But they didn’t speak. Mom stared to my left, mouth agape.
“The window …” she said. Her voice was soft and strained.
“Okay, sure, don’t worry about me,” I said. “Worry about the window. I’m just your daughter.”
Neither of them answered me. Their arms hung limply at their sides like a pair of broken puppets. They were fixated on the window, and I wondered if there was more damage than I’d realized. Repairing old windows like this would probably cost a fortune. But when I turned around, I saw the window swinging open, perfectly intact.
I felt a little wave of relief.
But something was still wrong with my parents. Very wrong.
“Oh no,” my mother said as she approached the open window. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.”
She dropped to her knees, still repeating no, no, no. Dad stayed frozen, standing above her.
Not gonna lie, I was getting a little freaked out. “You guys, it’s okay. It was only a storm. I’m not even that mad.”
They didn’t look up.
“Just … answer me.” I was suddenly so cold I couldn’t stand it. “Why won’t you answer me?”
And then my mother made this sound that I wish I could scrub out of my brain, this strangled half cry, half moan that meandered and twisted and turned to a wail, and then to a scream, and the scream just went on and on.
Then, in one swift motion, Dad grabbed my mother by the arm and pulled her out of the room. I heard their footsteps galloping down the hall.
In the silence, I stepped closer and looked out the window.
On the ground twenty feet below, sprawled and broken like a doll, was a body.
The eyes were open, but there was no spark of life in them.
I know that person, I thought.
But from where? The answer was buried in my head somewhere, like the lyrics to a song you haven’t heard in years. I just had to catch the answer, the way you catch one word in your memory and then the whole song comes flooding back.
I know that sweater.
Burgundy. Baggy. It was my father’s sweater. I remembered a Christmas card photo of him wearing it.
My thoughts slid together in a confused mush. I knew I should know who that was down there, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I rubbed my face with my hands, feeling dizzy.
Janie? Oh God. Could that be my sister? Could it—
No. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to remember.
Dad handing me a folded burgundy bundle after I borrowed it for the bazillionth time. Telling me to wear it with pride and restore it to its former coolness. Mom laughing and saying it was never cool, but it might have a chance now …
Now that Delia will be wearing it.
So … wait. That was my sweater? And was that my face? But why was my face down there?
Why was my face attached to a dead body?
It hit me with a pop!—the instant, horrible, irrefutable truth:
That wasn’t some random dead body.
That was my dead body.
I stared down at my dead self.
From behind me came the sound of bells, more clearly than I’d ever heard it before.
I turned around. A girl about my age stood a few feet away, wearing a pair of long, silky ivory pants and a matching tunic top. Her black hair was cut in a sleek bob that barely grazed her chin. She had a striking look—a thin uniformity to her eyebrows, a distinctive pink glow on the apples of her cheeks.
Around each of her wrists was a thin leather strap with a pair of jingle bells attached to it.
She folded her arms, sending a fresh peal of ringing through the air while she grimly surveyed the room. Then she stepped closer to the window and peeked out. Seeing the body below, she bit her lower lip and glanced at me.
“I see we both died in our pajamas.” Her voice was crisp, with a lilting British accent. Her large brown eyes were keenly intelligent as they flicked from my booted feet to my face. “I tried to get you to leave. Guess I didn’t try hard enough.”
I didn’t answer. I was mesmerized by the light coming off her alabaster skin, and the way her body seemed to flicker slightly … as if she was constantly having to catch herself to stop from fading away.
“Eliza Duncombe,” she said, stepping toward me with her hand extended. “Welcome to Hysteria Hall.”
When I didn’t reach out and shake her hand, she smoothly drew it back and gave me a cool smile. “Just a little joke we have among ourselves here. Obviously, it’s quite a rude nickname for the place. What year is it now? Is it the nineteen eighties yet? The last time I asked someone, it was nineteen forty-three. It could be the eighties by now, right? I died in twenty-two. Very difficult to keep it all straight, you know. Well, you wouldn’t know, would you?”
