On impulse I picked up the phone and decided to dial Aunt Marjorie’s number. She answered right away.
“Hey, Aunt Marjorie, it’s me.” I glanced at the clock. “I hope I didn’t interrupt dinner.”
“You didn’t interrupt anything that can’t be heated up later. You know that. It’s good to hear from you. How did the bridge ceremony go?”
“It was okay. There were a lot of people there, but I managed to make it through the whole thing. Other than that I’m just making up some science work with a friend from school who’s tutoring me.”
“They’re making you do more homework?” She sounded outraged, and I smiled. “But the whole time you were here, practically all you did was school stuff.”
“I know. But my science grades really suck. I have to take this big test at the end of summer and pass it, or else I’ll fail for the year.”
“You can do it,” she said. “I have complete confidence in you.” Then she turned serious. “Summertime is for having fun. Are you having fun, Abbey?”
I looked out the window by my desk, thinking hard about my answer. “I don’t know. Saturday was my birthday, and it was hard without Kristen here, you know? But my friend Ben came over; that was kind of awkward. And I just… I don’t know. I have a lot to think about.”
“Oh! I have your birthday card here somewhere. I’m sorry it’s late.”
“Hush,” I said. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
“So what’s the real reason for this phone call?” Aunt Marjorie asked.
“I wanted to talk to you about something. You didn’t question why I came to stay with you, and believe me, you’ll never know how grateful I am for that. But what if the reason I had to leave here isn’t valid anymore? What if I’m not as broken as I thought I was? Is that even possible?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, Abbey. Whatever your reasons were, I’m sure they were valid. That doesn’t mean that things can’t change, get better. Maybe part of realizing where you are now is all because of where you were three months ago.”
“So you think… what? That I had to… experience what I experienced to get better?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Just don’t be too hard on yourself for working through whatever needed to be worked through. You don’t have to carry it around with you forever, you know.”
“How did you get so smart, Aunt Marjorie?”
She laughed. “I can’t tell you all of my secrets. Where’s the fun in that?”
“Okay, okay. I’ll bow to your wisdom and hope to learn your methods one day.”
“That’s what I’m talking ’bout,” she said.
I laughed so hard at that, I had to hold the phone away from my mouth for a second. “Where did you hear that?”
“From a movie.”
Of course.
“Hey… Aunt Marjorie… what was it like for you?” I asked. “Um… falling in love?”
She took my sudden change of topic in stride. “It was exhilarating. And terrifying. The scariest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life. I didn’t know how I could I be so sure.”
“What if you’ve never had a boyfriend before?” I rushed out. “How can you know then?”
“Ahh,” Aunt Marjorie said. “Your friend, hmm?”
“I guess I’m just confused about a lot of stuff right now.” Like how I can be in love with someone who’s dead.
“I’ve always thought that maybe it’s different for everyone,” she said. “But for me, I had to trust my gut. One instant I was seeing your Uncle Gerald as just this good-looking fella, and then bam! It was almost like everything around me slowed down. And I knew.”
I knew exactly what she was describing. I felt that same stopping of time around Caspian, too.
“If you had the chance to spend one more hour with Uncle Gerald, knowing that the pain of losing him would happen all over again, would you do it?”
“Without a doubt,” she said. “I’d give anything to have one more minute with him. I’d take him by the hand, look him in the eye, and tell him that I love him.” Her voice broke on the last word, and I felt the ache of tears gathering. Blinking rapidly, I tried not to let them fall.
“Thanks, Aunt Marjorie.” I cleared my throat. “You’re the best great-aunt I’ve ever had.”
“You’re welcome, sweetheart. Anytime you need me, you call. And you’re the best great-niece I’ve ever had too.”
She said her good-byes, and I hung up the phone. I had a full mind and heavy heart.
I bided my time the next day, willing two thirty to come faster. For some odd reason I’d decided that two thirty was the perfect time to head to the cemetery, and I was counting down the seconds.
Finally, at two p.m., I changed into a red-and-white checkered sundress and spent an inordinate amount of time on my hair. It was precisely 2:32 when I left the house, and I told myself to try to walk at a normal pace.
But when those cemetery gates came into view, my heart flip-flopped inside my chest, and I quickened my speed. My feet flew as I followed the path, and I found myself standing in front of Caspian’s mausoleum.
Tugging nervously at my dress, I moved to the door and opened it. Then I realized what I’d forgotten to do, and stopped to glance behind me. No one was in sight, so I slipped inside.
I noticed right away that he’d lit more candles. The room was now clearly illuminated. Caspian was bent over one of his makeshift tables, with a candle resting on the box before him. He held up a finger to motion for me to wait.
“I didn’t know when you’d get here. I’m almost done.” His hands were shaping something. Flashes of silver caught the light, and I noticed a peculiar scent in the air. Like a wire burning.
“What’s that smell?”
“It’s my soldering iron. I was using it earlier.” He held whatever it was he’d been working on up to the light and inspected it. A moment later he nodded and then turned to me.
