Who: Flynn & Marsh What: Giving up the ghost Where: Flynn’s trailer, Searchlight When: Evening January 28th
Marsh still hadn’t been to his first therapy session but he knew there was someone who desperately needed his help and he had to take responsibility for the mess he’d left him with. In his hand was a six pack of beer, a peace offering though it wouldn’t correct his wrong. Marsh sighed before bringing his fist up to gently rap on Flynn’s door.
The trailer wasn’t too far from his and while Marsh had been trying to avoid him, it was hard to do in a town like this. He hoped he wasn’t met with a slammed door.
Flynn had finally brought all the boxes of stuff he had wanted to keep from his dad’s house to his trailer. He had handed over the responsibility of getting the place sold to a realtor. Because of this, his living room was crowded with cardboard, despite Ellie helping him get things sorted the past few days. He opened the door, a look of exhaustion plainly written on his face, though when he saw it was Marsh, he straightened up and looked alert.
He eyed the six-pack, silent for a long moment before finally speaking. “Come on.” Flynn turned and walked back into the trailer, expecting Marsh to follow.
Following after him Marsh noted the boxes and the general anxiety on Flynn’s face. “I want to start by apologizing for my behavior.” No need to beat around the bush. Flynn deserved it and he deserved to have this load taken off of his already heavy one. “I left you with a very sick man and it was a terrible decision. I’m sorry.”
He sighed and placed the beers down on top of one of the boxes. He took one out and popped the top off, handing it to Flynn. “If he’s still a problem, I want to help put him to rest so that you can move on as well as him.”
He hoped Flynn would take the offering, because it was weighing heavy on his own mind.
Flynn took the beer almost automatically, looking down at it as if seeing a beer bottle for the first time. “I get wanting to run away from it,” he told Marsh wearily before finding an empty spot on the couch and sinking down into it. “That was pretty much my reaction when it first happened to me. Granted, I was six.” He ran his fingers through his usually carefully styled, now messy hair. He took a deep breath.
“Lawrence has been...around,” he began, eyes darting about the trailer as if the man’s ghost was there, eavesdropping, “and I can’t get him to tell me what he wants. Far as I can tell, though, he’s angry.”
Marsh nodded his head as he listened to Flynn. He could hear the fear behind those words, just like he could hear it what seemed like every damn time he was around Flynn. What sort of life was that? A life living in fear. He grabbed himself a beer out of the pack and twisted the top off to take a quick sip of it. “Well I want you to find him again.” He was asking a lot, but in the end he hoped he could actually help Flynn.
“It might help to know that Lawrence was just like you. He was young and he was struggling to work through some trauma.” Marsh leaned against a counter and placed the beer down next to him. “He didn’t start showing symptoms of schizophrenia until after he’d been in a deadly car accident with some of his friends from college. They all passed and Lawrence had been driving the car.”
“I wasn’t the only one who tried to treat him. For six years he’d gone from psychiatrist to psychiatrist before he finally landed on me. We made progress and things had more or less been going good but then his sister passed and things started going south again.” Marsh sighed at the memory and crossed his arms over his chest.
“I think I can help you talk to him, if you’ll let me.” He finished, hoping Flynn would take the bait because he didn’t like seeing the kid have to deal with this all alone.
Flynn had been practicing with the materials James had provided him, before the whole Lawrence Beals situation. So he knew he could summon a particular spirit, it just took a lot out of him. But if it would bring him some peace, and help Marsh...he couldn’t exactly say no, could he? “I can bring him here now,” he told Marsh. “Things just might get weird, first.” As if to demonstrate, Flynn got up from the couch and switched on a bluetooth speaker, using his phone to pull up a white noise playlist.
“I have to meditate first,” he explained, before settling back onto the couch in a cross-legged position and closed his eyes.
“Alright Flynn. I’ll leave you to it.” He said and vowed to remain silent until Flynn told him he could speak. While he’d had his first appointment with his therapist, there was more work to be done still but this was what Flynn needed and what Lawrence needed. He waited as he listened to the white noise, feeling thankful for it since it was calming his own nerves.
For a few long moments, nothing seemed to be happening. Then the air changed around them, becoming charged, and the small hairs on his arms stood up. If Marsh looked closely enough, he might see the image of someone starting to appear in the room with them, though still largely transparent. The figure began opening his mouth to speak, but there was no sound, at least, not to anyone who wasn’t Flynn.
Flynn’s eyes flew open. “He’s here,” he told Marsh, unnecessarily.
Though blurry, Marsh could make out that familiar face. His blood rushed to his head and he felt it hard to breath. Maybe he didn’t consider what it would be like to see Lawrence again, how it would make the pain in his leg throb. He took a deep breath and forced himself to acknowledge the presence in the room.
“Hello Lawrence. Didn’t expect to see you again.” He said in as calm a voice as he could muster. “Why don’t you tell me what’s wrong?” He asked the ghost though it wasn’t exactly an easy question.
Flynn watched the specter of Lawrence standing before him and listened. “Wait, I think he’s actually calm,” he told Marsh, surprised. “Or lucid, at least.” He leaned back against the couch, taking a long pull of his beer as he decided how best to translate to Marsh. “He says, you know what you did.” The younger man closed his eyes, shaking his head. “You tried to kill him first. He was acting in self-defense by shooting you first.” It was uncomfortable speaking those words aloud, right to the other man’s face.
He rubbed the side of his jaw tiredly. “What do you want me to say back to him?”
He sighed and clasped his hands together in his lap. “We talked about this, I wasn’t after you. I wanted to help you.” He tried to explain, god knows they talked about it enough. “I wasn’t trying to kill you, I was trying to save you.” He remembered some of Lawrence’s more lucid days, they were some of his happiest memories of the paranoid schizophrenic.
