A Curious Tale of the In-Between

by Lauren DeStefano

  Pram’s aunts looked at each other, clearly taken aback by this boy who spoke so politely. They had raised Pram to be just as polite, but they functioned under the belief that other children were about as formal as wolves. They couldn’t decide if this level of politeness made them feel delighted or nervous.

  Aunt Dee handed Clarence a blank recipe card and the pen they used to write down phone messages.

  “Edmund Blue,” he wrote in the practiced handwriting Pram admired. Below that, he wrote his father’s phone number.

  “‘Edmund Blue,’” Aunt Nan read aloud. “Not the one who owns the refinery?”

  “The very same,” Clarence said.

  Pram didn’t know what was so remarkable about the refinery or why it mattered who owned it.

  “Be back by six thirty,” Aunt Dee said. “We’ll keep dinner warm for you.”

  “Okay,” Pram said.

  Once she and Clarence were outside, she glanced back at her aunts, who were huddled together behind the window, watching her.

  “How did they know about your father?” she asked.

  “It’s nothing,” Clarence said. “Forget it.”

  As they walked into the horizon, they passed Felix, who was hiding in the pond despite Pram’s warning that it wasn’t for swimming. And Pram couldn’t know the fuss her new friend had caused at the house. She couldn’t know that Clarence Blue was the son of the wealthiest man for miles.

  They walked for half a mile, until the sidewalk turned to a cobblestone path, lit up by the windows of tiny shops. Pram stopped to admire a mannequin adorned in lace and stripes in the dress shop window. Clarence watched her, thinking there was something magical about the way that most ordinary light touched her face.

  He didn’t know how to tell her this, so he bought ice-cream cones from a cart that was just about to close. The man in the striped shirt charged him only half price because it was the end of the day.

  Pram thought the chocolate-raspberry swirl was heavenly. But all she said were “Thank you” and “Where are we going?”

  “Around the block,” Clarence said. “I’ve been by it a few times, but I was never brave enough to go inside. I’d have needed tickets anyway.”

  “Can I see the tickets?” Pram asked, biting into her ice-cream cone to hear it crunch.

  Clarence reached into his shirt pocket and retrieved the tickets. Though they were brand-new, the coloring made them look like antiques, Pram thought. People took more stock in things that were old. LADY SAVANT’S SPIRIT SHOW–ADMIT ONE was printed on each ticket.

  “Clarence,” she said, and paused as she thought of a delicate way to word things. “What is it you’re hoping Lady Savant can tell you?”

  Clarence sat on a bench, and Pram sat beside him. “My mother died in a car accident,” he said. “The doctors said that it happened in an instant. I suppose all I want is a chance to say good-bye. That’s it.”

  “There used to be an elder back at the house,” Pram said. “It must have been one, maybe two years ago. All she ever said was good-bye. You’d bring her the morning tea, and she’d nod and say good-bye. You’d tell her it was time for her bath, and she’d grab her walker and inch toward the bathroom and say good-bye. I would wonder why that was all she said.”

  “What happened to her?” Clarence said.

  “She died in her sleep,” Pram said. “And after, she had children and grandchildren who came by to collect the last of her things. They asked my aunts if she had been in any pain in her last days and what her last words had been. And my aunt Nan told them that her last word had been the same word she’d said every day for weeks: ‘good-bye.’ I hadn’t understood it until then. I suppose she knew that any moment could be her last, and when her family came asking about her, they would know that she had told them good-bye. It’s a small word, but it means a lot, doesn’t it?”

  Clarence nodded. “That’s a sad story,” he said. “But I like it. Not a lot of people get the chance to say good-bye. I guess she knew that.”

  “Yes,” Pram said. “But it is a sad way to live, always thinking about the end.”

  “I don’t think my mother ever thought about the end,” Clarence said. “I bet she thought she was going to live for a hundred years. I thought she would.”

  “I’m sure that she was wonderful,” Pram said.

