Tuesday Mooney Wore Black

by Kate Racculia

  “Because I took them when we were down in the tunnel.” And Tuesday made finger guns and shot them at him.

  “Shit,” he said. He covered his mouth with his hand, tapped his fingertips against his cheek, and didn’t say anything else.

  “Where are you heading?” It wasn’t close to what she wanted to ask, but it was at least a rational question.

  “Home,” he said. He tugged on his earlobe, nodded toward the Park Street Church and parts beyond. “Over there,” he said. “Beacon Hill.”

  Tuesday’s mental file riffled.

  Home wasn’t Beacon Hill.

  She didn’t call him on it. She told him to have a good rest of his weekend, that they’d talk soon. Then she descended underground to the Red Line train to Alewife, shot across the Charles River, got off at Harvard Square for the longer walk home, all the while wondering: Why would he say he lived on the Hill when all her research indicated that he lived at the Mandarin Hotel, in his family’s condo? Was he trying to avoid his family? Was he trying to snow her, worried that she’d blown her own cover, wrecked her anonymity? (Not that showing up in the Metro hadn’t done that already.) Or was he still lying – and if so, why? What was he hiding?

  A bolthole?

  An accomplice?

  These were the things she was still stewing over late Saturday afternoon when Dr. Toby Bones knocked on her door.

  Tuesday liked Dorry’s dad. A lot. She wasn’t sure what he did, but he did it in a lab or a biotech company near MIT. He wasn’t very tall – Tuesday dwarfed him, and Dorry would be taller than him too, soon – and he was nerdy and bald, but he embraced his nature with dark-framed glasses and crisp collared shirts, pressed khakis and soft brown shoes. He had a nicely shaped head and dark eyes, and if he had a bit of a gut, he didn’t carry it with shame. He talked fast. Sometimes she saw a glimpse of Dorry in him, like when he looked away when he was describing something complicated, as if he were working it out as he spoke, and to make eye contact while he did so would overload his CPU. From stories Dorry had told about him, both from before and after Dorry’s mom died, Tuesday had a fuller picture of the man: He was sad. He was brilliant. Talking – especially about how he felt, but words in general – wasn’t his strongest suit. But he was trying to do what he thought was right for his daughter. Even Dorry could admit that, even if they didn’t have the same idea about what that meant.

  As soon as Tuesday saw his face on Saturday, she realized he was trying to do what was right for everyone. She saw it in the lines by his eyes, the draw of his mouth. Concern. Not just for his daughter – though principally for Dorry, of course – but also for her. He sat next to her – very close, because the love seat offered no other kind of seating – and expressed genuine concern for her, for Tuesday, getting involved in what was obviously a publicity stunt, and an irresponsible, potentially dangerous one at that. And now she had a criminal record? (Not quite, she told him.) What about her job? What about her future? (Tuesday raised a brow. Toby might have a decade on her, sure, but she wasn’t his kid or his sister or his girlfriend or his wife or anyone, really, who might give him the benefit of the doubt when he condescended to her.) Consider what you’re doing, he said. Really think about it. Were all the risks she was taking – well, risks worth taking?

  He’d told his daughter that he didn’t want her involved in any way, and he didn’t want Dorry to come over for any reason other than tutoring. She’ll still try, he said, but please dissuade her.

  “I understand,” Tuesday told him, because she did. “I promise to be the grown-up.”

  So now, a day later, after finally opening the door to Dorry’s knocking, she knew she couldn’t step aside for her to enter the apartment.

  “Hey Next,” she said. “I talked to your dad.”

  Dorry made a fist. With one hand, but it might as well have been her whole body.

  “Sorry,” said Dorry.

  “You have nothing to be sorry for,” said Tuesday. “He’s right.”

  “Maybe,” said Dorry.

  “What’ve you got there?” Tuesday asked.

  Dorry hesitated. Then: “Here,” she said, and whipped a plastic folder at Tuesday from behind her back. “It’s incredible. The collection is incredible. We have to – you have to—”

  Tuesday took the report. Read the cover. Flipped it open. This kid. This kid. “You’re a girl after my own heart,” she said, smiling. “Nice job, Dor. I’d say this more than qualifies you for silent partnership.”