“You doing ok Flynn?” He asked, noticing the wince from the younger man as he rubbed his jaw.
Flynn nodded slowly. “I’m tired, but we have to keep going. He can hear you, too, apparently.” He fell silent again as Lawrence spoke, the static charge in the air turning sharper, almost metallic. As it went on, he looked increasingly pale, his eyes becoming flatter, his voice monotone. Even so, at whatever he heard next, the young man visibly reacted and glanced up at Marsh. “He says, you shouldn’t have had the gun in your office in the first place.”
Marsh closed his eyes at that, a statement he’d made to himself over and over again. “You’re absolutely right, Lawrence, and I paid for it dearly. I lost my career and I lost my ability to walk for a year. Now I realize that I deserve all of that but I had a reason why I kept it there.” He began, closing his hands harder around each other.
He thought for a moment about what parts of his life he needed to pick apart to explain his reasoning. He settled on one in particular.
“When I started my practice, I moved my sister and my ma into my house after my pa died. Momma started dating within a year and one of these...gentlemen callers was a man named Harry Dunn. Now my pa was a drunk but nowhere near the caliber that Harry was. He used to hit my ma something fierce and then drive to the bar and do the same to some unsuspecting customer.”
He grabbed the bottle of beer and took a swig before he spoke again. “Had to call the police a handful of times cause he’d start on my sister and he was about three inches and two stones bigger than me. So, I made it a point to have something in case the situation got worse and seeing as this piece of garbage had a key to my house… well I didn’t want it to get in the wrong hands.”
Flynn listened to everything that Marsh was explaining, but he was worried that Lawrence was it. The ghost was appearing more and more agitated, pacing the room and sending a cold, shocking chill throughout, as if someone had left the front door open on a freezing day. The more movement the specter displayed, the more energy seemed to drain out of Flynn’s body. “He says you could have kept it literally anywhere else. He’s not getting any less angry. I…”
He trailed off, leaning forward, head over his knees and the beer bottle slipped from his hand, landing on the soft carpeted floor on its side, foamy beer gurgling out. His voice now was little more than a whisper. “I don’t think he cares, Marsh. I don’t know what’s going to get through to him.”
He sighed frustrated and paced himself. “My point is Lawrence, I wasn’t after you. I was trying to keep my family safe.” He sighed, defeated. He used to be so good at talking to Lawrence, even when he was having fits.
He raised his voice, though not at Flynn. “And I’m not perfect, nobody is. I’m sorry that my mistake cost you your life or that I couldn’t help you see that you deserved to live.” He was silent for a moment, waiting to hear from Flynn what his response was.
There was silence. The already slightly murky vision of Lawrence seemed to flicker in and out. Flynn wasn’t sure if it was because of him, or the ghost was finally beginning to leave. Then he spoke again. “He says…” The younger man looked up at Marsh with some degree of surprise on his face. “He says thank you. All he wanted to hear was that you messed up, that you had a problem too. That you’re not better than him.”
As these words were spoken aloud, Lawrence Beals blipped out of their sight completely. The air in the trailer seemed to return, and Flynn felt an immediate sense of relief, though he was still exhausted. “That was intense.”
He didn’t expect that to get through to the ghost but it did and one small weight was lifted off his shoulders and an even bigger one off of Flynn’s. “I’m so sorry for leaving you with him. I was a coward and I promise that whenever you need help again, you can call me.” This was the main reason he was here. Amends.
The truth was that Marsh’s trauma was far from being fully addressed, even with him finally making peace with the ghost. His upcoming therapy appointment would only be the tip of the iceberg and he’d have a lot more coping to do. “Can you ever forgive me?” He wondered aloud though he didn’t expect Flynn to answer.
Flynn picked up the fallen beer, staring at the growing stain on the carpet. “My dad died over Christmas,” he said, looking up at Marsh. “In a way, that kind of eclipsed the stuff going on with Lawrence. He literally became background noise. Actually, that probably pissed him off more.”
The taller man stood, slightly shaky on his feet. “I get why you ran. Yeah, I was pissed and confused. But I’m used to it. Honestly. People have been pulling away from me since I was a kid, and I learned how to do the same.” Flynn paused. “I don’t see myself hating you or anything.”
Marsh had no idea about Flynn’s dad and he recalled what it felt like to hear that same news when he was about Flynn’s age. Granted, Marsh’s pa was a drunk and not even his birth father but it still hurt. “Flynn I’m so sorry. I had no idea.” There wasn’t much you could say to someone who was grieving like that except to just acknowledge how awful they felt.
“Is that what all these boxes are for?” Maybe he could still help Flynn in some small way. The truck could easily transport these boxes to a storage unit if need be.
“Uh, yeah, these are...his house is being sold.” Flynn closed his eyes and rubbed his jaw, then let his hands drop limply to his sides. “Ellie has been helping me sort stuff, what to give away, what to keep. It’s hard because I don’t really have a sentimental connection to anything in that house.” He knelt down and opened the solitary box with the word ‘keep’ scrawled across it in sloppy black Sharpie. He pulled out a worn baseball glove. “So cliche, right? Sports was the only thing we ever agreed on.”
He straightened, tossed the glove back in the box, and crossed the room to where Marsh stood. “I’m pretty wiped out. Do you mind if I just…” Flynn nodded in the direction of his bedroom.
“Sure kid.” He said and finished off his beer before tossing in the trash. He knew the state Flynn was in, knew that he didn’t know how he was supposed to feel but he also knew that Flynn needed space. He’d have some time to check on him again in the next couple of days, maybe bring Rudy to help cheer him.
“Goodnight Flynn.” He said solemnly as he walked out the door. He wished he could do more, to be there for his friend but he still had his own issues to work out and he wouldn’t be much help with the state he was in.