Supervision

by Alison Stine

  I had said too much—but it didn’t matter. I grabbed his hand as if I could hold him still, as if I could keep him here in the car with me, keep him anywhere, make a ghost stay. “I need to know what you want,” I said. “I need you to figure out why you’re here, what’s keeping you here, because you can’t just disappear on me. The woman last night, the ghost? She got what she needed and then she was gone, in a heartbeat. She didn’t say goodbye. She vanished. She went through a door. You can’t do that to me.”

  “I won’t, Ez,” he said. “I promise.”

  But I didn’t know if I believed him.

  Martha didn’t know what she wanted. “I have everything I need,” she said, pulling a sheet from the wicker basket at her feet, the wind whipping the ends of the sheet around her legs. She hung the laundry on a rope strung between the barn and a tree.

  My grandmother wasn’t home, but I wondered what it would have looked like to her, what it looked like to someone on the road: the sheets sailing by all on their own, secured to the line by invisible hands.

  “I have a nice home,” Martha said. “A good position with a kind and decent family.” She smiled at me.

  The questions I wanted to ask her—why did you die? What was missing from your life that’s still missing?—I couldn’t bring myself to say. Those questions would dance around the other, central question of how she had done it and why.

  I watched her shake another sheet from the basket, clothespin in her mouth, and hoist the sheet onto the line. “Can I at least help?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I’ve got my system.”

  “Martha, why did you decide to be a maid?”

  At this, she laughed. “Decide? I didn’t decide. I needed to work, needed to help out my family, to send money to them, so I did. I found a way. I did what I could. I’m good at it.”

  “Yes, you are,” I said, watching the sheets catch the breeze and stiffen like a ship’s sails. “And your family? Are any of them, you know, ghosts too?”

  Did everyone become a ghost?

  “Oh no, Miss,” Martha said. She bent back to work. “They’ve all gone on. To a better place, I imagine.”

  I sat cross-legged, leaning back in the grass, and tried to imagine it: to have my family go on without me—and go where, exactly? Was that place any better than this one: this house, this work, this sunlight?

  “This position was supposed to be temporary,” Martha said. “Only until …” She stopped. Her face went slack.

  In the distance, I heard hammering. I waited. “Until what?” I said.

  “Until I met a man and had a family,” Martha whispered.

  Hammering again. Sawing.

  “Who’s working on their house around here?” I asked.

  The nearest neighbor was past the fairgrounds, and that house was a trailer. But Martha didn’t answer me. She wasn’t even looking at me. I followed her glance to the house, to its very top, where someone was standing on the roof.

  My throat tightened. “What’s he doing up there? What is that up there?”

  “It’s a widow’s walk,” Martha said. “For the wives of sailors at sea to watch for their husbands.”

  “Why is there a widow’s walk in Pennsylvania?”

  “Architectural folly,” she whispered.

  I rose, shielding my eyes against the sun. Backlit from a distance, the figure on the roof looked as thin and dark as a flame.

  But Martha threw her arm out in front of me, stopping me from moving. She looked me right in the eyes. “Don’t go up there,” she said. “Don’t you ever go up. It’s not safe on the roof. Don’t you ever.”

  “Okay,” I said. By the time I looked back to the roof, the ghost was gone.

  Mr. Black moaned, rolled his eyes, and ran his hands through his hair. “What do I want? What do I want? I want to be left alone. I want some peace and quiet. And whiskey!” He leaned back, his legs kicking, and not for the first time I worried he might topple from the gravestone where he was perched.

  I shook my head. “I don’t believe you. There’s got to be something else, something you need, something keeping you here. Something big.”

  “That stinking mud hole of a pond,” he said. “That’s big. That kept me here.”

  “I thought you told me the pond was small, ornamental?”

  “It’s deep!” he said.

  I fought a smile. Mr. Black was grumpy and drunk, but he had saved me from the Stationmaster. Twice. Maybe saved my life. I knew he was dependable. Martha had fetched him when the Stationmaster attacked me on the tracks, and he hadn’t hesitated.

