by Zoe Aarsen
“I did. But I have to run down to my locker to get them, and clock out. Do you mind waiting a few minutes for me to come back upstairs?”
Hanging out with a patient on my own time after a shift may very well have been a violation of one of the terms of my employment, so I just smiled at Luis in the elevator as I rode back up to the third floor and told him I’d left something behind in Mrs. Robinson’s room. A fresh crop of zinging tingles broke out across my scalp, and I attributed them to Jennie’s awareness that I was on the brink of figuring out how to hear her more clearly. Hope swelled in my chest at the thought that within the next few minutes I might finally be able to ask her what was going on, what I needed to prepare myself for. But naturally, that hope coincided with fear that Mrs. Robinson might be a quack, and that her advice might just be another dead end.
I knocked twice on Mrs. Robinson’s door before entering, and she greeted me with, “Took your time, didn’t you?”
Her television was on at a low volume, and she sat in a chair in front of it, her cataract-covered eyes fixed on its screen as if she could see it. “How did you know it was me?” I asked. “Both just now and when I came up a few minutes ago?”
She toyed with the amulet she wore around her neck. “I could hear you! Well, not you, but them. The loa that follow you around. They’re worked up about something tonight. That’s for sure.” She then repeated for emphasis, “That’s… for sure.”
My scalp was burning; the tingles were making their way down toward my ears. I set the bottles of essential oil on the coffee table and twisted off the cap of the orange oil so that she could take a whiff. “Mrs. Robinson, I really hope you can tell me how to communicate with my sister in the dark place, because…” I paused to take a breath. “Because I think whatever she’s trying to tell me is urgent.”
The elderly woman instructed me to heat a cup of water to a boil and then place three drops of each of the three essential oils into it so that we could spray Florida water around the room. I had to improvise a little by heating the water in a microwave and then flicking our mixture around with my fingertips because I hadn’t brought a spray bottle with me. Mrs. Robinson also requested that I reinforce the layer of salt around the perimeter of her room with the eggshells. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that what I’d set down on Monday had been vacuumed up, and I scattered the eggshells sparingly. Housekeeping would definitely have something to say about finding eggshells mashed into the carpeting.
With all of that done, I sat down across from Mrs. Robinson, and waited for her to speak.
“All right. Now,” Mrs. Robinson said, “if you’re sure your sister keeps trying to send you messages, then what you need to do is listen harder!” She ended with a yell, as if the solution should have been plainly obvious to me.
Defensively, I insisted, “But I do listen! Even on the way here, I thought I heard her on my earbuds—like, these little headphones that you put inside your ears to listen to music,” I clarified. “It just sounds like loud wind. A very specific kind of wind. If she’s saying words, I can’t hear them.”
“Well, then. If you think she’s saying words you can’t hear, you’re not listening to the right station!” she exclaimed, as if my trying to tune in to messages from the afterlife were a joke.
“I don’t understand. She’s not a radio broadcast.”
“But she is! If that’s how she’s trying to reach you, she’s manipulating radio waves. I bet if you tune in to the right frequency, you’ll be able to hear her just fine,” Mrs. Robinson said with a big smile.
I held back a frustrated sigh. Mrs. Robinson probably assumed that most people had radios available to them. “I don’t even think we own a radio. I mean, maybe my dad has one for emergencies?” There was a radio in Dad’s car, of course, but I didn’t know when I’d be allowed to apply for a driver’s license again. And of course, he only listened to his favorite talk shows on satellite radio.
Just as it occurred to me that I might be able to use an app on my phone to listen to local radio stations, two things happened.
First, behind me on the television, I heard a newscaster with a rich baritone voice making an announcement in a teaser for the nightly news. “Deadly tornados touch down in Wisconsin this afternoon. Tune in at eleven for the latest.”
And my phone buzzed with an incoming text.
CHERYL 7:18 P.M.
Have you heard about Mischa? Call me asap.
