The Secret Life of Sparrow Delaney

by Suzanne Harper

  “I don’t believe these are really pictures of ghosts,” I said carefully.

  He grinned. “Uh-huh. But do you believe that ghosts exist?”

  “Well, I—” I stopped, flustered. “Do you?”

  He gave a short, incredulous laugh. “Of course not.”

  “Because you’ve never seen one?”

  “Because it’s a ridiculous concept. Dead is dead.”

  “So you don’t believe in an afterlife either?”

  “Well, I—” Now it was his turn to look flustered. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t think there’s anything else, but even if there is, I don’t believe that people can come back for a cozy little chat with their friends and family. I mean, if they could, they’d do it all the time. And they don’t. So there you go.”

  “Okay,” I said, “but if you did see a ghost—”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “I’m just saying if—”

  “And I’m just saying it would never happen.” He clipped off each word with finality.

  I could feel my face flush with anger. I had opened my mouth to argue some more when I smelled incense and Prajeet’s voice whispered in my ear, “Breathe, Sparrow. Count. Relax.”

  I did, then tried again. “So, nothing could convince you?”

  He threw his hands in the air at the utter ridiculousness of this question, but he did answer. “I’d have to see the ghost with my own eyes, not just take the word of some crackpot medium,” he said. “And the ghost would have to look exactly like the person it was supposed to be. Not just some misty shape. Someone I can recognize.”

  I caught a whiff of a sharp, medicinal odor. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! Take the boy over to look at that spirit painting on the far wall,” Professor Trimble snapped. “No, the big one in the middle! That’s it.” She let out a huff of impatience. “Then let’s see what he has to say,” she said, and disappeared.

  I steered Jack over to the painting. “This looks interesting!” I said in a chipper voice. I pretended to read the information card fastened to the wall. “ ‘The mediums used to set a blank canvas next to a bowl filled with powdered pigment. They covered the canvas with a black cloth, and when they took the cloth away, there was a finished picture painted on the canvas.’ ” I took a few steps back and acted as if this were the first time I had seen the portraits of the young blond woman, the stern army general, and the man wearing a frock coat.

  “Another trick,” Jack said dismissively, but he came over for a closer look.

  After a moment my gaze slid sideways to see what Jack’s reaction was. I was ready for mockery and sarcasm, so I was taken aback to see him standing stock-still—rigid, in fact—in front of the painting of the girl. His face had turned pale, and he didn’t seem to be breathing.

  “Jack?” My voice seemed to vanish in the room like a wisp of smoke. He didn’t say anything. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Are you all right?”

  He didn’t look at me, but he nodded slightly at the portrait and said, in a hushed voice, “Do you see that?”

  I looked again. “See what?”

  “That face next to her shoulder . . .” He didn’t point, exactly, but cautiously flicked one finger at the painting, as if afraid to make any large or sudden movements.

  I leaned past him to squint at it more closely. My shadow moved across the glass. “I don’t see anything—”

  “Damn it!” he snapped, sounding much more like the Jack Dawson who endeared himself to everyone he met. “What did you do?”

  “What did I do?” I snapped back. “I just looked at the stupid painting! And there’s nothing there next to her shoulder!”

  “Well, now there’s not,” he said, eyeing me accusingly. “You must have breathed on it or touched it or something.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said, my voice rising. “All I did was look. Because you wanted me to, I might add.”

  “Fine. Forget it,” he said sharply, but he sounded disappointed.

  “If you did see a face—”

  He crossed his arms and stared at me.

  “Okay, okay, you saw a face.” I had a sudden thought. “Wait, could it have been your own reflection in the glass?”

  Jack rolled his eyes. “I think I can probably recognize my own face. I see it in the mirror every day.”

  “I was just asking,” I said. “So if the face didn’t look like you, then who did it look like?”

  There was a long silence as Jack stared at his feet. He stared at them for so long, in fact, that I finally sneaked a peek myself, wondering wildly if the face had now appeared on the toe of one of his scruffy sneakers.

