Being Dead

by Vivian Vande Velde

  "Want to go into town and see what there is to see?" Mom asked.

  Go into town. See what there is to see. They were already talking like hicks.

  "Thanks all the same," I said. "I'm going to take a shower."

  "You can take one when we get back," Dad said.

  "Oh, boy, good suggestion," Danny said, holding his nose.

  "Yeah?" I told him. "What makes you think anybody wants to smell you after you've been working all morning?"

  "We can leave the windows down," Dad offered.

  I shook my head. I was so sticky I couldn't stand myself.

  Mom said, "We can wait. We could go after your shower."

  "No, you catch all the highlights," I said, "and you make out a list of what I need to see."

  After they left I changed my mind about the shower. Things had been weird enough with the pond and the water bed so that when I stepped into the shower and started to pull the curtain closed, I had a sudden vision of that scene in Psycho where Janet Leigh meets Mother Bates.

  Options: Well, I could wait for my parents to come back home after I'd made such a fuss about needing a shower right away.

  Or I could hose myself off in the driveway.

  I opted for a bath instead. Not that I expected anyone to sneak up on me. But at least that way if someone did, I could hear him coming.

  I put in an extra scoop of Mr. Bubble, so the bubbles were extravagantly close to overflowing, then decided to be entirely decadent and poured myself some wine. (The glasses had ended up in the cupboard to the left of the sink.) Sometimes my parents let me have half a glass of wine with dinner, but they would not have approved this, so I knew I would have to make sure the glass Was washed and back in its place by the time they came back.

  Standing next to the tub, I couldn't help myself: I stuck my foot in and pushed the bubbles around enough that I could be sure there was nothing besides the bubbles in there. Brenda, I told myself as I got in, sometimes you can be such a baby. But I still felt better for having checked.

  I balanced the wine on the edge of the tub and was taking the "How Fashion Savvy Are You?" quiz in Cosmo and was feeling pretty Savvy and downright sophisticated when I reached for the glass and felt something drip on my arm.

  I was in a tub—of course things were drippy. I didn't even glance up from the page I was on. I took a sip from the glass, and only then, with my arm crossed in front of me, did I see a red spot on the back of my forearm.

  Why am I not surprised that something is dripping rust in this old bathroom? I asked myself: But even as I thought it, I knew it wasn't rust. Rust is more orange. And the wine I had poured myself was blush, not nearly that red.

  I looked up.

  A little girl was standing there.

  My heart felt as though it stopped for a second, then it began to thud. The wineglass dropped from my numb fingers into the bathwater.

  I tried to jump to my feet, and my heel slipped before I'd gotten more than a couple inches up—so that I sat down heavily, smacking my butt and sloshing water over the sides of the tub. I was incredibly lucky that I didn't come down on that wineglass.

  My heart was racing, but the little girl was just standing there, looking as though she herself had just stepped out of the bath, clothes and all. She couldn't have been even ten years old, and she was wearing shorts and sneakers, and a T-shirt with a unicom on it, and she had a bicycle helmet on her head, all dripping wet.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" I demanded, surprised that my voice worked, thinking Damn country manners...

  But then I really looked at her face.

  It was gray, and there was a smear of blood around her nose and mouth despite how wet she was.

  Nobody could be that gray, I realized, no matter how badly she was hurt Nobody alive could be that gray.

  I had just yelled at a dead girl. A dead girl was standing in my bathroom.

  I backed up as far away as I could, into the corner of the tub. If I could have fit down the drain, I would have tried that. Instead I grabbed the shower curtain and tried to wrap myself in that. (Fat lot of protection a vinyl sheet would provide.)

  I fought my inclination to just sit there and scream. I could barely get my voice above a squeak. "Who are you?" I asked. "What do you want?"

  She stood there a moment longer, water running off her hair, a drop of blood quivering on the end of her chin, then she turned and walked out of the bathroom.

  Go, go, go, I mentally urged her.

  But once she was gone, I thought, Where did she go? and What's she doing?

  I wanted to stay in the bathroom. I wanted to get out of the tub and lock the bathroom door and wait for my parents to get home.

  A locked door might keep Danny out, or even Norman Bates, but what good was a locked door against a ghost?

  I got out of the tub carefully.

  I grabbed a towel and poked my head out the door. Wet footprints went down the hall and into my room. Should I try running past my room, down the stairs, outside? Should I stand in the street trying to flag down traffic with only a towel wrapped around me and explain to whoever stopped that there was a ghost in my house?

  She's just a little girl, I told myself. She's a ghost, but she's a ghost of a little girl That was more sad than scary.

  I followed the wet footsteps down the hall and into my room, where they showed up even better on the wood floor. They stopped in front of the closet. And she was not there.

  Did I really want to open those doors?

  The girl, I told myself, was obviously dead. What harm could she do me? And she had asked for help. I was sure it had been her on the phone the day before. A dead girl was asking me for help.

  I put my hand on the door handle. Still, I hesitated, bracing myself for ... I didn't know what.

  Just do it.

  I flung the door open.

  My clothes hung exactly as I had set them up the day before.

  Or, at least, they seemed to.

