by Kim Hornsby
I turned and pretended to feel for the bathroom door, finding the edging and went into the room, closing the door and hoping Caspian was in there. Pulling aside the shower curtain, I first saw the toes of his boots, then the whole of him standing, almost comically, fully clothed in the claw-footed bathtub. He shrugged.
I quickly ran to lock the door and turned on the fan. “I’m so sorry,” I mouthed and pointed to the next room.
Caspian stepped from the tub. “Your mother is . . .”
I saved him the trouble. “…not someone you want to be around?”
He didn’t agree or disagree.
I stood only feet from him, now, just outside the tub. “Please tell me that you never kissed my mother.” I was ashamed to whisper that, but I had to know. And, I couldn’t ask him if he’d done the wild thing with her. The words wouldn’t come out. Kissing was as far as my mouth got with that horrible thought. If they’d kissed, I might ask the next question. “Did you?”
He looked at me reproachfully and I took it as a no. Maybe my assumption was because I wanted to believe that he hadn’t, or maybe I intuitively knew he hadn’t. I didn’t care at that moment. Caspian was here, I could see again, and all was good.
I turned to look in the mirror, knowing this might be the last time I could ever see again. Every time I was with Caspian and my sight returned, I thought this way. It wasn’t a given that he’d return each day.
Looking at myself in the mirror, I was pleased to see that the long scar on my cheek to my chin didn’t look as bad as I remembered from last time. I traced it with my thumb. “Hello Frankenscar,” I whispered.
Caspian stared at my reflection and I smiled at him, knowing he wasn’t my father but still not sure if he was my mother’s former lover.
“Thank you for letting me see,” I said.
He nodded and looked down the length of my T-shirt to my bare legs. “This is what you wear to bed? Where are your nightclothes?”
I was sure Belinda McMahon had worn a long flannel nightgown, although I’d never seen a photo of her and certainly didn’t know about her fashion, especially in bed clothes. My mother said that Belinda was pretty. She’d have been in her sixties when we visited long ago, and I had to think that after decades of living here, Caspian knew what she wore to bed.
“I wear this shirt to bed. It was my husband’s.” I’d told Caspian a little about Harry the first night we talked. I’d even asked him to try to find Harry in the afterlife, to tell him I missed him, but Caspian said Harry wasn’t close, that no one lingered around me but him, and I concluded that Harry had probably passed on. Not like Caspian who was stuck.
There was so much I wanted to say to Caspian, ask him. Every time he appeared, I felt like I had pages of questions that needed to be answered, things I thought about at night, while trying to find sleep. This time was no different, but my mother was in the next room, probably listening. I turned on the tap and splashed around, looking back to Caspian. “I’m sorry my dog ran through you earlier,” I whispered. “He can’t see you, I guess. Not like my mother and I. Why do you think you are seen by us and by Belinda, but not Eve and Carlos?”
Caspian opened his mouth to speak and there was a rap on the door. “Bryndle, who are you talking to in there?” my mother asked.
I turned off the tap. “I’m practicing my fa fa for the camera tomorrow. I like to do it in here.” I held my breath and looked to where Caspian stood by the toilet, fingering the ghost bracelet I’d given him a week earlier. I still wore his ring and although no one was able to see it, the gold lion with what I was pretty sure had been emerald eyes, dominated my right-hand thumb.
“I’ll listen to it if you like. Do it out here,” Rachel called through the door.
Even if I was practicing my on-camera dialogue, I’d never do it for Rachel. She was severely critical of everything I did or said on the show and made me feel like Moody’s Paranormal Investigations was a piece of mouse poop. I tried to not let her influence anything I did by not including her in anything I did. Now she was here to visit, I’d have to keep my Mother Armor secured tightly around my emotions.
“Thanks anyhow. I’m done for now,” I said. I shot Caspian a look and mouthed the words, “midnight, third floor.” I pointed to the ceiling. He nodded like it was as easy as that. He would meet me on the third floor at midnight. I wasn’t sure what we’d talk about, but I knew I had to see him without my mother on the other side of the wall wondering who I was talking to in the bathroom.