  “There’s, um – I mean. Yay! For partnership.” Dorry hugged herself. “I mean I’m still interested in a cut, money-wise. But there’s also. There’s a thing. It’s on page – let me show you—” Dorry flipped through the pages upside down. “If you guys win, and Archie’s okay with it, and you are, I’d really like – um. This.” And she pressed a fingertip to a picture of a pair of green-lensed aviator goggles.

  “Funky,” said Tuesday. “What do they do?”

  Dorry licked her lips.

  “See ghosts,” she said.

  Tuesday chilled.

  This kid.

  Dorothea Bones, whose mother had died. Dorry didn’t talk much about her mother, but when she did, she looked dazed and far away, overwhelmed with the sheer weight of the loss. The absurdity of it. Dorry’s brain could not compute it, would not accept there was nothing to do with this feeling but endure it. So she fought for answers, for certainties, however small, that she might be able to grasp. The overwhelming grief of missing someone without hope that they will ever return – Tuesday knew that feeling. And she knew how much pain lay in trying to make sense out of senselessness. In discovering, no matter how much you’ve already lost, there was still more to lose.

  Dorry was so young. And so full, of hope and of need.

  Her father was right.

  “Dorry,” Tuesday said, “you know, you can’t really see—”

  “Oh!” Dorry let out a raw laugh. “I know. I mean, I’m not a—” She looked away from Tuesday. To the side. To the floor.

  “I know,” said Tuesday.

  She tried not to look at Dorry’s face when she closed the door.

  No good ever came from ghosts. From seeing or talking to them. Tuesday knew.

  The disappearance of Abby Hobbes, the July they were both sixteen, hit her like a car or a fastball or a bullet. It yawned, opened the ground beneath her feet. The police came and talked to her, and to her parents and Ollie too. Nobody had a clue what had happened. Where she’d gone, or why, or with whom. That she’d slipped into the sea made the most sense – but where was her body? Why hadn’t it washed up anywhere? Even if you drowned, you didn’t disappear.

  Tuesday had made it through Fred’s fake funeral by stealing Abby’s Ouija board. She’d made it through the following week, the week before the first day of junior year, by making color-coded binder and notebook combinations for every class in her schedule and by sleeping twelve hours a day. She’d made it through the first month of school by force of habit, goosed by the anxious energy of everyone else, the kids in her classes, her teachers, the principal, even, worrying they might have to talk to her about it, worrying that she would force the conversation by painting a pentagram in the front lobby in gasoline and setting it on fire, because didn’t she and Abby do, like, spells together? What did one witch do when the other half of her coven vanished without a trace?

  Tuesday didn’t know what to do. At all. Every day she woke up (again), and every day she went to school (again), and every day she turned in homework (again), and every day she took notes (again), and every day she went to her locker (again), and every day Abby wasn’t there (again and again and again), and it never, ever made sense. Tuesday hadn’t expected to have a best friend. “Best friends” occupied the same imaginary territory as fairies or leprechauns, mythical things kids (girls especially) were told they should be looking for. She certainly didn’t need one – between Ollie and her parents and the other honors arty kids at school (the ones
who weren’t freaked out by all her black clothes), she wasn’t lonely, she had people to talk to, to sit with at lunch. But Abby and her dad Fred moved next door when Tuesday was twelve, and from the very beginning it was just there.

  Attachment. Abby was the first person Tuesday met and liked right away – the day she moved in, carrying a huge stuffed black cat into the house, draped over her shoulders like a stole. “Hi!” Abby called, waving from her porch to Tuesday, sitting on her own. “This is Beelzebub. Lame excuse for a real cat, but I’m allergic. My whole face turns into a balloon. It’s wicked.” Abby was the first person who didn’t share her DNA that Tuesday trusted. Maybe it happened because neither of them needed it, really; Abby might’ve been down a parent, but she was more independent than Tuesday. Or maybe it happened because neither of them was looking for it. It could have happened for no particular reason at all, other than the happy accident that two twelve-year-old neighbor girls living in Salem, Massachusetts, should be weird, should be smart, should share more than a passing interest in witches, monsters, ghosts, movies, mysteries, murder, and magic.

