget his momentary hesitation.

  As they shook hands again, Mr. Winters said, “And don’t worry about the ghosts. There really aren’t that many. Certainly not as many as the stories would have you believe.”

  Mandy smiled and turned to go, thinking that didn’t set her at ease; according to the stories there were hundreds of them. Less than that still left room for quite a few.

  She stopped outside and looked back at the three-story building. She half expected to see ghosts staring down at her from the windows, but they were empty. She could see the separation, the boys’ rooms over to the left with the girls’ rooms on the right and the common areas in the middle. The building was big on the outside, but seemed absolutely massive on the inside.

  “Hopefully I’m only working on one side. That’ll help in learning my way around.”

  She noticed people moving on the far left side of the grounds and she tried to make them out. They looked like groundskeepers, but either they were too far away or she needed to have her eyes checked; they looked like vague, indistinct blurs moving around.

  She checked her phone, but it still insisted there was nothing from Sam. Mandy drove home wondering what she had gotten herself into. But with Sam gone, she needed work, and the Mertland Childrens' Home was the only place hiring that didn’t require a degree or pay slave wages.

  So if she had to deal with a few spooks on occasion in order to pay the rent, she figured the kids didn’t seem too affected by it, so if they could do that, Mandy told herself so could she. And like he said, they weren’t there to scare or hurt anyone, they didn’t even acknowledge the living. He’d said it himself, their appearances amounted to nothing more than a moment in time repeating over and over.

  “And once I know what those moments are,” she said out loud to the car and herself, “I’ll be able to ignore them, and eventually tune them out altogether. Easiest thing in the world.”

  She got home a few minutes later and felt a moment’s disappointment at not seeing Sam’s car parked outside. Instead of stopping, she drove to Katie’s house.

  Saturday-Sunday

  She found Katie where she always found her: on the computer. Katie lived inside her laptop, whether shopping for free music on Amazon, manipulating pictures or just reading the same news feeds over and over. She researched products she was never going to buy, watched videos from bands she had no interest in or movie trailers for movies she would never see. Mandy didn’t know how she kept it all straight, or even what the interest in it all was, but she had to admit that Katie was, without doubt, the smartest person she knew.

  Maybe smart wasn’t the word, Mandy thought. Knowledgeable. That’s a better fit. She had a storehouse of knowledge in her brain of so many different subjects, information she could pluck from her memory banks at the drop of a hat whenever the opportunity arose.

  Today, Mandy found her reading Wikipedia. The page on Katie’s screen showed she was reading up on the history of the lunch box. Under other circumstances, Mandy would find this curious, but considering where she was and who it was doing the looking up, it was just another day.

  “How’d work go?”

  Mandy yawned and said, “It went, I guess. I don’t actually start until Monday. Today he just took me around and showed me the building, showed me where the rooms and everything are.”

  “Did he tell you about the ghosts?”

  “I think I saw one,” Mandy said.

  “Really? What did it look like?”

  “I don’t know. If it even was one, it was nothing special, just a little boy reading a book. But, he could have been real, I didn’t get a close up look.”

  “What was the book?”

  “I didn’t see. He did talk about the ghosts, though. The guy showing me around, not the little boy.”

  “What he say?” Katie was still scrolling down the screen and this was another thing it had taken Mandy some getting used to. Katie’s attention was divided, she was still reading about lunch boxes, but Mandy knew if asked later, she would recall their entire conversation.

  “He just said they’re there. He told me about one who fell out of a window when a bunch of boys tried to attack her. But he said they’re not there to scare anyone, that it’s like a bunch of old movies that just keep playing the same scene over and over. I guess I’ll get used to them?”

  Mandy stretched out on Katie’s couch. Her phone was clutched in her hand and she checked the screen. Nothing from Sam.

  “Has he bothered calling yet?” Katie asked.

  “Nope,” Mandy said, sighing.

  “I’m sorry. But do you even want him calling after what he did to you?”

  “It doesn’t make me not love him, though,” Mandy replied.

  “It should.”

  “Yeah well…people fight, it doesn’t change how you feel about them.”

  “It’s been a few weeks, though; don’t you think if he was going to call he’d have done it by now?”

  “I don’t know. If I knew where he was or what he was doing, maybe I could say. But for all I know he’s totally moved on and is seeing somebody else already.”

  This thought made Mandy’s gut clench and her heart speed up. The pounding in her chest was a warning sign to change the subject before she spent the rest of the night in a blue haze of loneliness, which was where her thoughts were headed. It didn’t matter she was with Katie, her best friend, it didn’t matter how long it had been or why it had happened; Mandy knew the life she had with Sam had been a complete life, a happy life, and anything other than that life was just Mandy doing a bad impression of happiness.

  Happiness, hell. That word wasn’t even on the table as a possibility. She was getting by. She was surviving, day to day. But it took a conscious act of will to keep her mind from drifting back to those thoughts, because once they were let in, it was damn near impossible to get them out.