  I took one step in, but then I took a hasty step out. Yeah, right, I thought, go inside, and she might slam the door shut, trapping you in there.

  At the same time I chided myself for being a coward.

  As well as overly suspicious—the closet doesn't have a lock.

  Still, I got my desk chair and propped one of the doors open. Since she was substantial enough to leave wet footprints, she was probably substantial enough to knock that chair out of the way—if she wanted to. But at least it would delay her for a second or two, and that might give me enough time to get out.

  I stepped into the closet.

  Chair and door stayed where they were.

  Tentatively I reached out, then I pushed the clothes aside to reveal the back wall.

  If she was there, I didn't see her; if she wanted me to notice something, I didn't notice it.

  I felt the back and the sides and the floor of the closet. No secret panels. Then I silently berated myself because now I had gotten everything I had touched all wet. Had my things been wet before? Had she stepped into or through the closet? I looked at the suds still on my shoulder and couldn't be sure.

  I got dressed, cleaned up the bathroom, and put the wineglass back into the kitchen cabinet with the other glasses. I was lucky it had survived being dropped. Sorry, Mom, I would have had to explain, I was sneaking a glass of wine, and it broke when I was startled by a ghost. Then I would have to assure her, No, no—I just drank half a glass before I saw her.

  Right.

  I stood in the kitchen, looking out the window at the pond. Should I go there? Had that been her I'd seen, trying to get my attention?

  No, I thought, not the pond.

  If she needed me, she was going to have to come to me in the house—the pond was just too creepy.

  The phone rang—the phone that hadn't been connected yet—and at the same time I heard from outside the ringing of that bicycle bell. I yanked open the back door.

  There was a girl standing there. But sh
e wasn't the same girl I'd just seen. This one was about my age, and she was standing with her hand raised as though she was about to knock. She took a quick step backward.

  "Don't shoot!" she cried, pretending to be even more startled than she was. She held her hands up, even though in one hand she was balancing a foil-covered plate. "If you don't like zucchini brownies, I promise never to bring them again."

  "Sorry," I said. "I just..." I craned to look beyond her, but there was no sign of anybody on a bicycle, and I couldn't hear the bell anymore. For that matter, the phone had stopped ringing, too.

  The girl at the door was looking at me with raised eyebrows.

  "Sorry," I repeated lamely.

  She turned to see what I could have been looking at. Who knows what she thought. "Were you waiting for someone? Did I come at a bad time?"

  "No," I said.

  Not a friendly opening, but she said, "I'm Michelle Shumway, from next door." She held the plate out to me. "Do you like zucchini brownies?"

  "I don't know," I admitted doubtfully.

  "Well, zucchini brownies are like zucchini in the same sense carrot cake is like carrots," she told me.

  "I like carrot cake," I said. It seemed rude to just take the plateful of goodies and close the door on her. "Want to come in?" I offered. "My parents and brother aren't here." That made me sound like a little kid; I added, "So if we decide we really like the brownies, we can eat them all before they get home, and they'll never know what they missed." Not likely, I thought, not holding out much hope for a dessert made from vegetables.

  The girl—Michelle—grinned. I decided I liked her face. "Oh," she assured me, "there's always more zucchini."

  "I'm Brenda Keehn," I said as I went to get plates and milk.

  "And you just moved in yesterday," she said. There were lots of ways she could have known that, but she added, "My brother Alec was spying on you with his binoculars while you were unloading the truck. Mom caught him at it and took the binoculars away, but he says there's a boy here about his age."

  "My brother, Danny, is eleven," I said.

  "Alec is twelve. I'm hoping somebody will invent suspended animation soon so that I can freeze him until I'm old enough to move out. Twelve to eighteen is absolutely unbearable in little boys, take my word for it. I have three brothers, and I'd like to donate all their bodies to science."

  "Oh yeah," I agreed, "except that Danny became unbearable around ten." Casually I asked, "Was that one of your brothers ringing the bicycle bell before?"

  "When?" Michelle asked, but before I could answer, she was already shaking her head. "Well, whenever, no. Alec is the youngest, and I don't think any of them ever had a bell. Patrick has one of those ah-wooo-ga horns on his car, but that's not the same at all."

  "No," I agreed.

  I was going to let the subject drop, but Michelle added, "And the Wilcoxes on the other side of you are too old for bicycle bells, too."

  "Oh, well," I said. It wasn't trying to change the subject that made me say, "These brownies are good." They were, I was surprised to find—moist and chocolatey.

  Michelle smiled and nodded, by which I guessed she had made them, not her mother. I can make brownies, too, but only from a box mix. Michelle went back to telling me what her brother had discovered about us: "So there's you and Danny, and both your parents?" Just the slightest emphasis on both, as though that was what she was checking.

  "Yeah. They teach."

  "At the high school?"

  "Community college."

  "They start in a couple weeks," she said. "We get a week and a half more. I'm starting junior year; how about you?"

  I nodded.

  "Great," she said. And it would be nice to have at least one familiar face to look for. Whether or not we were in a one-room schoolhouse.

  "Tell me about you," I said.

