The visitors, p.9
The Visitors, page 9
The visitors huddle close together in front of the fireplace. They look like a painting—all standing there reaching out for the warmth. Goldie lies at their feet, her eyes locked on the dancing flames like the fire is putting a spell on her.
The storm has settled down for the moment, but it hasn’t completely died off. A steady but less irritable drumbeat of rainfall plays across the roof, filling the house with an easy and constant rhythm that’s almost soothing.
Thomas is the first to ease down onto the floor. He sits facing the fire, leaning against Goldie’s back and hugging his knees. It doesn’t take long for his friends to join him, so I reckon I should too. I sit next to Thomas but not close enough to get Goldie all riled up. She’s already sending plenty of sideways glances and curious sniffs my way, but luckily, she doesn’t seem overly bothered by me now. I hope she can sense that I’m one of the good ones.
“Things still bad at home?” Mateo asks Thomas kind of cautiously. “With Sheila?”
Maya jerks her head in Thomas’s direction, like Mateo’s prying just gave her permission to ask a question she’s been holding in for a while. “Do they still make you call her Mom?”
Without looking her way, Thomas nods. A darkness passes over his face.
Mateo lets out a long sigh. “Dude, that is so messed up. I mean, just because your mom died doesn’t mean she never existed.”
The weariness I saw in Thomas’s eyes when the visitors first got here has returned, and now I understand.
“Don’t use that word, little brother,” Maya says.
“What word?” Mateo asks, looking at her with scrunched eyebrows.
“Died,” Maya says, bumping his arm with her elbow.
“What’s wrong with died?” Mateo asks.
“I don’t know.” Maya shrugs. “It sounds harsh.”
“Well, what am I supposed to say?” he asks. “I don’t think kicked the bucket is a very nice way of putting it.”
Thomas winces at that, but he doesn’t look away from the fire. I want to reach out and touch him, put a hand on his or something. I don’t think it would make him feel any better, though. It would just scare him.
“Shut up,” Maya snaps. This time she doesn’t bump her brother with her elbow—she punches his shoulder. “Just say deceased or passed away.”
Mateo looks at her a second or two like he’s deciding if she’s right about this or not. He turns to Thomas. “I’m sorry, dude. I didn’t mean any disrespect. You know how much we liked your mom.”
Thomas glances over at him for a second and then back to the fire. “It’s okay. It doesn’t really matter what you call it. She’s gone. The family I’ve always known is gone too.” Thomas pushes his hair away from his forehead. His eyes with their long, lazy lashes go hard on a dime. “My dad has certainly moved on.” The hard edge in his eyes is slipping into his voice. “He only waited a year before he started dating Sheila and only four months more before he married her. Now there’s a stranger living in our house, sleeping in my mom’s bed, moving everything, changing everything.”
When neither of the twins respond, he shakes his head a little. “Sorry.” He looks over at Maya, shifting their attention. “How are things with your parents these days?”
Maya lets out a heavy sigh. “Mom is trying. She mostly gets the pronouns right.”
“But not Dad,” Mateo adds quickly. “He still calls her Marco sometimes. It’s messed up.”
Maya doesn’t look at her twin. Just keeps staring into the fire, her eyes getting glassier by the second. I can’t tell if it’s the reflection of the flames or something else. After a quiet moment, her jaw stiffens, and her eyes lose their gloss.
“Dad says it’s a phase and that I’ll grow out of it,” Maya says. “I tell him it’s not, but he won’t listen.”
I look from one glowing orange face to the next. I really want to speak up and ask the visitors what the heck they’re talking about.
Pronouns?
What phase?
And why would Maya’s dad call her Marco?
“It’s hard enough at school with all the teasing and name-calling,” Maya adds. “It should be easier at home.” She peers into Thomas’s eyes. “And with my best friend.”
Thomas stiffens, averting his gaze from Maya. I shift a little on the floor, feeling like I’m intruding on something very private. After a few moments of waiting for a response from Thomas but not getting any, Maya seems to let it go with a resigned sigh.
