Chapter 1

CHAPTER 1
I’m raking dead leaves in my front yard when a figure with a leather briefcase and a crooked smile appears on the sidewalk.

“Talitha Velkwood?” he asks, as if it’s a genuine question, as if he doesn’t already know exactly who I am.

I barely look up at him. “You’re here to talk about ghosts, right?”

He offers to buy me a cup of coffee at the shop across the street, and with a stack of bills marked Past Due stuffed in my mailbox, I’m in no position to turn anyone down.

We sit at a corner table next to a smudged window, fidgeting in our seats.

“Thank you for meeting with me,” he says at last, and flashes me that crooked smile again. Up close, he’s younger than I expect, maybe even a few years younger than me. These days, it seems everybody’s younger than me. He tells me his name is Jack, and on reflex, I introduce myself, even though we’ve already been over this. He knows my name, knows everything about me. The whole world does. When you survive a tragedy like mine, privacy is suddenly a luxury you can’t afford.

“You from the government?” I ask, as I grip my coffee cup in both hands, the heat warming my palms.

He shakes his head. “Foxwell Enterprises,” he says, as though that’s supposed to mean something to me.

I sit back and stare at him, wondering how long this will take. Those leaves aren’t going to rake themselves.

“Foxwell’s a nonprofit,” he clarifies. “We’re interested in the Velkwood Vicinity.”

I scoff, turning toward the window. “You and everyone else.”

The Velkwood Vicinity. I’ve always thought how it’s a bit of a misnomer since it’s not much of a vicinity, not much of anything. It’s just a single street, one little block, eight houses in total. A blink-and-miss-it sort of subdivision, smack-dab in the middle of the suburbs.

Or at least it was blink-and-miss-it until something happened, something the world has spent years trying to unravel. A cosmic anomaly, a few people say. Proof of life after death, according to others. Either way, it went from a nothing neighborhood to a literal nothing—you can barely see it now, even when you’re looking right at it. Day and night, it wavers in between, there and not there, like some kind of ghoulish Brigadoon.

And because we lived there, me and my mom and my little sister Sophie, it’s named after us.

“Why couldn’t you choose the Owens or the Spencers down the road?” I asked at the time, but it made sense in its own morbid way. We were the first ones to build a house on the allotment, way back in ’88 when Aqua Net and indoor shopping malls were the order of the day, and ghosts were the furthest thing from our minds. That meant the street was christened with our last name. So when reality split in two, and there was suddenly no more neighborhood, only the misty outline where one used to be, the zone ended up named for us, too.

“I’ve got to tell you,” Jack says, leaning forward, cappuccino machines hissing pleasantly in the background. “I’ve been studying Velkwood Street for years. Since back when I was still in high school. So this is a real honor to finally meet you.”

He’s so earnest when he says it that I almost laugh in his face.

I take another sip of coffee instead. “It’s been a while since anyone asked me about this.”

No matter where I moved, I used to get guys like him sniffing around at least once a month. Cut-rate journalists and eager scientists and more than my fair share of G-men, all of them with lots of questions and very few answers. They expected me to fill in the blanks, like the neighborhood was just a riddle waiting to be solved, and I was their own personal cipher.

But that was a long time ago. It’s been twenty years now since it happened, and even ghosts have got a shelf life. Everybody tried to study the phenomenon, tried to get inside and see what had really happened, but the neighborhood would have none of that.

So the government did the next best thing. They blocked it off with pylons like it was a sinkhole and called it a day. Until this afternoon, I thought everyone had abandoned the street.

But Jack’s apparently not the type to walk away.

“We just got a grant,” he says, a flinty look in his eyes. “For research. You see, I’ve got a theory.”

And with that, he starts in, expounding on his four-part hypothesis. I stare into my coffee cup and wish I was someone else. They all used to have a spiel like this one, everyone so cocksure they knew why the neighborhood vanished off the map, even though they never seemed to be able to prove it.

“I’ve got pictures,” Jack says, and fumbles in his briefcase. “We sent in a drone. It didn’t last long inside. They always break down after a few minutes, but we managed to get these.”

He slides a small stack of eight-by-tens across the table to me. They’re the same size as acting headshots, as though the neighborhood is an ingenue auditioning for a movie role.

My head down, I thumb through the images, already braced for disappointment. People have tried taking pictures before, but they never come up with anything. And these ones are business as usual—a rusted-out mailbox, a sinuous street draped in shadow, a blur that could be anything at all—until I get to the last one.

