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Julie and the Phantoms play the Orpheum on a Saturday.
On Sunday, Julie hovers in the doorway of Ray’s home office, hands hidden in the sleeves of her hoodie, and says, “Papi, I have to tell you something.”
Ray immediately looks up from the spreadsheet he’s been fighting with. He’s been fielding calls all morning from record labels and news agencies, trying to get ahold of the band—mostly, he’s been sending them to Flynn, but he figured it couldn’t hurt to organize the relevant information at least a little bit. His children are more important, though, so he pulls off his reading glasses and frowns at his daughter, and says, “What is it?”
Julie hesitates just long enough for Ray to cycle through a nice long list of worst case scenarios. She doesn’t look particularly upset, though, or hurt in any way. If anything, she just looks… nervous. And yet, Ray can see Carlos bouncing on the balls of his feet in the hallway behind her, grinning like he’s standing in line to turn in his winning lottery ticket. It sets off a different kind of red flag in Ray’s head, because there are very few scenarios in which Carlos is happy about something that makes Julie nervous, and none of them are any good.
“¿Mija?” he prompts gently. “¿Qué te pasa?”
“Can you just come with us, please?” Julie flashes him a quick smile, but it’s a little too forced to be reassuring. “I just wanna check something, and… it’s just easier to show you…”
So Ray follows his children through the house and out the door and down the path to his late wife’s studio. Julie fidgets the whole time, while Carlos grins and bounces and says things like, “You’re gonna love this, Dad!” and, “Aw, man, I shoulda grabbed my camera!” that make Julie shoot him warning looks and make worry spawn in Ray’s chest.
Outside the garage, Julie pauses, one hand on the door handle, and says, “Dad, just… Just don’t be mad, okay? I didn’t know how to tell you, and then Carlos just figured it out! But… I didn’t want you to find out like this.”
“What—” Ray starts, but before he can finish his question, Julie pulls the door open, and Ray finds himself looking at…
Her bandmates.
The holograms.
Sitting in the garage like they live there.
It takes Ray a much longer time than he’s proud of just to even process what he’s seeing here. Despite having a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography, he can’t even pretend to understand how Julie’s holograms work, but he does understand that the basic concept is that they’re holograms. Image and sound and light, projected from Sweden or wherever the hell those boys are from. Not actually anywhere near his daughter. Not actually here.
So how are they eating burgers and fries on the studio couch and swinging their legs through the loft railing and standing on Rose’s grand piano, trying to reach one of the chairs on the ceiling?
“Hey!” Julie shouts, and the one on the piano—the guitarist who likes making heart eyes at Ray’s daughter—immediately jumps down, grinning sheepishly.
“Oh, hey, Ray!” the bassist calls from the sofa, through a mouthful of fast food. “We can eat again! How rad is that?”
Ray’s mouth drops open. He feels a little bit like he’s walked into a conversation halfway through, or like he’s about to take a test he didn’t study for. Why is Julie’s bassist talking to him like they’re best friends or something? Why is her drummer sitting in their loft flipping through a magazine Ray thinks he’s had since college? Why is her guitarist trying to climb onto the piano again?
Why are none of them holograms from Sweden?
“Julie, what… how…” He swallows against his dry throat and calmly turns to his daughter. “Did I know your band was visiting?”
The bassist shoots to his feet, his lunch completely forgotten. “Wait, can he—?”
The drummer leans over the loft railing. “Can you—?”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” Julie mutters. “Sorry, guys. I thought it was just cause Carlos knew about you already? But it looks like you’re just… visible now.”
“Sweet!” The bassist bounces right up to Ray and enthusiastically shakes his hand, and yeah, okay, definitely not a hologram, Ray’s pretty sure holograms can’t grip that tight or get that much grease on their hands. “We’ve got so much to catch up on, Ray! We thought we were gonna be jolted out of existence last night, but then Julie gave us all a magic hug, and now you and Carlos can see us! I haven’t been this excited since we saw Dave Grohl in concert!”
“That was a freaking awesome concert,” the guitarist says, coming up from behind to clap a hand on his friend’s shoulder, “but chill out, dude, you’re scaring him.”
Is Ray scared? He’s honestly… not sure. Confused, definitely. Very confused. He slowly extracts his hand from the boy’s tight grip and turns back to his children. Carlos looks just as excited as the holograms, his gaze bouncing around the room like he can’t look at everything fast enough. Julie just looks guilty.
“They’re not holograms,” Ray says stupidly.
Julie winces. “They’re not holograms. And they’re not from Sweden either, Dad. They’re… ghosts.”
Carlos cheers and immediately starts rambling about how he was right and figured it out before anyone else and come on, Dad, isn’t this SO COOL? But Ray can barely process his words. His brain is too busy blue-screening, wires misfiring and then frantically reconnecting.
But then one sparks, and even though Ray is still slightly worried and very confused… he knows who they are.
The first time he saw this band—trying to be proud and not angry as he watched Julie perform when she was supposed to be doing her Calculus homework—he thought the boys looked familiar, in the sort of vague, abstract way of recognizing someone who’s only ever been described to you. He recognized the instruments that sat in their loft for twenty-five years, recalled stories about Alex’s command of the microphone and Reggie’s bouncy swagger and Luke’s hands and eyes and smile.
But he thought that was just a coincidence. He thought that was five years of distance, and the fact that he’d come there in the first place to watch Carrie Wilson perform, drawing up memories of Trevor’s voice in his ear, crying over his lost bandmates, praying he could see them play again just one more time.
Now that Julie’s offered this possibility, though, as absurd as it may seem, now that she’s presented Ray with a possible, if not plausible, explanation for how he could be looking at three teenage boys who play music with his daughter and still see Bobby’s family, twenty-five years dead…
Julie nervously slips her hand into her Heart-Eyed guitarist’s and says, “Papi, this is—”
“Luke,” Ray interrupts, because of course it is. Of course the boy Trevor described as loving and loyal, with too much heart for his own good, is the one who looks at Julie like she hung the moon.
Julie and Luke both frown, and the boy—hologram? Ghost?—says, “How did you—?”
“And you’re Alex,” Ray continues, addressing the drummer sitting in the loft—tall and pink and anxious, just like Trevor said. He turns back to the bassist still standing in front of him, eyes wide with childlike wonder, and finishes, “And… Reggie.”
The studio falls eerily silent as six people—three people and three ghosts?? Do ghosts count as people?—stare each other down.
“Dad, how did you know that?” Julie whispers.
All Ray can say is, “You’re Sunset Curve.”
After that, Ray has to take Reggie’s spot on the couch to keep from getting lightheaded, and Alex climbs down from the loft to stand in solidarity with his bandmates while Carlos runs into the house to get Ray some water. Once he’s sipping it slowly, Julie sits next to him and holds his hand and explains as best she can—a demo her mom had up in the loft, three ghosts appearing twenty-five years out of time, magic and mayhem and music and then a hug that somehow made the ghosts not so ghostly anymore. She explains how the hologram thing was just an easy excuse, how she never felt right lying to him about it in the first place, but what else was she supposed to say? She didn’t think he’d ever believe her.
“Why did you believe her?” Carlos asks. “I thought there was ‘no such thing as ghosts.’”
