“Yeah? Did you beat him up and take his lunch?”
Normally I would have scolded Charlie for that, but I let it go. I didn’t want to call any more attention to my croaking voice than necessary. Plus as long as we were talking about Warren’s day, I didn’t have to answer any questions about mine.
But it was no good. Charlie saw me flinch and grab my side when I bent to get an onion from the pantry. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I grabbed a bottle of wine while I was in there. I had an idea I might need it. “Just a little sore. It was a rough job.”
“But it’s done now?”
“Not exactly. I’m going back Thursday.”
Charlie crossed the room to help me with the cork. Behind the counter where Warren couldn’t see, he pulled my sweater up a couple of inches. His face clouded over when he saw the shiny, burned skin there. “Warren,” he said, “we’ve got half an hour until dinner. Why don’t you go do your reading? Then you’ll be all done with your homework and you can relax after you eat.”
Warren looked from Charlie to me to Charlie again. He knew when he was being gotten rid of. But he didn’t say anything, just nodded and left the kitchen, leaving nothing between me and Charlie but a large glass of Cabernet.
“Sit.” He gestured at the counter and gave me the I’m-brooking-no-argument face. I hoisted myself up.
“Off.” He gestured again. With any other man, this might have been kind of sexy. I took off my sweater and sat in my bra while he scowled at my torso, most of which was mottled red and purple.
I could see him grinding his teeth while he got the burn cream from the kitchen drawer. “Want to tell me about it?” He rubbed it on the spots on my back he knew I couldn’t reach. Gently, I noticed. He was mad, but he was more worried.
I decided, perhaps unfortunately, not to lie. When I finished my story, I reminded Charlie again how important it was that Jeffrey be stopped, that the lives of heaven knew how many girls depended on it. Charlie reminded me again of the importance of Warren not having any more dead people in his life just now. We both had a point.
I pulled my sweater back over my head, choosing the moment when it was covering my face to say again, “I’m going back on Thursday.”
When the sweater slid past my eyes, Charlie was standing in front of me dumbfounded. He threw the ointment back in the drawer, slammed it shut, and stalked off without another word.
Warren came back in, looking worried. “Are you in trouble?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Wash your hands.”
He made no move toward the powder room. “Daddy looks mad.”
I nodded. “Grownups don’t always agree, just like kids don’t always agree. Everything is fine.” I gave him a stern-mom look. “Wash your hands.”
Still he didn’t move. “Ryan said his dad looked mad for a long time. Then he moved out.”
“Well, your father isn’t moving out.”
“Are you?”
I sighed. “Ryan’s father moved out because his parents got a divorce. But your father and I aren’t married.”
“I know that,” Warren said in the offended tone of a child who has had something explained to him too many times. “You’re here because Daddy needed help and my other father is dead.”
Inwardly I flinched at the bald way seven-year-olds have of putting things, but tried not to let it show in my face. “Exactly. Most aunts don’t live with their nephews. Someday I will move out.”
“But not now, right?”
“Not now,” I agreed.
“Good, because I’m hungry.” Warren shot me his gap-toothed smile, and I wished I could be his mom forever. Then he went to wash his hands.
I called Sherrie the next morning to check on her. She’d sent the kids off to school directly from the hotel, and she and her husband had gone back to the house alone. It was completely quiet there, just as I promised her it would be.
“I still don’t like leaving Avery Ann alone though,” she said.
“I agree. Have her sleep in your room tonight. Both kids, if you can fit them. Or have a family slumber party in the living room.”
This perked her up. “We can put sleeping bags on the floor. And I’ll make popcorn!”
“Um, okay. Great.” I suppressed my inner snicker and scolded myself for it. Yes, she wanted you to call her Sherrie, and she wore lipstick at all times and got disproportionately excited about popcorn, but I’d also seen her tending that fire with steely calm. A lot of people showed another side of themselves during a haunting, but it was rarely a better side. “I’ll be there by nine tomorrow,” I told her.
