The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year Volume Seven

by Jonathan Strahan

  “Your father will speak to you tomorrow, Sinead. Brigid, come with me.”

  Their mother led Brigid out of the room, and Sinead was left alone, equal parts terrified and furious. She couldn’t stop imagining all the terrible things that would happen now that her father knew. She also couldn’t stop thinking about hitting Brigid, or kicking her, or pulling her hair. Sinead got up and started pacing, but this only made her anger worse. Brigid’s insubordination could not stand, and since they weren’t going to school, the only way to punish her was with another prank at home. But if her father caught her doing something bad again….

  She needed a quick, deniable solution.

  Sinead rooted through her desk drawer until she found a stiff, moldering stick of gum and chewed it until she couldn’t even remember what flavor the gum had been. She found Brigid lolling facedown in a fresh set of sheets, her hair tousled against the pillow. Sinead’s fingers delicately removed the gum from her mouth and nestled it into Brigid’s hair.

  Sinead marched out into the hallway, flushed with triumph, only to find Ian staring forlornly at the door to his room. The sight was so sad that her adrenaline-and-anger high crashed, and shame surged in its place. What was she doing torturing her sister when their brother needed help? Ian turned to face her and cocked his head, as if he sensed her regret. She’d never received such a look of understanding from her brother. People had told them they’d get along when they were older, but Sinead had always written that off as the same kind of adult bullshit as telling her that she’d look prettier after the braces came off, or the kids would be nicer next year. Now, under the weight of Ian’s look, she felt the loss not just of her brother, but of their friendship. Their future.

  Tears spring to Sinead’s eyes. She hadn’t cried since Ian went back into the hospital, and even then she had been crying for poor Sinead, who had to endure Ian’s disease ripping her family apart. Now she was crying for her brother, who’d been bludgeoned by cancer and rewarded with a confused, silent afterlife.

  This was no time for emotions, however. Ian needed her help. She swallowed her tears and whispered, “What do you want?”

  She wasn’t sure what she expected. He was waiting outside his room. Maybe he needed her to open the door? Instead, Ian looked at her with hurt confusion. He mouthed something at her, but there was no sound. She wondered how long it took to learn to read lips. Probably more than twenty-four hours.

  “I can’t hear you,” she whispered.

  Ian mouthed it again. And again. When Sinead shook her head, his face colored with unfamiliar anger. Ian had a temper, but Sinead had never seen fury like this. Ian spat a silent evil phrase at her, then disappeared.

  A loud thump came from the kitchen downstairs, then a rustling. Something soft hit the floor, over and over. There was a crash, then the sound of footsteps, running.

  Sinead rushed to the kitchen. When she flipped on the light, she found the entire floor covered in lasagna. It was strewn on the floor in messy goops, stuck to the cabinets, mashed on the fridge. The trash can had been tipped over, as if by a dog they didn’t have; the rest of the lasagna lay inside in one red mass. The pans were still stacked in the sink and on the counter, crusted with burnt cheese products. One of them had shattered on the floor.

  Her mother must have thrown the lasagna in the trash, though Sinead couldn’t imagine her doing it—she hoarded food like a squirrel. Or maybe their father had decided he didn’t like it filling the fridge. Their father wouldn’t like all the dirty dishes in the sink, either, but perhaps her mother had staged her own tiny rebellion and refused to clean up after him.

  But now, the lasagna was smeared across the entire kitchen, which definitely wasn’t her parents’ doing. Brigid was fast asleep, and anyway, she never would have made a mess like this. But blaming it on her angry ghost brother wasn’t going to cut it with her father, so it was up to Sinead to fix it.

  Sinead got out a mop to push all the lasagna toward the trash can. It slithered along the floor, leaving a streak of sauce behind it. Sinead scooped the lasagna into the trash with a dustpan and thanked God that her mother took sleeping pills and her father drank whiskey. Then she reminded herself that she didn’t believe in God. Praying was a hard habit to break, though. She wished she could ask God to explain her brother to her. Why was he so angry? What was she supposed to learn from his punishment? But God wasn’t listening, and she had to mop the floor.

