There once was a ghost of a little boy who had passed away late one night in a seaside hotel where he and his mother had dropped their tawdry luggage when they’d gotten kicked out of their apartment.
He wanted the ocean; he wanted the salt and the sand because children who dug their toes in the sand seemed happier than children whose mothers were too lazy to pay bills. His mother wouldn’t let him go in the water, but she promised to take him later. The promise sat high on his head. For now, though, she was busy with other things. His mother made him sit quietly in the motel room because her head was hurting; her head was always hurting.
So the little boy stayed in the room while his mother slept; he sat in the room and stared at the patchy carpet. The sleeping pills on the nightstand looked like candy that his mother had let him get at the Stop-N-Go the last time she’d bought a pack of cigarettes, but they didn’t taste as sweet. They tasted like overdue bills and snuck sips of vodka and h e a v i n e s s … .
The little boy stayed in the room after his mother hauled his body away. She never came back to take him to the sea, but he waited. He could hear the ocean calling, but he couldn’t yell back; the French doors blocked the meek, ghostly sound of his little-boy voice. He’d press his hands against the windows; he’d breathe, but his breath make no fog. He was trapped.
The little boy stayed in the room.
The motel changed while the boy waited for his mother to take him to the sea. The carpet got replaced, and the creaky beds were fixed. More respectable families came to the motel; it was no longer a place for tawdry suitcases and broken families. Years passed, and the little boy stared at the not-so-patchy carpet as families sifted in and out like the ocean sand that the boy still longed for, families whose children played in the sea.
The little boy would walk up to his visitors and place his hands on their cheeks and touch his nose to theirs and he’d talk about his longing for the sea, but they wouldn’t respond. Sometimes the children would feel his breath and scratch their button noses and rub their shell-ears, but none of them talked back to him.
x
One day, a little girl with a gap between her teeth as wide as a toothpick arrived in the hotel. She had an unfortunate bowl cut and an eye patch decorated with 101 Dalmatians stickers.When she walked in the boy’s room (his prison cell) she looked at him over her glasses and raised her eyebrows without a word.
That night, while the little girl slept, the boy crept up to her. He breathed a puff of air on her forehead and the little girl pulled her blankets into a cocoon. He reached out a shimmery hand out to hers, and his pale hand sunk into hers. He wiggled his fingers, and her fingers moved on top of the hotel comforter. He pulled his hand back. For a moment he’d felt warm.
x
When the family opened the French doors the next day, the little girl lingered in the room and looked over her shoulder at the little boy. He was staring with a plain longing at the sea, the one thing he wanted in his little-boy, one-track mind. She raised her eyebrows, beckoning, but the little boy stared down at the carpet. He couldn’t leave his cell like this; his spirit was incapable of leaving the place where he had departed from his poor little-boy body. The little girl turned a sun-browned shoulder and exited the hotel room.
x
The next night, as the little girl had dreams that made her eyelashes flutter against her cheeks, the little boy watched and hovered next to the bed. He laid his hand on top of hers. They seemed to mesh together. He wiggled their fingers and rotated their wrists around in a flick. The girl opened her eyes and tensed, fearful for a moment. Once her eyes focused on the little boy, she relaxed and watched her hand move to the little boy’s accord. He was transfixed. He lifted their hands into the air in exaggerated conductor’s waves and in little-boy sign language and in shapes that casted themselves to the wall in the ocean’s moonlight.
The little girl quietly got up from her bed and stood nose-to-nose with the little ghost boy, theirs hands still one; he could almost smell the ocean on her skin. The girl took back her hand and nodded to the boy. He aligned their bodies front to back, staring at the back of the girl’s bowl cut. He took as deep of a breath as a little ghost-boy could take. He knocked the back of her heel with one of his feet and felt the give as his foot sank in. Then, he submerged the rest of his body, her frame encapsulating the little ghost-boy.
The little girl could feel the happiness of the little ghost-boy all the way down to warmth in her fingertips. The little boy could feel the essence of being all the way to the edges of the little girl’s feet. He craned her neck and he shook her arm and he rotated about on her waist.
He felt her assurance in her mind. She was beckoning him again. He took tentative steps toward the door of the hotel room that he had inhabited since the day he had stopped living, banned to half-life and half-breath and half-
Her feet had carried him out of the hotel room and onto the staircase and into the foyer and past the drowsy receptionist, who just lifted her eyebrows at the sight of a little girl wandering about in the middle of the night.
The little girl paused at the oceanside door and let the boy control his excitement for this thing he had waited for since that day of infinite sleep, the day his mother’s pills had exceeded their job description.
He suddenly felt the ocean air hit their faces. One step, and they were immersed in it, and he hadn’t such a feeling in years. They kept walking. Feet met sand, and the little boy made their body lie down and feel this true sense of rest and being. He dug their fingers in the sand and felt the moisture deep beneath and the roughness of the grains themselves.
Then, he heard the waves. Oh, he heard them. They were begging him, pleading. They wanted him. He bought their bodies up and looked at the ocean. He knew that it was about the end. This ocean was not false like the sleeping pills he’d mistaken for candy; it did not break promises or forget to pay the rent. It was real. It wanted him, and he wanted it back.
The pair of children, one real and one not-so-real, took their feet to the edge of the ocean and let the waves lap at their toes. The girl felt the boy’s happiness, an ecstasy so immense that it shook her even years later when she would visit the ocean.
For once, the little boy stared up at the star-filled sky. He wiggled the little girl’s toes in the water and smiled and felt a new kind of h e a v i n e s s, one of fulfilled wishes and ceased waiting: one of the weight of gravity and the force of the earth coming up under h i s little-boy f e e t … .