“Besides,” she says, her tone instantly lighter, “I can’t compete with Mateo when it comes to Dad anyway.”
Mateo rolls his eyes and shakes his head.
Thomas relaxes, now that the attention is off him, and his mouth eases into a grin. “Your dad is a little obsessed with you, dude.”
“I wish he wasn’t,” Mateo says.
“You’re his last hope for a son, little brother.”
A sheepish grin creeps up on Mateo’s face. “Yeah, thanks for that, sis.”
Thomas and Maya both chuckle. I feel bad for Mateo, though, so I don’t.
“Seriously, though, it really stresses me out,” Mateo says.
“Your dad?” Thomas asks.
Mateo nods, eyes glued to the fire. “Dad, my grades, the sports, the Scouts, my sister being trans.”
Mateo stops himself and looks over at Maya. “Sorry, you know what I mean.”
Maya gives him a shy smile and nods. “I know. And I’m sorry. Not for the being-trans part, but that it affects you too—not always in fun ways.”
I ponder the unfamiliar word. Trans? No idea what it means, but it sounds like something important. Something that Maya is.
Mateo nods at his sister, his face softening. “My anxiety is just through the roof lately. My head feels like it weighs a hundred pounds sometimes.”
Mateo’s words rattle something loose deep inside my brain. I remember Will feeling that way sometimes. He talked about his head feeling heavy and his chest feeling tight. I wonder if he had the same thing that Mateo does.
“Is the new medication helping?” Thomas asks.
Mateo shrugs. “I can’t tell a difference yet. Other than this one makes me sleepy a lot.”
Thomas nods at his friend and then they all go back to staring into the flames, soaking in the warmth of the fire and silently comforting one another. I look at them one at a time, realizing that they’re not all easy laughter and playful ribbing. They’re too young to have such complicated lives. But I guess all kids are. I know I was.
Maya gets up to retrieve Mateo’s backpack. “Well, since we’re stuck here, we might as well get back to Finding Will.” She digs out the recorder and the headphones and passes them over to Thomas.
“Right,” Thomas says, plugging the headphones into the recorder. He slips them over his head, letting them rest on his neck.
The brief tension between Thomas and Maya seems to have disappeared for the moment.
“Maybe you should talk about what we know about Will Perkins—before he came to Hollow Pines that day,” Maya says.
“Yeah,” Mateo says, his excitement level rising instantly. “Like what kind of student he was, if he had any friends, and who might want to hurt him and stuff.”
The hair on the back of my neck prickles to attention. I know I didn’t want to hurt Will that day. Things must have gotten out of hand. And if Frankie Dimery was here, like the visitors said earlier, I could see that happening.
“Who was Will Perkins?” Thomas says in his newscaster voice.
He has the headphones over his ears now and holds the recorder close to his mouth as he paces in front of the fire.
“Will was a straight-A student at Winyah Junior High. His favorite subjects were language arts and history. He held a perfect attendance record for Sunday school at Prince Street Pentecostal Holiness Church and he loved riding his bike. According to those who knew him, even though Will didn’t have a lot of friends, he was nice to everyone he met.”
I watch Thomas with my mouth hanging open a little. It’s almost like he’s reading from a script about Will’s life, but he’s not reading at all. He has the facts about Will memorized. It’s true that Will didn’t have many friends, now that I think about it. But Will and I were friends—once. Before I turned on him.
A low hum sounds upstairs. Soft at first, then louder—slowly morphing into a familiar sad melody and drawing the visitors’ frozen stares to the ceiling. I’m not even sure if they’re still breathing, because their faces have turned to stone. I should have known that Miss Rebecca wouldn’t stay quiet for long with strangers wandering around her house, breaking her furniture and starting fires in her living room and such.
Maya slowly rises to her feet. “Okay. That is definitely not the wind.”
Mateo stands, backing away from the fireplace, like that’s where the humming is coming from. “I told you.” His voice cracks. “Someone is in the house.”