It’s a grainy photo of a dark gray split-level with red trim, and I recognize it in an instant. That’s my house. Or at least it was my house back when things like deeds and property taxes and family dinners actually mattered.

I count the windows in the front. The third one over, the one that belonged to my little sister, Sophie. Even from here, I can tell her night-light is on. I always made sure of it. Every evening before bed, I’d tuck her in and flip the tiny switch. Sophie didn’t like the dark. She always said it was coming for her.

“Don’t go,” she’d say, holding tight to her plastic pony named Sam.

I’d just laugh and kiss her forehead. “You know I’ll be here in the morning,” I promised her. “I’ll always come back for you.”

“Please don’t forget,” she’d tell me, her face half-hidden beneath her bedsheet. “Because I’ll be waiting, Talitha.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I whisper and press my fingertips into her window on the photograph, as though I can still feel her there.

Velkwood Street isn’t your garden-variety haunting. There are no spectral whispers, no phantoms in chains, at least none that we’ve seen. Instead, it’s the houses and the sidewalk that are ghosts, death leached into the soil, into everything. Or at least that’s the official story.

“Are they all dead?” I asked twenty years ago when the government types sat me down at a long, empty table in a long, empty room. But nobody could give me a straight answer. They couldn’t tell me who was even still in there. Ghosts aren’t keen on roll call, and without a clear aerial view or an eyewitness, it was all guesswork. Sophie might still be inside, haunting her own life. My eight-year-old baby sister, never allowed to grow up. My mom might still be there too, along with everyone else we knew from the neighborhood.

Or maybe they’re not. Maybe they’ve been dead for decades, vanished in whatever disaster turned the street into a ghost in the first place. Nobody knows for sure. That’s the problem.

Only I decided long ago what I think: they’re gone, plain and simple. After all, ghosts are rarely subtle. If they were still around, somebody would have seen them by now, lingering at the edges of a blurry photo or calling out from within the confines of the street, their ethereal voices ringing out into the night like an eternal curse. But that’s never happened, not once, not in twenty years. The only thing left now is the illusion of that neighborhood. A living memory, a vague mirage.

I pass the pictures back to Jack, all except for the shot of my house.

“Can I keep this one?” I ask, holding it close.

He gives me a half smile. “If you’d like,” he says, and blushes a little. You can tell he doesn’t usually do this, doesn’t make chitchat with strangers, doesn’t talk much at all. I know what that’s like, the way life sneaks up on you. The way you end up alone, one day at a time.

Of course, I’m only assuming he’s alone. Maybe I’ve been on my own for so long that I just figure everyone else is too.

We sit together, the coffee shop bustling all around us, and I hold my breath, waiting for it. For what he’s about to do next. What they always do.

“You could help me,” he says finally, and I already know where this is going. Or rather, where he wants me to go.

“No,” I say, before he can even ask.

I clamber to my feet, my head gone gauzy, because I hate this. The way my past is a spectacle to people, a sideshow curiosity. Somewhere they always want to drag me back to.

I start to move for the door, but Jack is suddenly standing too, something in his face gone frantic.

“Please.” He leans closer, his hand on my arm, his touch warm. I should pull away, but I don’t. Instead, I ease back into my seat, my eyes on him.

“Why now?” I ask. “After all this time, why would I ever want to go back there?”

“Because,” he says, “it would mean so much to us. To everyone. This grant is a real opportunity.”

A real opportunity. What a joke. If it were a real opportunity, then they could get somebody else for the job.

“Why don’t you ask Brett Hadley?” I say, and for a moment, it takes my breath away. I haven’t spoken her name aloud to anyone in years. My once-upon-a-time best friend, someone who’s less than a stranger to me now.

Jack shakes his head. “Brett already said no. The same with Grace Spencer. You’re our last chance.”

It’s been a long time since anyone mentioned the three of us together. Me and Brett and Grace. We were the girls who got out, the last ones to escape the neighborhood. We all returned to college on a Sunday night, and the street was gone by Monday morning. Nobody except us called that a coincidence.

I rock back and forth in my seat, my coffee cup gone cold. “There’s no reason to return,” I say. “Nobody’s left over there.”

“Maybe not.” Jack goes quiet, as if genuinely considering this, the pointlessness of it all. “But if that’s true, it couldn’t hurt, right?”

