It seemed like he was making a point to show he had listened to the things I’d said before.
“Let’s go in,” I said after I’d gotten two mosquito bites. I brought the pitcher back to the kitchen.
Sam didn’t make it into the kitchen with me. I backtracked and found that he’d gotten caught in the living room. He was crouched on the floor with Lucca, playing with his train set. Lucca never sets up his tracks in an easy oval or figure eight, but uses track splitters to make elaborate designs all over the floor.
“Look, Thomas trains! I love Thomas trains!” Sam exclaimed. Lucca beamed.
Sam got so absorbed that I sat on the couch, watching. Were Lucca and I still in a fight? It’s hard to know with someone who never talks to you.
Mom stuck her head in. “It’s lunchtime. Want to stay, Sam?”
“Sure.”
Mom told Lucca to wash his hands, and he ran off.
When we were alone, Sam said, “Your brother’s shy. He wouldn’t even tell me his name.”
“His name’s Lucca. And he’s not shy. He just doesn’t talk.”
“At all?”
I shook my head.
Sam looked thoughtful. “Why not?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” I hopped off the couch and we went to join Mom and Lucca in the kitchen.
As we ate I kept glancing sideways at Sam, who seemed much more comfortable than I was. He caught me looking at him three times, so I stopped looking.
Why didn’t we have any napkins? What if I had mustard on my mouth? Would it be worse to leave it there or to wipe it on the back of my hand?
And why did I suddenly care so much about mustard on my face?
Lucca and Sam started trading broken pretzels for whole pretzels and then built something that looked like a log cabin out of the leftovers.
Mom kept beaming at me, even though I didn’t say a word.
“I have to go to the store,” Sam announced once the table was cleaned up. “Thanks for lunch!” he said to Mom.
“Anytime.”
“Come on, I’ll walk you out,” I said, and we walked to the end of the driveway.
“I’ll see you soon,” he said.
Really? I’d been boring as a box of bricks. But I said, “Yeah, see you soon. Thanks for coming over.”
After I came back inside, I spotted Lucca sitting on the toilet in the downstairs bathroom with the door open. His feet were resting on his toddler stepping stool and a picture book sat on his knees.
He couldn’t read, so he was looking at it.
Well, maybe he could read, but no one would know, right? Maybe he was a super-genius who should have been reading War and Peace already.
“Listen, Lucca,” I said, coming into the bathroom and crouching down to be at his eye level. “You’re three years old. That’s old enough to shut the door when you go to the bathroom.” Especially now that people might be dropping by. People who might not understand a three-year-old’s bathroom habits.
Lucca’s eyes widened at me. I knew what he was thinking.
“Oh, if you need help? Just call us. Bye!” I left the bathroom, Lucca still staring at me as I shut the door.
I headed into the kitchen.
“Mom, I just told Lucca it’s time he started going to the bathroom with the door shut.”
“What?”
“Yeah, he’s getting older, it’s ridiculous.”
“He’s not that old. How will we know if he needs help?” Mom started to leave the room, to go open the bathroom door.
“Wait.” I grabbed her arm. “You can always go in to check on him. But this way, maybe he’ll call for someone.”
Mom paused to consider my point.
“That’s tough love, right?” I explained. “Maybe he’s uncomfortable, but it could help.”
“You aren’t his parent, Siena. It’s not up to you to decide and enforce the lessons.”
“Well, what are you doing?” I asked. “Put him in a situation where he really needs to talk, and maybe he will.”
Mom looked angry, but then she sighed and spoke calmly. “Upsetting him won’t work either. It might even make things worse, rule out the chance of improvement.”
The sound of a toilet flushing made us pause. Then it flushed again, and again. Then there was a thunk that sounded like a book being thrown against a wall.
Mom and I forgot that we were in the middle of an argument and started laughing.
“I guess it backfired,” I admitted. “He worked out signals.”
“I’ll go see what he needs.”
“About the door? It’s just so much more civilized with it shut.”
“We’ll compromise: I’ll have him shut the door except for the last inch … no need to risk him getting locked in a bathroom.”
“Deal.” I headed upstairs to the window seat. The water looked beautiful and a cool breeze blew in through the screen.
I was surprised Mom hadn’t given me a lecture about window safety. I know not to lean on the screen, but I’d have to make sure Lucca didn’t visit my room and try it.
Oh, Lucca, are you ever going to talk to us?
11
My mind was scattered. Lucca still seemed to be mad at me, and Sam—why had he stopped by? Did he want to be friends after all?
But I needed to get back to Sarah, to finding out what happened, and what I was still sensing here. I picked up the pen.
We were sitting around the dining room table, me, Mama, Dad, and Joshua. Mama still had red, dripping eyes.
Dad looked about as upset as Mama, though he was not crying.
“This was bound to happen sooner or later,” Dad said. “Not that it makes it easier to let you go, son, but so many of our boys are being drafted.”
“It’ll be all right,” my brother said. “I’m ready to serve.”
Mama buried her face in her handkerchief again.
I kept quiet. I couldn’t eat anything.