“‘Cept he knows us,” Luke speaks up—the first words he’s said since Julie started explaining everything. He’s leaning against the opposite wall, hands in his pockets, staring at the floor. “Cause of Bobby.” He raises his eyes, and it startles Ray to see something close to anger in his eyes. “Right? Bobby told you about us?”
“Trevor?” Julie clarifies, frowning at her dad. “He never mentioned them to me.”
“They’d been gone a long time by the time you kids knew him,” Ray says softly, staring down into his empty water glass. “When your mom and I met Bobby, he was… lost in grief.”
“Guess it didn’t last long if he was stealing our songs by ‘98,” Luke grumbles.
Ray opens his mouth to protest, but finds that he… can’t. Luke’s right, after all. Trevor stole his songs. That’s the whole reason Ray hasn’t spoken to him in half a decade. That’s the whole reason he’s alone right now, dealing with all of this because there’s no one else who can anymore.
“Point is, people can see us now?” Alex says. “And we don’t have legal identities, so we thought that might be a bit of a problem.”
Oh. Right.
On Monday, Ray locks himself in his room while the kids are at school (and the ghosts are… actually, he doesn’t want to think about it) and makes a list: Things the Boys Need to Become Successful Members of Society Again Despite Technically Still Being Ghosts.
Yesterday, after some of the initial panic faded, Ray and Julie took notes while her bandmates experimented to see how far their less-dead status stretched. They already knew they could still “poof” (a fancy word for teleport and the latest subject of Ray’s nightmares), thanks to Reggie and Alex’s recent excursion to a burger place they liked, but they also knew they could get hungry and eat food again, apparently neither of which they could do before the “magic hug,” as Reggie called it.
Within a few hours, they discovered some other, slightly more concerning things. They’re visible to everyone, not just Julie and her family but people on the street, Flynn and her mother (who tried to speak to the boys in Swedish before Flynn hastily scurried her back home), and the mailman Reggie struck up a conversation with for a good twenty minutes just because he could. They cannot turn themselves back invisible, no matter how hard they try, which might become a problem for Julie and the Phantoms’ whole brand, but they all collectively decided to deal with that later. They can touch people, and objects a lot easier than they used to, but still phase through something as long as they don’t think about it too hard (as evidenced by Reggie trying really hard not to run into a wall and then running into a wall, only for Luke to fall through the piano because he was distracted by laughing at him). They still don’t have heartbeats, or blood, or working lungs (those tests were… terrifying, in Ray’s personal and reasonable opinion), so they’re not alive, but they’re not… quite dead. Not anymore.
Which means it’s Ray’s responsibility to get them their lives back.
His list ends up reading as such:
- Food, water, shelter
- Guardianship—contact parents? What do I tell them?? request legal guardianship until more alive
- School—at least finish high school; homeschool them if still ghostly by next semester?
- “Legal” documents: ID, social security, transcripts?
And then, at the very bottom of the list, he’s written and crossed out about four separate times: Someone should tell Trevor.
Because that’s what kept Ray up most of last night. Not just the knowledge that there were three undead teenagers crashing on the couch in his garage, or that his fifteen-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old son’s bedrooms are definitely not resistant to ghost teleportation. But that Bobby’s bandmates came back to life and he doesn’t know. And it should be Ray’s job to tell him, it can’t be anyone but Ray’s job to tell him…
But Ray hasn’t seen Trevor Wilson since Rose’s funeral. He hasn’t spoken to Trevor Wilson since they stood in the same studio that houses ghosts now and Trevor whispered, “I’m sorry, Rose,” through streams of tears, since Rose said, “That’s not good enough, Bobby!” and sent him away.
It feels cruel now, to break five years of silence for this. To have said, this mistake you made is unforgivable and then shove at him the victims of his victimless crime.
And if Trevor hates him for it… if Trevor calls him crazy, or doesn’t want anything to do with the boys, or doesn’t even pick up the phone… it’ll be like losing him all over again.
He crosses out the words again and folds up the list, shoving it in his pocket and heading for the door. He’ll think on it some more later. For now, the other items are more important.
Grocery shopping for three people is hard enough, when Carlos has the pickiness of a child half his age and there are only so many recipes Ray can cook with any amount of success. They’ve relied on Victoria’s generosity far too many times since Rose died.
Shopping for six is so much harder, especially when their three new guests are just getting used to eating again after twenty-five years without working digestive systems. Ray spends a really long time at the deli, wondering if he should even bother buying hot dogs anymore.
He quickly learns, though, that his first instincts are likely wrong.
He expects the boys to be vegetarians, because Bobby was, after undercooked meat killed his friends. But before he could start looking through Rose’s old books of vegetarian recipes for dinner last night, Reggie bounded up to him and asked if he could make ribs. (Reggie, he’s learned, has apparently been hanging around Ray a lot in the last few weeks, chatting with him even when he knew Ray couldn’t hear him or respond. Reggie treats Ray like an old friend, or his favorite uncle, follows him around asking inane questions about whatever Ray happens to be doing. It’s strange, but Ray’s found he doesn’t exactly mind it).
He expects the boys to have a lot more problems with food in general, in fact. He expects to have to dig through his brain for methods he hasn’t used or thought about in years, all the methods he and Rose used to employ to get Bobby to eat and keep things down when grief made his eating habits worse. He expects to have to fight three teenage boys, like he once fought one, to take care of their bodies despite the ways their bodies failed them.
Instead, Luke and Reggie eat like they’ve never been fed in their lives, enough for three people each at least. Alex… fits Ray’s expectations a little better. He doesn’t actively refuse food, like Bobby used to, or choke it down only to make himself sick as soon as he thinks Ray’s gone to bed (Ray stayed up all of last night, sat in the grass behind the garage so he could hear inside the studio bathroom, just in case Luke or Reggie’s enthusiasm at dinner came back to bite them). No, Alex just took tiny helpings from the big bowl of pasta Ray set out for dinner and cut each noodle into tiny pieces, put one in his mouth whenever Ray caught his eye across the table. He grew tense and visibly anxious when Ray asked Reggie to lead a prayer, didn’t relax until he was putting his half-empty plate in the kitchen, told Ray he’d had a big lunch when asked if he’d prefer something else.
Alex was gone this morning—visiting someone named Willie, Luke said—when the other kids sat down for breakfast. If Ray weren’t used to recognizing the signs, it wouldn’t be too much cause for concern. As it is, Ray’s determined to make sure Alex gets enough to eat at lunch.
Food, water, shelter is the first item on his list. Shelter currently consists of a fold-out couch in the studio, though Ray’s hoping to fix that soon (even though he doesn’t think the ghosts need to sleep much, if the way they spent most of last night experimenting with Julie’s CD collection is any clue). Food and water should be a little easier to deal with, then.
When he comes into the kitchen with a mountain of grocery bags, the three ghost boys are on the living room couch, watching Family Ties.
“Oh, hey, Ray!” Reggie calls, jumping up from his seat. “Need any help?”
Alex gets up, too, but less like he’s excited for Ray to be home and more like he’s worried he’ll get in trouble for sitting on the couch. It makes Ray’s heart sink, the idea that a friend of Bobby’s—a friend of Julie’s—could be so distrustful of him so soon after meeting. Did Ray do something, when he couldn’t see the boys, to make Alex think Ray would get upset with him for having fun in a home that’s essentially his?
“Go ahead and keep watching your show, Reggie,” Ray says as he lifts the groceries onto the counter. “I was actually wondering if Alex would like to help me make lunch?”
