Heidi Sees - Series 1 - Chapter 1
Heidi Crolley sees ghosts. It probably has something to do with her father, who died when she was eight. Her mother never believed her, which is 100% why Heidi lives half a continent away.
1
My name is Heidi Crolley. I'm 30-mumble years old. A Web page programmer. Single (ish). And I can see ghosts.
I can explain. Mostly.
First, "Heidi" is a family name on my father's side. Goes back five generations, or so I was told.
Second, I was born an increasingly long time ago that we won't discuss further.
Third, I'm a nerd.
And, fourth, my boyfriend/roommate and I recently decided that he and my other roommate would make a happier couple than he and I. No hard feelings. Seriously. Because finding a two-bedroom apartment in San Jose, California, and roommates you don't hate who help to make that apartment affordable is enough of a challenge. It's not personal, Don Corleone might say, it's modern living arrangements.
As for the seeing ghosts thing? It probably has something to do with my dad, since his was the first ghost I saw, at age eleven. Too bad my mother never believed me, which set the tone of our relationship for the next twenty-two years.
Hold that thought. We'll come back to it.
On this particular Sunday afternoon, which was, ironically, Mother's Day, I was lounging/slouching on the chaise portion of the dark blue Ikea Kivik sectional sofa my former boyfriend had contributed when he moved in, enjoying both the solitude and the near-silence of an empty apartment. I didn't even have music playing. It was just me and a sci-fi romance novel.
I was wearing my favorite pair of black gym pants, which dated back to my first year in the Bay Area, and an oversized, long sleeve black-and-green Xbox t-shirt I had scored at a conference about the same time. My almost-curly, shoulder-length, dark brown hair was pulled back from my face with an acid green elastic band. My tortoiseshell glasses had slipped down to perch on the slightly upturned tip of my nose, the ideal distance for my gray-green eyes to focus on the Kindle Paperwhite ebook reader I held in both hands.
The e-reader's display was backlit, but I had opened the vertical blinds of the living room's picture window anyway, just enough to let in some natural light. Unfortunately, that also meant I could hear the murmur of the other apartment dwellers and their celebrated maternal caregivers talking in the courtyard below. At least none of the ghosts out there were shouting.
The former boyfriend's parents had come into the city from Cloverdale and had taken him and his new girlfriend out for dim sum. His parents are adorable, and invited me to go along, but I declined. Because then I could have the apartment to myself for hours (while they waited first in traffic and then for a table at a restaurant on Mother's Day; sentimental suckers). A rare treat.
So it was a surprise—and not an especially pleasant one—when my phone lit up on the arm of the sofa next to me to let me know my mother was calling.
I hadn't spoken to my mother in nine years. Not since I had packed up the grapes of my wrath and left Tulsa, Oklahoma, to become yet another Okie migrant to the Golden State.
So I was both curious and irritated. Concerned that something might be seriously wrong—why else would she be calling?—but also not wanting to ruin a perfectly good Sunday afternoon with what was probably either a butt dial or the next, long-delayed round of our lifetime did-too-did-not-did-too-you-were-always-sabotaging-my-relationships argument. On the other hand, the intrusion had already occurred, and I could feel the emotional knot forming in my stomach.
I sighed, set the e-reader on the sofa next to me, and picked up my phone.
"Hello?" I said.
After a few seconds of silence, Mom said, "Heidi, honey, I—" Her voice was low and flat, as if she were struggling to control her emotions. I was out of practice reading my mother's mood through the phone, but I caught a distinct note of ominous. "I need you to come home."
I sat up. My mind went straight to the worst-case scenario, and the knot in my stomach twisted tighter. "Is Nicole OK?" I swung my legs off the chaise, so I could stand up if I needed to.
I had left one friend behind in Tulsa. Nicole Robbins had been Nicole Moore the day of our initial, disastrous meeting. Things became much worse when Mom married Nicole's father, but improved after their divorce. Though we were no longer legally sisters, we had become what the only child in me assumed actual sisters were like. We talked all the time. We had helped each other through college and therapy. It hadn’t been even a week since our last conversation, and I had seen posts from her on social media as recently as last night—
"No," Mom said, which was all I needed to hear. I was on my feet.
"What happened?" I asked, but I was no longer listening. I was in my bedroom, headed for the tiny closet. "Did something happen to the kids?"
"The kids?"
In my head I was making a list of what I needed to pack, who I needed to tell at work. In my closet, I reached through the hanging clothes, found the handle of my rolling suitcase, and yanked it to full extension. I started calculating my accumulated paid time off versus how much extra I could negotiate as I pulled the suitcase into the light. If Nicole needed me—
"Heidi!" The edge in Mom's voice stopped me. "Honey. Stop. Listen to me."
I stopped, suitcase in mid-roll over a pile of sandals and sneakers. I pressed the phone harder against my ear, and made an effort to pay attention. Except I was also trying to decide if I should wait for the roomies to come back and have one of them take me to the airport, or if I should just call a car and leave a note.
"Nicole is fine," Mom said. Her voice was flat again, but the emotion she was trying to control was not the same as it had been. This tremor of frustration was more familiar. "The kids are fine. This isn't about Nicole." Before I could recover enough to ask what/who/why she had called me on what had been such a wonderful Sunday afternoon—even if it was Mother's Day—she said, "This is about—" She took a breath. "I need you to come home."
My left hand released its death grip and the suitcase fell on its canvas face behind me. The knot in my stomach, though, kept its grip.
"Mom," I said, walking back to the living room, "you can't just call me up—"
"Heidi, I need you to come home."