Caspian stepped back into the tub, pulled the curtain and I opened the door to see Rachel standing there, waiting. I looked past her as if I couldn’t see her annoyed face.
“Why turn on the light when you can’t see anything?” she asked, innocently.
“Habit.” I tried to lead her back to the bed, but she ducked around me and into the bathroom. “I have to pee before we go to sleep. I had five cups of tea to stay warm tonight and fear I’ll be up a lot.”
I spun around as Rachel headed for the toilet, my eyes almost fixed on the shower curtain. I followed her into the room blindly. Caspian was probably still standing in the tub on the other side of a white shower curtain. Or, if he was smart, he’d have disappeared through the wall into oblivion. I took a firm stance in front of the tub, talking about anything I could think of. “What do you think of the house?”
“Privacy please,” my mother said as she pulled up her nightgown and sat down.
“I can’t see you, Mother, remember? Did you like the grand salon? Eve can play the piano, did you know? Why didn’t you ever give me piano lessons?”
I heard the tinkling sound and my periphery vision afforded me the knowledge that my mother was peeing.
“You have other talents,” she said. “You don’t need piano.”
I wondered if Caspian had ever been in the room when a woman was on the toilet. Decorum in the 1850s was different than now, not that I ever let Harry in the bathroom when I was on the toilet. Rachel had given me that piece of strange advice at the wedding reception.
“It ruins the mystique,” she’d said with a drunken wave of her hand.
When we made it back to the bed, my mother slid between the sheets and I tried to not focus my sight on anything. Caspian was still close, and I could see. I petted Hodor, said my goodnights to my baby boy and laid back on the pillows. “Is the light out?” I asked, proud at how good I was getting at this deception.
My mother turned her bedside lamp off and I closed my eyes. “It is now.”
“Wake me if you get scared,” I said, mostly to bug her.
“Scared of what?” My mother’s voice now had a slight thread of fear.
“If you hear anything like chains dragging, people moaning, children crying...” I smiled in the dark to imagine my mother lying in bed beside me in fear.
I was a bad daughter.
Chapter 7
According to Jimmy Big Ears, Bane was from a small town on the Olympic Peninsula, one ferry ride west of Seattle. Eve told me this news while we ate toast with Mrs. Hightower’s blueberry jam at the kitchen table. The Smuggler’s Cove Museum curator had left the jam on our doorstep while we were gone with a note to say she hoped we enjoyed it. We did, and already had plans to go begging at the museum for more.
“Mr. Jackson,” Jimmy said from Eve’s phone’s speaker, “is from Port Townsend where he owns a bicycle shop.” He lisped slightly on the word bicycle.
Somehow, I did not take Bane Jackson for someone who exercised, let alone owned a business. “Is it still open?”
“Yes. I went in there to take a look yesterday,” Jimmy said. “Nice place, although Bane wasn’t around. His employee said he’s in Seattle.”
I did not want this rabble-rouser to live close. Certainly not on this side of the country where he could see us out in public. I’d hoped he was a recluse in a basement in Florida.
Jimmy had a whole profile on the guy that he sent to Eve by email while we talked and just as we hung
up the phone with our private detective, I heard Eve yelp.
“What is it?” I asked, not able to read her expression because Caspian hadn’t shown up yet today and I was eating my toast blindly.
“Bane’s photo. Jimmy sent a picture of the guy.”
“Is he that grotesque?” I asked popping the last of my toast in my mouth. “Where the heck is Caspian when you need him? I want to see the photo.”
I heard Eve set her coffee cup on the table. “He’s not grotesque. At all. Bane Jackson is actually a nice-looking man if this photo is him.”
“Why did you yelp then?”
“He’s Harry’s doppelganger.”
The blood rushed to my head and I heard a whirring noise. I needed to see this guy. “Caspian!” Where was my ghost?
“Same eyes, same hair. They could’ve been brothers,” Eve said. “I’m sorry to tell you that but you’ll see for yourself when your eyes show up.”
