A Curious Tale of the In-Between

by Lauren DeStefano

  “Oh, Pram, no,” Aunt Dee said. “It’s not your fault at all.”

  “We wanted to raise you,” Aunt Nan said. She was standing in the doorway, dabbing at her misty eyes with a handkerchief; she’d been weeping a lot since Pram’s return. “We had the adoption papers filled out and waiting before you were born.”

  Aunt Dee glared. “Don’t tell her the whole truth,” she said. “She’s too young yet.”

  “She deserves to know,” Aunt Nan cried. “After all the poor child has been through.” She sat on the other side of Pram’s bed and cupped Pram’s face in her hands. “I don’t want you to think for one second that you weren’t welcome here.”

  Pram’s eyes hurt with the threat of tears. “But I killed your sister,” she said.

  “Is that what you think?” Aunt Nan said. “Pram, your mother—”

  “Don’t you dare tell her that part,” Aunt Dee snapped.

  “Your mother was very ill,” Aunt Nan said pointedly. “As you grew up, your aunt Dee and I wanted you to have a nice image of her, and so we told you all the good things. We told you she liked to read, and that she was a good swimmer, and we kept that picture above the stairs because it’s the only truly happy photo of her. But that wasn’t everything, and you have a right to know that. Toward the end, before you were born, she was living in a special hospital.”

  “An asylum,” Pram said, to prove that she knew the word. She knew more than she usually let on.

  “Yes,” Aunt Nan said. “The truth is that your mother was a very sad girl. She died on the day you were born, but you weren’t the thing that killed her, and I won’t have you go on thinking you’re to blame. Someday when you’re older, we’ll tell you the rest of it, but for now all you need to know is that she had always been sad, and she spent much of her life in and out of . . . hospitals. Your aunt Dee and I knew she wouldn’t have been able to take care of you. Your mother knew it, too, and we all agreed that it would be best if you were here with us.”

  “What about my father?” Pram said.

  Aunt Dee looked like she was going to say something unkind. She opened her mouth and then shut it.

  Pram’s shoulders dropped. “He didn’t want me,” she said. “Did he?”

  Aunt Nan frowned and fussed with Pram’s hair. “He sends money for your upbringing sometimes. Never any letters.”

  Pram stared at the compass, which was then swallowed by Aunt Dee’s fist. “She’s too young to be hearing this,” Aunt Dee said.

  “Clearly she isn’t too young if she’s old enough to be asking about it,” Aunt Nan said.

  “I needed to hear the truth,” Pram said, her voice weak, as though she’d been punched in the stomach. “Thank you.”

  “We’re sorry, Pram,” Aunt Nan said. “Really, we are. If we’d had any idea how much you wanted to meet him—”

  “I wanted to know the truth about him,” Pram said. “I wanted to know what he was like, and if he knew about me. That’s all, I guess.”

  She still wanted to meet him, but knowing that he knew where she lived all her life, and hadn’t wanted to visit, lessened her desire. Perhaps one day, she thought, when she was older. Maybe they would both be different people then.

  Aunt Dee threw the compass at the wall. It bounced back and hit the floor. Pram and Aunt Nan winced. “If you want to know the truth about your father, he never deserved you,” Aunt Dee said. “He was like a fly that got into the house. Once he met your mother, there was no being rid of him. He’d breeze into town on his little visits from wherever he’d been, and he’d sweep your mother off her feet and get her hopes up, and then he’d leave once he’d had his fun.”

  I see your exquisite face at every port. I’ve made a horrible mistake leaving you behind. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.

  “But he loved her,” Pram said. All those beautiful letters in that box in the closet, none of them for her.

  “Maybe he did,” Aunt Nan said sympathetically. “But he was a nomad and there wasn’t enough room in his life for Lily, or for you.”

  Pram stared at the closet door as though her father would somehow emerge from his letters and speak for himself.

  “If you’d like to meet him, maybe we can arrange something,” Aunt Nan said. “I have a PO Box address. You could write him a letter.”