  One toe moved slightly. Forward, then back. Finally he muttered, “Never mind. You’re right. I probably imagined it.”

  “Oh. Sure. Only—”

  “What?”

  “When you asked me to look at the painting, you seemed—” I hesitated over the word, then decided to tell the truth. “You seemed scared.”

  His eyes shot back in my direction. “I was not scared!”

  “Okay.” I offered another adjective. “Upset.”

  “No.”

  “Concerned? Taken aback? Startled?”

  “No, no, and no. I was not scared, I didn’t see anything, and I don’t want to talk about this anymore!” Jack stomped over to the spirit cabinet and stood staring at it, his hands in his pockets and his shoulders hunched. Even his back looked angry.

  “Fine!”

  That was the last word either of us said for the next fifteen minutes. Finally Jack glanced at his watch and muttered something about his mother’s picking him up. We walked down a back street to the gate at the main road, where visitors pay their entrance fee to drive into Lily Dale. I kept my head down, my baseball cap pulled low over my face, and my pace brisk, like a celebrity trying to avoid the paparazzi. We made it to the gate without being greeted by a single person.

  Just as we got to the road, a blue car pulled up. The horn beeped a cheerful little hello—beep beepity beep beep (wait for it) beep beep—that made Jack glance at me and blush slightly.

  Jack’s mother had the same dark hair and brown eyes that he had. She was smiling as she rolled down the passenger window and leaned across the front seat. “Hi, there,” she called brightly. “You’re Sparrow, aren’t you? Nice to meet you. How did you two do with the big project?”

  My eyes met Jack’s, then we both looked away quickly.

  “Fine,” he said with finality.

  His mother looked at me, one eyebrow raised.

  “Yes, fine.” I agreed, then added helpfully, “The museum was very, um, educational.”

  “Always a good thing for a museum to be,” she said solemnly. She held the car keys out to Jack. “Hey, do you want to practice? The traffic’s pretty light.”

  “Sure.” He shrugged, trying to look nonchalant, but I could see the gleam in his eyes as she got out of the car and he took the driver’s seat.

  As Jack started fiddling with the rearview and side mirrors, Mrs. Dawson walked over to where I was standing. She looked past me at the gated entrance, frowning slightly, clearly lost in her own thoughts. I shifted from one foot to another, not sure how long I should let this silence stretch out. Then a gust of wind blew her hair into her face. She blinked, brushed it away, and turned to me, the spell broken.

  “You know, I’ve lived in this area for almost twenty years, and I’ve never had the slightest desire to visit Lily Dale until recently.” She was smiling, but it was the kind of smile somebody used when she felt like doing anything but. “Isn’t that strange?”

  “Well,” I said cautiously, “a lot of people think it’s kind of weird.”

  “Oh, I know. I have a couple of skeptics in my own family. It makes for . . . well, interesting dinner table conversations.” She meant to sound rueful, I think, but there was a brittle note to her voice. Considering the scorn that Jack and, apparently, his father had for psychics, “interesting” was probably j
ust another way of saying “tense and argumentative enough to ruin every-one’s digestion.”

  “Lately, though,” she said softly, “I feel—well, I hope this doesn’t sound too odd, but I really feel drawn here for some reason.”

  Oh, no. I managed not to roll my eyes, but only just. So many of the tourists who come to Lily Dale say they were drawn here in that same exact hushed voice, as if they alone had tapped into a mysterious force beyond anyone else’s understanding. I couldn’t believe that Jack’s mom would be one of them.

  “What about you, Sparrow?” She gave me such a searching look that I glanced away, uncomfortable. “Do you believe in life after death? Do you think”— her voice quavered a little—“do you think people can actually contact the spirits of the dead?”

  “Um.” I stared at the sidewalk, wondering just how I had managed to get trapped in this metaphysical and apparently emotionally fraught discussion only two minutes after meeting Jack’s mother. “Well, it’s hard to imagine that we just disappear when we die,” I said finally. “And if people do live on in some way, I guess it makes sense that they would try to come back somehow. Maybe.”