Just then, my mother entered the room. I recognized her shuffling footsteps and the way she started talking before she even saw us. “Why are you yelling for Caspian, Bryndle? Does he usually come on command?” I heard her voice enter the room and her footsteps tap across the kitchen floor to the vicinity of the coffee pot. Hodor stood and greeted my mother. I knew all this because the sense I most relied on, my hearing, told me that my dog’s nails tapped across the floor to where I’d heard my mother getting a cup of java. “Does Caspian come when you shout? I’m interested,” Rachel said.
The thing about my mother is that everything she said sounded slightly snarky and possibly a lie, her voice having just enough sharpness to give that impression. Just the sound of her voice, even ‘hello’ put me on edge. “No, but I decided to give it a try. I had a question.”
“It sounded more like an emergency,” my mother said closing the fridge. She liked her coffee with lots of cream.
“It can wait,” Eve said, jumping in to save the secret that I needed Caspian for sight, from my mother. “We’ll ask him about the ship later, Bryn.”
Eve was becoming a good liar, something I felt only a tich guilty about. Rachel knew we were trying to find Caspian’s bones, something she said was horrifying and futile seeing bones that old would “probably be dust by now.” I tended to agree with her but was determined to try to help Caspian regardless.
“I had the worst sleep,” Rachel said. “I dreamed all night long, kept waking up and even thought I saw Caspian slip out the door of the bedroom.”
At least she hadn’t seen me slip out at midnight to meet Caspian, who never showed up. Had he still been in the room when I left to meet him? Although, it was my understanding that ghosts did not need to open doors to leave a room, I needed to redirect this conversation in case she realized Caspian had been hiding in the bathroom while we went to sleep. I had no idea of the rules of ghosts and didn’t know why Caspian hadn’t simply floated through the bathroom wall to the bedroom while my mother sat on the potty.
“That’s a strange dream.” I said, trying to forget that Bane Jackson looked like Harry. “What else did you dream?” I wanted to keep my mother talking just in case the next words on her lips had to do with how real it seemed to watch Caspian walk through my bedroom last night.
“Oh, I just woke up from one where I was a baby owl and I needed you to open a window to set me free.”
“Sounds like you want to go back to Seattle,” I said hopefully.
“Or, you need to cut me some slack,” she said.
This was an old theme of ours—I needed to not be so hard on my poor mother who couldn’t help being the one person in my life who could make my mood go from joyously happy to seeing-red angry in two seconds.
“What’s on the agenda for today? Ghost hunting?” My mother sat down at the table to my right, Hodor slumping to lie between us. “Is that Harry?”
I knew my mother wasn’t looking at Harry out the window but instead seeing the photo of Bane on Eve’s screen. My heart leaped while I waited to hear an answer.
“That’s Bane Jackson, someone who does not believe in ghosts and calls your daughter a liar.” Eve’s voice was soft like she almost didn’t want me to hear her reply, which was silly because my ears were on hyperdrive now that my eyes were not on any kind of drive.
“He looks like Harry,” my mother said, with no regard to what that statement might do to me. “Same eyes.” She took a noisy slurp of her coffee. Once Eve asked me if Rachel’s dislike of Harry made him more desirable to me. I wasn’t sure, but I knew that she hadn’t liked my choice for a life partner from the moment I said I loved this man. Harry had said the relationship was fine but telling a psychic that was futile. I knew my mother didn’t like Harry and he sensed her dislike.
One of the only good things about losing my clairvoyance at the time of Harry’s death and my injuries was the fact that I could not feel if my mother was pleased my husband was out of my life. I stuffed the thought she might be secretly relieved to have him out of the picture way down deep and did not ever want to pull it out to examine. Before the funeral, my mother told me that she’d had a premonition that there’d be an accident and Harry would die. That day, I’d vowed to never speak to her again. Not just because she lied about having a premonition, which she never had, but because she tried to hurt me deeply by saying this could all have been avoided. But it wasn’t.
