Ghost Wood Song

by Erica Waters

  As I sink into the comfort of his touch, I think how strange it is that here I am being comforted by Cedar, the rodeo boy. Even a week ago, I’d have only wanted it to be Sarah sitting next to me. But then I realize the person you choose to love isn’t the one who shows up when you ask them to. It’s the person who shows up even when you don’t. Maybe even when you don’t want them to. Sarah would have come if I’d asked, but I didn’t have to ask Cedar.

  “I was so scared,” I say, and then the words are tumbling out of me—the whole story of what happened at Frank’s office and then the wreck. And Cedar listens quietly, his eyes tender and his mouth set firm, like he’s never going to let anyone hurt me again. When I’m done talking and all my tears are spent, he holds me to him and rests his head against my hair. We sit like that until Mama comes through the front door.

  “Who’s this?” Mama asks when she pushes through the door with two duffel bags.

  “My boyfriend, Cedar,” I say. “He’s going to help you with those bags.”

  Cedar’s head swings around so fast it makes my own neck hurt. “Boyfriend?” he says at the same time Mama does, his expression so hopeful I can’t help but smile.

  I give him a wink I hope he feels all the way down to his toes.

  Cedar jumps up and takes the bags from Mama’s hands, his face a little red. “Nice to meet you, ma’am,” he says, smiling a little wider than the occasion would seem to warrant. But now he knows—I made my choice, and he won’t have to wait around anymore.

  Honey runs in from the bedroom and gazes up at Cedar, starstruck. “Are you a cowboy?” she asks, a grin starting over her face.

  Everybody laughs, and Cedar bends down to shake Honey’s hand. “I am,” he stage-whispers, and she giggles.

  “Cedar, you want to stay for dinner? You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” Mama asks, giving me an appraising look.

  After dinner, he gets his mandolin out of his truck and performs “Froggie Went A-Courtin’” for Honey, complete with all the voices and sound effects. She cackles all the way through the song and gasps when the frog gets eaten by a snake at the end. I smile, watching them together, but my mind’s on Frank and Jesse and the fiddle that longs for my touch.

  Mama agrees to let Cedar stay the night as long as he sleeps on the couch and I promise not to leave my old bedroom. I agree, mostly because knowing he’s downstairs between the front door and everyone I love is the only reason I’ll be able to fall asleep.

  But when a scream tears through the house, I know a hundred Cedars wouldn’t be enough to make us safe.

  Twenty-Five

  I dash into the room where Honey and Mama are sleeping and flip on the lights. Honey sits ramrod-straight in bed, the way she did the night of the wasps, her little chest heaving. I check the air and her skin, but there are no stinging insects.

  Mama’s eyes are open and staring, but she’s still lying down, as if she can’t move.

  “Mama,” I say. “Mama.” I reach out a hand and shake her, and she bolts upright, gulping air like she’s just surfaced from underwater. Her eyes dart around the room in panic before settling on me.

  “What is it? Why are you in here?” Mama says, putting a hand to her chest.

  “Honey was screaming,” I say. Mama looks sharply at my sister. “She was dreaming.”

  Mama’s quiet for a long moment. “Shady, will you take her downstairs and give her some juice or something? I’ll be down in a minute,” she finally says, her voice distant and strange.

  “What is it? Were you dreaming, too?” The hair at the back of my neck prickles.

  “Just . . . go downstairs,” she says. “Please.”

  Honey wraps her arms around my neck and buries her face in my hair. I carry her from the room but glance back when I reach the doorway. Mama pulls her knees to her chest and wraps her arms around them, rocking herself.

  A chill shoots through me, but I take Honey downstairs.

  When I reach the stairwell, Cedar waits at the bottom, gazing up at me in the dark. “Everything all right?” He must be scared too, the way he’s gripping the banister.

  “Bad dream,” I say, passing by him to get to the kitchen. He stops me and kisses my cheek, and then kisses Honey’s too.

  “I haven’t slept much either,” he admits.

  “Because of the ghosts or because of Frank?”

  “Both,” he says with a sheepish smile.

  We go into the kitchen together, and soon Aunt Ena and Mama join us.

