Ghosted: A Novel

Reuben and I flew in silence on a commuter plane to Fresno. Outside, the remains of a buttery sun melted over clouds; inside, civility hung between us on a fine thread. Tomorrow morning we would pitch to the board of directors of the hospice umbrella company, and Reuben was already angry with me.

On Monday morning he had arrived at the office with Kaia and taken us all through to the meeting room. He hadn’t quite been able to look me in the eye.

“So, I have some really great news,” he began.

“Oh, great!” Jenni said. She didn’t quite sound like herself, but she was trying.

“While we were in London last week, Kaia sent some e-mails to an old friend of hers, a guy called Jim Burundo, who runs a bunch of private special-needs schools in LA. Kaia told him all about our work, sent him some video clips, and he got back to her to ask if we’ll start regular Clowndoctor visits!”

There was a short silence.

“Oh,” I said eventually. “Fantastic. But . . . Reuben, we don’t have enough practitioners to take on a commitment like that at the moment.”

And Jenni had added, “Reuben, honey, we’d need to cost this up and get me a fund-raising target. I need—”

Reuben held up his hands to interrupt. “They’re self-funding,” he’d said proudly. “Paying one hundred percent of our costs. We can take on new Clowndoctors and train them and Jim’s company’ll pay everything.”

I paused. “But we still need to go and visit the school, Roo. And set up meetings. And a million other things besides. We can’t just—”

Reuben interrupted me with a smile that contained—shockingly—a warning. “Kaia has done a wonderful thing,” he said carefully. “You should be pleased! We’re expanding again!”

Jenni seemed too worn down to intervene.

Kaia tentatively stuck her hand up, as if in class. “I really didn’t expect Jim to say yes on the spot,” she said quietly. “I hope I haven’t made things complicated.”

“I’m going to schedule some meetings so we can plan it out,” Reuben said. “But for now I think we have a big ‘thank-you’ to say to Kaia.”

And with that he had started clapping.

We all joined in. My life, I thought. Jesus Christ, my life.

•   •   •

The first meeting had taken place two days later. And even though it did look like everything would work out, even though, yes, Jim’s people would fund everything, including training—Sure, just tell us what it is you need from us—I was on edge. It was all happening too fast. But when I tried to broach this with Reuben this morning, he’d actually snapped at me. Told me to be less corporate, more grateful.

I snuck a sideways glance at him as the plane began to bank into Fresno. He had fallen asleep, his face baggy and unguarded. I knew that face so well. Those long, midnight-black eyelashes; the perfect eyebrows; the veins in the deep valleys of his eye sockets. I looked at this familiar face and my stomach moved uneasily. I was meant to be back to normal by now, I thought, as the plane turned in the air and the low, golden sun stroked geometric shapes across Reuben’s face. I was meant to feel fine.

Later on, after we’d had dinner in a steak house next to our hotel, I went and sat outside by the small, probably never used pool. It was surrounded by a high metal fence, and its few lounge chairs were covered in mildew.

For the first time I allowed myself to consider properly what Tommy had said about Eddie last week. What it might mean that Eddie and I had met in that place, at that time, on that day. Whether he had something to hide. It had felt like an absurd theory at first: Eddie had just gone out that morning because he’d needed a break from his mother, and had been delayed on the village green because he’d met a sheep. To read any more into our meeting would be wrong.

But the problem was, I was beginning—at last—to get a handle on the thoughts that had been whispering at the peripheries of my consciousness these last few weeks. They were beginning to form a pattern. And I didn’t like what I saw.

I went inside as the first silver forks of lightning reached down from the sky, unable to shake the sense that a crisis was looming.

•   •   •

The next morning our meeting was preceded by a tour of the hospice.

Like anyone, I supposed, I found hospices hard—after all, few places in life treated death with such certainty. But I wore my best impassive face; kept the lurch of fear deep inside myself; made sure to breathe slowly. And I was doing quite well at it, I thought, until we walked into the TV lounge and I saw a girl in a chair near the window.

I stared at her.

“Ruth?” She was wrapped in a soft blanket, waxy pale and horribly slight.

