Free The Ghosts of Now by Joan Lowery Nixon Page A

head and pause, looking at Jeremy. I have got to reach through to him. And I’ve got to find out what happened. It’s a strange feeling, asthough if I don’t find out, Jeremy won’t ever come back. “Good-bye, Jeremy,” I murmur. “I’ll see you later.”
    I think I see his arm move, just slightly. Mom doesn’t react, so maybe it’s just my imagination.
    My feelings about Jeremy are so strong that when I come into the empty house I make straight for his room, stopping at the doorway because I feel like an intruder. Papers and books are mounded on his desk, and the dark red-plaid spread on his bed is pulled askew over lumps and bumps in the blanket. I step over his tennis shoes as I walk to his desk, and pick up a few papers that have slipped to the floor.
    I pull out the chair that’s tucked into the kneehole in Jeremy’s desk and sit in it. I divide the books and papers into two sections: books neatly to the left, papers to the right. I glance through the papers. School assignments. A bookmark hangs from one of the books. Jeremy’s reading
Captain Horatio Hornblower
? I wonder if it’s an assignment or if it’s a story he’s really into.
    I slide open the center top drawer. It’s a jumple of broken pencils, gum wrappers, even an old yo-yo. But there’s a slender book on top of the mess. It’s the size of a ledger, with a deep brown cover. I reach for it as though I’ve been told to do so, and as I open the cover I hold my breath.
    Poetry by J. D. Dupree.
    Jeremy writes poetry?
    I turn the page gingerly, terrified at stumbling into Jeremy’s secrets.
    I soon forget that I’m an intruder. The first few poems wouldn’t even be a threat to Rod McKuen; but the literary quality doesn’t matter. It’s Jeremy’s thoughts that are on these pages, and I’m discovering a brother I hadn’t known existed. He writes of loneliness, of the terrors of moving to new places. He writes of feelings I can share, and I’m ashamed that I thought those feelings were mine alone. But there’s a hopelessness in some of the poems that frightens me. I read one of them aloud, and the words hang shivering long after I’ve spoken them:
    I grab at stars
,
sweeping my hand across the heavens
,
hanging onto sharp chunks of hope

that cut my palm
.
Carefully, eagerly I pry open

my fingers

and find I have captured

only slivers of darkness
.
    Some of the pages in the book have been torn out. I read through a couple more poems before I come to the last one. Beyond this page lie clean, blank pages that are ready for his thoughts to come.
    As I read this poem I begin to tremble. The handwriting is a hasty scrawl of black ink, and the first line has been scratched out and written over. It’s a strange poem, different from the others, but it’s here for a reason, and I feel it tugging at me:
    The house is haunted

by the Ghosts of Now

whose shadows no one wants to see
,
whose screams no one wants to hear
,
until tomorrow
.
    What are you saying, Jeremy? I don’t understand
.
    I’m staring at the page, but it’s as though I’ve closed my eyes and have dreamed up a picture. In front of me is the haunted house that Del pointed out. It’s rotting under those twisting, unkempt vines, its windows blank eyes that shut off the ghostly world inside its walls. It’s a real house, not an allegory. Jeremy told me to stay away from that house. Why?
    I close the book, replacing it in the drawer, shutting it carefully away. Now I know what my next step is. I’ve got to find those “ghosts of now” and discover what they know about my brother.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    The Andrews place squats alone at the end of an empty, quiet street. Maybe it’s because of the overlarge lot that surrounds it; maybe it’s because the house looks like an unkempt, yellowed old man who badly needs a barber, but I feel that the other houses on the block have cringed away from this place, tucking in their tidy porches and neat walkways and dropping filmy curtains over