CHAPTER 4
IT WAS IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER, Mrs. Robinson told me, that Jennie was no longer on the physical plane. Spirits could pick up information from the living world from their side of things, but they didn’t exist or communicate the same way the living did. So although Jennie may have been able to manipulate radio waves and recognize me by my spirit, she may have lacked the finesse to make it clear that she was warning me about a tornado.
Of course, I’d guessed early on that’s what she had been implying. It had just seemed pretty far-fetched that she was suggesting an actual tornado was going to touch down in Willow. Tornados in our part of Wisconsin weren’t unheard-of, but rarely until after May, when the temperature began to rise for summer. The only other tornado to ever touch down in Willow that I knew of had done so when my dad was in high school; it had torn the roof off the old high school gym. And that had been thirty-five years ago.
When I stepped into the hallway outside Mrs. Robinson’s room to call Cheryl, she told me that power lines and cell phone towers had been torn down all over town, which was why I hadn’t heard the news until two hours after the devastation had occurred. No one in Willow had been able to use their phone until service was restored. And our town was so small that it would have taken a lot more than a powerful tornado to create a national buzz on social media.
The big news was that Timber Creek, the gated community where the Portnoys lived, had been where the first and largest of the three tornados had touched down.
“Mischa’s house was flattened,” Cheryl informed me in a strangely calm voice. She didn’t know anything about our failure to fully break the curse. I’d spared her having to feel any sense of responsibility about that since she’d been so eager to help us infiltrate Violet’s New Year’s party, and had played a key role in us getting Violet to participate in a second round of the game in Michigan. She still saw Violet every day at school, and it seemed unfair to put the burden of knowing there was unfinished business on her. “That’s what I heard, anyway. But… McKenna? My mom’s friend from work lives across the street from the Portnoys, and she said that Amanda’s… hurt. Like, badly. It doesn’t… look good.”
Amanda, Mischa’s sister, aspiring Olympic gymnast—on the brink of death. Amanda, the most popular girl in the senior class at Willow High School, who was always with her boyfriend, Brian. She was only eighteen.
My mouth went so dry that I coughed when I tried to swallow. Out of all the streets in Willow, out of all the families I knew in town… the tornado had flattened Mischa’s house. Her sister had been injured—and on the day when I hadn’t been able to perform the protection spell. Suddenly dizzy, I leaned against the cool wall and pressed the back of my left hand against my forehead. I felt like I was dreaming, like what Cheryl was telling me couldn’t possibly be true. It was too horrible to believe.
An unfamiliar throbbing sensation began at the back of my head.
“She must have just gotten home after school. When the tornado hit, it just tore right through the house. There’s nothing left but a pile of bricks. And her body was thrown into my mom’s friend’s front yard. I mean, this is awful, but my mom’s friend said she was out there for over an hour, just, like clinging to life. Ambulances couldn’t get through because there are so many power lines down in the streets.”
I couldn’t feel my legs or feet. It truly felt as if clocks had stopped ticking, and I was standing in a hallway under fluorescent lights in another dimension. The pulsing in my head grew stronger, making it feel as if my brain was be
ating like a heart, pressing painfully against the inside of my skull. Without even feeling my knees bend, I slid down the wall until I found myself squatting on the floor. A cheerful aide wearing scrubs passed me and smiled, but looked away quickly when she saw the aghast expression on my face.
“Are you there?” Cheryl asked after a prolonged moment of silence.
I hoarsely choked out, “Yes.”
“I don’t know if this is true or not, but my mom’s friend said she thinks Amanda’s spine snapped. She was afraid to move her.”
A broken back. That would probably mean paralysis.
“There’s more,” Cheryl said.
Somehow, I had known the moment my head turned toward the TV at the sound of the newscaster’s voice that there would be.
“The second tornado touched down across town. It hit Mischa’s dad’s car dealership.”