Alex’s eyes widen. Reggie frowns. Luke looks up from the TV, expression guarded, and it just makes Ray so sad, that all three of them seem to jump straight to negative conclusions when he’s just trying to help.
He tries to offer them the most reassuring smile he can muster, says to Alex, “Only if you want to,” and then turns away and starts unloading the groceries so that there’s no pressure for any of them to respond.
A few minutes later, though, the TV starts blaring again, and Alex joins Ray in the kitchen, leaning against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets. “I’m no cook,” he says flatly.
“Don’t worry, neither am I,” Ray assures him. “My wife was always the chef around here. She tried to teach me a thing or two, but she was always very particular about how her kitchen was run, so more often than not I just ended up in the way.”
“Yeah, that sounds about right,” Alex mutters, frowning thoughtfully. After a short pause, he says, “Sorry for your loss, by the way. I only met her once, but… she seemed like a great person.”
“She really was.” Ray smiles, a little sadly, before unloading the last of the groceries. He adds, almost as an afterthought, “And Bobby always said she would’ve liked you boys.”
Alex stiffens, his jaw clenching tight. “Right,” he bites out, then pushes off the doorframe and heads for the fridge. “So what are we making?”
They’re making sopa de fideo, because it’s simple but filling, and it doesn’t have any perishable ingredients that could potentially cause food poisoning. It was one of Bobby’s favorites, back in the early days. One of the only things he could almost always eat, so long as he stood in the kitchen while Ray or Rose cooked to make sure there weren’t any scary surprises. Ray’s hoping the same method will work just as well for Alex.
What doesn’t work, however, is any of his other attempts at conversation. He tries to ask Alex about the band and his drumming, about how he’s been adjusting to both forms of afterlife, about this boy Willie Ray’s heard a thing or two about. Alex barely responds, just mumbles enough vague non-answers to appear polite. But he seems engaged in the tasks Ray gives him, at least. He’s surprisingly efficient at chopping vegetables, navigates the electric stove with ease, washes dishes as they go without needing to be asked. Ray wonders if he liked to cook when he was alive the first time, but he’s worried Alex will clam up again if he asks.
Once the soup is simmering, Ray grabs a box of garlic bread from the fridge and hands it to Alex while he turns the oven on. When he turns around, Alex is reading the list of ingredients on the back of the box.
Ray doesn’t think. He acts on pure instinct, raises a reassuring hand and says, “Oh, you don’t have to worry about nuts. I know you’re allergic, but I cut them out of our family’s diet years ago. Even those midnight sandwiches Julie makes are sunflower butter.”
Alex blinks at him, still holding the box of frozen bread up to the light. The color drains from his face until he looks—ahem—ghostly pale, save for a blotchy red blush starting to creep up his neck. His voice is small, and tense, and ice cold as he says, “Geez, is there anything Bobby didn’t tell you about me?”
Frozen water floods Ray’s veins, leaving him gaping at Alex as his brain struggles to backtrack and realize where he went wrong. “He—I just meant—” His voice falters, but somehow he can’t stop himself from digging deeper into a regretful pit in the floor. “After you… Well, Bobby had a really difficult relationship with food because of what happened to you boys. Anything you couldn’t eat made him wary, and so… but it always helped him to be in the kitchen and watch us cook, so I thought it might help you, too. I couldn’t help noticing you haven’t eaten much the last couple days.”
He watches it happen—the moment he oversteps too far and loses Alex completely. It’s like a curtain has been drawn behind Alex’s expression, like he’s closed the door to his soul and locked it up tight. His eyes turn hard as emeralds, and he puts the garlic bread down on the counter with a thud. “You should ask Reggie to help with the rest,” he says tersely. “He gets a kick out of this kind of thing.”
He poofs out before Ray can find the words to apologize. By the time the rest of them have finished eating lunch, Alex still hasn’t returned, so Ray puts the leftover soup in a Tupperware container and leaves it in the fridge with a sticky-note taped to it, declaring it Alex’s if and when he wants it.
Back in his room that afternoon, Ray takes out his list again and stares at it, trying not to feel like a complete and utter failure. It’s hard to remember, with everything happening so fast, with how desperately he just wants to help, that the boys are seventeen or forty-two, that they’ve been on their own in both life and death long before he knew them, that he’s not actually their father, or even anything close. He can’t force them to let him care for them, even if sometimes that seems like the best option. The best he can do is give the offer. The boys have to want to take it.
When Julie and Carlos get home from school, they immediately head out to the studio for Julie and the Phantoms band practice (featuring Carlos the amateur cameraman for the official YouTube channel). Ray can hear them from all the way inside the house, rocking out to music that feels strangely familiar, deep in his bones. The music Julie and Luke have written isn’t quite like the music Trevor Wilson played, or even like the music Julie and Rose used to write together. It’s something else entirely, something unique and special and theirs. It reminds Ray how strong his daughter is, how much music means to her.
It reminds him that this is all worth it, no matter how hard it may feel in the moment. He needs to help these boys so that they can live again, so that Julie can live again, with her music and her friends and her family. He needs to be there for all of them, to be and do what the boys’ parents couldn’t, what Rose and Trevor can’t.
It’s scary, and overwhelming, and really really hard, but it has to be worth it. Because if Ray fails, then he’ll be the reason Julie loses her music a second time. The reason the boys can’t have their lives back.
After everything, he at least owes it to Trevor to help his friends get their lives back.
So, he spends the time while they’re rehearsing finding places for them to sleep. They can't be real people in the real world with real lives again if they're sleeping on a 30-year-old couch in his garage. But the Molina house only has so many bedrooms. And so many beds.
Luckily, Carlos insisted on getting bunk beds the second he moved into his own room, so that his friends could come over for sleepovers arguably, but also just because Carlos liked switching up whether he slept on the top or the bottom every night (it used to drive Rose crazy, because she had to wash twice as many sheets, but she could never deny him the pleasure). As long as Carlos is comfortable with it (and Ray has a feeling he will be), Reggie can bunk in his room, and Luke and Alex can share the king-sized bed in the guest room. That way, they’ll have more or less their own space, and real beds to sleep in, but then the garage, or any of the living room couches, will still be available as a backup if the roommate situation goes south.
With that settled, Ray puts a load of laundry in—all the bedsheets, Carlos’s baseball uniform, some of his shirts—and then gathers up Julie’s Orpheum dress and the boys’ suits to send out for dry cleaning. By the time he climbs up from the laundry room, the rehearsal’s over. He can hear Julie up in her room, arguing with Luke about needing to do her homework before she can write another song with him (Ray’s silently so proud). From the sounds emerging from Carlos’s room, it seems he’s showing Reggie some of his video games. Which just leaves…
Ray turns into the living room and startles as he registers Alex sitting in an armchair, his knees pulled up to his chest. He looks up when Ray enters, and his eyes go wide, his jaw tense, his hands gripping tighter around his legs. “Hey,” he huffs out. “H-hi, Mr. Molina.”
“You can call me Ray.” He tries for a calming smile. Alex just blinks, so he continues, “Did you have a good rehearsal?”
Alex nods. “It was good. I just, um… I just wanted to… Sorry about earlier, I didn’t—”
“That’s okay,” Ray cuts in. “I’m sorry I pushed. You don’t have to share with me anything you’re not comfortable sharing, Alex. I’m just trying to make sure you stay healthy, while you’re technically my responsibility.”
