I asked my mom if she’d like me to do anything else. I felt afraid to ask her that question, thinking she would stick me with making the entire rest of the dinner, but she actually told me she didn’t need any help until 5:00. She thought then that maybe I could put the buttermilk biscuits on a baking tray and stick them in the oven and maybe get the cranberry sauce out of its can and onto a serving plate while she made the mashed potatoes and vegetables.
Sounded good to me. I bounded upstairs, delighted to have an entire day to myself.
I worked on Leotard Girl for a bit. I completed a story I was working on in which she helped a student at her school who was being bullied. Coming across a couple of students pushing and shoving a classmate and teasing him for being gay, Leotard Girl shot a beam out of her head that seared a tattoo of a rainbow-colored flag on both of the bullies’ foreheads. Ha! I liked that. Poetic justice.
After finishing the comic, I emailed it to Kailee for her to look at, to see if she thought it was good enough for the school newspaper.
Then I wandered around my room, trying to decide what to do. Finally, I grabbed the necklace Brandon had given me and spoke his name into it several times.
To my great surprise, he appeared only seconds later.
He floated around the room. The way he moved matched all my earlier preconceptions of ghosts. He zigged and zagged. He touched the floor, then flew up to the ceiling, then zipped around the room, rustling the curtains as he flew past my windows.
I asked him, “What are you doing?”
He stopped. He floated down to the floor. He said, “Oh, just kind of stretching.”
I was going to ask why, but decided there were more important things to talk about than why he needed to stretch when he didn’t have muscles. I told him about Annie’s post in The Tiger’s Den and her retweets on Twitter. I updated him on where we were with the psychic. I told him that we were meeting with Gabriella that night after Thanksgiving dinner.
Brandon just stared at me. “It’s Thanksgiving?”
I said, “Yeah. Why?”
He floated down to the window cushions, bits of the cloudy stuff he was made of drifting away from him, making him appear not quite whole. “That was a very special day in our family ... that and Christmas. No matter what kind of a mess my parents were in, if they didn’t pull those holidays together, my grandmother always did. Those days were sacred. They were always fun and our family was always together.”
I understood his pain. “Oh, I’m sorry.” After thinking a bit, I added, “Hey, why don’t you get your family together? Ummm, I don’t think you can join my mother and me at Thanksgiving dinner, exactly. My mother would completely freeeak out if she saw ghosts. She’s not a very open-minded person. But, ummm, you could all hang out together in this house, like old times.” My mind kept running on top speed. “Hey, and then ... hey, maybe this would get you out of Purgatory faster! ... are you allowed to go anywhere you want? Can you leave this house and go anywhere?”
Brandon answered, “I think so. We can definitely leave this house.”
I continued, “OK, so, how about you kind of join my mom and me for dinner ... without my mom ever knowing you’re there ... OK? ... That last part is extremely important: my mother cannot know you or your family are there! And then, after dinner, you and your family all go with me and my friends to the psychic’s house?”
Brandon liked the idea. He popped out of my reality to go find his family and invite them to dinner. Hey, Mom, guess who’s coming to dinner? Hmmm ... It was sure to be an interesting Thanksgiving.
A few hours later, dinner was ready. The downstairs smelled heavenly: the mixed aromas of cooked turkey and buttery stuffing, baked sweet potatoes with melted marshmallows on top, biscuits. Oh my word, my mouth was watering as I released the Jell-O from its mold. And the ring shape completely disintegrated. The Jell-O walls fell apart, crumbling to the plate like debris from some ancient ringed fort.
I cringed. I expected my mom to get really angry with me. She didn’t, though. It was odd. She was completely OK with it. She actually started joking around. “Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the King’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again. Oh wait, no, it was the wall that fell apart! Humpty Dumpty wasn’t even there!”
I just rolled my eyes and laughed. I didn’t know how to respond to my mother being in good spirits. Well, at least the spirits being her own good mood and not alcohol.
We sat down to dinner. Everything was absolutely delicious. Even the Jell-O was good. Maybe it couldn’t keep a ring shape, but it was tasty with all the bananas in it.
Speaking of spirits, about halfway through the meal, Brandon and his entire family—grandmother, mother, father, and Neil—came floating through our dining room. I almost choked on a piece of turkey. God, I could have joined the afterlife myself that day, felled by a piece of meat.
I tried to watch them without appearing too odd or distracted. Once when I stared at some funny acrobatics Neil was doing around the chandelier, my mother asked me, “What are you looking at, Shade? You seem awfully interested in that chandelier.”
I decided to ask: “You don’t see anything unusual about the chandelier today?”
My mother studied it. “Hmmm, not really. The crystals might be moving a tiny bit. Is that what you see?”
I just answered, “Uh-huh.”
My mom got up from the table. She closed the damper to the fireplace in the dining room. As she sat back down, she commented, “This old house is awfully chilly. The air seems to creep in here through all kinds of places.”
