The Illusion of Separation

I'm sure Carter hated me.

When we left Chris's house, he wouldn't look at me. I debated talking to him, but what good was that going to do? I was pretty sure he wouldn't listen to me anyway, and what was I supposed to say? That Chris was still here and he was just a ghost? I couldn't do something like that to Carter, even if it was true. He'd think I was pulling one over on him, and it would make him snap since he was already so sad I could feel it across the distance separating us in the car.

Chris was sitting on my lap as we drove to Carter's house again. We weighed around the same so we could both sit on each others' laps, but he tended to sit on mine the most because he was one of those stupid, playful kids that didn't want to grow up. I swore he was Peter Pan come to visit us in the body of a vegan musician kid.

I'd told him I was going to explain everything. I hadn't yet and I knew he was impatient to hear it because he kept bouncing around on my lap like he had ants in his pants. By now he'd realized that no one except for me could see him, and he sighed as he watched Carter, whose knuckles were tight on the wheel, so tight that they were pale. It hurt me to see Carter so hurt while I was so happy and relieved I could barely breathe. Chris was here. He'd been here for several hours now, and he wasn't leaving. Yeah, maybe he was dead. But I could touch him and hear him and see him so to me he was as good as alive.

He was humming one of his songs, the name of which I didn't know. He was always coming up with new ones -- he must have had a notebook full of them. Several notebooks, maybe. He only put music to half of them and then he only let Carter and I listen to half of those, so we really only got to hear a quarter of all the songs he wrote. I had never heard the one he was humming, so I assumed he'd never played it for us.

"Need coffee," he finally said, thunking his head against the car window. "Fuck. I need coffee."

Chris drank his coffee black which was about the most disgusting thing I'd ever heard of. Then again, he was vegan and couldn't have milk. Sometimes he'd put sugar in it, but he didn't let himself touch anything with milk, eggs, cheese, or meat in it and so most times his coffee ended up black. Just like always, he'd watch as I poured all kinds of milk and creamer into mine and make faces, as if it was the most disgusting thing in the world that I was drinking milk with my coffee. I'd stare down into the light brown color and try not to feel like I was doing something horrible by drinking it.

I didn't even know how he was supposed to get coffee if his hands just went through everything. In the movies, I'd seen the ghosts lift up things and they'd seem to be floating in midair, but Chris couldn't even have that luck. I'd try and brainstorm on the way back to Carter's house and see if I could come up with anything.

My hand was gently resting on the small of his back, and his hand was sitting comfortably on my knee. Carter kept glancing at me, and I wasn't sure if I liked that better than him not looking at me at all or what. I'm sure he was thinking that I was crazy and that I'd been acting weird ever since we went to Chris's house, but like I said before, he wasn't going to believe me if I told him Chris was dead but I was able to see and touch and hear him. All I could do was try and find some way to have proof before I told him so that he didn't hate me.

"I'm sorry, Carter," I whispered.

"Don't fuck with me, Hannah," he snapped, and Chris raised an eyebrow. Carter cursed, but sparingly, and he certainly never cursed in response to something I said unless he was joking, so he had to be really mad at me. "At first you cried about Chris just like you were supposed to but then all of a sudden you're acting all weird and detached like it didn't really happen or something. It's pissin' me off."

Yeah, no kidding, I thought.

I could tell Chris wanted to say something. He could, since Carter wouldn't hear him anyway, but it felt wrong and unnatural, and even though I wasn't Chris I knew what he was thinking. It wouldn't help to say something when he knew that Carter wouldn't hear him.

"Carter--"

"Hannah."

He said it sharply and I fell silent, letting my head rest against the window. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes as rain started falling from the sky, like some kind of symbolism that things were going to suck for a while. Chris sighed heavily and rubbed my knee. "There goes our porch-sittin' weather, Carter," he said to himself.

I'd always pretended like those sessions were something stupid even though I loved them. Other boys Carter and Chris's age were out playing paintball at the local arena, or going to movies all the time with girls, or doing stupid stuff to see how much trouble they could get into in a small town like this. My boys thought the perfect Saturday morning was a sunny one with a light breeze so they could sit around and make up songs together. I'd tease them about it but really I'd rather have the weird kids with me any day.

And now I wanted more than anything for them to be able to just sit down and play again.

When we pulled into the driveway, Carter got out and slammed the door behind him. He didn't even open mine like he always had before, and I was left sitting in the car with Chris, who moved into Carter's seat. I couldn't hold it back anymore. I burst into tears for what seemed like the millionth time that day.

