And who was she to argue with Mama?
Olive was determined to work quickly, to hurry up and get her room taken apart, so they could put it back together. It was taking forever. They’d had to put her room on hold while they tore out the bathroom wall and redid the plumbing, which had begun to leak. Then her dad decided they really needed to paint the living room, and they’d gotten two coats done before he announced that the color was all wrong and Mama wouldn’t like it at all, so they’d tried a paler shade of blue, which he said wasn’t right, either. Olive put her foot down, insisting that they had to leave the living room and go back to working on her bedroom. If her dad wouldn’t help, and just abandoned the work like he had with so many other rooms before they were done, she’d finish it herself. She’d been camping out on the lumpy living room couch since before school ended and needed the sanctuary of her own room back. She could live inside a house that was a construction zone if she just had one finished place to take refuge in, one room where everything was in its place. An eye in the center of the storm.
“What’s up, Ollie?”
“I’ve been thinking. You know, about—” She hesitated, not sure she could go on. Knowing this was the one subject she wasn’t supposed to bring up, the thing that hurt her father the most. But she had to. She needed to know. “About Mom. About how things were just before she left.”
He clenched his jaw. He did not wear a mask when he worked, so she could see the muscles working under his taut, unshaven skin that was now coated with a thin layer of plaster dust. He looked like a ghost.
“Yeah?” he said, holding the sledgehammer, ready to swing again, but waiting now.
“I remember how she was gone a lot. Did she ever tell you where she was going, who she was spending time with?”
“No, Ollie, she didn’t. And when she did tell me, it was real vague. ‘Out with Riley’ or ‘friends,’ that sort of thing.” He paused. “Part of me knew she was lying. But I didn’t want to face the truth.”
“What truth is that, Dad?”
He scowled, shook his head. He wasn’t going to say it out loud.
“But what if that wasn’t the truth? What if that was all just rumors?”
“Drop it,” he said.
“But, Dad, what if that’s not what happened? What if she—”
“She would go out with one set of clothes on and come back in another!” Daddy’s eyes blazed. “She’d tell me she was with Riley when I knew damn well she hadn’t been because Riley called the house looking for her, wondering if she wanted to go out. There were nights she didn’t even bother to come home at all, Ollie. I’d catch her sneaking in at dawn. How else do you explain it?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Ollie. I’m really sorry, but it’s the truth.”
“I talked to Sylvia—you know, Mom’s friend who tends bar over at Rosy’s—and I know Mama spent at least one night over at her place.”
He turned back to the wall, ripped off a chunk of loose plaster with his hand. “Is that right?”
“Sylvia also said something about a club Mama might have been a part of. Do you know anything about that?”
She considered mentioning Dicky Barns but decided that was a lousy idea—she already knew what her daddy thought of Dicky, and she thought that might just send him off on a rant and that wasn’t the way she wanted this to go.
“She was probably talking about a dance club or something,” he said, sounding kind of disgusted. “Loud music, cheap well drinks. Your mama loves places like that.” There went his jaw again, tightening, like he was clamping something between his teeth, holding it tight.
Olive remembered how sometimes Mama and Daddy would go out for a date night: dinner at the steak place in Barre, sometimes a movie after. Sometimes they’d go out to Rosy’s to watch a Red Sox game on the big screen or meet up with some of Daddy’s friends from the town team after a softball game. Daddy used to play on the team but didn’t anymore because of his bad knee. But she couldn’t think of a single time they ever went out dancing or to a place that called itself a club. Those trips were reserved for Mama and Riley’s nights out. Or Mama on her own, meeting up with other friends. Other boyfriends maybe even, if you believed the rumors.
Olive shook her head. “I don’t think that’s what Sylvia meant.”
“Well, your mama never said anything to me about any club. She’s not exactly a joiner kind of person, know what I mean?” He turned back to her, looked her in the eye.
Olive nodded. She knew exactly what he meant. Her mom had never volunteered to help on field trips or to make brownies for the school bake sale. When Olive had begged to join the Girl Scouts in third grade because her best friend, Jenna, was in it, her mom had said no. “What do you want to go and do that for, Ollie? Sitting around making macaroni necklaces and selling cookies with a bunch of girls in identical uniforms, competing for badges. Groups like that, they’re just training kids to lose their individuality, to be like everyone else. That’s not what you want, is it?”
Olive had shaken her head then. But it was a lie. Secretly, part of her did want to be like those other girls, to blend in, to feel like she belonged.
Mama was her own person. Her own unique individual who spun and glittered and shone when she walked into any room. But Olive just wanted to blend in, to disappear in the scenery.
“Do you have any idea how special you are, Ollie?” Mama had asked her one night, not long before she went away.
Olive had shrugged, thought, Not me. I’m not special at all, but she didn’t want to contradict her. Mama was sitting on the edge of her bed, tucking her in even though Olive was too old to be tucked in really.
