The sky was a mixture of light blue and gray. The street down below was covered in the dry leaves of early October rattling up and down the street, around trees, under cars and getting caught in hedges and bushes. Another breeze whisked then through the Forman's yard, through the Pinciotti's on the corner and across an angle toward the Kutcher house. The trees in the neighborhood were bare, their empty limbs reaching up to the sky barren of their green summer foliage. It wasn't Halloween yet, but the neighborhood kids were already wearing plastic masks and scaring each other as they walked up the street to school. Along they way, the stomped through, crushing the dry leaves underfoot or raking them into the gutters at the edge of the curb. Kitty Forman had come down the driveway to get her morning newspaper. She stopped to beam a smile toward the children of her neighbors and regretted the fact she'd never be a grandmother. She so missed her own children. Laurie had vanished unto the underground of Chicago a few years ago… never to be seen again. Her youngest child, Eric… Well, he was another story she barely talked about. The neighborhood parents even talked about her being a bit off since his disappearance. He went off to a high school party several years ago, happy and smiling to be with his true love and best friends, and had never returned. To this day, no one was exactly sure what had happened to him. Kitty just faked her smile through her sorrow, took up the newspaper from her leaf-covered driveway and turned round in her furry slippers and bright pink robe to head back into the house, carrying the newspaper by the tip of its plastic cover. When she rolled the back door to the side, she caught the attention of her husband pouring himself a cup of coffee.
"Here's the newspaper…" She replied a bit matter-of-factly. "What would you like for breakfast?" She pulled her frying pan out from under the stove, placed it on the burner and turned on the heat. "I found this new thing at the store. It's like scrambled eggs from a carton. It's much easier than whipping the eggs myself."
"Kitty, you know I can't stand that processed stuff." He sat at the kitchen table and slipped the newspaper from its wrapper, shifting through it for the local news. "I'll just take coffee and toast." The curmudgeonly seventy-two year old was not enjoying his retirement as much as he had liked. He had a GI pension paying his bills, his house was paid for, he had taken Kitty on trips to Florida, the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore and yet, there was still something missing. He looked up to the empty seat before him and imagined the ghost of his son there. He could still picture him there. His gawky skinny frame, that cock-eyed smirking grin, that god awful lump of hair piled on his head and his constant insipid Star Wars references… just thinking about the pain in the ass made him want to reach out and smack him.
"No, you got to have some breakfast…" Kitty opened the refrigerator and took out the eggs. She took two eggs out from the carton and smacked them into the frying pan, dropping the shells in the trash under the sink. "How about bacon?"
"Don't worry about it." Red looked over at her. "I'm doing just fine."
"Good morning, Mrs. Forman…" A voice came from behind him. Red and Kitty turned round to Steven Hyde staying with them. The forty-something former felon just ambled over to the coffeepot to pour himself some coffee to wake his brain. Gone were the black rock-and-roll t-shirts, the torn t-shirts and boots. He was wearing a white shirt with a tie, tan khakis with black shoes and a tie. His curly brown hair was still there, but cut shorter than it was in his youth and joined by a thick bristling beard. He scowled a bit adding artificial sweetener to his caffeine. It was quite obvious that his life had taken a change into another direction since… the incident.
"Steven, how about some breakfast?" Kitty offered.
"Thanks a lot, Mrs. Forman, but I really got to be at the record shop early." He took a doughnut from the box at the table. "We've got a new shipment of records coming in plus a big Britney Spears promotion for her new album."
"Which one is she again?" Red could not keep track of all the current 90s pop stars. "Is she the one with the squeaky voice, the big chest or can't keep her clothes on?"
"She's the one who can't keep her clothes on." Hyde mugged a bit like the old Steven. "Kelso would have loved her!" He bit into his doughnut and sipped his coffee.
"I think Fez might have loved her too." Kitty was scrambling around the stovetop tossing things together. "Here you go, honey…" She gave him a sandwich with fried eggs in between two pieces of buttered toast. "Can't have you going hungry."
"Thanks a lot, Mrs. Forman…" Hyde smiled to her. She was just so wonderful to him while Red was still held a grudge against him. "See you, Red." He bit into the hasty sandwich and on out to his black 1995 Jeep out in the driveway. Red stewed at the table as his son's best friend headed off to his job. Listening to the Jeep backfiring its way down the driveway, the former Army sergeant rolled his eyes trying to keep from speaking his peace. He had a lot to ask the boy about involving his son, but he bided his time for now.
"There you see…" Kitty brought more toast to her husband. "You're talking again."
"That's not talking." Red sipped his coffee. "That's acknowledging his presence."
"Red Forman…" Kitty glared a bit. "How long are you going to harbor this grudge? We've known Steven since he was five years old! He did not kill Eric!"
"For Christ's sake, Kitty…" Red rose his voice to let loose. "Twenty years ago, Steven and the kids vanish at a party at the high school and are missing for twenty years, and then three months ago, the little creep gets flushed out of a deserted California sanitarium stoned out of his mind and screaming about ghosts and demonic clouds eating people and with no memory of the last twenty years! Just tell me, what do you think happened?"
"Red Forman, you're the biggest hypocrite in the world!!!" Kitty got his attention by laying into him. "When our son was alive, you put him through hell! If I had a dime for every time you threatened to put your foot up his ass or something, I could buy myself a car! A really nice one!!! You never liked Eric! You never liked being a dad to him! You treated him as if he wasn't even your son! The only one you really liked was Laurie and look what happed to her!!! You hated being a dad to Eric so don't sit there and grieve for the boy or even blame Steven for something that never happened! You drove Eric away!!!"