  Brigid marched down the stairs the next morning and threw the clump of her gum-wadded hair at Sinead. There were perhaps more sophisticated or more covert ways of handling her anger, but Brigid did not want to employ them. She hated her sister, and she wanted her to know it.

  “Bitch,” Brigid said. Ian had taught her all the curse words when she was five, but she’d never used one before. The anger behind it burnt her mouth.

  Sinead flinched at the word, but also seemed strangely impressed. “I’m sorry,” Sinead said. She didn’t do the looking-away-and-shrugging routine that usually accompanied her apologies. But she didn’t seem that sorry, either. Or, she seemed to feel she’d already paid the price.

  Brigid stood there, fuming. Then she turned on her heel and marched into the pantry to look for something to eat.

  “I saw Ian last night,” Sinead called to her. “After I did it. He tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t hear him, and he got mad.”

  “I don’t care,” Brigid said. This was not true, but she was sick of doing things Sinead’s way. She took an entire box of cookies and marched back up to her room.

  Brigid spent the entire day in her room, making herself sick on Chips Ahoy and reading through every book she owned that featured ghosts. But the ghosts in these stories were either too evil, or too good. The kids had friends, or adult helpers, or siblings who didn’t put gum in their hair. None of them told you what to do when you were alone, and scared, and haunted by your mean, sick brother.

  Brigid was sitting on her floor, staring at her pile of useless books and tugging on the newly gum-shortened chunk of hair when an epiphany broke: They had only seen Ian when they were pulling a prank.

  She found herself perversely glad that Sinead had put gum in her hair. That meant she needed to get revenge on Sinead. And when she did, perhaps she could finally help Ian.

  When Brigid heard her mother go downstairs to start dinner, she stole down the hallway into her mother’s bathroom. She enjoyed spelunking in the cabinets when her parents weren’t home, and the dusty bottle of Nair was right where she remembered. She’d seen a commercial that suggested it had something to do with summertime and shorts, but people also made jokes about using it for pranks on TV. Brigid was used to not understanding things, but she’d filed the idea away for when it was needed.

  Brigid took the Nair into Sinead’s bathroom and got out her honey-vanilla-mango shiny-hair shampoo. She unscrewed both caps and prepared to pour the white Nair into the conveniently white shampoo. But in the bright bathroom light, the clamor of words on the bottle—“patch test” and “doctor” and “burning”—gave her pause. Burning? Brigid was furious with Sinead, but was she furious enough to set her hair on fire—which, as far as she could tell, was what this concoction would do?

  Brigid unscrewed the cap and watched herself in the mirror as she raised the bottle. She moved in slow motion, raising it, then placing it over the shampoo bottle, then tipping it in. When the first bit of Nair poured out, Ian was standing next to her.

  Brigid set the Nair bottle down on the counter without taking her eyes off her brother. In the mirror, Ian snatched it up and tossed it between his hands in the languid, confident way he’d moved when he was alive. Her throat tightened; this bottle-tossing was the most Ian-like thing she’d seen the ghost do, and it made her ache for her brother. Brigid sensed he was waiting for her to do something.

  “Hi,” Brigid said.

  Ian nodded in response and continued to toss the bottle back and forth.

  Brigid tried to remember the
plan she and Sinead had come up with for this encounter. “Do you…W—what do you want?” she said.

  Ian’s face darkened at that question, and Brigid fumbled for a new, non-angry-making one. She couldn’t think of anything. Instead, she blurted out the only other question she had. “Is it better? Now that it’s over?” she said.

  Ian snatched the bottle out of the air and froze.

  “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to say it like that. But, I just…people said, when you died, that it was a blessing, because you were suffering but now you’re here, and I don’t understand—”

  Ian’s face had changed when Brigid said the word “died,” but she couldn’t stop herself from talking, even as he looked at her with angry confusion, like Brigid had just told him a lie out of spite.