Two seconds later, Brandon flew behind her and made a very funny face. Then he turned himself into Humpty Dumpty.
I thought I would die. I did not even know he could do that. It was all I could do to keep myself from bursting out laughing.
Then, finally, Brandon and his family flew out of the dining room and went upstairs. I hoped to God they wouldn’t mess up my room. I crossed my fingers that Grandmother Yates would keep everything under control.
After my mother and I had finished dinner, put away the leftovers and washed all the dishes, we sat down to eat dessert. My mother had picked up two pies at the grocery store: pumpkin and apple. I took a generous slab of both and topped them with mounds of whipped cream.
As I lifted a forkful of pumpkin pie and whipped cream to my mouth, the front door shook with a knock that sounded more like thunder.
I felt scared. My mother just smiled and said, “Oh, I’ll get that dear.”
She seemed too calm. Come to think of it, she’d been unusually happy all day. I followed behind her as she left the dining room. From the entryway into the kitchen, I saw her fling open the front door.
There, framed in the doorway to our house, was that creepy guy Brandon had beaten with a tree branch and chased away by conjuring up a black dog with glowing red eyes, the night that guy had come to my house and given me a package for my mom. He had threatened me when he handed me the package, told me to stay out of his neighborhood if I knew what was good for me. And I had seen that same creepy guy pushing a girl into a van on Halloween night.
My mom was being just as friendly as she could possibly be with him. He handed her a package, much bigger than before, but sealed with the same kind of packing tape. My mom practically gushed at him, “Oh, thank you sooooo much. I’ll be sure to deliver these to the girls. Do you have any money for me?”
The guy frowned, enhancing the ugliness of a scar I hadn’t noticed before: a line that ran across his nose and across his entire cheek under his right eye, all the way to his ear. He said, “You’ll get all the money we owe you after you deliver these.”
Then he turned and walked away.
I scurried back into the dining room. I plunked myself back into my chair. I tried to shovel a generous amount of pie and whipped cream into my mouth and devour it without choking. I wanted it to look like I had been eating desser
t all along, but most of it was still on my plate.
My mother disappeared somewhere in the house and then returned, trying to act as if nothing major had happened, but she looked tense and distracted.
Having finally swallowed the mouthful of dessert I had been working on just as my mother sat back down at the table, I quickly stuck in another forkful, so as not to have to say something at least until after I had swallowed.
My mother asked me in a rather hollow voice, “So, how’s the pie?”
I stopped chewing just long enough to mumble, “Mmmmm ... mmmmm...”
My mother forced a laugh. “I take that to mean it’s good.”
Serving herself a slice of pumpkin pie and squirting a little bit of whipped cream on it, my mother mostly ate in silence. More than once, she remarked, “This really is good!” like she hadn’t already said that.
After we did the dessert dishes, I told my mom I needed to do homework and then meet up with friends for a school project. She was fine with all of that.
As I passed her room on my way upstairs, I noticed that she had opened the box. I stopped on the stairs and watched her. She pulled an especially ugly dress out of the box: purple—and huge—with yellow ducks all over it. Then I realized: it was a maternity dress! What the hell were my mom and that creepy guy doing with maternity clothes for “the girls?” And who the hell were “the girls?”
When I opened the door to my bedroom, I discovered Brandon and his family reading books. I wanted to ask them why they still read books, but felt it was important to tell them right away about everything I had just seen.
Brandon promised not to leave my side as we ventured into the neighborhood of the psychic later on that night. He agreed, however, to remain invisible until we were all inside her house. All the members of his family agreed to do likewise.
When we got to Gabriella’s house, her Christmas lights brightened up her entire street. You could see them a block away. The Tree of Life was blinking furiously, completely taking over the identity of the real tree to which the lights had been tethered. The white reindeer drank from the electric blue stream. When we reached the front door, the angels already twinkling in the light started flapping their wings. The dragon stared at them. And at us, I thought.
Brandon and his family were invisible to me. But, after opening her door, Gabriella greeted Kailee and George and me and then said to what looked like nothing but air, “And how nice to meet all of you!” Holding her door open, she looked like she had lost her mind, pretending to usher an invisible group of people inside. The motion-activated angels continued to flap their wings.
Once her door had closed, Brandon and his family became visible to all of us. Gabriella’s cat let out a shriek and a hiss and went slinking off to another room.
As before, Gabriella’s living room danced with the flickering light and shadow resulting from flames roaring in the fireplace and on the wicks of candles set upon every conceivable surface. Gabriella herself seemed lit from within. She wore a white dress decorated in tiny purple flowers that had long, flowing sleeves; and she had draped a white shawl around her shoulders. Her face appeared serene, wise, illuminated from within. Her purple eyes and the speck of blue in her right eye were clear and bright.
