by Alison Stine
“No!” I said. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
“You hit your head. You hit your head when you went into the subway tunnel. You blacked out. You had a concussion, they said, and they said to watch you. What if I didn’t watch you long enough? What if you died on the train, or at the station?”
“No,” I said. “No, I can feel pain. I can feel hot and cold. I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I still eat and sleep. I bleed. Ghosts can’t do that.”
“Right,” my sister nodded.
I narrowed my eyes. “How do you know all that?”
“Esmé, are you naked?
“Excuse me?” I said. “No.”
“Why are your clothes invisible then? Are you wearing my clothes?”
“Look, I don’t know the rules, okay? My clothes are invisible. Things I write are invisible. I tried to write a letter to Grandma, and—”
“Don’t change the subject. When you left, I had more than a few outfits missing.”
“My word,” a voice said. “The resemblance is extraordinary. Are all the living this annoying, or just you and your family?” Mr. Black sat on the staircase, peering at us through the bottom of a bottle.
“Get out of here,” I said.
“What?” the Firecracker said.
“I’m not talking to you.”
“Oh,” Mr. Black said. “So you wanted me to guard you last night. You wanted my protection in the dark, but in the cold light of morning, you don’t want me around. You’re tired of old Mr. Black. You’re too embarrassed to introduce him to your family.”
He was drunk. More than usual. I wondered if it was Martha that had put him out, Martha crying over the Builder, Martha running into the kitchen, Martha … Mr. Black drained the bottle and lobbed it at me. I ducked and he missed, the bottle tumbling over the stairs, knocking into my sister’s suitcase.
“Ignore it,” I said. “It’s just a ghost.”
“I know,” the Firecracker said.
“You know?” I stared at my sister. “You know? How can you know? What do you mean you know?”
“Never mind,” the Firecracker said. She bent to her suitcase.
“Can you see him?” I pointed to Mr. Black—as if my sister could see me point.
He gave a little wave. “Hello,” he said cheerfully.
“Can you see a drunk ghost on the stairs, right now?” I said.
“Drunk?” the Firecracker said. “A drunk ghost? That’s a good one.” She righted her suitcase, slinging her huge purse over her shoulder.
“You do hear him, right?” I said.
“No, I don’t.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You do! You do!” Mr. Black said delightedly, clapping his hands. “She does.”
“She does not,” my sister said.
We all stopped what we were doing, my sister fiddling with the bags, Mr. Black clapping. “You see ghosts,” I said softly to the Firecracker. “You hear them.”
She didn’t look at me. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m not talking about it with you. Not now.” She started up the steps with her bags. “Where am I staying?”
“Staying?” I trailed after her. “You’re staying?”
“You’re a truant and apparently invisible. Grandma’s house is overrun with cats and junk, and she thinks you’re dead. Yes, I’m staying.”
Mr. Black leaned out of her way, but she glided past him effortlessly, as if she really did see him there on the stairs. I couldn’t make up my mind about her, if she was pretending or lying or what. “How long are you staying?” I asked. “What about your job?”
She stopped and turned to me or tried to, looking somewhere above my head. “I got laid off. There’s not a big call for publicists right now. I don’t have a job anymore.”
I reached out for my sister’s arm, and she jumped. The touch must have felt like it came out of nowhere, must have been frightening. I must have been frightening. “I’m sorry,” I said.
She shrugged. “I can’t afford the apartment in New York without a job. So…”
“We lost the apartment?” I changed my voice. “I hated that apartment.”
“Just find me a room, please,” the Firecracker said. “One without cats.”
I sat on the bed of the room the Firecracker had chosen, the blue room, watching my sister unpack her suitcase. “I think Grandma thinks I’m dead,” I said. “Grandma’s kind of strange. She goes places at night.”
“It’s not that strange,” the Firecracker said. “People work the night shift.”
“I know that,” I said. “She works at a nursing home. But she goes other places. She has other jobs. She … freelances.”