  They’d only been best friends for four years. It was just so goddamn unfair.

  And it didn’t make sense. It didn’t make any sense at all. There were Those who said Abby’d gotten mixed up with witchcraft, Satanists, cultists – it was Salem, after all – and had been human-sacrificed. There were Those who said she’d show up eventually, kids like that always did. Overwhelmingly, there were Those who said Abby killed herself. It looked like a suicide, like a goth teenager flinging herself into the sea, and of course it could only be what it looked like. But it wasn’t, because Abby wasn’t really her ripped tights and black lipstick, because ripped tights and black lipstick weren’t anything but clothes and makeup. She was strange, she was macabre, she talked about being dead, being a ghost, sure, but excitedly, nerdily, the same way she talked about her witch ancestor and Sam Raimi. Even when she talked about her dead mom, and wanting to call her on the Ouija board, it wasn’t like—

  Just because you wanted to talk to dead people didn’t mean you wanted to be dead yourself.

  They’d watched a video in health class, and Abby didn’t do any of the things the suicidal kid did. She didn’t cancel plans. She didn’t fade. She didn’t give away her things. She shook Tuesday down to get her things back – a pair of purple Doc Martens with glitter soles, her copy of Something Under the Bed Is Drooling. Abby’d already bought all the fabric for her Halloween costume that year, yards of black and purple satin. She was going as the Grand High Witch from The Witches, had shown Tuesday her sketches: a cape with a high neck, elbow-length gloves, and a black cocktail dress she would never sew.

  All September, Tuesday sleepwalked through her days, itching to crawl into bed and lose herself to unconsciousness. But then as soon as it was time to sleep, she couldn’t. Her brain turned. Over and over and over, it turned on what had become the central mystery of her sixteen years: What had happened at the light station? And where was Abby now?

  It wasn’t until October that Tuesday thought about Abby’s Ouija board again. She’d taken it after the memorial out of nerves and instinct, out of a desire to keep some part of Abby safe, or at least to herself. But now the whole experience – the police, the funeral, the memorial – was wrapped up in a black cloud, thick and still, that only the occasional detail pierced: an unfinished bowl of ice cream. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow. A board game, stolen.

  Only it was more than a board game. It was a telephone for talking to dead people.

  Tuesday hadn’t believed in it like that, as a literal link to the other side. Ouija boards were like Tarot cards: they didn’t tell you anything your subconscious didn’t already know. But the night she thought of it – it was well past midnight, she had a history quiz the next day, and the more she insisted to herself to go to sleep go to sleep go to sleep, the more awake she stayed, until the thought slipped in like a dead leaf beneath a door (Ouija board, use it, use it), and she was suddenly, completely, perfectly awake. That night, the night she remembered she had the board, she was suffering from such a ferocious desire to believe it may as well have been true belief itself.

  She dunked her head over the side of her bed. The Ouija board was underneath. This whole time she’d been sleeping on it. She crossed her legs. Unfolded the board over her knees. All those paper faces that Abby cut out – Mulder and Scully and Keanu and Winona and Wednesday – Tuesday’s first thought was If this works, you’ll know. For sure. If this works, you’ll know she’s dead. She swallowed. Set the planchette on the board and her fingertips on the planchette. Her hands were shaking.

  She sat there quaking until after one-thirty (screw her history quiz, just screw it), but the planchette never moved. She was relieved at first, and then disappointed, because – she felt it too. She felt it as deeply, as instinctively as Fred that Abby wasn’t just missing. Abby was dead. So she tried again the next night. The planchette didn’t move. She tried the next, and the next, and the planchette didn’t move, until the eighth night, at thirteen minutes after midnight, when it finally swooped in a figure eight, then spelled S-U-P-T-U-E-S.

  Tuesday burst into tears. ’Sup, Tues. And she could hear her, she could hear Abby in her head, clear over the sound of her own furious, ugly crying. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t rational. But it was real. It was Abby Hobbes, saying ’Sup, Tues.

  Once the connection was made, Abby didn’t shut up. Tuesday heard her even when she wasn’t using the board. In math class (thank God I’m already dead, pre-calc would have killed me). At the video store (I can’t believe I never made you watch Suspiria while I was alive). At home, over dinner (your brother is like REALLY into action figures, isn’t he). And every time Tuesday tried to ask – What happened to you? – she clammed up. Later, she’d say. Not now.

