“It’s too dark in here,” I say, flipping the switch, but the room doesn’t get any brighter. I turn on the lights over the kitchen table for good measure, but it doesn’t make a difference. It takes me a second to realize why.
I mean, of course it’s foggy outside—what else is new?—but right now it’s foggy inside. Mist is snaking its way in from the windows, over the counter and around the stove, above the refrigerator and beneath the table—our own private meteorological phenomenon.
I hesitate before reaching for my phone; I don’t want to break up our normal evening. But I guess the stupid fog has already destroyed our brief foray into normalcy, so I go ahead and pull my phone out of the pocket of the jeans I stole from Mom back in August. Mom is so intent on slicing the mushrooms that she doesn’t notice it when I hit record and scan the room, walking in an enormous circle around her, recording every last inch of fog. If we were in a movie, this would be the moment when an actual specter would appear. All the mist would gather together, condensing until it was in the shape of a little girl. Maybe she’d open her mouth and say something.
I walk around the counter island, standing across the way from Mom. I focus my camera on the center of the room, waiting. Mom takes up a tiny space in the corner of my screen; the sound of her knife going through the mushrooms is a steady sort of drumbeat, one after another after another.
Suddenly the sound changes, and the corner of my screen turns red.
“Mom!” I shout, dropping my phone with a clatter on the counter. Blood pours out from her left wrist.
“I must have cut myself,” she says, stating the obvious. She’s much calmer than I would be if I were the one who was bleeding. She is a nurse, after all.
“Don’t tell me my klutziness is rubbing off on you,” I say, but the joke falls flat. Maybe because my voice is shaking as I say it. I grab a wad of paper towels and press them against her left wrist.
“You’re shaking, Sunshine,” Mom says. “Are you really still that grossed out by the sight of blood?”
I nod, but it’s not just the blood. I’m shivering because I’m freezing. The temperature in here seems to have dropped fifty degrees in the last thirty seconds. I gag on the musty smell of mildew in the air.
Her right hand is still wrapped around the knife. She’s holding it so tightly that her knuckles are white. “You can put that down,” I say, pointing. “Mom?” I prompt. “Put the knife down.”
Mom shakes her head. “I’m not finished.”
“The mushrooms can wait.” I reach for the knife when suddenly—
“Ow!” I shout. Now I’m the one who’s bleeding. I hold my left hand out in front of me. There is a gash at the base of my thumb. Tears spring to my eyes.
“Sunshine!” Mom shouts. “What were you thinking?” I shake my head—what was I thinking, reaching for the knife like that? They teach you that kind of thing in kindergarten: never grab a knife by the blade.
But I didn’t mean to grab the blade. I was reaching for her hand, wrapped around the knife’s handle. I must have slipped or something.
“Let me see your hand,” Mom says, reaching for me. She doesn’t notice that it’s so cold that her breath comes out of her mouth as vapor. For a split second I wish I were still holding my phone, recording all of this. No, that’s insane. I had to put my phone down to help. The ghost is important and everything, but not nearly as important as the fact that Mom and I are both bleeding.
My blood lands on the counter next to Mom’s blood.
Plop, plop. Plop, plop.
Suddenly the room is spinning. My head feels like it’s filled with helium and is threatening to pop right off and float away. My cut isn’t nearly as bad as Mom’s, but still . . . it’s just so much blood.
I slide forward, my hand leaving a bloody trail on the counter. For some reason I can’t seem to keep my eyes open.
The next thing I know, I’m lying on the couch, with Mom standing over me.
“What happened?”
“You fainted.”
“I did?”
“I guess all that blood was too much for you,” she says. So much for our normal night.
“I don’t think this is very funny,” I protest. My hand is bandaged perfectly; so is Mom’s. The advantages of living with a medical expert.
“How did I get onto the couch?”
“I carried you.”
“You did?” Since when is she strong enough to carry me?
“Dinner’s ready,” she says.
“You cooked dinner?”