  That was a mood she wanted to avoid right now. She had a job, she had one more full day of freedom, and she had good company. If she could get her friend to talk about something else, that was.

  “So,” she said. “Lunch boxes? Really?”

  “What’s wrong with lunch boxes?” Katie asked.

  “Nothing, I guess. Just wondering how you stumbled on that one.”

  “Well, if you have to know,” Katie said, getting up and walking to the kitchen, then coming back, a big purple nylon bag draped over her shoulder, “I got you a congratulations present for work, and since it’s not technically a box, I didn’t know if I should call it a lunch box or if there was some other, modern, word for it. So there.”

  She handed Mandy her present and Mandy took it, her face full of wonder at such a strange and, strangely appropriate, gift.

  “Wow,” she said. “Thanks, really. I hadn’t even thought about that, but I guess I am going to have to eat while I’m there, huh? And he didn’t say if the staff eats with everyone in the cafeteria, so who knows? Thanks.”

  “Twas nothin’, mah dear. You’d have done the same.”

  “Honestly,” Mandy said, “I doubt I’d have even thought of it.”

  “Hmm. Nice friend,” Katie said, taking her seat and continuing what was surely a fascinating study. Of the lunch box.

  From the outside, no one would have ever pegged Mandy and Katie as best friends. Their lives had ta
ken such different paths after high school, it was a wonder sometimes they managed to hold it together at all. Mandy had bounced from job to job while Katie had taken a temp job at Fett Tech, a local manufacturer, right after graduation in order to make some money for college, which neither Katie’s parents, nor her grades, could afford. The job had stuck, she was hired full time, and she’d been there ever since, still in the same position as material handler, driving her forklift to deliver parts here and there around the campus. Mandy sometimes thought her friend could be doing so much better for herself while Katie argued the work was easy, the pay was incredible and the amount of responsibility that went with it extended no further than making sure the parts she delivered to the Ship Loose department actually belonged to Ship Loose and not Aerials. Easy peasy, she said.

  The job paid the bills and kept her mind free to ponder life’s greater mysteries like how come the coffee filter always managed to collapse and ruin an entire pot of perfectly good coffee on the morning she most needed it.

  Mandy felt sometimes like Katie was looking down on her for her lack of stability thus far, her lack of direction. Although looking down wasn’t exactly right, but neither was judgment; it was just an overall feeling Mandy had that Katie sometimes compared their lives and was happy she’d drawn the one she did. If asked, Mandy was 98% sure Katie wouldn’t trade with her in a million years.

  Mandy, on the other hand, knew she could do a lot worse than having Katie’s life. She wondered sometimes if maybe that wasn’t why they’d stayed such close friends over the years, if maybe Mandy was keeping her close in a desperate attempt for some vicarious contentment while maybe Katie needed the constant reminder of what her life could have been if she’d just taken that left turn at Albuquerque.

  Mandy shut down these thoughts, deciding it didn’t matter why they were still friends, and in fact to even think their friendship needed to be analyzed was a sort of betrayal in its own right, and decided instead to study her new lunchbox. Lunchbag? Lunch-carryall?

  “So do you still call it a lunchbox if it’s not technically a box?” she asked.

  Katie shrugged, still staring at the screen, and said, “I guess.”

  “Well. Then thank you for my new lunchbox. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever owned a lunchbox before.”

  “Really? That’s weird. I’ve gone through a dozen.”

  “You have a job.”

  “And you’ve had plenty of jobs.”

  “Hardly a good thing. All that shows on an application is that I can’t hold a job,” Mandy said. She sat up and continued examining the lunchbox, inspecting the pocket on the front, adjusting the strap.

  “Still, you’ve had several of them, I can’t believe you’ve never had a lunchbox before.”

  “Never needed one. You work in a restaurant, you order something on break. You work in a grocery store, you buy something on break. The call center had a Taco Bell next door.” Mandy shrugged. “Jesus, we’re talking about lunchboxes, for Christ’s sake.”

  “They’re pretty interesting,” Katie said.

  “I’ll take your word for it. What are we doing tonight? I have to be there day after tomorrow, so I’ve got a lot of time to kill.”

  “As long as it’s free, I’m in. I’m broke as hell until next week.”

  “Dude, I haven’t worked in forever. If it isn’t free, I’m out.”

  “Good point,” Katie said.

  “Plus, I’m kind of scared to really do too much.”

  “How come?”

  “I really really don’t want to run into Sam.”

  “I thought you wanted to see him.”

  “I do,” Mandy said. “But I want to know I’m going to see him. I can’t just run into him out of the blue; I’d have a heart attack and die. Especially if I had to see him with someone else. I don’t think I can take that right now. Not yet.”

  “But then you’d know, right? You wouldn’t have to keep driving yourself crazy wondering.”

