Page 29 of Haunt Me

He climbed out of the truck.

I followed, and that’s when I understood, for the first time, that following might not be the right word for what I was actually doing.

I didn’t walk across the parking lot behind him. I didn’t feel gravel, didn’t feel the cold that made him hunch his shoulders against it. One moment I was in the passenger seat watching him cross toward the motel office, and the next I was simply inside the room he hadn’t opened yet, standing near a bed that hadn’t been slept on, in a space I had no memory of entering.

Turning in place, I tried to understand it. The door was still closed. I hadn’t passed through the wall, hadn’t felt any resistance or absence of it. I’d just been in the truck, and then I was here, the way a thought arrives fully formed instead of arriving in pieces.

I didn’t know the rules yet. But that was the first time I understood, really understood, that whatever I’d become didn’t move through the world the way I used to. Distance didn’t apply to me the way it applied to Samuel. I instinctively stepped around furniture as if my body still remembered what it meant to bruise. I could speak, scream, and cry without producing a sound anyone living could hear.

But I couldn’t touch him. That was the only rule that mattered.

A key card beeped outside. The door opened, and Samuel stepped through it like a man walking in a stranger’s life instead of his own. He dropped his keys on the scarred dresser, then sat on the edge of the bed without taking off his shoes. Leaning forward, he rested his elbows on his knees and dropped his head. For a while, he didn’t move at all. The television remained dark, and the only light in the room came from the lamp beside the bed, staining everything a dull yellow.

I lowered myself in front of him.

“Look at me.” His eyes stayed fixed on the carpet. “Samuel, please.”

I reached for his face. My hand disappeared into the rough shadow along his jaw. Even knowing what would happen did nothing to soften the hurt of it.

He inhaled sharply.

For one hopeful second, I thought he’d felt me. Then he stood and left the room. I followed without understanding how.

The parking lot was nearly empty. Samuel crossed to the convenience store beside the motel and returned several minutes later carrying a brown paper bag. I saw the shape of the bottle before he pulled it out.

“No.”

He closed the door behind him and twisted off the cap.

“Sam, don’t.”

The first swallow made him wince. The second didn’t.

I grabbed for the bottle, wrapping both hands around glass I couldn’t feel, but my fingers slipped through it just as they had slipped through him.

He drank again.

I shoved at his arm.

Nothing.

“Please.”

He kept drinking until some of the rigid control left his shoulders, then sat back on the bed and closed his eyes.

I knew what he was doing.

Samuel had never been a man who drank to excess. He drank occasionally with his brothers, one beer stretched across an evening because he liked having something in his hand more than he cared about what was inside it.

This was different. He wasn’t trying to relax. He was trying to disappear.

I sat beside him even though the mattress didn’t shift beneath my weight. When he leaned forward, I moved with him, placing my hand against his back out of habit and desperation.

“Come home,” I whispered. “You don’t have to go back to the cabin. Go to Knox. Go to Dad. Go anywhere people know your name.”

His head lowered farther.

I tried to wrap my arms around him, but there was nothing to hold. No warmth beneath my cheek. No heartbeat against my chest. I could surround him and still leave him completely alone.