Infamous (30 page)

 … mental illness wasn’t one of them. Alison stood up.

“Shit,” A.J. said, his hand against his forehead as he briefly closed his eyes. “Please. Wait. I know how it sounds. I know what you’re thinking, because, believe me, I’ve thought it, too. I’ve had a CAT scan, it’s not a tumor, it’s not physiological. So yeah. Either I’m, I don’t know, maybe schizophrenic or delusional in some other way, or … Maybe he’s real. And Alison, God help me, after tonight? I think he’s real. He was the one who found the trailers that needed to be evacuated. Please, will you sit down and hear me out? Please.”

He looked up at her, and now, from this angle, with the light shining more fully on his face, he looked younger and almost angelic. His blue eyes held disappointment and regret, as if he knew that whatever he said, she wouldn’t—couldn’t possibly—believe him.

His hair fell forward into his eyes and he impatiently raked it back with one hand.

Alison’s stomach churned, and the smell of the waffle and syrup she hadn’t finished seemed suddenly cloyingly, overpoweringly sweet. So she took her plate to the sink, ran water over it to rinse it into the garbage disposal.

She turned off the water, and just stood there, looking down at the chipped and worn white ceramic, as all of the little weirdnesses that she’d noticed about A.J. Gallagher suddenly made sense.

He talked to himself—or rather, to his hallucinations. She’d caught him often enough, but she’d brushed it off. He was quirky. A man that attractive, that funny and smart, couldn’t possibly be mentally ill.

Except he was.

“He first appeared to me,” A.J. said quietly from his seat at the table, “about two and a half weeks ago. He’s been following me around ever since. He’s the reason I came here. To Jubilation. He asked me to help him clear his name.”

“There’re no such things as ghosts,” Alison said.

“That’s what I used to think.”

She turned toward him, and God, he looked as gorgeous as he had in her shower, in her bed, with the light glinting off of his nicely sculpted body and too-handsome face. “You can see him?” she asked, her voice breaking slightly despite her efforts to not cry. “Right now?”

“I’m so sorry,” A.J. said, his voice thick with his regret. “I know I should have told you. And I meant to tell you before things went too far. I tried, but I didn’t try hard enough, because I just … I was selfish. I’ve never met anyone like you, and I couldn’t say no.”

She wiped her eyes, nodding. “You
should
have told me. You’re right, that was wrong. It was … deceitful and … very wrong, but … One thing at a time, all right? Just tell me. You see him. He’s here, right now?”

“Well, he was,” A.J. said, “but he stepped outside, because … Jamie,” he called, then looked over by the door. “He’s back,” he told Alison.

“By the door.” Where there was no one and nothing.

A.J. nodded. “Yeah.”

“Why can’t I see him?” she asked. “If he’s really there, tell him to let me see him, too.”

“He can hear you,” A.J. told her. “I don’t have to repeat … and …” He paused, as if he were listening to someone speak, then nodded and said, “It’s one of the rules. For returning. I guess there’re rules. If he’d chosen to return to a specific place, like his house, everyone who went in could conceivably see him, but he wouldn’t have speech. And he never particularly liked charades, so …” He cleared his throat. “He’d also be restricted in terms of his movement. By choosing to appear only to me, I can not only hear him, too, but he can go anywhere I can go. But no one else can see him. It’s a trade-off—
what?”

And God, that was freaky—watching him give his full attention to the emptiness beside the door, nodding slightly and then saying, “That’s right, that’s right.…”

He turned back to Alison, and he must’ve seen the expression of dismay on her face, because he apologized again. “I’m sorry. That must be bizarre. It must look … But the snake. Remember the snake? That was Jamie. And the odd electric shock that was kind of cold and hot at the same time …? That was Jamie, too. For some reason—he doesn’t know why—but when he comes into contact with living things, he gets that reaction.”

“The
snake
was Jamie …?” she asked. Oh, God …

“No,” A.J. said, laughing. “Jesus, no. Jamie
zapped
the snake. That was why it didn’t bite me. Jamie was there and he touched it, and it flipped out like that. You saw it. That wasn’t me, Alison. Was it you?”

