Free Spirits

by Julia Watts

  “That would be nice,” Abigail says politely.

  “Why don’t you set and rock with me a few minutes?” Mrs. Boshears says, and she holds the mirror like she’d hold a baby and rocks back and forth, humming an old murder ballad that’s also a favorite of Granny’s.

  After Mrs. Boshears has had a few minutes to fuss over Abigail, I say, “We heard about you from a guy named Harrison Branch who used to live here when it was called Strawberry Fields.”

  Mrs. Boshears smiles. “Harry and Kathy, they was sweet young’uns. All them young’uns that lived here was sweet. They was a queer-looking bunch, but they was good-hearted, and they kept the place up and kept me company. Not like now when it’s so rundown and lonesome.”

  Since a lot of local folks didn’t care for the Strawberry Fields people, I’m kind of surprised that Mrs. Boshears was happy haunting a houseful of hippies. “So you were sad when the Strawberry Fields folks left?”

  “Oh, I was real sad about it,” Mrs. Boshears says. “I’m still sad because the house has set empty ever since. And the saddest thing about it is it was my grandson that run everybody off.”

  “Why did he do that?” Adam asks.

  Mrs. Boshears shakes her head. “I can’t say for sure why Rick’s done all the things he’s done. Maybe his mother and daddy getting killed in that car wreck when he was little broke something in him. I truly believe there’s good in that boy’s heart, but something ain’t right in his head, and sometimes it makes him do ugly things.”

  In my mind I see the rude yellow letters spray painted on the outside of El Mariachi.

  “Rick was always the kind of boy who flitted from one thing to another,” Mrs. Boshears says, still rocking with Abigail. “When he was in high school he was all about being on the football team for a while, but then he soured on that and was all about being in the band. Then he soured on that, too. It was like he was always looking for a place to belong, and it was the same way even after he left home. He took up with the hippies till he turned against them too, and turned into…whatever it is he’s turned into.” She looks faraway for a moment, and sad. “I reckon he’d say he found the Lord, but the Lord he talks about don’t have a thing to do with the Lord I know.” She shakes her head. “It’s sad to see somebody you’ve loved your whole life turn out to be so hateful. If you want to know just how hateful Rick can be, all you have to do is go down to the river.”

  “The riverbank here?” Adam asks.

  Mrs. Boshears nods her ghostly head. “The one down the road apiece, but I don’t want to talk no more about it. I don’t want to get all upset when I should be glad to have company.”

  A light floods into the bedroom window, and a car’s engine roars. Mrs. Boshears disappears in a cloud of vapor, leaving Abigail in her mirror resting on the seat of the rocking chair.

  Adam says a word that kids our age aren’t supposed to say. A ball of fear knots in my stomach, and I look out the window expecting to see either a police car or Rick Boshear in his red pickup truck, getting the gun from the gun rack so he can shoot us trespassers.

  What I see is almost as bad. It’s Mom’s car.

  Chapter 14

  It stinks to be grounded for the first two weeks of summer vacation. Adam is grounded too, which for him means no computer, no DVDs and no video games for a week. At least with me, there’s less to be grounded from.

  Mom and Granny showed up at the Boshears’ place because Granny had a vision that Adam and I were there and in danger. And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that she was right on both counts. As Mom was turning off Possum Creek Road, with Adam and me in the backseat like criminals in a police car, a big red pickup truck was turning in. Rick Boshears’ truck.

  Mom took Adam home and spent what felt like a year talking to Mrs. So on her front porch. The rest of the ride home was silent, but I knew that as soon as we were in the house, I was in for it.

  Mom isn’t the type to raise her voice to her kid, let alone raise a hand to her kid. Instead, like the social worker she is, she talks about feelings and reasons. And so as soon as the door to the house shut, Mom and Granny directed me to the kitchen, which is where all the serious conversations in our family take place. Granny put on a pot of chamomile tea and Mom sat down at the table across from me and said, “Miranda, I choose to stay out of your head because I believe young girls deserve both privacy and respect. But I have to say that your behavior tonight was worthy of neither of those things.”