The silence continued until Joshua said, “May I be excused?”
“Of course, Joshua,” Dad said.
After he’d left, I looked up. “Me too?”
I walked upstairs and found him in his room, sorting through some of his belongings.
“Hi, Sarah.”
“Are you taking all your things when you go away?”
“Nah. You don’t really get to take much.”
Suddenly I understood why the boys in the war didn’t have enough blankets. That was why we’d had the dance.
I ran over to where he sat on the bed, jumped into his arms, and pressed my head into his chest. “I don’t want you to go!”
“I know, Little Bug.” He pulled me off him, just far enough so that we could look into each other’s eyes. “Can I tell you a secret?”
Ooh, a secret. Those special words that give you a tiny piece of someone else to carry around, to prove you know something important about them.
“Yes. I won’t tell. Cross my heart.”
“I wasn’t drafted, like I told Mom and Dad. I enlisted.”
I stared at him.
He realized I didn’t know the difference. “Mom and Dad think the government sent a letter saying I had to go. It wasn’t like that. I signed up myself.”
“Why would you do that? Why would you want to go away?”
“It’s not about going away, it’s about helping. Half my class has signed up. If I didn’t sign up, I would always doubt my own courage. I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to show I was ready.”
I didn’t see why he needed to do any of it. But his eyes told me that it was very important to him.
“I’ll keep your secret,” I promised.
And then I was back in the present, staring at the words on the page. That was it—it had just stopped. Sarah had no more to tell me right now?
Oh, no. Joshua. Joshua would be going off to war.
No, this story had happened already, in the past.
Joshua went to war.
Sudde
nly I had flashes of churning red water; the bombed, abandoned town; a sick little girl in my arms. They weren’t just dreams; they were memories. Joshua’s memories. I had seen them in my sleep, without knowing it, just like I’d seen this house and it turned out to exist.
Why was I having Joshua’s memories? I felt a little shaky and lay down on the window seat.
Calm down.
Think.
I was getting somewhere in the ghost mystery. Maybe Joshua hadn’t made it home? Could his spirit have come all the way back from overseas just to haunt this house? Spirits could probably go anywhere they wanted, in time or space.
Or maybe it was someone else? Maybe his mom had gone a little nuts in his absence and it was her spirit who was here, still waiting for her son to come home?
I’d have to find out later. It was never possible to get right back into Sarah’s mind. I sat up and went downstairs to look for company, but there was a note from Mom on the kitchen counter, saying that she and Lucca had gone to playgroup. They’d be back soon.
I scribbled, At the beach—S across the bottom of Mom’s note and left it on the counter.
On the beach, I sat down in a meditating pose and tried to sense if I felt the spirit-feeling out there. I did, kind of. But only near our own section. I spent ages wandering farther down the beach, where it felt normal: lonely, and windy, but not like I had extra company.
Why was it that Mom and Dad didn’t seem to feel the extra presences? Was it just a kid thing—because Sarah the Ghost was a kid? But not Joshua. He went off to war.
By this time, I had wandered down to Mrs. Lang’s house. I knocked on her door.
“Hi, Siena!” she greeted me. “I was just sorting some old clothing to give away. But it might be a good time for a break.”
She shuffled down the hallway and got the Uno cards. Before she had even dealt them, she said, “I got a chance to visit Ella Mae.”
“And?”
“She said that the owner hasn’t lived in the house for a long time, over half a century, that the house has mostly been rented out. But before that, back in the forties, when Ella Mae was young, a family lived there. She didn’t know them personally, but she knew of them because they were kind of a strange family. There were two children: a boy, who went off to the war and then came back unwell, and a girl, who wouldn’t ever talk. The mother and father in turn shut off to most of the world. Rumors spread that the whole family was mentally ill.”
My heart started pounding. The boy who’d gone off to war and the girl who was his sister were in my visions—that was scary enough to think of—but it didn’t quite match.… If what Mrs. Lang was telling me was true, Joshua had made it back and Sarah …
“They were all mentally ill? The girl didn’t talk?”
“Those were rumors. But there was something about them, something unstable or odd.”
I felt sick. Could Sarah be the girl who didn’t talk? She talked in my version of the story so far; what had happened?
But wait a minute …
Let’s say she didn’t talk … and there was something weird in the family and several of them didn’t talk much … and we had moved here because Lucca didn’t talk … that was just … all twisted up and scary. Maybe we didn’t belong here at all. Maybe we belonged as far from here as possible.
“I have to go!” I said, pushing back from the table and standing up.
“We haven’t even started yet,” Mrs. Lang said, surprised.
“I’m sorry.… I’ll come back soon!” I ran out the door and all the way home. The sand under my feet said Shouldn’t, shouldn’t.
We shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t, shouldn’t.
I found Mom on the porch, using a paint peeler and sandpaper to get the old paint off the railings.
“Why did you pick this house?” I blurted out, not even bothering to catch my breath.
“What?” she asked, startled.
“Why did you pick this house?”
“Repainting isn’t going to be so bad, Siena.”