Alex’s expression flickers, something almost like a flinch. He nods again. “I understand… sir. It’s just—It’s just weird, you know? Not having a body and then suddenly having a body but not really knowing how it works… It’s not that I’m scared of dying again, really. It’s not… the food’s fault, it’s mine. I’m not used to needing it yet. That’s why—” His mouth clicks closed.
“Why you haven’t been eating,” Ray finishes, and Alex gives another tiny nod. Ray knows he should quit while he’s ahead, that this is the first real conversation he and Alex have had and he shouldn’t ruin it by pushing, but he can’t help it. “So this is a new problem, then? You never… had any issues with eating before you died?”
The color drains out of Alex’s face, and Ray knows that he’s lost him once again. Slowly, Alex unfolds himself and gets to his feet, gaze locked on the floor at his feet. “Look… Ray,” he says tersely. “I don’t know what kinda bullshit Trevor told you. About me, about… any of us. But it’s not true, okay? He didn’t know us as well as he might think he did. He doesn’t know us… and neither do you. I appreciate everything you’re trying to do for us here, really, I do. But just… just back off, okay? Stop trying so hard.”
He walks out this time, instead of poofing, leaving Ray standing frozen in his living room, trying once again to figure out where he went wrong, until the front door closes behind Alex with an echoing thud.
On Tuesday, Ray follows Julie’s directions to Mitch and Emily Patterson’s house, a few blocks uptown.
Technically, food water shelter has been crossed off his to-do list, even if he made the opposite of progress in getting Alex to trust him. His next attempt to help the boys acclimate to post-afterlife is contacting their families, to figure out once and for all just what Ray can, legally, do for them. With Reggie’s family in the wind and Alex refusing to talk about his, Luke’s is all Ray’s got.
Even after calling ahead and having a very pleasant conversation with Emily in which Ray explained that he was Julie Molina’s father and “I believe my daughter spoke to you about some of your son’s belongings that were left in our garage, would you mind if I stopped by to discuss what you’d like to do with them?” Ray feels more than a little awkward standing on the Pattersons’ front porch.
“You might want to check with Luke first, Papi,” Julie warned him before she left for school this morning. “His relationship with his parents is… complicated.”
And Ray wanted to respect that, of course he did. But at the end of the day… Ray can’t help these boys find their way back into the land of the living without some form of legal guardianship, and he can’t achieve that without letting their parents know they’re alive. He won’t make Luke talk with his parents if he doesn’t want to, of course, but he couldn’t stand the idea of broaching the topic with Luke and being shut down. If Luke’s not happy with him about it, then that’s a consequence Ray will have to deal with… but ultimately, this is a conversation Ray needs to have.
So, he rings the doorbell.
A kind, studious-looking man—a few years younger than Ray’s own parents, he’d wager—opens the door and gives Ray a familiar sad smile—the kind of smile Ray himself trains on people when they make a point to tell him that something reminded them of Rose. “Ray Molina?” he guesses, holding out a hand for Ray to shake.
“Pleasure to meet you,” Ray confirms. “You must be Mitch? Luke’s father?”
“Well, I haven’t been known as that for a very long time,” Mitch says ruefully, “but yes. Please, come in.”
The Patterson house is neat and homey, vintage pillows on every chair and fancy china in the cabinets. There are pictures of Luke everywhere, at almost every age, but none of the photos show him in his teen years, as he looks now (as he looked twenty-five years ago and god, that’s still so strange). Emily appears to introduce herself—it startles Ray to see her, for a second; Luke has her eyes—and then offers Ray tea, which he doesn’t know how to refuse. Soon enough, the three of them are sitting at the kitchen table, framed by this big front window, drinking tea and eating these little handmade blueberry scones.
“So,” Emily starts them off after all the pleasantries are over with. She gives Ray that same, sad smile. “It was such a pleasure meeting your daughter the other day, she is just a delight.”
“Oh, why, thank you,” Ray says sincerely. “To be honest, I didn’t even know she’d contacted you until recently. Your son… It was only the last few days that I realized who he was.”
“I hope you won’t think too poorly of us,” Mitch says. “We knew Luke’s band had somewhere they rehearsed—a friend’s garage, he always said—but he never… We weren’t very involved in that part of his life. If we’d known his things were just sitting there all these years, of course we would’ve contacted you to collect them ages ago.”
“Oh, well, that’s all right,” Ray says awkwardly, because there’s no easy way to just come out with well, actually, thank god you didn’t because Luke needed those things when he came back as a ghost.
“After you called,” Emily continues, pulling a piece of paper out of her sweater pocket, “I tried to make a list of some items I know were important to Luke? If you don’t have them, of course we understand, but I figured it couldn’t hurt to ask.”
Ray swallows back guilt. Maybe he should’ve come up with a different excuse for being here, because he doesn’t think Luke would appreciate Ray giving his things away. But he forces a smile and says, “Yes, of course, let me see?”
The list is… not what Ray would’ve expected. He’s known Luke less than three days now, and even he would be able to name Luke’s top four prized possessions: his three guitars and his songwriting journal. If he had to stretch it to top five, maybe he’d add the lucky rabbit’s foot Luke keeps chained to his jeans, or the stone necklace he often wears, or one of the guitar picks he chews on like they’re candy.
According to his parents, “items important to Luke” include a rosary he received at first communion, a book of poetry Emily used to read to him before bed, and a stuffed dog he apparently slept with until he was fourteen… all things Ray swears he has never seen in his garage before.
Actually, that’s not true. He has a brief memory, watered down by time and grief, from the day Rose and Trevor fought, the last day Ray ever spoke to him. They’d just bought the house off of Jim Schaefer, who’d paid off Bobby’s parents for it years before. Julie, Carrie, and Carlos were inside inspecting the bedrooms while Trevor helped Ray and Rose clean out the studio. They’d told Trevor he didn’t have to help, that they’d understand if sifting through his lost bandmates’ abandoned belongings was just too much for him, but he’d insisted, blinked back tears and said, No, I don’t expect you to keep all of this. I’ll know what things mattered.
And there was a whole bag’s worth of things, gone decades untouched, to which Trevor said, Reggie emptied out the whole room when Luke ran away. But this is all stuff his parents cared about; he always meant to throw it out.
Ray can’t remember if Rose ever took the bag down to Goodwill, or if she kept it out of spite, or out of some twisted sense of respect for the musicians Trevor had betrayed.
Because it was on that same day, as they were sorting out the studio, that Rose found a journal with Luke’s name in it and an album’s worth of songs that seemed very familiar…
If they did keep the Pattersons’ things, however, they’re definitely not still in the garage. Maybe Ray should check the attic…
He shakes himself out of his thoughts, his hands tightening a little on Emily’s handwritten list so that the edges of the paper crinkle. This isn’t actually why he’s here, he has to remind himself.
“I’ll make sure to do a… full inventory when I get home,” he says awkwardly, folding up the paper so he can fit it into his pocket. “But actually, there was something else I wanted to speak to you both about.”
“Oh?” Mitch’s expression is curious, polite.
Ray inwardly winces. There’s no scenario in which this goes smoothly. He considered just pulling up the video of Julie and the Phantoms performing at the Molinas’ garage party, but he worried just seeing their son alive and well (more or less) without any prior context or explanation might give the Pattersons a heart attack. Better to just come right out and say it.