“Of course,” she answers, like that’s the most obvious thing to do after you’ve cut both yourself and your daughter and then your daughter passed out. I get up and follow her into the kitchen, still feeling slightly woozy. The mist is completely gone, except for some patches of condensation scattered across the kitchen counter. The room is bright with all the lights on, and Mom is spooning chicken onto two plates.
Maybe it’s not too late to salvage this normal evening, I think hopefully. I set my mouth into a smile and force myself to say, “Looks delicious.”
But as I cut into the meat, I can see that it’s not going to be. “Mom? I don’t think this got cooked all the way through.”
“What are you talking about?” she answers, reaching across the table and spearing the chicken meat with her fork. The yellowish meat drips water as it crosses to her side of the table, and I try not to gag as she lifts the nearly raw meat to her mouth and chews it with gusto.
“Don’t eat that!” I shout. “You’ll get sick.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s perfect.” Her wound hasn’t healed, and blood seeps out of the side of her bandage onto the chicken on her plate. I watch her eat it all: the undercooked meat, the drops of blood. If my phone weren’t all the way over on the kitchen counter, I’d record this too. Though it would probably be barely watchable, the way my hands are trembling.
I don’t know what this is, but it’s certainly not perfect. How can Mom think that anything at all is perfect?
The First Cut
I’ve always been fond of that human expression: the first cut is the deepest. Of course, I don’t actually believe it. The first cut is usually barely enough to cause any real damage. It’s the hurts that come later that are the real cause for concern.
Sunshine finally engaged with the child. I’m glad I chose a young spirit for this task: enticing Sunshine with games worked wonders. Sunshine might have gone on for months without interacting, intent only upon what was happening to Katherine.
But clearly this girl has the capacity to care not only about the woman she calls Mom. She cares about the spirit’s suffering as well; I could sense her concern when she blacked out the box on the board game that bore the image of a faucet. Sunshine couldn’t possibly have fully understood why the picture would be so upsetting to the creature she played with, and yet she knew exactly what to do to soothe the spirit’s anxiety.
Empathy can be a powerful tool.
But then empathy is not the only sensation flowing through Sunshine now. I can also feel her fear: I sense it when her pulse quickens, when her hands grow clammy and cold. She doesn’t understand what’s happening to Katherine. She certainly doesn’t yet see that there is something larger at work here, something bigger than the goings-on in her small, damp house.
She is frightened. I am curious: Will she let her fear, or her empathy, determine her next move? Will she take the time to learn more, or will she dive under the covers and hope that one morning she’ll awaken to discover that everything has gone back to the way it was before? Surely she longs for the time when her nights with Katherine were full of laughter and affection, not steel and blood. When supernatural was a word that existed only in stories rather than a reality in her house. When she didn’t have to question whether everything she thought she knew about the world had shifted.
It is almost enough to make me feel sorry for her. She doesn’t yet understand that nothing will ever be th
e way it was before. Perhaps I will send a little help her way, something—or someone—to nudge her in the right direction.
Metaphorically speaking—if not perhaps literally as well—the cuts will only be deeper from here on out.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Make New Friends
“Let’s start with the most obvious explanation,” Nolan says reasonably. “Does your mom have any reason to hurt herself?”
“That’s the most obvious explanation?” I protest. “How about the knife slipped, and my mom accidentally cut her hand?”
“Followed almost immediately by yours?” Nolan asks incredulously. I finger my bandage—Mom said we didn’t need stitches but we do need to keep our wounds clean and dry for a few days.
We’re in the library now, cutting Monday’s visual arts class. I couldn’t stand the idea of having this conversation with Ms. Wilde lurking in the corner of the room, listening. It’s my second time ever cutting class, and even though this is an emergency—and the time before was an emergency too—I feel pretty guilty about it. Mentally I lecture myself not to make a habit of this kind of thing. Nolan looks even more nervous than I am about getting caught, even though it was his idea to go to the library in the first place.
“You okay?” I ask.
He nods distractedly. “I’ve never actually cut a class before,” he confides. He looks mildly embarrassed by this admission, like he thinks he’s the only junior at Ridgemont High for whom cutting class isn’t old hat.
