A Curious Tale of the In-Between

by Lauren DeStefano

  “Why are we hiding?” Pram whispered.

  “I’m not allowed in here,” Clarence said. “Only the maid comes in, to clean the floor and the windows, and she’s careful not to disturb anything.”

  He heard his father’s heavy shoes approaching and hoped he would assume the door had been left open by the maid, who was forgetful sometimes.

  But to Clarence’s surprise, his father pushed the pale blue door all the way open and then stood there, looking at the way the light reflected from the bottles and mirrors, like bits of dust that had been set on fire.

  Then he did something he’d rarely done when Clarence’s mother was alive. Something he had forbidden after her death. He entered the room.

  The floorboards creaked loudly under his weight. Clarence’s mother had been a wisp of a woman, petite and unassuming. The floorboards were startled by her husband’s presence.

  Clarence’s father stood at the dresser for a long time, and then he picked up a glass bottle of perfume and misted the air with it. In a ray of sunlight, the drops were visible as they fell amongst the other things. He held a picture frame next and ran his large, strong hands over the photo inside.

  It felt like an eternity before he left, closing the door gently behind him.

  Pram was relieved that they hadn’t been caught, and she thought Clarence would be as well. But when she looked at him, there were tears in his eyes. And Pram understood, even before he said the words.

  “It wasn’t a ghost at all.”

  CHAPTER

  9

  To find her father, the only tools Pram had were some old photos, a compass (which she wore around her neck for safekeeping), and a name: Maxwell Baines.

  And Clarence and Felix, of course.

  The air was icy and held the promise of a first snowfall. And shorter days meant that the sky was already darkening by the time they’d made the hour-long walk to the ocean.

  The boats were all docked and gently swaying. During the daylight, the boaters could mostly be found in a series of tall buildings that had once been ware houses or factories long ago. But now the only light came from a shanty tavern.

  Pram hesitated. Her shoes were just beyond the reach of the tavern’s light, and she felt afraid.

  But Clarence wasn’t going to let Pram back down. He stepped into the light and took her hand.

  Felix, who had been three paces behind Pram the whole time, cleared his throat. “Your aunts will wonder where you are,” he said.

  Pram looked back at him. “You’ve never cared what they thought before,” she said. “You think they’re silly.”

  “All living people are silly,” Felix said defensively. “Especially you, worrying so much about someone you’ve never even met.”

  Pram spun away from him and joined Clarence in the beam of light. “Felix is being cruel,” she told him. “So he’s going to wait outside.”

  “Fine by me,” Felix muttered. But it wasn’t fine. It very much upset him to watch his only friend in the world holding a living boy’s hand. She wasn’t the sad and lonely girl he’d known for years. It wasn’t that he wanted her to be sad and lonely—only that he’d wanted to be the one to make that sadness go away. But his light tricks and dancing clouds could never do the things a boy with a heartbeat could do. He couldn’t even remember what it had been like to have a heart beating in his chest.

  Soon Pram would outgrow him entirely. This was only the beginning of things.

  Felix watched at the window. If anyone tried to harm her, he could knock a few glasses from the shelves, at least.

  Pram squeezed Clarence’s hand. Together they pushed open the door to the tavern. A sign above the door read, the Oak Mermaid. Anything to do with mermaids couldn’t be that scary, Pram told herself.

  The smell of cigar smoke and fish was the first thing she noticed. Also, the floor was filthy. There was a roar of laughter that rose up like a wave, and it hurt her ears.

  “Excuse me,” she said. Her voice was immediately lost.

  Clarence took a step forward. “Excuse me,” he said, much louder, and Pram was impressed. He’d gotten the attention of the men who sat at the bar. They were all broad-shouldered with thick arms.

  The man behind the bar tossed a towel over his shoulder and laughed a little. “Have you two lost your way, then?” he said. “The playground’s a few miles back.” Another roar of laughter.

  “We aren’t lost, thank you,” Pram said politely. “We’re looking for a sailor.”

  “A little young to come here looking for that, love,” a waitress said, wielding a tray of drinks on one hand.

  Pram didn’t understand what this meant, but Clarence had an idea about it.

  “His name is Max,” Pram said. “Maxwell Baines.”

  The name was too formal for this lot of sailors; it was regal and they were burlesque. They laughed again, and Pram began to see them as something other than human. Hyenas that she’d seen in picture books, maybe.

  “Go home, sweetheart,” the barkeep said. “It must be nearing your bedtime.”

  Pram couldn’t imagine that her father was anything like these men. None of these men would have written such kind letters to a woman they’d left at home.

  She sighed, and when she breathed in again, she found that the weight of the entire world sat upon her chest. She turned for the door, and Clarence followed her.

  Felix followed a pace behind as they walked home and continued to keep a watchful eye on Pram. He felt awful for how he’d acted, and felt worse to see his only friend so sad.

  “What now?” Clarence said.

  There was only one more place Pram could think to try when she needed answers. “Maybe next time we can try the library,” she said.

  The sun had already set, and the lights of the two-hundred-year-old colonial house shone in the distance. As they passed the pond, Felix mumbled his first word since the docks. “Good night,” he said.