Ruth looked up, and after what felt like an agonizing pause, she smiled. “Oh, my God,” she said. “This I did not expect.”

“Ruth!” Reuben bounded over to hug her.

“Careful,” Ruth said quietly. “Apparently my bones are brittle. You don’t want to snap me in half or anything. You know how fond Mom is of a lawsuit.”

Reuben hugged her gently; then I joined in.

Ruth had been one of our first patients, back in the day when it was just Reuben and me and we’d barely heard of Clowndoctors. She had been a tiny baby, in and out of surgery, and we’d always known that her life expectancy—if she survived at all—was very limited.

But my God, that girl had fought. And so too had her single mother, who had raised the money to go to the Children’s Hospital LA for her neonatal care because a doctor there was a world specialist in Ruth’s rare genetic condition. Their we-will-not-take-no-for-an-answer attitude had repeatedly compelled Reuben and me to push on with our own work.

I did not make a habit of meeting the kids. I found it far too painful. But there was something about Ruth I couldn’t resist. Even when my job had ceased to involve hospital visits, I still went to see her, because I couldn’t not.

Now here she was, aged fifteen and a half, wrapped in a blue fleece blanket with a moon print on it, an IV stand next to her armchair. Tiny and scrappy; her thin hair brittle. For a moment I stood still as shock curled around my throat.

“Well. This is a nice surprise,” I said, sitting down next to her.

“What, to find me looking like a dead chicken in a hospice?” she asked. Her voice was thin. “How do you like my hands? See? Like chicken feet. Oh, come on,” she said, when I tried to disagree. “You’re not going to try to tell me I look like a hot babe, are you? Because if you are, go away.” She smiled through chapped lips and I felt a savage tearing in my heart.

“You came back home, then,” Reuben said. “To sunny Fresno.”

“Yeah. I felt that the least I could do would be to check out somewhere close to home,” she said. “Poor Mom’s exhausted.”

And without warning, she started to cry. She cried silently, as if she no longer had the energy to produce noise or tears.

“This sucks,” she said. “And where are your guys? Where’s a red nose when you need one?”

“That’s what we’re here to talk about,” Reuben said, blotting her tears with a tissue. “But even if it doesn’t go ahead, we’ll try to have a Clowndoc come visit you. As long as you don’t think you’re too old.”

“I don’t,” she said weakly. “Your people have never talked to me like I’m a kid. Last time I saw Doctor Zee, he said he was going to help me write a poem for my wake. He’s a great wordsmith when he’s not being a dick. Can you send him?”

“We’ll make it the first thing we talk about in our meeting,” I told her. “I’m sure Zee’ll be up for visiting.”

“I love those guys,” Ruth said. She leaned back against the chair, the effort of talking to us leaching energy fast from her body. “They’ve been the only constant, all these years. The only people who are bigger assholes than me. No offense,” she said in Reuben’s direction. “I know you started out as a clown.”

He smiled.

“Do you want us to help get you back to your room?” I asked Ruth. I tucked the blanket more tightly around her. There was a hard swelling in my throat. How was this possible? Funny, smart Ruth, with her ginger ponytail and those parsley-green eyes. Why was her life ending just as it was beginning? Why wasn’t there anything anyone could do?

“Yes,” she whispered. “I need a nap. Damn you, making me cry.”

As we left her room a few minutes later, I brushed away an angry tear and Reuben took my hand. “I know,” he said. “I know.”

•   •   •

After our presentation to the board we broke to a sunny terrace for coffee. The hospice’s VP of Care Services took me to one side to ask further questions.

I should have seen it coming; I should have known from the questions he’d asked earlier. We often came across people like this man, who couldn’t see past the red noses, refused to differentiate our practitioners from party clowns.

“The thing is,” the man was saying, with his pebbly glasses and wobbly chin and thunderous hauteur, “my team have years of training among them. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with them having to work around . . . well, clowns.”

The passion that had driven our presentation had now dissipated. I felt an overwhelming need to escape.

“Your staff will always be in charge of the children’s medical care,” I made myself recite. I watched a bird in the tree above him. “Just look at our practitioners as you would any other visiting entertainer. The only difference is that they’ve been through months of specialist training.”