“I’m not talking about painting. I don’t care about painting. I want to know why we came here—here, to this house.”
Mom seemed to think this was more of my bizarre, over-analyzing behavior. She calmly explained as she continued peeling paint, “We already told you. We looked at a lot of houses. This one reminded us of the one you’d talked about and … I don’t know, maybe because of that, I liked the feeling here. It just felt right. It felt like something here would help Lucca. Or maybe it was the beach. Something about the beach would help Lucca.”
“Something here would help Lucca?”
“Yeah, I think so. Just a feeling I had. Still have, actually.”
Her steady voice calmed my thumping heart. But still …
“What if it isn’t to help him? What if it’s a trap … what if there’s something wrong here?” What if I had dreamed it up for the wrong reasons? For reasons that would hurt us? What if a bad spirit had pulled us here?
“Siena, there’s nothing wrong here. You always think there’s something wrong everywhere. Hey, here …” She turned to a box of supplies and fished out another paint scraper. “It might calm you down to help me. Make some improvements. Not think too much about … whatever it is.”
I took the scraper and began to work on my own section of the railings. She was right, it did calm me down. About twenty minutes later, she asked, “Setting your panic attack aside, do you like it here, Siena? I mean, for you?”
“I think it’s great here. For me.”
“I’m so glad. There was always a chance it would end up being harder for you, starting over.”
“No, I like it.”
“Your brother—that’s hard on you, isn’t it?”
I shrugged. “I love Lucca.” I felt a squirm of guilt in my stomach. “Maybe I’m not always the nicest sister to him.” In fact, yesterday I’d been downright horrible.
“Nobody’s perfect one hundred percent of the time. Usually you’re very good with him.”
Mom’s so contradictory sometimes. Like she was mad about us fighting yesterday, but now it sounded like not such a big deal.
And she’s so funny, too, because sometimes she acts like I’m nutso for worrying about some things and other times she totally gets it.
We both went back to scraping.
Finally I said, “It’s just that it’s so easy for something to turn out different than you expected.” I had expected that Lucca and I would get along great, that he would get me in a way my parents didn’t. And in a lot of ways he did, but then …
“That is kind of scary,” Mom said. “But it’s also the kind of thing where you get to show how strong you are.”
“I’m not, though. I’m all mush inside.”
“No. It would be so easy for you to get frustrated with a brother like Lucca, one who needs a lot of extra attention.”
“He’s just a little boy. I know he needs help. And love.” Even if I didn’t always show it.
“He does. You are very wise to see that.”
I took a deep breath. “I sometimes wonder if he doesn’t talk because he doesn’t like us.”
“You know … I wonder that sometimes, too, when I think of the long list of whys; I can’t help it. But think of how he sneaks into our beds to cuddle, or how he reaches up to hold our hands, or how he laughs when we play with him. He wouldn’t do those things if he didn’t like us.”
“That’s true. Then what is it?” Was it my fault?
“It’s a mystery,” Mom answered. “But one day, it might just disappear. You just need to hang on and believe it will. That’s what I’m doing.”
Again, Mom is funny. She tries and she tries and she tries and then she says when it comes down to it, she’s just hanging on.
I was in the kitchen chopping up veggies from the farmers’ market when the house phone rang.
“I’ll get it!” I yelled. It was kind of exciting to have the phone ring. So far it had only
rung twice, when Grandma called.
“Hello?”
“Hi. Is this Siena?”
“Yes.”
“It’s me. Sam.”
“Oh, hi!”
Sam. I don’t know who I’d been expecting.
He was so funny: just showed up when he felt like it, just called at dinnertime. Wacko.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Just called to say hi. What are you doing?”
“Helping make dinner.” I headed back over to the counter and the cutting board. “How’d you get our number? I don’t even know this number.”
“It was on your fridge. With a note that said ‘Learn this number: our new house phone.’ ”
At first I thought he was joking, but when I turned to look at the fridge, he was absolutely right; the note was there, in Dad’s handwriting.
“And you memorized it?”
“Well, I only had to remember the last four digits. The others are the same as everyone else’s in town.”
“Is that Sam?” Mom asked. “Let me talk to him after.”
I gave her a look like she had ten heads.
“Just really quick. When you’re done.”
I nodded at her and turned away.
“What did you do today?” I asked him.
“Morgan and I went tubing.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, it was fun! You should come next time.”
“Maybe I will.” Maybe. If I was actually invited. “Where do you go?”
“There’s a good river about twenty minutes away. My uncle drops us off a few miles up and then meets us at the end where the river dumps into the ocean.”
“Do you worry about getting pulled out to sea?”
Sam laughed. “No. Should I?”
No, that was me. I was the worrywart, about everything.
“Oh—my mom wants to talk to you.”
“She does? What for?”
“No idea.”
I handed over the phone.
“Hi, Sam. Yes, I’m fine, how are you? I was wondering if you would be interested in coming over to play with Lucca and I’ll pay you. It will be kind of like babysitting, except we’ll be around most of the time. He seemed to like you and I think having a boy around might be good for him. We could make it a regular thing.”