  It had to be the most lame, halfhearted, weaselly defense of Spiritualism ever uttered, but Mrs. Dawson looked as relieved as if I’d just offered demonstrable proof of the soul’s existence.

  “Exactly!” she said. “That’s exactly what I think! And whether you’re a believer or a nonbeliever, you’re still choosing your position without proof. So why not have hope that something exists beyond the world that we know?” She leaned forward, intent on making her argument. It sounded like one she had made many times before. “Why not believe in something instead of nothing?”

  Her eyes, dark and desperate, locked with mine. I shrank back. I recognized this look. I’d seen it many times before, when people carrying an overpowering weight of guilt or grief entered our parlor. Even observing such anguish from a distance always made me feel totally inadequate, and sad, and a little sick. For a long moment neither of us said anything.

  Then there was a blast from the car horn, and we both jumped. Mrs. Dawson laughed a little in reaction, and the strange mood dissipated. Jack was frowning with embarrassment at the dashboard, adjusting various knobs with the focused concentration of a fighter pilot.

  “Well,” she said, “I think we’d better get going. Can we drive you home?”

  My heart skipped a beat at the thought. Had Grandma Bee ever taken down those baboon skulls she had strung across the front porch last month? I couldn’t remember.

  “No, thanks,” I said hastily. “I have a few errands to do in Jamestown. I’ll catch the bus.”

  “Are you sure? I don’t like leaving you alone.” She sounded really worried, as if we were standing in a dark alley in a bad neighborhood at 3:00 AM.

  I thought about the effigy of a hated math teacher that Lark and Linnet had created in the front yard last week. And the attic windows, which Raven had painted with mysterious runic signs for Halloween and then never scraped clean. And the fifteen garden gnomes that stood guard on the front lawn, a few of them even wearing little crocheted hats that Lark had made.

  “I’ll be fine,” I reassured her even as I wondered what kind of menace Mrs. Dawson imagined could be lurking in Lily Dale on a bright Saturday afternoon.

  “Well . . . all right. If you’re sure . . .”

  “Absolutely. Thanks anyway.” I gave her a big, bright, all-will-be-well smile. She finally got into the car, and Jack pulled away from the curb without a backward glance.

  As I walked home, I kept replaying the scene in the museum, which seemed odder and odder the more I thought about it. Jack didn’t seem like the type of person who liked to play practical jokes. And he had seemed pretty spooked when he was looking at that painting, no matter what he said.

  So then why had he tried to act as if it were nothing? His furtive manner reminded me of someone, but I couldn’t think who. And that strange conversation with his mother—I could sense all kinds of strong emotions under the surface, but I couldn’t figure out what they were. It felt strange and mysterious and murky, just when I wanted life to be plain, simple, and straightforward.

  It wasn’t until later, after I had flopped down on my bed with a plate of graham crackers and a glass of milk, that I was suddenly jolted with the realization of whom Jack reminded me of.

  Me.

  Me, trying to hide my ghosts from my family.

  Me, trying to avoid telling anyone at school where I lived.

  Me, doing my best to pass as just another ordinary sophomore.

  All of which made me wonder, What was Jack trying to hide?

  Chapter 14

  We had only eaten three or four bites of dinner that night when my mother cleared her throat and said, “My darlings, there’s an important matter we have to discuss.” Her voice was uncharacteristically firm and focused. “I’d like to call a family conference, please.”

  As attention getters go, this may not sound particularly momentous. But my mother’s normal state was one of dreamy abstraction, so to hear her speak so crisply, like a CEO calling a board meeting to order, had the effect of totally silencing the table.

  “Thank you.” She paused to collect her thoughts, then went on. “As you all know, this was a rather disappointing summer from a financial point of view.”