I got up to refresh my coffee, to do anything but listen to my mother tell me that my nemesis looked like my beloved dead husband. It was either go for coffee across the room or do a swinging rabbit punch in the direction of my mother. I walked to the coffee pot.
I heard the scrape of my mother’s chair, a shuffling of feet, and knew that she’d started to leave the table, maybe to help me, but Eve had stopped her. How did I know with such certainty that Eve stopped her? I felt it. I smiled to think that my sixth sense might be returning after all. There was no way hearing told me that Eve had put a hand on Rachel’s forearm to get her attention, then gave my mother a look and a nod to tell her to stay put.
I’d fricking sensed it, along with the clear picture of what they looked like! Eve was wearing a sweater with a pug dog on it that she’d knitted in college and her hair was in high pigtails. Knowing this confirmed something was creeping back into my talent pool and I was ecstatic about the possibilities. Caspian was not in attendance and I hadn’t seen it. I sensed it.
If I could’ve sensed where my mother had put down the creamer, I’d have been happy. But I couldn’t, and still mad at my mother for saying Bane looked like Harry, with no apologies, I let her have it. “Kitchen rules for blind people,” I said forcefully. I turned towards the table. “Always put back in the same place anything you use in this room. Everything has its place. And that includes the cream, Rachel. Follow the rules and you can stay here with us.” Carlos and Eve had become really good at keeping everything in the exact same place, but I was sure my mother’s learning curve would not be as promising.
“The cream is ahead and to your right about two feet. Sorry.” My mother did not sound like herself and I worried she might be coming down with something. Not because I feared for her health, but I feared for my own as her roomie and bedmate.
I poured cream and tried to figure out how to get my mother to go back to Seattle and leave me in peace.
***
Caspian continued to be AWOL all day and when Eve suggested we take a stroll around the house before it got dark, I agreed that some fresh air would be good for the soul. I’d spent most of the day working on my Braille lessons, something I hated but had to learn. Passing an exam in Braille was important to me because it would keep me from being labelled illiterate which I disagreed with but could do nothing about. Without the Braille lessons, I’d be labelled a dummy. I was already sensitive about not graduating high school, never mind not going to college. Harry had told me many times that I was an incredibly intelligent person, something that always made me want to fling myself into his arms and plant a big wet kiss on hi
s lips, but having not been a good student, I felt lacking in degrees. I wanted that Braille certificate.
I was hoping to connect with Caspian and worried that being in the same room as my mother on the potty might have ruined his willingness to be part of my life now. Moody Investigations had a summoning planned at midnight and if Caspian didn’t show up, Eve would be the star of the show. Her clairvoyance was peeking its cute little head out of her psyche and she’d be the only one with talent tonight if my spirit guide had other plans.
This week, it felt important to get some credible footage uploaded to counteract Bane Jackson’s theories about us. Tonight, was the night to tape something good. I’d planned to go to bed with my mother at ten and slip out of the bed to go to Eve’s room at midnight. There, I would dress and get Moody’ed up. I did not want my mother witnessing the summoning or taping of the show and had joked with Eve I was planning to tie my bedroom door shut to prevent Rachel from escaping while we worked. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out we were investigating tonight but so far, my mother hadn’t mentioned she knew what was going on and Carlos and Eve had been very careful not to say anything in front of her.
Heading outside for a walk in fresh air would do everyone good, including Hodor. I whistled for my dog who was chewing on a braided rawhide in the library at Carlos’s feet, Eve had said.
“Come on, Boy. Wanna go for a walk?” I yelled.
“Do you want TapTap?” Eve asked.
“Nope,” I said. “I’ll hold on to you.”
Eve grabbed our coats from the hook thingie at the front door and we headed outside. Fresh air would do us both good and Hodor needed outside time. I felt him whoosh by me on the porch as I zipped Puffy and pulled Beanie on my head. Hodor’s nails tapped their way across the foyer.
“He’s headed to the Coach House,” Eve said.
“How do the cats get in and out?”
