But it wasn’t important. It was futile. Her mother was not like the puddles that evaporated. She was not rain, and she wasn’t coming back. This machine wasn’t going to change that. All it was going to do was continue to steal the only parent she had left.
As Emmaline approached the machine, its otherworldly glow painted her skin a deep shade of purple. Its incessant humming disturbed the tea in her cup, causing it to ripple.
It wasn’t her hatred for the machine that caused her to do what she did next. It was her love for her father.
At the front of the machine there was a rectangular mouth, the source of all the light. Emmaline didn’t know what it was for, but it seemed vital, like an exposed heart.
Before she could stop herself, she poured her tea into the rectangular mouth, until the cup was empty. She knew that she might regret this later, but right then her anger clouded her judgment.
The machine growled low. And then it went silent. Emmaline hadn’t realized how long it had been since the house was this silent, but now here it was. There was no hum, no thrum, no persistent whirring.
The silence was death. It was her mother’s absence. Her true absence, and the promise that she was dead and buried with no hope of returning.
Emmaline understood immediately what she had done. What she had cost her father. Without his ghost machine to give him hope, he would have to understand that Margeaux Beaumont in all her forms was gone.
The light began to fade, until Emmaline was left standing in blackness. Not even the moonlight could enter through the soot on the tiny basement window.
Her heart was pounding. But she wasn’t sorry. She did what needed to be done.
That was her last thought before the machine began to shake, and a burst of light blinded her, and she was thrown off of her feet.
The shrill whine of the teakettle was the next thing Emmaline heard. But that wasn’t what truly woke her. It was the voice humming at the top of the basement stairs.
Her face was pressed to the cold, gritty cement floor of the basement, and her head felt stuffed with cotton. It was dark, and at once she remembered what she had done to her father’s machine.
“Emmaline,” the humming voice called to her. “Emmaline, dearest, don’t you want some tea?”
That can’t be …
“Mama?” Emmaline’s head was throbbing and her throat was dry, but these things were secondary. She pushed herself upright.
There was a light coming from the top of the stairs, and a silhouette stood in the doorway. Emmaline’s vision was blurred, but it began to clear as she made her way toward the staircase.
It had been so long since Emmaline had seen that familiar shape, that gold hair piled into a bun and pinned with a silver clip. It had been years, and yet it had also been no time at all.
Emmaline looked back into the darkness behind her, where the machine stood dead and still. Had it worked? She looked back to her mother, waiting for her with a cup of tea in either hand.
“Emmaline?”
Her mother didn’t look like a ghost. She didn’t glow, and her skin wasn’t transparent. She looked warm and whole and alive.
Since her father lost himself to the ghost machine, Emmaline had been forced to possess enough logic and practicality for the both of them. But at the sight of her mother, that logic and practicality left her, and she ran until she wrapped her arms around her mother’s waist.
Margeaux Beaumont laughed as tea spilled onto the floor from the rattled cups.
“I thought you were gone forever,” Emmaline sobbed, squeezing her tighter. “I thought you were never going to come home.”
Emmaline felt a gentle kiss on the crown of her hair. Real.
But something wasn’t quite right with Margeaux’s voice when she said, “Let’s sit and have our tea. We have so much to talk about.”
The kitchen table was cluttered as ever, but as Emmaline followed her mother, she could see that a small space had been cleared away so that they could sit and face each other.
Emmaline wanted to ask if her mother was a ghost, but at the same time she didn’t want to know. She thought that questioning a thing about this moment would cause it to pop like the soap bubbles she’d tried to keep forever on her fingers when she was little. So she said nothing, and took her tea.
“Your papa hasn’t been keeping up with the housework.” Margeaux sounded sad. She brushed her fingertips over a dusty book called Mourning, a Single Parent’s Guide.
“I should help him,” Emmaline said.
“You should do no such thing,” her mother said. “Your papa should be taking better care of you, not the other way around. I understand full well why you tried to break that machine.”
Emmaline started to feel tears filling her eyes again. “I’m sorry, Mama. I never thought that it would work.”
Margeaux took a sip from her cup. “Finish your tea; I have to take it with me when I go.”
“You have to take the tea?” Emmaline asked, confused. “Take it where?”
Margeaux leaned close, a sad smile on her lips. She brushed the hair from her daughter’s face. “It will evaporate.”
Emmaline felt the same desperate fear as she’d felt two years ago, when her mother was in bed and burning with a fever no doctor could cure. The feeling of watching something slip away when it was still so loved and needed.
“Can’t you stay?” Emmaline asked.
“Do you remember how we’d sit and drink tea during thunderstorms?” Margeaux said. “You were frightened. You thought the thunder would cause the house to collapse.”
“But we’d count the silence between the lightning and the thunder, until we knew the storm was moving away,” Emmaline said. “I remember.” She took a sip of her tea, and it tasted rich and sugary. And then it tasted like nothing at all, and she looked down and saw that her hands were empty.
Emmaline blinked. “Mama?” she said. But the only one in the room was Emmaline, sitting alone at the messy kitchen table piled with neglected bills and dishes.
