Читать книгу Supervision - Alison Stine, Alison Stine - Страница 9

I flew out of the tunnel. I couldn’t get out fast enough. I barely remember climbing the ladder, but somehow my fingers found the brick holds. Then I was coughing in the sunlight, gasping for air. Tom followed me out.

“You’re sick,” I said to him. “Sick.”

He stood over me. “It’s true, what I said.”

“That’s not funny. You’re a jerk like everyone else in this town.”

He touched my shoulder. I started to shrug him off, then I grabbed his arm by the wrist. “See?” I said. “You’re real. Real as me.” I shook his arm. It went limp in my hand. “I can touch you. I can feel you. You’re solid, just like me.”

“Because we’re both dead. You can touch me because you’re dead too.”

Clara had come out of the kiln and stood watching by the tree.

“Help me out,” Tom said to her.

“Oh, I don’t think so. I already tried. Besides, you’ve had more experience.”

“Experience?” I said.

“He died before me.”

I flung Tom’s arm away. I felt shaky. I needed to talk to someone normal, the Firecracker, the maid. I started toward the house, but Tom followed me, motioning to Clara to do the same.

“Leave me alone!” I said to them. “What’s wrong with you? What is this—gang up on the new girl? I haven’t been hazed enough? Someone trying to sit on me in school wasn’t enough?”

Tom halted. “Someone tried to sit on you?”

I stopped too.

Tom’s voice was patient, low. “No one talked to you in school, did they, Ez? The teachers didn’t notice you. Your grandmother didn’t even say hello to you.”

“I—I,” I stumbled. My mind was spinning. “Martha talked to me! My grandmother’s maid.”

“Martha?” Clara stood at my elbow. “She’s been dead a century.”

I tried to remember what the maid had said. She knew my grandmother. She seemed to know me. And the house was always dusty, the stairs un-swept, the bathroom moldy. Martha said she had worked in the house … forever.

I thought back over the last two days: the school bus doors nearly closing on me every time I rode, the boy trying to sit on me, the other boy running me down in the hall. I remembered Clara, appearing out of nowhere on the bus, and Tom materializing on the bank of the pond then disappearing behind a birch.

I felt clammy and cold. I felt for my arms. I could feel them. I kicked my legs. I felt solid to me. I remembered the nightmare the night before I had left New York, when I had thought my hand was gone—but that was just a dream. I had those kinds of dreams a lot, along with the dreams of my mother, dreams where people were shouting at me, shaking me, dreams where I woke up feeling choked.

“The Firecracker!” I said.

Tom and Clara stared at me.

“My sister. Her nickname is the Firecracker. I talked to her just yesterday. I talk to her every day. She wouldn’t be able to talk to me if I were dead.” I had already pulled out my phone and was dialing. Please pick up, please pick up, please, please, I begged her in my head. “Oh thank you!” I said when she answered.

“What?” she said. “What’s wrong? Did something happen?”

I put the phone on speaker and held it out to Tom and Clara.

“Esmé?” the Firecracker said, her voice crackling. “Esmé, are you there?”

“See?” I said.

Tom and Clara just looked at me. Clara seemed unimpressed. But Tom looked frightened. His eyes were on me, not on the phone, as the Firecracker’s voice blared: “What’s going on? Is everything okay over there?”

“Everything’s fine. You’re speaking to me, I’m fine, and everything is fine.”

“Okay,” the Firecracker said. “That’s not suspicious.”

“I just met some people, and they didn’t believe some things about me.”

“I’m really glad you’re making friends. Listen, I’ve got to get back to work, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “Love you too.” I snapped the phone shut. “See?”

But Tom shook his head. “No. Something is wrong. You wouldn’t be able to interact with us. You wouldn’t be able to touch us unless you were like us. Unless you were dead too. That’s how we found Martha. And Mr. Black.”

“Who’s Mr. Black?” I asked.

There was the sound of a car then, creeping up the driveway. We all turned to see my grandmother’s station wagon pull up in front of the barn.

“I’ve an idea,” Clara said.

“No,” Tom said. “She’s not ready.”

“How else is she going to get ready? How will she ever believe us otherwise?”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

My grandmother got out of the station wagon, balancing a grocery bag on her hip. She set another bag on the ground as she closed the car door.

I whispered, “Grandma?”

She picked up the other bag, pausing for a moment, as if she had noticed or just remembered something. Her face took on the look it had taken in the sitting room. Concentration, mixed with a strange sort of blankness. She stared into the woods in the distance. Then she blinked and shook her head, as if shaking off a memory, coming out of a trace.

