Supervision

by Alison Stine

  “But I want to help.”

  Martha patted the bed. “Say your prayers now.”

  “I don’t say prayers, Martha.”

  She closed her eyes. “I wish your grandmother was a ghost so she could see to properly raising you.”

  I slipped under the covers, doing my best not to mess up the smooth tucked envelope Martha had made of the sheets. I pulled the quilt up to my chin. “We kissed,” I whispered. “Me and Tom.”

  Her hands flew up. She bounced onto the end of the bed. “What was it like?”

  I was expecting her to be shocked or to scold me, maybe, not to be springing on the mattress. “What was what like?”

  Martha glanced over her shoulder, then leaned down to me and whispered: “Kissing.”

  “Martha, you’ve never been kissed before? You’re nineteen.”

  “I know.” Her hands fluttered to her face, covering the blush that might have appeared on the cheeks of a living girl. “I’ve never had the occasion.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I started work at fourteen. My first position was out in the country, no decent young men, all hayseeds there. I was eighteen when I came to work here at the house. And then …”

  “There were no men in Wellstone?”

  “Not one that I wanted. Not one who wanted me.” She stood up from the bed.

  “Wait, wait!” I said. “Don’t go yet.” I felt like I had my sister back. “Don’t you want me to tell you about kissing?”

  But Martha said, “Maybe not tonight, Miss,” and flicked off the light.

  I dreamed of Tom. Kissing Tom.

  Kissing a ghost.

  I couldn’t look at him. My lips were buzzing, my skin was on fire. His fingers grazed my cheekbones, and his touch was not cold, not at all. It was warm. It felt real. It was real. I had kissed a ghost. I had been kissed by a ghost, a boy technically a hundred years older than me. It was a good kiss, I thought. It was not my first. But it was the first where I felt like I wanted it, where I felt something, some feeling I couldn’t yet name.

  A sound outside woke me. Rising from the bed, I went to the window in time to see a figure run across the grass, his limbs glowing in the moonlight, his black hair blending into clouds.

  Tom.

  I dressed, tucking the long T-shirt I slept in into a pair of jeans, yanking on tennis shoes as I tripped downstairs. And then I was outside, running before my eyes had fully adjusted, hurtling myself into the shadows. The grass was dewy and slick, and I stumbled down the hill to the road. No cars. No streetlights, either. Tom fled down the hill ahead of me. He had almost disappeared.

  Then I heard a whistle.

  I didn’t think I could run any faster—but I did. I ran until I couldn’t feel my feet, or my long hair hitting my back. I ran as the terrain beneath me changed from asphalt to grass and back to concrete. I lost sight of Tom.

  The train station was empty under the moon. A train cooled on the tracks, wheels steaming, and before it, on the rails, he lay.

  I prepared myself to jump, to leap down to him. There was no other way onto the tracks. But Clara said, “It’s too late.”

  She was there, of course she was there.

  “I have to go to him,” I said.

  “It was too late decades ago.” She grabbed my arm until I was face to face with her, her cold black eyes staring into mine. “Have you ever seen a dead body before?”

  “Clara.” I pulled away from her.

  “Well, you won’t see one today. Tom died years ago, all right? Years and years. That’s not his body down there. It’s his ghost. It’s painful, but it’s temporary, what he’s done. He’ll be back.”

  Out of the corner of my eye, there he was: a strange shape, so still on the tracks. I had never seen anyone be so still. “Why?” I asked. “Why does he do it? Why does he come back here, night after night, to die?”

  “He seems to think he can stop it, stop being a ghost.”

  “Do you?”

  “Not really. What’s done is done. We died. We’re ghosts. We might as well make the best of it.” Her eyes darted. “Like kissing strangers. I suppose that’s something we could do.”

  “You saw?” I said, weakly. Her eyes were so dark, and the rest of her colorless, bloodless. The contrast was alarming, as stark as ash on snow.

  “You shouldn’t have been flaunting it,” Clara said.