  “No,” Pram whispered, still reeling from all the revelations. “Not now, anyway.”

  “Can we get you anything?” Aunt Nan said. “Would you like some cake? I think I’ll bake you a cake. Dee, do we have any eggs left?”

  “You can’t give her something that’ll rot her teeth every time she’s unhappy,” Aunt Dee said.

  As her aunts argued about whether the cake was a sensible decision, Pram stared at the compass that lay on the floor. It no longer meant what she had thought it meant. All that trouble to find him, and he knew where she was; he just didn’t want to visit.

  “I don’t want cake,” Pram said suddenly. “And I don’t want to write my father a letter. I want to go back to school on Monday.”

  “School?” Aunt Dee said.

  “You wanted to protect my mother, didn’t you?” Pram said.

  “More than anything,” Aunt Nan said. “We tried everything. The best hospitals. Home care. Chicken soup.”

  “And you’ve tried to protect me,” Pram said. “But I don’t want to hide anymore. I’d like to spend more time in the living world. I don’t think I need to be protected the way that my mother did.”

  Aunt Dee smiled sadly. “No, I suppose you don’t,” she said. “It startles me how much you look like her, but you’ve never been Lily. You’ve always been Pram.”

  “Our pragmatic niece,” Aunt Nan said.

  Just as the compass seemed different to Pram now, so did the aunts. Pram looked at them and realized how wrong she’d been. All that trouble to find where she belonged, and it had always been here.

  That night, Pram couldn’t sleep. She stared at the silhouettes of tree branches on her wall, and she thought of Lady Savant and of her mother, whose paths had only briefly crossed.

  She felt the pull of a memory drawing her in, and then her bedroom disappeared, and she was a nurse in a room that stank of mold and metal. The rooms behind her were filled with screams, but the commotion had long faded into a distant malaise. She had learned not to pay it any mind, even when it haunted her dreams.

  Instead, the nurse focused on the metal tray in her hands, most notably the slender S-shaped utensil that the doctor retrieved. There had been much debate in the field about using it on such a young patient as the girl before them, but the girl’s parents were desperate and they’d agreed.

  The girl was bound to her mattress. Earlier she had been kicking and flailing, but now she was weary, and her hands flinched like fish dying on the shore. Her eyes were big and dark and bloodshot from old tears. She saw the S-shaped tool and whimpered.

  “It’s going to be all right now, Claudette,” the doctor said, and pressed his palm to her forehead, steadying her. “We’re going to make the ghosts go away now.”

  Pram forced herself out of the memory. Her cheeks were wet with tears.

  “I’m sorry they hurt you,” she whispered to Lady Savant, even though Lady Savant could not hear her.

  CHAPTER

  26

  Pram was wearing three scarves, a pair of mittens, and a sweater underneath her coat. Her aunts insisted that every one of these things was necessary if she was to go outside, even though most of the snow had melted.

  The pond was no longer frozen. Pram walked to its edge, but all she saw when she tried to peer into the water was the sky’s reflection.

  “Felix?” she said. “I don’t know if you can hear me, but I wanted to say thank you. For saving Clarence. I know you were always a bit jealous of him.”

  “I am not jealous,” Felix said. Pram followed his voice and found him sitting up in his tree. “He has a funny-looking nose, and eyes like a Saint Bernard’s.”

 
; “Felix!” Pram jumped excitedly. “Where have you been?”

  “That’s a fine question, and I don’t know the answer,” he said, hopping to the ground in front of her. “That batty woman hypnotized you in the middle of the night and forced you to tell her all your secrets. Once you were back in bed and safe again, I was so angry about the whole thing that I went to give her a good old-fashioned haunting—rattling the windows and giving her gooseflesh and everything.

  “And then, next thing I knew, I was trapped in someone else’s memories. And when I found my way out, I was thrown right back into someone else’s memory. And so on. The most pointless things like ballroom dances and car rides. At one point I believe I was trapped in your wallpaper, making the petals move.”

  “Lady Savant is very dangerous,” Pram said.