He watches me across the table, his gaze sliding slowly over me in a way I like more than I should. He wants me to be thinking about his proposition, about me returning to my old neighborhood, but here I am with my free cup of coffee, thinking of a different proposition altogether. Me and him and whatever fleabag motel room his nonprofit could afford. A distraction from my day, from my life. He’s cute enough, and a little desperate too, that spark of hopefulness brimming in his eyes.

I smile at him, the first time I’ve smiled all day, maybe all week. He grins back, blushing again. I’m practically a celebrity to him, some girl he’s studied for years, and I think how easy this would be. I probably wouldn’t even have to ask the question before he’d be more than eager to answer.

I start to say something to him, maybe something I’ll regret, but that’s when I hear her voice in my head, echoing like she never went away at all.

You’re not a very nice girl, are you?

My mother, her words like a switchblade in my back. I remember when she said that to me, the two of us alone in the rec room, the rage boiling in her eyes, everything about her looking too disappointed to bear. That was me, the daughter who was only good at not being good enough. And hell, she might have been right. I’m probably not very nice, not the right kind of girl. But if you look at the others in my neighborhood, some of them never got to leave. They’re less than air now, less than nothing. So maybe being a nice girl doesn’t have the perks everyone tells you it does.

But I’ll try to be a nice girl today. I’ll try to make my mother proud, even though she’s probably dead and would probably be ashamed of me either way.

I finish off the last of my coffee. “I need to get back.”

I head out the door, but Jack follows me onto the sidewalk, the November air crisp and unforgiving. “We could pay you,” he says, and I can’t help but turn back, my heart as empty as my bank account.

“How much?” I ask.

“Five thousand.”

“That’s it?” I curl up my nose. “One of those sleazy paranormal reality shows could pay me twice that.”

“I told you we’re a charity,” he says, his voice wavering, because he already knows he’s losing this fight. I’m already walking away. “Plus, we can get the permits. Those reality shows can’t.”

He’s right about that. You can’t visit the Velkwood Vicinity without approval, and most of the time, you can’t visit even then. The area isn’t very welcoming to visitors, and I don’t just mean the government. The land doesn’t let you in. You can’t get close, even if you try.

Or at least most people can’t get close. That’s why Jack is here talking to me.

“I already told you,” I say, still gripping the picture of my house. “There’s nobody left in there.”

“That’s all right,” he says. “You’d get the money either way.”

“And what if it’s not safe?” I inspect the cracks in the sidewalk, the way the dead grass sprouts up in the negative space. “Almost nobody’s been inside since it happened.”

Almost nobody. We both know someone has.

“But you could make it inside,” he says. “I’m sure of it. The street would let you in.”

My eyes flick up at him. “But would it let me out?”

Maybe that hasn’t occurred to him. Or maybe it has. A risk is always easier to take when it doesn’t belong to you.

I start down the sidewalk again but glance back suddenly. “You knew me by sight,” I say. “You’ve seen my picture before?”

He blushes again, like a guilty child. “I’ve seen a few of them.”

I can already guess which ones. The smiley yearbook portrait taken back when I didn’t know any better, and the shell-shocked aftermath photos when I did, and a smattering of tabloid snapshots from over the years—Talitha Velkwood graduates college! Talitha Velkwood fails at a series of dead-end jobs! Talitha Velkwood takes out the garbage at her shitty rental house where she’ll probably die before age fifty and have her face eaten off by her neighbor’s cat!

Fortunately, the tabloids have more or less given up on me now. A small mercy. The one thing I don’t want is anyone’s pity.

But Jack’s not looking at me like he pities me. He’s looking at me like an opportunity. He wants me to say yes, and he wants it very badly. One word from me could justify years of fastidious research and fastidious obsession and enough grant money that could pay the bills for months. His and mine.

I breathe deep, the words tumbling out before I can stop myself. “Let me think about it.”

With a grin, Jack gives me his business card. Then he turns, briefcase in hand, and walks away. Because everyone can walk away from this except me.

I never finish raking the leaves. I never finish anything. It gets dark early, and inside my empty house, I wait out the rest of the evening. TV tray, TV dinner, TV shows until my eyes go numb. This is my life, the remnants of it anyhow.

But now of course I’m thinking about my other life, the one I left behind. The one that left me behind. All the things I’ve tried to forget flashing through my head, memories tucked away like a yellowed photo in a family album.

Like the last time I visited the neighborhood. It was two months after everything happened. I went at midnight, dodging the meager patrol, edging toward the precipice where reality ended and something else began.