  “Good night,” Pram said, not looking back at him. Hand in hand, she and Clarence walked the rest of the way home.

  Even before Pram could turn the knob, Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan threw open the door. They were about to scold Pram for being so late, but they had a change of heart when they saw that her hand had just broken away from Clarence’s, as though she meant to hide the embrace from them. She also wiped the frown from her face, again a moment too late.

  “Come in, come in,” Aunt Nan said. “We were starting to worry, and dinner is about to go on the table.”

  They insisted that Clarence stay for dinner. He tried to decline the offer, as that was the polite thing, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer. It was the least they could do. Clarence didn’t know the sense of relief he brought to Pram’s aunts. He was Pram’s first living friend. And he was charming, rich, and very polite to boot. He was just what she needed, they thought. If her mother had met a nice boy like Clarence, things would have turned out differently.

  CHAPTER

  10

  On Saturday afternoon, Pram walked to the library with her father’s name in her memory and his compass around her neck.

  Clarence and Felix went with her. Felix, who was usually fearful of the world beyond his pond, found that his desire to ensure Pram’s safety made him brave; first he’d left his pond to visit the docks, and now the library. This was a big deal for him. He had, after all, been a ghost for a very long time. He no longer remembered what the town had looked like when he was alive. It was like visiting a foreign country.

  He was aware of cars because he had seen them driving by his pond. But it was fascinating to see them up close.

  A black Cadillac was approaching, and Felix leaped from the sidewalk to touch it. The front of the car looked like a peculiar bug; its lights were eyes that sat on either side of a wide metal smile.

  “Felix, no!” Pram yelled. The car hit him, and Pram let out a scream that turned the heads of every pedestrian in the plaza.

  The car drove away, and Felix was left s
tanding in the road, his eyes bright with excitement.

  “What’s the matter?” Clarence asked.

  “Never mind,” Pram said, her cheeks red with embarrassment and a little bit of anger. “That was a mean trick,” she told Felix.

  “It wasn’t a trick. I only wanted to get a better look,” Felix said. He was walking beside her now. “There were children playing in the backseat.”

  “Don’t do it again,” Pram said. “I could have had a heart attack.”

  Clarence patiently walked beside Pram as she had a conversation that didn’t include him. He told himself it wasn’t fair to be jealous; Felix had a lot of challenges, being a ghost.

  A woman bumped into Pram and then hurried on her way, calling apologies. Felix saw the unease on Clarence’s face as he asked Pram if she was all right, and it made him feel relieved to know that someone in the living world was looking out for Pram.

  Once inside the library, Pram spoke with a librarian, who directed them to the newspaper archives. The newspapers were kept in a back room, and the pages were brittle and dusty.

  Pram only knew that her mother’s affair with her father must have ended the year Pram was born. She started with the month of her birth and worked backward through the archives. Clarence scanned the same papers a second time, just in case she’d missed anything important. Neither of them knew exactly what they were looking for, but still, it seemed like an injustice when they found nothing.

  Felix, who had never learned how to read, sat beside a woman who was reading a story to her children amid the bright covers of children’s books. He didn’t know what Pram might find in her search, but it worried him. Her aunts would have told her where to find her father if they thought it was a good idea.

  It was past noon when Clarence suggested they take a break for lunch. His maid had packed sandwiches. So they sat on the library steps, nibbling at the triangular slices. Felix jumped through puddles in the street, making splashes only Pram could see. Felix was not in the mood to let Clarence and the rest of the living world see his tricks. Pram tried her best not to be sullen.

  “Thanks for helping,” she said to Clarence. “I know this isn’t as exciting as the spiritualists.”

  After discovering his father had been the one to move his mother’s things, and presumably open the bedroom curtains each morning, Clarence had decided to take a reprieve from his search for his mother’s ghost. His heart simply could not endure another failure. He was now working his way through the many shades of grief. Sadness made everything gray, he’d learned, but there were different types of gray, some much darker than the others. There were dark spots in his memories he wasn’t brave enough to enter.

  But Pram was always bright. There was always some sort of light clinging to her. He often thought of her when he was sad.

  “It’s more informative than the spiritualists,” he said. “We’re learning some local history.”

  Pram dropped her chin into her hand. “I guess so.”

  Felix leaped out of the way of an approaching Volkswagen. He especially liked these because they had the body of a beetle but the snout of a terrier.

  As the car blurred past, Felix, with the advantage of being invisible, saw something peculiar. A woman stood on the opposite side of the street, and she was staring at an oblivious Pram. The woman had a long coat that was trimmed with fur, and she was half-hidden by a tree that grew from a box in the sidewalk. Now that Felix was noticing her, he realized that he had seen her on the way to the library, too. She was following them.

  He didn’t like the way the woman stared. It was his belief that most people were cruel, or at the very least something of which to be suspicious, especially adults. Pram didn’t share in this belief, and that worried him. There were few things more dangerous than trust.

  He looked back at Pram and Clarence, who were having a conversation and not paying him any mind. Pram might scold him if she knew what he was about to do, so he would have to be subtle.

