Technically, it was Abby’s Ouija board.
Tuesday had stolen it from Abby’s room during the wake. No. It wasn’t a wake. What do you call it when everyone goes back to a house after a funeral to eat cold cuts and prepared salads and make strained conversation? A memorial? But could it even be a real memorial if there hadn’t been a real funeral?
It wasn’t a real funeral. There had been no official death. There was no obituary. There was no body. Abby was still considered a missing person. Even so, one morning they’d lowered an empty casket into the ground – empty except for a pair of purple Doc Martens, a few photographs, and the High Priestess card from Abby’s Rider-Waite deck, which Tuesday had slipped in when Abby’s dad, Fred, wasn’t looking. (She couldn’t bury the whole deck; dropping the whole deck in would have meant that she’d given up hope, and she hadn’t, not then.) By noon, Tuesday was at her presumed-dead best friend’s house, dragging a chip through French onion dip. Tuesday was sixteen. Abby was sixteen too. She would have turned seventeen in November if she hadn’t disappeared in July.
Tuesday’s parents and her big brother Ollie were eating chips too, and Ms. Heck, their English teacher, and a bunch of people from school and the neighborhood and of course Fred, who was vibrating with grief. Tuesday could almost still feel the pain of watching Fred hovering, fluttering, asking if he could get people anything to drink, trying to take care of everyone else so he wouldn’t have to stop, not even for a second.
All funerals are for the living, but this funeral, this premature burial, was explicitly for Fred. He was already a widower. Tuesday didn’t know if there was a word for the surviving parent of a (presumed) dead child, but now he was that too. He had tried to hope for the rest of July and most of August, and that was enough; he couldn’t live with the uncertainty. She’d heard her parents talking about it, late, on the back porch, a little drunk. “He said he’d rather proceed as though she were dead than live with false hope,” her dad squeaked. “Can you – can you imagine? Is that pessimism? Is that – what is that?” And her mother said, “It’s a ritual. A rite. A motion to go through simply to move.”
Tuesday, at the memorial, fled to Abby’s room, which looked exactly the same as it had every day of Abby’s life, or at least all the days of her life during which she and Tuesday had been friends. Matted purple shag carpet, a black bedspread with purple pillows. Taped to her sloped ceiling, a blue and black and white movie poster: a woman, buried to her waist in the ground, trying to pull herself free but held down by a disembodied arm, a rotting hand wrapped around her throat. I’m going to be one of the evil dead, Tues. None of this nice dead business for me. Sneaks and platform clogs lined up at the end of the bed. A pile of clean socks and T-shirts stacked on her dresser.
You would never guess that two months ago she had vanished off the face of the earth.
Or off the edge of Derby Wharf at least. Into the water, probably – into the cold Atlantic, all while Tuesday was fast asleep in her bed. Tuesday was supposed to be staying over at Abby’s, but they’d had a fight. Sort of. It was a dumb fight. Abby had wanted to go out to the light station at the end of Derby Wharf that night, and Tuesday didn’t. For years, they’d walked out during the day – it was their usual meander around town, down by the old counting house and out the long concrete stretch of the wharf to the tiny white light-house at the end. They’d lean against the light station and scuff their feet over the crumbling stone and most of the time they talked, but sometimes all they did was sit and watch the sea and the sky. Tuesday would only be able to articulate later – years later, with the language of time and adulthood – that that was the first time she understood it was possible to be with another person and not feel at all alone.
That June, right after school ended, they started going out to the light station in the middle of the night. It had been Abby’s idea – of course – but Tuesday needed little convincing to get on board. They each filled their backpacks. Abby with candles and matches and a spell book she’d found and, naturally, the Ouija board. Tuesday with sweet and salty snacks, Oreos and chips and two bottles of chilled Sprite and, once, two teeny bottles of cherry-flavored vodka she’d found at the back of her parents’ liquor cabinet. They snuck out of their houses, two girls in the dark world, packing spells and candles.
She knew her parents would have freaked out, but she didn’t care. They weren’t trespassing – the wharf was a national historic site, and it was open twenty-four hours; she’d checked at the visitor center. And they weren’t actually summoning, like, demons. They were trying to talk to people who had died – recently, in town, or historically, at sea, always with limited success (This Ouija is broken, said Abby, we need a better board) – yes, but mostly they were talking to each other. Making each other laugh. It was a ritual, all right: they were tasting their own freedom. And they were getting away with it.
The reason Tuesday hadn’t wanted to go that night was because it was raining. And because, earlier that day, Abby had asked Tuesday what she thought about trying to contact the ghost of Abby’s dead mother. Tuesday had said sure, but her gut went tight and cold and dug in its heels. She didn’t want to have to tell Abby the truth: that she didn’t really believe believe in this stuff. And that she felt a strange breed of shame – shame for the plain dumb luck that her mother was still alive when Abby’s wasn’t.