  “Don’t you know?” Brigid said. “Ian, you’re—”

  The scary anger returned to Ian’s face, and his hands began to twitch. They flew up to his head and grasped the tufty blond hair that grew there. He pulled on it, and a chunk came away in his fist. He opened his hand and watched it float to the ground. Then he pulled out another chunk. And another. The chunks of hair floated down all around him, like the leaves of a dying plant.

  “Stop!” Brigid said. His eyes darted between his head and Brigid’s, then to the bottle of Nair. He snatched up the bottle and poured it all over Brigid’s head. The thick liquid gushed down in a white stream, covering Brigid’s messy brown hair, her forehead, eyes, nose, and mouth. Her eyes burned and she choked for breath. She watched her reflection in horror as Ian pulled her long brown hair from her head in sickly, dripping strands.

  Brigid bolted out of the bathroom and down the stairs. She nearly knocked her mother over when she burst into the kitchen.

  “Brigid!” her mother said, grabbing her daughter by the shoulders. “What are you doing?”

  Brigid tried, and failed, to hide the terror in her eyes as her mother scrutinized her. She wasn’t sure what her mother saw, but she seemed to think it required no more than a comforting hug. She held her daughter for a brief, sweet moment. Then she turned her attention back to the kitchen.

  “Daddy will be home for dinner,” she said. Her mother’s hand on her shoulder tightened at the mention of Daddy. Brigid felt trapped. “Could you set the dining room table?”

  The last thing Brigid wanted to do was touch the good china with her shaking hands. No, that wasn’t the last thing she wanted to do. The last thing she wanted to do was sit in her room, alone, and wait for Ian’s ghost to find her. She didn’t think they should be trying to help him anymore. She wondered if she and Sinead were actually keeping him here.

  The dishes in the china closet trembled when she approached it, and Brigid caught sight of herself in its mirrored back wall. Between the mirrored backs of the dishes, her reflection had all its hair. Brigid searched the corners of the mirror for Ian, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  After Brigid finished setting the table, her mother discovered her newly short chunk of hair and yelled at her for ruining her haircut. Brigid didn’t rat Sinead out this time, not because she was cowed by the stupid gum prank, but because she was afraid Sinead’s revenge would provoke more terrifying Ian episodes.

  Sinead was hiding in the basement in an attempt to put off her interview with her father, but she also had important work to attend to. Sinead had decided after the events of the previous night that Ian was lost, and being lost made him angry, so he needed to be guided to heaven, or wherever he was supposed to go—Sinead was pretty sure heaven was a part of the whole God-lie. Sinead had not made the prank connection, since she didn’t know about all of Brigid’s pranks; in fact, she was convinced that Ian was seeking them out, unable to let go. She had spent the afternoon acquiring the necessary tools: salt, an important memento, a tiny bell. The next time she saw him, she intended to send him off to eternal peace, whether she believed in it or not.

  Sinead refused to come up from the basement to cut the potatoes, or polish the silver, or put out the glasses. She didn’t even respond to their mother’s calls for assistance, which made her sound as if she was shouting down the stairs at no one. By the time Daddy came home, their mother was crackling with irritation, and it fell to Brigid to make the appeasing niceties required whenever her father joined the family for dinner. When he asked her how she had spent her day, she told him she had watched cartoons.

  The rest of the family was already seated by the time Sinead emerged, the little bell tinkling in the pocket of her hoodie. Her parents’ half-empty bottle of wine sat on the kitchen counter and reminded Sinead that she wanted juice. She dug into the refrigerator for her orange-mango concoction, which she had secretly started to get sick of. But it inexplicably annoyed her father, so it would serve well as a final act of defiance before her punishment.

  When Daddy came home for dinner, the family always ate in the dining room, with the gold-edged china and the freshly polished silver. The candles were always lit, and the girls’ mother made food that was cooked in the oven, not the microwave. Tonight there were small, bloody steaks freshly seared in the broiler, roasted fingerling potatoes, and garlicky greens. Each of the women handed a plate to Daddy, and he dropped on greens and potatoes and a single, wobbly steak. Brigid got half a filet, both because she was the youngest and because she was considered by the whole family to be fat. Then Daddy served himself a filet and Brigid’s leftover half, and the women listened to him talk about his day, and everyone enjoyed a nice family meal.