  As Pram finished her ice-cream cone, Clarence offered her a napkin. He didn’t tell her about the raspberry smudge on her nose, partly to be polite, but mostly because he found it charming.

  After she threw her napkin into the trash, he said, “Shall we?” He offered his arm, and she hooked her elbow around his.

  “We shall,” she said cordially.

  They might have missed the entrance to Lady Savant’s Spirit Show if not for the poster at the mouth of the alleyway. Pram had been in town frequently, but never down its alleys. She didn’t know there was anything in them besides trash bins and maybe some rats.

  Clarence mistook Pram’s hesitation for fear. But really she was looking at the open doorway in the alley. It was a rectangle of yellow light, and from where she stood Pram could smell the incense. There was a man standing by the light, and Pram couldn’t tell if he was living or a ghost. Rarely did she struggle to tell the difference. She could usually tell right away when she was dealing with a ghost. Ghosts looked just like the living, and they even moved as though they were breathing. But there was a certain energy they carried, an urgency to be somewhere that no longer existed, or to do something that could no longer be done.

  But this man, while he appeared to be living, did not seem entirely present. That would be one way to tell if Lady Savant was for real. She could ask Clarence if he saw the man, but if he didn’t, he would know immediately that she was strange.

  Or maybe he already knew. He was staring at her.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “Are you frightened?” he said.

  “No,” Pram said, and stepped forward, tugging him with her.

  “Tickets,” the man at the doorway said. Pram was greatly relieved.

  Clarence presented their tickets and they entered, still arm in arm. Now it was Clarence who felt nervous. He’d worn his nicest button-down shirt today, and spent extra time at the mirror brushing his chestnut-brown curls, all in the hope that his mother would be pleased with his appearance. She had been an elegant woman who cared greatly about such things.

  Pram had given up any hope of meeting her own mother. She’d thought about it, of course—especially when Felix came along, and on the third Sunday of each month, when she and her aunts left flowers at her gravestone. But there was no trace of her mother anywhere. Sometimes the dead had no reason to linger in the living world.

  She once asked Felix if he had known her mother or her father, since he’d been at the tree for so many years. He told her that he remembered a woman splashing about in his pond. Maybe there had been a man with her sometimes; he really couldn’t be expected to have kept track. Time did not pass in the same way for the dead as it did for the living. Pram’s mother and father might as well have existed a million years ago, for all he cared. Pram was the only living thing he cared about, and it was because she was the only living thing who cared about him, too.

  She could see that Clarence was uneasy. “Here,” she said, and pushed away one of the curls that had tumbled over his forehead.

  He smiled gratefully.

  The room was small and crowded. Most of the folding chairs were already full. There were some empty seats in the back, but this was one time Clarence didn’t want to hide. He grabbed a chair from the back and dragged it closer to the stage, and Pram did the same.

  In moving the chairs, they had to let go of each other’s arms, and they both felt a peculiar chill now.

  Pram craned her neck and studied the crowd. They all appeared to be living. They were holding each other’s hands and talking; many of them were sobbing. A ghost wouldn’t think to occupy a chair—like the living, ghosts don’
t care to be sat upon. A ghost would also know to look for someone like Pram; Felix had told her that she buzzed like an electric fence.

  Though the lights were already dim, they dimmed further. The makeshift curtains at the stage (bedsheets, most likely) swished. The man standing at the door called out, “Silence, please, as Lady Savant approaches.”

  Pram didn’t understand the need for the theatrics.

  The sheets/curtains parted, and from them emerged Lady Savant. She was a short, pudgy woman. Her arms were covered in bracelets, and rings sat on her fingers like bejeweled insects. Her hair was in a beehive, and one of her false lashes had come halfway unglued. Pram could see that she was a young woman under all that makeup.

  She didn’t welcome her audience. She didn’t address them at all, except to raise one finger to the crowd and say, “Shh!”

  She sat upon the wooden crate that had been placed on the stage and closed her eyes.