“Wimp,” said Abby. “It’s just rain.”
“Rain is cold,” said Tuesday. “And it’s not supposed to rain tomorrow.”
It seemed like an airtight argument.
“Well then, I guess I’ll see you tomorrow,” Abby said. They were in the Hobbeses’ downstairs den, watching The Evil Dead on video for the zillionth time, and though Tuesday wasn’t done with her bowl of vanilla ice cream and jimmies and radioactive-red maraschino cherries, she knew Abby had told her to leave. So she left. Hours later, tucked warm into her bed and tired of fretting, she figured, when she saw Abby tomorrow, that they’d do what they always did: pick up where they left off.
But the next day all the Salem police found was Abby’s backpack, heavy with the previous night’s rain, leaning against the white concrete of the light station. And Abby’s fringed scarf – Tuesday could still picture her haggling with a cart seller on Essex Street – caught around the station’s high metal railing, a black banner flying twenty feet in the air.
If Tuesday hadn’t left Abby’s house – if Tuesday had gone to the wharf, or even just asked what was so special about that night, and why Abby wanted to go – she would have seen. She would have known what had happened to her best friend.
She might have stopped it from happening.
But she didn’t.
Seven-odd weeks later, she finally did something. The day of the memorial, in Abby’s closet, on the tall shelf next to her sweaters, was a short stack of board games, shelved in order of how often they were played: Life, Clue, and on top, Ouija.
It was the same Ouija box that Tuesday, wrists and pride still smarting from the police’s handcuffs, balanced on her lap a lifetime later. The box was old, foxed and squashed, dark blue with a lighter blue sketch of a hooded figure, one hand raised. Good old William Fuld’s mysterious oracle, a quality product made by Parker Brothers, right at home in Salem, Mass. She hadn’t taken the board out in years, hadn’t wanted the reminder (as though she needed a reminder), but maybe she should have. It was like seeing an old friend. Abby had personalized the edges of the board with pictures cut from magazines, a Sgt. Pepper collection of heads and shoulders: Lydia Deetz. A winged Claire Danes. Three different Keanus, a John Lennon, a Morrissey, an Edward Scissorhands, a Wednesday Addams. Anjelica Huston as the Grand High Witch. The 27 Club: Hendrix, Cass, Joplin, Cobain. Mulder was glued upside down, next to the sun in the upper left corner, a word-bubble connecting his mouth with the word YES; Scully was opposite, glued beside the moon, saying NO. Abby had sealed everything flat and smooth with a coating of clear nail polish. It still smelled, chemical and tee
nage.
She rubbed her eyes. God, she was tired. And confused.
She set the Ouija board on her knees and placed the plastic planchette, yellowed with age, a short nail spiked through the clear viewing hole, on the board. Gunnar, purring like a fiend, rubbed up against her leg.
She coughed.
“Abby,” she said, and she was worn so thin that just saying Abby’s name out loud made her throat tighten and her eyes sting and she cried a little. She coughed again. “Abigail Hobbes. Calling Abby. Abby Cadaver. It’s me. It’s Tuesday Mooney.” She twitched her lips. “Your living best friend.”
Gunnar bonked his forehead into her shin.
She rested the tips of her index fingers on the planchette and closed her eyes.
“Abby,” she said, “I thought I saw you.”
She breathed in and out.
“And then I – heard you.”
She lifted one lid to peek. Nothing. Gunnar was lying on his back now, furry limbs splayed like a little murder victim. He blinked at her.
“Abby, are you there?” she asked.
Silence.
“That’s settled, then,” said Tuesday. She laughed, but it wasn’t from amusement. She was relieved. And disappointed. And worried. She had no idea if she was losing her mind.
Again.
5
BLOODY MARYS
Friday.
Tuesday’s alarm went off at the usual time. Her arm shot out from a mound of duvet and smacked Snooze with a great deal of violence.
Before any discernible time had passed, it went off again.
And this time she remembered the night before.
Her brain sprang to life, dinging like a pinball machine. She had chased Pryce’s clue into the bowels of Park Street – ding! – and found a secret code – ding! – with a wealthy, obscenely attractive stranger – ding-ding! – who also – ran away and left her to the cops?
Had that really – had that—
She pulled her duvet up and over her face. Her lips cracked into a demented grin. Tuesday, alone in her apartment, cocooned in her bed, began to laugh. It came out first like a strangled hiss, air pushing between her clenched teeth, but the more she thought about it, the more absurd – she was exhausted, but it was – she was – her head was full of helium. The laugh pushed itself up and out into a full-throated cackle.
Tuesday Mooney was awake.
And now that she was awake, she had some decisions to make. Like: Should she call in sick? Or was calling in sick delaying the unavoidable; was it better to suck it up and get the worst of the “yes, that was me you saw on the internet in handcuffs” conversations out of the way before next week?