  When Sinead sat down at the table with the mango juice, Brigid banged her knife on the table to get her attention, but Sinead refused to look up from her plate. She took a bite of her potatoes, then took a sip of her juice. She didn’t even register the taste; all she knew was that it had to be out of her mouth, now. Sinead spat orange liquid all over the white tablecloth, splattering the green beans and extinguishing one of the candles. The silence afterward was so complete that when Brigid took a breath, it sounded like the rush of the ocean.

  “What,” their mother began with a sharp, clipped tone, “was that.” She clearly hoped to derail their father by taking on the scolding herself, but he spoke over her before she could get out her next word.

  “Is there something wrong with your drink, Sinead?” he said. He said it so gently that all three women at the table tensed.

  Sinead said nothing as she stared at Brigid, who looked at her with wide, helpless eyes. Brigid had never felt regret like this before, not even when she told Ian that he was dead. That had been an accident. This was something she had done on purpose, and it had worked exactly as she had planned. As terrifying as Ian’s reaction had been, he had stayed trapped in the mirror. Sinead and her father were here in the room.

  Sinead kept staring at Brigid as she said, “Just went down the wrong tube.”

  Their father considered this answer, folding his hands like the girls imagined he did in complex negotiations. “Take another sip,” he said—then added, as if it had just occurred to him, “so we know you’re all right.”

  As she brought the glass to her lips, Sinead thought of the people who ate bugs on television. The horrid hot-salty flavor of the juice burned her throat, and her stomach turned and gurgled when it hit bottom. She put down the juice in a way she hoped was ladylike, then covered her mouth for one tiny cough.

  Sinead could not tell if her performance had any effect, because now their father was looking between them, as if trying to spot an invisible thread. “Brigid, why don’t you take a sip?” he said.

  Brigid should just take it. Just take the glass, choke the whole thing down, and spare Sinead. But she would spew juice everywhere or, worse, throw it up. “I hate that weird mango stuff,” she said. She pathetically hoped this would win his sympathy, since he, too, hated the weird mango stuff.

  “Give it another try,” their father said. “Go get the bottle.”

  Brigid rose from her seat as slowly as she possibly could, and shuffled into the kitchen. She pulled out th
e orange-mango juice and a glass and shuffled back into the dining room like a prisoner headed to the gallows. The three members of her family stared at her with anger as she approached, though their anger was confused, and directed at different people. Her sister was angry with Brigid for pranking her and furious with their father for toying with them. Her mother was angry with the girls for provoking her husband, though her constant, simmering anger at their father boiled up from beneath the other, safer emotion. And her father—her father was angry at his children, and at his wife, but his ideas of who they were and what they represented were so distorted that the anger might as well have been at different people entirely. He’d been furious at Ian when he got sick again. Brigid had seen him slap him. Their father’s anger made no sense.

  All these competing angers made Brigid angry, too. Hers was not mixed with denial, however, or directed at someone who didn’t exist. She was angry at everyone, and she was going to make this stop. When she crossed the threshold, she slid her foot underneath the rug and elaborately, comically, tripped. The glass went flying out of her hands, and the juice bottle crashed to the floor. Their parents stared at Brigid, frozen, but Sinead leapt to her aid, making sure to knock over her juice glass in the process. Sinead slid her hands beneath her sister’s arms and drew her to her feet.

  Then their parents started screaming about the rug and broken glass and carelessness and disrespect. Sinead and Brigid couldn’t make the words out, exactly. They were too distracted by Ian’s reappearance. Sinead saw him standing next to their father, arms crossed. Brigid saw him staring out from the china-cabinet mirror, hovering.

  “—disrespect that should have died with your son!” their father shouted, just at the moment when their mother fell silent. Then everything was silent, taut with the ugly truth that had just been unleashed. Ian was dead. And each member of the family had wished for that death in the hope that life would be better without him.