  “My heart is heavy this evening,” she said. “Someone here has lost a loved one to an act of great sadness.”

  Clarence tensed. Pram looked at him, but his eyes were glued to Lady Savant, the reflection of her jewels in his eyes.

  “A car accident?” one woman called out.

  “A diving mishap?” gasped another.

  Lady Savant shook her head furiously, and at last she opened her eyes. “It was a broken heart,” she said.

  Pram was still looking at Clarence and didn’t notice right away that Lady Savant was looking right at her until Clarence nudged her.

  “You,” Lady Savant said. “Did you come here to find someone you’ve lost?”

  “Me?” Pram said, feeling uncomfortable to have so many pairs of eyes on her. Everyone in the room was staring. “I just came with a friend.”

  “But is there anyone who could be looking for you?” Lady Savant said, her voice a theatrical whisper. “Someone who took her own life?”

  “I’m sure there isn’t,” Pram said.

  “Could it be my mother?” Clarence said. “She died in an accident.”

  “Perhaps,” Lady Savant said. “Was she very sad when she died?”

  “Yes,” Clarence said.

  “Could the accident have been on purpose?” Lady Savant said. “A suicide.”

  What an absurd question, Pram thought. An accident happening on purpose.

  “No,” Clarence said. “I’m very sure.”

  “This woman is looking for her young daughter so she can apologize,” Lady Savant said. She looked at Pram again. “Are you certain your mother isn’t looking for you?”

  “Yes,” Pram said. She didn’t know many things about her mother, but she knew that if her mother’s ghost were to visit, the last thing it would want to do is apologize. Pram thought that her mother’s spirit had moved on. Wherever she was now, she must have had no use for a living daughter.

  “Then this spirit is not your mother.”

  Lady Savant turned back to the crowd, this time channeling a man who’d died in the war. No fewer than five women took interest in this spirit.

  Clarence stared at his lap, and Pram ached for him. She didn’t say “I told you so,” which Clarence appreciated greatly because she could have.

  They were both quiet for the remainder of the show.

  Once it was through, Clarence called his father from a pay phone to collect them. It was dark now, and most of the shop windows had gone black.

  Clarence hung up the phone and joined Pram on a bench under a street lamp. She was swinging her feet and staring at her shoes. They were well-polished loafers with a heart-shaped leather pocket that housed a penny in each shoe.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Never mind,” Clarence said. “It was silly of me to have expected anything.”

  “I meant that your mother was sad when she died,” Pram said. “I’m sorry about that.”

  Clarence looked at her. She had since become aware of the raspberry smudge on her nose and wiped it away. No matter. She had a small, pert nose, and it was pretty either way.

  “Was your mother sad?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” Pram said. “All I know is that she had light hair and freckles, and she liked to swim.”

  Clarence had spent nearly a year in the grayness of grief, studying the misplacement of objects and looking for signs of his dead mother. He hadn’t given any thought at all to the living. He’d hidden from life, forgotten his friends, and isolated himself from their symposium of card games, insects, and other simple pleasures that all seemed equally meaningless.

  Until Pram came along and took his seat. And when he’d learned that she was also motherless, he’d thought they could share their grief the way they shared that desk. But Pram didn’t seem to be grieving. She appeared to be incomplete in some other, more mysterious way.

  “What’s it like to be able to remember someone you lost?” Pram asked him. She had lost both of her parents before she was born.

  “It’s like my mother has become an actress in a play,” Clarence said. “And the play isn’t told in order, and sometimes the lines have changed. Sometimes I’m sitting too far away to see her face or hear her voice.”

  “What’s the play about?” Pram asked.

  “It’s all just moments she’s lived before,” Clarence said. “Good ones, mostly. Like how she had a silk scarf wrapped around her neck, and when she drove with the top down in the car, it flew behind her, and the way it fluttered it looked like the entire world was underwater.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” Pram said. It was a proper memory, unlike the black-and-white photo of her own mother that hung over the stairs.