“Grandma,” I said.

Without hearing me, she headed for the house. But Clara blocked her path. Reaching out, the girl plucked something from my grandmother’s grocery bag: a carton of eggs.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“She can’t see me. She can’t see you. But she can see this.” Clara opened the carton and pulled out an egg. She tossed it to Tom, who caught it.

“Clara, stop.” He set the egg gently on the ground.

“You’re no fun.” Clara took another egg from the carton.

My grandmother watched the eggs, transfixed.

“Stop it,” I said.

“Fine,” Clara said, and she dashed the egg against the house.

The egg broke against the wall with a sickening smack, yellow sliding down the side. My grandmother flinched. She tightened her hold on the grocery bag. But Clara wasn’t done. She threw another egg against the house. Another and another until the house was smeared with yoke and shell. My grandmother stared hard. I felt like crying.

“Leave her alone,” I said. “You’re scaring her.”

Clara laughed. “That’s the point.”

Finally, my grandmother dropped the grocery bag and fled. I watched her disappear around the side of the house. Groceries tumbled out over the driveway.

“Clara,” Tom said. “That wasn’t necessary.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“You’re a monster,” I said to Clara. “I trusted you.”

“No,” Tom said. “She’s a ghost. Just a ghost. And so are you.”

“You’re wrong. I know you’re wrong.” I picked up one of the items that had fallen from my grandmother’s bag: an apple. Green, like the apple Tom had rolled to me in the cafeteria. A Granny Smith. As Tom and Clara watched, I turned it and took a huge bite. I swallowed roughly, the apple stuck in my throat. “I can get hungry,” I said. “I can get thirsty. That means I’m not dead, right? You said you couldn’t do that. I can sleep. I can feel cold and warmth. My heart beats. I’m breathing. I bleed. I…” I saw a stick on the driveway, one of the many limbs that had fallen around the yard. “I can feel pain,” I said. I dropped the apple and picked up the stick.

It was sharp and curved on the end, like a hook.

“Ez,” Tom said.

In one quick motion, I cut my arm. Blood screamed across the skin. I winced in pain, and Clara gasped, but Tom moved toward me. He took the stick, broke it in half, and tossed it.

I gritted my teeth. “I can bleed,” I said. “Can you do that? Can you bleed, Tom? I’m alive.”

In the little bathroom off my bedroom, Martha the maid found gauze and bandages. I sat on the side of the rusted tub while she crouched before me, dabbing iodine on my arm.

I saw my arm. She saw it. She touched it. How could it not be real? How could I not be? What was happening to me? I felt pain from the cut, stinging from the antiseptic. But mostly what I felt was numbness; I was a doll Martha patted and tended. I was hollow. I didn’t understand what was happening. No, none of this could be happening.

“Clara is a strange one,” Martha was saying.

“I thought she was my friend,” I said blankly.

“She’s changeable. What she’s been through and at her age, getting stuck at that age—well, I should have warned you. But Tom is kind. They will make good friends for you, keep you good company now that you’re….” She stopped.

“I’m not dead, Martha,” I said. “You can see my blood. You can feel my pulse.”

Martha looked away, down at her work. I watched her doctor my arm. She wore a long dress and black leather shoes like Clara’s, only they looked even older and more uncomfortable. She smelled strongly of laundry soap, something harsh and toxic, and of earth. I remembered Clara had smelled of earth too. Like a basement. Like a grave.

Martha unwrapped a bandage and pressed it on my arm. Her touch was warm, as Tom’s had been.

“You feel alive,” I said.

She shook her head. “But I’m not.”

“How do you know?”

She held my fingers to her chest. “No ticking.”

It was startling to lay my hand against a body that was not beating. Her collarbone felt solid, but there was no heartbeat beneath it, no movement, no comforting thrum.

“How did you figure it all out?” I whispered.

“When no one spoke to me. When no one seemed to see me or hear me. After awhile, then you know. You learn.”

“I don’t think I can believe this,” I said. “I don’t think this is real. Maybe I’m asleep. Maybe I’m still dreaming.”

“Of course,” Martha said. She squeezed my hand and I dropped it. “No one prepared you. But this house used to be full of people, children, generations of families—I watched them grow up. But no one ever saw me except the Builder, Mr. Black, Tom and Clara.”

“The Builder?” I asked.

“You’ll meet him. He built this house—and it took him.”

“What do you mean, it took him?”

