The year you disappeared, summer filled September and October. The sun beat down on the dead leaves and the birds refused to fly south. Our friends took it as permission to return to normal, a second chance at a summer we’d spent in mourning. They threw parties, drove to the city for shows, and worst of all, swam in the Rivanna. I stayed home as much as I could, drinking and shooting empty cans in the backyard, leaving only to work and buy groceries or bullets. To cover rent, I gave the spare room to Morgan, the only one of our friends who seemed to miss you as much as I did.

My sister called it your “disappearing act” and imagined it was all a well-crafted performance: you building a new life somewhere without having to tell me to my face I wouldn’t be in it. I thought that was her way of comforting me. Maybe you were in Johnson City or Ocracoke like you’d always talked about. I imagined you making coffee for tourists on the coast, taking molly and watching the sun rise over the ocean on your days off; or hopping trains until you were somewhere deep in the Blue Ridge, finding work splitting timber. Underneath the fantasy, though, I held on to the certainty that you were dead and gone. No one held a funeral.

The ghosts I had known before were spirits of the dead: Uncle Clark, who took a bottle of Percocet in my grandfather’s bathroom when the Walmart in Ruckersville fired him, his silhouette always on the other side of the shower curtain; a little girl who emerged from the woods to build fairy huts by the side of the road every summer; most of all, the ghosts who haunted the Rivanna trail, which as kids had always made our imaginations run wild. We fantasized of Charlottesville as a site of violence, our minds filling cul-de-sacs and parks with serial killers and secret cults. I expected that if you were really dead, I would find you on the riverbank, lurking in the jewelweed and scaring joggers.

Instead, something new began to haunt me. First I heard running in the halls, the floorboards creaking underfoot. Then a baby crying, a little girl laughing, always a room away. Morgan heard the same thing but seemed unworried. “Old houses are always haunted, babe,” she said.  “Remember the boy who crawled out of the shower drain in my place on Cherry Street?”

On a Sunday morning in October, I saw our daughter in the kitchen window. It was dawn, and I was in the backyard, drinking Johnnie Walker to pass the time until work. I was barefoot in my red sundress, the one you used to love me in. She looked eight or nine. She leaned against the kitchen counter, sipping a glass of chocolate milk. Your ghost was across from her, hair longer and greasier, lines forming around the inner border of his cheeks.

My heart started beating faster, but my brain knew a mirage when it saw one, the colors too alive, their skin almost glowing. Soon, our daughter left the room, and your ghost was looking out the window, his eyes never landing on me.

It went on like that. The next day, I saw them together in the yard, her around four years old, in a princess dress covered in mud. I was with them, the same except for the crow’s feet under my eyes. Our hands were wrapped together, and we crouched in a circle, chanting: “Cows in the meadow, eating buttercups, thunder, lightning, we all stand up.”

Growing up, I thought of you like a sister, stealing your eyeliner, reading my diary to you, triangulating among our friends for attention. Sliding from friendship to love was wet and hormonal, the product of a thousand sleepovers watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Do you remember when we fucked for the first time, in the changing room at Fashion Square Mall? When I told you then that I was going to marry you, your knuckles still inside of me?

When you transitioned, I enjoyed the scandal, took pride in your family’s anger. I liked flaunting myself as a dyke with a boyfriend, giving you your testosterone shot, watching your stubble grow in, feeling your clit start to swell. Our bodies grew into each other. Most of all, though, you were mine, mine, mine, and I could drink from your well all I wanted.

Without you, my desire grew like bamboo on the side of the highway, new shoots sprouting every day. I wanted your mouth and your breasts. I wanted you to cook me sausage and scrambled eggs and serve them to me in bed. I wanted to swim with you in the Rivanna and dry off in the sun while you read to me. I wanted to carry a daughter for you and for all of us to play ring-around-the-rosie in the yard, tumbling into the grass. Want without satisfaction turned into anger at you for leaving, then at myself for believing you would leave, then all my hate dissolved into certainty that you were dead.

