The Vanishing Season

by Jodi Lynn Anderson

  “When I was a kid, it always frustrated me that when you opened your eyes, the dots disappeared,” Maggie admitted. “I wanted to catch them. Weird, huh?”

  “Everyone who ends up on this peninsula has some kind of issue,” Liam teased. “Water Street is like the Island of Misfit Toys.”

  They breathed and listened to the quiet of the cellar.

  “How many years old is this house?” Liam asked. “Do you know?”

  “My dad said it was built in the 1880s,” Maggie answered. “What are your issues?”

  “Loving an unattainable girl my entire life,” Liam said easily, without hesitation. “Who does that?” He didn’t sound embarrassed. He seemed to want to go on, like he needed to explain himself, but it took a few seconds. “Pauline loves to go on and on about how life is short and how you have to live it up. But, I don’t know, I think it’s just her way of dodging real stuff sometimes.” Maggie could hear his feet shifting on the dirt in the dark. “She talks about her mom being stuck in the past, on what happened with her dad, but in a way she’s stuck on it too. It’s like she doesn’t think she has a future, just because her dad died young.” Liam paused, sorting through his thoughts. “She won’t make any real choices—I’ll bet you anything she ends up working at the tea company all her life, because she won’t decide anything big for herself. And I think her mom likes it that way. I don’t think her mom wants her to grow up and find her own path or anything. She just wants her close.”

  “You think she’ll come around to you one day?” she asked.

  “To me? I doubt it. But I can’t help feeling how I feel. I’m kind of a one-girl guy. I can’t help it; it’s like a curse, really. My dad was the same way, even though my mom didn’t stick around.”

  There was a strange pause, and he moved closer to her. Reflexively Maggie stepped on the stair to open the cellar door and reached her arms overhead, pushing upward. Sunlight flooded in. In front of her, Liam was kneeling. He’d found something on the ground. He held it up to her. A delicate bracelet, grimy from dirt, with a tiny, cherry-shaped charm.

  “I felt it with my foot,” he said, and smiled, friendly. “Here, for you.” In the light she could see his face was glistening with sweat from all the effort carrying the pots.

  Maggie took the bracelet but didn’t say anything. Turning it over in her hands, she wondered how old it was and who’d left it, how it had fallen off. But she’d never know, she guessed. Liam was watching her curiously. There were too many things to like about him. Maggie could feel her affection being bound to him like roots, and she didn’t like it but didn’t know how to stop it from happening. Because it came with a desire to stand closer to him, the way he smelled affecting her pulse.

  Out on the grass, Liam helped her bundle up the potting-mix bags, and Maggie took hold of them in a giant armful. “Well, thanks. See you.”

  “Yeah.” Liam turned and started walking away.

  She looked at the ground just to give her eyes something to do besides watch him walk, but just before he disappeared into the pines, she turned them on him until he’d disappeared, studying the form of his back, the outline of his arms. “Maggie, you’re an idiot,” she said to herself. As she walked inside, she stroked the bracelet in her palm.

  * * *

  Maggie’s heart is a darkening red; it’s slowly turning a different shade. I watch her lie awake and wait for something to plug up the hole that’s opened inside her, and it makes me wish that I could tell her what I’ve learned, being a ghost. I’ve seen enough of people stretching the years to know the things we want are bigger than what we get and as deep as outer space. Looking up at the cold, empty sky beyond the cellar door, I know that our longing can stretch at least that far.

  It’s the bracelet that disconcerts me. It looks familiar—I already know it, where it’s shiny and where it’s dull. I know already that some letters are more faded than others. In other words the bracelet rings a bell, and that’s a feeling I can’t remember having. As Maggie holds it up to study it, I try to make out the faded name. Maybe it’s my name. But I have no more luck than she does.