  He watched her now, watched Martha below us, still hanging sheets by the barn. In the late afternoon, the wind was strong, and Martha’s ghost work still wasn’t done. Or maybe she was doing it again. Clouds raced across the sky, gray with blue undersides. When I looked at Mr. Black, he was smiling.

  “Oh, watch the gusts now. They’ll steal the sheet away. No, she’s good. She’s got it.” He grinned at me. “Monday. Laundry day.” His expression changed. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  “Um. Laundry day?”

  He took a drink. “Fair enough.”

  We were sitting in the family cemetery above the house. It was a nice enough spot, when the wind blazed through, cooling my face, but I felt uneasy. Everywhere, all around us, gravestones poked out of the ground.

  “Why do you hang out here all the time?” I asked.

  “No reason,” Mr. Black said. “I like the view.”

  In the valley below, the sheets fluttered in the wind. Martha wiped her hands on her dress.

  “It’s Martha!” I said. “Martha’s the reason you’re still here. You want Martha. You love her. You’re a ghost because you never told Martha you love her!”

  “I don’t love her!” Mr. Black said. “My word! The living are crazy!” He looked horrified, then he looked down at his bottle, studying it as if it were fascinating or endlessly deep.

  “Martha’s never been kissed before,” I said. “And I happen to know she wants to be.”

  He didn’t look up. “Is that so?” A horn blasted in the distance, familiar to me now. “Keystone from New York City,” Mr. Black said. “Right on schedule.” His glance flickered up. “Oh no. You may want to avert your eyes, my dear.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s idiot’s up on the roof again.”

  I looked up. The ghost stood on the widow’s walk. “What’s going on?” I said. “Who is he?”

  In the yard, Martha stared up at the house, shielding her eyes, her laundry forgotten.

  I rose. “What’s happening?”

  “I said don’t look!” Mr. Black said. He leapt off the gravestone and clamped his hand over my eyes.

  I swatted him. “You smell like an alley!” I said.

  “You can’t be trusted to close your own bloody eyes!”

  “Why do I need to close my eyes?”

  But Mr. Black wouldn’t tell me, and he wouldn’t move his hand.

  And so I didn’t see the Builder fall from the widow’s walk of my grandmother’s house, fall for the hundredth or more time and die. An accident, a terrible accident. Again. I heard Martha scream. Mr. Black dropped his hands, and I saw her running, holding her skirts. She streamed into the house. The laundry went slack on the line. One sheet tore loose and was trampled.

  Xavier Vale started building his house in 1890. It took ten years—and he never really finished. He also never really let anyone else help. He fired workers, contractors, then did the work himself, scaring the neighbors, worrying the town. He kept adding rooms, even though he and his wife, Emily, only ended up having three children. He wanted more. He wanted to throw a big party when the house was finally done, to invite the whole town, to make peace with them, after all the hammering. The family did throw a party: it was a combination housewarming, New Year’s Eve party—and a kind of wake. He died at the party, as did his maid.

  And after the party, the gardener drowned. />
  Vale was the Builder, a ghost bent on reliving his death by returning to the roof, and Mr. Black was the gardener, but where did Martha fit in? Why had she died?

  I closed the search window of the library computer, my eyes aching. It was hours before last period and the bus to take me home. It was also the last day of school before summer break, and every few minutes, there was whooping in the hallway. On the bus ride in, I had witnessed two boys showing off cans of shaving cream stashed in their backpacks.

  I was wondering if there was a spot in the back of the library where I could just curl up and read a book, away from the librarian, when the door breezed open. I heard a snatch of conversation from the hall, a question I recognized.

  “Can you help me find my locker?”

  This time I didn’t wait for blood to appear on a wall. I didn’t wait for a kid to be scared to the ground and bloodied, and for everyone to laugh and think he had tripped. I left the library.

