by Alison Stine
“It’s okay,” the library aide, the sensitive one, said to no one, to the air—hearing me, but not seeing me. No one saw me. “It’s okay.”
I waited in line for the bus alongside boys covered in shaving cream.
They were laughing. Everyone was laughing. One boy, the one who had called my grandmother a witch, jiggled water balloons in his arms. The buses were late. I heard the students talking; someone had egged windows down in the garage. There were cheers, once the news spread, which I didn’t understand. Late buses meant everyone would be getting home late, late on the last day of school.
“Guess some things don’t change.”
I didn’t have to turn to know who said it. I tightened my hold on my bag. I made myself say nothing.
“In my time, we had tin cans and firecrackers and frogs. You don’t want to know what that combination makes.”
I still didn’t answer. I didn’t turn.
“The bus will take forever,” Tom said. A bit of pleading had come into his voice. “Why don’t you skip it, Ez, and we can walk home together? Clara said you found out about the runaways. I’ve met some, you know, over the years, some that were dead, some that were ghosts like us for a time. No one’s lasted as long as we have, but Clara says—”
I spun around, so fast that the boy next to me fumbled and dropped one of his water balloons. It broke with a splat. “Clara says your plan isn’t working,” I said.
“One of these nights it will,” he said quietly.
“One of these nights when you’ll—what? Sleep with me?”
I saw something flicker over Tom’s face. “Stop it, Ez. I don’t like this.”
“Right. And I know now why you like me. Well, I’m sorry it didn’t work out the first time. I’m sorry you didn’t move on or disappear or go into the light or whatever when you kissed me, because you’re not getting a second chance. You’re not getting close to me again. I won’t let anyone close to me ever again.”
“What are you talking about, Ez?” Tom said, moving forward.
“Get back,” I said, and I pushed him.
Ghosts could hurt me. Ghosts could wound me, shove me, draw blood from me, knock me down, bruise me, burn me. Because I was invisible. Because I was lost. Because I was nothing.
But I could hurt ghosts too.
Tom fell when I pushed him, knocking into the boy with the water balloons. The boy turned, thinking someone was messing with him, and lobbed a balloon at no one, at the air. But the balloon struck me.
I didn’t flinch. The balloon broke against my folded arms. The cold water felt like a punch in the stomach. But I still didn’t move.
“Whoa,” the boy said. He and his friends backed up.
“It broke before it hit the ground!” one of them said.
“Cheap plastic,” the first boy said as the buses careened into the lot.
Students started to move, to hug goodbye, get their yearbooks signed. I stayed rooted with my arms folded, dripping and cold. I watched Tom pick himself off the ground and back away from me.
“All right, Ez,” he said. “I didn’t want you to get hurt. I didn’t want you to get involved in my death. I’ve done too much already.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You have.”
“I won’t bother you again,” he said. And he faded into the crowd, replaced by students, real live students with books and balloons, surging forward onto the buses. They pushed past me. I let them bump into me. One dropped a book from his open bag and just left it, got on the bus without looking back.
I picked up the book. It had a green cover with an embossed gold frame. The yearbook. He had left his yearbook, full of people I wouldn’t know. I flipped to the first page anyway: a dedication, a full-page photograph of a boy, skinny, with glasses and red hair. In Memoriam, the script at the bottom read.
I turned to Tom, but he was gone.
When I checked my phone on the bus, there were several messages from the Firecracker. The bus dropped me off, and I called her back without listening to them first.
“What have you done to Grandma?” she said.
“Hi to you too,” I said.
“Esmé, she is so upset.”
“Upset?”
“She called me twice last night. Twice. First, Grandma never calls. Second, she was crying. Crying. What’s happening? What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.” Then I remembered the food I had slowly been swiping from the pantry and fridge, the dishes I had washed and tried to replace in the right spots, the showers I took when I thought she wasn’t home. “What did she tell you?”
“That’s the thing. She won’t say. She won’t give me specifics. She only says you’re in trouble.”
Trouble?
“It’s your fault for sending me here,” I said. “This place is bad luck for people my age. Some kid disappears like, every year. Some of them don’t make it home. Every year—did you know that? This town is cursed. And you thought it was going to be good for me?”
“This isn’t my fault,” the Firecracker said. “We’re talking about you here. She’s in trouble. She’s in trouble. That’s all Grandma says. Esmé, what trouble? What is going on over there?”
I had made it to the top of the driveway. I stopped. My grandmother’s car was parked by the barn. She was home.
“Gotta go,” I said into the phone and hung up.
I turned the corner of the house to find Martha on the front steps. A basket sat beside her, and half a dozen of the cats zigzagged over her lap, crawling in and out of the basket. I remembered what Clara had said, about her being jealous.
I wished I had never gotten off the bus.
“Hello there,” Martha said. She was sewing something, looking down at her work, not at me. Maybe she couldn’t bear to look at me. “How was school?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Last day, was it? How did it go?”
“Fine.”
“Did anyone see you?”
“No.”
She set her work down. “Miss, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. My bag felt heavy, pressing on my burn.
