Part 3: Awakening
a serial ghost story by Erin Zarro
“Kristen, wake up.”
The voice was distant like a dream. I struggled to come to the surface of consciousness, to open my eyes. Hands shook my shoulders. “Come on, I know you’re in there. Wake up.”
My eyelids released, and the bright light of our office speared into my retinas. I wanted to close them again, because pain, but forced myself to look into Shelley’s eyes. “I am…here. What…happened?” I yawned, suddenly exhausted.
I was at work. No one was around except Shelley. The clock said six-thirty.
The notebook.
What was my last memory?
The notebook.
Hi, sweetheart.
“You passed out after seeing—”
“No, he…that isn’t possible,” I said.
“I didn’t write it,” Shelley said. “And no one else is here. Look, I know you don’t believe in ghosts, but spirits can sometimes manipulate things if they want to communicate. I’ve never heard of it being so…overt…like this. He must really want to talk to you.”
It couldn’t be. Adam was gone. In the ground. There was no spirit to manipulate anything. Someone was playing a joke. A terrible, nasty joke. That was all. “It’s not him.” I tried to stand, but dizziness stopped me. “Can you help me up? I think I want to go home.” And then I remembered that I’d be going to an empty home, and Shelley’s offer to stay with her. “Or, uh, to your place…if the offer still stands, that is.”
“Yes, of course.” Shelley picked up the notebook and placed it in one of the lower drawers of my desk. Good. I didn’t want to see it. “We can go. If you’re feeling okay tomorrow and want to come in, we can resume everything then.”
“Okay.” She helped me to stand and grabbed my coat and things for me, while my mind spun with all sorts of frenzied thoughts. It couldn’t be Adam, but the handwriting was unmistakable. His was completely unique and no one could duplicate it. If it wasn’t him…who could do that? And who could do it without Shelley seeing it in the short time I was in the bathroom?
Could Shelley have done it?
No, that was absurd. I trusted her. She was trying to help. She’d never play with my emotions like this.
It wasn’t anyone but Adam, a voice inside me said. You know it in your heart. How could it be anyone else? He’s back somehow. You should be happy.
It just didn’t make any sense.
“We should go. The sooner you get horizontal again, the better,” Shelley said.
I nodded, even though my thoughts lasered to the notebook in the drawer without my conscious effort. “Of course.”
Shelley turned the lights off and we exited the building. She locked up.
The ride to her house was quiet as I processed everything. I tried to push it all away. Then I tried to understand it. My headache intensified.
“How do you feel now?” Shelley asked, stopping at a red light. Some jerk blew his horn at us, and she flipped him off. “You’ve been so quiet. I almost forgot you were here.”
Thank you, Captain Obvious. “I’m okay. The headache’s a bit worse. The dizziness is gone, though. I just want to sleep.”
“You can, for sure.” She accelerated, moving faster than the speed limit. Oh, so she liked to speed. Interesting. “Do you mind if I put some music on? If I keep it low? I like to listen to music on the way home. It calms me down.”
She didn’t look particularly stressed, but what did I know? I shrugged. “Sure.”
She turned on the radio, and a DJ was babbling about some big concert and tickets they were giving away. “Come on, just put the music on.”
“I hate that,” I said with a sigh.
Suddenly, right in the middle of the DJ’s speech, the station cut to music. Bon Jovi. “You Give Love a Bad Name.” Tears filled my eyes. Really?
Shelley glanced at me quickly and changed the dial. The next station was playing “Runaway” by, you guessed it, Bon Jovi. What the hell?
She put her turn signal on and made a left turn down the next major road. “Kristen, I don’t think this is a coincidence,” she said softly. “What are the odds—”
“Oh, come on,” I scoffed. “What? Adam did this? To keep us from having to listen to the DJ? No, it’s possible these stations both played the same band. It’s happened to me before. Not often, but it has happened.”
“Let’s try another station, then.” Shelley stopped at another stoplight, this time not getting a horn honked at her. Progress. She was wrong, though. Adam wasn’t here. He couldn’t be.
“Fine,” I said. My temples throbbed. I really didn’t feel like arguing.
She changed the station and…
Bon Jovi. “Dead or Alive.”
She looked at me, one eyebrow arched. “You still think it’s a coincidence?”
###
A herd of dogs and cats greeted me at the door. I was covered in dog slobber and cat hair in seconds. Add that to my headache. Sheesh.
“Sorry about that. They’re very friendly. That’s Bubba. That one over there, the Schnauzer, is Emma, and the two cats are Larry and Moe. Curly, unfortunately, passed away. They were a set,” Shelley said with a smile. “Never a dull moment here.”
“No kidding.” I stepped into her homey, very tidy, flowery home. When I say “flowery,” I mean it. Her entire décor concept revolved around flowers. Her coffee table and shelves held pretty vases of roses, her curtains were the color of pink carnations, and her couches had the pattern of roses and other pretty flowers on them. A large rose covered the fronts of the two throw pillows on her couch. Her carpet matched the curtains and provided a splash of color on the floor. The dog and cat beds were also flower-colors, I noticed. There were ceramic trinkets of various kinds of flowers everywhere.
And no dust.
“It’s lovely,” I murmured.
“I’m a flower freak,” Shelley said with a laugh. “I originally wanted to be a florist, but I took a class and hated it. So I decided to do the office thing instead. Apparently, I was meant to only admire flowers, not play with them.”
“Interesting.” I ran my fingertips over a lovely rose trinket — it looked as if it were just plucked from a rose bush. The detail was stunning — the petals looked as soft as velvet, kissed by drops of dew, and the thorns were sharp enough to prick my finger if I wasn’t careful. “This is gorgeous. Where did you get it?”
“My mother gave it to me for my birthday,” Shelley replied. “Roses are my favorite flowers.”
Just then, the trinket warmed in my hand. As if someone had been holding it for a long time, or maybe it had been outside, bathed in the sun, for an entire day. It made me think of summer, and the summers Adam and I spent going to concerts, writing music, and lying on the beach just hanging out, watching the waves and people.
And roses…how he’d given me a single red rose for our first date. How I still had it dried and tucked in my yearbook somewhere. That was one thing I’d never part with.
“Kristen?” Shelley’s voice broke me out of my reverie.
“Sorry. I was just thinking about Adam and the rose he gave me for our first date,” I said, carefully setting the trinket down. I wasn’t going to tell her about it being warm. I wasn’t sure why. It seemed like a secret.
A secret between Adam and I?
Adam isn’t here.
But somehow, against all odds, he was.
And I knew the moment he walked into the room.