  It wasn’t easy for Felix to manipulate objects in a way that the living would notice. When he made the clouds dance for Clarence, all he had done was create an illusion. Ghosts could do this. The living would see something strange for a moment, and then things would be normal again and they’d blame their imaginations. But Felix was determined to be rid of this woman, and so he stood very still, and he concentrated on the tree where the woman stood, until his vision blurred. The leaves began to tremble; the branches quaked. It was a very small tree, and with a final thrust it was uprooted and fell before the woman with a crash.

  A baby wailed in its push carriage; a man rushed to the woman in the coat and asked if she was all right. Pram and Clarence snapped to attention. Felix resumed leaping through the puddles.

  If Felix had meant to keep the woman away for the moment, he’d succeeded. But if he’d meant to make the woman forget all about Pram, he’d failed. He didn’t see the interest on the woman’s face as she watched Pram and Clarence on the steps.

  CHAPTER

  11

  Felix wasn’t sure of his limits, if he had limits. After he’d been dead a while, he began to suspect he could swim to the bottom of the oceans. Beyond that. He suspected that he could swim so far down that he’d eventually go through the center of the earth and come out the other side. He could swim into the clouds, into the stars. Maybe there were ghosts on the other planets. Maybe there were ghosts laughing and splashing each other with the heat of the sun. He wasn’t brave enough to find out.

  It wasn’t that he was especially fond of Earth—he wasn’t. He had the distinct impression that it hadn’t been kind to him when he was alive. But just the same, he’d been human once, and he kept to the restrictions humans had. He’d sat on the kitchen counter and listened to the radio as Pram’s aunts made breakfast, though, and the voices in the radio talked of walking on the moon one day. The living were so restless, he thought. The living wanted to get away from their little world, while he wanted to hold on to his.

  But if he wanted to hold on to Pram, he would have to leave his limitations. He would follow her. He would be brave. He would stay beside her for as long as she would have him.

  He didn’t know how long their arrangement could last. One day she would be too old to want him. It was already happening. She was as tall as he was now, and next year she’d be taller. He had watched her for years before she noticed him. As a toddler she would infuriate him by stomping around his tree on her uncertain feet, all as her aunts would stand by and encourage it. She was forever upsetting the quiet to which he’d grown accustomed.

  And then, when she was a bit older, she reached for the ghost of a grasshopper that bounced before her. “What have you got?” one of the aunts asked. “There’s nothing there.” And Pram, frustrated, chased after the thing until it led her to Felix.

  She didn’t see him, exactly, but as she looked through him, her young eyes showed a curiosity that wasn’t ordinary. It took Felix days to work up the courage to touch her hair, and months for her to realize it was not the wind. It was a delicate balance for the two of them to come to know each other, and months still before she could see him all at once, but she had never been afraid of him. And as he grew to care for this living girl, Felix’s exasperation gave way to longing.

  He’d made the mistake of caring for a living girl. Time for the living was not the same as it was for the dead. For Pram, growing older was a thing that happened more quickly than she could help. In a blink, her jumper was too short. In another, her hair too long and her shoes too tight. But for Felix, it had been an eternity, marred by the subtle signs that his only friend in the world was getting older.

  He thought about this as he followed her home. She was weary from a day of searching through library archives, deflated by unrequited hope. She laid her head on Clarence’s shoulder.

  Felix knew that he could never like Clarence. Felix might be dead, but he still conformed to some rules of the living, and he could never like a boy he wa
s jealous of. And he was quite jealous, especially of the way that Clarence was there even when he wasn’t. Sometimes Pram would be quiet, but there would be a sparkle in her eyes, and Felix would know that she was thinking of her living boy.

  When they returned to the house, Pram’s aunts once again insisted that Clarence stay for dinner, to which he politely declined. His father was expecting him at home. “Tell him we say hello!” Aunt Nan called after him.

  Felix followed Pram up the stairs and stood with his arms folded while she scrubbed her face before the mirror. “You almost never come inside,” she told him.

  “I thought you might need me,” he said. “You look sad.”

  “I’m not,” she said, folding the towel neatly and then hanging it from the bar. “Just disappointed.”

  She stared at her reflection for a long time. She looked like the photo of her mother over the staircase. Felix could see, in that oval of glass, what she would be in ten years. He had seen Pram’s mother when she was alive and hadn’t thought much of her. She was the youngest daughter living in that old colonial, and she swam in Felix’s pond. But she hadn’t ever seen Felix, or the ghost insects, and she spent most of her time there below the water’s surface. Never spoke a word.

  At first, Felix thought the woman who swam in his pond might have been a ghost herself. Though she didn’t see him, and though she breathed, he could feel sadness in her that seemed too heavy to belong to anyone in the living world. It surprised him when, years later, the woman’s daughter appeared under his tree, shrouded in sunlight.

  “Maybe you should wait and find your father when you’re older,” Felix said. “Old enough to travel, at the very least.”

  “I’m nearly twelve,” Pram said.

  “It doesn’t have to be now, is all,” Felix said. “You’ve always been happy here, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure I can explain it,” Pram said. “All my life I’ve felt as though I should be something else.”

  “What else could you possibly be?” Felix said.