* * *
Zia practiced making spooky noises the whole way back to the ghost boy’s apartment, which didn’t inspire any confidence in me, but once we were outside the building, she turned serious again.
“Is she alone in the apartment?” she asked.
“There’s the ghost boy.”
“I know. But is there anybody in there to look after her? You made it sound like she’d need help to take care of herself.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “There was no one else there last night. I suppose somebody could come by during the day.”
“Well, let’s go see.”
We flew up to the fire escape outside her kitchen window, lost our wings and feathers, and then stepped into the between. A moment later we were standing inside the kitchen. I could only sense the old woman’s presence—at least hers was the only presence I could sense that was alive.
“Oh, Ghost Boy,” Zia called in a loud whisper. “Come out, come out, wherever you are. If you come out, I have a nice little…” She gave me a poke in the shoulder. “What do ghosts like?”
“How should I know?”
She nodded, then called out again. “I have a nice little piece of ghost cake for you, if you’ll just come out now.”
Donald materialized in the kitchen by walking through a wall. He pointed a finger at Zia.
“Who’s she?” he asked.
Zia looked at me.
“You didn’t say he was so rude,” she said before turning back to Donald. “I’m right here, you know. You could ask me.”
“You look like sisters.”
“And yet, we’re not.”
He ignored her, continuing to talk to me. “Is she here to help?”
“There, he’s doing it again,” Zia said.
“This is Zia,” I said. “And Zia, this is Donald.”
“I prefer Ghost Boy,” she said.
“Well, it’s not my name.”
“She’s here to help,” I said.
“Really? So far, all she’s been is rude and making promises she can’t keep.”
Zia bristled at that. “What sort of promises can’t I keep?”
He shrugged. “For starters, I’m here, but where’s my cake?”
They held each other’s gaze for a long moment, and it was hard to tell which of them was more annoyed with the other. Then Zia’s cheek twitched, and Donald’s lips started to curve upward, and they were both laughing. Of course, that set me off too, and soon all three of us were giggling and snickering, Zia and I with our hands over our mouths so that we wouldn’t wake Ghost Boy’s mother.
Donald was the first to recover, but his serious features only set us off again.
“Okay,” he said. “It wasn’t that funny. So why are you still laughing?”
“Because we can,” Zia told him.
“Because we can-can!” I added.
Then Zia and I put our arms around each other’s waist and began to prance about the kitchen like Moulin Rouge can-can dancers, kicking our legs up high in unison. It was funny until my toe caught the edge of the table, which jolted a mug full of spoons, knocking it over and sending silverware clattering all over the floor.
Zia and I stopped dead and we all three cocked our heads.
Sure enough, a querulous cry came from down the hall.
“Who’s out there?” the old woman called. “Is there somebody out there?”
That was followed a moment later by the sound of her getting out of her bed and slowly shuffling down the hall toward us. Long moments later, she was in the doorway and the overhead light came on, a bright yellowy glare that sent the shadows scurrying.
Zia and I had stepped into the between where we could see without being seen, but Donald stayed where he was, leaning against the kitchen counter, his arms folded across his chest. He was frowning when his mother came into the kitchen, the frown deepening when it became apparent that she wasn’t able to see him.
We all watched as the old woman fussed about, trying to gather up the spoons, which, with her poor eyesight, she couldn’t really see. When she was done, there were still errant spoons under the table and in front of the fridge, but she put the mug back on the table, gave the kitchen a last puzzled look, then switched off the overhead light and went back to her bedroom.
Zia and I stepped out of the between, back into the kitchen. Our sudden appearance startled Donald, which was kind of funny, seeing how he was the ghost and ghosts usually did the startling. But I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to set us all off again—or at least it would be enough to set Zia and me off. I could feel that chemical imbalance spilling through me because she was so near—a sudden giddy need to turn sense into nonsense for the sheer fun of it—but I reminded myself why I was here. How, if I didn’t fulfill my promise, I’d be beholden to a ghost for the rest of my days, and if there’s one thing that cousins can’t abide, it’s the unpaid debt, the unfulfilled promise. That’s like flying with a long chain dangling from your foot.
“How did you do that?” Donald asked.
Zia gave him a puzzled look. “Do what?”
“Disappear, then just reappear out of nowhere.”
“We didn’t disappear,” she told him. “We were just in the between.”
I thought he was going to ask her to explain that, but he changed the subject to what was obviously more often on his mind than it wasn’t.
“Did you see?” he asked us. “She was standing right in front of me and she didn’t even notice me. Dead or alive, she’s never paid any attention to me.”
“Well, you are a ghost,” Zia said.
I nodded. “And humans can’t usually see ghosts.”
“A mother should be able to see her own son,” he said, “whether he’s a ghost or not.”
“The world is full of shoulds,” Zia said, “but that doesn’t make them happen.”
It took him a moment to work through that. When he did, he gave a slow nod.
“Here’s another should,” he said. “I should never have gotten my hopes up that anyone would help me.”