  “I thought I’d be trapped like that forever,” Felix said. “I was beginning to forget who I was. And then I heard you screaming. ‘Felix! Felix!’ You were so loud that I found my way back just in time to watch that batty woman throw your boyfriend into the lake.”

  “Clarence isn’t my boyfriend,” Pram said flatly.

  “Not yet,” Felix said.

  Pram blushed.

  “Anyway, after I dragged him out of the lake, you were long gone. I tried to find you, but it was as though you’d stopped existing.”

  “Maybe Lady Savant blocked you from hearing me,” Pram said.

  “I was worried,” Felix said. “I didn’t know where you could be. So I waited here, and I thought that if you died, your spirit would come back here and find me.”

  “I did enter the spirit world for a little while,” Pram said. “My body was lying in the snow.”

  “I’m glad you’re alive,” Felix said. “I prefer you this way.”

  “I’m happy about it, too,” Pram said. “Lady Savant was teaching me to reach your world, the spirit world, but I don’t think I want to do it anymore.”

  “Really?” Felix said. “Not at all?”

  “Well, maybe. But only if I can help someone,” Pram said. “I’m becoming quite good at recovering memories. I’ve even been able to enter the memories of the living sometimes. I could try to help you remember who you were, if you want.” She didn’t tell him what she already knew; she would tell him if he ever asked, but it would have to be his decision.

  Felix shook his head. “I forgot those things for a reason,” he said.

  Pram supposed this was true. He had died as a child, after all. “I’ve missed you,” she said. “Why didn’t you visit me right when I came back?”

  “I did, here and there when you were asleep,” Felix said. “But I left before you woke up. I thought it was important for you to be among the living while you got better.”

  Pram smiled. How selfless and incredibly sweet of him. “I’m better now,” she said.

  “Yes,” Felix said. “Except for that strange lump on your ear.”

  “What?” Pram said.

  Felix reached toward her ear, but then swiped the hat from her head and took off running.

  “Hey!” She laughed and chased after him.

  From the window of the two-hundred-year-old colonial, Aunt Dee and Aunt Nan watched Pram play with her invisible friend. “Let her have her fun,” Aunt Dee said. “She’ll only be a little girl for so long.”

  Pram spent most of the afternoon playing with Felix. They built a rather pitiful creature from the dregs of snow still on the ground and decided he was a banker with two bad legs and a permanent scowl.

  “I like him anyway,” Pram said.

  “Yes, me, too,” Felix said, laughing. “Even though he looks more dead than me.”

  Pram smirked.

  “I wish it could be like this forever,” Felix said. He sounded sad, and Pram looked at him with concern. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking while you were away,” he said. “It felt like you were gone for a thousand years, and I began to think that I should just move on. You’re the only thing left for me in this world anyway.”

  “I’m back now,” Pram reminded him.

  “You didn’t wake up for a long time,” Felix said. “And I wondered if you would die, and come meet me in the spirit world and be a girl forever. But then I thought about how clever you are and how much your aunts and that boy care about you, and I knew that you belonged in the living world. So I told you to wake up.”

  “I remember that,” Pram said. “I knew that was you.”

  “You are going to be a very interesting grown-up one day, Pram. You’ll do lots of things. You’ll help people, both living and dead. You’ll have a daughter named Felix, and I’ll meet her on the other side after she’s lived to be a hundred and moved on. It’s not fair for me to try to keep you coming back to see me. I need to let you grow up.”

  “I don’t need to grow up today,” Pram said. She grabbed his hand.

  “Soon,” Felix said. “I think I’m ready to go soon.” But when Pram rested her head on his shoulder, for one selfish moment he wished that he really could keep her for the rest of time.

  CHAPTER

  27

  In the nights that followed, Pram could not forget the memory she’d visited, in which Lady Savant had been a little girl and the doctors in the asylum held her down.

  There was a lot of bad in Lady Savant, but she had not started out that way. Pram was sure of that. She would lie awake in bed and think of the things Lady Savant had taught her. Lady Savant had not been an especially honest woman, but Pram believed there was truth to many of the things she’d said.

