"VACATION'S almost over, " she said when we kissed good- bye in the parking lot of her motel that Saturday night. "I'm here for another week. " "Me, too. But then, I'll be going back to school. " "I could come visit you. I could take the bus to Philly. " "No. You can't. " "Why not?" Listening to my own whining, I should have known the answer. "You're too young, David. " "But . . . " "This is what it is. Fun. A summertime fling. Don't get all serious on me. " The transistor radio in my head rolled through every sad song about summer romances ever recorded. "See You in September. " "Sealed with a Kiss. " Chad and Jeremy's "A Summer Romance. " The Beach Boys wailing about "having fun all summer long. " "But . . . " I stammered again. "Don't worry, Dave, before letting you go, I want to feel some kind of good-bye. " She was paraphrasing Holden Caulfield from The Catcher in the Rye. "Sad or bad, I need a good-bye. " Her tongue tunneled into my ear again. "We'll head back to the dunes. Tomorrow night. Say our good-byes there. Finish what we started. " "Uh-huh. " She was cupping my crotch. "And David?" "Huh?" "It won't be sad or bad. It'll be the best good-bye you've ever had. " I nodded. I had already forgotten about my imagined visitor back in the funhouse. Hell, I had forgotten my own name. THE next night, however, Brenda was gone. "We thought she was with you, " said her roommates when I showed up at their motel for our hot Sunday night date down in the dunes. "Did she go back to Philly?" I asked. "No. Her stuff is still here. Don't worry, Davey. She'll show up. "
BUT she never did. I kept going back to the Bay Breeze Motel. Her two girlfriends kept telling me they hadn't seen or heard from her since that day she went to the Boardwalk with me. Her beach bag was draped over the headboard of the bed she had been sleeping in. The sheets were rumpled and cold. On Tuesday, Kimberly and Donna called the Seaside Heights Police. The cops asked me all sorts of questions. On Wednesday, my dad came to the police station with me and brought Kevin's father, who was a lawyer. I answered every question as honestly as I could without embarrassing myself in front of my family. The police didn't need to know about the beer and Boone's Farm. About Brenda and me making out in the haunted house. I stuck to the facts. Wheres and whens. "I only hung out with her twice, " I said, sounding much younger than sixteen after two hours of interrogation. "I hardly even know her . . . " "Are you officers finished?" asked Kevin's dad, sounding exactly like Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law from TV. "Yeah, " the cop said. "Miss Narramore's family is worried, is all. Nobody's heard from her since Saturday. Not like her not to check in, they say. " "I'm sorry, " said my father, "but David here is in no way responsible for any of this. For goodness' sake, officers, Miss Narramore is a college student. Nineteen. She should be able to take care of herself. She sure as hell shouldn't be running up and down the beach playing Mrs. Robinson, seducing high school boys!" I remember the cop nodding. "They're going through a rough stretch. " "Who?" my dad asked. "Her family. The girl's grandfather died a couple weeks ago. Now she disappears. They're not thinking straight, you know? Keep pushing us to dig something up. I figure she's just another runaway, like in that new Springsteen song. Guess she was 'Born to Run. ' " The grown-ups all nodded. I didn't. In fact, I froze. Because, in my mind, at that moment, I knew exactly what had happened to Brenda Narramore. It was just like that old man who had come back from the dead to help the rescue squads find his granddaughter. The demon in the dunes was Brenda Narramore's recently deceased grandfather! When I wouldn't stop pawing her, groping at her on the beach and in the Boardwalk spook house, when I wouldn't listen to his ghostly demands to leave his granddaughter alone, he had found a way to stop her! That's when I would've totally freaked out if I hadn't started seriously smoking, full-time. Dorals at first, to honor Brenda's memory, I guess. But Dorals were low in tar and nicotine. Not enough juice to wash away the guilt that came with the weight of knowing that my actions had caused a beautiful girl to be "disappeared" by a demented dead relative. I moved on to Marlboros. Unfiltered Camels. Cigarettes can numb you out. Erase a lot of mental anguish. Help you stuff down all sorts of feelings of guilt and shame and remorse. I think this is why, when I was a kid, all the priests and nuns