Walking Ghost Phase Read Online Free PDF

faded.

 
     
    Emily woke at six on a Thursday morning and threw her hand over the digital alarm clock, drowning out the red haze. She looked around the room, took in the lingering smell of hair conditioner and recognized the closeness of the walls. For the last three months, a brown teddy bear, which she had perched on the dresser top, watched her morning ritual with dime-sized eyes.
    She touched her feet to th e floor and went to the dresser, and as she fumbled through the drawers for a T-shirt, she stared at the bear's taunting smile. Her father, while in a hospital bed at Vanderbilt Medical Center, gave her the toy on her tenth birthday. The bear was now missing an ear, a single black thread held its nose, and half the stuffing had leaked out. Still, Emily could argue that the years were kinder to the bear than her family. Two days after she carried the present home, the doctors took her father off life support.
    It was a mem ory she'd have rather forgotten but nonetheless a memory—complete from the day her father received the cancer diagnosis and ending when his coffin lowered into the earth. The sight of the bear each morning kept that memory whole, unlike the fragmented images: moving to this small house but not remembering the trip, the first day of school but recalling none of the teachers, attending junior prom but not knowing her date's name. She pulled a blue T-shirt from the top drawer and put it on. Then she swiped at the bear, knocking her no-longer-needed reminder to the floor.
    Emily 's mother sat at the dining room table, staring through the window, and she held a glass of ice water in one hand and an unfolded piece of paper in the other. As Emily stepped out of her room, the floorboards belted out a shrill creak. Her mother turned.
    Someone—Emily remembered only that the voice was female—had once said how much she resembled her mother. Now half-moons of black flesh painted the cusps of her mother 's eyes. Streaks of gray ran the length of her blond hair, more frizzed than her usual straightened style. Emily decided not to ask if she had slept.
    “ How are you feeling?” her mother asked.
    Emily crumpled into the chair and exhaled. “My head hurts, my back hurts, my skin hurts.” She rubbed her scalp. “Even my hair hurts. How can hair possibly hurt?”
    Her mother folded the letter, concealing the government letterhead. “Maybe you'll feel better once today is over.”
    “ I doubt it.” Emily leaned across the table and looked at the empty street. “When are they supposed to be here?”
    “ Nine. Do you want to go for a walk? You have time, and if they show up before you get back—” Her mother smiled. “—they can wait.”
    Emily glanced at the bottom of the f ront door, at her tennis shoes, which she had worn the soles down to a paper-thin layer of rubber over the last three months. The walks were her escape from a house absent of meaningful reminders—a chance to recognize someone, remember the things her mother wouldn't tell her.
    Their neighbor, Ralph Thomas, always waved when she stepped on the sidewalk. Thomas, who was in his fifties, lived alone, and he wore the same red suspenders every day as he slung garden hoses around the lawn, watering dirt that never seemed to grow a blade of grass. If Emily left her house to remember, she supposed Mr. Thomas left his house to forget. Michael Thomas, the man 's only son, was one of the seventy-four Washington victims from their town. Emily assumed he knew about her trip, so to avoid the subject, she would simply tell Mr. Thomas how nice his lawn looked and go on her way.
    Emily covered miles of cracked sidewalk, looking at the strange houses, trying to connect them to a lost memory, but the cookie-cutter designs swarmed in her thoughts. Even the For Sale signs, which decorated every other front yard, were identical. Jack McDonald, realtor extraordinaire, probably owned a swimming pool full of cash.
    As she continued on her walk, the