“How do you know this?”
“I followed her once. I’m invisible, remember? I can do those kinds of things.”
“Esmé Wong, I’d better not hear that you’re shoplifting.”
I sat up straighter. “Listen to me. Grandma went to a house. A haunted house. She has this ability …” I paused. “She hears ghosts, I think. Those people in the house she went to hired her to hear their ghost and get rid of it. She’s got this big black bag, and she’s got candles and dowsing rods and prayer books.”
“Look,” the Firecracker said. “Let’s slow down.”
“She’s got dowsing rods and five hundred cats,” I said. “She picked up my voice on a tape recorder. I met the ghost in the house we went to, and Grandma knew what the ghost wanted.”
“You met a ghost?” the Firecracker said. “Already?” She sank onto the bed next to me. On me, actually. I squealed and she moved over. “Sorry. Tell me when it started.”
“When what started?” I asked.
“When you started being able to sense the ghosts.”
I looked at the Firecracker. I tried to study her face, but she had made her face into a mask. She looked hard, older than she actually was. For the first time, I realized that reminded me of Clara. What would happen to you to make you have to change your face? To make you freeze?
“When I came here,” I said, “I got off the train, and the first person I met wasn’t a person at all. He was a ghost. Is a ghost. Tom.” I waited for my sister to say something, but she didn’t, so I kept going. “Well, I guess first I met his sister, Clara. Adopted sister. Anyway, then I met Martha and Mr. Black. And the Stationmaster. I have to warn you about the Stationmaster.”
“Wait.” The Firecracker held up a hand. “You met all these ghosts. You saw all of them?”
“See them,” I said. “All the time. Yes.”
“Are any of them here? Right now?”
“No. Mr. Black was on the stairs before. He threw a bottle. You said you knew that.”
“I—” The Firecracker looked down at her lap. She messed with something on her black pants, a long white hair. “Stupid cats,” she said.
“You can’t wear black around here.” I thought of Mr. Black. “Unless you’re a ghost, then I guess it doesn’t show.”
“All I have is black.” The Firecracker brushed off her pants more urgently.
“Talk to me,” I said.
Her eyes stayed fixed on her lap. “Okay. A few days before I turned sixteen, I started having dreams. I dreamed about people, people in my room watching me at night, watching me sleep, people in funny clothes.”
“Funny?”
“Like old-fashioned, old. The people weren’t scary. They were just … there. I kept dreaming about them. And then when I turned sixteen—when I woke up on the morning of my birthday, they were still there in the day.”
My voice became very quiet. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I could still see them, see the people from my dreams standing in my room when I woke up. They weren’t dreams, Esmé. They were ghosts. You need to know you’re not alone.”
“I am alone,” I said. “I’m alone and invisible. You left me here.”
The mask of her face softened. “I know. I’m sorry. But d
o you understand? You’re not the only one of us to sense ghosts.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. She was the one who didn’t understand. How could I make her know what it was like for me, how real everyone—all the ghosts—were? I didn’t make them up. I didn’t think I saw them. It wasn’t a dream. It was every day of my life now. “Did you ever actually talk to your ghosts, the people from your dreams? Did they ever ask things of you?”
The Firecracker frowned. “No. I didn’t try to talk to them. I mean, Mom …”
My body felt slack and cold. “What about Mom?”
“Mom knew about them. Mom experienced them too.”
“Mom saw ghosts?”
“Not exactly,” the Firecracker said. “She smelled them.”
CHAPTER 14:
Mr. Black
It was different for everyone, the Firecracker said. All of the women in our family. With her, it was seeing usually, and not always a whole figure. Sometimes, my sister saw snatches of color, a fabric, the corner of a dress. With Mr. Black, the Firecracker said she saw a black cloud, tangled and twisting, like brambles. His hair, I thought.