“We didn’t say we wouldn’t or that we couldn’t,” Zia said.
I nodded. “I made you a promise.”
“And cousins don’t break promises,” Zia added. “It’s all we have for coin and what would it be worth if our word had no value?”
“So you’re cousins,” he said.
He didn’t mean it the way we did. He was thinking of familial ties, while for us it was just an easy way to differentiate humans from people like us, whose genetic roots went back to the first days in the long ago—people who weren’t bound to the one shape the way regular humans and animals are.
Instead of explaining, I just nodded.
“Show me your sister’s room,” Zia said.
Donald led us down the hall to Madeline’s bedroom. He walked through the closed door, but I stopped to open it before Zia and I followed him inside.
“It’s very girly,” Zia said as she took in the all the lace and dolls and the bright frothy colours. Then she pointed to the pennants and trophies. “But sporty, too.”
“Not to mention clean,” Donald said. “You should see my room. Mother closed the door the day I died and it hasn’t been opened since.”
“I’ve been in there,” I said.
“But Maddy’s room,” he went on as though I hadn’t spoken. “Mother makes sure the cleaning lady sees to it every week—before she tackles any other room in the apartment.”
“Why do you think that is?” Zia asked.
“Because so far as my mother was concerned, the sun and moon rose and set on my sister Maddy.”
“But why did she think that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You told me something the last time I was here,” I said. “Something about how maybe you reminded her too much of your father….”
“Who abandoned us,” he finished. “That’s just something Maddy thought.”
Zia nodd
ed. “Well, let’s find out. Did your sister call you Donald?”
“What?”
“Your sister. What did she call you?”
“Donnie.”
“Okay, good. That’s all I needed.”
“Hey, wait!” Donald said as she pulled back the covers and got into the bed.
Zia pretended he hadn’t spoken.
“You two should hide,” she said.
“But—”
“We don’t want your mother to see anybody but me.”
“Like she could see me.”
That was true. But the mother could see me.
I didn’t know what Zia was up to, but I went over to the closet and opened the door, pulling it almost closed it again so that I was standing in the dark in a press of dresses and skirts and tops with just a crack to peer through. Donald let out a long theatrical sigh, but after a moment he joined me.
“Mama, Mama!” Zia cried from the bed, her voice the high and frightened sound of a young girl waking from a bad dream.
Faster than she’d come into the kitchen earlier, the mother appeared in the doorway and crossed the room to the bed. She hesitated beside it, staring down at where Zia was sitting up with her arms held out for comfort. I could see the confusion in the old woman’s half-blind gaze, but all it took was for Zia to call “Mama” one more time, and a mother’s instinct took over. She sat on the edge of the bed, taking Zia in her arms.
“I…I was so scared, Mama,” Zia said. “I dreamed I was dead.”
The old woman stiffened. I saw a shiver run from her shoulders all the way down her arms and back. Then she pressed her face into Zia’s hair.
“Oh, Maddy, Maddy,” she said, her voice a bare whisper. “I wish it was a dream.”
Zia pulled back from her, but took hold of her hands.
“I am dead, Mama,” she said. “Aren’t I?”
The old woman nodded.
“But then why am I here?” Zia asked. “What keeps me here?”
“M-maybe I…I just can’t let you go….”
“But you don’t keep Donnie here. Why did you let him go and not me?’
“Oh, Maddy, sweetheart. Don’t talk about him.”
“I don’t understand. Why not? He’s my brother. I loved him. Didn’t you love him?”
The old woman looked down at her lap.
“Mama?” Zia asked.
The old woman finally lifted her head. “I…I think I loved him too much,” she said.
The ghost boy had no physical presence, standing beside me here in the closet, but I could feel his sudden tension as though he were flesh and blood—a prickling flood of interest and shock and pure confusion.
“I still don’t understand,” Zia said.
The old woman was quiet for so long I didn’t think she was going to explain. But she finally looked away from Zia, across the room, her gaze seeing into the past rather than what lay in front of her.
“Donnie was a good boy,” she said. “Too good for this world, I guess, because he was taken from it while he was still so young. I knew he’d grow up to make me proud—at least I thought I did. My eyesight’s bad now, sweetheart, but I think I was blinder back then because I never saw that he wouldn’t get the chance to grow up at all.”
Her gaze returned to Zia before Zia could speak.
“But you,” the old woman said. “Oh, I could see trouble in you. You were too much like your father. Left to your own devices, I could see you turning into a little hellion. That you could be as bad as he was, if you were given half a chance. So I kept you busy—too busy to get into trouble, I thought—but I didn’t do any better of a job raising you than I did him.
“You were both taken so young and I can’t help but feel that the blame for that lay with me.”
She fell silent, but I knew Zia wasn’t going to let it go, even though we had what we needed.
The ghost boy’s mother did remember him.
She had loved him.