“Your son is alive.”
Okay, maybe there was a better way to say it than that.
Ray’s not quite sure how he expected Mitch and Emily to react. Maybe he thought they’d be relieved? That they’d start crying? Thanking him profusely? Praying to their chosen power? At the very least, he thought they’d ask him to elaborate, which he was fully prepared to do. He had a speech prepared and everything, knew just the way he was going to tell the story—from the hot dogs, to Julie finding the demo in Rose’s studio, to evil magicians and magic hugs and now—poof!—something between life and death.
It was a pretty good speech, too, if he does say so himself.
He doesn’t really get to give it, because as soon as the thesis statement is out there in the open, Mitch Patterson growls, “Get out of my house,” and Emily starts crying, but not in an, Oh, thank god, I’ve prayed for this day sort of way. More in a, “How dare you say something so cruel!” sort of way. Because that’s what she says to him.
Ray realizes, a little belatedly he’ll admit, that he may have taken the wrong approach here. In the Pattersons’ mind, he’s just shown up out of the blue—a stranger with access to all their dead son’s belongings—to play some cruel practical joke on the grieving. In their defense, if someone he’d never met before showed up to tell him Rose had mysteriously come back to life… well, now he’d probably believe them, but a week ago, he might’ve called them cruel and crazy, too.
It takes a thousand apologies, and Ray dodging a few antique tchotchkes thrown at him (Emily’s got a pitcher’s arm, he never would’ve guessed), but finally he manages to get the Edge of Great music video pulled up on his phone and shoves it in Mitch’s face.
“Emily,” he says over his wife’s anguished shouts, his face an alarming shade of gray. “Emily!”
She turns to look, and the blood drains from her face. She drops into her chair, a shaking hand reaching up to turn the phone closer to her. Ray worries she really did have a heart attack.
But her voice is strong and steady when she says, “That’s my baby boy.”
“How…” Mitch croaks, blinking up at Ray with tears in his eyes. “How is this possible?”
Ray doesn’t really know, but he does his best to explain. It’s hard to tell how they take it, exactly—the Pattersons are stone-faced and silent throughout the entirety of his speech; even as teardrops roll down Emily’s cheeks, she makes no sound and no move to wipe them away.
“So he’s… he’s alive?” Mitch gasps out once Ray’s fallen silent. “Just as he was, seventeen?”
“Seventeen and change,” Ray agrees with a shrug. “I still don’t fully understand how the whole thing works, he…” He doesn’t want to say the word died. “It was July, and then they were… nowhere, the three boys, they were in this dark limbo place for two and a half decades until somehow they came back. But they were ghosts, they were… invisible to everyone but Julie, except when they played music. And it was right before Luke’s birthday, but that was a month ago, so maybe he’s eighteen now? It’s hard to tell. He’s still… ghostly, sometimes. But he eats, he sleeps, he bleeds—” All three of them flinch. “He’s alive, as much as he can be.”
“So he can come home,” Emily says.
And… here comes the hard part. “That’s the thing,” Ray says, leaning back in his chair a bit in case Emily tries to throw something at him again. “I’m not sure he wants to, yet.” The Pattersons go pale, so Ray rushes to explain, “Remember, to him, it feels like it’s been a month, maybe two. That’s still almost a year since he left home, but nowhere close to twenty-five. He loves you both, and he misses you, even I can see that. But he’s been on his own a long time, and he’s used to living with the boys, with the band… I’m not sure he’s ready to come back here. That’s actually why I wanted to come and talk to you two in person, I… was hoping you’d give me permission to be his legal guardian, just temporarily, while we figure everything out.”
“What does that mean?” Mitch’s voice is low, dangerous, the opposite of his kind exterior. “You’re trying to take our son away from us?”
“No! No, no, no, not at all!” Ray hastily assures them. “Please, you misunderstand. He’s living in my house already, eating my food, playing music with my daughter. He’s happy there, and I want to provide for him while I can. I need to figure out how to get him a legal identity, get him back in school—this is all crazy, you have to understand that, your seventeen-year-old son is sleeping in my garage despite having been dead for twenty-five years! He can’t just move back in with you like it’s 1995, what would you tell people?”
He sees it on their faces, the moment Luke’s parents realize he’s right. The defensive anger drains from Emily’s eyes, her fists uncurling in her lap.
Ray relaxes, takes a breath, and continues, “The easiest way for me to make sure all three of those boys are going to be all right is if I have all of them under my roof, just until they’re settled. I’m not asking you to sign away your rights or anything, I’m not trying to adopt him, I just… I want to take care of him until he can really get his life back. And I’d like to do it in as legal a way as possible.”
“Can we think about it?” Mitch says after a moment.
“Can we talk to him?” Emily adds.
The former question is much easier to answer than the latter, so Ray fishes out a business card from his coat pocket and says, “Take all the time you need. I’ll try to nudge Luke toward the idea of reaching out.”
“We’ve missed him so much,” Emily says, and once again, the determination in her voice reminds Ray so much of her son. “We love him so much. Please make sure he knows that.”
“I will.”
She stops him on his way out the door and digs out an ancient-looking address book from a side table. “You’ll need to talk to the others, I assume. They all left town, after… that July. Mitch and I were the only ones who could bear to stay. I lost track of the Mercers—they were never very friendly to us to begin with—but I stayed in touch with Gwen Peters after her divorce. She’s Gwen Harris now.” She tears a page out of the book and presses it into Ray’s hand with a tiny smile. “If Reggie’s back, too, she’ll want to know.”
Ray nods gratefully, pockets the paper, and heads back out to his car.
Where Luke Patterson is sitting in the front seat.
Ray freezes, halfway down the drive. He glances over his shoulder, but Emily’s gone back inside, and the curtains have been drawn over the front window. No one can see Luke but him, no matter how visible and tangible he may be. Through the tinted glass of the passenger side door, Ray watches Luke curl in on himself, his hands tangled together in his lap, his feet kicked up on the dashboard. He’s more still than Ray has ever seen him, more still than Ray even thought him capable of being.
Ray’s stomach fills with icy dread.
He doesn’t talk, just gets in the car and turns the key, doesn’t spare Luke so much as a glance. If they linger in the driveway too long, Mitch and Emily might get suspicious and come out to check on Ray, and he has a feeling that if Luke wanted to talk to his parents right now, he would’ve just gone to the door.
But once they’re a block away, Ray pulls over to the side of the road and shoves the gear into park.
They sit there in silence for a moment, Ray’s hands on the wheel. Then he draws in a breath and begins, “Luke—”
“You had no right to do that.” His voice is low and dangerous, like Ray’s only heard it when he was asking about Bobby. “You should’ve talked to me.”
Ray sighs. “I knew that you might react badly, and it was a conversation that needed to be had.”
“We don’t need you, you know,” Luke snaps, finally dropping his feet to the floor. Ray keeps his gaze trained on the front windshield ahead, but he can still feel Luke’s angry eyes on him. “I—we’re doing this for Julie, man. We’re not looking for a dad, or a landlord, or a—we’re not trying to get our lives back. We’re looking for new lives. And if that means I gotta end up on the streets again, then that’s what I’ll do. I’m not ready to see my parents. I don’t want them sticking their noses in my business like they did my whole life. I wanted to talk to them when I was ready to talk to them, and you took that choice away from me. You can’t do that if you expect me—if you expect any of us—to stick around. We’ll just leave. You can’t stop us.”