“Some people, they have magic in their veins. You’re one of them. You and me both. Can’t you feel it?” Then she reached down and touched the necklace, the I see all necklace, and smiled real big.
. . .
Now, Olive stared at her dust-covered father, knew she had to keep going, that he might know something, might be carrying some crucial piece of the puzzle around without even realizing it. “Do you remember the necklace Mama wore all the time then? The silver one?”
“I think so, yeah. Why?”
“Did you give it to her?”
He sighed. “No, I didn’t.”
“Do you know where it came from?” she asked.
“I don’t know, Ollie. It was probably a gift I guess. Maybe he gave it to her.”
Olive swallowed hard. She didn’t need to ask which “he” Daddy was talking about. It was the mystery man, the other man, the man Mama supposedly left them both for.
But what if it wasn’t true?
“I think it would be best,” Daddy said, “for you to forget all about that necklace.”
Olive could feel the silver pendant against her chest. She wanted to reach up and touch it but didn’t want to give Daddy any clues.
“I think you’ve got other things you need to be concentrating on right now.” He looked at her, his brow furrowed like he had a bad headache coming on. “School starts next week,” he said at last.
“I know,” she said, her mouth suddenly dry. She’d been trying hard not to think about it.
“Things are going to change around here this school year.” He was breathing harder now, his face red. He looked like a man ready to stroke out. “You think you’ve been fooling your old man here, but you haven’t. I’ve gotten the calls. The letters. Your report card. I know how much school you missed last year. How many assignments you missed. You passed ninth grade by the skin of your teeth, Ollie. I even went up and had a meeting with the principal and your guidance counselor.”
“What?” she gasped.
“They understand that last year was tough for you. That there were extenuating circumstances. But things have to change, Ollie. This year they won’t be so easy on you. They know you can do better. I know you can do bet
ter.”
“Daddy, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .”
He shook his head slowly, like his neck was sore and his head was so, so heavy. “I don’t want apologies. I just want to see that this year it’ll be different. That you’ll go in there and bust your ass. Make up for last year. You’ll go in there and make your mama and me proud.”
He looked at her, eyes rimmed with red.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“Know what else?” Daddy said now, the sledge swinging in his hand like a heavy pendulum. He wore his stained leather work gloves, so worn that his index and middle fingers poked through on the right hand. “I think you should stay the hell out of Rosy’s. I don’t want you talking to that Sylvia Carlson anymore.” He spat out the name like it left a bad taste in his mouth. “Stay clear of her. She’s half in the bag most of the time. If there was any clubbing going on, Sylvia probably put your mama up to it. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Sylvia’s the one who introduced your mama to—” He stopped himself here, his face reddening under the pale layer of plaster dust.
Olive finished the sentence in her own head: Him.
Him again. The man Mama ran away with.
She almost asked the question that came into her head then, the question she’d been asking herself again and again since she’d found her mama’s necklace: What if that’s not what happened? What if Mama didn’t run off with some man she’d met in a bar?
But the answers to those questions were almost more difficult, more painful to imagine, than thinking that her mama had been unfaithful, had a boyfriend on the side whom she took off with.
“Let’s get back to work,” Daddy said, turning from Olive, swinging his hammer as hard as he could into the wall, sending the plaster flying, smashing right through the thin wooden strips of lath. He pulled his hammer back, hit it again and again, with so much force, so much anger, Olive thought he might bring the whole house down around them.
FLOORS AND TRIM
S
CHAPTER 29
Helen
S SEPTEMBER 9, 2015
“Are you sure about this?” Helen asked as she followed Riley through the door of the old Hartsboro Hotel. Everything about this felt strange and slightly dangerous. There was no way the old Connecticut Helen would have let anyone drag her to a creepy run-down hotel to sit with a bunch of strangers and try to make contact with the spirit world. It seemed like the opening of a bad horror movie.
The sign in the front said that it was an antique shop now. They stopped in the lobby, beside the old front desk, like they were waiting to check in, waiting for someone to pass them one of the old keys that still hung on hooks on the wall.
“Like I said, it can’t hurt, right?” Riley told her, voice low. “Dicky hosts these spirit circles every Wednesday, and they’re open to whoever comes by. Maybe if Hattie or Jane or Ann has a message, they’ll be able to get it to you through the circle.”
Helen was hesitant. She was still struggling to figure out the logic of all of this, because it seemed like if something was going to happen, wouldn’t it happen back at the house? The house and the objects in it were what drew them back. How was coming to some dusty old hotel five miles away from the bog, where you had to pay twenty bucks to sit around in a candlelit circle with strangers, going to help? But still, she was desperate to make contact again. Since seeing Ann’s spirit for that brief moment a few weeks ago, there had been nothing.
Riley seemed determined to give this approach a try, and Helen had to admit she was curious about the spirit circle: what it would be like, who might be there. What sort of people were desperate enough to talk to the dead that they’d come to something like this?
Me, she thought. I’m their target audience.
“Have you been before?” Helen asked Riley.