  “What did you dream about, Honey girl?” I ask, my heart racing. “Was it wasps again?”

  Honey rubs her eyes and nods. “They hurt a little girl. Up there.” She points at the ceiling. Mama shivers and then takes Honey in her arms, holding her tight. Is it the same little girl from all my dreams when I lived here, the dead girl in the ceiling? The thought makes me shiver too.

  Aunt Ena glances up, her blue eyes wide and frightened. “I told Brandy not to take the cookies for the tea party,” she says, her mind not in this world. She begins to hum the low, mournful song the fiddle was playing when I dived into the lake. Daddy’s song, the one that turned him darker than “The Twa Sisters” ever could. My skin tingles.

  “This is why I moved y’all out of here. This house isn’t good for a child,” Mama says. “Or an adult for that matter,” she adds, looking meaningfully at Aunt Ena, who stares at her folded hands on the table while she hums.

  Mama’s face is pale with fear.

  “What is it, Mama?”

  She shakes her head. “I’m going to take Honey back to bed, but then we’re leaving in the morning. We won’t spend another night here. I can’t stand it.” She carries Honey from the room. Cedar gets up too and goes back to the couch, probably trying to stay out of our family business.

  But I trail after Mama up the stairs, a horrible thought forming into a question in my mouth. “Does this house have an attic?”

  “It’s blocked up,” she says, “and for good reason.” Halfway up the stairs, she stops and stares into space, as if she’s listening. When I put a hand on her arm, she flinches. “Let’s go home tonight. I don’t want to stay here anymore. This house isn’t fit for the living.”

  “I won’t leave Aunt Ena alone here,” I say. “Not like this. And we should stay together. Frank could come—”

  Mama swivels to face me. “Don’t you see—Frank’s the least of our worries right now.” Her eyes are pleading.

  “No, it’s all connected somehow,” I say, the knotted threads of the last few weeks beginning to come unsnarled in my head. “Frank and whoever Brandy is and Jesse and Daddy. It’s all connected somehow.”

  “Shady, get your head out of the goddamned past. What’s done is done. All we can do is live now. Because we are alive.” She sets Honey down gently on the bed.

  “If you care so much about the living, why don’t you fight for Jesse? Call the police and tell them to arrest Frank.”

  “I’ll stay tonight, but tomorrow we’re gone. Ena can come stay with us if she wants to.” Mama crawls back into bed, pulling the covers over herself.

  “You had the same dream Honey did, didn’t you? Who’s Brandy, Mama?”

  She rolls over to face the wall. “Just go to bed, Shady.”

  “Is she the dead girl in the ceiling?” I ask, but Mama won’t answer.

  “Shady-Shade, sleep here,” Honey says, pulling at my pajama pants. “Sleep with me. I’m scared.”

  “Shhh, Honey girl, don’t be scared,” I say, sliding into bed beside her. I pull her against my chest, and she snuggles into me. But I’m scared now too.

  Honey is breathing steadily after a few moments, and even Mama falls back to sleep. But I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, listening to the moans and creaks of the old house.

  It has always felt most haunted at night here—the patter of footsteps across the floorboards, sighs pulling doors closed, unidentifiable smells floating through rooms. As a child I found it comforting, signs that o
ur ghosts were nearby, watching over me while I slept. But tonight the ghosts are silent, the only sounds from the house itself—ancient wood settling and creaking. I’d almost say the ghosts are afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

  But what are they afraid of? What’s left for a ghost to fear after death?

  I can feel the secrets in every corner, spun like cobwebs. Are they holding this house together? If I begin to untangle them, will the whole place fall down around our heads? Maybe I should try to find the attic and discover what it’s hiding. Because Brandy and a little dead girl in the ceiling, the shadow man, Daddy’s fiddle and Honey’s dreams—right now they feel like single threads, but I sense that there’s a larger pattern.

  I thought Daddy’s fiddle would solve our problems, but it’s only made more trouble. It didn’t make Jim tell the truth or get Jesse out of jail. It only brought me more enemies—Frank and the shadow man and the wasps.