  Through the window I can smell the air coming down from Canada, breezes full of the Arctic. If you fill your lungs deeply enough, you’ll breathe the ice caps, moose breath, Eskimo campfires. A ghost town comes to mind, north of here, that was abandoned in the late 1800s—I don’t know when I saw it or why. It’s not the kind of ghost town you picture in the West, with tumbleweeds and shoddy, clapboard houses. It’s polished and sophisticated, with an avenue of clean, white houses and a courthouse, a dry goods shop, a mayor’s house, a capitol. It’s so impeccably clean that it looks like all the people left just the day before. It feels as if everyone has packed up their things all at once and gone suddenly. Every time I think of it, I get a lonely feeling.

  I drift out of my window, to go see where they’re digging the new grave of the latest victim; she’ll be buried in White Stone. I float out to the old cemetery, wander among the bones I can see under the dirt—some curled in balls in their tombs, some long and stretched out like they’re standing on a stage. I can hear their souls whispering in the trees sometimes. I’ve begun to suspect they’re here after all, and closer than they’ve let on. My empty, invisible, nonexistent heart picks up speed. Maybe it turns a darker shade of red too—I don’t know, because it isn’t there.

  A late, last warm-weather storm is crackling somewhere far-off—I see the faintest hints of lightning.

  And suddenly I see my first ghost. He’s one lonely-looking wisp of a man, sitting on a stone a few yards away; he’s transparent and—just as I’d pictured—glowing. He seems to want to tell me something, but I can’t hear him, and he can’t hear me. “Where are all the ghosts?” I ask, but no words escape my lips. He keeps looking at me as if there’s something important he wants me to know. “How can I keep people safe?” I ask. But he shakes his head. And then he floats into the woods and fades away.

  I float home, over town after town, toward Gill Creek and Water Street. An occasional car drives below or a person walking through the woods or down the streets of town.

  If I could show you the lives of the people below me—the colors of what they all feel heading into this chilling, late fall—they’d be green and purple and red, leaking out through the roofs, making invisible tracks down the roads.

  * * *

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  8

  THE COLD RETURNED SOMETIME THAT NIGHT AND STAYED. IT BLEW DOWN FROM the north and settled in for the winter. It blew across the fourth girl, found just before Thanksgiving in the icy slush at the edge of the lake in Sturgeon Bay. She was like the others—facedown, no sign of struggle. She had been gone a full week before turning up in the lake. Meanwhile, Gill Creek pulled together in the face of the threat. There were bake sales and benefits in honor of the families of the victims; there were indoor activities planned every Friday night for families to attend together. The town forged on with its traditions and small events: There would be a fall festival and a Turkey Gobble the weekend after Thanksgiving. “Faces of Gill Creek Past” was on exhibit at the Maritime Museum, and that Saturday Pauline invited Maggie to go.

  They rode downtown in Mrs. Boden’s Mercedes, which she kept parked in the garage so that it was shiny and perfect, black as ink. Maggie marveled at the way the car smelled and how smoothly it glided down Water Street, but she also marveled that someone could spend so much money on a car. Mrs. Boden wore a brown trench coat and pressed, emerald-green pants. Her blond hair was perfectly done, and she wore red lipstick and dark eyeliner on her catlike eyes. Pauline, on the other hand, was mismatched in a long, wrinkled maroon skirt, blue boots, and a vintage green coat she’d bought at a thrift store.

  Mrs. Boden asked Maggie the standard adult questions as she drove. “How’s school going? You must be very self-
disciplined to be homeschooled? What’s your best subject?” And she acted interested in everything that Maggie answered. She kept nodding, saying “I see” or “Oh, really?” or “Good for you.” But it was like they were just things to say. Pauline sat in the passenger seat looking out the window quietly.

  The museum was small, but someone had put a lot of imagination into the exhibit—it consisted of several rooms through which you walked past life-size black-and-white photos of past residents of Gill Creek—dating all the way back to the time photography had been invented. Some of the photos were large, plaster cutouts—trimmed to the shape of the people they portrayed—so that their silhouettes stood in the middle of the rooms. The photos on the walls showed people in their daily lives: in front of tractors or shops, bustling down Main Street, stomping cherries at the annual Cherry Festival, the harvest queen riding in a parade.