I took a step back.
Now she considered me as if I might be a little slow. “Aren’t you going to talk to me?”
No. I was not, in fact, going to talk to her.
What I was going to do was scream.
I screamed until Eliza Duncombe turned away and vanished into thin air. I screamed until the body on the ground became a blur. I screamed until I collapsed in on myself.
Until the whole universe collapsed around me.
* * *
At some point, I stopped screaming and fell to vacantly staring around the room. The ceiling looked like a normal ceiling. The walls looked like normal walls.
I can’t be dead. This is only a dream.
But there was nothing dreamlike about the flurry of activity that soon took over my room. Police officers and paramedics crawled all over the place. My mother’s sobs carried in from the hallway. A woman in a suit stood at the open window, taking pictures of the body.
Yes, the body. It was no longer me—my body—but just a thing, separate from me.
Of course the fact that there was a dead body on the ground, one that looked exactly like me, was intensely, soul-shakingly disturbing. But that body wasn’t mine anymore. I didn’t feel the urge to link back up with the pitiful corpse lying on the ground any more than you would throw yourself onto an old sofa you’ve hauled out to the curb.
I wasn’t ready to let go of my life—at that point I hadn’t even contemplated the remotest possibility of doing so—but my body was a different story. I could watch the guys in the COUNTY CORONER shirts load it onto a stretcher without breaking down.
My parents, however, could not. Mom gripped her hair in her fists, twisting and pulling as if she were trying to scalp herself. Dad’s chest rose and sank so quickly that one of the paramedics finally told him to sit down and take deep breaths or he was going to pass out.
Seeing their reactions, a very un-dreamlike stab of pain pierced right through the center of my chest. So I turned away and watched the body below being loaded into a van. Then I followed a pair of detectives as they made their way downstairs, pretending as best I could that I was just another onlooker, a member of the team.
But as I moved through the house, it began to sink in that things were capital-D Different now.
Walking, for instance—I could walk on the floor, no problem. It felt solid under my feet, just like it always had. But going down the hallway, I could actually feel the air go through me. It was almost like walking in the rain and feeling the water against your skin, except I felt it on the inside of my skin, too.
As I wove between all the people gathered in the lobby, the shock began to set in. I caught sight of Janie hunched on the couch, looking impossibly frail and thin, wrapped tightly in the arms of a female police officer. The woman spoke quietly into my sister’s ear, but Janie didn’t seem to hear her. Her face was red and puffy, her eyes glazed. I’d never realized how much life had been in my sister’s face until it was replaced by this dull, depthless sorrow.
I drifted by a group of paramedics talking about how “Hysteria Hall” gave them the creeps.
“You kidding me?” one of the guys said. He was short and wiry with mahogany skin. “Who wo
uld bring their kids to a place like this?”
For a split second, I felt oddly vindicated. Then I remembered that my parents had just had their lives ruined, and I felt guilty.
“I heard the house is cursed,” said a female paramedic with a long red braid.
“Yeah,” the first guy said. “My granddad was part of the government team that came here to scout for copper during the Depression. His twin brother got sucked into a ditch and drowned … only there was no water in the ditch. They never figured out how it happened.”
“Well, clearly,” the redhead said, forming her hands into creepy claws, “it was a haunted ditch. Boogedy boogedy.”
From behind me came the authoritative clearing of a throat, and the paramedics jumped to attention at the appearance of a man in a dark suit who walked past them and over to my parents, seated on one of the sofas. He introduced himself as Detective Kinsella, then began to ask them questions—like why I’d been alone in the room, what they’d observed in the house, and then more and more small questions that grew from the big ones like branches. He was after every detail.
And then he went for it. “So you say you were angry with your daughter,” he said slowly. “Did you … strike her?”
Mom looked up, agape. “Strike her? You mean … hit her?”