I summoned a memory of Portnoy Luxury Automobiles to my mind. I’d never actually gone inside or looked at a car there, but I’d probably driven past it a thousand times in my lifetime. It was on the far side of town on the way to Ortonville, the more upscale part of town, closer to the subdivisions of Sherwood Hills, where Candace had lived, and Timber Creek.
I barely felt my mouth form the words. “Is her dad okay?”
There’s no reason to assume he’s dead, I told myself. He might have been working in Green Bay or Sheboygan today.
“I don’t know. All I heard was that there are cars everywhere.”
That was two tornados. Two members of the Portnoy family. As if on cue, Cheryl continued slowly, knowing how much the news she was delivering would tear a hole in my heart. “And the third tornado touched down on State Street, not far from Mischa’s mom’s real estate office.”
I waited. “And?”
“It ripped up the asphalt, messed up buildings and cars along one side of the street. And the other side of the street looks fine, like nothing happened.”
Don’t leap to conclusions, I ordered myself. Mischa’s mother was a real estate agent. She rarely had reason to be in the office since she was often showing houses to prospective buyers around town. But deep down, I knew it was too coincidental. In the past, when the evil spirits had demonstrated their ability to interfere with matter and energy in our world, I’d always interpreted their actions as threats. This time, they’d called my bluff. They’d shown me—and Mischa—what they were capable of doing.
“Do you think Violet has anything to do with it?” Cheryl asked. “She’s been missing at school a lot this spring. I mean, not that I’ve been paying much attention. But she’s in US History and calculus with me, and she was out for almost two weeks straight in February.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I don’t think so.” Surely the tornados had to do with the curse that had originally been on Violet, but I didn’t have any reason to believe that she had involvement in its cycle anymore. The spirits had moved on and were focused on Mischa. Even though I hadn’t heard about Violet missing school, I was too stunned by everything Cheryl had just told me to consider what that might mean while we were still on the phone.
The pain in my head was unbearable when I asked Cheryl to call me if she heard any news. One, two, three. Mischa had been right. Violet’s spirits had collected on their debt, three times, just like they’d been threatening they would.
I tapped Mischa’s name in my contacts list with every intention of reaching out to her, but couldn’t think of any words to type. There was a possibility that Mischa didn’t know anything about Amanda yet because she had been at the gym in Ortonville the whole time. I didn’t want to take the chance of being the one to break that news.
So I tapped the audio button and listened to her phone ring, expecting that she wasn’t going to pick up. In a voice that didn’t even sound like mine, I left a blunt voice mail telling Mischa to call me. I already knew she wouldn’t.
I wandered back into Mrs. Robinson’s room in a daze. Mrs. Robinson didn’t ask me what had happened. Even though she couldn’t see the despair on my face, she was able to deduce that whatever news I’d just been given on the phone had been bad. “Hand me that book up there on that shelf,” she told me, pointing up to the top of the credenza to the right of her TV. When I walked over, I found a row of corny bodice-ripper romance novels, and she clarified, “The Bible.”
I found a dog-eared paperback King James Bible at the end of the shelf, and handed it to her. She blindly thumbed through the pages, into which she had crammed all sorts of folded notes, bookmarks, and old photos. From a page near the middle of the book, she withdrew a small leather pouch that had been flattened during its time in the Bible to look more like an envelope. She gestured at me to take it from her.
“This is a gris-gris,” she informed me. “You take this home, put it on a cord, and wear it around your neck. Find something that belonged to your sister and place it inside—it can just be a tiny bit of something, a scrap of fabric, a little photo, whatever you’ve got—and this will protect you. Do you understand?”
The gris-gris looked pretty old and, honestly, gross, like perhaps someone else had worn it for a long time. If I hadn’t just heard that my worst fear had come true, I would have only humored Mrs. Robinson and tossed it in a dresser drawer when I got home. But instead, I held it in my palm as if it was precious.
“And you need protection. Because these loa that follow you around? They’re happy right now. They’re celebrating. If you could hear them like I do, you’d know. They’re saying we told you so.”
