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When asked, Bellamy will lie and say he does not believe in ghosts. Some places are simply haunted, though, and this is one.
Late spring has melted the final stubborn edges of snow, leaving the ground dark and water-logged and squelching beneath his feet. Above, patterns of gray clouds move swiftly, threatening rain, and the air smells like oncoming rain, clean and clear like water, heady like rich, black dirt.
Bellamy can only just make out Raven's neighbors, one to the left and one to the right, each house half-hidden by the curves of the road. Nothing out here but the road and the sharp-edged mountain peaks, and the deep, verdant evergreens, and the long stretches of telephone wires, all dwarfed below the endless crush of clouds and shifting sky: a landscape beautiful in the fullness of the seasons, desolate now in the threshold of a new turn in the year.
A breeze comes up as he slams his car door, blows past him and around him, a warm current, as he slips between his bumper and the back of Raven's truck. Murphy's car, which Bellamy remembers as perpetually beat up on the outside, perfectly tuned by Raven's hand within, is already gone from the driveway. He’s not sure what he expected. Still it hits him hard.
He's halfway across the lawn when the front door opens, and Raven steps outside. For a long moment, she stands on the top step, a lone figure in dark colors, her hair in a loose ponytail falling down her back, and watches him. The screen door closes behind her with a long whine and sudden snap. She's wearing Murphy's old jacket, and this, more than even the sight of her after all this time, causes Bellamy to stop right where he is, in the middle of the dead and yellowed grass, and stare at her.
"I thought I heard your car pull up," she says, as she stomps down the porch steps and crosses the yard to him.
Bellamy doesn't answer, but as soon as she is close enough, he pulls her into his arms. And she rather, than grabbing for him, simply collapses against him as she has never done before. He can feel the hard point of her nose against his shoulder. He can take the measure of her, all of her, smaller than he remembered, wrapped up in him and close against him. She is holding on to him without the fever he'd expected but as if, without him, in this moment, she could not stand.
He holds himself perfectly still and closes his eyes.
When she pulls back, she takes a deep breath, a steadying breath, tilts her head back to look at him with an even stare. The breeze picks up again, briefly. Stray strands of hair blow wildly across her face.
"I'm sorry," Bellamy says, "that I couldn't make it to the funeral."
Raven nods, once, the barest tilt of her head. "It all happened fast," she answers. He knows better than to take these words as forgiveness. They are an acknowledgement, only: all he could hope for; enough.
The wedding happened fast too, but he made it anyway; she might have reminded him of that. He'd been on the other side of the country, at the time, and she and Murphy had been traveling, riding west, when they decided on a whim to tie the knot against the grandeur of the plains. Bellamy was one of a handful of witnesses, all of them small beneath a high clarity of sky and scudding clouds, a sheen of summer sun. Raven wore a white sundress, and sandals, and carried a bouquet of wildflowers—Murphy in a white button-down shirt from Bellamy’s suitcase, with the sleeves rolled up—both of them yelling their vows over an unexpected and blustery wind—
“You know you’re—” She cuts herself off, bites down hard on her lip. Then she reaches up, with unexpected gentleness and near-hesitation, and touches his cheek, as if perhaps she thought he would break beneath her touch. “You’re pretty much the only person,” she says, “that I want to see right now.”
He tugs her forward against his chest again and answers, “I’m here.” The words sound useless, feel dry on his tongue. He has one arm wrapped around her, his hand at her hip, and the other hand tangled in her hair.
Once, not long before the lease ran out, in the kitchen of their old apartment with the lights off and the sunlight leaching into dusk, she’d sat on his lap. She’d straddled his lap with her arms draped over his shoulders and her face buried against the side of his neck, and he’d held her for a long minute, precisely unmoving, too stubborn to let go, both of them tense and hot and slick with sweat. The sound of the clock ticked louder than their ragged breaths. He has not thought about this moment in a long time. But it comes back to him now with such clarity that he feels, for a half-second, as if he is inhabiting it once more. As if he is back beneath the sediment of his current life, as if he is holding her not again, but still.
*
The three of them became tangled up together early, and irrevocably, when they were only eighteen: a time that felt like adulthood then, and seems like childhood now. Bellamy and Murphy shared a dorm room and Raven lived down the hall. Out of necessity, rather than by choice, they were together all the time: they ate together; studied together; brushed their teeth side by side. Fell asleep together, sometimes, in the boys’ room, when Raven wanted to avoid her roommate, when their long, scattered, lazy conversations ran long.