She shook her head. She
had
seen the snake act strangely, but …

“It was also Jamie,” A.J. told her, so intently, so convinced, “who knew you were trapped in your bathroom. You were supposed to meet me, remember? But you didn’t show up, and I got worried and … He found you and he thought maybe you’d fallen and hit your head. You were lying on the floor in the shower. He didn’t see the snake and I didn’t either at first, but then when he did see it, he touched
it. He didn’t know it was going to react that way, but I was glad that it did. And he touched it again and again and … That electric shock we felt, here in your kitchen? That was him, too.”

Alison just shook her head. This was just too much.

“He’s going to touch you,” A.J. told her. “Jamie is. He’s right next to you and he’s going to put his hands on your shoulders and—”

“Oh, my God!” It was the same peculiar electric current that had gone through Alison that first time she’d kissed A.J. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant, except it was, because it was
weird
. “Don’t do that!” she told A.J., suddenly—for the first time—frightened. “I don’t know how you did that, but you
stop!”

“Back off!” A.J. stood up and he was so tall, so big that she quickly backed away, bumping into the wall between the kitchen and the hall.

He immediately sat back down. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I wasn’t talking to you, I was talking to Jamie—”

Her voice shook. “I think you better go.”

“Please,” he said, his hands carefully out on the table in front of him, as if that would help her to see he wasn’t a danger to her. “Jamie won’t do that again. I promise. I can see how … that was too much. Too soon.”

Except how did she know he
wasn’t
a danger, to her or to himself? She didn’t.

“Yeah,” A.J. was saying, but not to her. “Yes. That’s …” He turned to her. “In the living room there’s a bookshelf. There’s not a lot of books on it, but there’s a Bible.”

Alison was already shaking her head. “I’m not going to read the Bible with you, A.J. I want you to go.”

“I don’t want you to …” He exhaled hard, but then started over. “Alison, please. I can prove that he’s really here,” he implored her. “And if you want to know the truth, it’ll help me prove it to myself, as well. No more shocks—he won’t touch you and … I won’t touch you again either, okay?”

He sounded so lucid. So present and coherent. But she just didn’t know enough about this kind of mental illness. For
all she knew, this was normal. He’d be articulate and reasoned—until he wasn’t.

God, the last thing she wanted to do was get the crazy man angry. What she had to do was call for help, but of course, her cell phone was with her keys—at the bottom of her handbag, in her crushed tin can of a trailer.

But as if he knew what she was thinking, he added, quietly, “If you still don’t believe me after we do this, then … I’ll go.”

So Alison nodded.

“I’ll stay right here,” A.J. told her. “While you get, you know, the Bible.”

She backed away, turning on the lights in the living room, listening for him to make any noise—to push back the chair—although what she would do if he did, she had no clue.

And there in the bookcase that she’d all but ignored because it held mostly knick-knacks and tchotchkes from tourist destinations such as the Grand Canyon, Mount Rushmore, and Wall, South Dakota, was a cheap, faux-leather-bound Bible.

She took it from the shelf—it was covered with dust—and brought it back into the hall, where she could see A.J. still sitting at the kitchen table.

Looking so normal.

“I know you said you’ve been to a doctor,” she said, unable to keep from asking, “but have you seen a psychiatrist?”

“No,” he said. “My, um, mother’s been pushing for that.”

“Your mother, the
doctor
, knows that …”

“I see Jamie,” he finished for her. “Yeah. She’s not convinced he’s real either, even though he helped her find an old oil tank that was buried in her backyard—which used to be Jamie and Melody’s backyard.”

A.J.’s mother lived in the same house that Jamie and Melody had shared. Supposedly shared. Alison shook her head, not allowing herself to be distracted. “What does your mother think about …?” she asked. “You know …”

“What does she think is wrong with me?” A.J. asked, and she nodded. “She thinks it’s PTSD-related.”

“Is it possible,” Alison said carefully, “that she’s right?”

He smiled. “Over the past few weeks, I’ve learned that just about anything is possible, so … Yeah.” He looked away from her, again as if he were listening to someone speak. “That could do it,” he said, then turned back to Alison. “There are no mirrors behind you, right?” he asked.

“Mirrors?” she said, turning to look. She was in the hall that led to the bathroom and the bedroom. “No. Why?” She looked back at A.J.

