#Wattys2015 The Ghost of James Fitzpatrick

Chapter 10

I knew I would see him again. I knew it was only a matter of time and patience. As I vacuumed the living room Saturday morning, I caught a glimpse of 'movement' through the railing that climbed up the stairs toward my bedroom. It was just the sort of movement one might think they only imagined.

I shut off the vacuum cleaner and briskly ascended the wooden steps toward my bedroom, and there he began to appear in the same spot I had seen just the day before. He stood at my window and looked out on to Lilac Street. I took several steps into the room. There was a transparency to his arms, but as inconsistent as this was, I could see other details of him very clearly.

He was about my age, with dark brown hair that just touched the collar of his red jacket. I could see the morning sun on his profile as he looked out my window toward the front yard. There were freckles across his nose, and peach fuzz climbed lightly up the side of his face.

"Who are you," I asked quietly. My words startled him and I knew then he had heard the sound of my voice. He looked and looked directly at me and I was sure my heart stopped beating and my blood stopped flowing.

"Sarah?" he asked, and then he simply faded. The 'tuning dial' that brought him into my room could not retain that perfect frequency, so just as a great song frustratingly disappears on the car stereo, he was gone.

"Oh no, stay," I said simultaneously disappointed and relieved.

He had known my name. I heard him say it out loud. The only sound now was that of the bare oak branches clicking like fingernails against my window in the cold wind outside, and I heard my mother call me downstairs for breakfast.

*************

Instead of doing the twenty four assigned math problems from Chapter 17, pages 169-171, I sat at my homework desk later that night with Margaret Miller's homage to her young, dead neighbor, James Fitzpatrick. I had a similar book when I was about eight, but it was dedicated to Zac Efron and the entire High School Musical cast, admittedly not as noble an effort as this child's scrapbook before me.

I directed my desk lamp over the blue folder and first turned my attention to James' photo on page one. He smiled, oblivious to the tragic fate which awaited him. His face was confident, but friendly and open. His smile was true. He was a handsome boy, and I thought about how the girls at Arden High must have liked him back then, and how they surely cried when he jumped. I read his obituary:

James Ryan Fitzpatrick, age 17, passed away Tuesday, February 12. James, a native of Arden, was a senior at Arden High School. As a fourth year Arden Charger baseball player, James led the league in hits, and as a freshman, broke the Arden High record for stolen bases.

James is survived by his mother Mary, and his brother Tom, both of Arden. He is preceded in death by his father, Gerald Fitzpatrick.

The remaining pages of Margaret's scrapbook were a few photographs of James, and a news article from the Arden Chronicle about his important grand slam in a game against Arden's cross town rivals in 1976. The last photo in the book was that of him alone, on what I recognized as the front steps of my own house. He was older in this photo, perhaps 16 or 17, and was seated on the top step, leaning on his bat, and smiling for whomever took the Polaroid that would eventually end up in Margaret Miller's book.

If Margaret had been sixteen instead of six, her little scrapbook would have been the ramblings of an obsessive girlfriend worthy of a restraining order. Instead, it was delicate and carefully constructed out of admiration for a boy who must have seemed like a grown man to her. I pictured Margaret and her red pony tail, humming to herself and taping pictures and articles into this labor of love.

Tucked into the last page as an afterthought, and perhaps put there by Margaret's mother, was a news article. It was not pasted down, so I pulled it out and unfolded it to read:

Drowning Victim Identified as That of Arden Teen. A body pulled from the Mississippi River, approximately a quarter mile south of the Interstate Bridge on Wednesday morning, was identified as that of 17-year-old high school senior, James Ryan Fitzpatrick, of Arden.

The Bridge, which spans the river between Arden and south St. Louis has been a meeting place for teens since its completion in 1928, said Sheriff's Department spokesman Marty Stern. Fitzpatrick's bicycle was found just beneath the main tower of the Bridge on Wednesday.

I folded the article and tucked it back where I'd had found it and gently closed the book.

The sides of The Bridge had long ago been closed to foot traffic, and whatever 'hanging out' teenagers did in the 1970s no longer occurred on The Bridge. It was just a means of leaving Arden. I never thought twice about its presence, but I knew one thing was certain. I would never again cross it without the thought of James Fitzpatrick's long and final plunge from its heights to the rush of  the the dark water below.