The news reports always said not to get too close. They said it would make your head hum and your nose bleed and your skin tighten on your bones until you couldn’t bear it any longer. Until it felt like you were being sliced apart from the inside out, your guts carved up like prosciutto. That’s why they’ve never needed a chain-link fence around the neighborhood. Nobody can trespass even if they want to.

Except I could. With my entire body quivering, I stood there at the edge of the perimeter, staring down the street that used to be mine. Somehow, I knew I could go whatever way I pleased—back into the real world or back into their world. It felt like I had a choice then.

So I made that choice. I ran far from the memory, far from home, and I never went back. I told myself it would be better that way.

But now all these years later, I have to wonder what’s really better about this. I’m forty years old and none the wiser for it. I’m living in a house that isn’t my own, still saddled with student loans from two decades ago and a bevy of ghosts even older than that. There’s no escaping the past. It’s everywhere. It’s unrelenting.

I curl up in bed, still holding the grainy picture of my old street. This is the closest I’ve been in a long time, closer than I ever thought I’d be again. Most people don’t know what this is like. They don’t know how it feels to know you’ll never go home again.

Except there’s someone else who does understand. I grab my phone and scroll through my contacts until I see her. Brett. I stare at her name, at the gentle curve of the letters, debating if I should bother her. We’re not friends anymore, that’s for sure, though we still try to put on the pretense. Every year, she sends me a Christmas card, and I send her one, and that’s about it. I’m not even positive this is still her number until I dial it and she picks up, that familiar voice breathless and earthy on the other end.

“Talitha.” She says my name like it’s a sermon, like something to cherish, and I wonder for a moment why we don’t talk much these days.

“Hi, Brett,” I say, and then seize up, already knowing what I should do next. I should try to make chitchat. Ask her about her day, her job, herself. That’s the right thing to do, the thing a real friend would do. I blurt out something else instead. “Did that guy from the nonprofit come and see you?”

She hesitates. “You mean Jack? The cute one?”

I roll over in bed, still holding the picture, still holding the past. “That’s him.”

“He stopped by last week,” she says, and I imagine her running her fingers through her long hair, bored with the very thought of boys. “I turned him down.”

“You must have wondered if he’d come to me next.”

“I did wonder that. I also wondered if he was your type.” A long pause before she asks, “Did you sleep with him?”

“No,” I say and snap my tongue, pretending the notion never crossed my mind.

Even through the phone, I can tell she doesn’t believe me. “So,” she says, “are you going to take him up on his offer?”

I scoff. “Of course not.”

“Then why are you calling me?” The question is all steel and defiance. Brett, the only one who really knew me back then. The only one who knows me now.

“Maybe I just wanted to hear your voice,” I say.

“That’s not it.” She lets out a defeated laugh. “You’d never call me for that.”

Shame washes over me, and we don’t say anything for a long time.

“I’m not going back,” I say, and I’m not sure if I’m trying to convince her or me. “We were dying to get out of that neighborhood, remember?”

“You know I remember,” she says, her voice sharp as nails, and instantly, I realize the conversation is over.

“Good talking to you, Brett.”

“You too, Talitha.”

The line clicks, and regret oozes through me. I want to call her back. I want to try again. Ask her about her day, ask her anything. If nothing else, now I remember why we don’t talk more. Because it always turns out this way.

We used to do everything together, the three of us on Velkwood Street. Now Brett and I barely speak to each other, and neither of us ever talks to Grace. That’s because she won’t talk to us. Not for years, not since she went back to the neighborhood. Grace is the only one who ever made it past the perimeter, and she lasted no more than a night. Longer than anybody else, but too long for comfort. Ten minutes to sunrise, she wandered out, mumbling and barefoot, refusing to speak a word about what she saw over there. Maybe even she doesn’t know. Maybe there isn’t a word for it yet. All that matters now is that she moved away and locked herself up in a little blue shotgun house on the other side of the state. She’s been a shut-in ever since.

I don’t want to end up like her. I don’t want to end up worse than I am now.

My hands shaking, I look again at the picture of my house, holding it up to the light this time, squinting at the third window from the left. There’s a blur I didn’t notice before. A shadow almost too slight to see.

Then my heart holds tight in my chest as I realize it’s not a shadow at all.

I dart across the room, fumbling through my purse for Jack’s business card. It’s past midnight, but he answers on the first ring.

“Talitha? Are you all right?”

“I’ll go back,” I wheeze, still clutching the picture, still staring at that upstairs window.

Right into my little sister’s wide and vacant eyes.