  One particular night, unable to sleep, Pram climbed out of bed, turned on her desk lamp, and made a list of things she had learned while in Lady Savant’s asylum:

  It’s a gift.

  Talking to Lady Savant makes me lose my memories.

  Thinking of Clarence helps me to remember.

  Memories of the dead float like balloons.

  All I have to do is want it. Anything I want is mine.

  Pram sat in the oval of light from her lamp for a long while, thinking of all the memories that drifted through the air. As far as she understood, the memories were not something she could control. She might enter the memory of a child on a swing or a man in a hot air balloon. Or she might enter a dark memory, a last memory—one that might well break her heart. Pram decided she wasn’t willing to take that chance. Not to night, at least.

  This didn’t mean that she didn’t want answers. Though Pram had tried to appease her aunts and behave like a normal child, Lady Savant had shown her that she did in fact have a gift. The spiritualist hadn’t said that Pram was strange—she’d said she had a gift. And Pram was grateful for that. She knew that it would stay with her for the rest of her life.

  “She tried to steal my soul,” Pram reasoned during lunch. “She was only using me so she could keep her youth and gain my powers.”

  Clarence frowned. “You don’t sound convinced.”

  Pram took a bite of her sandwich. After a moment, she said, “Do you think it’s strange that I’m grateful to her?”

  “My mother used to say that there’s a reason for everyone we meet,” Clarence said. “Everyone impacts us in some way or other.”

  It didn’t answer her question, but Pram knew it was the best answer anyone could give her. She began folding her napkin into squares and then triangles, losing herself in worry and thought, until Clarence said, “Maybe what you need is closure.”

  Pram nodded. “I think I need to see her one last time. I don’t know what I expect exactly; I just feel as though there’s something she needs to show me. One last something.”

  Clarence was worried. “The last time you felt you needed to see her, it was a trap. She lured you while you were asleep.”

  “I’ve thought about that,” Pram said. “I’ve been writing down my dreams. I started shortly after I came back home. Nothing has been unusual about them. And I think Felix would sense if something wasn’t right.”

  “What does Felix think of
you seeing Lady Savant again?”

  Pram sank between her shoulders. “I haven’t told him.”

  “Oh,” said Clarence, and Pram knew he was surprised that she’d shared a secret with him and not with Felix as well. He was gracious enough not to smile about it, though.

  “When I was with Lady Savant and she was stealing my memories, the only thing that seemed to bring me back was you,” Pram said, and her cheeks felt very hot. “I think—if you were to come with me . . . I think I would be okay.”

  Clarence was looking at the table. Pram glanced at him and saw his smile.

  Pram and Clarence decided it would be best not to tell Pram’s aunts about visiting Lady Savant. They had agreed to let their niece attend school, but they were still hesitant to relinquish her into the world. Aunt Nan was only just starting to recover from her frenzy of nervous baking; the elders had enjoyed the post-dinner treats, but they were often out of eggs and butter, and Aunt Dee had been forced to hold an intervention.

  “We’re going to the library,” Clarence told them after he and Pram returned from school. They would be sure to stop by the library so it wouldn’t be a lie. Pram felt horribly guilty about the whole thing, and so Clarence did all the talking.

  “Be back for dinner at six thirty,” Aunt Dee said. Pram gnawed on her lip and nodded.

  As she and Clarence walked away from the house, Pram could feel her aunts watching her from the window.

  “Is Felix here?” Clarence asked as they passed by the pond.

  “No,” Pram said. “I’m not sure where he’s gone.” Felix had taken to wandering lately. He had followed Pram to school once. He perched on the curtain rod and listened to the teacher talk about the continents. He roamed the halls and found the older children having an art class, and he looked over their shoulders as they painted cryptic hints about their lives. It made him curious about other classrooms, and then other buildings, and other towns entirely.

  He had gotten very brave. But no matter how far he traveled, he was back by the time Pram began to get ready for bed. Before turning out the light, she would look from her bedroom window and see him at his tree, chasing ghost insects or rearranging the stars for his amusement.