Pluto's Ghost Read online

  COPYRIGHT © 2010 SHEREE FITCH

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication has been applied for

  Ebook ISBN 9780307374561

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  Visit Random House of Canada Limited’s website: www.​random​house.​ca

  v4.1

  a

  For Gilles, a strong and gentle man

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Doubletake

  Part 1 - take one

  Chapter a

  Chapter b

  Chapter c

  Chapter d

  Chapter e

  Chapter f

  Chapter g

  Chapter h

  Chapter i

  Chapter j

  Chapter k

  Chapter l

  Chapter m

  Chapter n

  Chapter o

  Chapter p

  Chapter q

  Chapter r

  Chapter s

  Chapter t

  Chapter u

  Chapter v

  Chapter w

  Chapter x

  Chapter y

  Chapter z

  Chapter z

  Chapter y

  Chapter x

  Chapter w

  Chapter v

  Chapter u

  Replay

  Part 2 - take two

  Chapter a

  Chapter b

  Chapter c

  Chapter d

  Chapter e

  Chapter f

  Chapter g

  Chapter h

  Chapter i

  Chapter j

  Part 3 - take three

  Chapter a

  Chapter b

  Chapter c

  Chapter d

  Chapter e

  Chapter f

  Chapter g

  Chapter h

  Chapter i

  Chapter j

  Chapter k

  Chapter l

  Chapter m

  Chapter n

  Chapter o

  Chapter p

  Chapter q

  Chapter r

  Chapter s

  Chapter t

  Chapter u

  Chapter v

  Chapter w

  Chapter x

  Chapter y

  Chapter z

  Chapter

  Chapter y

  Part 4 - take four

  Chapter a

  Chapter b

  Chapter c

  Chapter d

  Chapter e

  Chapter f

  Chapter g

  Chapter h

  Chapter i

  Chapter j

  take off

  Acknowledgments

  BAVARIAN GENTIANS

  Not every man has gentians in his house

  in Soft September, at slow, Sad Michaelmas.

  Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark

  darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto’s

   gloom,

  ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue

  down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day

  torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto’s dark-blue daze,

  black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,

  giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter’s pale lamps give off

   light,

  lead me then, lead the way.

  Reach me a gentian, give me a torch,

  let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower

  down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness.

  even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September

  to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark

  and Persephone herself is but a voice

  or a darkness invisible enfolded in deeper dark

  of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with passion of dense gloom,

  among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on

   the lost bride and her groom.

  —D. H. Lawrence

  Doubletake

  White light blinds me.

  The cameras catch me squinting and stunned. A buck frozen in a half-ton’s headlights. I hold up my hands and shield my eyes, but it looks like I’m trying to hide my face.

  “A little too late for that, dillweed,” one officer says and yanks my arm nearly out of my shoulder socket.

  “Sticks and stones’ll break—” I start to answer back but he’s got my thumb twisted damn near back to my elbow, so I shut up. Pain needles through me and what comes out of my mouth next is more a yelp, like a dog with a paw in a rat trap. I’m about to tell the thumb-twister where he should stick that thumb of his, but from out of nowhere this one camera guy gets right up close. Hey, I think, lot of nerve. Before the cop shoves camera guy away, I twist away from buddy, flash the third finger of my right hand and grin into the lens of the camera. No doubt about it—this makes me look like a psychopath to all those law-abiding citizens watching big-screen television from the comfort of their family rooms. My thirty seconds of fame and last chance at looking innocent and I pretty much screw that up. Jake Upshore. Giving the world the finger. My signature.

  Next thing I know, I’m in cuffs and there’s this barricade of cops shooing away the reporters like they’re a flock of circling vultures. Everything’s wacked and I’m in this totally crazy shit-show. Surrrrreal. And it gets weirder. All those shapes and shadows make me start thinking about marionettes—this shadow play I saw way back in kindergarten where there were these humongous spineless pterodactyl flying flapping puppets. Those goddamn dinosaurs haunted me in my nightmares for years. So I think for a second I’m lost in another of those prehistoric dreams and I’ll wake up any second in my bed and say, “Whoah, that was some nasty freakin’ dream, eh?” But no. I’m in a nightmare for sure, a real one—and wide, wide, wide awake.

  “Get in the car,” another fuzz-ball yells, and I’d love to co-operate but they’ve got me in a stranglehold. One yanks me by fistfuls of my hair. I still can’t move.

  “Get yourself inside,” he yells again.

  Two sumo-sized officers shove me into the back seat of the cruiser and push so hard I think I’m being scalped. My head buckles, twists backwards, then sideways, as if my neck’s made of coil. There’s this mother of a cracking sound. I’m like “Whoah, fellows, do you think you could take it a bit easier because like you maybe just broke my neck?” Only it doesn’t come out polite as all that. My legs crumble beneath me. Think of two pillars of sand letting go. Blood drips from my temple, runs a goopy red river into my left eye and across my cheek and seeps into my mouth. My blood’s warm and sticky and tastes like an old copper penny. My head and back hurt. A lot. But I’m not going to cry. I sure as hell want my father, though. He’s a guy you can count on in a crunch an
d right now my neck bones crunch with a brittle sound that makes me think of uncooked pasta noodles.