With our mother, it was smells: cinnamon, horses, a cheroot cigar. Grandma could hear things, according to the Firecracker: hooves, cries, fragments of conversation. Grandma called it cocktail listening, being half-aware, making herself half-asleep on purpose in order to let the whispers in. She had to concentrate to do it, trance-like. When we moved to live with her, after our parents died, she told the Firecracker that she had heard, as she tucked me into bed one night, a ghost say above my head, I’m here too.
“That was why we moved out,” the Firecracker said flatly.
I shook my head. “No. We moved out because you turned eighteen, and could take care of me legally. Because we were better off on our own.”
It was the Firecracker’s turn to shake her head. “No. We moved out because it scared me, what Grandma said. Grandma scared me. Mom said we had to hide it, the ghost thing. She said it wasn’t a gift. Dancing was a gift. Her gift.”
“Your gift too.”
“Mom was ashamed of the ghost thing. She didn’t really believe in it, even though it happened to her all the time. She thought it was just a quirk, a trait, like … having black hair, or being nearsighted. The Wong women could all sense the dead. It was something to ignore, Mom thought. But Grandma!”
“Grandma makes a living off it,” I said. “Or tries to.”
“She encouraged it,” the Firecracker said. “She kept goading me into things, baiting me, trying to trick me into admitting I saw things, trying to get me to tell her what I saw.”
“What did you see?”
She shrugged. “Blue eyes once, I thought. I don’t know. I don’t really remember.”
I tried not to gasp. Had my sister had seen Tom? Had Tom seen me when I was a child? He must have. He had been here all these years. Had he been watching me back then? Had all of them?
When my grandmother saw the Firecracker, there were tears, much fussing and hugging. My grandmother cooked for her, like she used to cook for me when I was a child. I was surprised, when the little mounds of dough on the counter began to take shape as vegetable dumplings and shrimp wontons, to find that I remembered. I remembered her cooking. I remembered the ritual. My grandmother set the dumplings in a pan of boiling oil, lifting them out with a lightweight utensil that had a bamboo handle and a wide webbed basket. I remembered the tool. I remembered the smell of the oil.
I sat behind my sister on the floor of the dining room, behind her chair. I was hungry. There was no mention of me. My grandmother chatted on about the weather, the house, the economy. How she had never liked that city, never understood why my sister wanted to live there. I noticed the tight, clipped tone to my grandmother’s voice. She was hiding, chattering on because she was hiding what she really felt and worried about: me. She was barely holding it in.
“I’ll steal you something to eat if you ask nice.”
I blinked and saw eyes at my level. But not blue eyes. Clara’s dark ones glowed under the dining-room table. The tablecloth shrouded the top of her head and hair, making her chest and limbs look disembodied, even more ghostly.
“Shh,” I whispered. “Clara, don’t ruin everything.”
“I haven’t had a good scare in such a long while,” she said. “Your sister seems susceptible. Vulnerable. Pretty, Tom says.”
“Stop it,” I said. “He did not say that. Stop making things up.” I raised myself up on my knees so I could peek across the table. My grandmother looked tired, the skin beneath her eyes creased and gray. Her black hair fell limp, not at all like the springing, set curls I was used to seeing on her. She didn’t seem to be eating.
“You know, my work takes me out of the house,” she said. “I didn’t know how soon, how hard I would have to watch your sister.” She fiddled with the silverware, smoothed the tablecloth by her place. “I didn’t know how quickly danger would find her. I didn’t know what the gift might do to her, where it would take her.”
This was too much. I yanked at her napkin. Clara rolled over and began to kick the underside of the table.
“Ghosts,” my grandmother said irritably, pulling her napkin back. “This old house. You remember what it’s like.”
“I remember,” my sister said.
“It’s gotten worse since you left. This one young ghost is particularly disruptive. Touched, I think.”
Clara reached toward my grandmother’s shoes. I crawled back under the table and slapped her hand. What had my grandmother said about a gift taking me someplace? What did she think had happened?