“He died here, Miss.”

“What is this place, a death trap? Did the house kill you too?”

“Oh no, Miss,” Martha said. “I did that.”

I flinched as if I had been hit. This sweet girl, barely older than me. What had she done? What had happened? “How?” I said. “Why?”

She shook her head. “Not today. That’s a story for another time, when you’re feeling better.” She put the iodine and gauze away in the medicine cabinet. “It won’t last.” She nodded at my arm. “The bandage, the work I did. It’ll be undone by tomorrow at the latest, so you’ll have to watch it. Re-bandage it yourself, now you know how.”

I looked down at the bandage. It seemed secure to me. “Why won’t it last?”

“Because I’m a ghost, of course, silly.” She glanced out the window beside the sink. “That’ll be Mr. Black out there now.”

I rose and stood beside her. The strange man I had seen in the driveway was pacing in front of the barn, hands in his pockets, and kicking stones. He seemed to be talking to himself.

“He’ll be wanting to go down to the pond again,” Martha said. “But don’t you let him.”

“Why?” I asked.

“It’s not good to re-visit the place of your death.”

I felt sickness rising up in my throat. It was too much. It was all too much. I turned away from the window too sharply. The room spun. But a hand was there, a hand at my elbow, lowering me to the side of the tub. Not Martha’s hand.

He had appeared so fast. “Do you feel all right?” Tom asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Thanks to Martha.”

She curtsied and left.

Tom sat on the edge of the tub beside me. “I’m sorry about Clara. She means well. It’s just, we don’t know how to do this. We’ve never met anyone like you before.”

“Like what?”

“Someone who can interact with us; someone who is just like us, except, I suppose—”

“Not dead?”

“Right,” he said.

“So you believe me.”

“I think so.” He sounded like he was talking himself into it. “The eating. The breathing. The bleeding. You’re still cut, right? You still have a wound?”

I looked down at my bandage. “Pretty sure.”

“I believe you. And you believe me?”

I looked at Tom. He wasn’t what I had imagined a ghost would be like. But I had never really thought about ghosts too much before. I didn’t want there to be a middle, a limbo, a world of ghosts. I didn’t want there to be a halfway between the living and the dead. I didn’t want it to be true, what he said he was.

I had a horrible thought. “Tom, my grandmother isn’t dead, is she?”

He shook his head. “No. But she doesn’t seem to be able to see or hear you, and neither does anyone else in this town except us. Did something happen to you before you came here? Something bad? Were you hurt?”

“I got in trouble,” I said. “I hit my head.”

“You hit your head?”

“I didn’t die, Tom. I didn’t hit it that hard. I was in a train tunnel. But I was pulled out—alive—and I got in big trouble. I wouldn’t get threatened with jail time if I were dead, would I?”

“Probably not.”

“Do you think hitting my head did … something to me?”

He touched my arm, above the bandage. “Something happened to you.”

When he touched me, I was surprised to feel what I had felt before when he had held my hand: a feeling of urgency. His touch was light and elusive, like something that might blow away, be taken from me. His hand felt not quite real. “Tom,” I said. “In China, they treat strangers like ghosts.”

“What do you mean?”

“My great-grandparents both emigrated. My grandma was the first to be born in this country. And in China, before you know a stranger, it’s like she’s not even there. Like she’s a ghost to you. I thought my grandmother was doing that to me. I thought she was mad at me, that I had offended her somehow. We didn’t have …” My voice trailed off. “It was hard with her before. She was really sad about my mom, and I don’t think she wanted two little kids around, suddenly. And then we left. We never visited. My sister took me away. We barely even called. I thought I was a ghost to my grandmother. And it’s like I am now, Tom. My sister hears me, but my grandmother can’t.”

Tom looked down at his hands. They were raggedy, the nails short and torn and dirty. Black with earth. He spoke into them, avoiding my eyes. “We think your grandmother might … notice things sometimes.”

“Notice things? What things?”

“The work Martha does around the house. Martha thinks your grandmother knows about it, appreciates it. Maybe Martha just needs her to.”

I thought of the girl, not much older than me, who had taken care of me, the girl who had apparently made my bed and cleaned my room without me even knowing she was there because her work kept disappearing. “What happened to Martha?” I asked.

Tom stood. “That’s a story for her to tell you.”

I looked up at him. I knew I might be ending the conversation. But I had to ask it. I had to know. “What happened to you, Tom? How did you die? What killed you, Tom?”

But he wouldn’t tell me.