The Mortician’s Daughter

by Nan Higgins

  I looked at my phone and saw that it was after five. My day with Sloane had flown by. “No, but thanks for the offer. It sounds terrific, but I should be getting home.”

  “Maybe some other time, then.”

  “I’m just going to walk Aria out.” Sloane grabbed a pan from a high shelf for her mom. “Then I’ll help you make dinner.”

  “Okay.” Sandy smiled at me. “Come back and see us soon, Aria.”

  “I will.” I couldn’t help but smile back at her. “Thank you.”

  Sloane stepped onto the front porch and held the screen door for me, and we walked to my car together.

  “Thank you for today, for everything,” I said. “You’re a good teacher.”

  “It was fun.” She leaned against my car door and gave me a lazy smile. “Almost makes me hope training gets canceled tomorrow, too.”

  I wished I had agreed to stay for dinner, if only so it would be darker and my blush wouldn’t be so obvious. Several moments of staring at each other went by. Finally, she broke the spell by turning and opening my car door and resting her arm on it as I approached the driver’s seat.

  “Have a good night,” I murmured.

  “Be careful driving home,” she replied, and with those words, she put her other hand on my shoulder, and we were in each other’s eyes again. I thought she was going to kiss me, and my lips parted a little. “See you tomorrow, Aria.” Instead of kissing me, she tapped her forehead to mine, then took a small step back.

  “See you.” I got into my car. Halfway through my fifteen-minute drive, I reached up and touched my forehead where hers had been.

  Chapter Thirteen

  My parents were making dinner when I got home, and while they didn’t seem exactly back to their old selves, it was the first time I’d seen them working together on anything since my birthday. Considering that they shared a business, a home, and an offspring, that was pretty huge, and it was a relief to see my mom setting the table and my dad flipping pork chops in the skillet.

  “Hey, hon,” Mom said. “Where’ve you been?”

  “Studying at Sloane’s,” I said. To my father, “Ghost school was canceled today.”

  He nodded. “I know all about it, and we are going to remedy that problem tonight.”

  Before I could ask what that meant, my mom said, “Go and wash up for dinner. It’ll be ready in just a few minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  I went upstairs to change clothes—nothing like pajama pants after a long day—and wash my hands. I stepped into the hallway, and in front of me was a crying Clara Braverman. I screeched. It was shocking to see anyone I wasn’t expecting, but aside from that, Mrs. Braverman looked terrible. I couldn’t see through her, and yet she was faded. The whites of her eyes were expanding, taking over half the irises, and she had a shiny appearance, as if she was clammy and covered in a slick layer of sweat.

  “Mrs. Braverman? Clara? What’s wrong?”

  “You have to help me. You have to help me. They keep saying I’m not finished here, but I am. I am! I just want to leave this place, but they won’t let me.”

  I reached out and was more surprised than I should’ve been that my fingers couldn’t make contact. “Who won’t let you?”

  “Your father,” she cried. “You have to convince him it’s time to let me go.”

  “But…but why would my father keep you here?”

  “He’s a bad man.” Clara nodded aggressively “He’s spreading lies about me, and you’ve got to set it right.”

  “Aria?” My dad’s voice floated up from the bottom of the stairs. “Dinner’s getting cold.”

  And like someone had flipped a switch, Clara Braverman disappeared.

  I looked through the rooms upstairs, calling out to her softly. She was gone, though, as quickly as she’d appeared. My heart pounded, and my entire body trembled. I slumped against the wall and wrapped my arms around my midsection as if holding myself tightly might help me get my shit together.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been so scared. It had probably been when I was a child and had a nightmare. If only this was as simple as that had been. The nightmare had ended when I woke up, and my parents had rushed to my room, turned the light on, and comforted me until I felt safe again. This nightmare was happening while I was wide awake, and my parents were the ones keeping me in the dark.