I turned on my heel and walked inside. Morgan was in the living room in yoga pants and a sweater, counting a stack of cash. I wasn’t sure if she was coming or going, but her hair and makeup were done, and she had two dozen baggies of cocaine arranged on the table in front of her. I loomed until she looked up, cocking her head at me.

“Have you seen Hunter with a little girl that looks like me?” I asked.

“No,” she said. She seemed to take the question in stride.

“I think I’m being haunted.”

In my household, growing up we had a process when a haunting disrupted the peace of the living, when it became too loud or too violent to tune out. My mother was a woman of spiritual uncertainty. She grew up Southern Baptist, then left the church when she moved to California, growing weed and stripping somewhere north of San Francisco for the better part of a decade, only returning to Virginia when she was eight months pregnant with me. She rarely went to church but still talked about her sins, and my sins, and salvation in the Lord when she was drunk. There was no figure she saw as more of a spiritual guide than her “exorcist.” His website, designed sometime in the late nineties and never once updated, had advertised his services in astral projection, clairvoyance, laying on hands, ancient Chinese medicine, snake handling, and tarot reading. But for her, raised on a diet of horror movies, he was the exorcist.

I emailed and scheduled an appointment for the weekend. He charged $300 in advance, which I paid in credit. He arrived in the same muddy white van he’d driven when I was a kid, wearing aviators and baggy jeans and a wrinkled white shirt. I remembered him with a long, wiry salt-and-pepper beard, but he’d shaved it off at some point in the past decade, and his stubble grew all white.

I waved to him from the driveway. “Thank you for coming.”

“No trouble.” His voice was as slow and baritone as I remembered. “Happy to help a nice young lady such as yourself.”

“I knew you when I was a little girl,” I blurted out. “My mama must’ve hired you three, maybe four times over the years. Our house had so much bad history. You remember Arlene out by Zion Crossroads?”

He stared somewhere past me for a moment. “Sure, sure. How’s Arlene doing?”

Half-mad, living in Pensacola, married to a retired cop who believed the government was putting estrogen in the water to sterilize men. She only called when she was manic, and told long stories that didn’t make sense about her father and uncles and brothers, what good men they were, how I’d find a man like them someday. “She’s alright. Passes along her regards.”

He circled the yard before following me inside. Morgan was doing yoga on the living room floor and gave him a curt nod. She had resisted inviting him into our home, pulling up his blog posts about the Book of Revelation and home remedies for Lyme disease and reading them aloud to me. She gave in when I pointed out that having the ghost of a young girl running the halls would make selling coke out of our living room a challenge.

The exorcist asked me for a tour of the house, inspecting all the cabinets and inside the microwave and under the coach. Morgan kept the living room spotless, but when it came time to look in my room, I was reminded of all the things I had begun to neglect in your absence. The floor was buried beneath several layers of laundry; books covered your side of the bed; an empty beer can sat on the window sill; shards of glass covered the floor near the closet. The exorcist breathed deeply, surveying the room, and I blushed and played with the hem of my dress.

“I can sense its presence in this room. It’s strong here,” he told me.

A baby, crying all night. You, rushing out of bed to take care of it. Over and over until the sun rose some nights.

I remembered his banishments as cinematic events, the light dimming and walls shaking. Watching it as an adult, he looked smaller and brighter, out of place in my bedroom. His sneaker was on top of a discarded bra. He lit a bundle of hyssop and waved it. It carried a chemical scent I had forgotten until it reached my nostrils again.

“Spirit, I cast you out in the Lord’s name, and in the Lord’s name I send you below, for the sin of taking time that is not yours.” His voice boomed. He began circling the room. His foot landed on a tube of lipstick and I heard a crack. “Spirit, there is no justification without judgment, and the Lord in heaven is your judge, your jury and your executioner.”

I pictured you in hell, flesh scarred and limbs twisted, just burning forever like your father said you would. Imps peeling your sin and tearing your hair out and licking your wounds with barbed tongues.