Which gave me the rest of the day to prepare to do battle with Jeffrey again. Foremost in my mind was that shout. I couldn’t let go of the idea that the word was the same language as my incantation. I couldn’t repeat it, or remember exactly how it sounded even, but I thought I might recognize it if I saw it.
If only I had Cyrus’s books. If only Cyrus had left them to us when he died. Or at least let us read them when he was alive. If only Cyrus wasn’t such an asshole.
It was our mother who got us involved with him, although certainly not on purpose. One day when Nat was eleven and I was ten, she took our older brother Samuel out shopping for some new sneakers. We were outside playing, so she left us a note (which we would not see until the next day) telling us they might just grab a bite at the mall, but that there was chicken and pie in the refrigerator, and plenty of apples.
It was not unusual for her to leave us to our own devices while she tended to Samuel. I always felt that my mother wished she’d stopped at one. Just the one perfect Samuel, a parenting record unblemished by the daughter who was (always said in a low voice, and never in church) divorced and the son who was (always said in a whisper, and never if she could help it) gay. Of course back then, she didn’t know about either the divorce or the gay. But we still always understood that Samuel was her heart’s darling and we were, for the most part, a chore.
What was unusual was that she locked us out. My father was out of town for work, as he often was, so we were stuck outside through a pleasantly warm November afternoon that darkened into a cold November evening.
Cyrus lived down the street. He was weird, and his hygiene didn’t seem good, and we avoided him when possible. He drove by on his way home that night, while Nat and I were sitting on our front porch, shivering and hungry and too cranky to think of any more to do to keep ourselves occupied. A few minutes later, he walked up the street with his scraggly little dog and asked us what we were doing. Nat explained the circumstances.
Cyrus looked very put out by the burden of hospitality, but he said, “Well then you’d better come inside with me to get a sammich and wait. I’ll leave a message for your mother and let her know where to collect you when she gets home.”
If Warren ever just up and went with a guy like that, I’d punish him for days. But Cyrus wasn’t a stranger, really, and his weirdness wasn’t the threatening kind. Some of our other neighbors even got along with him. Plus we were cold.
He was making our sandwiches when Nat found the canteen on a bookshelf in his living room.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Cyrus plopped two plates (not matching) of liverwursty goodness onto the coffee table and walked back into the kitchen again, saying over his shoulder on his way by, “Switchel ring.”
“What’s switchel?” Nat asked.
“This is.” Cyrus came back with two glasses (also not matching) and handed one to each of us. His couch sagged as we sat in front of our sandwiches.
Nat was the first to sip his drink. “This is really good,” he said, and so began our lifelong love of switchel. When Nat finished his sandwich, he went and picked up the switchel ring again.
“It looks really old.” He looked back at the shelf it had been resting on. “So do all these books. Can I look at them?”
“No you cannot,” Cyrus said. He was eyeing Nat thoughtfully, with an in
tensity that made me vaguely worried. Although not as worried as I was about the liverwurst stuck to the roof of my mouth. The question of Cyrus’s stare was quickly pushed aside by the question of whether asking for another drink would be bad manners or not.
The following weekend Cyrus called my mother and asked if Nat might like to come and do some yard work for extra cash. I tagged along, being as interested in extra cash as anyone. We cut his grass and trimmed his bushes and drained the hose lines in preparation for winter. When we were finished, he invited us back in for switchel.
“So, you like old things, do you?” Cyrus asked. Nat’s eyes had gone to the bookshelf again. I was becoming curious myself. There was something about that worn clay ring, a mysterious antique object surrounded by old books. To a kid’s imagination, that shelf looked like something you’d find in a wizard’s house; those forbidden books looked magical. And as it turned out, it was, and they were.
Nat allowed that he did like old things. Cyrus asked if he also liked ghost stories. I chimed in at that, even though I wasn’t the one he asked. I loved ghost stories.
And that was how our training began.
We went back to Cyrus’s house week after week, under the guise of doing odd jobs and such. Cyrus wasn’t much older than my father, but his health wasn’t good, so our helping him out didn’t raise any suspicions.