  “It is, sometimes,” Clarence said. “But then, just when it starts to feel real, it disappears.”

  Pram could feel the sadness in his words. Although Clarence was a living boy, sometimes she could sense him just as well as she could sense ghosts. It boggled and intrigued her, and she wondered if it was normal for one living person to be so attuned to another.

  “Tomorrow is Saturday,” Clarence said. “We could do something else, if you’d like. My father will have one of his drivers take us anywhere we want to go.”

  Pram raised her head. The street lamp placed a halo of light in her hair. “Do you like the ocean?” she said.

  CHAPTER

  6

  Every Saturday for the next several weeks, Clarence’s driver brought them to the ocean. Pram wore a heavy sweater and sat on a towel, watching the boats leave the docks. Clarence sat beside her and scanned the newspapers for new spiritualists. Whenever he found a promising lead, Pram accompanied him. Sometimes she saw ghosts and other times she didn’t, but none of the spiritualists ever noticed them.

  Clarence became increasingly sullen, and Pram worried for him. She was beginning to wonder if she should tell him about the things that made her strange. But she worried that her inability to find his mother would anger him. He might not understand that she couldn’t control which ghosts appeared. He might not understand that most people never became ghosts at all.

  Her worry made her less talkative. Clarence noticed and thought he had done something wrong.

  On Sunday afternoon, after a morning confined by the dreary stained-glass windows of the cathedral, Clarence made the half-mile walk to Pram’s house so he could apologize.

  He spotted her from the road. She sat by the pond near her house, plucking at blades of grass. He stood and watched her. She was talking to herself, and sometimes she paused and then laughed as though she was having a conversation. Clarence spoke to himself sometimes, but this was different. She seemed to be asking questions and receiving answers from the wind.

  It was early November now, and he could see that her ears had turned red from the cold.

  Pram didn’t notice him. She was too distracted by Felix, who swung from a branch over her head.

  “I wish you’d come down,” she said.

  “Does your boyfriend climb trees?” he teased.

 
“He isn’t my boyfriend,” Pram said. “And no.”

  Felix jumped down and knelt in front of her. “You aren’t yourself today,” he said. “You haven’t been yourself for weeks, and you hardly come and play with me anymore.”

  “I’ve had a lot of thinking to do,” Pram said. “I may be about to make a big decision.”

  Felix looked concerned. “What is it?” he said.

  “I may tell Clarence that I can see ghosts.”

  “You can’t!” Felix said. “He’d tell the authorities, and you’d be sent away to the circus. Or there are worse places, you know!”

  He was being serious, but Pram couldn’t help giggling. “I don’t think that will happen,” she said. She leaned back on her elbows, still giggling. Felix was stoic. “Oh, come on,” she said, reaching for one of his hands and pulling him down beside her.

  “Be careful, Pram,” he said. He lay back in the grass and bumped his head against her shoulder.

  She threw bits of grass into the air like confetti. “Aunt Dee says I’m very pragmatic,” she said.

  “Maybe you could tell him another secret. A smaller one, to test whether he’s trustworthy.”

  “Like what?” Pram asked.

  “Tell him what your hair looks like in the morning. If that doesn’t scare him off, nothing else will.”

  “Felix, that’s mean.” But she laughed.

  Felix smiled, but that smile faded when he saw Clarence watching them from the road. He stood, braced himself, and jumped into the pond. Pram would have called after him, but now she saw Clarence.

  How long had he been standing there?

  She waved, and he started walking toward her. His hands were in his pockets, and he looked handsome in his Sunday suit.

  Pram stood to meet him and dusted the grass from her wool coat and her skirt. “Hi,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I came to see you,” he said. “Were you just talking to someone?”

  Ripples appeared on the pond that weren’t entirely the wind’s fault.

  Pram didn’t want to lie. She was particularly bad at it, and it gave her a stomachache. She was good at changing the subject, though. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “There’s something I wanted to show you.”