smoked. We Catholics needed all the help we could get. By Halloween 1975, I had forgotten all about Brenda Narramore. Callous of me, maybe, but I just assumed that the police officer was right. She was a runaway. Yes, that first month back home I would sneak down to the corner drugstore on my bicycle to check out the newspapers from Philadelphia and down the shore. I kept searching for a gruesome story like "Missing Girl's Body Found, Flesh Ripped off Her Beautiful Body by Deranged Beast" or "Monster Stalks Jersey Girl. " But I never found anything about Brenda Narramore at all. Not even in the tabloids with the stories about Elvis and aliens. The demon in the dunes was, most likely, what I first supposed it to be: a figment of my overactive imagination. Face it, seeing evil creatures lurking in blank white spaces is what a comic book artist does. I just started seeing my mythical tormentors earlier than most. However, after that ride down the tunnel of love with Brenda Narramore, I never saw that particular apparition again. I blocked him out of my waking thoughts. Only let his image seep into my subconscious when it needed an especially hideous creature to haunt the shadows of my graphic novels, like my first New York Times bestseller, an early Belinda Nightingale tale called The Withered Wraith of Westmorland. The only thing I can't comprehend: Why am I thinking about all of this again? Why now? Why today? Why am I drifting back to Seaside Heights, August 1975? Surely there are more important places and dates in my life for me to review. Especially now. I hear a knock on a door. Remember where I am. My wife crawls out of the hospital bed. I creak open an eye. Expect to see a doctor. Maybe a nurse. It's a middle-aged woman with short-cropped, wiry gray hair. "May I help you?" my wife asks weakly. "I'm sorry, " says the visitor. "I'm an old friend of David's. When I read in that papers that he . . . " The visitor holds up a faded paperback book. Burgundy cover. The Catcher in the Rye. She opens the front flap. Shows my wife the doodle of the baseball catcher with the bottle of rye in his mitt. My wife nods. Recognizes my signature. The demon in the dunes didn't kill Brenda Narramore. She grew old and frumpy. I try to speak. Groan out her name. Can't. Too weak. Dammit! Why am I thinking about that night we first met? Saturday. August sixteenth. 1975. I close my eyes. Race back. Replay it. The young, topless Brenda Narramore hovers over my trousers. "Shhh. You're just nervous. " I nod. I am. "Here. " She digs into her beach bag. Finds the crumpled Doral pack. "Have another smoke. It'll calm you down. " "I thought we were supposed to, you know, smoke afterward. " She lights two fresh cigarettes. It appears. Ten feet behind her, lurching out of the shadows. The gaunt walking skeleton of an old man, all jagged bone edges and drum-tight skin. A man, maybe not all that old, maybe barely fifty, who only looks like a walking, hairless cadaver because he has been undergoing radiation treatments and chemotherapy for his lung cancer. The demon wobbles forward; close enough, this time, for me to see his eyes when that cloud drifts away from the moon. His hazel-green eyes. My eyes. "Stop!" he wheezes. "Now!" And I know. He is my wraith. The ghost of a person on the verge of death sent forth to haunt himself. He is me. I am sixteen years old but staring at my own dying soul, shrouded in a white knit hospital blanket from Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City where Brenda Narramore has come to say farewell to her long-ago summer love, where my wife has kept constant vigil, sleeping by my side in the hospital bed, forgiving me when I bribed an orderly to sneak me a pack of Marlboros so I could creep downstairs to the sidewalk with my rolling IV pole of postchemo drips to have one last smoke. My wife, who is weeping now because I am dying while the most crucial events of my life flash before my shuttering eyes. I force my spirit back in time in an attempt to right the wrongs I did to myself. "Stop!" I wheeze at my younger self. Me as I was and as I will become. "Now!" I have, mercifully in my final moments, been given the opportunity to go back and warn myself. On the beach. In the funhouse. My first cigarette and the one that got me hooked for good. The one I never quit from again. Or did I? I hear my withered lungs rattle. The inside of my chest itches and burns. Did I heed my wraith's command? I will never know. For if I did, I won't be lying here dying while dreaming about 1975 and the demon in the dunes.