Martha returned to her sewing. “Well, your grandmother’s home early, and she’s not happy. I’m concerned about her. I think you should look in on her.”
“Look in on her? How am I supposed to look in on her? She can’t see me. She can’t hear me.”
“Miss?”
I exploded. “It’s not my fault that Tom went after me. It’s not my fault he kissed me. I didn’t know!”
“Didn’t know?”
“What he was doing. What he was planning. And that you’d be mad.”
“Mad?” Martha stared at me. “I’m not mad. I’m happy for you, and for Tom. I’ve been hoping for decades he would find a young miss. Of course, I had hoped she would be dead. But no one is perfect.”
She patted a spot on the step beside her. I dropped my bag and sat, scooping up a cat to make room. The Manx hissed and swiped at me. “Can the cats see you?” I asked.
“Yes. More bothersome than anything really.” Martha fished a cat out of her basket and set it on the ground.
“Are they grandmother’s—what are they called—familiars?”
“No,” Martha laughed. “They’re strays. They live in the barn. Your grandmother feeds them and we pet them. They like the attention. They get more of it from ghosts than from the living, I suspect. Now,” she turned to me, “what do you mean, planning? I don’t think Tom planned for you. I don’t think he planned to feel the way he might feel about you.”
I fell silent. Sitting on the steps, in the sunlight with Martha, it was easy to question Clara. Was she lying? I had listened to her.
I watched Martha’s hands. “What are you working on?”
“Darning your socks. I can’t work like I used to. But I have to do something.”
“Is it boring, being a ghost?”
“Yes,” she said. “It is. A person would like to stop it
, if they could.”
She didn’t seem jealous. She seemed sad. I wanted to talk with her about Tom, to ask her if she knew why he had kissed me, why he liked me—he barely even knew me—if he did. But I stayed quiet, petting a cat who had wandered close. I asked Martha. “How did you die?”
For a long time, she was silent. Finally she said: “In the kitchen. I died in the kitchen. So I don’t go there anymore. I don’t cook. I can’t help you with your meals or cleaning up. I can’t go in there. I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s okay,” I said.
She folded the last socks in neat pairs and stood, balancing the basket on her hip, the work done, the conversation over. “Your grandmother’s home early and she’s in a way. You should look in on her.”
“Okay,” I said. I rose. “Thanks for talking with me.”
“Congratulations on your last day of school, Miss. If I could go in the kitchen, I’d bake you a cake. I was good at baking, I think.”
I found my grandmother in the sitting room. It was the only place I ever saw her, really, sitting on the stiff flowered couch with the crocheted back, watching television—often with the sound off. Usually she was gone when I came home from school, at the store or running errands, and she often worked through the night. This was strange, Martha said, her being here in the afternoon, and I knew it. And I knew to go to the sitting room once I entered the house because of the voice.
Someone was talking. It filled the hall, a female voice, high and young. I looked behind me for Martha, but she was gone; only the basket sat by the open door. Already the socks were unfolding themselves, holes opening up at the toes. Martha’s work, the work of the dead, was undoing itself.
I followed the voice.
By the time I reached the stairs, I had recognized it as mine.
It made me walk faster. What was my grandmother listening to? How could she have a recording of me? Was it an old video? I turned into the sitting room. The television was off, and my grandmother lay on her back on the sofa. She didn’t move when I entered the room. She didn’t see me, or hear me. I was surprised by the disappointment I felt at this—from my grandmother, the medium.
I wasn’t a ghost, I reminded myself. I wasn’t dead. Why would she sense me?
My grandmother had closed her eyes. A cloth lay across them. She was lying in the dark room, listening to a tape recorder she held close to her ear. It was the small, portable recorder she had taken to Kate’s house. Without removing the cloth from her eyes, or hardly moving at all, my grandmother stopped the tape, rewound it, and played it again.
I heard my own voice, threading through the machine. “Me? Me?” I said on the tape. “Where are you? What do you mean? Can you see me?”
My grandmother made a sound. She stopped the tape, rewound it.
“Me? Me?”
I crept into the room. I stood over my grandmother, listening as she listened. There were long pauses in between my words, as if someone else was answering me.
Someone was.
It was the conversation in the kitchen, the conversation I had with Kate. The tape recorder had worked. It had picked something up—but not a ghost sound, as my grandmother had probably hoped, not the sound of the woman haunting the couple’s nursery. The tape recorder had picked up her own granddaughter’s voice.
I was the ghost on my grandmother’s tape.
“Where are you? What do you mean? Can you see me?”
“Grandma,” I broke into my own voice. “Grandma,” I talked over myself, trying to reach her. I shook the back of the couch. But she never looked up. She never heard me, the real me.
I stood by her side as she rewound the tape, listening again and again.
CHAPTER 11:
Mixed Up
My grandmother thought I was dead.
This was complicated by the fact that my grandmother saw the dead—heard them, at least; could sense them sometimes, according to Tom—and yet she couldn’t find me, her own granddaughter.