  Three weeks after she started talking to the ghost of Abby Hobbes, Tuesday took a good long look at herself in the bathroom mirror. She didn’t look like a teenager having a psychotic break. She didn’t look like she was delusional. She looked better than she had since July: she was pale (because she always was), but she’d lost the translucence that Ollie called her jellyfish skin. The shadows under her eyes were purple instead of black. “You’re getting better,” her mother said, cradling Tuesday’s head in her palms, locking her eye to eye. “I think a few spins of Bella Donna on the old turntable and you’ll be yourself again.”

  She let her mom put on Stevie Nicks. They danced around and it did feel good, but Sally Mooney was wrong. Tuesday would never be herself again. She could only be a new self, a new Tuesday, a Tuesday who believed in best friends but whose best friend was dead.

  A Tuesday who talked to her ghost.

  On a Wednesday in November, while Tuesday was waiting for Ollie to drive them both to school, kicking pyramids of built-up slush from the undercarriage of his car, Abby told her, I don’t remember.

  The slush plopped to the ground.

  “What?” Tuesday said out loud.

  I don’t remember.

  “You mean,” started Tuesday, and Abby let it all go in a rush.

  I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything about the night I died. I thought it would come back but it’s all – blank. It’s my death, my own death, but I can’t remember it and I need your help. I need your help.

  “Why?” Tuesday’s breath was a cloud.

  I need your help to find out who killed me.

  That hit, too. Maybe harder than Abby’s death, because she’d become so tender in the intervening months. She felt like an idiot for not seeing it sooner. She had taken everything she had seen and heard from the news, from the police, from her parents, and from everyone at school, and balled it up into a wad of meaningless noise. But there was an answer. Something had happened that night at the light station out on Derby Wharf, something that took her best friend out of the world.

  And Tuesday could find out what that something was.

  Or who tha
t someone was.

  The only time she felt like crying about it was that first day, on the ride to school with Ollie – crying, out of relief, out of grief, out of rage. If he noticed – which he probably did; he was as sensitive as she was – he didn’t say anything. By the time he threw the car into Park in the student lot, Tuesday was still. She was full and clear with purpose. He was the first person she told.

  “Abby was murdered,” she said, “and I’m going to find out who did it.”

  To his credit, Ollie still didn’t say anything.

  Abby’s ghost was zero help. She didn’t remember anything, even when Tuesday pulled out her Ouija and lit all of Abby’s black candles and talked to her for hours – walking her through the day she disappeared (a normal summer day until their stupid argument; they got breakfast at Red’s, read the obits, Tuesday came over that night). Did she remember meeting any freaks that day? (Define “freak,” said Abby, and Tuesday said, “That is not helpful.”) Abby couldn’t say who killed her or why, but she said a whole hell of a lot else: Is Mr. Mack ever going to retire? Ancient creeper is like ninety percent dust. Wear the floor-length skirt with the heeled lace-up boots, yeah? What sorcery is this stew – man, your dad can cook. Gus Rousseau has got to be the biggest skeeze to ever slime his way around Salem. And isn’t he older than your brother, didn’t he graduate? Why the hell is he haunting his old high school?

  “You should talk,” said Tuesday, and Abby said, Har har har. Also he is not even remotely cute.

  “Yes, he is.”

  No he is not. Grossville, Tuesday, grossville.

  The fact that Abby couldn’t provide additional information, Tuesday had to concede, was a fairly clear sign that she wasn’t communing with the dead so much as exhibiting what a book on abnormal psychology she found in the Salem library called “classic signs of dissociative identity disorder.” Abby, not unlike Tarot cards, couldn’t tell her anything she didn’t already know, because “Abby” wasn’t anything more than a schism in Tuesday’s psyche. But she didn’t want to interrogate herself too closely. She wanted, she needed, to trust the sound of her best friend’s voice. She didn’t think she could bear it if Abby went away again. And regardless of what Tuesday needed to believe to get through the day, that her best friend had been murdered – that her life had been taken against her will – made sense. A whole lot more sense than anything else.