I suddenly grew shy. “Hi.…”
“Hi.” He palmed the item and walked over. “I thought you might change your mind. Why’d you come back, Abbey?”
How do I answer that? “Curiosity,” I blurted out. “I have lots of questions.”
“Oh. Right.” His face fell, and he turned away. I took a step forward and put a hand out to touch him, then let it fall to my side.
“What do you want to know?” He shoved the item he’d been holding into his back pocket.
“Tell me what that first day was like. The car crash. And after. What do you remember? How did you get here?” Are you buried here? was on the tip of my tongue, but I held it back.
Caspian glanced up and then ran his fingers through his hair. “You don’t start with the easy ones, do you? What’s my favorite color, when’s my birthday…”
“Oh, I want to know those things too, but later.”
He closed his eyes. “It was the day after Halloween. I remember that.… My dad wanted me to get a part for him at a junkyard. I went to go pick it up, but I got the wrong one. When I got home, Dad yelled that I’d never learn, never get a real job, if I didn’t start paying attention. I shot back some smart-ass comment about how I didn’t want to be a grease-monkey like him. Didn’t want dirty fingernails and split knuckles for the rest of my life. Then I took off.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me, but I could tell he wasn’t really seeing me.
“I was going to go back and get the right part. I don’t know if he ever knew that. I never told him.…” Sadness was all over his face, and I ached to put my arms around him.
But I couldn’t.
“The next thing I remember… I was sitting on the side of the road. Just sitting there. It was dark, and when I tried to figure out where I was, I had this big, gaping hole in my memory. It was like the hangover from hell without the nausea.”
Since my alcohol experience was limited to occasional sips of wine at special dinners and weddings, I didn’t know what the han
gover from hell felt like. But I did know about that gaping black hole. I’d experienced the same thing when Kristen died.
“Was there anyone around? Cops, firemen, random people?”
Caspian shook his head. “No. I was alone, and my car was gone. Now that I think about it, there wasn’t even any glass or anything on the road. I don’t know how much time had passed. I just ended up walking back to the house. Dad was asleep when I got there, so I went to bed too. Figured I’d get my car back in the morning.”
He hesitated, then started pacing back and forth. “I must have slept… or something… for a while, because I think it was a couple of days later when I woke up. I’m not sure why, but time passes differently for me now. Faster.” He glanced over at one of the boxes, and I followed his gaze to the alarm clock sitting in there.
“That’s why I have that,” he said, pointing to it. “I had to set it to go off every time I was supposed to be meeting you.”
“Time moves faster? How?”
“I can’t explain it. But when I close my eyes, I kind of fall into this void. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s my body going to an astral plane, or heaven… or wherever it is I’m supposed to be.”
“Do you find yourself visiting yourself in the past or future?” I joked. “Are you wearing chains? Or do you hang out in the attic of old houses?”
He looked at me blankly.
“You know. Ghosts of Christmas Past and Christmas Future? Haven’t you ever seen that Bill Murray movie Scrooged ? And the chains and the attic are from haunted houses. Technically, you are a ghost.”
“Thanks for the reminder,” Caspian said.
Open mouth, insert foot.
“But no, no chains or haunted houses. Just calendar pages flipping faster and faster. What’s a day for you can be a week for me. Or a month. Whenever I said I’d meet you at a specific time, I’d have to set the alarm to make sure I didn’t miss it.”
“Why close your eyes and go into this black void thingy at all then? Why not just stay awake the entire time? Do you need to sleep?”
He looked me directly in the eye. “It’s not like when I was alive. I don’t need sleep. Sometimes, this weariness comes over me…” He paused, then said, “Have you ever felt time crawling? Have you ever been so desperate to make the hours disappear that you’ll do anything? Do you know what that feels like?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “When Kristen died. After her funeral. After I met you… I couldn’t sleep. My dreams were awful, so I forced myself to stay awake. It got so bad that I started to think that Kristen was there with me. That she’d… come back.”
His eyes were understanding. “Sometimes I’d go weeks at a time and not wake up.”
“What changed?” I held my breath waiting for his answer.
“You,” he said. “I saw you and Kristen here, and around you I could see color. I knew that meant you were different.”
I cracked a smile. “What did you see—my aura?”
“No. I saw your beauty.”
My heart lurched and started beating triple time. It was thumping so hard that I put one hand to my chest, afraid it would break right through.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “What’s wrong? Do you need to sit down?”
His concern for me was adorable. “I’m fine. I don’t need to sit down. You just need to give a girl some warning when you’re going to say something like that. It sends my heart into quivers.”
Caspian suddenly looked all bashful and shy. I liked that almost as much as I liked him being worried about me. But I took pity on the poor boy. “Tell me what happened with your dad. When you finally woke up.”
“I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t answer. I thought maybe he was just pissed about the car thing, so I went outside to give him some space. Saw some people on the sidewalk and said something to them. They ignored me too.”
He paced over to the bench and sat down. He looked sad. I moved toward the bench too and sat next to him.