I learned in bits and pieces over the following months, and then years, that the switchel ring had been passed down through Cyrus’s family for a few generations. He needed someone to pass it on to from there, but had no close family of his own, only some cousins he greatly disliked. The pool of candidates for believing you can send a ghost to the afterlife through an antique canteen was fairly small, which was how he settled on Nat and I.
He never did let us open those books, though. Cyrus only taught us what we needed to know to banish apparitions. Naturally, what other magical wonders he had tucked away on those shelves or in hidden drawers or locked chests became the stuff of legend between Nat and I. (Even though we never saw any hidden drawers or locked chests.) But we never found out, either what the secrets were, or why Cyrus guarded them so closely.
Over the years that cache of forbidden knowledge became a bit of a fixation. I thought of it every time I had a supernatural mystery or problem to solve, including the day I was planning my return to Jeffrey’s house.
I tried to get in touch with Cyrus after Nat died, but only managed to track down one of the much-maligned cousins, who told me that Cyrus was long dead. I offered then to buy any old books he might have kept, but I was refused.
I thought it might be time to try again. I dug out the cousin’s email address. He never had given me his phone number; it seemed friendliness was not a dominant trait in Cyrus’s gene pool. I sent him a message asking whether he might have any of Cyrus’s old books that he’d be willing to sell, and explained that Cyrus himself had gotten me interested in book collecting when I was a girl, which was pretty much true. I did not mention that I remembered perfectly well that I’d already asked this question once and been turned down.
We had Charlie’s super-secret-setup dinner at the Lins that night, a potluck to which they’d invited a couple dozen people. Normally I’d have warned Charlie ahead of time so he could at least pick out a good shirt. Charlie and gay stereotypes have their common ground—the man’s never met a show tune he didn’t love—but fashion sense is not on it. He was still pissed off and barely speaking to me, though, so I went ahead and let him wear the ugly mustard-colored one that made his color look sickly.
I flashed Amy a quick thumbs up behind Charlie’s back when she introduced us to the guy. He looked a little like Nat—thick dark hair, dimples—but not so much that it would be creepy if they hit it off and started dating. He also seemed very nice, and when he leaned over to shake my hand and said “Nice to meet you,” his breath was minty. The only immediately obvious flaw was that he was called Norbert. (I heard the following exchange no less than six times that night: “I’m sorry, was it Norman?” “No, Norbert.”) But that only made me more inclined to root for him. I feel a kinship with all the unfortunately named, sharing as I do the name of the least likable and most slutty Bennett sister. And I was my mother’s only girl, so it’s not like she didn’t have the other options.
Charlie spent most of the night in the living room talking to Norbert. I spent most of it trapped at the kitchen table between Susan Holdt and Martha Corey. Susan was only capable of talking about her children and her yard, and resented any intrusion on her preferred topics, especially by Martha. For a while there was a conversational duel between Susan’s hydrangeas and Martha’s conviction that there were four ghosts (she seemed very sure on the number) haunting the local middle school. I briefly considered whether I might be able to leverage them (the ghosts, not the hydrangeas) into a job, but just because Martha believed in them didn’t mean anyone else did. And even if all the administrators were convinced the school was haunted, they’d still never get the budget for a professional banishment. While I was off inside my head thinking all that over, Susan was joined by a couple of her cronies.
“Martha was just telling us about some ghosts at the middle school.” Of course Susan finger-quoted the word ghosts, because she was classy like that.
“Oh Martha, you should go on that Famous and Haunted show,” Jenna Sergeant said.
“Why, is Martha a celebrity now?” Susan asked. “Of course she is to us, but I mean in the wider world.” She grinned around the table with her unnaturally whitened teeth, but her eyes were mean.
“Well no, but at least she’d find some people who believed in ghosts there.” Jenna matched Susan’s smile. It was the equivalent of a smiley emoticon in an email: they thought they could be as nasty as they wanted as long as they tacked on a smile to show they were just kidding around and you should be a good sport about it.