  I’m tired of wondering about everyone’s secrets, sick to death of waiting for the pattern to be revealed. I’m going to get the answers I need. I’ve failed at everything else I’ve tried, but I won’t fail at this.

  I throw the covers off and creep from the room, back into mine. I turn on the light and pull Daddy’s fiddle case from beneath the unmade bed. I’ll take it out to the woods, I’ll walk the paths Daddy walked and play the songs Daddy played. For me, for Jesse, but for all the rest of my family too—for Aunt Ena, for Mama, for Honey.

  Just as I start to stand, a floorboard creaks behind me. I whip around. Cedar’s eyes widen when he sees me on my knees, the fiddle case clenched tightly in my hands.

  “No,” he says, shaking his head. “No, I won’t let you play it again. Not after what happened. You could have—you could have—I don’t know what would have happened, but it was bad. You weren’t in control of yourself. Your mama’s right. You need to leave it be.”

  I try to brush past him, but Cedar’s hand closes over my wrist. His eyes are determined. “No. I won’t let you do this. Not again.”

  “Let go,” I say, but his fingers stay wrapped around my wrist.

  “I need to find out what’s going on in this house. Everyone’s dreams—the things Aunt Ena keeps saying. I can’t do anything about Frank tonight, but I can find out what this house is hiding. I can find out what’s causing so much pain to everyone I love.”

  “There are other ways,” he says. “We can search the whole house for clues if you want.” His green eyes are wide and pleading and resolute. The light dusting of freckles on his cheeks and nose stands out starkly against his skin, which is uncharacteristically pale. He must be more frightened or angry than he’s letting on. “Please, Shady.”

  With agonizing effort, I make myself release the fiddle case. I push away the voice that says Cedar’s just another person trying to get in my way. When I nod, his fingers relax against my wrist. “Then I want to find the attic,” I say.

  “All right,” he says. “All right.”

  It takes a long time for us to find the entrance to the attic, and we have to be quiet so we don’t wake anyone. We check the ceilings and the walls, searching everywhere for the outline of a door beneath the plaster and wallpaper. Finally, Cedar thinks to push the heavy dresser in my old bedroom to one side. We pause to listen for Mama, in case we woke her up, but if she hears us, she stays in bed and pretends she doesn’t. Then I run my hands along the wall, feeling for a place where the door should be. The wall is smooth, but I find a dip in the plaster. I trace it with my finger and wonder who sealed it closed, locking my family’s secrets inside.

  After a half hour’s quiet work, Cedar uncovers the attic door and pulls a heavy tape from around its edges, unsealing it for the first time in decades. Plaster and splintered wood litter the floor around it, and the wallpaper is torn around the edges. But it’s there—an attic door just big enough for us to fit through.

  It doesn’t have a doorknob or even a latch; that must have been removed when it was sealed. Cedar pries his fingers into the edge, pulling at it. After a few moments, it pops open with an ominous creak. I swear every ghost in the house sighs—with relief or fear, I can’t tell.

  The light bulb doesn’t come on when I pull the hanging string, so I send Cedar to the kitchen to get flashlights from a drawer by the stove. I stand waiting at the entrance, goose bumps covering my arms. I expect the air to feel cool and musty like a forgotten library, but it’s like most Florida attics: hot, humid, and rank. My stomach feels sour and my head slightly dizzy, like my body knows better than to climb these stairs and is trying to stop me.

  As I stare into the yawning blackness, the house seems to grow even quieter, the silence practically humming around me. I can’t shake the feeling that I’m about to travel into the decayed, worm-eaten center of my family’s secrets, and every ghost here knows it. But Cedar comes back with two flashlights, and I cross the threshold into the waiting, silent darkness.

  Once inside, we have to step more carefully, shining the flashlights down to find our way. The floor’s rotten in places, hardly an inch of it stable. We cast our flashlights around the walls and ceiling, revealing old boxes, broken furniture, and forgotten tools.

  “I know it’s just an attic, but it doesn’t feel right,” Cedar says, his voice husky. “Let’s do this fast.”