  * * *

  I was shaky as I descended the stairs, but by the time I got to the kitchen, I almost felt as if the incident with Mrs. Braverman hadn’t even happened. Here in the warmth of the kitchen, when the gentle glow of candles lit the area around the table, and my parents had already heaped my plate with pork chops, mac and cheese, green beans, and a sourdough roll. There was even a glass of orange juice next to my plate.

  I sat across from my mom and dad, looked at their smiling faces, and decided not to talk to them about Clara tonight. She was wrong or confused. Had to be.

  “Dinner looks great,” I said.

  “Thanks,” my parents said in unison and smiled at each other.

  I had been worried about them. Worried about my mom, of course, but also worried about them. For the first time in a month, it was starting to feel as if things were going to be okay with my parents. I’d come home thinking I was going to confront them about all I’d learned earlier in the day, but they seemed so relaxed, and I didn’t want to ruin that with questions about all the secrets they’d kept or whether my dad was some kind of monster.

  I took a bite that was every bit as good as it looked and smelled.

  “So,” Dad said, “we’ve been quite remiss in telling you about AfterCorps and about your heritage.”

  My mouth was full, and I didn’t really know what to say, so I nodded.

  “We’re going to fill you in on the basics tonight,” she said.

  I drank a swallow of orange juice. “Okay.”

  “You come from a long line of interpreters,” my father said. “We can trace our lineage back nearly five hundred years. But more than about five generations back, it gets murky. We’re going to focus on your great-great-grandfather and move forward.”

  “He’s the one who wrote the textbook,” I said.

  “Yes, and he wrote many others. He is often called the father of modern interpretation. He founded Jasper Funeral Home and really pioneered the marriage of surface and interior careers so interpreters could make a living and have legitimacy while also having ready access to priors.”

  “He also created AfterCorps,” Mom said. “It’s evolved over the years, but Myron organized all the facets of interpreters who had various skills and sects and gathered them into the central institution that AfterCorps is today.”

  “So before AfterCorps, interpreters were on their own?” I asked.

  “There were small groups scattered all over the globe,” he said. “And back then, it was a lot more difficult to connect people worldwide. Correspondence was slow and unreliable at best. But he made it his mission and his life’s work to find the brightest interpreters in their areas of expertise and bring them on. Most of the interpreters he enrolled at AfterCorps have descendants still with us.”

  I took a moment to chew my mac and cheese and think. “So there are interpreters who aren’t a part of AfterCorps?”

  “Yes. Think of it like this: there are people who consider themselves spiritual, believing in one god or another, but not all of them go to the respective churches of their faiths. You can be a Christian and not belong to a church. You can be an interpreter and not belong to AfterCorps.”

  “But is that the choice of the individual interpreter or of AfterCorps when someone doesn’t belong?”

  “It varies,” my mom said, and I thought I saw her smile fade a little.

  “There’s a lot to tell you,” Dad said. “Your mother and I thought we were doing the right thing by keeping all of this from you. Our hope was that you wouldn’t need any of this knowledge, but the truth is, we were wrong. You come from a family of
proud leaders in interpretership, and this is your birthright.”

  “It’s going take several years of training to find out what interior job you will have,” my mom said. “But your dad and I think we’ve come up with a great option for a surface job.”

  “We certainly have,” he said, beaming. “I think you’ll find it a great compromise.”

  “Death singer,” I said.

  “Well,” Mom said, “yes, although I don’t think I’d call it that.” I could see she was remembering and regretting her old wedding singer joke. “How did you guess?”

  “Sloane gave me a crash course on surface and interior jobs today. She was the one who guessed it. Looks like she was right.”

  “I know it’s not a recording deal, honey,” Dad said. “But you’re going to be doing important, meaningful work for the rest of your life.”

