Ghost Flower

by Michele Jaffe

  But it was perfect for a party.

  Because I wasn’t going to be making my rendezvous with Bridgette. I had somewhere else in mind.

  I was passing one of those kiosks that line the walkways of all malls when I saw a pendant that looked like a shimmering orange-and-black butterfly. The price was high, but I couldn’t pull my eyes away from it.

  “That’s a monarch butterfly,” the kiosk guy told me as he stood a little too close to fasten it around my neck. He was young with dark hair and eyes, a few days’ growth of beard, and a slow, confident smile that said he was used to his advances being welcome.

  He spoke English with a slight accent, and when I’d walked up I heard him talking into his phone in a language that sounded like Hebrew. Now he said, “They are special because they migrate.” He stood back and pretended to examine it while looking at my boobs. “For my people, the Native Americans, the monarch butterfly is a symbol of change. Of adventure.”

  He was no more Native American than I was a liger. “Really?” I asked, wide-eyed.

  He nodded. “You look like a girl who could use some adventure.”

  My initial response was to turn around and walk away. I, Eve Brightman, couldn’t afford to draw attention to myself, to play games with people. I’d spent the past few years trying to be invisible.

  But you’re Aurora now, I thought. And the rich can afford to play all the games they want.

  I gave the kiosk man Aurora’s cocky smile and said, “Who couldn’t use some adventure? Any chance of a discount?”

  Incredibly, it worked. His eyes widened slightly, and his hand went to my forearm. “That depends. Any chance of a date tonight, butterfly?”

  “Sure,” I lied. I took the 20 percent off and didn’t mention that butterflies don’t come out at night.

  At the hair place I quizzed the woman who did my color about how to get to the Amtrak station and even made her write out the directions so she would be sure to tell anyone who asked that’s where I’d gone. It was amazing how nice people were when you seemed to have money. I pretended to go to the bathroom, snuck out the back of the shop without paying, climbed a fence, and used the map I’d ripped out of the yellow pages at the cabin to make my way to the bus station.

  I hesitated outside it. My mother had loved buses. When I was little, we spent a month taking buses, and whenever I would ask her where we were going, she would just say “farther.” Looking at the station my fingertips tingled, as though searching for a hand to hold, and my chest felt tight.

  But I couldn’t think about my mother now. I needed to get ready, to stop being Eve and to really start to be Aurora.

  What would Aurora do? I asked myself, and as the question lingered I spotted a bar across the street from the station. It was cool and dim inside, a long counter with mushroom topped bar-stools that rotated. The bartender wasn’t sure he wanted to serve me, but a man three stools down said, “Just give the lady her beer, Art.” So Art did.

  “I’m Jerry,” the man on the stool introduced himself. “What are we drinking to?”

  “Eve,” I told him.

  “Friend of yours?”

  “She was for a long time.”

  “Something happen to her?”

  “It was her time to go.”

  “Well, then, to Eve,” Jerry said.

  “To Eve.” We clicked bottles.

  “Nice necklace. Monarch right?” he asked, then went on without me answering. “Interesting creatures. They’re poisonous, you know.”

  “I didn’t.”

  He winked. “’Course only to their enemies.”

  The sun was getting low two hours later, as the bus lumbered out of Phoenix. I stared out the window past Eve’s reflection—now Aurora’s—into the yawning darkness beyond.

  PART II

  HAUNTED

  It’s not like waking up. It’s like breaking the surface of the indoor pool at the Country Club, she thinks, going from murky silence to the humid, slightly mildew scented air that hangs heavily over you.

  Only this isn’t the pool, isn’t the Country Club at all. Her half-open eyes focus slowly on different objects, the thin grey light of evening trickling in through the partially closed curtains to her right, intermittent headlights across the ceiling above her, her toes in a pair of high heels so far away at the foot of the bed, the hazy outline of the dresser beyond that, a mirror atop it.

  The sound of steady traffic makes a low buzz from outside; from somewhere closer comes the stuttering drone of a tired air conditioner.