Over time, a solid foundation of friendship formed, his feelings for her deepening cracks running through.
“You can stop pretending now,” Murphy told him once, “that nothing is happening,” and Bellamy recalls the moment perfectly—the sound of Murphy’s voice and the quiet of the room—though no longer what was happening, what had already happened by then, and what had not.
He remembers just as well the first time that Raven kissed him, abruptly and decisively, to shut him up. He’d been ranting about something, which seemed important at the time. The night was frigid cold and clear, their breath wafting out in plumes before them as they walked. And after, he’d wanted to ask her if she meant it, but the question seemed frozen and distant, nothing compared to the cold of her skin as he pressed his hand against her cheek.
*
After graduation, Murphy moved down south again, and Bellamy and Raven found an apartment together in the city.
*
Long separation means little, once he’s walked through the door. Two years gone, slightly more, since they saw each other in person; still they fall easily into old, soft habits again. He knows himself well with her. Only Murphy’s absence remains a jagged pit between them, a pain that spikes sometimes as a physical hurt, other times as a foggy confusion, the sense of something not quite seen out of the corner of his eye.
That night, Raven makes up the guest bedroom with fresh sheets, leaves the window slightly open to air out the stale and darkened room. Bellamy forgets to close it again before he falls asleep. A strong wind, like winter’s grip refusing to loosen and give way, starts up late, and makes him toss and shiver in his sleep.
When he wakes, he pulls a heavy sweater out of his suitcase, and a pair of thick socks, and wanders through the house toward the kitchen. At first, he doesn’t think Raven is up. Then he notices the light on and, just barely visible through the door, the edge of an old shoebox on the table. The hallway is eerily quiet. His own footsteps are muffled, sliding against the hardwood floor. A sense of unease grips him.
He sees her shoulder first, and then her back, bent over and lightly shaking. Her t-shirt is a faded black and too big for her. Her hair falls down loose to either side of her face. He knows that she’s crying, nearly inaudible but forceful sobs that rack her frame, before he fully understands it, so at first he stands in the doorway as if struck dumb and wonders how he can make his presence known.
He settles at last for crossing the room, pulling up the chair next to hers, letting his hand rest gently between her shoulder blades. She startles, and briefly loses her breath. Then she straightens and wipes frantically at her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I’m okay, I’m all right,” she murmurs, around watery breaths.
Bellamy’s hand is still rubbing circles against her back, and he tries to tell her it’s okay, but she won’t let him.
“Fuck, it’s been three months, you know, I—”
“Raven, you’re allowed—”
“Don’t.”
She snaps the word so sharply that he takes his hand away. Both of them end up folded in his lap, his shoulders slumped, his gaze downcast. Then Raven’s hand is on his knee, gripping his knee.
He can hear her sniffling, still, and when he glances up he sees that she is pawing at her tear-stained face, which is red and swollen with raw, undiluted grief.
The shoebox is full of photographs. Bellamy recognizes some from Murphy’s old camera, others as printouts of the digital photos they used to send him: Murphy and Raven practicing their tourist smiles at the Grand Canyon; Murphy posing in the snow; a candid of Raven, outside in summer, against a backdrop of peeling paint and overgrown flowers, laughing so hard she cannot breathe.
A few pictures have left the box and found their way to the tabletop, and as he watches, Raven wipes her hand off on her pants and picks out one, and slides it across to him. The three of them together, he’d guess freshman year. They look so young. They have their arms around each other, posed but sincere grins and the air of a long night about them; Raven is using her spare hand to wave at the cameraman. It’s not a good picture—the flash has paled his and Raven’s skin and left Murphy, standing between them, almost as translucent as a ghost—but it calls up something within him nonetheless.
“I want you to have it,” Raven says.
He tries to slide it back. “I can’t—”
“Bellamy. It’s a picture. You don’t need to be a hero.”
She’s wearing Murphy’s clothes again, the same Joy Division shirt he has on in the photo.
“I have others,” she adds, softer now. Bellamy takes his hand off the photo and relents. He’s not sure, anyway, why he should not have it, when he has so few souvenirs of that era, when he feels these crevices of loss, too.