  I looked at my mostly empty plate for a few moments. How could they both act as if this was something I could be happy about? Knowing what my life could have been and thinking that singing at funerals and escorting ghosts to run their final earthly errands could be any kind of substitute made me wonder if they even knew me at all. A horrible part of me even wished my mom would go back to her zombie state. At least then she had appeared as if she knew what I had lost and what that meant. “I think I’ll go to my bedroom.”

  Mom and Dad looked at each other, their eyebrows lifted. Finally, he spoke. “If you could rinse your plate, I’d appreciate it. But we’ll continue this conversation soon, Aria.”

  I dumped the last bits of food down the garbage disposal and stuck my plate in the dishwasher. When I went upstairs, I turned the hall light on, scared I might bump into Clara again, but it was empty. Now that I was by myself, it all seemed real again. Great, I’m a twenty-two-year-old who’s afraid of the dark. I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth, terrified with every movement and every step that the ghost might appear out of nowhere and start wailing about my father again.

  I’d had the creeps about ghosts when I’d first found out I’d be able to interact with them, but since I’d only ever talked to Mrs. Braverman, and only at the funeral home, I’d relaxed into the knowledge that I could only communicate with them there. Tonight had proven me completely wrong, and now I felt robbed of all feelings of safety in my own home.

  I went to my closet and pulled down a box of old things I’d outgrown. Underneath a battered old teddy bear, some pictures from my earliest recitals and a dried, crumbling corsage from a high school dance, I found what I was looking for: my old Power Puff Girls night-light. I plugged it in and was both delighted and relieved to see it still worked.

  That night, I slept with a night-light for the first time since I was eight.

  Chapter Fourteen

  For the first time, I arrived at ghost school before Sloane. My sleep the night before had been tense and restless; every creak and groan of the house had woken me with a start, and I’d given up at seven and had gotten up. I looked at my phone now and saw it was almost fifteen minutes before nine o’clock. I was a little excited to see her.

  I sat and got my notes and textbook out, then played on my phone. I frowned when I realized I’d missed a call from Macy the night before and sent her a text with a promise to call her tonight.

  “Hey.” Sloane strolled past me to her desk and sat. Today she wore a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, and I at least knew a few of their songs.

  “Hey,” I said and pointed at her shirt. “A band I’ve actually heard of.”

  She grinned. “Well, I would hope so. Led Zeppelin is some real music.”

  “After the song you played yesterday, I’m not sure if you’re the best judge of real music,” I said and was rewarded with a throaty laugh.

  “Fair enough. Although I’m a little nostalgic about ‘Alien Love’; my mom used to sing it to me in the morning when I was little, and she got me up for school. I don’t necessarily think it would be my jam if it weren’t for that.”

  “That’s adorable,” I said before I could stop myself.

  “Thanks.” Crooked smile.

  “Good morning,” came a booming voice. It wasn’t Nick; it was my father. Immediately, I was on edge. It had become the norm for him to be uninvolved in my AfterCorps experience, and now that he was finally starting to be present, I should have been happy. I wondered why I wasn’t.

  “Nick will be along shortly, but I wanted to stop by this morning to welcome you. I try to get around and speak to new students during their first week of training and introduce myself.” He smiled at me. “I’m already very acquainted with one of you, so why don’t I focus on the interpreter-in-training to whom I’ve not been introduced?”

  Sloane stood, and I noticed her hand was shaky when she reached to receive his handshake.

  “I’m Nathan Jasper, and you are?”

  “Sloane,” she answered, her voice a little groggy. She cleared her throat and spoke again. “Sloane Dennison.”

  His smile widened. “You’re Sandy Dennison’s girl.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh, I’ve known Sandy for years; she was only a few years behind me in training.”

  “Yes. She speaks very highly of you, sir.”

  He waved. “Oh, please don’t bother with any sir business. You can call me Nathan.” When Sloane shook her head, he laughed so loudly it echoed against the cinder block walls. “Or maybe you can start by calling me Mr. Jasper. Would that make you more comfortable?”

  “It would, Mr. Jasper.”

