by Jordan Loveland
(This story contains mentions of murder and suicide.)
“What the hell,” Aria demands, “this is my sister?” She falters, face flush with anger and bottom lip trembling. “How do you know her?”
Crumpled where her hand holds tightly to the page, the drawing isn’t one of my most accurate, but the similarities between their two faces shock me and I wonder how I never connected the dots. The same curve of the brow, the same high cheekbones, and the same bow above the lips. If it weren’t for the obvious disparity of age, the two faces might have been twins.
So, how to explain that the woman on the page—her sister—is a ghost I’ve been meeting under the cover of darkness in this vast forest; that there are other spirits gathering under its canopy for midnight parties.
In my hesitance she says, “Fuck this,” and turns on her heel, striding out the front door.
Her worn-in, dirt-crusted hiking boots land on the hardwood floor like a gavel striking a damning verdict. It echoes like thunder, rumbling through the house. Pete and Nujal, her dogs, stand at attention, eyeing me warily in Aria’s absence. Both assess the situation, uneasy at the sudden turn of mood. I’m lucky they haven’t pulled me to the floor. They are more devoted to Aria than gravity is to Earth. The dogs are large—a good eighty plus—but Nujal, a bloodhound named for the hunt, is bigger. She’s old, her face sagging, and clouds are blooming in her amber eyes, but her nose is keen. The younger one is a rescued Redbone Coonhound who is spry and eager to please.
“I couldn’t pass him up,” Aria had said, “He belonged with me—we had a spiritual connection. Named him Pete, because his tail thumps out a good beat.”
I hadn’t gotten the reference. “Who?”
“DePoe. Are you kidding me?” Her dark eyes grew wide. She turned to me fully and asked, “Do you not know of Peter Depoe?”
The slam of the screen frame jolts me back to the present. Without donning shoes or a coat, I rush outside, hoping to catch Aria before she revs up her truck’s engine and is gone for good. Not that she’d abandon her hounds, but she could leave me. Unsure of what to say, I forge on, certain that necessity will join truth and eloquence.
Outside a fall storm rages, having festered off the West coast before migrating inland to get caught at the peaks of the Olympics. The muddy driveway squishes between my toes, darkening my feet. Aria’s red Chevy is tucked under a wide maple tree with large, drooping leaves that hang heavy with water.
I shout, “Aria!”
The dogs followed me outside, curious and sniffing for clues. Aria’s not lingering in the open, allowing herself to get soaked to the bone. Pete stands on his hind legs, tail wagging, peering through the truck window. I approach, knocking gently on the glass. Inside, Aria shoots me a glare. The doors are locked—the knobby little locks pushed down—but the engine is off. She’s distorted by rivulets of rain, but her anger and confusion are as clear as bullets to the chest.
Silently, for she won’t hear my plea through the truck or the cacophony of rain, I ask permission to enter her space. She rolls her eyes but unlocks the doors. The light click beneath my palms is enough encouragement to have me plodding around the truck and hauling my waterlogged body into the cab. Pete, nimble and obstinate, leaps onto my lap before I close the door. He doesn’t care about his four large, muddy paws or the heaviness of his landing. Nujal has gone back to the porch, unwilling to shimmy beneath the truck to stay dry.
“Well?” Aria’s chest rises and falls in a too-controlled manner.
I still haven’t found a way to explain all of this. Whenever I cast my mind over the last few months, none of it seems real. The sketch is in her hands.
Aria sighs deeply. “You know, Merril, this whole ‘no answers’ thing isn’t doing much to convince me you aren’t a serial killer.” She slides me a sideways scowl. “In fact, it’s doing the opposite. Tell me how you know—knew my sister,” she corrects herself, “or by the spirits, I’ll bury you so deep in the rainforest that they will never find you.”
“They is you,” I say.
“Yes,” she confirms, “and I’ll lead my search hounds in all the wrong directions. Get talking.”
Pete is nudging her hand, asking for attention and offering solace. Aria isn’t one to pass on petting a dog, so she pats his head and scratches behind one of his long, red ears. Half of the hound is settled across my lap, the dampness between us warming with our proximity. Beyond our wet stench, the cab smells of fresh cedar.
Breathing in for a steadying moment, I say, “I never met your sister in the flesh.”
Shaking her head, she says, “That doesn’t make sense.”