  “Crazy is my middle name. I don’t want to know,” Mandy said. She set the lunchbox aside and went into the kitchen. She grabbed a bottle of water and talked to Katie from the next room. “If I don’t know for sure, I can keep telling myself he misses me, that he’s thinking about me and regretting leaving and that he’ll be home any day.”

  “And if he was with someone else, he could still be thinking those things.”

  “It’s not the same,” Mandy said. “Sure, he could still be missing me, but if I saw Sam with someone else, it wouldn’t be my Sam. It would be this other, different, weird Sam who is out with someone he doesn’t care about, who’s only doing it because he’s so desperate to put me out of his head that he’ll attach himself to the first warm body he runs into just because she’s not me.”

  “Jesus,” Katie said, “you’ve really put a lot of thought into this.”

  “No,” Mandy said, returning to the living room and reclaiming the couch. “It’s just how I’d feel if it was reversed. I don’t want to date someone else. But if it came down to it and I had been the one to leave him, I’d want to force myself to move on, I’d want to convince myself it was okay, because that’s over, so it’s time for the next thing and the best way to keep from dwelling on it is just to date someone else.”

  “Even if you don’t care for them.”

  “They’re just a distraction anyway.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “What?”

  Katie had turned around and faced Mandy. “Go out with someone else.”

  “I don’t want to go out with someone else,” she said, sounding shocked at the very suggestion.

  “But you just said--”

  “I said if I left him. I didn’t. I just want him to come home! In fact, I’d rather just make myself believe it never happened.”

  The tears were under the surface, Mandy felt them just under her words, but she had spent so much time already crying over Sam that she’d told herself if she didn’t stop she would lose her mind. And that, so far, had worked the past few days in holding back the tears. Mandy was a lot of things, she thought, but crazy wasn’t one of them. Some people fear bugs, some fear heights. For Mandy, the big fear of her entire life had been insanity. Not that she would necessarily lose her mind, but that she’d be in a position where those around her thought she had. Involuntary commitment, that fear that everyone around her would think she had lost her mind and nothing Mandy said or did would convince them otherwise, that she could ever find herself in a hospital against her will with no way of convincing those in power that she didn’t belong there. It was the secret fear in her heart that had guided so many of her decisions in life. It guided her now in stomping back the tears and gave her eyes that blank, unaffected glaze. It was that fear that made her say, “I just want things back to normal.”

  “Things are normal,” Katie said. “You’re here and we’re going to have fun. Free fun, but it’ll be fun.”

  “Long, free fun,” Mandy said. “I’ve got two days to kill.”

  “Long, free fun,” Katie echoed. “That doesn’t help. So we spend the next two days taking a walk, browsing a store we can’t afford, looking in the Red Lobster window and watching TV.”

  “Pretty much,” Mandy said. “Anything good on tonight?”

  Katie turned back to her computer and checked TV listings, then said, “Nope.”

  “Perfect,” Mandy said. “We’ll watch nothing. Got any food? We’ll make an evening of it.”

  “Some frozen pizzas.”

  “Can’t beat that.”

  Katie went back to the lunchbox page on her computer, but asked, “Tell me more about the job. What are you going to be doing?”

  “Babysitting, it sounds like,” Mandy said. “Pretty much, anyway, although the title is caregiver. They just need adults there to keep an eye on the kids. Take them places, put movies on for them, doesn’t sound too complicated.”

  “Maybe you’ve found your calling,” Katie said.
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  “We’ll see.”

  Mandy went into the kitchen and turned on the oven for pizzas. When she got back, Katie had moved on to Amazon and was searching new free music. Mandy’s phone rang and they looked at each other. Mandy felt a knot in her chest swell to the size of a softball and everything inside her felt like it was plummeting.

  She grabbed the phone, not wanting to see who it was. She looked anyway and everything inside her felt safe again, at least for the moment; it was only her mother.

  “Jesus, Mary and Joseph.”

  While Katie downloaded free music, Mandy put the pizzas in the oven and tried to entertain her mother with stories of how well she was doing despite the past few weeks. Yes, it was all for the best, she was fine, was already putting it all in the past. Yes, she started her new job the day after tomorrow.

  She could tell Katie was holding in her laughter, and that didn’t help. Mandy rolled her eyes and Katie lost it, covering her mouth and giggling as quietly as possible.

  “I know, Mom,” Mandy said. “Yeah, I know. No, I promise I’m fine, I don’t even care, it was stupid and I’m not going to bother with it anymore. Hey, I gotta go, I’ll call you tomorrow or something.”

  It took another five minutes of placating her mother before Mandy was finally able to hang up.

  “God, I hate talking to her.”

  “Why do you hate her so much?”

  “It’s not her I hate. It’s how she is. You’ve known me long enough, you were there sometimes. I can’t deal with how she is.”

  “You can’t deal with thinking it’s gonna happen to you. But you’re nothing like her, and you know it.”

  “Hope springs eternal,” Mandy said.

  Ten minutes later, she and Katie were eating pizza, Katie at the computer while Mandy flipped through channels on Katie’s television.