“We’ve never touched our daughters in anger in their entire lives!” My father’s voice was almost a roar, and he started to get to his feet. “And for you to suggest otherwise is inviting a lawsuit—”
Detective Kinsella remained totally unruffled. He held up his hand. “Mr. Piven—”
“Dr. Piven,” my father seethed, apparently not too grief-stricken to be all high and mighty about his PhD.
“Dr. Piven,” Kinsella said. “Please understand that these are standard questions that must be asked. Because your daughter’s condition is somewhat alarming.”
“Of course it is.” Mom broke into fresh sobs. “She’s dead.”
Dad exhaled through his teeth. “She fell out a window—”
“Fell,” the detective repeated. “Forgive me, I know this is difficult. But … did you happen to see her hands?”
“What are you saying?” my father asked.
The officer sighed. “That she seemed to have worked quite hard to detach the wire screen from the window. Did your daughter seem upset to you at all? Had she been in treatment for any mental disorders, had any traumatic breakups—”
Dad leapt to his feet. “My daughter did not kill herself!”
“She was in therapy, but we all were,” Mom said. “Not for any specific disorder. Lately, we’ve just had some … communication issues within the family.”
The officer nodded and made another note.
“I’m telling you,” Dad said. “Delia didn’t jump from that window. Maybe she wanted some fresh air and lost her balance—”
“But her hands were covered in blood,” my mother whispered. “I saw them. She opened that screen herself.”
Then she just sort of—I don’t know, melted. Her shoulders rolled inward and her head hung low on her neck. She seemed to shrink to the size of a child. “Why did she do it?” Mom asked softly. “Why didn’t she come to us?”
“This is ridiculous!” And then my father made a fist, hauled back, and punched the wall so hard he made an actual indentation in the wallpaper.
“Excuse me, Mr.—Dr. Piven,” the detective said, standing up and grabbing him by the elbow. “Why don’t we all go get some fresh air?”
I’d never seen my parents like this—Mom totally unhinged, Dad aggressive and belligerent. It made me feel a little jittery, so I walked away, toward the door that led to the wardress’s office. A few minutes of peace and quiet would do me good.
Part of what bothered me was that I didn’t actually remember what had happened. Did I pull that protective screen away from the window? It seemed unlikely that they’d be wrong about something that evident.
Did I really …
I shied away from the question, trying to suppress it under a bushel of other, marginally less troubling thoughts, but it popped back up anyway.
Did I really jump?
I couldn’t stop myself from asking, but I could refuse to answer. I was at the door to the wardress’s office. Instinctively, I reached for the doorknob, but my hand went right through it.
I tried again, but the same thing happened.
“Sorry, sugar, that’s not how you do it.”
Startled, I looked up and saw a girl watching me. She was a few years older than me and so breathtakingly beautiful that for a second I forgot to think about being dead.
She wasn’t even wearing makeup. Her only ornamentation was ash-blond hair that flowed in graceful waves almost to her waist. Her brown eyes glittered, framed by thick, dark lashes. Her smile was sympathetic, her lips a perfect cupid’s bow. The dress she wore was pale blue cotton, floor length, with a high neck and a white ribbon tied around her slender waist. There was nothing especially fancy about it, but its simple loveliness made me feel like a toad.
And she smelled overwhelmingly of buttercups.
She was a ghost, of course. Another ghost. They were everywhere. I was surrounded by them. I’d been surrounded by them from the moment I stepped inside the stupid building.
“I mean, I suppose you could do it that way,” the ghost said to me. “Well, I could, you couldn’t, not yet—but it’s not worth the trouble.” She had a Southern accent, with soft, rolled Rs and drawn-out vowels.
I stared at the doorknob.
“Shall I show you how?” she asked in her sweetest charm-school voice. “Oh, and how rude of me to not introduce myself. I’m Florence Beauregard.” She pronounced it bo-re-gahhhd, with an airy manner that suggested a refined upbringing.