"Really…" Red looked at her nerve to chew him out. "And the others just followed him for the heck of it?"
"Well," Kitty turned round from venting her anger and poured herself some scrambled eggs. "I don't have all the answers! All I know is that Steven did not kill our son. When he says he doesn't recall getting dumped in that sanitarium, I believe him!"
"Let me say this…" Red pouted a bit and took a deep breath. Kitty stopped what she was doing to glare at him. "I admit that Steven has never wavered from that story, but why was he, Eric and the kids dumped in that place to begin with? Someone had to have taken them cross-country for that particular place and if that's the case, why would it take him twenty years to escape?" He leaned back having made his point. "Kitty, why were they there?"
Steven had been asking himself that question ever since the police and the FBI had questioned him. He fled from that place as a nineteen-year-old kid, and he was released as a forty-year old man from police custody just a week later. What had happened to his life? Why did he not have any memory of it? It was like the mystery of those three Burkittsville filmmakers who had vanished looking for the ghost of a witch in the woods. Where they going to appear in twenty years suddenly accelerated into adulthood? All he did know was he woke up in that basement, he was terrified for his life and when he stormed out, over twenty years had passed. A nineteen-year-old kid in the body of a grown man, he had missed his own graduation and the whole of the Reagan years, but his biological father had recognized him in the news, supported him in the ensuing investigation and gave him a job managing a music store. Where there had once been vinyl records was rows and rows of cassettes and now CDs. It was a good thing they were so much smaller; there were so many more new artists to keep track of from the Material girl to mullet-headed country stars. Keeping up on them was almost as hard as it was getting his GED. Heading to the music store to get ahead of the deliveryman, he nervously bit his nails and stared ahead at the people on the crosswalk. Even after twenty years, the Maple Drive exit on to Main Street was still the slowest light in Point Place, Michigan. It finally turned green, but the guy in the Le Sabre barely looked up. When he finally noticed the change and drove through, the light was red again and Steven was stuck in traffic again!
"Crap and a half!!!" He pounded the steering wheel of his jeep out of frustration. He frustratedly rolled his eyes and leaned back in the driver's seat watching the pedestrians crossing by in front of his Jeep. A guy rolling several boxes behind on a cart, a mom with a cart, several kids from the Chik Filet heading to his old high school, a coffee-sipping businessman with a briefcase and an older woman with a bag of groceries. He smirked toward the girl in the Madonna hooded sweater, her bosom spreading wide the Material Girl's likeness. Oh, to be young again to proposition her! Hyde then turned his gaze to the next young lady… his blood running cold at the sight of her. Gazing at him from the crosswalk, Jackie Burkhart peered back to Steven Hyde watching her. An evil glint to her face, her cold gaze directed upon him, she grinned heartlessly toward him and walked before the grillwork of his Jeep. Garbed almost entirely in black from head to toe, she looked just as young as the last time he saw her! Her long dark brown hair bobbing on her shoulders, her enhanced supernatural figure accentuated by the souls of the living, her presence mocked him to the core of his soul. Steven's jaw dropped as she walked by him and toward their old school!
"What? Jackie???" Steven stammered. She was quickly vanishing away from him! He tried to turn into the traffic but a silver Subaru nearly cut him off. Pounding his wheel in disgust, Hyde checked the traffic again and forgot about getting to his music store for the moment. He turned right into the traffic and peered over the cars parked along the curb alongside him. A recognizable brunette head was bobbing behind them.
"Jackie!!!" Hyde screamed for her to stop. He wasn't sure if he wanted to talk to her, but he had to stop her. He felt he had to! His black Jeep rolling unsurely down the curb, Steven looked over and around cars, trucks and vehicles between him and the sidewalk. Crossing in front of the book store to the money-lenders, Jackie looked back at him once in front of the Starbucks, her blue eyes even brighter than he recalled, her bosom larger than it ever was, and vanished behind a van blocking Hyde's view of her.
"I don't think so…" Hyde rolled quickly ahead and found himself approaching the Main Street and Prepone Street intersection, Fez's foster family once lived on this street. Instead of stopping, he flipped on his turn signal and turned sharply to stop Jackie, timing it that she'd have to collide with the side of his Jeep, but she never emerged beyond the end of the van.
"What?" Hyde reacted confused. Where'd she go? He looked down through the little tunnel shaped by the awning and the van up close together turned to look further up the street and noticed something else. Down the hill from him, strolling up the other hill on the other side of the Barbecue Place toward the houses beyond, Jackie had somehow vaulted ahead almost two blocks. She even looked back once more to see if he was still following her. She was strolling past the wood between the U-Haul place onward to the Old Bartilson House on the corner at Tisdale Drive. That old place had had a reputation of being haunted since the 1940s. No one wanted to live there since Michael Bartilson and his family swore they heard voices and experienced doors closing in the place. With Hyde getting closer, Jackie continued onward to the boarded up two-story frame house. Looking up once more, her presence passed between the trees in the front yard. Hyde stopped before the house just as she stepped up on to the front porch. Jackie looked back at him once more and passed through the front door turning into immaterial matter. His pulse racing, his breath increasing, Hyde couldn't believe what he was seeing. He was following her ghost!!!