Gabriella smiled at all of us. She gave Brandon and everyone in his family a warm handshake or hug as she greeted each one in turn, asking their names after having introduced herself. When she got to Neil, she acted very grandmotherly, almost as though she were Neil’s own grandmother. I wondered once again if she had a family of her own—any children or grandchildren. She was wonderful with Neil.
She placed her hands on her cheeks and made her eyes go wide with surprise. She exclaimed to Neil and to all of us around him, “Oh, my goodness! And who do we have here? You are a child ghost! How delightful!”
My mind paused and took a moment to edit this scene in my brain. You know, if it was a story for a movie I was writing or something, would these be the correct words to use? Now, I couldn’t change anything Gabriella Underwood was actually saying or anything—I certainly didn’t have that kind of power—but I felt a need to take a closer look at her words, to evaluate them because they struck me as very odd. What kind of person was Ms. Underwood, anyway? The only way a kid got to be a ghost was to die. Neil had died in a most tragic way. His brother floating right next to him was responsible. That was certainly more horrible than delightful. But Gabriella was being so warm and loving and welcoming, I guess that’s what made this scene happening right before me feel perfectly wonderful and acceptable. Maybe it was like: We all know children die every day, Gabriella as a psychic can see the dead, and so Gabriella would be delighted upon meeting a ghost child in the same way most grandmotherly types become animated and delighted upon seeing young children. My brain relaxed. Puzzle solved. The feeling I had about this surreal introduction was that Gabriella was simply delighted to meet a young child. And, also, I think she was trying to offer him comfort.
By the time my brain snapped out of analysis mode, Neil was laughing. Gabriella was saying, “So, if you like hot chocolate and marshmallows, I will bring you a cup with marshmallows shaped into a dragon on top. I promise!”
Neil grinned. He started zipping and zooming around the room the same way a happy little kid might start running around the room. A few seconds later, his mother yelled at him to settle down before he broke something. Ha-ha! I thought that was very funny.
Next, Gabriella Underwood turned her attention to meeting Harper Yates. I’m not sure what happened in that introduction, but it was powerful. As the two women discussed the girls that had gone missing, they both glowed. The light around them became so brilliant, it reminded me of circulating streams of starlight and sunlight mixed together. Dust motes swirled like a tornado around them. I thought of fairy dust. Then dark clouds enveloped them: angry, swollen storm clouds. Their words turned into an ancient tongue told in whispers with rumblings of thunder.
Somehow, I gained wisdom. I realized I knew something I had not known before. These two women coming together in their concern for missing children had tapped into something quite different than the panic I had felt upon seeing the swollen pregnant belly of Ursula Wooten’s overwhelmed mother. They had tapped into the feminine protective energy of the universe, a guiding force of love that would come through them and lead them to fight for these missing children as though they were mother bears fighting for the survival of their own cubs.
When it was over, I thought that perhaps I had imagined all that. It felt true, however. I felt proud, perhaps for the first time in my entire life, to be female.
After things returned to normal—or at least as normal as they could be with a psychic and five ghosts in the room, Gabriella went off to her kitchen to make tea and hot chocolate. As promised to Neil, she brought him a cup of hot chocolate—as big as a soup bowl—with a magnificent dragon shaped from marshmallows floating on top.
I wished I was a kid again, not a teenager saddled with all the responsibilities I had.
Gabriella turned and smiled at me. “Would you like a cup of hot chocolate with a marshmallow dragon on top?”
I blushed and said yes. Then I remembered the box of cookies I had bought at the grocery store and gave them to her. Gabriella was so thankful, you’d think I had baked those cookies myself and sprinkled them with gold dust. She immediately went out to her kitchen and came back with a porcelain tray. She arranged all the cookies on it, then took one for herself and passed the rest around.
Moments later, as Kailee, George and I sipped our hot chocolate from around the sides of wobbling dragons and Brandon did some kind of weird ghost behavior where he directed hot chocolate steam from his cup to his nose, we got down to business. We showed Gabriella and all of Brandon’s family everything we had found in the bedrooms of the missing girls. We also showed them the ledgers.
Gabriella and Harper had sat down next to each other on the couch. George, Kailee and I had spread out a
ll our evidence on the engraved coffee table in front of them.
Gabriella placed her hands on each of the items before her. Harper touched each item with her hands that became more translucent the longer she worked. At one point, I could see the pages of the ledger she was reading right through her hands.
Gabriella and Harper looked at each other. Then the psychic placed her crystal ball on the table before her, waved her hands over it, and gazed past its shiny surface.
She told us: “Once again, I see house number 1044 as strongly related to the girls you seek. I think you are going to have to look into that.” Then she said to Harper, “I think Brandon should go with them. He could protect them. And he can get into places where it’s not safe for the living to go.”
Harper agreed, saying to her grandson, “I feel this is an opportunity for you to redeem yourself. I feel you need to do this.”
Brandon immediately accepted. Neil wrapped his arms around his older brother.
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