  "Well, I'm the second to the youngest of five, unfortunately all of them boys except for me and Rachel, who really doesn't count because she's so damn old she's forgotten what it's like to be a kid. My mother is a visiting nurse, my father skipped out on the family years ago, and I've lived in the same house all my life."

  She was discreetly looking around the kitchen.

  "I love what you've done with this place already," she said. "It was getting to be a real wreck before, but you've fixed it up nice." She stood and followed the hose from the sink to the doorway. "A lot of plants upstairs that need watering?"

  I laughed. "Water bed," I explained.

  "Yeah? Me, too," she said, which surprised me—I would have figured a straw-stuffed mattress with a goose-down comforter, handmade by her grandmother from the down of her family's own geese. She asked, "So where did you move from?"

  "Buffalo."

  "Must be neat living in a big city like Buffalo," Michelle said wistfully, as though we were talking about New York or Paris. "Sometimes it's so annoying living in a small town. Everybody knows everybody, and everybody knows everybody's family. Like it's not bad enough having my teachers say, When your sister, Rachel, was in this class...' some of them remember when they taught my mother. And everybody has you pegged by your family, so they'll say, 'Oh, those Shumways, they never amount to anything,' or 'Those Lyons girls never can pick a man that'll stay around for longer than it takes to father a litter of kids.' My mother's a Lyons. At least we're not Doolittles, who have to hear people say, 'The Doolittles do little,' a million times a year, with everybody thinking they're being so original. You're lucky—your family will be newcomers for at least a couple generations before people admit you're going to stay in Westport and come up with some way to describe you besides 'the new uns.'"

  I didn't tell her that I only planned on being in Westport for two years. Actually, I thought she was kind of funny and fun. I liked the way she seemed willing to say anything.

  I helped myself to a second brownie.

  Michelle had been waiting for me before she accepted a second helping herself.

  "So you knew the people who lived here before?" I asked.

  "Yup," Michelle said.

  "Any little kids?" I didn't ask, Any little kids who died? but I was sure she was going to tell me all about it.

  "Nope," Michelle said. "Old Mrs. Reinhardt was renting it out to a bunch of students from the college for the last twenty years or so." She flashed her quick grin. "Not the same students for the whole twenty years," she clarified.

  "And before that?" I asked, but already I was thinking, Kids didn't wear bicycle helmets like that twenty years ago, did they?

  "Before that," Michelle said, "old Mr. Reinhardt was alive."

  "They have any kids?"

  "About a zillion years ago."

  So who was that little girl I had seen? And why was she haunting this house?

  Having finished her second brownie, Michelle said, "A bunch of us were going to go to the community pool. Want to come?"

  "There's a community pool?" I asked.

  "Sure. We don't spend every afternoon riding around in the back of our pickups shooting woodchucks."

  I laughed, though that was pretty close to the picture I had of how teenagers in the sticks would pass the time.

  The ghost had contacted me once by phone, once by the pond, once in my water bed, and once in the bathtub. Three out of four times near water. Much as I thought Michelle and I might well eventually become friends, it was too early for me to tell her why I didn't dare go to a public pool—not till I found out what was going on, and why.

  "I'd really, really, really like to go," I told her. "I am not brushing you off—please, please, please ask me again some other time."

  "Humph!" she snorted, tossing her head as though insulted. But then she grinned and said, "Sure. Send your little brother over to meet my little brother. If they have each other to play with, maybe they'll spend less time tormenting us."

  After she left I went upstairs to check on the progress of my water bed, and that was when I remembered that I was wrong: I hadn't had
four encounters with the ghost—I'd had five. For there were my clothes, once more lying on the floor. This time there were muddy footprints where she had stomped on them.

  The ghost said she wanted help, but she also seemed to have a temper.

  Despite the effort my father had put into preparing the water bed for me—twice now—I slept in the extra bed in the computer room. Dad rolled his eyes and said, "Fine"; Danny asked if he could have the water bed, and I was tempted to inflict it on him; and Mom said, "Good night."

  I woke up to the sound of a bell ringing—a bicycle bell. I opened my eyes and saw that there was an odd light in the room. Not the light of dawn coming through the window, or the light from the hallway coming underneath the door. I could make out the numbers on my wristwatch, which I'd put on the nightstand before climbing into bed: 1:23. That would be A.M.

  I turned my head slowly.

  The light was coming from the computer monitor screens. Both of them were on. Do I need to mention I hadn't turned them on before going to bed? What was this ghosfs thing about one o'clock in the morning?

  I got up and looked. The little girl's face stared back at me from both screens. She was still dripping water. But she had changed. I quickly averted my eyes. She was more obviously dead than before: Bits of her skin were missing; she was decomposing.

  "What do you want?" I asked.

  When she didn't answer, I stole a quick glance at her. She was just looking at me, swaying slightly as little kids do—the kind who can't hold still for a moment. Not fair, I told myself as I caught myself in that thought. She IS still, wherever her body is. She's still and she will be from now on, until her body...Well, that wasn't a good thought, because her body evidently already was starting to...

  "If you aren't going to be more helpful at this hour of the night..." I whispered to her.

  I would have turned off the computers, but they weren't turned on. So I tossed my blanket over the monitors, the way people do to get their pet birds to sleep.