“It’s a good one of us,” he says. “I mean, not good, but.”
“Yeah.”
He stares down at it for a long while, trying to remember where it might have been taken, and when, why every feeling it conjures in him seems as if it is sensed through a plate of bubbled glass. Trying to understand that the boy in the middle is not about to walk back into the room.
Some time later, he notices the scrape of Raven’s chair pushed back across the floor, then the deep scent of coffee brewing.
*
“You can stop pretending now,” Murphy said, “that nothing is happening.”
Bellamy had been sitting at the end of his bed, reading by the slant of sun through the window. Until Murphy spoke, he had not noticed that the light had long faded, deepening to purple and shades of darkening blue. Their room was soft and smudged with shadow. And the window must have been open, because the air smelled like the warm breezes of spring.
Murphy, lying on his back on the opposite bed, dissolute and thoughtful, spoke only once and then waited for Bellamy to speak.
They had never been demonstrative people, any of them. Their closeness had not been based on physical touch. So they could not pretend that the way they embraced now, the stray kisses on the cheek, the mouth, were only an expression of the same, familiar friendship, deepening but at its core unchanged. Something had changed. Boundaries had started to blur. He could not see, anymore, the lines he’d left still to cross.
You can stop pretending. That nothing is happening.
Raven’s sweatshirt left on the back of his desk chair. How Murphy had locked the door behind them, the night before, pressed himself back against the doorknob; the quick exhale of Raven’s breath, the tense grasp of Bellamy’s fingers.
The precipice of evening, the end of the year. He believed all of his senses were heightened and sharp. But later this span of weeks will feel like a dream.
*
Murphy did all the cooking and without him, by Raven’s own admission, she has taken to subsisting mostly on simple foods: sandwiches and soups and pasta. “And not even the fancy kind,” she adds, “like he used to make.” She twirls a chunk of spaghetti around her serving fork, frowning as she tries to move it to Bellamy’s plate. “And I always overcook it, too. Then it sticks.”
Bellamy stands next to her, slowly stirring the pot of tomato sauce on the stove. “Do you remember,” he asks, “when he tried to make that… that shrimp pasta thing and almost burned down the whole building?”
“Yes—only the first time, though!” She laughs, handing Bellamy his plate. “That one was actually really good, once he figured out how to do it.”
“Your apartment smelled like smoke for a week.”
“True.” The steam from the sauce wafts up in curling tendrils in front of her face. She grabs his dish and hers, and gestures for Bellamy to bring the salad and the drinks. “It’s probably bad that the smoke alarm didn’t go off."
“Yeah, because that place was a shithole.”
“All of those apartments were.” She sits down at the table, and the bright smile on her face begins to fade. “Back then. They all were.”
She clears her throat, drops her gaze. Bellamy, who has only just sat down, gets up again to search for the grated cheese.
“So, tell me,” Raven says, when he’s back at the table again, “where have you been? Where in the world was Bellamy Blake?”
He glances at her out of the corner of his eye, trying to gauge from her face what he cannot from her voice: if there is an accusation beneath her neutral words. Where were you, she might be asking, that night when I tried to call?
—Sitting on the edge of his hotel bed, much later, after midnight, he’d listened to the distorted recording of her voice, choked with tears—the long whine of a car horn in the street as he closed his eyes tight. Stars fuzzed the edges of his vision. Something’s happened, she said. He tried to pretend he did not know what that must mean.
But Raven has always been straightforward, never hid her anger, at least, from him for anything.
“India,” he answers. “Covering the elections.”
“You should tell me about it.” She looks up at him, almost wistful. “The stuff that didn’t make it into the articles.”
What she wants to know is what he felt when he first disembarked from his plane, and about the people he met, and the views from the streets, and the food. He leans in closer to her as he talks. And as they settle themselves into the present, with its narrow constraints, its sense of safety within what is certain and known, the kitchen starts to feel small and warm; the boundaries of the glow cast by the ceiling light delineate the true edges of the world.
*
Their relationship had already begun to falter by the time Murphy moved back to the city.
He showed up at their place first, after two days on the road in a van he’d quickly sell, thinner than Bellamy remembered and his hair cut short. He hugged them both with unexpected ferocity, because it had been such a long time.