Martha was trying to be a good sport, but I could see a little flash of hurt in her eyes and it pissed me off. Which was hypocritical of me, since I made fun of Martha Corey as much as the next person. But at least I kept it to myself, or maybe a little bit to Charlie or Amy, when I was sure nobody else could hear. These bitches, whose own sons had probably helped stuff poor Jack Nimble into a box and haul him up a tree, were embarrassing a lonely woman at a party.
“Well I believe in ghosts, and I’m right here,” I said, and dismissed Susan and Jenna with a turn of my chair, making a two-person group of me and Martha. “Did all four of these ghosts die at the same time?”
Jenna and Susan drifted off into the living room after that and were probably happier for it, while I had a long conversation with Martha that included several comments about my aura and offers to make me a love potion so I could meet somebody nice “my own age.” (I wasn’t sure whether she thought I was in danger of going older if left to my own devices, or younger.)
“Oh and there’s Charlie!” Martha clapped her hands, and I turned to see Charlie and Norbert refilling their drinks behind me. Charlie bent to kiss Martha on the cheek. “Norbert, Martha, Martha, Norbert.”
“Is this a new friend, Charlie?” Martha didn’t use the finger quotes, but she emphasized friend the same way Susan did ghosts. “You should bring him to my birthday party next month.” She smiled at Norbert and said, as if sharing a great secret, “I was born early, on the fourteenth of October, but I was due on All Hallow’s Eve!”
And then something terrible happened: I glanced at Charlie, ready to catch his eye for a silent exchange of mutual amusement over Martha Corey. (Yeah I know, I already said I was a hypocrite.) But instead, I saw him exchange that look with Norbert. My look. About my neighbor. Our joke.
Maybe I was still in a bad mood because of Susan and Jenna, or maybe I was feeling insecure because Charlie was still mad at me, or maybe I was actually on to something. Whatever the reason, I felt a bright hot flare of jealousy and resentment and something else, something awfully like fear. Norbert did not seem nearly so hands
ome or so nice anymore.
Maybe that’s only the beginning, Lyds. Maybe he’ll just move into your house while he’s at it. Maybe he’s better at remembering the right kind of cereal to buy and never overcooks a chicken. Maybe Warren would rather have him than you.
That party was not fun.
I woke up the next morning with the same headache I’d gone to bed with. There was no answer from Cyrus’s cousin in my inbox, but there was no point in delaying things in hopes of one. I had to strike while Jeffrey might still be tired from the last time.
I thought about Nat much more than usual that day. It was only natural, I guessed, after seeing Charlie with someone else the night before. Not to mention going to face a poltergeist. I thought about him the whole way to Sherrie’s house. I thought about him as the awful silence inside wound itself around me like a snake. I thought about him when, with a shaking hand, I set the switchel ring down on the dining room table and began unpacking the other things from my bag.
“Do—”
The sound of Sherrie’s voice made me shriek. She shrieked back. We looked at each other, smiling weakly.
“I was just going to ask if you want me to fill the bowl,” she said.
“Oh.” I handed it over. It was better that she fill it. I wasn’t sure I could keep my hands steady enough not to spill the water, and I didn’t want to show her any more jitters than I already had. “Thanks.”
Sherrie left the room and a second later I heard the faucet.
“Okay then,” I whispered. “Here goes.”
As before, Jeffrey’s laugh preceded him. But I was ready for that, and my voice didn’t even waver. I kept going about my business as the heat came into the room again, searing the wounds I’d gotten the last time, the way hot water does when you take a shower without bandaging a burn. I ignored it. I ignored him, too, when he finally came into sight. I didn’t even look at him. And I wouldn’t, either, no matter what he shouted. I knew his game now, and I could beat him.
One verse to go. I dropped the book into the bowl with a wet plop. The smell of burning paper wafted up, then was gone. Seven more lines. Only seven.
Ghost in the Canteen (The Adventures of Lydia Trinket Book 1) Page 4