Page 3 of The Spirit Key
He turned his attention to me. “How you feeling, Scotty?” His voice, with a confusing bunch of emotions in it, cracked when he spoke. “Doing okay?”
There were tears in his eyes. My dadnevercried.
“Dad?”
At the sound of my voice, he buried his face in Mom’s neck and sobbed. The door opened, and Ryan stepped in. His attention flicked in my direction, and then Dad opened an arm, and he ran to our parents.
“What’s going on?”
“We’ll let the doctor tell you.”
The door opened once more, and an older man walked in. He smiled at me and strode toward the bed. “You’re awake. That’s a very good thing.” He looked at my chart, then followed that up with a cold-as-hell stethoscope on my chest, back, and stomach, murmuring as he checked me over from head to foot. When he finished, he stepped back and winked. “I have to admit, in all my years, I have never met someone I would classify as a miracle, but you definitely qualify.” He put the chart back on the bed, then drew closer. “What do you remember about what happened, Scotty?”
I scrunched up my face. There were snatches of memories, but nothing tangible I could grab hold of. “I… I died.” Then, since this was the perfect opportunity to ask, I turned a hard stare at the doctor. “Am I a zombie?”
Mom gasped, but the doctor chuckled. “No, you’re definitely not a zombie. What you are is a boy who got incredibly lucky. We’re going to have to run some tests, but right now, it seems you’re perfectly healthy. Are you hungry? The kitchen has pudding.”
“Chocolate?”
He grinned. “Of course. Is there any other kind?”
I scrunched up my face and told him about Mom’s tapioca, a thick, lumpy mess that tasted like I was eating dirt. Not surprisingly, he grimaced.
“Yeah, you need chocolate, and lots of it.” He reached out and ruffled my hair. “But before you can have your dessert, you’ll need to eat some dinner. Do you feel up to it?”
“What is it?”
“Oh, that’s going to be a surprise. But only if you think you can eat.”
My stomach rumbled. “Yeah, I’m hungry.”
So, before I bore you to death about the stay, let me tell you that dinner was some kind of gross meat patty with potatoes, smothered in gross gravy, with this rank corn that didn’t even have butter on it. And the promised pudding? Mom’s tapioca would have been better.
It turned out that I had been in the hospital a few weeks. There were times, especially during the first week, when they thought I wasn’t going to make it. Guess I showed them. They did their tests, which took place over several days, then announced that I was good to go home.
I was dubbed the miracle child. Personally, I liked “the boy who lived,” but that would have probably gotten me in trouble over a copyright from that book that came out a few years before. Anyway, my life slowly went back to normal. Ryan, after telling me how I ruined his summer by dying—remember that?—had gone back to his obnoxious self. Mom and Dad still coddled me, but they were finally letting loose of the reins once more, and school was starting again.
Oh, and the most important thing of all: I spent a lot of time with Tim. And even though I couldn’t put a word to it, having him near me became the most important thing in my world.
It wasn’t until much later that I realized I was in love with him. Which made what I had to do years later so much harder.
WHEN WEreturned to school, I was famous for, like, fifteen seconds. Kids don’t really have a grasp on the concept of death, and I wasn’t much for talking about it. As the months went by, the memories of the event surged back into my mind. The terror of drowning left me with debilitating issues when it came to standing water. Even something as shallow as a puddle set my heart thumping, because in my mind, it was that pit again, and when I saw it, I couldn’t breathe.
Mom and Dad took me to see a psychologist, who worked with me for a few years, all the while reminding me that there was nothing weird about having issues, especially with the trauma I underwent. She also said that, overall, she considered me to be a very normal kid. I was never sure if that was a compliment or not, but I chose to take it that way.
So, by now I was nine years old, and things were going well. Ryan had hit puberty, and the cool guy I thought he was had vanished in a haze of BO and Axe body spray. His every waking thought was girls. Morning: Girls. Afternoon: Girls. Night: Dinner, followed by girls.
It got old fast.
Tim was still my best friend, and being with him always suffused me with a strange euphoria. With the help of Dr. Trainer, I was finally dealing with my “death,” and things were looking up.
Until the day came that I saw my very first ghost.
Winter swamped Milwaukee with a vengeance. In January of 2003, we got nailed hard with hail, frigid winds in excess of fifty miles per hour, and snow that left drifts high enough that they covered the front windows of our two-story home on the city’s south side. About the only good thing was that Ryan had been at a friend’s house when the blizzard hit, so he wasn’t home.
The bad thing? I was lonely. Mom couldn’t take me to see Tim, and he couldn’t get to me, so I sat in my room, letting my imagination run wild. And doing it quietly so as not to bother Mom.
Schools were closed—not that it was a hardship—and travel was snarled throughout Milwaukee and the surrounding suburbs for days. The plows couldn’t keep up with what Mother Nature had been dumping on us. I heard my dad tell my mom that the old bitch was probably looking down at us and laughing.
