Ghost
II
A week later, Jake finds himself in K and L’s home. K will be traveling for work for 2 days and offers Jake the time to comb the place over. Look for something that might clue him in to L’s whereabouts, or reason for leaving and not coming back. Is a person’s essence in their stuff? he wonders.
The journal in question sits on the kitchen counter. He starts there in the kitchen but doesn’t read the journal right away. Immediately a few things strike him. All the appliances are unplugged. Blender, coffee maker, toaster, toaster oven, kettle. That’s odd, he thinks, who needs two ways to make toast? He looks in the cabinets, standard contents. Pantry, sparse, but not empty. Condiments and beer in the fridge. Empty vegetable drawers.
He walks a hall to the bathroom and opens the medicine cabinet. Mouthwash, floss, ibuprofen, a half empty pack of birth control pills, a few razors, band aids, breath mints. Still 2 bath towels, no toothbrushes. There’s a disembodied robe hung on the back of the door.
In the bedroom, he feels a little off kilter. There are a few framed photographs on one wall – a view from mountains, a sports car with K smiling widely in the driver’s seat, K and L embracing, a sunset. It’s a small room and the way the bed is situated, you sort of need to sit on it to open the closet and look inside. It’s been rifled through already, clothes on the floor, empty hangers. Maybe L grabbed a bunch of clothes packing in a hurry. Maybe K is just messy. Jake slows down here, piles all of the clothes on the bed, dividing his from hers. He searches all the pockets and finds gum wrappers, a few coins, several movie theatre stubs.
The woman was small, he decides, based on her clothing. A feature he hasn’t been able to gauge from the few photos that K has of her because they are mostly just her face in profile with sunglasses on. What color are her eyes? There are some shoes on the floor, men’s cammo hiking boots, a pair of very tall red high heels. There’s a wig on the closet shelf, brass colored long and curly. Jake puts it on, looks in across the room into a mirror, and he briefly doesn’t recognize himself.
He empties the closet completely. Still no sign of that umbrella. He uses a flashlight to peer into the high and low corners and then steps into the now empty closet, which is long and shallow. He can lie on the floor and stretch to almost his entire 5’10” length. Tapping his feet against the far wall it sounds hollow, so he crawls to that end to find a little door in the wall closed with a small hook latch. He opens it and shines his flashlight in. A stack of journals topped by a pack of cigarettes. Marlboro lights. Damnit he thinks (he has been trying to quit smoking). He leaves the bedroom with only the hidden items in hand
Five journals. He sits at the kitchen table and spreads them out. Different sizes, colors, a few look old. And the cigarettes. No ash trays in the house though. He starts with the one that set K into the tailspin, starts to flip through what appears to be an account of the author and someone named Phillip. The author seems a little obsessed with the man. Who is Phillip? K has already told Jake he doesn’t know. He sets that one aside and opens another. Different name, this one describes a man named Bryce. This journal starts like a storybook portrayal of love, the writer loses herself in this man. But it changes. There are drawings of bruises labeled with dates. There are descriptions of fights and make up sex. The author traced her hands and feet into the pages midway through the journal. Why? The story holds Jake, everything slows down. She describes a broken eye socket, stitches in her palm, a miscarriage. Her words leap out at him like a startled moth. She was terrified. Jake feels sick. He stops reading, finds a lighter in the junk drawer, and walks out back with the cigarettes.