The Gone Away Place by Christopher Barzak

Author:Christopher Barzak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2018-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

For the next hour, Mom and I watched as a local channel ran segments on Newfoundlanders telling their stories. Stories all about hauntings. All ghost stories. The paper from Cleveland was just the first to dig into the wreckage of our community and unearth the strangeness that we’d all been hiding behind closed and broken doors.

They showed footage of our ruined cemeteries, of our half-collapsed high school, of the pile of rubble and pipes and wood that had been our town hall. They showed helicopter views of neighborhoods that had been wiped out completely, as if they’d never existed, and of the places where the woods that wove their way through and around Newfoundland had been reduced to fields of splinters. They showed footage of our funeral home parking lots packed tight with cars. Footage of people crying in shelters and in the housing units the government had erected at the county fairgrounds. And all the while, between these flashing images, they ran interviews with people around town who were being haunted.

Toward the end of the hour-long report, they interviewed Dr. Arroyo, introducing her as a community-trauma specialist. She was sitting in the chair behind the old steel desk in her makeshift office, talking about the hauntings from a psychologist’s point of view. Granted, a psychologist who, as the interviewer noted, had been trained in Jungian psychotherapy—which is sort of old-fashioned, according to Mom—but it was that particular philosophy, Dr. Arroyo said, that provided her with the skills a community like ours needed at a time like this.

“I’ve been speaking with people for weeks now,” Dr. Arroyo said, “who claim to be seeing ghosts. Young people, middle-aged people, the elderly. Men and women alike. There is no particular pattern to who is experiencing this phenomenon. It is the community as a whole that is being haunted, and that is not entirely unexpected, if you have studied other communities around the world that have suffered great losses. I have traveled to and have lived within communities that have been destroyed by earthquake, ravaged by tsunami, or affected by environmental disasters. In each of those cases, phenomena such as this are present.”

“And what’s become of those communities?” the reporter asked next.

“Some have moved on. Some are in the middle of rebuilding. Some are still afflicted many years later, if the community was unable to put itself back together.”

“What do you think will become of Newfoundland and the surrounding towns that were hit hard, here in Ohio?” the reporter asked.

For a second, Dr. Arroyo seemed to wince, but then, with a sudden air of conviction, she said, “I believe the people of Newfoundland will be able to move beyond what’s occurred here. People here are struggling, but it’s still early. And they’re already going about repairing various aspects of their lives. In the end, it will be a long process. A long struggle. Only time will tell the final story.”

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