He frowned into his coffee and said that his own staff were also highly trained, actually, but they didn’t need to wear silly clothes or carry musical instruments. And suddenly—even though years in this job had taught me never, ever to take on people like this man—I found myself doing just that.

“You can focus on the playful side of what they do, if you want,” I said. “But we’ve had countless doctors and nurses tell us they’ve learned helpful tools from our practitioners.”

The man started. “Oh!” he said. The sun flashed in his glasses. “So you’re telling me our staff could learn something from a bunch of out-of-work actors?”

Reuben, standing with the main group, turned round.

“That’s precisely what I’m not saying,” I said. I had him eye to eye as if we were in some kind of duel. What was I doing? “All I’m saying—as you’d know, if you had actually listened—is that feedback from medical professionals is resoundingly positive. But these professionals have had some level of humility.”

“Mrs. Mackey. Did you just say what I think you did?”

Reuben joined us very quickly. “Can I help with anything?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” the man said. “Your business partner was just telling me that my care staff could learn a thing or two from your clowns. Including humility, if you can believe it. So I’m just taking a moment to let that one sink in.”

“Mr. Schreuder—” Reuben began, but he was cut off.

“I have a team to manage,” Pebble Glasses said. “Good day.”

The bird above him took off and flew down the street. I watched, wishing I could go with it.

“What the hell is going on?” Reuben demanded, as soon as we got into the taxi.

“Sorry.”

“Sorry?” Reuben was furious. “You might have just cost us that entire contract. Which would be fine, Sarah, if it were just about us, or money, but it’s not. It’s about Ruth. And all the other kids in there, and the four other hospices they own.”

From the front of the taxi I could hear snatches of a Latin American voice and cumbia music. I took a few slow breaths. If I were Reuben, I’d be furious, too.

“For chrissakes, Sarah!” Rueben exploded. “What’s up?”

The taxi driver had finished his phone call and was listening to us with interest. He didn’t get a great deal of satisfaction, however, because I had nothing to say.

After a long pause Reuben spoke. “Is it about me and Kaia?” he asked. He was staring fixedly at the spread of traffic on the other side of the highway. “Because if it is, we really need to talk it out. I—”

“It’s not about Kaia,” I said. “Although if I’m honest, I think she needs to back off.”

“Then what? You’ve been off-key a while. Sarah, we were married seventeen years,” Reuben said. “I still know you.”

“No, you don’t.”

A mother and her two kids crossed the road ahead of us at the lights. One of them was kicking his legs in a stroller; his sister was dancing ahead of them with a shiny little party trumpet, toot-toot-tooting for all she was worth. Hannah had had one of those. Sometimes she’d blast it in my ear if she woke up before me, and I’d scream my head off. And she would be in hysterics, running around with her trumpet, hooting and tooting and laughing.

As the lights changed and we pulled forward, I realized I was crying.

•   •   •

I stood in the dirt-flecked window of the gate later on, watching planes taxi through an evening the color of rust. My cell phone rang out three times before I realized it was mine.

“Jenni?”

“Oh, Sarah, I’m glad you picked up.”

“Are you okay?”

“Pass. But look, the strangest thing happened just now.”

I waited.

Reuben waved at me. The last few passengers were disappearing out of the gate area.

“I just saw Eddie, Sarah. In our building.”

“Sarah!” Reuben called. “Come on!”

I signaled to him to wait, holding my hand in the air as if waiting to be counted.

“I’ve looked at his photo so many times,” Jenni was saying. “There was no mistaking him. He was talking to Carmen at reception, but by the time I went out there, he’d left.”

“Oh.”

My arm dangled stupidly in the air, all the blood running out.

“He asked Carmen if you were in, then left without leaving a message.”

“Oh.”

“It was him, Sarah. It was definitely him. I looked at a photo right afterward. And Carmen said he had an English accent.”

“Jenni, are you sure? Are you one hundred percent sure?”

“One hundred percent.”

“Right.”

“Sarah? What the hell’s going on?” Reuben sounded angry again.

“I have to go,” I said heavily. “I have to get on a plane.”