I had spent my time in Wellstone going out of my way to avoid being detected by her, being quiet, covering my tracks, not wanting to confuse or scare her. Now I needed her to see me, to know me, to know I was all right. I was fine. Just … invisible. I spilled flour on the counter in the kitchen and wrote: I’M ALIVE. When the bathroom mirror fogged after a shower, I wrote a note on the glass. I didn’t clean up after myself. I convinced Martha to stop making my bed (it unmade itself in a few hours, anyway).
“She still thinks you’re dead,” Clara said. “She just thinks you don’t know it yet. Which is the worst kind of being dead. Also, she thinks you’re a slob.”
“Were you ever like that?” I asked.
“A slob?”
“No. Did you ever not know you were dead?”
We were out on the driveway. I didn’t want to speak to Clara, not after what she had said to me in the library, but I would walk away from her and she would only appear in the next place. She haunted me. I couldn’t shake her.
“No,” Clara said. “I knew I was dead. I welcomed it.”
I bent down for a stone, not looking at her. “Did you … were you like Martha? Did you do it to yourself?”
But Clara didn’t seem offended. She didn’t seem like anything at all. She knew what I meant and shrugged. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t that. My death was an accident. I had a plan to do something. But the plan didn’t work.” She was walking back and forth on one of the railroad ties that divided the yard from the driveway, balancing on the rotting beam as if in a circus, her arms outstretched. “I was cold. It was winter. Our shack wasn’t heated. And I thought a fire might do … other useful things.”
“A fire?”
“Yes.” She dropped her arms and looked at me. “I burned to death. Are you impressed?”
“No. That sounds awful.” I studied her face for emotion. She looked blank, consciously blank. She had hardened herself. She had switched off. “Clara, I’m so sorry.”
“I didn’t plan on burning myself up. But it was a better death than if he had done it.”
“He?” I asked.
“The Stationmaster. My father.” Clara smiled when she said the word; I remembered Tom had spit it out. She hopped off the railroad tie, and kicked the pebbles I had lined up on the asphalt, slowly spelling out H-I, my message to my grandmother. Clara swept them neatly down the drive. We watched them roll into the road.
“Great,” I said. “Thanks a lot.” I looked at Clara, her white-blond hair, perfectly waved, frozen in that style for a century. She was often scowling or humming or talking to herself. Disturbed, Martha called her. Damaged. Not her fault, Martha said. Tom said Clara meant well, was doing the best she could. “What did the Stationmaster do to you?” I asked. “Why did he adopt either of you? Why was he ever allowed?”
“Because we were left,” Clara snapped. “Because we were both the last ones at the station, and it was his station, and if he didn’t take us home with him, they were going to send us back to New York.”
I thought of the apartment in New York: small and cluttered, noisy and expensive. “The city’s all right.”
“I would have been sent back to my mother,” Clara said. “My mother was a working mother, and she said I was almost the right age.” A scattering of pebbles was still left on the driveway. Clara picked them up and began to throw them, one by one, at the road.
“Why did the Stationmaster want to adopt kids?”
“I don’t know.” Clara hit the mailbox with a rock. “He wanted company.” She hit a tree. “He wanted control. He wanted someone to keep house for him, and cook for him, and work the garden.” Some of the cats had wandered over from the house and were sniffing at her. Clara stroked one with her free hand. “And sometimes?” Clara said, her hand tightening around the cat’s neck. “Sometimes, you just need something to kick.” The cat loped away from her, yowling. “It was all right when Tom was around. There were two of us. We stuck together, looked out for each other. We kep
t each other safe. But after Tom died? There was no one to keep me safe. So I died. Only to have the Stationmaster follow me.”
“Clara,” I said. “What do you want?”
Clara wasn’t like Tom. She wasn’t like Mr. Black, with whom I’d had to guess, or Martha who confessed in whispers, or the Builder, Xavier Vale, the ghost I still didn’t know anything about. Clara just told me.
“For my brother to be happy,” she said.
I walked back alone to the house, trudging through the grass. With every shove through the weeds—why didn’t my grandmother ever mow?—I tried to forget Tom, how his name sent a shiver down my spine. I tried to concentrate on another mystery. Back in my room, I took the folded clipping from my backpack and read it again.
Louise was fourteen. She had never come home from her afterschool job, babysitting just a few streets away from her own house. She was last seen just before twilight. The father of the family she babysat for had offered her a ride home, but she decided to walk.
It wasn’t even dark, after all.
Her body was found by the railroad tracks. There were no suspects.
I thought of the picture in the paper, the girl’s faraway smile. I wished I could talk to my grandmother, to ask her questions, if she knew so much about ghosts. The ghost Louise hadn’t disappeared until after she had shown me the article taped to her locker. Was that all she wanted, for someone to know? Or did she want me to solve her murder? How was I supposed to solve a murder? Was this the kind of thing my grandmother did?
I couldn’t sleep that night, and when the train whistle blew at midnight, I was ready, headed out the front door and onto the lawn before the first blast even faded. In my pocket, I had a small black vial my sister had given me back in New York.