"Hannah," Chris said in surprise. I was guessing he hadn't known just how terrible I felt about this whole thing, especially he didn't know what happened. "Hannah, tell me what happened," he pleaded, taking my wrist in his hand and trying to move it away from my face. When he was unsuccessful, he settled for running his fingers through my hair and humming again, something different this time.

"Carter hates me," I choked out.

"Naw, he doesn't. He's just being weird, but Hannah, you gotta tell me what's going on. What's wrong, baby?"

I had to take a few deep breaths and concentrate only on Chris before I could tell him every single thing that had happened. I watched as I told him and his face kind of crumpled when he heard about the accident, about how he'd died in a horrible, painful death, and how we'd just been on our way over to discuss the funeral and so on when he'd appeared in his own room, or, now that I thought about it, the car on the way over here. It made me wonder if he even remembered how he died.

Apparently not, because afterwards, with thin tears slipping one at a time down his face, he said, "That's horrible. So I'm...I-I'm dead?"

"Yeah. You are. And Carter hates me because he doesn't see you or hear you like I do, and so he thinks I'm an insensitive bitch for not crying like I was before, and acting actually kind of happy. I see where he's coming from, but it's killing me having him mad at me."

Chris passed through the door. I went after him, wondering what he was planning, and watched as he came into the living room where Carter was standing at the kitchen island. He marched right on over to his best friend and shoved him in the shoulder, but his hands passed straight through Carter and his momentum propelled him all the way through until he hit the counter which he also passed through, but only enough to end up in the middle of the counter.

"Fuck it!" Chris shouted.

I raised an eyebrow in question, since Carter was still in the room.

"I'm stuck in the fucking counter," he explained.

I tried as hard as I could not to laugh. I swear I did. But it came out anyway, and Carter shot around to see me, angst in his eyes. "What the hell, Hannah?!" he asked, his voice raised, which might as well have been him yelling since he tended to be well-mannered enough. "You think you can fucking laugh at a time like this?! Look, I know that you react to stuff differently than I do, and I know that we're not really the same people, and we have different emotions and reactions and all that shit. But damn, Chris is fucking dead and you can just...you can laugh?" His voice broke at the end, and my heart shot straight to the bottom of the earth. "He was your boyfriend. I thought that might mean something."

He left me, going back to his room to do who-knows-what. Chris looked helplessly at me from the counter, sad both because of how Carter had yelled at me and also because he had no idea how to get out of the counter. I allowed myself a small smile as I went over to him and extended my hands, and in a few long seconds I'd pulled him out, although it felt like moving through molasses.

"Big solid objects are hard for me to go through, I guess," he told me. "It felt like walking through quicksand when I was in there. Probably I can lean against stuff if it's kind of thick and big, but I have to watch myself or I'll start sinking. Anyway...shit, Hannah. I'm sorry. I'm going to make him see me, okay?"

I shrugged. "Doesn't seem like anything will cheer him up."

"Seeing me will, and then he'll know you're not just being a bitch." His hands were still in mine, and he used that to tug me closer to him, pressing his lips against mine in a soft kiss. It sent electricity through my skin, just like it had the first time we'd ever kissed. I didn't think it was ever going to happen again after he'd died, and now here I was, enjoying him just like I had before he'd been killed. It was wonderful.

Once last summer Carter's air conditioning had broken down. Chris, Carter, and I had all laid on the floor trying to get cool by pressing water bottles against our foreheads and imagining ice cubes and snow, except that none of us had ever seen snow since it had never snowed, at least in our lifetimes, here in Joplin. We spent most of the time moaning and making stupid jokes and Chris made up this song that hardly made any sense about how he wished the air conditioner was fixed. Realistically, we could have gone over to my house, but none of us wanted to move in the heat. We were all drenched with sweat and I could remember Chris telling me I looked sexy in sweat even though we hadn't even been dating back then. Anyway, when the repairman finally came around and fixed the air conditioner up, we'd stood in front of it, letting it blow straight into our faces until they felt numb. It had been the most wonderful feeling in the world, and we'd basked in it until we were cool again.

That was how kissing Chris after he'd been killed felt. It was a feeling that I was sure I'd never experience again, and here I was, experiencing it. "I just wanted you to know," I said, "that in case anything happens, you're beautiful."

"Now why would anything happen?" he asked, brushing his nose against mine in an Eskimo kiss.

I shrugged. "I just want to be sure."