Ghost Trippin' by Cherie Claire

Author:Cherie Claire [Claire, Cherie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Happy Gris Gris Publishing
Published: 2019-02-17T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Ten

I move my hand in front of my face but the darkness has eaten it up. My head pounds and I wonder if I hit something on the way to the ground. I think I’ve fainted but I can’t be sure and when I sit up and gaze around to find TB or Wanda, the darkness envelopes me like a blanket.

“Hello?” I call out but even my voice sounds hollow and dim.

Suddenly, Dad appears, an oasis of light in black. He, too, looks around as if trying to figure out where he is and why there’s so much darkness. When he spots me, a smile erupts.

“Sweetpea.”

“Dad.”

It’s then I remember the shoes and start to cry.

“What is it, honey?”

I try to regain control of my emotions. “What have you done?”

He reaches for me but the darkness acts like a barrier; we’re two beings on different planes of existence, a ghost and the living. “I’m worried about you, Vi. Are you sleeping enough?”

“Dad, were you involved in some kind of drug thing?”

He acts like he doesn’t hear me. “I’ve been thinking a lot and I hope you and your husband are able to move on. The death of a child is life-altering. When my brother died, I thought my world had ended.”

Not what I was expecting. “My world did end.”

He inches closer. “No, sweetie. Don’t let it. One thing I’ve learned here….”

“Where?”

“…is that you cannot hold on to pain. It will eat you up inside.”

“But Dad, we need to know….”

“I should have gotten counseling about Sean. I shouldn’t have let it turn into problems that affected all of you.”

“You weren’t to blame for your brother’s death.”

“I know that now. But it didn’t just ruin my life.”

“We’re all fine, Dad. We need to know why you were in….”

“Portia.” He doesn’t say more, pauses and turns sullen.

“What about Portia?”

John looks away, lost in thought.

“Dad?”

“There’s no manual to parenthood. You think you know what you’re doing, that you’ve got this. Then you realize you screwed up but it’s not a lesson plan or a thesis that’s riddled with errors. It’s a human being.”

Is he talking about leaving us?

“Why didn’t you come home, Dad? What made you stay in Texas?”

“I failed her. I failed you all,” he says quietly and then disappears into the darkness.

It’s then I smell something truly awful and open my eyes to find Spiderman hovering over me with smelling salts.

“Peter Parker?” I scream at the ENT and he laughs. Behind him I spot TB looking at me as if something shifted in my brain on my trip to the ground and now I’m completely insane.

I sit up on the tailgate of the ambulance — this is becoming a habit, I’m thinking — and rub my neck which feels sore. “We know each other,” I quickly tell my husband.

I met Peter when I fainted inside a cave outside Eureka Springs, my first press trip and my initiation with ghosts of water. You’d have fainted too if you had found a bloody girl

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