  The ghost girl stood there in the hallway, clutching her books, as I knew she would be. She saw me right away. It was startling to be seen.

  “Can you help me?” she asked.

  I tried to forget her strength, her anger. Malicious, Tom had called her.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I can’t find my locker.”

  “Do you know the number?”

  Wordlessly, she turned her hand over so that I could see her palm, where she had written the numbers in marker, childish green ink smearing her skin.

  “696,” I read. How long had it been written there? Years? Decades?

  The girl put her hand down.

  “Okay,” I said. “The six hundred lockers are in the next hall, by the computer classrooms.” From what I could see of the courtyard through the windows, a jumble of shaving cream and limbs, many students weren’t in the classrooms. Any classrooms. “Let’s go now, okay?”

  “Really?” she said. “You’re really going to help me? Far out.” She was friendly, sweet even, sticking close to my shoulder as she followed. There was no sign in her of the rage that had made blood appear on a wall. “Are you a senior?” she asked.

  “Sophomore,” I said.

  “Really? I dig your hair. Is that henna?”

  I looked at her. “Um, no. It’s just black.”

  “Cool,” the girl said.

  We had reached the right hallway, and I trailed my fingers across the lockers. Most had been decorated for the end of school with streamers and glittery signs. But 696, when we found it, was bare, banged up. There wasn’t even a lock.

  I tugged but the door didn’t open. “That’s funny,” I said. I pulled at the handle again, but it was stuck, rusted shut. “I’m not sure this is gonna work.”

  The girl reached up, balled her hand into a fist, and pounded the locker hard. The door swung open.

  “Wow,” I said. “You’re going to fit right in around here.”

  Now she would do it. Now she would disappear or fade away, or do whatever it was that Kate had done, whatever it was that ghosts did when their mission was accomplished, their want fulfilled, and they could go, just go. Go … wherever. I didn’t want to think about where that was; I just wanted the girl to go there.

  But she didn’t.

  She peeked into the locker. She was so short, she had to creep up on tiptoe to do it. The locker was empty.

  “There’s nothing there,” I said, my stomach tightening. What was she looking for? What if she got angry again? What did she want?

  “One thing’s there,” the girl said. She tore away a piece of paper that had been taped to the inside of the door, and handed it to me. “Take a look.”

  It was a newspaper clipping, yellowed and creased. The headline read: SEARCH FOR MISSING GIRL ENDS IN TRAGEDY. There was a picture.

  I turned to the girl. She was gone. I scanned the hallway. It was deserted. I heard a squealing, and turned to see the boys from my bus, sliding across the linoleum floor at the end of the hall, covered in shaving cream. I looked at the girl in the picture again. Her hair looked neat and combed, parted in the middle. She wore wide-legged jeans and a shirt with daisies. There were no circles under her eyes, and she was smiling. She didn’t look tired or angry or malicious at all.

  Not yet.

  June 5, 1976, the paper read. A missing Wellstone High freshman has been found dead.

  CHAPTER 10:

  Can You See Me?

  Clara sat on the library cart and watched me on the computer. As I grew more and more frustrated, she grew more and more bored. There wasn’t much information on Louise Parker, the girl from the article, the ghost from the hall: only a few sites noting her death, and many more speculating that she was haunting the high school (apparently she had been looking for her locker for quite some time).

  At first, I thought the lack of information was due to the age of Louise’s case. Her death was more than thirty years old, and even news of a murder or suicide—no one seemed sure—fades after awhile. But then I realized the true reason Louise Parker didn’t have many sites devoted to her.

  There were too many other dead or missing.

  Almost every year someone went missing in Wellstone, or in the small towns around Wellstone, a grisly tradition stretching back as far as I could find. The names crowded over each other: Sandra, Victoria, Sarah, Ted... They sounded so ordinary, so normal. But they had vanished.

  “They’re not all ghosts so don’t go looking for them,” Clara said. She was stretched out on top of the book cart, reclining over a stack of encyclopedias.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Tom and I would have met them by now.”

