by Laura Tucker
I guess I was asleep, a little bit.
The bag of faucets made an uncomfortable lump in my sweatshirt pocket. What if my mom got up tomorrow and wanted to work? I could leave them out for her, on her worktable, like a present. Maybe they’d be the inspiration she needed.
I gathered my energy and rolled up to sit. The loft was completely quiet as I padded toward the big room in my bare feet, thinking about how good it was going to feel to brush my teeth.
But as I pulled back the curtain that separates my room from the big room, I stopped.
The big room was flooded with a shivery, magical light from that huge full moon. Panels of ghost beams crossed the floor and illuminated the walls. We’d lived in that apartment my whole life, and I’d never seen anything like it before. The watery moonlight had transformed the big room into a place of enchantment. This wasn’t light to walk through; it was filigree—light you danced through, or swam.
And they danced by the light of the moon, the moon. It was a song my dad used to sing to me when I was little.
I stood there for a long time, my exhaustion forgotten for the second time that night. I could feel, more distinctly than I ever had before, where my body ended and the cool air began. I thought about grabbing my notebook, but I knew I’d never be able to capture that light so that someone looking at my drawing would have the feeling I had, like every hair on the back of my neck was standing up in wonder.
And so I willed myself to remember all of it, even the feeling of the bag in the pocket of my sweatshirt against my fingertips, the brown paper velvety soft from being carried around, the heaviness of the little gold faucets a contrast to the silvery light. If I could remember every single detail, maybe someday I’d be able to make a piece of art that would give someone else this feeling, too.
It was the way my mother’s sculptures made people feel.
At the thought of my mom, my eyes turned to her workbench, and in a single second, that fairy-tale light turned from magical to menacing—from something beautiful into the light that fills a forest when you’re running as fast as you can from a monster in a dream, branches reaching out like bony fingers to grab at you.
Looking is easy. Very few people see, my dad always said. I’d wanted to be one of the people who saw, and so I’d turned every walk into a memory exercise, noticing details that nobody else did, memorizing the way light reflected off a greasy puddle, the cornice above a doorway cocked like an eyebrow, the faded shadow of an old advertisement for hats painted onto the bricks between buildings.
But for all the time I’d been standing in the doorway of my bedroom, drinking in every detail of the big room bathed in that glorious light, I had not noticed the most important thing.
I had not noticed that my mom’s sculpture was gone.
“Oh, no,” I breathed—out loud, even though there was no one there to hear me. “Oh, no, no, no.”
My mind scrabbled for an explanation like a dog taking the corner too fast on a slippery wooden floor. Maybe her dealer had come to pick it up. Maybe she’d sold it. Maybe she’d moved it into the bedroom so she could see what it looked like in different light. Maybe she’d taken it to the studio because she needed to use a tool up there.
But even as I was saying those things to myself, even as I was crossing through that bewitched light toward her workbench, my breath coming fast and shallow and loud, I knew that none of those things had happened. And when I slid to a stop, I saw that I was right.
The sculpture wasn’t gone. It had been destroyed.
Pieces of it were broken up and scattered across the surface of the workbench and the floor beneath it. The crumpled sign was against the radiator, like it had been kicked. The tiny fan was at my feet. I knelt to pick it up, turning it in my hands, hoping I would see a way to fix it, but it was bent and twisted beyond repair. Worse, it had lost its magic. It had gone back to being garbage.
The wrongness of it made me feel sick.
I never touched my mother’s work without permission; I’d known not to do that since I was a baby. But I wouldn’t leave those pieces—the fan, the embroidered tea bag, the button marked PUSH with the wire trailing out behind it like a mermaid’s hair—lying all bent and broken and scattered like that, the precise, intricate clockwork of the story they’d begun to make ripped apart.
My dad kept old newspapers in a cardboard box by the door. I emptied it and bent the flaps down so they’d stay inside. Then I picked up all the pieces of my mom’s sculpture and placed them carefully inside.
I left the box in the center of her workbench. As I was turning away, I felt the bag of tiny faucets, heavy in my pocket. I took them out and put them in the box, too. And then I brushed my teeth and went back to bed.
FOR A GHOST
The next day was Friday: Our projects were due.
Eyes sandy with sleeplessness, I took my completed model to school.
My dark mood didn’t match the festive feeling in the classroom as everyone milled around before the bell, looking at the Egyptian-inspired projects set up on people’s desks. Even though I felt rotten, I was still interested to see what other people had done.
Nat Franklin had built a precise replica of the pyramid site at Giza out of papier-mâché. It was terrific; the Sphinx looked exactly like the real thing, down to the smashed-up nose. Nat wants to be an architect like his dad, so he’s got practice with models. He’d glued real sand down, and made a tiny camel out of folded paper right by the pyramid where Khufu is buried. I was really impressed.
Erin Rizzoli had used salt and baking soda to mummify some apple slices. She’d stuck the long brown leathery chunks to a paper plate so they looked like fingers. No thanks.