Florence watched me expectantly, clearly willing to help. But I wanted nothing to do with any ghosts at all, and prettiness and polite manners weren’t enough to change that.
I ignored her and plunged straight ahead, planning to walk right through the door. But instead I ran right into it. My head radiated pain as if it were a real head that had just made contact with a real door. I reached up and tried to rub the ache away.
Florence stood to the side, looking slightly amused, her eyebrows raised. “I told you, that’s not going to work. Let me—”
She came closer, and I jerked away.
“No,” I said. “Just go away. Leave me alone.”
She cocked her head to the side, and her smile evaporated. “All right, sugar. Enjoy yourself.”
She disappeared through the wardress door as if it weren’t even there.
I turned around. The activity level in the lobby had gradually descended from a buzz to a low murmur. While the police officers held little meetings among themselves, my parents now sat on the sofa with Janie, who was asleep with her head in Mom’s lap.
Dad and Mom didn’t look like they were going to be able to sleep. Maybe ever again.
I sat on the floor at their feet. I wanted to lean against Mom’s knees, but I went right through them, which gave me a sick, spinning sensation. So I leaned against the sofa instead.
I didn’t think about being dead, in the larger sense. There was time for that later. For now, I just needed to feel like a member of the family. Oh, the irony—what I wanted most in the whole world was to stay right there with my parents. Safe. Loved. Overprotected. One of the group. Suddenly, nothing else seemed important at all. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why I’d ever been so eager to distance myself from them.
My mother shifted. Her eyes slowly came into focus, and then they trained on the double doors that led out to the front yard. “She’ll walk in,” she said faintly, dazed. “Any minute.”
Dad, who had been zoned out, snapped to attention.
Mom’s free hand drifted over and grabbed his wrist. He tensed and almost pulled away, then sat deathly still, like he was within striking distance of a rattlesnake.
“This isn’t real,” M
om said, her gaze never wavering, her voice growing eerily clear. “This isn’t happening. Watch—I’m going to say her name, and she’s going to walk through those doors.”
“Lisa—”
“Don’t say a word,” Mom said, her voice thick with despair. “We just need to wait a minute. We just need to sit here. And then she’ll come back. I’ll say her name, and she’ll come back.”
Dad closed his eyes. “She won’t come back. She can’t.”
“Yes, she will. She has to. She’s my baby, and she has to come back.”
My father glanced over at Mom, dread on his face. He was about to speak when she cried out in a horrid, jagged voice.
“Delia!” she yelled. “Delia!”
Janie snapped awake and sat up, her eyes wild with fear.
“Stop it!” Dad hissed. “You’re scaring Janie.”
“Why are you saying her name?” my sister asked, struggling to get to her feet. “Is Delia alive? Was this a joke? I knew it was a joke!”
“Delia!” Mom said again. She leapt to her feet and ran to the front door, pulling it open and shouting hoarsely into the morning air. “Delia! Delia! Come back!”
Janie stared at my father, her mouth open. “Daddy? Is Delia really alive?”
“Oh God. Oh God, no.” My father’s face suddenly seemed to crack into a thousand pieces, and Janie collapsed against him. They were both sobbing. I’d never seen my father cry before. Never in my whole life, I realized. My whole life. Which was now over.
The room was in sudden, bewildering chaos. Despite the paramedics who hurried over to try to calm her down, Mom went on calling my name.
“Delia!” My mother’s voice broke. And something inside me broke, too.
“Mom, I’m here!” I yelled, running toward her. “Mom! I’m right here! I can see you! I can hear you!”
She paused.
“I’m here!” I wailed. I couldn’t stop myself. “Look at me, Mom. Just turn and look at me!”
She turned. And I swear—I swear—she looked right at me.
Hope blossomed in my heart. I could take being dead, I could take being a ghost, if my mother could see and hear me. If I just had someone I loved to hold on to, to anchor me and love me and make me feel real.