  She is incredibly thirsty. Her throat is dry and scratchy, and her tongue feels like it’s twelve times too big for her mouth.

  Memories slip in and out of her mind like the rake of headlights across the ceiling—looking for someone, falling, red brake lights by the side of the road, the whine of a powerful engine reversing toward her.

  Only then does she feel the first stirring of fear. Remembering the car makes her heart beat faster; she feels something tighten in her chest. Get up, a voice in her head says, suddenly urgent. You have to get up and get out of here before he comes back.

  He? He who? she asks herself, but there is no answer, just abruptly, this sense that she must flee. Now.

  She sits up fast—too fast—sending a wave of pain and nausea crashing over her. Collapsing backward on the sweat-soaked bedspread, she takes three shallow, gasping breaths, then three deeper, more measured ones.

  She swallows hard—God, she is thirsty—and tries sitting again, this time moving toward the edge of the bed and getting up more slowly.

  There’s another dizzying moment. But this time it passes and when her eyes refocus she is facing a girl in the mirror. Herself, it must be herself, because there is no one else in the room. But there is nothing familiar about the girl she sees, the girl in the dirt-streaked sleeveless blouse and the pale peach miniskirt with the bloody lip and the cut over her eye. She has no memory of her. She has no idea what her name is.

  Panic overtakes fear, and she starts to tremble. Breathe, she orders herself, as she feels around and finds a pocket in her skirt. There’s a twenty-dollar bill and a piece of broken chain but no ID, nothing to tell her who she is.

  Her eyes slew to the reflection of the window behind her. The curtains are half-closed, but the space between them is lit by the artificial brightness of a clot of neon signs. She stares at them without consciously seeing them, forcing herself to keep breathing. She lets her gaze linger, unfocused, around the room, until it rests on her hands. They’re badly cut and filthy. A handful of dust, she thinks, and then shivers. Something about the phrase makes her uncomfortable, but she’s not sure why, or where she’s heard it before. Maybe if she closes her eyes and lies down.

  Go! the voice in her head orders, knocking her out of her thoughts. You have to get out of here!

  This time it works. Stumbling to her feet, she makes for the door. She pauses on the threshold, caught by the dim sense that she’s forgetting something—should she have a coat?—but it’s fleeting, overpowered by the urge to get away and her thirst, almost unbearable now. She’d kill for a Diet Coke.

  Wrenching open the door, she stumbles into the warm night air.

  CHAPTER 11

  FRIDAY

  I fell asleep on the bus and dreamed of laughing girls and orange butterflies landing near my cheek and only woke up when the driver’s voice announced our arrival in Tucson.

  From the station I spent the last of my money on a taxi up into Ventana Canyon. It was the road that led to the Silverton compound, but that wasn’t where I was going. Not yet anyway.

  If everything went as I’d planned, though, it was where I would end up.

  The size of the houses increased as the road rose, and so did my nervousness. My fingers tapped against the black vinyl seat next to me, and I pressed my forehead, suddenly warm, to the glass of the window hoping for cool relief. There was none.

  As the taxi pulled up in front of the address I’d given the
driver, I was seized with a jolt of apprehension so strong it nearly left me dizzy. Why are you doing this? a voice in my head asked. There was nothing wrong with Bain and Bridgette’s approach; it would have worked. So why are you rushing things, why this way, why tonight…?

  I knew the answer, even if I hadn’t been ready to admit it to myself until that moment. When I’d come up with the idea, I’d told myself I wasn’t going along with Bain and Bridgette’s plan because I wanted to appear in Tucson with a bang, not just stroll up at tea time. Tea time is languorous, that in-between moment in the day when all the shadows are slanted obliquely and reality can slip easily from one thing to another. People do things they regret mildly at tea time.

  Night, though—if you do something you regret then, it won’t be mild. At tea time “what if?” is a kid’s game, something to keep conversation going; at night it’s a beckoning whisper from behind a barely open door of your psyche. Night is the darkness of a theater before the curtain goes up, full of strangers’ coughs and bodies shifting and unknowns that can be wonderful or terrifying or both. It is elusive, intriguing, and, fundamentally, lonely. It fit Aurora, this new Aurora, perfectly. She had to come home at night.