Goldie pushes up on her haunches, directing a menacing growl upstairs.
Thomas stands. Looks at the ceiling but doesn’t say anything.
“What do we do?” Mateo asks, panic tightening his voice.
“I think someone is trying to scare us off,” Maya says, looking from Mateo to Thomas with more questions in her eyes than answers.
But Miss Rebecca’s not just trying to scare them off. She’s upset. Agitated. Her broken spirit has been disturbed again. And if Miss Rebecca gets all riled up, there’s a good chance Jackson Culpepper the Third will too.
Maya picks up one of the broken-off chair legs that hasn’t been thrown into the fire yet. She grips it in her right hand like a club, even though she doesn’t seem one hundred percent certain about her next move. Thomas lifts the recorder toward the ceiling as he eases over to the staircase.
“Dude,” Mateo exclaims in an urgent whisper. “What are you doing? Let’s go!”
Thomas shushes him with a finger to his lips.
Maya nods. “Yeah, I have to agree with Mateo on this one.”
But Thomas pays them no mind. He stands at the bottom of the staircase, holding up the recorder.
“Thomas!” Mateo whisper-shouts.
Thomas turns back to them. “What if someone is up there and they’re hurt? What if they need help?”
Maya shakes her head, still gripping the chair leg like a club. But she hesitates. “I don’t know, T. I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.”
Mateo edges toward the front door. “Come on. Let’s just get out of here.”
“And go where?” Thomas says, lowering the recorder and pressing the center button to stop it. “Are you really going to walk all the way home in that storm?”
Mateo clenches his jaw. His nostrils flare. “Yes.”
But his eyes don’t look so sure. And if I can see that, I’m sure Thomas can too. Both boys look at Maya—waiting for her to choose sides, I guess. Gritting her teeth, Maya stomps her foot a little. I don’t know who’s going to win this standoff, but I have to be prepared.
I sail around Thomas and Goldie, and I’m up the stairs and at the nursery door before I hear Thomas take another step. I don’t know how I’m going to persuade Miss Rebecca to stay quiet and out of sight. I just need to calm her down and convince her that I can handle the visitors. And I’m pretty sure I can, but it’ll take what Teacherman sometimes calls extreme measures.
I need to let them see me.
11
MISS REBECCA DOESN’T even look up when I pass through the door of the nursery. I find her right where I knew she would be—sitting in the rocking chair by the window and holding the ratty old baby doll in her arms like it’s the real living baby Ford. She’s wearing the dingy white nightgown that she died in and she’s humming the lullaby. Sometimes it sounds more like a moan than a hum—or like a record player slowed way down. Her messy hair is piled on top of her head like a big mound of dried Spanish moss. Her pale face is still kind of pretty, but her eyes are cold, resting lifeless and gray in their sockets.
“Miss Rebecca,” I say quietly, not wanting to startle her. We lost souls can be startled too, you know.
She stops humming and looks up at me, a sad smile stretching out her face.
“Boy?” she says. “Is that you? Come over here and look at baby Ford. He’s sleeping like a precious little angel.”
I do as I’m told, slipping in beside her and peering down at the baby doll’s cracked, bald head. Moldy patches dot its face, a chunk of plastic is missing from its left cheek, and one eye hangs out of the socket by a thread. A small black spider crawls out of the empty eye hole, skittering down the doll’s good cheek like a creepy giant teardrop with eight furry legs.
“Yes, ma’am,” I say. “He sure does look like a precious little angel to me.”
Footsteps sound downstairs, moving toward the staircase. I guess Thomas won the standoff. The visitors will be here soon.
“Who’s in my house?” Miss Rebecca asks, a hard look quickly replacing her somber smile. “You get them out of here this instant, boy, before Jackson gets ahold of them.”
“I’ll take care of it, ma’am,” I promise.
She forgets me for a moment and looks back down at the baby doll, the lullaby trapped inside her tightly closed mouth.
I put a finger to my lips. “But you have to be quiet, Miss Rebecca. And it’d be best if you made yourself scarce.”