  “I wasn’t—”

  “You think you’re so smart because you’re alive, so special. You want to be with Tom,” Clara said. “Fine. Be with Tom.”

  I saw her arms flare out, palms first, and come toward me. I backed up, and she pushed me. I stumbled backward over the lip of the platform, and fell, landing on my shoulder in the gravel beside the train tracks.

  Clara towered above me. “You’re not dead, Esmé. You’re not one of us. You don’t belong here, and you don’t belong with Tom.”

  “I live here,” I said. “Live. You’re the one that doesn’t belong.” I struggled to a standing position. I was about to remind Clara that this was my home, but Wellstone? Home? What was wrong with me?

  I rubbed my aching shoulder. Had it been only a few weeks? Weeks since I had gone to school in New York, since I had sat in the back of the classroom with Acid: a normal guy, who never called. I had been normal, seen. It seemed like years ago. I remembered the train…

  The train stopped in Wellstone once a day—once only, in the afternoon. I remembered because the Firecracker had made a big deal about how I couldn’t miss the train. We couldn’t be late, because it was the only one. But it was midnight now, past midnight.

  What was this train?

  Clara had disappeared. I forced myself to look beyond Tom. It’s not him, I told myself. It’s not him.

  I focused on the train behind him. The engine faced me, black and hulking. This was not like the train that had brought me from New York: a modern, streamlined train, with blue-and-silver cars. This train was smaller. There was a bronze bell on the engine, and a smokestack that leaked a gray plume.

  The smoke drifted in front of the train, engulfing me. I gagged and coughed. Putting my arm over my eyes, I walked, half-blind, alongside the train. Behind the engine stretched a line of passenger cars. They were wooden, painted green. Their windows were closed.

  And peering through every one of them was a face.

  I backed away, right into the cloud of smoke. I coughed, choking, and the faces came alive behind the windows, moving and squirming. They had seen me. They were trying to shout at me. They were all children.

  Children stared out of the windows, pressing against the glass. Their faces were gray as dirty sheets, so gray they looked almost purple, sick, with circles under their eyes. They opened their mouths, but no sound came out. They shut their mouths like fish: blankly, mute.

  It looked like they were trying to scream.

  I staggered away from the children, smoke searing my eyes. The passenger cars disappeared in the plume. I couldn’t breathe, but a hand found my shoulder. Clara. Come to her senses, or come to fight me.

  “Clara,” I coughed. “What’s wrong with this train?”

  “Nothing wrong with it,” a man said. “Except you’ve been riding too long.”

  The hand spun me around, clenched down on my shoulder, so tight it met bone. The smoke thinned and I saw him: the brown hat, the stubble, the gray, stinking teeth. It was the man from the train tracks, the man with the lantern.

  Tom’s father. Tom’s killer.

  He leered at me. His teeth were big and straight and stained. His hand was clamped firm on my shoulder, fingers digging into my flesh. “How many stops have you seen, child?” he asked me. “How many?”

  “Clara!” I screamed.

  “Got a mouth on her, that’s good. Got a powerful set of lungs. Got some muscles to go with those lungs?” His hand moved down my arm, squeezing me.

  I shook and twisted. “Get off me!”

  But the man held tight. His other hand grab
bed my jaw, squeezing my mouth open as I tried to scream. And when his finger drifted into my mouth, feeling for teeth, I didn’t hesitate.

  I bit.

  He yanked his hand out of my mouth, yelling. He lost his grip on my shoulder. I reared back and kicked him in the knees as hard as I could. He doubled over, and I ran, plunging into the smoke.

  When the cloud cleared, I could see the platform ahead of me. My shoulder throbbed, but I lifted myself up, putting all my weight on my arms. I had swung one leg over the side of the platform when I felt it.

  Pain. More pain.

  Pain in my back. Pain tearing through my spine, delivered from a sharp blow in the center near my backbone. My hands slipped and I fell back onto the tracks and curled onto my side, groaning. The fall was hard, but it was nothing compared to the hurt between my shoulder blades. It was a hot pain, searing.