“For days… or weeks… I don’t really know which, I walked the streets. Screaming at the top of my lungs. Trying to stop every person I came across. Searching for someone to tell me what was going on. I even went to the police station. Threw myself in one of their chairs and waited all day. Nothing changed.”
I shook my head, horrified at what he was saying. “Did you… did things… people… pass through you?”
Caspian didn’t answer. Just looked at me. I wanted to touch him so badly that I locked my fingers together so I didn’t forget again and reach out. “You must have felt like you were going crazy,” I whispered. “Like everyone around you was a part of something connected, but you had broken loose.”
“That’s exactly what it felt like.”
“How did you get here? To the cemetery?” I asked him. “Are you… ?”
“I’m not buried here. And for a while I just stayed in my old room. It wasn’t hard. I didn’t get hungry or thirsty, so I never needed food. I tried not to move anything in case my dad noticed, but he wouldn’t come into my room, so eventually I just stopped caring. That worked until—” He broke off.
“Until?” I prodded.
He got a funny look on his face, somewhere between horror and frustration. “Have you ever watched all of your stuff being hauled away? Seen your parents put the contents of your life into garbage bags and set them outside at the curb? Like yesterday’s trash? He put a tarp over the bags… ,” he said slowly.
I forgot then, or remembered, but I just didn’t care. I grabbed for his hand.
And hit solid bench as it went right through.
He looked down, startled.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just… Oh God, Caspian. That’s awful. And terrible. No parent should ever do that.”
Caspian shook his head. “I don’t blame my dad. He waited long enough. It was time to move on with his life.”
He traced the ornate scrollwork on the arm of the bench before speaking again. “I followed the trucks that took my stuff. I thought they were going to the dump, but they went to Goodwill. So I waited until it got dark and jimmied the lock on the store. Filled one of the bags with my art stuff, some clothes, and a couple of books.”
“I went to the high school and stayed there for a while. Sometimes I’d wander the halls when the bell rang, just to feel like I was a part of something again. I thought that if I tried hard enough, brushed shoulders with them long enough, that someone would know. Someone had to see me or feel me.”
A mischievous look spread across his face, and I was struck again by his gorgeousness. My heart was rapidly melting at the sight of him.
“I have to admit though, it wasn’t that bad there. Perhaps you’ve heard of the urban legend about my school?”
I cocked my head to one side. “Enlighten me.”
“The legend says that the White Plains High School boys’ bathroom is haunted. Oddly enough, strange things only happen when the jocks are beating up on the freshmen.”
“I take it that was you?”
“Maybe. Nothing makes a football player scream faster than the words ‘You are going to end up with bad hair plugs and tiny balls by the time you’re thirty’ suddenly appearing on the mirror.”
“Steroids?”
He flashed a smile. “Exactly. That’s why the biggest ones always screamed the loudest. The plumbing is awful too. Sinks randomly turning on, toilets that won’t flush at the most inopportune times.”
“Why didn’t you stay there? Practicing random acts of… non–toilet flushing?”
“Summer came. School let out. Everything was stale and tired. Then eventually I started growing more and more used to the quiet. The dust. I knew that when school let back in, I wouldn’t want to be around all those people anymore. This place came to mind, and I figured it would be perfect. It took me three days of searching to find a mausoleum that was open.”
“So then… you just keep your stuff here and in your spare time hang out with the crazy girl
who can see you?”
“Crazy beautiful,” he said with a half smile. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”
Chapter Eleven
SHADOW PUPPETS
The sequestered situation of this church seems always to have made it a favorite haunt of troubled spirits.
—“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
While waiting for Ben at our next tutoring session, I was practically vibrating with energy. Things were going so well with Caspian, and Mom and Dad were being cool too. And if sometimes, late at night in bed, I questioned whether or not I truly was insane, I told myself that it didn’t matter. I was too happy to care.
Ben came in and sat down, but I noticed right away that he was acting fidgety. “Ben?” I said. “What’s up? You look worried.”
He glanced at the table. “I just, uh, didn’t want things to be awkward… after the other night.”
“I am so sorry about that. My mom—”
“No, not that. Your mom was fine. I meant me. Us. Me leaving. I’m sorry.”
I’d already forgotten about that. “No big. We’re cool.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yup. Now let’s get started.”
“Okay. Do you have a highlighter? We’re going to need one for this next section.”
“Let me check the junk drawer,” I said. “I think there’s one in there.”
I dug through a pile of old batteries, rubber bands, burned-out lightbulbs (Seriously? Why are we keeping those?), and years-past-their-expiration-date coupons, but I couldn’t locate a highlighter.
“Not here,” I told him. “Let me run upstairs. I know I have one in my room.”
When I reached my bedroom, I went right for the supply box that was stashed under my work desk. As soon as I felt the capped end of a highlighter, I pulled it free. A small piece of paper was stuck to it, and drifted to the floor. I recognized it right away.
It was the recipe for peppermint tea that Katy had given me for Christmas last year. I’d never even noticed it was missing.