  Pauline trailed along behind her mom from photo to photo. Standing behind them, Maggie could see that Pauline emulated the way her mother tilted her head as she examined each photo, though she couldn’t seem to stop her foot from tapping, clearly restless.

  “Oh, Maggie, here’s one of your house,” Mrs. Boden said, turning and waving her toward them.

  Maggie came up beside her and studied the photo, surprised and excited to see the familiar white house, though it looked different in the photo . . . of course, newer. A tiny scrawl at the lower corner indicated that the date was 1887, the year after the house had been built.

  A woman stood in front of it in a white Victorian dress. The photo was too grainy to make out her features perfectly, but she was beaming—her teeth big and white on her tan face. She had dark-blond hair piled to the back of her head in the Victorian way, and there was something foreign about her. Maggie wondered if she could be the person who’d owned the cherry bracelet. Her arms sprouted goose bumps, thinking about it. The woman looked so full of life.

  A tiny label to the left of the photo said: “Marilyn Gustafson, 1865–1889.” She’d died young, probably not too long after the photo was taken. How had she died? Why did she move to the middle of nowhere? Maggie wondered.

  She guessed people never changed—there was always this desire to strike out and make the best life possible for yourself. It was nice to think that some things stayed the same even over hundreds of years. These photos were proof of things moving forward, people living and dying while the houses stood on and on.

  Maggie looked up and around to find that Pauline and her mom had wandered out of sight. She walked into the next room and the next and found them in the back-most exhibit area. Pauline was looking at a photo of a fisherman and his young son standing on a commercial fishing boat. Lines were etched deep into the man’s face.

  Pauline’s mom was raking her hands through Pauline’s messy, dark hair, trying to smooth it out. Pauline kept shrugging away.

  “Mom, I’m not five. You don’t need to do my hair.”

  “I know, but you have such beautiful hair and all you have to do is brush it.”

  Pauline sighed and gave in, letting Mrs. Boden continue to fuss at her.

  “This is my great-great-grandpa, isn’t he cool?” Pauline said over her shoulder, when she saw Maggie was there, pointing to the little boy. “I like this one, because he looks so much like my dad in it.” She turned to her mom. “Doesn’t he remind you of Dad, Mommy? Same eyes.” Maggie noticed they were Pauline’s eyes too.

  Her mom looked at the photo, then nodded. She looked back at Maggie and smiled, the same smile that wasn’t really happy. “Maggie, don’t you think Pauline’s too young to have a boyfriend? This kid James keeps calling her.” She was changing the subject. But Maggie didn’t want to argue with someone’s mom, even though Pauline was giving her the wide eyes of annoyance.

  “I don’t even want to go out with him,” Pauline said.

  “But are you being clear about it? Boys need things spelled out.”

  “If completely ignoring him is being clear about it, then yes.”

  Mrs. Boden looked at her, exasperated. “Can I help it if you’re precious to me?”

  “I’m not going out with anyone, Mom. You’re like Mommie Dearest or something.” Mrs. Boden gave a tinny laugh, then turned and headed back into one of the other rooms.

  “It’s actually a pretty good exhibit,” Maggie said, making conversation.

  “My mom donated twenty thousand dollars to this museum,” Pauline said absently. Maggie nearly choked on her own tongue. “What, do you think that’s a crazy amount?” Pauline turned to her in surprise.

  “It’s just, like, half my mom’s salary,” Maggie said.

  “Oh,” Pauline said, “sorry. I’m so gauche. My mom always says that.”

  They both turned back to the photo. “Don’t they all look like hardy, noble souls? You know,” Pauline said, “it’s so easy to think someone’s perfect when they’re dead. My mom thinks my dad was perfect, and I guess so do I.”

  Maggie didn’t know what to say to that. “What was he like, besides funny? I remember you said he was funny.”

  Pauline thought. “He looked out for me. It was, like, I was always safe because he was there.”

  Pauline fished into her pocket and a moment later pulled out a little piece of paper. She peeled something off the back, then raised it to the image of the grown man holding the boy’s hand and placed it under his nose. It was a fuzzy mustache sticker. Maggie peered around behind them nervously to see if anyone was watching.