They spent the evening eating boxes of Chinese out on the fire escape, Raven ranting about her boss, while Bellamy flipped through the books Murphy had finally returned to him. The air was mild and still, the height of a calm summer, the glint of light golden on the windows of the buildings across the street. If Bellamy thought at any point that the night would slide away from there, he was mistaken. They might as well have been eighteen again, and new to each other, as if separation had reset their friendship and washed it clean.
When the lease ran out, he and Raven let the apartment go. Bellamy moved in with a blonde sorority-dropout, who needed someone to help with the rent after her girlfriend abruptly split. And Raven started crashing on the couch in Murphy’s cramped and narrow fourth-floor walk-up. Bellamy remembers that apartment better than his own, by now: the crack in the wall above the bathroom mirror, the radiator that clanged and hissed through every winter in a pattern of alien song.
Whether they fell in love then or only later, Bellamy still doesn’t know. He’d been distracted: his life had started to take a different turn. He got a new job, and then another. He made his own plans.
Murphy bought a motorcycle, following Raven’s advice, and they started taking cross-country trips in the summer. From the road, they’d send postcards to Bellamy’s new address in D.C.
One, from the Great American Alligator Museum:
Bellamy—
Second day in New Orleans; found a place that makes chili better than Murphy’s. (He admits it.) He says we should sell our worldly possessions and move to the swamp. Don’t know how I would occupy myself in the swamp. Take care of yourself. R
And below, squashed letters in Murphy’s blocky hand:
B—Play nice with the senators. Youre our man on the inside. Raven lies about the chili. She lies, this woman I love! M
*
After his shower, Bellamy exits the bathroom in a cloud of steam and finds the house quiet and dark. He listens to the creak of his heel against the floorboards, tries to fight the sense that he has woken and found himself still in a dream.
Raven is leaning against the railing on the back porch, her head tilted back to watch the subtle, nearly invisible movements of the pines, bending in a high and forceful wind. The warm approach of spring has brought out flies and other tiny bugs. They hurl themselves with tiny thumps and the singe of fluttering wings against the light next to the door. Bellamy can smell the rich scent of Raven’s coffee, from the mug she holds wrapped tightly in her hands.
“Caffeine at this hour?” he asks, and Raven jumps, scowling at him over her shoulder as she presses her hand to her chest.
“I laugh at your low tolerance,” she answers, and takes a slow, dramatic sip.
“Right, right. You drink coffee, and I’m up all night.” He crosses the porch and takes up a spot next to her, his hands in the pockets of his pajama pants. “It’s warmer up here than I thought it would be.”
“That’s because the last time you came to visit, it was the middle of winter,” Raven says, stretching her leg out to poke at him with her foot. She rolls her eyes lightly and bites back a smile.
“Yeah, and I had to spend the first morning digging my car out from under a snow drift. It made an impression.” He’s smiling too, a hint of laughter under his breath. All at once, he understands the full depth of his affection for her, a force of feeling that might once have overwhelmed him, but now settles as a deep, comfortable weight. He feels it as the pit in his throat.
Raven’s expression falters, and he realizes he’s been staring too long. Dips his gaze down, to her blunt-nailed hands around her mug, the space between their feet on the wooden floor.
“It’s weird,” he says, “this is the last place I thought you would end up.”
He means the two of you, the years they spent on frozen ground, how the outskirts of the village feel like the fringes of the world. Only hardy people survive through long and snowbound winters. And yet he has long known this of her, used to think that if they were to end, they would take each other down with fire: both too stubborn and strong-willed to make a home.
And Murphy, endlessly adaptable, persistent, darkly confident in his ability to belong everywhere because he attached himself to nowhere—about Murphy nothing should have been a surprise. Some dinosaurs survived, he reminded them once, in different forms.
Raven’s face briefly contorts. He wonders if she read a different meaning: this is not how I thought you would end up. You alone.
“No, it’s true,” she answers, after a moment. “We never meant to stay this long. But then the restaurant took off…” She sighs, bends down briefly to set her near-empty mug down on the floor. “I’m thinking of moving.”
“Really?” He can’t say he’s surprised. She shoots him a look, to tell him he’s done a bad job feigning shock.