For a moment, she felt as though her mother were simply in the next room, or upstairs, or even outside, chasing off the raccoon that dug through her garden at night. The word “gone” had meant something different when Emmaline’s mother was still alive. A person who was gone would come back.
But then, slowly, the new definition of that word returned to her. The real definition. Margeaux Beaumont was gone again, and still, and always.
CHAPTER 4
In the morning, Emmaline awoke with no memory of having gone to bed. There was a rough spot on her tongue from where the tea had burned it. She remembered drinking it in haste because she was afraid that it would disappear.
She ran down the stairs and found her father, muttering as he dug through the clutter that had spread from the table to the countertops. “Emmaline, have you seen my wrench? The one with the orange handle. It has to be that one.”
Her heart fell to her feet. “No, Papa.”
“I’ve asked you a thousand times not to move the things on the table. They’re important, all of them.”
“I didn’t.” Her voice trailed as she looked to the sink. But there was no trace of the teacups or the kettle.
It hadn’t been a dream. Emmaline was quite sure. Her mother had been here.
But she couldn’t tell her father. Not yet. Not until she knew what exactly had happened after she broke the machine.
She returned to her bedroom and dressed for school, and as she stood in the mirror she saw a scrape on her arm from when she’d been thrown away from the machine.
“It worked,” she whispered to her own reflection.
But what was it her mother had said? Her mother had asked her if she remembered something about thunderstorms, and now Emmaline had forgotten.
She was still trying to remember as she walked to school, but it was as though someone had gone through her memories and colored over bits of them with a black crayon.
As always, Gul
ly and Oliver met up with her at the intersection by the ancient cemetery.
They were twins, and utterly identical, save for the faint white scar under Oliver’s left eye. Even their curly black hair fell in the same messy tangle, and their eyes were the color of the sky when it turned dark early in the winter.
They began to walk the remaining three blocks to school, and it took nearly half that time for the twins to realize that Emmaline was not trying to moderate their argument the way she always did.
“Emmy?” Oliver said. He had the softer voice of the two, and a more prominent line in his brow when he was concerned. He petted her shoulder. “What’s the matter?”
Emmaline bit her lip. The three of them talked about everything—except her father’s ghost machine. The twins knew how much it pained her, and anyway, Emmaline didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know how to explain that her father couldn’t pick her up from school when she was sick with a fever last June because he hadn’t answered the telephone, or that he never visited her mother’s grave in the day, only at night when there would be no one to pass on the streets, or that the power in the house was always flickering and the bill was so high that Emmaline hadn’t had new shoes in well over a year, because she didn’t want to ask him for money and he hadn’t noticed their state of disrepair or how tight they had become.
She would rather talk about lighter things, anyway. And the twins always made her laugh. Made her feel like things were normal until she climbed the steps to her home and walked inside.
But all of that was before the machine had worked.
When she didn’t answer, even Gully started to look concerned. “What is it?” he asked.
Emmaline stopped walking. They were standing at the end of the cemetery. It ended abruptly with a sharp turn that led into the shopping center. All those gravestones gave way to cafés and the bakery that made the mornings smell like spiced cinnamon and caramel. Death turned into the hope of living things.
Emmaline had never noticed the contrast before, when her mother was still alive.
She looked between the twins. “What if,” she began, and paused. “What if my father’s machine could work? What would you think?”
“I’d want to see Tidbit again,” Oliver said, with the sweetness Emmaline admired about him. Tidbit had been their dog—an enthusiastic old bloodhound with a copper coat and persistent bark.
But Gully spent a great deal of time thinking things through. More so than his brother. He was twelve and three quarters, but his eyes were years older. “Do you want the truth?” he asked, his voice low and serious.
“Yes,” Emmaline said. “Of course.”
“I wouldn’t want to see anyone again. Not if they’ve died.” He looked at his brother. “Tidbit had a good life. A long one. He’s happy wherever he is now.”
“But who is feeding him?” Oliver said. “Who knows that he needs someone to throw the orange ball around the yard after dinner so that he’ll be tired? Whose bed is he sleeping on?”
“Don’t be dumb. None of that matters when you die.”
“Someone has to take care of him,” Oliver countered. “Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean he won’t want somebody to play with.”
They began to argue, and Emmaline looked to the graves. Gully and Oliver had never lost their mother. They knew where she was, and that she would be there when they came home, and that the kitchen would smell of the pie-scented candles she burned on the shelf above the stove. This was something that Emmaline couldn’t explain, and losing someone they loved was not something she wanted them to understand, besides.
“Emmaline.” Gully’s voice brought her out of her thoughts. She turned and found herself looking right into his eyes. “Did something happen with the machine?”
Oliver was looking at her just as intensely. “Did it work?”
“I—I think it did,” Emmaline said. “Actually, I know it worked.” She looked around to be sure they were alone on the sidewalk. “I was so fed up with the machine that I did something horrible and tried to break it. But instead, I somehow made it work. It sparked, and threw me across the room.” She held up her arm, showing them the scrape as evidence. “And the next thing I knew, my mother was upstairs, calling for me.”