  “I’m pretty sure this guy had a sense of humor. I brought a whole pack. Let’s go do the other ones,” she said. “Let’s do your lady too.”

  Afterward, walking downtown, they saw the headlines in the metal newspaper vending machines, a particularly prominent one saying “Evil Among Us.”

  “It’s not evil,” Maggie said, frustrated. “Someone’s probably just got bad chemicals making them go bonkers. Good and evil sound so nice and simple compared to messed up, crazy brain stuff.”

  As they walked people looked at Pauline, especially guys. Maggie had never felt so much like the center of attention before. But Pauline seemed oblivious. She was dressed carelessly in a wrinkled, thin coat; her hair was tangled despite her mom’s finger brushing. They came to a standstill in front of a bakery, peering in through the window at all the cakes.

  “I believe in good and evil,” Pauline said. She seemed distant, like she was thinking it through.

  A cute guy around their age emerged from the bakery and turned to look over his shoulder at Pauline as he walked away.

  “Pauline, do you notice how many people check you out?”

  Pauline shook her head as if shaking it off. “It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t care. It’s stupid.”

  Maggie couldn’t imagine what it must be like to be noticed all the time. She knew some people noticed pretty girls in a good way, and that others, like Elsa, made all sorts of negative assumptions about them—that they were conceited or bitchy or whatever other clichés went along with beauty. She guessed it was like a blessing and a curse. Still, she didn’t love the way she was invisible next to Pauline. A kernel of envy lay at the pit of her stomach, and Maggie tried to dismiss it.

  “Maggie, I was thinking about what you said, about your mom’s salary. I know you’re going to college, and you’re trying to save and all that, and my family has just . . . a lot of money. My mom gives me this allowance, and I never end up spending all of it because that’s not humanly possible. I have, like, eight thousand dollars in the bank.”

  Maggie looked over at her.

  “I just . . . can I give it to you?” Pauline glanced up at her, looking embarrassed, then back at the cakes. “I’m not trying to be condescending or anything; I just really don’t need it. I’ll probably stick around here anyway and work for my mom. And I just . . . it’s not fair. I want you to be able to use it for school, so you can be a world leader someday or something. The world needs someone like you.”

  Maggie felt her eyes s
tart to prickle. She shook her head. “That’s . . . that’s just so sweet, Pauline, but I’ll be fine. Believe me, I’ll be fine. I really appreciate you offering. So much.”

  Pauline gazed back through the window. “Okay, but if you ever need it, just remember, the offer stands.”

  Maggie tried to swallow the lump in her throat and followed her gaze.

  Finally Maggie looked over at Pauline and widened her eyes at her. “We should get a ton of pastries. We can take photos of ourselves eating them. Then we can do an exhibit called ‘Faces of Gill Creek Eating Their Faces Off.’”

  A lady walking past frowned at her; she looked like one of the museum curators.

  They drove home with a bag full of napoleons and disco on the radio that Pauline had picked out and insisted on playing loudly through open windows despite the cold, with warm air blasting from the vents.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  9

  THE BARN WAS AFLAME AS MAGGIE AND HER PARENTS CROSSED THE PARKING lot—a block of glowing yellow squares in the dark, with twangy, lively country music escaping through the double doors. This year the town committee had turned the annual Turkey Gobble into a benefit for the families of the victims and decided to hold it at the huge, refurbished barn that sometimes doubled as a community center.

  It was warm and bright inside, crowded but subdued—lots of people gathered by the dessert table and the bar, chatting and eating. As Maggie and her parents entered the music switched to polka. Shrugging out of her coat, Maggie found Pauline and Liam hiding in a corner at the air-hockey table, completely silent. (Pauline tackled any game where she competed against him with utter seriousness.) She was wearing a headband with two wobbly turkeys attached to the ends of long, springy antennae. She didn’t look up as Maggie approached; she just bit her lip as she thrust her left hand forward over and over to knock the puck back at Liam.