I couldn’t stand it. I emerged out from under the table on my grandmother’s side.
On the other side of the table, my sister’s expression didn’t change. She couldn’t see me, wasn’t looking. She ate without thinking. She ate to avoid speaking, silently chewing, her eyes cast down. My grandmother was looking down too. I stretched my hand toward her.
Then I felt the grip of her fingers around my wrist. My grandmother had reached out and grabbed me.
I was surprised at how strong my grandmother was. With her other hand, she continued holding her chopsticks.
The Firecracker looked up. “Grandma,” she said. “Meet Esmé.”
My grandmother dropped my wrist. “Esmé,” my grandmother said. She was looking down at her plate, looking around the table, looking anywhere but at me. “Esmé.”
“She’s not dead,” the Firecracker said. “And not in limbo or a netherworld. She swears. Just invisible.”
Grandmother brought her hands up to her face. I couldn’t see her expression from where I stood behind her, but her shoulders were starting to shake. “Esmé,” she said. “I thought we had lost you. I thought your gift had come wrong. I thought it had taken you to a dark place.”
“What do you mean?” I looked across the table at my sister. “What’s going on?”
She put down her chopsticks and swallowed. “It wasn’t just for punishment that I sent you here.”
“What?” I said numbly.
“It was planned. For when you were sixteen. But you started having trouble earlier, getting in trouble earlier, seeing things much sooner than we expected—”
“What do you mean, we?”
“Grandma and I thought you should come here because … because it went so badly with me, when I turned sixteen, when my gift came. Mom didn’t warn me, not really, and then she died, and I didn’t know what to do, what was happening. I tried to hide it, deny it.”
“You were still denying it this morning,” I said.
“I was waiting for Grandma to tell you.”
“But she can’t even hear me!”
“Try,” the Firecracker said. She leaned across the table. If she could have seen my hand to hold it, I know she would have. “Try again, Esmé.”
“Do you hear me?” I asked. I crouched before my grandmother. I put my hand on the table next to her. “Grandma, can you hea
r me talking?”
“Faintly,” my grandmother said. “A whisper. Far away.”
Why was she having trouble? The Firecracker heard me fine. “I’m right next to you.”
“Wait,” my grandmother said. She closed her eyes. “Speak again.”
I closed my own eyes. I thought of my grandmother. I hardly knew her at all. I remembered her from when I was a child as distant, foreboding. I remembered her more as pieces, as objects: a car motor at night; a match striking a candle; a big black bag; a mason jar of nettles; a stinking pot of boiling, almond-shaped leaves. But she and my sister were all I had. What if my sister complained about her so much because she was scared of what my grandmother could do, what my sister herself had been turning into? What if my grandmother wasn’t weird or a witch?
What if I was just like her?
I took a breath. “Grandma. It’s me, Esmé. I’m here. I’ve been here for weeks, in the house. I’ve met all your ghosts.” I struggled with what to say. “They’re very nice.”
“Mostly,” my grandmother said with her eyes closed.
“Do you want me to tell you about them? You’ve been hearing them for years. Do you want to know their names, their stories?”
“No,” my grandmother said. “I want to know about you.”
There was nothing in my grandmother’s books about someone like me, someone invisible, though she had been looking for weeks, since I first failed to show up at the train station, she said. Now we looked together, riffling through pages, dislodging envelopes of dried herbs and bookmarks of feathers. In the middle of searching, my sister got a funny look on her face.
“Blue eyes,” she said. “I see blue eyes.”
I turned. Tom stood in the doorway.
I surveyed the sitting room, what he must have thought of the mess we had made. Here I was with my family, more of my family than had been together for a very long time.
I looked at him shyly. “Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
“We’re trying to figure out what’s up with me. Why I’m invisible. So far, we’ve got: stayed too long in the subway tunnel, hit my head, terrible illness …”