“I wouldn’t—” Ray starts, then stops, shutting his mouth with an audible click and dragging in another deep breath. He’s always had this problem, needing more time than most people to steady his thoughts before he speaks. It was probably a coping mechanism, at one point, a way to curb his emotions so he wouldn’t end up reacting in anger and hurting the people he loved, so he wouldn’t end up like his father. It used to drive Bobby crazy. “Luke, you have to understand… This is all so new to me. You’ve had a month or so to get used to everything, and I’ve only had a few days. I’m just trying to figure everything out, to keep you boys safe. I can’t let you go off on your own, Julie would never forgive me. But I could get in a lot of trouble if someone found out you were walking around without identification, living in my house without me having guardianship. If one of you got hurt, or sick, or in trouble—I wouldn’t be able to do anything about it. It’s all complicated, I know that, and the last thing I want is to hurt you boys, but while your parents are still alive, I need their involvement to be able to take care of you properly. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is.”
Luke glares at him, his jaw clenched tight, his eyes blazing with emotion. They’re so much like his mother’s, it’s almost hard to look at. Ray finds his gaze flitting around the car, making sure there’s nothing in reach for Luke to throw at him.
“Reggie had so much faith in you.” Luke spits the word faith like it’s some kind of curse. “But you’re just like every other asshole dad we’ve had to deal with. No wonder traitors like Bobby hung out with you.”
His words beyond sting, but Ray barely has time to react before Luke poofs out, leaving only a buckled seat belt and the faint scent of body spray in his place.
Ray wraps his hands around the steering wheel and squeezes with all his strength. He doesn’t let himself panic. He doesn’t let himself cry. He sucks in breath after breath, even though each one leaves an increasingly agonizing ache in his chest.
And then he drives home. Because despite Luke’s anger at the situation, Ray firmly believes he won’t actually disappear without letting someone know where he’s going. And Ray knows he’s doing the right thing here, as hard as it may be. He’s got some calls to make—Gwen Harris, and the Mercers if he can track them down, and maybe a government agency or two. He can’t give up just because his new charges are a little reluctant to be cared for.
When he pulls into the driveway, rock music is blaring from the studio. For the moment, at least, it seems Luke won’t be making good on his threats.
But Ray knows he’s walking on thin ice here. One wrong step, and they’ll all drown.
On Wednesday, Ray calls Principal Lessa of Los Feliz High School.
“You know, I’ve been meaning to reach out to you,” she says, sounding like she’s on her fourth cup of coffee at least at 8:30 in the morning. “Julie has been doing so well this semester, ever since she started that band!”
Despite the gravity of his current situation, Ray’s heart warms. “I’m so glad to hear that. She seems to be enjoying music again, that’s for sure.”
“Well, we’re all so happy for her,” Lessa says. “And those boys she plays with—what talent!”
Ray takes the opening. “They’re why I’m calling actually. They’re wards of the state, the three of them, and I’m going to be fostering them for the foreseeable future. I wanted to see what the chances were I could get them enrolled with you in the spring.”
The lies come too easily, as Lessa talks to him about needing vaccination records and previous school transcripts, how they’re welcome to audition for the music program, but she can’t guarantee there’ll be space for them. Ray can’t help feeling a little guilty as he spouts total bullshit about the boys being homeschooled until very recently, about why they need to wait until next semester to jump into public school life, about who they are and how they came into Julie’s life and Ray’s legal care. But it’s necessary, while he’s still gathering information. And he’s damn good at it.
When he finally hangs up, armed with a mountain of information he already knew (most of it boiling down to the boys can’t go to school until they have legal identification and Ray has legal proof of guardianship and if they can’t get all of that, he is not qualified to homeschool them), he’s not much better off than he was when he began, but he crosses item three off his list anyway, since there’s not much more he can do about it right now.
Just as he’s putting his pencil down on his desk and dropping his aching head into his hands, there’s a knock on his office door.
Ray looks up, his breath catching in his throat. His kids are at school, so it must be one of the boys. But he hasn’t seen any of them since last night, when they all sat through the most awkward dinner in the history of the universe. Julie and Carlos were confused and concerned, glancing between their father and their friends at every eye roll and snide mumble. Alex barely touched his food. Luke glared as he scarfed his down and left the table as quickly as he could. Reggie fiddled with his fingers in his lap, his eyes going wider and more nervous by the minute.
It’s Reggie who pokes his head through the (still closed) door now when Ray gives a soft, “Come in.”
“Hey, Ray!” His grin is bright but a little strained. “Got a minute?”
Ray manages a smile of his own and waves the boy in. So far, he’s two for two on pissing off the ghost boys he’s supposed to be helping; Reggie’s the only chance he’s got left, and he doesn’t intend on screwing up again. Not that he intended to hurt Luke and Alex either. He’s just trying to help, can’t they understand that?
Luke’s words in the car yesterday haven’t stopped ringing in Ray’s ears since they were first spoken: Reggie had such faith in you. If the past tense is to be believed, maybe Ray’s failed him already.
Still, he’s not going to stop trying. So he sits back in his desk chair and says, “What can I help you with, Reggie?”
Reggie stands just inside the door, bouncing on the balls of his feet and twisting his hands together in front of him. He notices Ray noticing and stops, then flashes another quick, unconvincing smile. “I just wanted to thank you! I know it’s been kind of a crazy week, and all this ghost stuff must be totally stressful for you, but the guys and I… we really do appreciate everything you’re doing for us.”
Ray nods slowly, gaze flitting over Reggie’s shoulder like he’s expecting Luke and Alex to be hovering in the background, ushering him on. “I’m trying my best, Reggie, I hope you boys can see that.”
“We do. We can. Or, I can, at least. Luke and Alex are… well, they’re trying, too, sir, they really are.”
Sir? Ray’s heart sinks into his stomach. Has he really failed Reggie so badly, so quickly, that Reggie “Ray, you and I are buddies,” “Ray, can you show me how to use a chainsaw?”, “Ray, you like birdwatching, right? Cause I was thinking of starting a club” Peters has regressed to calling him sir?
Ray lets out a deep sigh, letting his eyes flutter closed for a minute like that’ll make this week stop going so horribly wrong. “Should I just give up, Reggie? Be honest with me, am I… am I not trying hard enough? Am I trying too hard? I just want you boys to have everything you could ever need, but I feel like I keep taking things from you instead.”
Alex’s comfort. Luke’s privacy. Reggie’s trust. All gone, because Ray couldn’t keep his mouth shut.
Reggie shifts nervously from foot to foot. “You’re really asking?”
“I would love your advice,” Ray says honestly.
So, Reggie takes a seat in Rose’s old rocking chair in the corner of the room and rocks back and forth for a minute, clearly trying to gather his thoughts. After a long minute or two, he finally says, “The thing you gotta understand about Luke and Alex is… they were on their own a long time. Luke ran away right after his seventeenth birthday. Alex’s parents barely looked at him after he came out. Even I… spent a lot of time here. With Bobby, in the studio.”
“Is that really what this is all about?” Ray can’t help asking. “You don’t trust me because I was friends with Trevor?”