I didn't quite make it to the chaise lounge and my sci-fi romance. Still standing, I said, “I need more than this, Mom. There's work, there’s—“ I was going to say my former boyfriend's name but stopped myself because I was pretty sure he would be OK if I took off. And so would my other roommate. So long as I paid my part of the rent. "I can't just drop everything and head back to Tulsa."
"Really?" And then the tone of her voice became very familiar. "I could have sworn you were almost halfway here when you thought it was Nicole—"
"Nicole is—" I stopped myself before I said family, which would then require Mom to take offense and I would have to launch into the way-too-familiar defense of my relationship with Nicole versus my relationship with my mother—
"But when I need you, your mother, suddenly you need more—"
See how well we know each other? Finishing each other sentences like that? Except I really didn't want to rehash any of this.
"Mom," I said. OK. I lied. I wanted to rehash all of this. I wanted to engage with the bait being dangled in front of me. But I resisted. I took a breath and let it out, trying to relax the tension I felt all over but especially in my gut.
"—and I can't just ‘call you up.’ Well, I'm not just ‘calling you up,’ Heidi, I need you to—"
"Mom." The unfinished argument was right there, just waiting for me to pick it up and—
"—come home. Don't you think I know you don't want to talk to me?"
But I was no longer the young woman Mom had last spoken to her nearly a decade ago. "Mom."
Signaling that maybe she wasn't the same Mom I had last spoken to nearly a decade ago, as well, Mom stopped.
The silence between us stretched long enough that I peeked a look at the screen of my phone to make sure the connection was still active. The big red end-call button was right there, tempting me. Instead, I said, "Mom?"
"I think," Mom started.
I expected her to think this call had been a mistake and hang up on me. She had thought similar thinks many times before. I was already lining up reasons why, when she did that, I wouldn't call her back and how I wouldn't sit and fume on the chaise lounge and miss out on the remainder of a quiet Sunday afternoon—
"Heidi, honey." She took a deep breath, her voice tight again. "I think I'm haunted."
Her words came out in a tumble, as if she had to force them out all at once or they would get stuck.
Still expecting a passive-aggressive attempt to get me to call her back, I had my finger poised and ready to end the call. As the words registered, though, I let my hand drop and put the phone back to my ear. I tasted bile in the back of my throat.
I said, with all the cleverness I could muster, "What?"
"I've been seeing—"
"You have got to be kidding me," I said. And before she could say anything else, I said it again. "You have got to be fucking kidding me."
Not once in the years since Dad had died had she ever believed me. Not about seeing his ghost, nor anyone else's. She had accused me of lying. She had told anyone who would listen that I "just wanted attention." She had accused me of trying to sabotage her relationships—including with Nicole's father, which, for the record, she had done without any help from me. She had jeered and teased and mocked me, even when the burden of it all nearly killed me. I had learned to avoid talking to her about Dad or anything even tangentially related to death and ghosts, especially Dad's, which meant I had increasingly little to talk to her about. She didn't want to know. And eventually, I didn't want to tell her.
"Heidi, honey—"
“No!” I shouted the word. I lost it. I saw myself lose it. "No! No! No! No! This is not how you decide to reach out. This can't be how you thought you could come back into my life. I can't believe this."
"Heidi, he's been showing up in my dreams—"
"I'm not in junior high anymore, Mom. You can't just pretend—finally—to believe what I'm saying—"
"—I think it's your father."
"—and I'll just ... let you in and ..." My voice trailed off as my throat closed around the words. The twisting in my gut throbbed. My heart beat in my chest. My knees felt weak. I wasn't sure I could make it the rest of the way to the sofa, let alone the chaise lounge.
"I've seen him, Heidi. I've seen Alan. In my dreams. Night after night."
I shook my head. I wanted to protest that this wasn't possible. The hard lump in my throat stopped the words. How could she see Daddy? I hadn't seen him in over twenty years. When it first happened, I had had no idea what was going on. By the time I figured it out, that he was a ghost, he was gone. After that, I could see any ghost that happened to float past or haunt a location—except the one I most wanted to see.
I wanted this to be a lie. To be some desperate attempt by Mom to reach out and try to reconnect, because then I could reject the attempt. Reject her. The way she had—
Except I could hear it in her voice. The fear, the bewilderment. Seeing a ghost does that to you, even in a dream. Once you realize the dream isn't just a dream.
Finally, we had something in common.
Mom said, "He's asking for you." After a few seconds of silence, she added, "He says he's looking for his baby girl."
I swallowed. I tried to clear my throat, but the lump remained. My lower lip trembled. I could hear his voice in my head. I’m looking for my baby girl. Have you seen her? I finally managed to say, "I'll be there as soon as I can."
"Heidi, honey—"
I ended the call. My legs folded under me and I sank to the carpet.
The sun still leaked in around the vertical blinds, but the light no longer seemed natural and it provided no warmth. The shadows had become darker. In the courtyard two stories below the window, I could hear laughter, and people singing "Happy Birthday." And one of the ghosts was shouting now, angry words in a language I couldn't understand. I ignored the ghost and focused on the singing. Just because it was Mother's Day, it didn't mean it wasn't also someone's birthday. Lucky them.
I leaned forward and rested my head on the cushion of the chaise lounge. The texture of the upholstery pressed against my skin, proving its reality. I stared at the ugly sea foam pile of the carpet. I waited for the pain in my stomach to pass. It didn't. I crossed my arms in front of me, rubbing my right hand along the inside of my left forearm as I did, feeling the scars through the fabric in a way I usually avoided. I hugged myself as tight as I could, which eased the chill but did nothing for my stomach.
After a long moment, I uncrossed my arms and pushed myself back to my feet. There was a lot to do.
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