I’d fulfilled my part of the bargain and I wanted to tell Zia to stop. I almost pushed open the closet door. I’d already raised my hand and laid my palm against the wood paneling, but Donald stopped me before I could actually give it a push.
“I need to hear this,” he said. “I…I just really do.”
I let my hand fall back to my side.
“But why don’t you ever talk about Donnie?” Zia asked. “Why is his room closed up and forgotten and mine’s like I just stepped out for a soda?”
“When I let him die,” the old woman said, after another long moment of silence, “all by himself, swelled up and choking from that bee sting…” She shook her head. “I was so ashamed. There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about it…about him…but I keep it locked away inside. It’s my terrible secret. Better to let the world not know that I ever had a son, than that I let him die the way he did.”
“Except you didn’t kill him.”
“No. But I did neglect him. If I’d been here instead of driving you to some piano class or gym meet or whatever it was that day, he’d still be alive.”
“So it’s my fault….”
“Oh no, honey. Don’t even think such a thing. I was the one who made all the wrong choices. I was the one who thought he didn’t need attention, but that you did. Except I was wrong about that, too. Look what happened to Donnie. And look how you turned out before…before…”
“I died.”
She nodded. “You were a good girl. You were the best daughter a mother could have had. I was so proud of you, of all you’d achieved.”
“And my room…”
“I keep it and your memory alive because it’s the only thing left in this world that can give me any pride. It’s the light that burns into the darkness and lets me forget my shame. Not always. Not for long. But even the few moments I can steal free of my shame are a blessed respite.”
She fell silent again, head bowed, unable to look at what she thought was the ghost of her daughter.
Zia turned and glanced at where I was peering at her from the crack I’d made with the closet door. I knew her well enough to know what she was thinking. It was never hard. All I had to do was imagine I was in her shoes, and consider what I would say or do or think.
I turned to Donald.
“Is there anything you want to tell your mother?” I whispered.
He gave me a slow nod.
“Then just tell Zia and she’ll pass it on to your mother.”
He gave me another nod, but he still didn’t speak.
“Donald?” I said.
“I don’t know what to say. I mean, there’s a million things I could say, but none of them seem to matter anymore. She’s beating herself up way more than any hurt I could have wished upon her.”
I reached out a comforting hand, but of course I couldn’t touch him. Still, he understood the gesture. I think he even appreciated it.
“And I don’t even wish it on her anymore,” he added. “But then…while I feel bad about what she’s going through, at the same time I still feel hurt for the way she ignored me.”
I opened the door a little more, enough to catch Zia’s eye. She inclined her head to show that she understood.
“I’ve talked to Donnie,” Zia said. “In the, you know. The hereafter. Before he went on.”
The old woman lifted her head and looked Zia in the eye.
“You…you have?”
Zia nodded. “He understands, but he really wishes you’d celebrate his life the way you do mine. It…hurts him to think that you never think of him.”
“Oh, God, there’s not a day goes by that I don’t think of him.”
“He knows that now.”
Zia’s gaze went back to me and I made a continuing motion with my hand.
“And he wants,” she went on, then caught herself. “He wanted you to know that he’ll always love you. That he never held you to blame for what happened to him.”
The old woman put her arms around Zia.
r /> “Oh, my boy,” she said. “My poor, poor boy.”
“He wants you to be happy,” Zia said. “We both do.”
The woman shook her head against Zia’s shoulder.
“I don’t even know the meaning of the word anymore,” she said.
“Will you at least try?”
The old woman sat up and dabbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her housecoat.
“How does one even begin?” she said.
“Well, sometimes, if you pretend you’re happy, you can trick yourself into at least feeling better.”
“I don’t think I could do that.”
“Try by celebrating our lives,” Zia said. “Remember both your children with love and joy. There’ll always be sadness, but try to remember that it wasn’t always that way.”
“No,” the old woman said slowly. “You’re right. It wasn’t. I don’t know if you can even remember, but we were once a happy family. But then Ted left and I had to go back to work, and you children…you were robbed of the life you should have had.”
“It happens,” Zia said—a touch too matter-of-factly for the ghost of a dead girl, I thought, but the old woman didn’t appear to notice.
“It’s time for me to go, Mama,” Zia added. “Will you let me go?”
“Can’t you stay just a little longer?”
“No,” Zia said. “Let me walk you back to your bed.”
She got up and the two of them left the room, the old woman leaning on Zia.
“I’m going to wake up in the morning,” I heard the old woman say from the hall, “and this will all have just been a dream.”
“Not if you don’t want it to,” Zia told her. “You’ve got a strong will. Look how long you kept me from moving on. You can remember this—everything we’ve talked about—for what it really was. And if you try hard, you can be happy again.”
* * *
Donald and I waited in the bedroom until Zia returned.
“Is she asleep?” I asked.
Zia nodded. “I think all of this exhausted her.” She turned to Donald. “So, how do you feel now?”
“I feel strange,” he said. “Like there’s something tugging at me…trying to pull me away.”