Melanie Geller had drawn hieroglyphs onto a long piece of printer paper that she’d dipped in weak tea to make it look like papyrus. Mrs. Ejiofor had let her use special gold paint from the art room to do the outlines, and she’d rolled the ends of the scroll around two dowels from her dad’s hardware store. There was a rumor that the hieroglyphs were coded messages about people in our class, but Melanie only looked sideways at him when Richard asked her about it.
Rowan Merody had made a life-size sarcophagus from a refrigerator box with real hinges so you could climb inside. Alex said Rowan’s mom had made it for him, which was probably true, but that didn’t stop everyone in the class from wanting to climb into the box so they could lie with their arms crossed over their chests like real mummies. I didn’t climb in. Nat’s project was better; Rowan’s was just big.
I was happy to see that Richard got a lot of attention for his Khepri maquette. It was great: scary and beautiful. Alex’s mummified bunny didn’t look any better than it had at the studio, but Jerome Jacobson had mummified his sister’s Wonder Woman Barbie and it was even worse, especially the wrapping in the armpit area.
“Bad week to be a little sister,” I said under my breath to Lady Day.
She looked at Jerome’s Barbie with visible distaste. “Or a doll.”
Lady Day’s project was, not surprisingly, the best one in the class. She had done a sculpture of Bastet, the Egyptian goddess who appears as a black cat. Lady Day’s Bastet sat, calm and attentive, on a painted plinth made of a boot box, her front paws lined up neatly beneath her.
Posted on the box base was an information card, just like in a real museum:
Bastet: Late Period (Ptolemaic) 664–630 BC
The protector of women and children.
Also goddess of domesticity, fertility, and women’s secrets. Benevolent, but wrathful when crossed.
I stared at the graceful black cat, keeper of women’s secrets. She was gorgeous: elegant and a little mysterious, with real gold hoops in her ears.
Kind of like Lady Day herself.
“Elmer’s wood filler and three-hundred-twenty-grit sandpaper,” Lady Day said, tall behind me, explaining how she’d got
ten the papier-mâché as lustrous and smooth as the original bronze. “Melanie’s dad gave me this beeswax-dipped cloth to pick up the dust between coats. I have to go back, tell him how great she came out.”
The cat statuette must have taken hours of work. Not for the first time, I wished Lady Day had been making her project at the studio with me.
I put my model on the radiator, out of the way. It didn’t look very Egyptian, compared to all the others. Most people stopped by quickly, admired how small everything was, and moved on. That was fine with me. I didn’t need them to look.
Ms. Colantonio spent a long time with it, though, moving around the box so she could see from every angle.
“Tell me why you didn’t use color?”
I liked the way she asked me, not like I’d gotten lazy or run out of time, but like she knew I’d made a choice.
“Once I saw it with the primer on, it was just done.”
She nodded. “That’s a good thing to know, when something is done.” And she kept looking, even though she’d spent more time with my project than with anyone else’s.
Lady Day joined us.
“Tell me what you see, L.D.,” Ms. Colantonio said, still bent to look.
Lady Day didn’t have to think: “At the Met, there’s a replica of a room from the town next to Pompeii. It got wiped out, too, when the volcano erupted. People were eating, talking, playing with their kids when the lava came, too fast for them to escape. It caught a dog mid-bark.”
Ms. Colantonio looked up at her, listening intently.
“They’re just stopped there, in time,” Lady Day said.
I thought about a volcano erupting over downtown Manhattan, freezing my mom in bed, Mr. G selling magazines under the Optimo sign, Manny Weber lying on his back in the sarcophagus Rowan Merody’s mom had made, hands crossed over his chest.
Archaeologists were detectives, reaching back through time to sift ruins for clues, but they had the same problem real detectives had. If you found us all after a thousand years, you’d learn some true things. But you’d get a bunch of stuff wrong, too.
Lady Day shrugged. “And everything’s white. Anyway. That’s what your model reminds me of. That room.”
Across the room, Rowan shrieked in protest: Javadi had closed the lid of the sarcophagus on Manny and was holding it down while Manny tried to punch his way out of the buckling cardboard.
Ms. Colantonio straightened up and turned in their direction, but she was still looking into my model even as she started to walk away, so that I barely heard what she said:
“She’s right. It’s like you built a room for a ghost.”
* * *
After Manny had been rescued and everyone finally got back to their seats for roll call, Ms. Colantonio made an announcement: Our projects would be on display in the school’s lobby until summer vacation.
The smaller ones could go in the glass cases on the walls where the sports trophies would have been kept if we’d had any of those. Bigger projects, like Richard’s and Lady Day’s and Rowan Merody’s, would have their own special spot near the principal’s office.
Excitement buzzed around the classroom again, and not much got done in math.
At the end of the day, Ms. Colantonio asked everyone to collect their coats and backpacks and then return—“in a civilized manner, please, ladies and gentlemen”—to the classroom so that each of us could take our project down to the lobby on our way out. She led the way, lifting one end of Rowan’s sarcophagus and calling out yet another reminder behind her. “Careful, please, and with a minimum of noise?”
For all the reminding, there was still a noisy swarm of kids and coats and papier-mâché and backpacks, so I took my time getting my coat. The classroom was empty by the time I was hefting my diorama, hot on the bottom from its spot on the radiator, into my arms.