She flattens out the paper snowball in her hand. Over Pete’s whine of protest, I can hear the crackles of it unbecoming, being made smooth again.
“This isn’t,” Aria starts, a hand tenderly framing the drawn face, “this isn’t one of the photos we used.”
“How do you mean?”
“There were only a few photos shared—for the posters and notices—when she went missing.”
She stares at me quizzically, her thick brows pulling together.
“I didn’t realize you had a sister,” I confess.
“She’s dead, my younger sister.”
The words fall with a dull, factual weight. Aria’s face shutters into a long-practiced mask; an impenetrable perimeter. She won’t look this way.
Sitting in the cab lends a compound sense of privacy. Painful secrets passed in the dome of a parked vehicle seem secure. It’s as true for rainstorms with their deafening shield of a quadrillion water drops slamming into Earth. Our location is additionally isolated. There is not a town for miles, not a grocer for hours, and a scant chance of interruption,
She starts petting Pete and his tail wags, thudding against the door. I turn my face to avoid a few damp blows that land near my eye. Around us, the rain plays a concerto of pings, pangs, and plunks on the metal skin of the Chevy.
“We lost her eleven years ago,” Aria begins. “She was seventeen; her name is Martha, but we all called her-”
“Marty.”
“Yeah…,” she trails off. “How do you know that?”
I shrug. “We’ve talked, She’s precocious. Chatty—in a friendly way.”
“When was this? What else did she say?”
“Recently?” I respond, without thinking.
“Recently?” Aria reiterates. There’s an excitement in her tone that I need to trim before it sprouts leaves and grows into something like hope.
“She’s alive? You speak with her? Where-”
“No,” I say shortly, “and yes, but mainly no.”
Her brow crinkles. “I don’t get it.”
“When I moved here, I started seeing things in the woods. Ghosts and-” I gesture with my free hand, “I thought I was losing it, but what I heard and what I found lined up.”
“Like what?”
“There’s this boy, I thought he died young. But no—local archives have primary school photos as far back as the 1910s.”
“You recognized a student?”
I nod. “Yeah. Son of a lumberjack and a Good Time Girl turned environmentalist. From what they’ve claimed, land near their home was being bought up and clear cut. It was horrifying. Formative. There are others, too, more ghosts.”
She asks, “Like who?”
“A whole family from way back,” I say, “not sure what did them in.”
Aria adds, “Local legend says some homesteaders starved one winter after paying for supplies that never arrived; that it’s still haunted.”
“Can confirm,” I say. “There’s another—a soldier who died in WWII. Took me forever to figure out who they were.”
Skepticism leaks into her voice as she says, “They wouldn’t just tell you?”
“No. It’s all nicknames and memories—and people forget the details. All of them avoid the subject of their death as much as they can.”
“Gee, I wonder why.”
“Right,” I say. The silence is oppressive and in it the void becomes terrifying. I keep talking. “It depends on what they’re focusing on at that moment. But for this one, for the longest time they appeared only as one thing-”
“They change? How do you know these aren’t mischievous spirits pranking you?” She laughs, a crackling release of tension like bolts of lightning. “You’re being duped; you don’t even know! You come out here, hole up in the woods, get stoned, and hope for what? Some spiritual connection? Revelations in the wilderness?”
I shrug. Coming here had been as unexpected as everything thereafter.
Her chuckle rumbles like thunder. She says, “You don’t even know.”
Pete’s gotten up, wanting to join the conversation. He’s off my lap and sits like a cedar between us. He might as well be the width of that record tree down the highway. The heat running off his body leaks into the cab. The vacated spot in my lap cools rapidly. I’m noticing the rain that soaks my soft t-shirt, the drops of water that tickle while they trickle down my scalp, and the muddy clumps of dirt in my lap.
“My friend killed himself last spring. Lost a war he’d been fighting since childhood. Not sure about his family, but I inherited the cabin. That’s why I’m here, though I’m not sure what to do with myself. It’s true.”
Aria’s scowl softens at my confession. She leans back into the seat and says, “I think I know who you’re talking about. Shot himself,” and she nods past the cabin, “out there. Nujal sniffed out the body. He’d been gone for a while.”
“Yeah,” I say, “no open casket, that’s for sure.”