  I did what I always do when I get in trouble with Mom. I started to cry.

  “I’m not even going to go into how it made me feel that you were dishonest with me,” Mom said, “because that’s not what’s most important. What’s most important is your safety, and how can I look out for your safety when you don’t tell me the truth about where you are? Who knows what would’ve happened if your granny hadn’t had her vision?”

  Granny set a cup of tea in front of me. “When that vision come to me, I seen that you and your little Oriental friend wasn’t at the school.You was out in the dark alone,trespassing on private property. Private property that was full of spiritual activity.”

  “We got in the car and came immediately,” Mom said.“But we shouldn’t have to use the Sight to know where you are, Miranda. We should know because you tell us.”

  I told her she was right, which she was, and I was sorry, which I was. But sorry wasn’t enough to get me out of being grounded.

  But that was thirteen days ago, and today Adam and I have finished our sentence. Our reward for good behavior was Mom taking us and Abigail in her mirror to Morgan for pizza and bowling, which it turns out, Adam and I are hilariously bad at. Now, in the car, on the way back from the bowling alley, I decide to take a chance. “Mom, is it okay if we stop at the riverbank for a couple of minutes?”

  “Oh, would Abigail like to see her soldier boy?” Mom asks.

  Abigail giggles.

  “She’s giggling her head off right now, so I guess that’s a yes,” I say.

  I’m happy for Abigail to get to see Virgil. But that’s not why I want to stop at the river.

  Once we get out of the car, Mom slips off her sandals and sits on the hood. “You take Abigail to see her little friend. I’ll just stay here and enjoy the stars. I don’t want to interfere in the love life of the deceased.”

  Once we come up on the riverbank, there’s Virgil sitting on the bank with the little Indian boy. They’re playing some kind of game with pebbles. As soon as Virgil sees we’re here with Abigail, though,he stands up and puts on an adult attitude.“Good evenin’,” he said. Then he looks at Abigail’s mirror. “Evenin’, miss.”

  “Hello,” Abigail says, her voice broken by a giggle.

  The other ghost, the woman, is pacing back and forth on the surface of the water. She wails and rubs her hands together fretfully.

  “She’s right wound up tonight,” Virgil says, nodding in the ghost lady’s direction. I think of Mrs. Boshears’ words: “If you want to know just how hateful Rick can be, all you have to do is go down to the river.”

  “Excuse me!” I yell in the direction of the pacing, weeping ghost. “Do you know Rick Boshears?” I yell. “Rick Boshears?”

  Her eyes meet mine, then she skims the surface of the water like a high-speed Jet Ski headed straight toward me. Her face— her beautiful, sad face, like a grieving woman in a painting—is nose to nose with mine. “Rick?” she says, her voice choked with a sob. “Rick?”

  “Rick Boshears,” I say. “Do you know him?”

  Her ghostly hands grip my shoulders, making me feel like I’ve been splashed with icy water. “Rick! Rick!” she says, her brown eyes big and pleading, and then she lets loose a stream of words I don’t know but I recognize as Spanish.

  I’ve never been so frustrated that nobody here teaches a foreign language till high school.“No habla,” I say, I’m sure, with a terrible accent. “No habla español.” I look to Adam in desperation. “Do you speak any Spanish?” />
  “We did some coloring sheets in Spanish in second grade,” Adam says. “I think I remember the word for orange.”

  “Wow, that’s really helpful,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Abigail, do you know any Spanish?”

  “My papa taught me some Latin,” she says.

  “Leave it to a ghost to only know a dead language,” Adam says.

  I don’t know what else to do, so I look into the ghost woman’s sad brown eyes and say, “We’ll come back. We want to help you.” And then, just because I know how to say it, I add, “Buenas noches.”

  I hope that even though she can’t understand my words, she’ll know that the tone of my voice is kind.

  She nods, says “Buenas noches” and floats back out to the surface of the water.

  Mom yells from her spot on the car, “Kids! Time to go!”

  We go, as soon as Abigail and Virgil have wished each other a shy goodnight.