  “Very fine, very fine. Tell me, Sloane, what do you aspire to do as part of the AfterCorps organization?”

  “I…I’m interested in being a part of the CDU.”

  He stole a quick glance at me before turning back to her. “That’s quite a tough division. I like a student with lofty goals.”

  A shiver tickled the base of my spine. The longer he stood before us, the more uncomfortable I became. In the past, I would have said that he was the most authentic human being I knew, so why did all of this feel like a forced, disingenuous charade?

  Nick arrived, nodded at my father, and went to his desk. He started taking things out of his bag.

  “Well, I see your fearless leader is here.” Dad handed Sloane a business card. “Please know that I’m only a text or call away should you have anything you’d like to discuss. That’s an open offer.” He smiled at her, leaned in to give me a quick hug, and waved at Nick on his way out. Nick gave him a slight nod again.

  Nick had always been my dad’s right-hand man and one of his closest friends. It was odd to see him being so curt. I wondered how their talk had gone yesterday. But my parents had given me the beginning of a rundown on our family history last night, and ghost school was open again, so things had to be better.

  After pulling the last item—a green pear—out of his bag, Nick walked to the front of his desk, sat on it, and studied us.

  “How did your studying go yesterday?” He shined the pear on his checkered shirt and took a bite. “Did you both read the first chapters?”

  I nodded and glanced at Sloane, who did the same.

  “What did you think?”

  “It was sort of an overview of stuff I already knew,” Sloane said.

  “And you, Aria?” He asked around another bite of pear. “You’ve had less of a chance to acquaint yourself with interpretership in the past.”

  “Actually, Sloane and I did some studying together yesterday after you…” I stumbled over my words. “After training was canceled. She went over the basics of the hierarchy with me, so I wasn’t completely unprepared when I got to our homework.”

  He lifted an eyebrow. “Going above and beyond for the director’s daughter isn’t a bad strategy, Sloane. It won’t get you into CDU, but it can’t hurt. Now…”

  But I didn’t hear what he said for several moments after that. Was that what she was doing? Sucking up to the main dude’s daughter? I felt like a bucket of ice water had been dropped on me.

 
“Aria?”

  “What?”

  He was standing at the blackboard and had written “Discussion Questions” on it. “What questions do you have after what you read yesterday?”

  It took me a second to get out of my head and open my notes. I looked at my hurried handwriting and tried to find a question. “I guess one of the first things I’d like to know is, how can you tell when someone is a prior? I know none of us could tell at the time of our quickening.”

  “It’s something you learn to distinguish as you start to work with them,” he said. “For one thing, you learn to sense the slight drop in temperature.”

  I thought of all the times I’d watched horror movies where people started shivering when a ghost was around. “That’s a real thing?”

  “Yes, but it’s more subtle than you think unless a ghost is agitated.”

  I was cold last night when I was in the hallway with Mrs. Braverman, but the reason hadn’t occurred to me. “Okay. What else?”

  Nick paused. “You start to develop a…a sort of Spidey sense about it. Before you know that someone near you is a prior, it’s easy to think they’re a reg. But now that you know, you’ll be able to identify them more and more. The energy in the room shifts when you’re talking to a ghost. The air feels more stagnant, almost dry. It’s easier to identify them in the summer, which is part of the reason that we always begin training in June. Our Ohio summers lend humidity and heat, which helps us to distinguish when that cool papery feeling appears in the air.”

  “So we don’t use K2 meters or EVP recorders to help identify them?” Sloane asked.

  Nick frowned. “Where did you hear about those kinds of things?”

  She grinned. “I have done more research than you can imagine while I waited for my formal training to start. Especially when I thought I might not get to take classes.”

  “I see. No, we don’t use tools that regs commonly use for their ‘ghost hunting’ sessions.” He scrunched his nose. “The people who resort to those contraptions do so because they wish they had the kinds of gifts we have, and for the most part, they’re hacks and charlatans.”