  Sirens whoop and whine. What a nasty noise—especially when you hear it up this close and personal. Then, maybe I’m in shock, because I see the sound: blue and crimson whirlpools of light spinning and spilling out into that slick black grease of wet pavement and night sky. For a few suffocating seconds, I feel like I’ve been locked inside an airtight oil drum. I swear I just saw the sound spiral all the way up to the moon and past it. My head’s swimming into outer space and I imagine sound bleeding into the “silence of those unknown spaces” I heard about once—maybe reaching as far away as Pluto.

  “Pluto’s Ghost,” I whisper and zoom backwards in my own little Skye-train travel machine. I’m in the underground caverns again, in Virginia, with Skye Derucci by my side, and all of us down there blinking in jaw-dropping wonder at the rock formations surrounding us. I remember how charged up I was that day, the electric body current that zapped through me when Skye’s arm brushed mine that first time. That slow, shivery wave. Urgent drumbeats in my body, every part of me throb throb throbbing with pleasure. Me squeezing my eyes. Grinding my teeth. Trying to act like her touching me was no big deal. Then seeing the knowing look in her eyes. A signal. A whisper. Yes yes yes.

  So how could anything that started so amazing end up like this? I’m wondering. What am I doing here, in the back seat of a cop car that reeks of stale beer and dried vomit? The upholstery’s been stripped and I’m sitting on nothing but cold, hard plastic. The taste of my blood’s making me sicker by the second.

  I rock back and forth, banging my head against the Plexiglas shield.

  “Mental! He’s gone completely off his rocker.” I’m sure that’s what some couch potatoes back home in Poplar Hills are saying to each other or themselves right about now if they’re watching.

  “Idiot. See ’im? Is that Jake Upshore? Freaking out? Nutcase. Half cut. Crazy, man. Always was. Dirtbag. Insane.”

  But that’s where they’d be wrong. I’ve never felt more sane. I’m listening to a tune in my head and whispering.

  One word.

  “Skye. Skyeskyeskyeskye,” I say. “Skyeskyeskye Skye.”

  As if her name is a chant and repeating it’ll help me smash through a concrete barrier of sound and lies and change everything that’s just happened.

  “Skye,” I say again and press my face against the honeycombed grate on the side window. The metal’s cold and greasy and smells like sewer backwash. I can’t see much through the scrum of reporters and the army of cops out there. All I hear is static. Maybe I’m almost crying.

  All of a sudden camera guy’s there again. He gets another shot of me, then swings around and pans the cemetery. I wipe my eyes and follow where he aims the camera. I can see all right. Along with those folks watching at home, this is what I see:

  one body bag

  one stretcher

  tombstones

  blood-soaked earth being cordoned off by yellow tape

  evidence

  Everything is evidence, I realize. Evidence which will or will not necessarily lead to the truth.

  Rage is a killer, and there’s some who’d swear under oath in a court of law that I am, too. Murderer? It’s one kick in the belly of a word and it tastes like barbed wire and has wild hyena eyes. Murderer.

  Fact: There’s a dead body out there. Fact: There’s me. Jake Upshore. In a cop car. Blood all over me. A rush of voices. A blur, a buzz. A sound like the swarming of nasty bees in my head.

  That’s when I remember what I want to forget.

  So here’s the bedrock truth about me and Skye Derucci and how we ended up that tragic night in the Old Burial Ground Cemetery in Halifax.

  take one

  a

  Skye Derucci and her mother, Ruth, disappeared on a Tuesday night in March. A nasty spit of a night. Snottin’ weather we say here in Poplar Hills—that frozen, phlegmy mix of sleet and snow. Not very pleasant and not exactly the kind of night to hit the road unless you had one good goddam of a reason. So to give you a time line, approximately forty-eight hours later I was arrested in Halifax and freaking out in that cop car. That night was months back and then some but seems more like an hour ago. Time’s a slippery slide of an idea anyways and how do you tell time when you feel you’ve gone underground, when you’ve been swallowed and sucked right under by some monster sinkhole? Answer me that.

  Everything that’s happened is because of Skye. I’m not blaming. I’m just saying. I’m telling this tale because of Skye and everything I did those two days was because of Skye and the only reason I was starting to think my pathetic life wasn’t such a crock a shit after all was because of Skye. Maybe, when you hear me out, you’ll come to understand I’m guilty of only one thing for sure—losing my way because of Skye. Loving her way too much. I’ll own up to that from the get go.