“Thought you bought the place discounted,” she whispers, and then neither of us says anything. It doesn’t last. She says, “Tell me more about these ghostly encounters that might be shape-shifters.”
“I believe them,” I say, “or in them.”
“You haven’t seen your friend?”
I shake my head.
“Your soldier ghost, then,” she supplies.
My mind stirs again, enchanted; the way I’ve been getting whenever haunted by these ghosts. “It’s not uncommon for the ghosts to change,” I say, and flounder for a way to describe this spectral event, “to fluctuate around stages of their lives. This one, she’s always done up—very mid-century—ready to go dancing.”
“I thought they were a soldier.”
“She was,” I say, “that’s how she died. She told me about it. One moment, a marvelous lady—then this pale, dying soldier.” I envision the spirit. It was like she hung in the dense, chilly air. “She was gone for a while, but she came back and told me about her spouse, a childhood friend she married before deployment.”
“This spouse still alive?”
“Barely,” I snort. “We’ve met. No prodding necessary, she told me all about her first spouse and how they would sneak out of town for nights of dancing.”
I lean toward Aria, summoning the conspiratorial glee of that frail old woman: “Dressed as women, we were.”
We break into smiles. I’m close enough that Pete’s sniffing my face, reaching his fat tongue out to lick my chin. Backing away, I can see Aria is getting swept into this spell of crazy impossibility.
“Did my sister tell you who-”
“No.” This is hard to say, worse to hear, and it won’t give Aria the peace of mind she wants or the justice either one deserves. “Just that he’s a white out-of-towner—someone she’d never seen before.”
“Fuck!” she exclaims, slamming a palm on the wheel, making the horn bark.
This startles Pete, and I see Nujal standing at attention through the back window.
Aria continues, “When they started looking—weeks after the fact—they never found a trace. Nothing.”
“Weeks?” I ask, “Why didn’t they begin sooner? The first couple of days are crucial! After that…”
She’s giving me a flat stare; one that I’ve seen throughout our acquaintance. I’ve labeled it ‘Dumb White Boy: knows nothing.’
“What? What am I missing?”
Rolling her eyes, she explains, “You know, indigenous women are murdered at a rate greater than ten times the national average for, like, the whole-ass continent?”
“Well, I do now,” I say, horrified.
Aria scoffs. “No one puts the resources into investigating. They’d say we’re all careless runaways if they could—miscreants not wanting to be found.”
Her gaze is lost somewhere beyond the rainwater washing waves down the windshield.
“Let’s go into the forest,” she says.
She and Pete pop out of the truck and head towards a path that sneaks around the rickety log cabin, winding along a covered space built for cords of chopped wood. The stash of firewood, the main heat source in this cabin, is dangerously low. I swing out of the truck and follow Aria deep into the darkening forest.
“This is how people get lost,” she’d normally spout, “or mauled. Then we’re out here, sniffing for days.”
She’s so cautious and practical that it’s easy to venture into this foggy abyss, to follow behind her, even if it’s counter to her usual judgement. I’ve lived here for months; I’ve seen these trails in nearly every season. It’s her warning echoing in my head: ‘That doesn’t change what you don’t know, confidence is dangerous, and these woods are wilder than tourists would like to think.’ But Nujal is at my side and she leads us through rain as thick as curtains.
Aria and Pete are sheltered beneath a towering fir. The music of the rain is a new melody under this tree. The air is fresh and moist with life. Tucked on tree limbs and stones, moss unfurls, expanding like sponges to soak in this opportunity. The dogs shake and sit.
Breaking the meditative silence, Aria says, “I wish it was clear to me what happened, but I don’t think I’ll ever know.”
Aria mourns her sister like a phantom limb. Thoughts of Marty and my dead best friend swirl in my mind like a brewing monsoon. Ultimately, we all die alone but what a tragedy it must be to face the cold barrel of death feeling alone.
“You told me once,” I say, “that the wilderness didn’t scare you. Why?”
Aria steps into an opening in the dense canopy. The sky weeps, its tears saturating the land, providing nourishment under a somber gray. We are both soaked to the bone, quivering in the chill, and lifting our faces to the cloud-quilted sky. There’s a numinous quality to this moment, as if billions of mycelial connections bind us, allowing our grief to be shared, the burden lessened in our union.
“It feels natural,” she says, “like we’re not supposed to be anywhere else.”