  I had been burned.

  I heard crunching gravel: footsteps. From where I lay, I could see two worn, brown work boots approaching. “Don’t you walk away when I’m talking to you.”

  I didn’t have the strength to raise my head.

  Something landed in the gravel at the man’s feet, inches from my face: a large, red metal object, handle swinging. I knew it was the thing that had hit me. The lantern. Flame burned at its core. I could feel the heat pulsing from the glass.

  The lantern disappeared from view as the man picked it up again. I managed to lift my head off the ground in time to see him stand over me, raising the burning lantern above his head.

  There was a splintering sound. Something sharp rained down upon me, and I covered my eyes with my arm. A thud, and I opened my eyes to see the man had fallen onto his side in the gravel. Broken glass trickled over his face.

  On the platform, staring down at us, stood Martha and Mr. Black. Mr. Black held the jagged remains of a bottle.

  “What now?” I whispered.

  “Now,” Mr. Black said, reaching down to me. “We run.”

  We ran to the house. We swung the big front doors shut behind us, the rusted hinges groaning after so long hanging open, and we stood behind them, peering out through the windows on both sides. I was breathing hard.

  Mr. Black and Martha were not breathing at all.

  “So ghosts can hurt each other,” I said, “if they hurt each other in life. And ghosts can hurt me. Ghosts can hurt the living.”

  “Well, we didn’t know that,” Mr. Black said. “It’s not as if we’ve done that before. What kind of ghosts do you take us for?”

  “And,” Martha exchanged a look with Mr. Black, “it’s not as if you’re exactly living.”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “You’re in between is all, Miss. Not dead, but not … seen.”

  “That man who killed Tom, do you think he’ll follow us?”

  “No,” Mr. Black said. “He won’t come in the house. Not allowed.”

  “Why?”

  “He never lived here in life, and we’re bound by our patterns. I shouldn’t have even come in, not through the front doors, anyway.”

  Martha put her hand on his arm. “It’s fine.”

  We all looked at her hand for a moment, resting on Mr. Black’s dark sleeve. He stared at it, then at her. She took her hand away.

  Mr. Black cleared his throat and continued. “Only allowed at the back door, and only to ask a question. Don’t want to track mud in the house. Don’t want to make a mess.”

  “Where did you sleep then?” I asked him.

  “Above the stables.”

  “There’s no one left to care anymore,” Martha said. “Besides, your work is just as important as a house servant’s. The garden used to be—”

  “Used to be,” Mr. Black said.

  I turned away from them to look out the window again. The yard was dark, and all was silent, but I knew I couldn’t go to bed. I would never be able to sleep now. “Who was that man?” I asked. “What was his name?”

  “The Stationmaster,” Martha said simply. “We don’t know his name. He took Tom and Clara in when they were living, and he treated them no-good, and he deserved what came to him eventually.”

  “Which was what?”

  “Killed by a train.”

  I shuddered. He was the man from the stories; the ghost in the woods, the one I had vaguely remembered; the reason children, when I had lived in Wellstone before, had been afraid to play beyond their own yards.

  “Time to go to bed, Miss,” Martha said. “If you can sleep, you should.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll wait up for Tom, thanks.”

  “We can send him up to your room when he gets home,” Mr. Black said.

  Martha looked horrified. “No. We can’t.”

  We compromised. Mr. Black brought in a dusty velvet chair from the sitting room for me. He placed it by the front doors, and I promised try and sleep. And even though the chair was uncomfortable, the ancient velvet crackling every time I shifted, I did fall asleep. Sometime in the night, someone—probably Martha—put an afghan over my shoulders. But later, something caused me to turn and wake.

  My grandmother stood in the hall, staring at me.

  She was dressed to go out, her hair curled at her chin. She wore a raincoat and carried her big black leather bag, a doctor’s or nurse’s bag, I thought, except a tall white candle poked out of one of the pockets. What was she doing? Was there an emergency at the nursing home? What kind of an emergency needed candles?