Gully’s concern grew. He touched her forehead, checking for a fever. He didn’t find one, which only seemed to concern him more. “I think you hit your head when the machine threw you. Have you noticed anything else strange? Any ringing in your ears?”
Emmaline sighed, frustrated. “It was real. I poured my tea into the machine and my mother came back.” It sounded more absurd the more she tried to explain it, and her voice cracked. “She was just as I remembered her.”
“Oh, Emmy.” Oliver frowned sympathetically. “I believe you.”
Gully looked conflicted. “The bell is going to ring soon,” he said. “We should go.”
Gully knew that they would make it to school just in time for the bell if they started walking now. It took one and a half seconds to walk across one square in the sidewalk, and three seconds to cross the driveways in front of the nine storefronts, and seven to cross the street—or ten if Oliver dragged his feet, which he often did. From the cemetery, this added up to two minutes and fourteen seconds.
Gully was always keeping track of things. He only faltered when it came to Emmaline, who changed from one day to the next. Who smiled when she was sad. Who was patient when she had every right to be angry. Who was thoughtful and often secretive.
He couldn’t figure her out, but still he liked to try.
And by noon, Gully knew that something had surely changed in Emmaline. She had been very quiet and still all morning in class. Pencil in hand, she had only drawn senseless lines and shapes on her notepaper, as though she was trying to conjure up a thought that wouldn’t surface. She didn’t even raise her hand to answer the geography questions, even though geography was her favorite subject and she always studied ahead of the required work.
When it was time for lunch, he watched as Emmaline tore at the skin of an orange, not seeming to care whether or not she could effectively peel it. They sat in the school yard, on a low stone wall that bordered the playground.
“Why did you pour tea into the machine?” Gully asked.
Emmaline raised her head as though waking from a trance. “What? Oh. Because I wanted to break it, like I said.”
“Yes, but why tea?” Gully pressed. “Why not regular water, or why didn’t you try to hit it with something?”
Emmaline thought about this. “Because,” she began, with some difficulty as she grappled to remember, “I had made myself a cup of tea, and something about tea made me think of my mother—although now I’m not sure if that’s right. My memory is fuzzy.”
“Your mother used to make you tea,” Oliver chimed in. “When you were scared of the thunder. That’s what you told me.” Though Emmaline did not discuss her father’s machine, she did often talk about her mother.
“Did I?” Emmaline said. “I can’t remember. That’s another thing. It feels like pieces of my memories are missing, too.”
Emmaline struggled to find a memory of her mother making tea for her during a thunderstorm—even one. Now that Oliver had introduced the idea to her, she knew that the memories were there, and she could sense them, like she was trying to remember the melody of a song heard once and long ago.
“Think hard,” Gully said. “What’s something you remember about her?”
Immediately, Emmaline recalled a time several years earlier when Monsieur and Madame DePaul had to travel overseas. Gully and Oliver spent a weekend at her house. They gathered all the pillows in the house and made a giant cloud on the living room floor with them, jumping and laughing and stuffing their faces with chocolates and warm milk, until they fell asleep.
Vaguely, Emmaline could recall the storm on the first night, the way that rain poured out of the sky and the windows shook from the force of it. She remembered thunder, and the
n the warm smell of—something. What was it? Something that had allayed her fears and lured her to the kitchen, the twins at either side of her, all three of them huddled in the same quilt.
But this was where the memory turned black, as though it had been painted over.
She blinked, and Gully and Oliver were both watching her intently.
They were the only friends who had ever really known her mother, and now, the only ones who ever would. And that alone made them all the more special to her.
“I can’t remember,” she said. “I remember thunderstorms, but not my mother making me a cup of tea. It sounds like something she would have done, but—”
Sadness came over her just then. She had already lost her mother once, and now she felt that she was losing her again. “It’s like someone broke into my house while I was sleeping and took some of her pictures off the wall,” she said.
Oliver patted her hand, and she couldn’t help smiling at him.
Gully stared into the distance, his jaw pushed forward the way it always was when he was thinking hard. “What has your father used to fuel the machine?”
“Electricity,” Emmaline said. “And lots of it.” She was studying Gully closely. She could see that he was forming some kind of revelation.
“Maybe the machine needs more than electricity,” Gully said. “You can use electricity to power a toaster, but you still won’t have toast unless you give it bread.”
Emmaline was beginning to understand. “You think the tea specifically had something to do with it?”
“Not the tea, but the memory attached to it,” Gully said. “Maybe if you feed the machine a memory, that’s what makes it work. And now the memory is gone.”
“We’d have to experiment,” Oliver said, his eyes lighting up. “You have lots of things that remind you of your mother.” He nodded to the gold chain that hung from Emmaline’s neck, which held an old skeleton key that Emmaline’s mother had saved when her childhood home was demolished to build a hotel in the city. “If you fed the machine more things, maybe you’d be able to see your mother again.”
The Girl With the Ghost Machine Page 2