“No,” Reggie says, too quickly. “Well, maybe… Maybe that’s part of it for Luke. He tries to hide it, but the whole song stealing thing really messed with him. And Alex went through a lot of rough stuff with his family, and it’s just… We’re not used to it, the three of us. Having people to report to, having people… make choices for us. Even if it’s for our own good. And maybe someday, we could be more receptive to it—they could be more receptive to it—but right now, I think… we still don’t know you very well, is all. And you don’t really know us. And the only people who do know us, other than Julie, are…”
Trevor, Ray fills in without Reggie having to say it. And maybe their parents, though after his talk with Mitch and Emily Patterson, Ray’s not so sure about them.
“That must be very lonely,” he says after a minute of thought. “To come back to a world where no one knows you but each other.”
“And Julie,” Reggie repeats, a smile pulling at his lips. “We really like Julie, sir.”
“I can tell.” Ray offers Reggie what he hopes is a sufficiently reassuring smile, hoping he doesn’t look quite as exhausted as he feels. “And I know she really likes you.”
“Good.” Reggie nods with finality and pushes himself to his feet. “Anyway. I think it’s just a learning curve for all of us, but I promise we do want to be here. So, thanks for everything you’re doing, Ray.”
“Of course, Reggie,” Ray murmurs, but Reggie’s only halfway to the door when he continues, “May I tell you something?”
Reggie turns back to him, eyes wide. “Sure?”
Ray doesn’t know why he says it, why the thought comes to him right now at all, but the words are out of his mouth before he can put too much forethought behind them. “Bobby really did love you boys. And I like to think he loved Rose and me, too, and our kids. So you weren’t the only ones he betrayed.”
Something shifts in Reggie’s expression—confusion bleeding through the calm—and he takes a step back toward his rocking chair. “You mean… When did you find out? That the songs weren’t his?”
“August 2015.” Almost four years to the day before Rose died, but he doesn’t say that. “Rose found Luke’s journal in the studio. We were ready to hear any excuse, but Trevor didn’t have one to give. He’d been passing those songs off as his for years by then, not just to the press and the public, but to us. To Julie and Carrie. He was proud of them, and he had stories and feelings behind each and every one—Luke’s feelings, I suppose, though I think Trevor found his own ways to identify with them. You have to understand, Reggie, I—Trevor was my best friend. I wanted to believe him, to forgive him. But he knew he’d done something wrong, and then lied about it, and he couldn’t even defend himself. So Rose told him she didn’t want to see him anymore, didn’t want him around our children. And that was that.”
A shiver runs down Ray’s spine. He hasn’t talked about it since… ever. After that day, Rose preferred to pretend Trevor Wilson never even existed, and with Julie and Carrie falling out soon after, it wasn’t hard. If she hadn’t gotten sick, Ray might’ve tried hard to argue with her, but it was hard for him to deny her anything in those last few years.
Reggie sinks into the chair again, hands tangled in his lap. “Did he ever… Did Bobby say why he did it?”
Ray shakes his head. “He was grieving, Reggie. He was troubled. He wanted to hurt you, it’s as simple as that. He didn’t think there’d ever be anyone to feel the pain.”
“Yeah,” Reggie whispers. “Well, he should’ve been right.”
They fall into silence that’s somehow not awkward or uncomfortable. Ray wonders if that’s because he and Reggie have spent so much time together already, even if Ray wasn’t aware of most of it. Maybe something subconscious in him knows he can be comfortable around this ghost boy.
But the calm doesn’t last long, because thinking about Trevor has only served to remind Ray how much he still has to do for these boys, whether they want him to or not. This conversation with Reggie, though enlightening, hasn’t changed anything. He drops his head into his hands and tries to breathe, tries to remember the list sitting in his desk drawer.
Food, water, shelter. Check.
Legal guardianship, or something close to it. As check as he’s going to get for the moment. The Pattersons don’t want to make any final decision until Luke agrees to talk to them, Reggie’s mother won’t return Ray’s calls, and the Mercers are nowhere to be found.
Get the boys back in school. A work in progress…
Legal identification. Ray doesn’t know how he’s going to get this one done, when the boys don’t have birth certificates or social security cards and are currently marked legally dead by the government.
God, what was he thinking? How did he get himself into this? How did his daughter get herself into this?
He can’t help thinking, somehow, that Trevor would know what to do.
“Ray?”
He raises his head. Honestly, he’d sort of forgotten Reggie was still sitting there. “Sorry. Yes, Reggie, what is it? Did you need something else?”
Reggie’s expression is hard to read, his body language closed off but not tense. “I’m gonna talk to the guys,” he says with a tiny smile. “I know you’re trying. I’ll talk to them, okay? And in the meantime, maybe… You could ask for help? We’re a lot, I know that. But you don’t have to figure everything out for us all on your own.”
Ray nods, and thanks him, and tries to appear calm and collected until Reggie has left the room. But as soon as the door falls shut behind him, Ray lets out a bone-weary sigh.
Help. Right. Where on earth is he supposed to get some of that?
On Thursday, Ray steps into Rose’s studio, lets the doors fall closed behind him, and stops.
He can’t stop thinking about the last, temperamental, item on his to-do list. Someone should tell Trevor. Trevor deserves to know.
He can’t stop thinking about Reggie’s kind, soft words sitting in Ray’s office yesterday. You don’t have to figure everything out for us all on your own. You could ask for help. The only people who know us, other than Julie…
He can’t stop thinking about this one time in August, 1995, when Bobby broke his hand from punching a wall after seeing pictures from a funeral he wasn’t invited to and shouted, “They don’t even know him!”
He can’t stop thinking about Trevor.
But any thought of Trevor nowadays—every thought of Trevor since August 14, 2015—is paired with the thought of Rose, lying in bed with a migraine and telling Ray, “I don’t care if I’m dying, mi amor. He went too far. He doesn’t deserve our forgiveness.”
So he stands in the studio, looks up at the ceiling, and says, “Hi, love.”
Talking to Rose has become commonplace for him in the last year. He tells her about his day. He asks her for advice when Julie’s in trouble or Carlos is being particularly eleven years old. He ends his evening prayers to Dios with an evening prayer to his wife, and no matter how much Victoria warns him about inviting ghosts, he doesn’t let anyone stop him.
She never says anything back, of course, but it’s not like he’s delusional enough to expect her to. Talking to her soothes him anyway. And he truly believes she can hear him, wherever she is.
(That was one of the first things he asked Julie, amid her complex explanation of everything her life had become. “Could your mother—?”
“Not everyone becomes a ghost,” she cut him off, flashing a pained smile. “Sorry, Papi.”)
“It’s me,” he continues, a little redundantly, stepping further into the space. “I’ve had… a very stressful week, so I’m sorry I haven’t spoken to you much. But there was something I needed to say… something I needed to ask you.”
He falls quiet, like he’s waiting for some sort of response, or permission to go on, or something. He lays a reverent hand on the lid of Rose’s piano—slightly smudged from Luke’s shoes—and swears he feels the wood warm beneath his skin.
He tells her everything—Julie’s band, and how she came to him, and how he’s been trying so hard to do right by those boys. He tells her how badly he’s been failing.
“I’m not sure… I can do this by myself.” He’s sitting at the piano bench now. He’s no pianist like Rose and Julie, but even he had his fair share of nights spent right here at Rose’s side, her gentle hands guiding his fingers on the keys. He lays his hands on the fallboard and pretends her warm presence is pressed against his side. “They’re good boys, Rose, you’d love them so much. But they have no reason to trust me. And I don’t know them well enough to be able to earn their trust and take care of them at the same time. I need help. I need… I need Trevor.”