  I know how it looked. I do. I know that when I went after her, I looked like some storybook monster on a jeezlus rampage but I had my reasons and I sure as hell didn’t intend to hurt anyone. Especially Skye. My girl. My girl. Mine. Skye.

  Did you ever read a poem by that e.e. cummings poet dude? The poem I’m talking about’s got lines in it that go something like you are whatever the sun blah blah blah blah and the moon, too? Well that poem pretty much says it all. Except for one other pretty significant factor: I fell in love with Skye Derucci the same year my mother died.

  I was five. Yeah. I’d like to say it ain’t so, about my mother I mean, but it is so the truth and maybe that’s why ever since then, love and death fit together like interlocking pieces in a never-ending puzzle called my life. If you think a five-year-old boy can’t fall in love then you don’t know squat. At least you don’t know what I know about how little kids feel.

  Best as I can describe it, love feels like in the summer when I’m outside mucking in the dirt and it’s one of those days so blue and yellow and lime green you got to wear shades or you’ll be blinded by all that jeezly light.

  That’s how it is—that’s what love feels like whether you’re five or fifteen or maybe even eighty-five-who knows? My point is, I fell head over heels with Skye Derucci in kindergarten.

  I’m eighteen now, so you might even say I’ve been crazy about her since before I can even remember.

  Skye. Moon. Sun. Stars. My universe.

  b

  As for how I turned into the angry arsehole dipshit I can be sometimes, well, you could pretty much pinpoint that to around the time I had to go to school for real. Who knew you were supposed to sit still in a chair from the age of six until the age of eighteen for endless hours a day every goddam day? Five freakin’ days a week? In a chair, in a row, in a classroom, in a school. School rhymes with cruel for a reason. Least to my ears. There I was, all day long, only let out for recess and lunch like a dog let out for a piss and a run. So I coped as best I could. Until Grade Two. That’s when I flunked. I didn’t fail. I wasn’t held back. I fuh-lunked. “I’m a spelunker and a fuh-lun-ker.” There’s gotta be a song in those syllables somewhere, someday, eh? So yeah, Skye Derucci and the rest of my pals all went on to Grade Three while I got labelled dyslexic by the experts and retard, dumb-ass and a bunch of other nicknames by my classmates because little kids don’t give a shit about political correctness and a lot of them really can be spitball-throwing, name-calling, nasty little snot-blowing, knee-hugging buggers, the offspring of Satan himself, if you ask me. No shit. So I was seven when I got ticked off and then walked around with a boulder on my shoulder never mind a chip and I stayed mad pretty much up until this very second. And so now they tell me it’s more like I’m an audio-olfactory-gustatory synaesthete. It’s a gift, I’m told. Whatever. I’m still ticked off. See yellow spray when I say that? Coming out of a green hose? Kind of like a rubber dick? You see all that—why, even you, too, could be a synaesthete. Everything’s kind of connected to everything else.

  Pisses me right off.

  c

&n
bsp; Mad’s better than sad, right? Well, okay, the other reason I’m telling my story is because I’m supposed to. Anger management. Mental health.

  “Rage on the page,” Shrinkette said to me. Shrinkette? Translate: Really short female shrink. It’s on the S page of the Jake Upshore Frictionary, as in bitchin’ words that totally rub most of my teachers the wrong way. This Shrinkette’s called a “narrative therapist.”

  “Telling your story will be therapeutic,” she said.

  “That so,” I said, pinching my earlobes, feeling for the holes where my studs used to be. Earlobe pinching. One of my favourite de-stressing strategies.

  “Have you ever read the book Catcher in the Rye?” she said.

  “Who in the what?” I said, tugging my earlobe harder.

  “Well, anyhow,” she sighed.

  “Anyhow—or was it anyone?—lived in a pretty how town. Now, yeah, I kind of know that one,” I said. “That e. e. cummings dude must have taken some crazy drugs,” I added. “Shroom shroom, you know what I mean?” The woman frowned and pretended to write something down. “Do you think maybe he suffered from low self-esteem printing his name in lowercase like that?” I said. She scribbled harder and ignored my question. Rude or what?

  “This approach will help you recover from your trauma,” she said like the chirpy little chickadee she reminded me of. “Help the healing process.”

  “Maybe you should shove that theory of positive thinking up your skinny—” I was ripping at my ear by then, thinking of that Van Gogh “artiste” dude who’d cut his ear right off. Nasty. And talk about violent. Ear slicing from a guy who painted sunflowers? “Little,” I continued, “b—”

  “Jake!” she said, and her eyebrows jumped up her forehead and arched into a perfect letter m.

  “Little butt?” I whispered to myself. Shrinkette almost grinned. Guess she liked that I called her skinny. Middle-aged anorexic’s my guess—one of those bony you-can-never-be-too thin types.

  “Jake, could you open up to the possibility that it might help you deal with what happened?”