“Once or twice, but it was forever ago,” Riley said. “You just have to promise you won’t tell Olive we did this. She’ll think we’ve both totally lost it, and right now I think you and I are pretty much the only stable things she’s got in her life.”
“And you have to promise not to ever tell Nate,” Helen said.
“It’s our secret then,” Riley said.
Riley had handled Nate, telling him that she was whisking Helen away for a girls’ night out. “Come on, all work and no play makes Helen a dull girl. I’ll take good care of her,” Riley had said. “I promise.”
The three of them had spent the day installing the hardwood floor in the living room. It was salvaged maple, and Helen was thrilled with it: each scratch and nail hole gave it character—a warm charm that new flooring could never achieve. Even Nate agreed that the extra work to get the old boards fitting together and flush was worth it. And Riley had gotten them a great price on it. Riley had also found them a few hundred square feet of wide pine boards from an old silo that they were going to use for the upstairs floors. Nate was thrilled that they were now under budget on flooring.
Now, Helen followed Riley up the hotel stairs (which didn’t feel all too sturdy) and down a carpeted hallway. They passed doors to old hotel rooms, most closed, but the open ones were packed full of junk: broken furniture, racks of moth-eaten clothing, rusting bed springs.
At the end of the hall was a set of double doors. Above them, an old sign read: bar and lounge.
Riley went through, Helen behind her.
The room was dark and smelled of scented candles, musty incense, and maybe marijuana. There was a long wooden bar just in front of them with a mirror behind it and a row of empty stools in front. To their right, a wall of windows that had been covered with heavy curtains. To their left, a group of people sat in a circle, candles burning all around them: on the floor, the mantel of the fireplace they sat in front of, on tables and empty chairs. They were talking in low voices. Riley led Helen over. The floor was covered by a tattered throw rug. The furniture was beat up, the upholstery full of holes. There were six people in the circle, and now, all twelve eyes were on Riley and Helen.
“Hi, Dicky,” Riley said.
“Nice to see you, Riley,” he said.
“This is my friend Helen.”
The man she spoke to nodded, looked up at Helen, eyes locked on hers. The skin on the back of her neck prickled.
“Welcome,” he said. “Take a seat.” He was tall, Helen guessed in his early fifties, and had an angular, weathered face with small gray-blue eyes and a large mustache. He was wearing jeans, a button-down shirt, cowboy boots with pointed toes. Then Helen noticed his large leather belt and the holster attached to it. The man had a handgun strapped to his waist.
What did a man who talked to ghosts need with a gun?
She thought the best idea was to take Riley’s hand and drag her the hell out of there. But it was too late. Riley had taken an empty seat and was pointing at the last vacant chair, letting Helen know she should take it.
They’d been waiting with two empty chairs. Like they’d been expecting them.
Helen settled in, looked over at Dicky and tried to imagine him as the little boy who had lost his father to the woods, to the white deer. What had little Dicky seen that day? How long had he chased after his father and the deer, calling out, desperate?
The woman to Dicky’s left leaned over and whispered something to the old man next to her. He had large eyes and ears with tufts of hair growing out of them. Helen thought he looked like a great horned owl. The owl man nodded.
“Before we begin,” Dicky said, “let’s all take a minute to remember that the communication we all seek with those who have passed doesn’t begin and end here, in this circle.”
The owl man nodded, gave a low “Mm-hmm.”
Dicky cleared his throat and continued. “I reckon you could say learning to read signs from the spirits is a little like learning to speak another language.”
This got him more nods of agreement.
“It’s about picking up on patterns, learning to be more receptive to the signs we get from our departed ones every day. We’ve all gotta be on the lookout for those patterns. You all know the stuff I mean: dreams we have again and again, numbers that come into our lives over and over, a song on the radio, an image we can’t shake. Reality . . . it ain’t random.” He shuffled his feet in the pointy-toed boots. “The spirits, they have the power to manipulate the world around us. To send us signals. It’s up to us to keep our eyes open. To listen to what they’ve got to say.”
Was it Helen’s imagination, or was Dicky looking right at her when he said this?
“I keep seeing that pileated woodpecker in my yard,” a man Helen recognized from the pizza and sub shop said. “It was my brother’s favorite bird. I’m sure it’s him.”
There was a general murmur of agreement from the group, followed by more discussions of coincidences, serendipitous moments, and signs they’d all received: repeated license plate numbers that were actually a code, voices with important messages picked up on the static in between radio stations, recurring dreams.
Helen said nothing.
Dicky looked at her. “Tell me, Helen, have you experienced anything like this?”
She squirmed, looked at Riley, who gave her a little nod.
“Well,” Helen began, “I do find myself waking up at the same time in the night. Three thirty-three.” She didn’t tell them she woke up and saw ghosts. Though she was sure this was exactly the sort of crowd that would be eager to hear such a thing, she wasn’t willing to trust this detail with a group of strangers.
The Invited (ARC) Page 27
