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with me at all and often looked at me as though trying to remember who I was and how I got there. They didn’t need me to work in the office. I was starting to wonder why I was there myself. Ironically, I was starting to feel like a ghost myself, just moving through the rooms, keeping to myself, and trying not to interrupt the things around me.
    Writing to David gave me the opportunity to at least prove I still existed. Between him, my mother, and the waitress at the tavern over in Falcon, I had regular communication with people now who knew who I was and expressed interest in what I was doing. The waitress, whose name I’d learned was Grace, was slowly becoming my closest friend–a thought that might have depressed me under normal circumstances but now seemed okay. She was probably a year younger than me and always greeted me with a warm, welcoming smile. On her breaks she’d sometimes slide in across from me at my booth and we’d chat about the town, current movies, and plans for the summer. The restaurant was a busy one, and she always appeared to be the only one working, but she was never too busy to throw a few kind words my way and I lapped them up like a hungry dog.
    And then there was David.
    There are some people in your life you can go years without talking to and then pick right back up where you left off. We were like that. We’d bonded as children in our weirdness (he ate bugs and talked to himself and pretended a unicorn picked me up every night and took me to a magical land under Lake Michigan) and although as adults we had little in common something just kept us hanging on. Maybe it was nothing more than a shared past, but it was enough.
    Now, during the day when Janet didn’t give me anything to do and I was sitting at my desk, bored senseless after cleaning it for the fifteenth time that day, I could write David long emails. At first, he might go a day without answering them. Soon, however, he was responding almost immediately. I think he must have been lonely, too. I described the grounds, the house, what was going on at night, what had happened in Kentucky, how sad and lonely I was feeling, and my excitement about graduate school. He wrote about his job, his breakup, and new recipes he was trying out.
    Neither one of us got out much.
    I didn’t know much about David-the-man. We hadn’t spoken in a long time and my memories were of him as a little boy, or him as an awkward teenager. In some ways, it was like having a pen pal I’d never met.
    On some nights, when it was hard to sleep, if I could get up enough courage to open my bedroom door I’d steal downstairs in the darkness, flip on the low-wattage lamp at my desk, and write him longwinded emails. Even while the noises above me carried on throughout the wee hours of the morning and terrified me to the point where I often wanted to throw my things in the car (forget the blasted refrigerator-I’d find another one) and hightail it out of there, my letters to him were an anchor of sanity. Writing about the weather, a movie I’d just treated myself to, a nightmare I’d had, a song I’d heard and liked…anything to keep my mind off of what was going on around me.
     

     
    U sually, after work, I’d drive into town and eat dinner. Sue Ellen, my favorite server at the tavern, was always waiting for me, ready to serve me a bowl of chowder or a burger. Her smile was a welcomed sight after spending a day of mind-numbing work with people who hardly said more than a word to me. I was aching to talk to someone and found I sometimes held her back from her duties by spilling out everything that was on my mind. If she minded, she didn’t show it. I didn’t tell her about what was going on in the farm house. Part of me was still trying to explain it away in the hopes that it was simply the sounds an old house made; creaks and groans from settling and wind.
    But I knew it wasn’t.
    Instead of being a “problem child” for her, I tried to be