  I was cold. The afghan, which had slipped off my legs, lay puddled on the floor. And my grandmother stood there, staring.

  It must have been the chair. The chair was out of place. The afghan didn’t belong on the floor. Grandmother had a big house, but surely she would remember that she hadn’t left a chair here in the hallway.

  Yet she wasn’t staring at the chair, or at the closed doors, or at the afghan. She seemed to be looking into my eyes. She almost looked like she was listening for me.

  “Grandma?” I said. “Grandma, it’s me.”

  She tilted her head. Her eyes left mine and unfocused. But then she shook her head. Tightening her grip on her bag, she pulled her coat closed, and then she was gone through the doors. Soon I heard the sound of her car starting.

  She had never said a word.

  Tom came home at dawn. I woke up in gray light, and he was there, pulling the afghan, which had slipped down again, back over me. “It’s just me,” he said.

  I looked for bruises on his face, but I couldn’t see them in the dim hall. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Still dead.” He might have smiled.

  But I didn’t. “What’s wrong with you? Why did you go back there again?”

  The smile, if there was one, vanished. “One of these days, I’m going to change things. One of these days, I’ll hurt him. You’ll see, Ez. Except you won’t. You won’t be there. I don’t want you there. I don’t want you following me again, all right? It’s not safe.”

  Something bubbled up in me. I shook off the blanket. “You can’t control me,” I said. “I’m alive. I’m invisible. I can go anywhere.” I unfolded my legs from the chair, intending to rise, but pain shot through me.

  “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

  I rose from the chair with difficulty. “Ghosts can hurt me,” I said. “Did you know that? Maybe because I’m invisible, Martha thinks. Not dead but not fully alive. You can hurt me, and you can …” I wanted to say kiss me.

  No, I wanted him to say it—and then to kiss me again.

  But he didn’t. “Who hurt you?” he asked. “The Stationmaster? Did he hit you?”

  “Technically,” I said, “he burned me.”

  “That’s it. That’s enough. Clara said this was wrong, and it is. It isn’t fair to you. It isn’t right.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “As soon as we knew, as soon as we found out you weren’t a ghost, that you weren’t one of us, we should have let you be. I should have. You’re not dead. You still
have a life to live. I can’t let you be hurt by my death, my mistake.”

  “You’re not letting me do anything,” I said. “And being killed by a lantern-swinging psycho is not your mistake, you know. Not your fault. Unless you could have stopped him from being your dad.”

  Tom was silent for a moment. “I could have,” he said. He turned from me. He could drift away in a heartbeat. He could choose to hide himself from me, for days, forever. He could appear in a moment. He could carry me as if we were flying.

  I couldn’t control him, but it was impossible to control anyone, even the living. So I just kept talking. “What was that train? The train from New York doesn’t come through at night. That was a ghost train. That was a train from your time, wasn’t it?”

  “Something like that,” he said.

  “Was that train full of ghosts?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why were they all children?”

  He paused. “They were orphans.”

  CHAPTER 8:

  Wickedness and Snares

  Black-and-white images swam up to the screen of the computer in the school library: photographs of children hanging out of train windows; a huge group gathered on the tracks around an engine, their faces thin and pinched. No one smiled.

  Two hundred thousand, the computer said.

  An estimated two hundred thousand children from New York and other cities were taken from their homes, put on trains, and shipped off to find new homes in the country. The trains would stop in small, rural towns, the children were placed on stages, and anyone who wanted to could take them home.

  Anyone.

  I read stories of happy families where children were adopted, lived on farms, grew healthy, loved. I read stories of children who became farmhands, or indentured servants. Or worse. Tom was one of those kids, I knew. I knew without him telling me that his story was one of the unhappy ones.

  The trains were called baby trains and orphan trains, but some of the children weren’t orphans at all. Some had one parent. Some children were poor, or had run away, or had parents who drank. Some children were working themselves out on the streets—selling newspapers or flowers, or stealing. Or worse.