  When we get back to the house, we still have half an hour before it’s time for Adam’s dad to pick him up. We go to my room. I set the mirror down on the floor, and Abigail rises from it like Excalibur coming out of the lake in the King Arthur stories.

  “So how are we going to find an interpreter who’s willing to translate for a ghost?” Adam says, once we’re comfy on the floor pillows.

  “Isabella should be willing.” But as soon as I say it, I realize the problem. Kids like me can see and hear ghosts because of our special psychic gifts. Adam can’t see ghosts, but he can hear them because his mind is open to accept them. But most kids can neither see ghosts nor hear them. “But I don’t know if she’s able.”

  “Well, there’s an easy way to find out, isn’t there?” Abigail says. “Invite her here one evening. If she can hear me, she should be able to hear the lady at the river.”

  Chapter 15

  “This is so much fun,” Mom says, dropping dry spaghetti into the big pot steaming on the stove. “It’s like a party.”

  I guess it says something about my social life that Mom thinks of me having two friends over for dinner as a big blowout.

  “You know, you’re the first non-Mexican kid who’s invited me over since I moved here,” Isabella says.

  “And I should’ve invited you sooner,” I say. “I guess I’m so used to kids being freaked out by me and my family that I don’t figure anybody would ever want me to invite them over. Most people in town call our place the witch house and won’t even come near it.”

  “In Mexico, you and your mother and grandmother would be honored for your gifts,” Isabella says. “People here have some strange ideas.”

  “No kidding,” Adam says, “like nobody will believe that Miranda’s not a witch and I’m not Chinese. Say, Isabella, maybe next time we hang out you and Miranda can come to my house for dinner, now that we’ve got that pesky ghost problem cleared up.”

  Isabella laughs. “Will we have Chinese food?”

  “Not unless somebody moves to Wilder and opens a Chinese takeout place,” Adam says.

  We sit at the table and eat spaghetti with sauce made from the garden tomatoes Mom, Granny and I canned last summer. Methuseleh sits perched on Granny’s shoulder and occasionally dips his head down to grab a noodle in his beak. Isabella laughs, and when I accidentally slip into her thoughts, she’s not thinking that Granny and Mom and I are weird. She’s thinking we’re nice.

  I think Isabella’s nice, too. And I wish I had invited her over sooner. After our bellies are full of spaghetti followed by Granny’s blackberry cobbler, I ask Isabella if she’d like to see my room. Once we’re there, she looks around at the canopy bed, the fireplace, the floor pillows. “It looks like where a princess would sleep,” she says.

  “I’d like you to meet someone…if you can,” I say.

  It’s no wonder Isabella looks around the room, confused. “Uh…is it a pet?”

  I smile. I don’t think Abigail would like being thought of as my pet ghost. “No, she’s a friend. She’s not here now, but she should be showing up any minute.”

  “She’s a ghost,” Adam says, apparently getting tired of my hemming and hawing. “A very nice ghost.”

  Isabella giggles nervously.

  “Does that freak you out?” I ask.

  “No,” she says, “as long as she’s a nice ghost. I’ve always believed that spirits walk among us. I’ve believed, but I’ve never seen.”

  Never one to miss an opportunity to make a dramatic entrance, Abigail knocks on the inside of the closet door.

  Isabella gasps. “Is that her?”

  Abigail steps out of the closet, turns to face Isabella, and curtsies. “How do you do? I’m Abigail.”

  Isabella doesn’t miss a beat. “Nice to meet you. I’m Isabella.”

  “I know,” Abigail says. “Miranda has told me so much about you. Isabella is such a beautiful name. It sounds like music.”

  “Isabella,” I ask, “can you see her?”

  “I can see a white cloud,” Isabella says. “Or not exactly a cloud. More like…”

  “Fog?” Adam says. “That’s always what she looks like to me. I can hear her perfectly, but she always looks like a little patch of fog.”

  Abigail sticks out her lower lip in a pout. “I assure you both that I’m much prettier than a patch of fog.” She smiles suddenly, then claps her hands. “Since there are four of us, we should play one of the board games in Miranda’s closet. Usually there are just the two of us to play, but playing with four would really be jolly!”