He lets his words hang in the air for a moment, echoing like he just struck a gong. If he closes his eyes, he can see her pale, angry face shooting daggers at him, can hear her hoarse voice whispering, “It’s not worth it, Ray, can’t you see that? He lied to us for twenty fucking years, no merece ni nuestro perdon ni nuestra respeta. And there is nothing he can do to change that.”
So he opens his eyes. She was sick, then. And hurt. And so angry. And Ray is alone now.
He’d always been willing to forgive Trevor. He just didn’t want to risk losing Rose by pushing her on it. And he lost her anyway.
“I didn’t want to reach out to him without your permission,” he concludes, speaking to Rose’s piano now, to one of the few things he has left of her soul. “But if you’re able to forgive him from heaven, my love… then I will forgive him on earth. I think the boys really need him… And… I miss him. Almost as much as I miss you. He was part of our family once, and I want that again. I want the boys to have that again. I want Julie and Carlos to have that again. So if you could just… If you could send me a sign… tell me it’s all right to bring him back into my life again? Then at least I’ll know I have your blessing.”
He’s not sure what sort of sign he expects. It’s not like he thinks the heavens are going to open up and Rose will descend on the wings of an angel to grant him special permission to contact his former co-parent after five years of radio silence.
He’s probably not expecting anything at all. In the end, it will always have to be his decision to make. But he had to ask anyway.
“You can call him.”
Ray’s head snaps up, his heart stuttering in his chest—but of course, it’s not Rose’s voice that spoke, or Rose’s form leaning anxiously against the studio doors, arms crossed and head ducked low.
It’s Luke. With Alex right next to him, hands in his pockets and shoulders at his ears. And Reggie hovering behind them, looking very proud of himself.
Ray swallows, his fingers curling over the edge of the piano. “What?”
“Bobby,” Luke elaborates. “You should just call him. Don’t need our permission.”
Reggie nudges Alex pointedly, who adds, “If you think he could help figure stuff out for us, then we want that. We’re not trying to cause any trouble. Sir.”
“Plus, I wouldn’t mind an apology out of the traitor,” Luke mumbles.
“What Luke and Alex are trying to say,” Reggie cuts in sweetly, “is that we’re all going to try a lot harder to show our gratitude for everything you’re doing for us, Ray. We know you only have our best interests at heart.”
“Yeah, Reggie chewed us out for being jerks.” Luke rubs the back of his neck sheepishly. “And then Julie did. Violently. She’s got quite a swing, your daughter.”
Ray bites back a snort. “Boys, I really am sorry—”
“Look, we’re not blind, we know you’re trying,” Alex cuts him off. “Thing is, you don’t know us. And a lot of what you don’t know…” He shrugs, looking anywhere but at Ray. “We’re not exactly pumped to talk about.”
“But Trevor would know,” Reggie says, his smile a little sad. “So, if having him around can make things easier for you, then that’s fine with us.”
“We promise not to haunt him,” Luke adds, in a tone that highly implies that’s something Julie coached him to say. Ray decides it’s best he not ask for elaboration.
“Thank you,” he says genuinely. He adds a second, silent, thanks to Rose, figuring this is as close to a sign as he’s likely to get. “I’ll call him first thing tomorrow.”
On Friday, Ray stares at his phone so long that his vision starts to go blurry. And then, before he can chicken out, he dials a number he hasn’t called in a very long time.
It rings for what feels like forever. Just before he’s certain it’s going to go to voicemail, a voice picks up, gruff and hoarse and hesitant: “Hello?”
It’s so familiar it leaves Ray dry-mouthed and speechless. It’s been so long since he’s heard Trevor’s voice; he even avoids TV interviews with him, not that he’s given many of them in the last five years. A minute ago, Ray knew exactly what he was going to say, but now all thoughts fly straight out of his head.
“I really don’t have time for prank calls,” Trevor sighs.
“Don’t hang up,” Ray blurts hastily. “Trev, it’s me.”
He’s never heard silence quite so loud. After a moment or two, Trevor’s, “Ray,” comes out as barely a croak.
“Hi,” Ray whispers. He’s sitting in his office again, the door closed and locked, not that anyone’s home who would a) think to interrupt him or b) be at all deterred by a locked door. He considered doing this out in the studio, but that felt almost sacrilegious somehow, like he’d be doing Trevor and Rose both some kind of disservice by offering reconciliation in the place that tore them apart. “Where are you right now?”
After a long pause, Trevor says, “Home. I just… Was just discharged from the psych ward.”
“What?” Ray exclaims, shooting to his feet despite himself. He starts looking for his keys, almost out of instinct. “Trevor, I—I had no idea, what—are you okay? What happened?”
“You don’t have to do this, Ray.” Trevor’s voice is softer, emptier, than Ray’s heard it in a very long time. Or maybe he just remembers it wrong. “You don’t need to pretend you care, just tell me why you called.”
“Trevor.” Ray swallows, holds the phone a little tighter to his ear. “Come on, baby, I never… stopped caring.”
The line goes quiet again. Ray thinks he’s really screwed up, that Trevor’s about to hang up on him, that using terms of endearments that used to come to him as easy as breathing was going one step too far. But finally, Trevor admits, “I’ve been… hallucinating. Recently. So I admitted myself on Saturday night. I’m fine now. Nothing you need to worry about.”
Like Ray could ever not worry. But something about Trevor’s statement, emotionless and cold, doesn’t sit right with him. Even at his worst, Bobby didn’t hallucinate very often. And when he did, he was only ever seeing one thing that wasn’t there… Well, three things, Ray supposes.
“Trevor, you weren’t,” he says before he can stop himself. “I’m so sorry I didn’t call you sooner. Whatever you saw—they’re here. They’re real. They came back.”
He wonders, perhaps too late, if he went about this the wrong way again, like he did with the Pattersons. If Trevor will start screaming at him down the phone, or call him cruel, or hang up and really never speak to him again. He doesn’t know what he’d do if that happened. Now that he’s come this far…
God, he’s missed Trevor’s voice. He misses Trevor’s face. He doesn’t want to lose him again, not over this, not when he needs him most.
“How…” Trevor finally breathes. “How is that possible?”
“It’s a long story?”
“You’re not… Right? You wouldn’t?”
Even after five years, Ray knows him well enough to know exactly what he’s asking. “I promise, Trevor. I swear on Rose’s soul. I’ve met them. I’ve talked to them. They’re everything you said they were. They want to see you.”
“They’ve already seen me.”
“No.” Ray recalls what Luke said: We promise not to haunt him. “They want to talk to you. To offer forgiveness. To apologize. So do I.”
“You don’t have anything to apologize for,” Trevor insists. “Ray, I… I shouldn’t have lied to you, I should've… I wanted to call you after Rose… But I didn’t know…”
“It’s all right,” Ray says, and means it. All of it is all right. “That’s all in the past. Right now, I need your help.”
Julie and the Phantoms play the Orpheum on a Saturday. Exactly a week later, Trevor Wilson comes over to the Molina house for the first time in five years.
Standing in the open doorway, blocking the view of the two children and three teenage ghosts inside, Ray looks him in the eyes for the first time in just as long. And knows that somehow, someday, everything will be all right.