  But sitting in the back of the idling taxi, staring at the mansion in front of me, I realized I’d also done it precisely because I was scared. Because if I’d shown up at tea with the Family, I could still have backed out somehow. Appearing this way, though—there would be no running away. I would be committed.

  I’d copied the address out of the Sonora Heights Academy alumni directory, but for a moment I thought I might have gotten it wrong: The house was massive and apparently fancy, but the entire front yard was ripped up, a construction zone. And there were no lights in the windows.

  The cab driver appeared to share my apprehension. “You sure this is what you want?” he asked, eyeing me speculatively in the rearview mirror.

  He meant the address, but his question echoed in my mind. “You sure this is what you want?” I could still turn around, still go back to Phoneix, call Bain or Bridgette and have them come get me, arrive the way they’d planned—

  I spotted a billowing purple silk pagoda on the far side of the construction zone, apparently spanning a path. That must be the entrance. “Yes,” I said. “I’m sure.” I paid him, took a deep breath, whispered, “Here we go, Aurora,” and walked beneath the pagoda, along the tea-candle-lit path, into Coralee Gold’s graduation party.

  It was like walking onto a stage set. The swimming pool was filled with floating candles, the entire area around it covered with oriental rugs. Brightly colored silk cushions were grouped around low octagonal tables with hookahs on them, and iron candelabra twisted in exotic shapes taller than me hoisted thick white candles all around the yard. Shirtless serving men with well-oiled chests and puffy harem pants stood behind tables of drinks and food with their arms crossed, statue-still. There was a faint breeze that rustled through the leaves and made the candles flicker slightly, stirring a wind chime somewhere in the distance. Other than that there was no movement, no sound. It was like the moment before the director yells action.

  I knew the party had started more than an hour earlier, but at first I didn’t see any guests. Then my eyes moved to the terrace beyond the pool where a massive pink-and-white striped canopy had been erected over a dance floor. The floor was ringed with people, all of them staring solemnly toward the center. I couldn’t tell what they were looking at, so I moved closer and stood on my tiptoes at the edge of the crowd to get a better view.

  The crowd formed a U-shape, open at the far end, where a woman was sitting on a chair. “Chair” is the wrong word; it was more like a throne with ornately carved gold sides and plush red velvet cushions. It was large and seemed larger because the woman inside it was tiny, almost birdlike. She could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty years old. She had long, unnaturally black hair and was wearing a lapis blue silk robe edged in gold. Her eyes were closed, her head was tipped back, and her lips were moving.

  That’s when I figured it out. Coralee Gold had hired a spiritual medium for her party. I had to stifle a laugh. This was either the best thing that could happen to me or the very worst.

  Straining my ears, I made out the words, “Which one of you is there? I see two of you but I can only hear one. Which one are you?”

  There was a moment of the kind of silence that comes only from one hundred people all holding their breath, the kind of silence that clings to you, turning a group into a single yearning organism. I had good reasons for not believing in ghosts or mediums, but as the silence stretched, I felt myself getting caught up in it. Wanting to believe, anxious about what was going to happen.

  The tension wound itself tighter among us until it was nearly suffocating. At that moment, the woman with the dark hair opened her mouth and in a thin, reedy voice completely different from the one she’d been using said, “I am Aurora.”

  A shudder convulsed the crowd. Everyone craned closer to listen. But the next words were indistinct, jibberish.

  Speaking in her own voice, the medium said, “Can you repeat that? We couldn’t quite hear you Aurora.”

  Silence.

  “I had her, but I feel her slipping away,” the medium said with a small shake of her head, eyes still closed as though she were talking to herself as much as to us. Taking a deep breath, she raised her fingers to her temples and intoned, “Aurora or Elizabeth, if either of you is still there, can you ring the bell?”

  More sticky, lengthening silence. And then, faintly, the bell began to ring.