  A sigh rippled around the table. We all knew, only too well, what my mother was referring to. Lily Dale is a summer community, so the mediums make almost all of their yearly income from the tourists who flock to town for those three short months. Like squirrels, we hoard any money made during the brief season of sun and try to live off it during the bleak midwinter.

  Also like squirrels, we (that is, my mother) have a tendency to stuff dollar bills in various receptacles around the house and then forget where they’re hidden. For years a simple trip to the grocery store meant tossing couch cushions to the ground, flipping through books, and upending vases in search of cash.

  Once Wren got old enough to understand the concept of banks, she insisted that Mother open a checking account. This worked better than the previous system, although now we often have to conduct wild searches under couch cushions, behind books, and inside vases for the missing checkbook. But the checking account did give us all a much clearer picture of our family finances.

  This year the picture was exceedingly gloomy. For whatever reason—a rainy June, the high price of gas, a subtle misalignment of the planets—Lily Dale had experienced the slowest summer in a decade, even though the season had been extended for a week after Labor Day. We stared glumly at our plates.

  “I’m afraid we have to cut some expenses, my darlings,” my mother said.

  “We’ve already cut everything we can!” Linnet cried.

  “Guess we won’t be getting the TV back from the shop after all,” Raven said with a certain malicious satisfaction. She fancies herself an intellectual and greatly enjoys despising all aspects of pop culture.

  “But the TV has been in the shop for weeks!” wailed Lark, who worships at the altar of pop culture.

  “Months,” Linnet corrected her. She confronted my mother. “It’s ruining our social lives! How do you expect us to fit in with our peers if we don’t even have a television?”

  Mother held up a hand and said, “There’s no need to get upset. First, let’s make a list of possible—possible, Lark!—places where where we can cut back. Then we will vote, as a family, on where to cut. If everyone wants the TV back—”

  “Not if it means cutting the gas budget,” Raven said. She used our family car the most, to get back and forth to her job at the local convenience store. “I can’t take the bus to work.”

  “The rest of us take the bus. Why can’t you?” Lark said in a snippy tone. “In fact, why do you get to drive the car all the time, while the rest of us are forced to live in the Dark Ages?”

  “Hardly the Dark Ages,” Dove murmured peaceably. “Wouldn’t that be horses a
nd carts?”

  Raven glowered at Lark. “I get to drive the car because I actually have a job, where I actually make money for this family to live on. Furthermore—”

  “There’s no question of not buying gas for the car,” Mother interjected firmly. “I thought we might look at some of our more . . . optional expenses?”

  “I suppose you mean my candles,” Oriole said, a bit huffily.

  “No one else in town burns two dozen candles every time she holds a reading,” Wren said.

  “Exactly. It gives us a competitive advantage. Not to mention creating a romantic atmosphere—”

  “And dripping wax on all the furniture, which I then have to clean up.”

  “And there was that time Grandma Bee set the couch on fire—” Linnet chimed in.

  “Not my fault, not my fault at all—”

  “Of course not, just because you always wave your hands around like some mystical priestess—”

  “We’re lucky that poor man didn’t sue—”

  “He wouldn’t dare.” Grandma Bee’s eyes narrowed dangerously at the thought.

  “So.” Wren held up her hand, as if we were taking a congressional vote. “I nominate eliminating all expenditures on candles forthwith.” She settled back in her chair, smiling smugly. I could see that she was pleased with that forthwith.

  “Incense too,” she added.

  “You have no soul,” Oriole said, casting her a look of betrayal.

  “We’re just brainstorming right now, dear,” my mother said. “We’ll add candles and incense to the list of possible cuts. Any other ideas?”

  “Have you looked in the pantry lately?” Grandma Bee said. “We can’t possibly need that many cleaning products.”

  “Good point,” Raven said. “It looks like we’ve cornered the market on Windex.”

  Wren bridled at this. “Well, if you actually cleaned a window once in a while, you would know how fast it gets used up around here—”

  “I work at a full-time job, the only person in this family who does, thank you very much. I shouldn’t have to do housework on top of that—”