  We separate, shining our flashlights in different areas, searching through the jumble. For what, I don’t know. What are we hoping to find here? A dead girl’s body? After twenty minutes, our efforts turn up only junk—old insurance papers, magazines, and ancient, moldy clothes. Despite this, I sense that we’ll find the answer I need here, the one that makes everything fall into place.

  We’ve looked through so many boxes and trunks that in my desperation, I’m starting to think of sneaking off to play the fiddle again. With a sigh, I pull out an unsealed cardboard box that once held bananas. At the bottom of a pile of dusty papers rests a heavy book, an old family photo album. I turn my flashlight on it and begin to turn the pages, my hope quickening. I don’t recognize any of the faces—the pictures are old and yellowing, belonging to another time.

  But then my flashlight illuminates a crumbling, water-stained family portrait of two parents with two young children. I recognize Daddy first, perhaps ten years old. He’s not smiling, just staring at the camera with deep-brown eyes that look exactly like mine. Aunt Ena’s next to him, maybe six or seven, smiling nervously. Their mother is thin and pretty, her hair feathery and strange, her clothes even worse. She seems familiar somehow, but it’s the man in the portrait that stops my breath.

  “Him.”

  “What?” Cedar says, coming over to squint at the page.

  “He’s the ghost that came to my room when I was little. He’s younger here, but that was him. The first ghost I ever saw Daddy raise.”

  My vision goes spotty at the edges, and my fingers ache with a familiar pain.

  “Are you sure?” Cedar asks.

  “He seemed like a confused old man who’d lost his way. I didn’t understand why Daddy was so afraid. Why he cried.” I look up at Cedar, but he’s hardly more than a silhouette in the darkness, his face blue shadows. I touch his arm to make sure I’m still in this world.

  “The ghost was my grandfather. My daddy’s father. And Daddy was scared of him.”

  Of course he was. What little bit I know about who he was in life would have made me afraid to meet his ghost.

  Cedar puts a protective hand on my lower back. “That’s your dad there?” he asks, pointing at Daddy’s face.

  “Yes, and that’s Aunt Ena.” I shift the flashlight to get a closer look, searching her young face for clues of the woman she would grow up to be. Her head is tilted away from the rest of the family, as if she’s leaning toward another person. I tilt the picture and gasp. “Look, there was someone else here, in the portrait.”

  Cedar reaches a tentative finger and scratches at the paper. Part of the built-up residue flakes away, but the image is no clearer. Water stain
s and mold branch out from that side of the portrait, reaching hungry fingers toward the young family. It’s like they’re being eaten up by time.

  I don’t know what the mildew is hiding, but I feel it in my gut, know it as sure as I know the words to all the songs Daddy ever taught me: This is what made Daddy play the way he did. This is the reason for his dark moods and rages. This is the reason for everybody’s pain. This little patch of mold-stained paper could answer all my questions.

  I fold the picture up and put it in my pocket, ignoring the unpleasantly damp smell it leaves on my fingers, the unnatural weight of it in my hands. Maybe it won’t bring Jesse home, but it could help me lay some ghosts to rest.

  Twenty-Six

  I wait until dawn, when morning just begins to break over the horizon, casting pale shafts of light into my bedroom, illuminating the dusty dresser that we shoved back into place last night. Cedar is asleep beside me in bed, his hair sticking up like duck fluff. Mama would have a heart attack if she knew he slept the rest of the night in my bed, but all he did was hold me. All he did was help keep the darkness at bay.

  It was a late night, and he’s not waking up anytime soon. So I tiptoe past him and out of the room, stepping carefully down the stairs and avoiding the creaky ones. He’ll be mad I left without him and put myself in danger without him there to protect me. But there are some things even cowboys can’t protect you from.

  I grab my fiddle on the way out.

  I cut through the woods to get to Miss Patty’s house, a half-mile walk from Ena’s. She’s the last person I want to talk to, but she’s the only one who knew Daddy’s family back then, the only one except Aunt Ena who can explain the picture I found in the attic. And Ena is too fragile right now for me to bother her with questions.

  Church music rumbles out of an open window, but not the nice kind of church music. It’s repetitive and overly emotional, and all about blood and sacrifice. I have to knock three times before Miss Patty shuts it off and comes to the door. She peers out at me suspiciously.