She jerks her head in my direction, eyes accusing. “I will not leave my baby unattended ever again, boy.” She pauses. A flash of anguish darkens her eyes. She looks down at the doll. “I left him once and I’ll never forgive myself for what happened.”
I stare at her a silent moment and swallow hard, trying to imagine what Miss Rebecca must have felt when she found baby Ford lifeless in his crib. The sound of footsteps on the stairs rouses me out of my grim thoughts.
I touch her arm. “Just for a bit, while I talk to them. I need to explain things to the boy who’s about to come through that door. He’ll understand. He’s really smart.”
She trains her cold, dead eyes on me. “No one is allowed in this room. You know that.”
“Please, Miss Rebecca,” I say. “Give me a few minutes alone to talk with him. Make him understand. I’ll get him out of the nursery as fast as I can.”
The footsteps land right outside the door, a set of two and a set of four.
“Well,” Miss Rebecca says, “I suppose I could give you a few minutes alone with him. But you’ll have to keep rocking baby Ford, so he doesn’t get fussy.”
I stare at her, waiting for her to bust out laughing.
That was a joke, right?
She stands and nudges me into the rocking chair, easing the doll down into my arms.
“Watch his head, boy,” she snaps.
I place one hand under the back of the doll’s head. “Oh, sorry, ma’am.”
I can’t believe that the first time Thomas is going to see me, I’ll be rocking a spider-infested baby doll. It’s not exactly how I imagined our first face-to-face meeting would be.
“Just a few minutes, now, you hear me?” Miss Rebecca points her index finger in my face. “I’ll be over in the corner, watching. And you take real good care of my Ford or I’ll take a switch to you. Biggest one I can find.”
I nod real fast, but I don’t say anything, because the doorknob is already turning.
“Hello?” Thomas calls from beyond the door. “Is someone in there? I’m coming in.”
I start to panic, because Miss Rebecca is still visible, patting the top of the baby doll’s head. I hope that spider is gone. I may be dead, but I hate spiders. She’s as good as her word, because the moment the door swings open, Miss Rebecca is nowhere to be seen, at least by the living.
Thomas stands in the open doorway, staring at me, because I let him see me now. And what he sees must look pretty strange to him—a boy about his own age sitting in a rocking chair, holding a busted-up baby doll. Goldie stands next to him, the hairs on her back rising to attention. She growls at me. I think she was just starting to get used to me when I was invisible. But seeing me is a different thing altogether. She calms down at Thomas’s touch. He holds on to her collar just in case, and I think that’s really nice of him to do. I’m sure Goldie will like me this way just fine once she gets to know me.
“Hello?” Thomas says, like he’s asking.
Maybe he doesn’t believe his own eyes. I can understand. I realize that a few seconds have passed and I haven’t said anything back, which is rude of me.
“Hello,” I say finally.
Thomas steps inside the room, still holding on to Goldie’s collar with one hand and the recorder with the other, the headphones resting around his neck. “We heard moaning or humming or something. Are you okay?”
I give him my best I-am-not-a-scary-ghost smile. “I’m fine. Thank you for asking. Are you okay?”
His forehead creases. “Um. Yeah. I guess so.”
Thomas eases closer, pulling Goldie along with him. She sneezes with her whole head.
“What are you doing here?” Thomas asks. “Are you alone?”
I ignore the second question and answer the first, glancing down at the baby doll and back up. “I was sitting here, rocking and singing.”
Another step closer. Another Goldie sneeze.
“We were just looking around. We didn’t know anyone else was here.” Thomas’s eyes linger on the doll a moment. “What’s that you have there?”
My cheeks go hot in an instant and I stand. I take the baby doll over to the rickety old crib in the corner of the room. Gently, so Miss Rebecca doesn’t get upset, I give the doll a kiss on the forehead before laying it down inside the crib on its back, the way Grandma said you’re supposed to. That should make Miss Rebecca happy, but it probably looks real creepy to Thomas. That can’t be helped, I guess.