  Everyone around me straightened abruptly, as though they were all feeling the same chill I felt, and a whisper went through the crowd. I said to the person next to me, “That’s cool.”

  He turned and looked at me. And gasped.

  It was fascinating the way it happened—just the slightest murmur, the sound of bodies shifting as they moved to elbow their neighbor or point, like ripples begun by a leaf hitting the surface of a pond, until someone said aloud, “Oh my God, that’s Aurora Silverton.”

  Then the medium woman’s eyes flipped open, and she stared at me, shrieked, and began to writhe. The crowd parted to make way for her, and she jerked across the floor toward me, as though she were a marionette whose arms and legs were being controlled by an invisible giant. She stopped in front of me, swaying. Her eyes rolled, and her long, blood-red nails curled in my direction. “You—you dare to mock the work of our sister Madam Cruz,” she said in a low, booming baritone completely different than the voice she had been using before.

  “I didn’t mock, I was just—”

  “Silence!” Her head tilted to the side, and her face moved up and down next to me, as though she were an animal of prey sniffing meat. “You are a cursed thing only half-alive. Be careful that evil does not claim the half that still lives. You come from a world of lies and shadows, and they cling to you like ivy. You reek of the fetid stench of death.”

  “I’m really sorry, I—”

  A strange growling noise came from deep in her throat. “Your punishment awaits you already. The spirits will have their revenge. Go! Leave! If you have any sense, you will fly from here forever.” And then she passed out.

  It got a bit hectic then. iPhones began popping out everywhere, and I was swarmed by people. From what Bain had said, I got the impression that Aurora and Liza were a bit aloof from the other students in their class, and that probably explains why most people drew closer to me but didn’t address me, watching me instead through the cameras on their phones. There were a handful of girls, who came forward to hug me, but they seemed more wary than glad to see me.

  As though Aurora was nice enough, but not really nice. Or as though they wanted a picture with me to post on their Facebook pages.

  I wasn’t disappointed. I’d only really had a chance to study Aurora’s friends in a yearbook from three years earlier, so I wasn’t going to be able to recognize most people, not easily anyway. Which meant
this part was the most dangerous part of my arrival—and I would need to cut short.

  That had been part of my plan from the beginning. Except it’s not as easy as you’d think to start a fight at a fancy graduation party. Actually getting someone to stop tweeting and take a swing at me was a challenge. I had to goad three guys, including one whose iPhone I threw in the pool when he wouldn’t stop filming me, before anything happened. Even then it was only because they summoned one of Coralee’s mother’s bodyguards, and after bruising my knuckles on his chin, I kicked him in the nuts.

  The police arrived almost immediately—someone must have called them as soon as I started the fight.

  The officer who brought me in was surprisingly young. He wasn’t good-looking, not in the traditional sense anyway, but he had the kind of face you wanted to keep looking at. His mouth was too big, his nose looked like it had been sculpted in a bar fight, and he was scowling. His face was made for it.

  He was the kind of guy you’d never see at a country club, but who would have no trouble getting past the velvet rope at a night club. The name tag pinned perfectly straight on his blue patrolman’s uniform said “N. Martinez.”

  He approached me cautiously, but I could have told him he didn’t have to worry. I only fight when it’s unavoidable, and I’d already called all the attention to myself that I needed.

  He cuffed me, then steered me into the backseat of a waiting cruiser. Neither of us spoke during the twenty-two-minute drive to the police station, and the scowl didn’t change. When we got there, he scraped a chair out from next to a desk and pushed me into it. “Where’s Ainslie?” he said to the only other person in the place, a white man with graying hair in a tweed coat and a tie, a detective. “This one’s for her.”

  “What is it?” the detective asked, wincing a little as he looked at me. Clearly somewhere between the fight and getting thrown into the pool, my looks had lost a bit of their luster.

  “She was that domestic disturbance at the Gold residence,” N. Martinez said. I could tell he didn’t like the detective and that he was not the kind of person who was good at hiding that. “Crashed Coralee Gold’s graduation party. Looks a lot like Aurora Silverton, doesn’t she? That case was Ainslie’s.”