“I could run the place on my own, but what’s the point? And the house…” Again, she trails off, shakes her head. She leans forward over the railing and looks out at the backyard, the creeping wilderness, shadowy and not quite still. The sense of endless, curving road and infinite sky that dwarfed him when he pulled into the driveway is here transformed, after sundown, by the deep green of the pines and the sharp, scattered points of stars between heavy clusters of clouds, the threat of forest sounds and the low hooting of owls, into a space so dark and close he can feel it, pressing in without force against his skin. He turns so that he is standing like she is, facing forward and close enough to touch.
“Clarke offered to let me stay with her,” Raven says. “Out in Oregon. So. I think I might do that.”
“I would,” Bellamy answers. “If I were you.”
“Didn’t even have to think about that?” She smiles, but the expression is thin, and he reaches over without looking and grasps her hand, crushing three of her fingers together in the curve of his palm. When he lets go, it is only to wrap his arm around her shoulders instead. She fits neatly against his side. He feels safer under the illusion that she is safe next to him.
“Are you telling me you’re tempted to stay?” he asks.
She shakes her head. “Not anymore.”
Bellamy pulls her closer. She turns to press her face against his chest.
Another sound starts to gather, lighter and gentler than the flickering twitch and buzz of the flies around the porchlight. Bellamy recognizes it at first only with uncertainty: a pattern of intermittent rain, tapping on the grass and the porch steps. Without warning, it breaks into a downpour.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Raven asks. The words, faint and muffled, sounds like a sort of ghost themselves.
He can’t see through the rain, the sheet of it falling with furious energy in front of them. He can hardly hear her voice above it either. The question is the last he would have expected of her, and he hesitates to put words to his own sense of unease, to what may be grief or even a sort of hope, stubbornly holding on in him.
He shakes his head and tells her no, and when she pulls back to look at him—her arms have snaked around his waist; they are holding each other close—he raises his eyebrows, feels himself about to ask if she has seen one. But he doesn’t, because he understands now that the confession was of something else. He was always the storyteller among them, and she wishes he could tell her one now.
He starts to pull her back against his chest again, but instead, she leans up on her toes and kisses him. The soft, insistent pressure of her mouth knocks him off guard. He does not move, at first, but only lets her lean against him, until she has pushed him back against the railing, and his hands fall back to grab at the rain-slick wood. Rain streams down his back, wets his still-damp hair. Without thinking, he reaches up with one hand and takes her hair down, tangles his fingers in it as she fists her hands in the front of his shirt.
He has missed her so desperately. He feels the strain, the tension in her body, strength that feels like insistence, feels like need. At every almost break, she leans into him again. This is a homecoming. This is the line between them, thinning to nothing, the barriers weakened until they break.
Even after she pulls away, and he runs his knuckles down along her cheek, swipes his thumb across her cheekbone, where her face looks thin, still she does not disentangle herself. She rests herself against him. He sinks against her. Exhausted, and boneless, they stand outside for a long time.
*
Bellamy pauses on the front step, tilting his head back to observe the pale, nearly colorless gray of the sky. The stillness of the morning stretches out in all directions, interrupted only by the high-pitched chirping of unseen birds, somewhere above.
He takes the list out again, reviewing it one more time as he heads out to his car. Milk, eggs, coffee—dictated by Raven and scrawled out in his hand. Easy enough. He returns the piece of paper to his pocket and fishes out his keys.
He’s just opened the driver’s side door when he hears his name, and the sound of bounding footsteps coming near, looks up to see Raven jogging across the yard to him. “Bellamy—wait! Hold up! Butter.” She slows her pace as she approaches him, but still reaches out to grab his arm as if to stop herself. “I just noticed we’re out of butter. Add it to the list.”
“Butter. Got it.” He pulls out the list again and adds butter in nearly illegible block letters at the end, with the pen that Raven hands him. “Anything else?”
“No. That’s it.”
“I have my phone on me, if not.”
“I know.” She gives his arm a quick, tight squeeze, and then steps back, leaving him enough room in the driveway to reverse. “Thank you for doing this.”
“It’s no problem. I’ll be back soon.”
And he will. She waves to him anyway, from the edge of the grass, strands of loose hair blown across her face by the wind.
As he slides in behind the wheel and slams the door, a strange feeling reverberates in him: that this moment of domesticity, real as it seems, is not his. That he is existing within someone else’s life. That what he feels now is the echo of a life he did not lead.