They sure had told me so.
“How can I hear and see them like you do?” I asked.
Mrs. Robinson laughed at me. “Well, you can’t! It’s taken me eighty long years of trying! But I’ll tell you what you can do.”
I leaned forward, desperate for any guidance she could give me.
“You take a pinch of salt and throw it in the air to the east.…”
I listened intently, even though I was skeptical about the magical power of common table salt. But I was upset enough by the news from Willow to consider anything that might offer protection.
“When it hits the ground, if it looks different from just regular old salt, then you’ve got something bad on your tail.”
I thanked Mrs. Robinson for her guidance, and assured her that I’d be back the following afternoon. Once back in the hallway, I texted Mom with numb fingers. She wrote back within seconds, assuring me that she was fine. The tornado hadn’t touched down anywhere near Martha Road, although it had done some damage in Glenn’s neighborhood. I should have called her, but in my gut it felt safer to avoid making that much more of a connection. She was safe—for now. Mischa’s family had been punished and not mine… but what if my family was next if I kept trying to help Mischa? As I clocked out for the night, I felt cold, and my limbs seemed to be moving too slowly, like in a nightmare when you’re running away from something scary and your legs just pinwheel like you’re in water.
It had been foolish of me to play along with Violet’s game back in September, but I’d known all along that my friends’ subsequent deaths hadn’t really been my fault. This, however, was. If Amanda Portnoy didn’t survive, or if Mischa’s parents had died during the tornado, those deaths were on me. I was the one who’d begged Mischa not to follow the spirits’ orders. Not even twenty-four hours had passed since Mischa had called to tell me that she was scared of exactly this. I could have sneaked out of the house the night before to buy more candles, but had chosen to talk to Trey instead. Three new moons had passed since the night the curse had jumped from Violet to Mischa—over three months, and in all that time, I hadn’t made any real effort to figure out how to help Mischa.
I’d let the distance between Florida and Wisconsin convince me it was safe to wait.
But maybe Mischa’s mom and dad were injured or rattled, but fine. Maybe Amanda could still make a full recovery if Mischa issued three more death sentences before the new moon. This could all have been just a
stern warning.
The powerful wave of nausea in my stomach said otherwise, though, and I feared that we’d run out of warnings. This was real, as real as the accident into which Trey and Olivia had gotten, as real as Candace drowning in the Pacific.
Dad must have heard the news about Willow, because he texted me from the parking lot of the assisted living facility to let me know that he had come to pick me up instead of Rhonda. It was raining when I stepped outside Oscawana Pavilion, and I felt my temper surge as I hesitated under the awning over sliding front doors. I was angry at Dad for having driven over in the rain. Angry that we had to ride home together on slick roads. Angry at myself for putting everyone I knew in danger—again.
“You’ve probably heard,” he greeted me as I climbed into the front seat. He sounded grim, which was rare for him.
“Mom’s fine. Nothing happened on our street,” I replied stonily.
Before pulling away from the curb, he said, “You’ve gotta remember, McKenna… extreme weather systems have nothing to do with ghosts or spirits or occult games.”
“I know, Dad,” I replied because I had to, although he really had no idea what he was talking about. On one hand, he was right. Bad things happened everywhere, to a lot of innocent people. But surely by now—after Olivia’s accident, and the meningitis outbreak that had almost killed my classmate Tracy Hartford, Stephani deMilo’s tragic “suicide,” and the avalanche that had endangered every eleventh grader from Willow High School on the ski trip in January—he realized that something was very suspiciously wrong in our town.
The trouble in Willow, Wisconsin, was painfully obvious to anyone whose mind was open to the possibility of paranormal interference with the regular world. Kirsten texted me before Dad and I even got home asking simply, WTF? She didn’t need any convincing.
I didn’t write back. I couldn’t. My whole chest ached with heaviness because Mischa still hadn’t replied, which meant either she was completely—and understandably—emotionally devastated, or furious.