On my way out the door, I almost bumped into Bill the janitor, pushing his cleaning cart. A lot of kids are scared of Bill because of the livid red scar that slices down the center of his face, but he’s interested in monsters and likes to talk to Richard about them, so we know he’s nice. Bill waited patiently until the box and I had gotten safely all the way through the doorway, then moved carefully past me into the classroom, leaving his cart in the hallway.
“Richard told me you two are getting into shapeshifters these days,” Bill said as he leaned over to pick up the heavy metal trash can next to the classroom door.
With the Transformation section in full swing, the Taxonomy had taken on a new life. We couldn’t find pictures of a lot of the monsters Richard had researched, so we had to rely on what details we could gather from the stories about them, and on our own imaginations.
“Metamorphosis, too,” I said.
“He keeps you busy!” Bill said over his shoulder, the red cord of the scar lifting up the corner of his lip in a smile. He headed into the classroom, calling back, “You get home safe and have a good night, now.”
“Thanks. You too,” I replied automatically.
But the thought of going home sat in my stomach like stones. I stood by Bill’s cart, the after-school smell of glass cleaner and heavy-duty disinfectant crowding my nose and my diorama suddenly heavy in my arms.
I looked down at the Tab can, the coffee cup, the little cat.
A room for a ghost.
Balancing the box precariously on my outstretched left hand and forearm like I was carrying a tray, I used a fingernail to pry Apollo’s color study from the side of the box. Still balancing the diorama, I shoved the little canvas quickly into the pocket of my jeans.
Then, curious, I tilted my hand a smidge, like the worst coffee-shop waitress in the world. It wasn’t a lot, just enough for the model and everything in it to slide off my arm, right to the bottom of the big black plastic garbage can on Bill’s rolling cart.
SATURDAY (AGAIN)
“I have to be home in a couple of hours,” Alex told me on Saturday morning. “My mom wants to open the house this weekend.” He meant their house on the Island. “I packed already, but she wants to be in the car around two.”
My heart beat a little faster. By two—as long as everything went as planned—I’d already have talked to my dad. I’d gotten ten heavy dollars in dimes from Mr. G after school, and Richard had agreed to do the talking in French. We’d call all the hotels near Écalles-Sainte-Catherine while Alex was on the Terrorpole.
And once I found him, my dad would know what to do about my mom.
“Richard slept over at my house again, but I couldn’t deal with waiting for him to get ready. He’ll meet us later.” Alex noticed the goose pimples on my bare arms. “You’re sure you’re warm enough?”
He was right: Just like last Saturday, I’d forgotten a sweatshirt.
Just like last Saturday, he said, “Race you,” and didn’t even wait for me to get my key out from around my neck before he’d started climbing the front of the building. Just like last Saturday, I ran as fast as I could and found, just like last Saturday, that Alex had beaten me.
But unlike last Saturday, I’d left the window open.
So when I swung open the door, breathing hard, there he was, standing right there in the middle of my living room, looking around.
“Ollie,” he said, in a voice I didn’t recognize, “What’s going on?”
At first, I didn’t know what he meant. Then I looked around, too, and I could see the room the way Alex was seeing it.
It was a mess. There were apple cores and peanut shells on the trunk we used as a coffee table, and a lot of my books on the floor, and I’d made myself a kind of nest on the couch for when I fell asleep in front of the TV. I’d washed out some of my underpants so that I’d have some clean ones to wear, but I couldn’t reach the shower rod easily, so I’d put them on the backs of the chairs to dry.
I wasn’t crazy about having Alex see my underp
ants, although I’d seen his Spider-Man ones plenty of times. But I could tell how freaked out he was by the fact that he wasn’t making fun of them.
“Where’s your mom? Is she here?”
I felt a flash of panic. “She’s here; she’s in her room. I already told you. She’s not getting out of bed right now.”
The doors to my mom’s room are double French doors, with the glass panes painted so that you can’t see in. Alex was most of the way to my mom’s room when I caught up with him. As fast as he was moving, for once I was faster. I slid in front of him and pressed against one of the doors, covering the faceted knob behind my back with my hands. The glass was cool, and I held onto it tight.
Alex looked at me steadily.
“You can’t go in there, Alex. It’s not going to be forever, she said so. But she needs to be alone right now.” My heart was beating so fast, I thought I’d see it bumping through my T-shirt when I looked down. “She needs to rest.”
At that moment, I was sure that if Alex opened the door to my mom’s room, I would kill him for sure. But when he slowly and deliberately reached around me and took my hand away and turned the doorknob, I didn’t do anything at all.
The door to my mom’s room swung open. Once again, I saw everything through Alex’s eyes. The shades were down so the room was dark, but you could see a lump under the covers. My mom didn’t move, even when the sunlight from the big room crossed the bed. There were new cigarette packets and Tab cans on the floor. There were stains on the comforter I hadn’t noticed before, and where it had pulled up at the bottom, you could see that there wasn’t a bottom sheet on the bed at all; she was sleeping on the bare mattress. The pizza slices I’d brought for her a couple of days before were still on the table next to the bed; I hadn’t gotten to the plate during my cleanup before she’d yelled at me.