And there you were in the bedroom, holding our baby girl in your arms, another of you helping with her homework, another painting my nails, another fucking me with your strap. Where the smoke touched you and our daughter and I, our bodies melted like wax.

I was reminded of when I held a baby for the first time, my newborn cousin. I had just come from school. My aunt Georgia handed him to me without a word, and instinctively I wrapped my arms around him, my hand cradling the back of his head, shifting the weight in my hips to support him. I felt like a new person, older, capable of standing firm enough on my own two feet to hold someone else up. The light looked different, softer. I could feel his breath on my neck.

And I was reminded, too, of when I was nineteen, living with you in Charlottesville, and I went to dinner at my mama’s house for the last time. Casually, between bites of brisket, she told me it was a shame she would never have grandkids, that I would have made beautiful healthy babies, that they’d fire me from the daycare center when the parents found out what kind of woman I was, holding their children.

“Spirit, let your sins drain into the cold earth, let your sacrifice nourish the soil for the Shepherd’s crops, and—” When he turned toward me and the smoke touched my arm—my real arm, not a spirit’s—my skin seared and began to slough off. I slapped the hyssop from his hand. It landed on my red sundress on the floor, and I watched it begin to burn before he stomped it out.

When I looked back up, his face was red, and I couldn’t tell if it was fury or humiliation. For a moment, I thought he was going to hit me, and I braced myself.

“You know what a ghost is, young lady?” He spoke slowly, like he was talking to a child, and I felt like a little girl watching him banish my Great Aunt Mabel again. He jabbed my shoulder with his finger. “It’s you, it’s your sin, wanting something you can’t have. You keep it here, and you hide it from judgment. The cleansing isn’t for the dead, and it isn’t for the house. It’s for you.”

My anger came flooding back all at once, washing away every thought but hurting him. It would have felt good to hit him, but what I really wanted was to make him afraid, to be the mad woman who chased him off her property howling and crying because she loved her dead boyfriend and the daughter they would never have. My gun was in a drawer in the bedside table. I kept it loaded. I shoved past him and pulled it out, and it felt light in my hands.

“Get the fuck away from my daughter.” I swung it in his face.

He stumbled back, the doorframe checking his shoulder.

“Now, ma’am, there’s no need for that kind of thing,” he sputtered.

“I will fucking kill you and I will piss on your corpse.” My voice just shrill enough to pierce.

I let him run and followed him out the door. Morgan was behind me, shouting insults. For my finishing touch, I pulled the trigger while he climbed into his van, grazing the roof. I didn’t stay outside to watch him drive away.

One of your ghosts was in the kitchen, sharing a bottle of wine with our daughter, who must have been in her thirties. You looked good with your hair graying. Another of you was frying an egg, another kissing my neck on the kitchen table, and a dozen more all crammed into the kitchen. Outside, I could see the three of us playing ring-around-the-rosie.

I retreated to the living room, where there were only a few of our ghosts. Morgan followed, lighting a blunt, and sank into the couch together. You played blocks with our daughter on the rug.

“I guess this is our home now,” I mumbled. The gun was still in my hand, and I rubbed my forefinger on the trigger.

“You know,” Morgan exhaled and handed me the blunt. “I always hated the idea of moving on. Why should you have to pretend it’s fair? Why should you have to let someone just disappear?”

I heard a dozen of you speaking over each other, laughing, screaming, whispering, humming, crying. Together, they become unrecognizable, and try as hard as I might, I could not remember the sound of your voice alone. Sinking deeper into the couch, my legs crossed with Morgan’s, I pictured you. Not the ghost of your future, but the old you, the you who belonged to me, there beside us, and I wanted you more than I had ever before. With relief, I decided to want you forever.

About the Author:

Annie Russo grew up in Virginia and lives in Massachusetts. Her previous work can be found in Isele Magazine and her story Anti-Cosmic is forthcoming in Cosmic Horror Monthly.

Feature image by ål nik on Unsplash