“Open the book,” A.J. said, “and put your finger to the first verse you see.”

Alison looked at him. He was sitting on the other side of the kitchen, at least ten feet away from her. There was no way he could read the tiny print of the Bible from where he was. Still, when she opened it, as more dust fell from its cover and onionskin-thin pages, she kept it carefully angled away from him. She moved closer to the hall light, because the print was so small,
she
was going to have trouble reading it from where
she
was.

Her finger fell on what looked like some kind of poem.

And across the room, A.J. said aloud,
“Asleep on my bed, night after night, I dreamed of the one I love—”

Alison slammed the book shut and spun around. There was no one behind her, no mirrors, nothing. She spun back and stared at A.J. How had he done that?

“That was the Bible?” he asked, pushing his hair out of his face. “What the heck
was
that?”

“I don’t know,” Alison said. It had to be some kind of trick. The book was rigged somehow, made to fall to exactly that page. He’d planted it there. Made it appear to be dusty. And maybe he could tell from about where her finger was, at which verse she was looking.

“It was Song of Songs,” A.J. said. “At least that’s what Jamie says. I’m gathering from your reaction that I got it right?”

Alison nodded.

And A.J. laughed. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “I just might not be crazy. Go on. Try it again.”

She backed up even more, so that she was all the way at
the end of the hall, against the plain wooden door of a closet. She couldn’t see A.J. from here, and he couldn’t see her. Still, when she opened the book she held it very close to her chest. She put her finger down.

“Proverbs 12, verse 19.
A lie has a short life, but truth lives on forever,”
A.J. recited the words that were printed just above her finger, raising his voice so she could hear him clearly from the kitchen.

She snapped the book shut and went back toward him. “How are you doing this? How does it work?”

“I’m right again?” he asked. “Alison, don’t you get it? This is
great
. Jamie’s
real.”

“Is there something—some kind of sensor hidden in this Bible?” she asked. “Or … a camera, in the hall light fixture …?”

“No hidden cameras,” A.J. told her. He was grinning—
grinning
. Like this was the best night of his life. “No tricks. Just a ghost. Jamie stands beside you and reads aloud the words that you point to. Of course, you can’t hear him, but
I
can and—”

“No,” Alison said, tossing the book onto the table, flooded with anger and grief and terrible, crushing disappointment. “You take that with you and you get the hell out of here. You think this is
funny?”

“No,” he said, his smile wiped from his face. “I’m sorry, I’m …”

“I’m sorry, too,” she said. “But you said that you’d go, if I did what you wanted and … I did. So now
go.”
There was a landline here in the kitchen, inches from where she was standing, but she didn’t have the phone numbers for security—or even for Hugh. Those were all programmed into her cell. She wiped her eyes with hands that were shaking and her voice shook again, too, as she went for the bluff, picking up the kitchen phone. “Don’t make me call security.”

He looked crushed—like she was the one who’d broken his heart, instead of the other way around.

“Go,” she said again.
“Now
, A.J.”

“I’m sorry,” he whispered again, and he picked up his
boots and his jeans and his jacket, and went out the door, closing it gently behind him.

It was only then, after Alison had put on the night lock and she was as secure as she could possibly be, that she let herself cry.

“You know, you’re not the first ghost I’ve ever seen,” A.J. said to me, as we sat in his truck, just waiting for the sun to come up.

I’d followed him out of Alison’s after that total fiasco. He’d stopped on the porch and pulled on his jeans and boots in silence, after warning me, “Don’t say a goddamn word.” I figured it was wise to keep my thoughts to myself as he neatly folded that towel and left it carefully hanging over her front railing.

He didn’t tell me to go away, so I stayed nearby as he stomped over to his truck and climbed inside. I resisted the urge to tell him that sitting around in wet jeans was not the best way to remain chafe-free. Instead, I just sat beside him as he put his head back and closed his eyes and pretended to sleep.

But then, about an hour after we got into the truck, he surprised me by saying that. That I wasn’t the first ghost he’d seen.

“Is that right?” I said, since he’d started the conversation.

“Yeah,” he said. “I was in San Francisco. A little over ten years ago. I was drunk off my ass. Completely shitfaced.”