  “But you’re saying they’re all dead? All of these missing kids are dead?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe.”

  Sandra, Victoria, Sarah, Ted…

  “What happened to them?” I asked.

  “Different things. Drowning and hanging and being hit by automobiles. And being hit by trains. And, what are they called? Drugs.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “And running away. A lot of running away.”

  Wellstone was small, suffocating—it was true. There was no mall. There wasn’t even a movie theater. New York was a day’s drive, but who had the money to go there? Who had any money at all? The houses were collapsing, taken back by the bank, or surrendered, sold to no one. Many of the houses weren’t houses but trailers. The lawns were overgrown, the businesses abandoned.

  I hadn’t actually had a conversation with anyone living in Wellstone, not anyone alive, but what would they have thought of me, if they could have seen me: the Chinese-American orphan girl from the city, sent here as punishment for trespassing? Would I ever make a friend here? Everyone already thought my grandmother was a witch.

  And they were kind of right.

  I turned back to the computer.

  “Why are you such a bore?” Clara said. “Tom and I thought you’d be levitating things by now. Throwing candles and moving chairs and writing messages on foggy windows. There are lots of fun things you can do, you know, and you never even do them.”

  “Like what?” I said glumly.

  “You could steal candy. And you could actually eat it. And ribbons. And wear them. So many things you could do, Esmé! We don’t know why you don’t do them.”

  “We?” I said.

  “Me and Tom.”

  I saw her reflection in the computer screen, her hazy shape leaning forward. I heard her whisper icily in my ear. But I didn’t feel her breath; she had no breath. “He doesn’t love you, you know.”

  I jerked away, pushing the chair out from the desk and standing. I didn’t care if the librarian or anyone saw. I stared at Clara.

  “I know Tom kissed you,” she said. “Martha’s seething with jealousy. Everyone’s talking. But I’m the only one who knows why he did it.”

  “Why?” I echoed.

  I felt a strange tightness in my chest and limbs, a buzzing in my ears. I didn’t know what to
feel first, anger over Clara or fear about Martha being jealous. Martha who laughed with me, who helped me decide what to wear, who sat on the end of my bed and tucked me in. Martha who was like my sister now that my sister wasn’t here.

  Clara drew her knees together, clicking her heels against the cart. “Tom thinks he’ll move on if he loves you. He thinks he’ll stop being a ghost. You know if you get what you want on earth you can go away? You can stop haunting this place, this backwoods town, stop reliving your death every stupid boring day.”

  “I know,” I said, weakly. “I’m the one who figured that out.”

  “Well, we always suspected that was it, you know. You’re just so direct, Esmé.” She flipped her hair. “Tom was never kissed in life. So when you came along, he hatched the plan at once.”

  “The plan?”

  “To make you love him. To make you kiss him. He hasn’t gone away yet, so he thinks he has to do more. He wants to go further.”

  I felt my legs go wobbly and I leaned against the chair. The burn on my back, which had been healing, felt fresh as the day it had happened. My head pounded, and seemed to be full of sound. I couldn’t stop thinking of Tom. I thought of him in my grandmother’s car. I thought of him at the pond. And I thought of him in the cafeteria, how his lips had been like anyone’s lips, except I wanted him to kiss me.

  I remembered everything I thought I knew about love, which was nothing. Acid never called. He never emailed, or texted, or wrote. He would never visit me here, I knew. He wanted to be around me only when I was close, when I was convenient. I thought Tom was different than other guys, but what did I know?

  He was dead. That was the only difference.

  My eyes clouded over and I couldn’t see Clara anymore. All the encyclopedias on the cart had spilled out onto the floor. What did I know of Tom, really? He was half an orphan, he had come from the city, he had stolen things. But what were his dreams before dying? What had he hoped to be? Was he capable of hurting me? Who was he? I thought of him running in the moonlight. I thought of him lying still on the tracks. I thought of him crying. I started to cry.