  We play Clue, and even though Adam and Abigail and I supposedly have superior detecting skills, Isabella wins the game. I hope this isn’t a bad sign.

  After we’ve put the game away, I say, “Isabella, there’s a reason I wanted you to meet Abigail, other than the fact that she’s a delightful person.” Abigail rests her head on my shoulder for a second, leaving it cold. “I wanted to make sure you could hear her, that you could hear ghosts.”

  “Okay,” Isabella says in that way people have when they don’t really know where you’re taking them, but they’re willing to go along for the ride.

  “There’s a ghost down on the riverbank who we think might know something about the guy who vandalized the restaurant,” I say. “But the ghost speaks only Spanish.”

  “So you want me to translate for you?” Isabella says.

  I nod.

  Isabella is on her feet. “Let’s go now.”

  “I don’t know if we can,” I say. “It’s too far to walk in the dark, and I don’t know if Mom will take us.”

  “Well, your mom was going to drive me over to meet Dad at the restaurant at ten,” Isabella says. “Maybe she’d take us all a little early and we could go to the river first.”

  “I don’t know,” I say, looking at Adam. “She took us there the other night. She might get suspicious if we want to go again so soon.”

  “But,” Abigail says, with a shy smile, “your mother does know that I have a very good reason for liking to go to the river.”

  “There’s another ghost at the river,”Adam explains to Isabella. “A boy ghost.”

  Isabella smiles and shakes her head. “It’s certainly turned out to be an interesting evening. I guess I should go to white people’s houses more often.”

  “Well,” I say, “if we’re going to try to convince Mom to take us to the river, I guess you’d better get in your mirror, Abigail.”

  Isabella looks understandably confused, so Adam tells her about the mirror while I set it on the floor for Abigail. Once she’s jumped in and Isabella has recovered from yet another shock, we go downstairs so I can make my case to Mom.

  She’s in the living room reading a mystery. “Um,” I say, “we were wondering if we could leave about half an hour earlier than we were planning so we can stop at the river before it’s time to drop off Isabella.”

  Mom sets down her book and looks at me. “What is it with you kids and the river lately?”

  As she looks at me, I think, Don’t come into
my head. Don’t come into my head.

  But then she glances at the mirror in my hand and smiles.“Oh, of course. Has Isabella had the pleasure of meeting Abigail?”

  “She can hear her but can’t see her, like Adam,” I say.

  Mom smiles at Isabella. “Well, the fact that you can hear her says good things about your character, Isabella. It means your mind is open in a way that many people’s are not.” She slips into her sandals. “Okay, let me grab my car keys and we’ll go out to the river. I won’t stand in the way of young love, though I don’t know how young it is if both parties have been dead for over a hundred years.”

  “Don’t be long,” Mom says a few minutes later. “I’ll wait here.” The sky is full of stars, and the river glows with moonlight. Virgil and Adahy sit on the bank tossing out stones and watching them skip on the surface of the water.

  Isabella’s eyes grow wide at the sight of the stones that seem to have been thrown by nobody.

  At the sight of us, Adahy disappears into the woods, but Virgil takes off his cap and says, “Good evening, ladies.” He nods at Adam. “Good evening to you, too.”

  “Hey,” Adam says. Modern boys are a lot less formal.

  “Hello, Virgil,” Abigail says. “It’s nice to see you.”

  “Hello, Abigail,” Virgil says. “It would be nice to see you, too.” He nods at me. “Miranda, would you hold the mirror close so I can look at her?”

  Virgil comes closer, and I hold up the mirror just as I would if he was going to use it to see his own reflection. When he looks at it, though, he says, “Look how that yeller hair glows in the moonlight. Like spun gold.”

  “Oh…oh, you!” Abigail says, giggling hysterically.

  I hate to spoil the mood,but we don’t have much time.“Virgil,” I say, “have you seen the other spirit tonight—the woman? I’ve brought someone here who can speak her language.”