She stopped laughing and sat up straight.
Her parents.
It was too early to call her parents. Any call from her before eight a.m. would scare the daylights out of them, but she should probably try to talk to them before they saw it somewhere. Complicating matters was the fact that her parents had recently discovered Facebook. At her brother’s insistence, they’d created a page for Mooney’s Miscellany, which was really a way for Ollie to post pictures of the rare action figures he traded and sold out of the store on weekends. Her father thought Facebook was hilarious – “Six people liked what I had for breakfast. What a world!” – and her mother mostly used it to take personality quizzes. “Guess what?” she’d say, as though passing along hot intel. “If I were a Muppet, I’d be Gonzo.”
Did they look at Facebook at home before opening the store at ten? She didn’t know. She turned off her alarm and glared at her phone. She could check her own Facebook app and see how bad it was. She loved the internet, but she loathed feeling so fucking available. So exposed. And so goddamn distracted.
Gunnar howled from the kitchen.
She didn’t want to call them.
She didn’t want to have to explain any of this. She already knew what they’d think, even if they didn’t say it. Especially if they didn’t say it. It would ooze into all the cracks and crevices between their words.
And they would be right, this time, to be worried.
Her phone rang. The screen filled with a picture of her parents’ dog, Giles Corey III, pressed to sleep under a mound of couch cushions.
She slid her fingertip across the phone.
“Is this my daughter the terrorist?” her mother said. Sally Mooney had a voice like dark maple syrup, sweet and deep. And she was Gonzo; she invented strange, mostly useless things (an automated toast butterer, a case for golf pencils) and held firm beliefs about the healing powers of various Stevie Nicks songs. Tuesday didn’t need an online quiz to tell her that her mother was a weirdo.
“I was really hoping I could break it to you guys,” she said.
“There’s this thing, dear terrorist daughter, called the internet. It’s faster than the speed of a daughter’s admission of guilt.”
Tuesday tucked herself farther under the covers. “I don’t feel that guilty. Lucky, yes. And ashamed, maybe? That I got caught.”
“It’s true, we raised you to be slipperier than that. Are you okay? Ted – Ted, pick up the phone. It’s your daughter the terrorist.”
The line crackled and her father’s higher voice – nerdier, brighter, the voice of an overly enthusiastic cartoon squirrel – broke in. “You say terrorist, I say anarchist. Moonie! What the hell happened?”
“I—” And here it was: the wall. When asked for an explanation, Tuesday found herself unable to provide the truth, whole and unvarnished.
For a variety of reasons. Despite being on social media, they weren’t tech savvy; they wouldn’t know how to tweet Archie’s involvement to the world (not that she felt any great desire to protect him at this point). But every time she so much as glancingly mentioned a man, in any context – Pete, her mail carrier; Alvin, her bus driver; Fancy Hobbit, the short, curly-haired, bowtie-wearing stranger she saw most days on her commute – both of her parents turned into giggly preteens. For as resolutely nontraditional as they both claimed to be, for all the talk of dream-divining and heart-following, and the gently radical dogma that had permeated her childhood (the fourth little pig lived off the grid, which is why the wolf never bothered him in the first place), when it came to the question of relationships, a conservative streak ran deep. They only wanted her to “fall in love,” to “be happy” – as if the only way she could possibly be happy was by securing an explicitly sexual romantic partnership – but she wasn’t looking for excuses to get their hopes up, particularly when their hopes were theirs and not her own. So she said:
“Dorry and I figured out the clue. How could I not go for it?”
Elision was the best kind of lying. You didn’t even have to lie, just selectively tell. She selectively told them about the editorials, the hideous hearts, the raven in Park Street. She told them about the clown mannequin.
She did not tell them that it had, for a moment, worn the decaying face of Abby Hobbes.
“Oh Moonie,” said her dad, who had never forgiven himself for hiring a clown for her third birthday. “I am so sorry.”
Her phone buzzed against her ear.
It was Dex: guess who’s on the front page of the metro.
She felt her entire body try to sink into her mattress, desperate to become one with her bed.
Gunnar galloped the length of the apartment and sprang onto her feet. Then he sat, deliberately thumping his tail, flattening the duvet, and stared at her.
“The world is telling me I have to get up and get this over with,” she said. “I promise not to make too much more trouble.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep,” said her mother. “But be careful. You know you’re our favorite daughter.”
“I’m your only daughter,” she said. They’d been reciting the same joke, like a benediction, ever since Tuesday was old enough to understand why it was supposed to be funny.
“Moonie,” said her father, the brightness of his voice dimming. Tuesday pulled the duvet
back over her head. There was never any question of telling them that she’d seen and heard Abby – never, ever would she do that – but she didn’t have to. Abby was always just below the surface.
Tuesday Mooney Wore Black Page 9