If only he knew.
Nolan must have watched the video I recorded on Saturday night a dozen times. He seems much more interested in Mom’s accident—the part I avoid looking at because, ew, blood—than he is in the mist I caught on camera.
“She didn’t cut my hand,” I say now. “It was my fault. I tried to grab the knife.”
Nolan shakes his head. “I know you’re clumsy, Sunshine, but I really don’t think you would grab a blade like that.”
“So you think it’s more likely that my own mother stabbed herself and then me? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Sunshine, are you even looking at this?” he asks.
“What are you talking about?”
He holds my camera out in front of us, zooming in on the lower right-hand corner where my mom is chopping mushrooms. “Watch carefully,” he instructs.
I see my mother slice one mushroom, and then another. She’s every bit as careful and methodical as I imagine she is when she assists on surgeries at the hospital. I never really equated her cooking with her job before, but it occurs to me that maybe she likes recipes—with their clear instructions, their lists of measurements and ingredients—because in a strange way they remind her of her work.
Nolan hits pause. “Pay attention.”
“I am,” I insist.
“I can tell when your mind is wandering.”
“No you can’t,” I say, but I’m blushing.
“And don’t close your eyes when there’s blood on the screen.”
“I fainted the last time I saw this much blood,” I remind him.
“Okay, but this is only a recording of blood. There’s no actual blood here in the room with you.”
“That doesn’t make as much difference as you’d think.” Even when I’m just watching a hospital show on TV I cover my eyes during the bloody scenes.
“Keep your eyes open,” Nolan instructs, pressing play again. I open my eyes wide.
On my phone’s small screen I can see that Mom doesn’t take her eyes off the knife. With the same care she took in slicing the mushrooms, she lifts the blade and lowers it until it hits her wrist, drawing blood. The surface of her skin is wet, not just with blood, but with water from the mist surrounding her. Her hair is dripping water as though she’d just gotten out of the shower. I didn’t even notice that at the time, as though whatever moisture there was in the air, it was touching only her, not me.
“Open your eyes, Sunshine,” Nolan reminds me. He hits pause.
“Right,” I say. “Sorry.”
He presses play again, and I watch as she presses harder, drawing more. Even though she must be in pain, she doesn’t stop until I hear my own voice shouting.
That’s when I dropped the camera, so there’s nothing more to see after that.
“Oh my gosh,” I exhale, and Nolan nods.
“What do you think we’d see if you’d been recording when she cut you?”
I shake my head, slouching in my chair. Once, when we were six, Ashley accidentally kicked me in the stomach during a game of Twister, and I still remember the way I curled up into a C-shape, feeling like I would never catch my breath again. Mom said I’d just had the wind knocked out of me, and now I feel like someone has done it again—punched me in the gut, leaving me gasping for my next breath.
Nolan puts my phone down on the table in front of us and scoots his chair closer to me; I concentrate on the sound of the chair scraping against the linoleum floor. Maybe it’s leaving a mark and we’ll get into trouble for damaging school property on top of whatever trouble we’re already in for cutting class.
Before he can put his arms around me I sit up, straightening my spine. Gently he puts his hand on my back, between my shoulder blades. I can feel the heat of his skin through my T-shirt; it’s the closest we’ve ever come to actual skin-on-skin contact. I feel like I might throw up. I take a deep breath and swallow, feeling almost hot.
On top of everything else, the touch of the boy I maybe-kind-of-sort-of like makes me dry heave. Fantastic.
“I told you I wasn’t good with blood,” I say finally, hoping that he’ll think that’s the reason why I’m practically gagging.
“No one is actually good with blood, right?” Nolan answers, shrugging. He drops his hand and inches his chair back across the floor, away from me. The nausea subsides.
“My mom is,” I say, biting my bottom lip. For a split second I bite harder, wondering whether this is how my mom felt when the knife touched her skin. When I was a little kid crying from a skinned knee I asked her why it had to hurt so much, and my mom said that pain was actually a good thing, that it’s the body’s way of warning us that something is wrong, the body’s way of saying Stop. I press my fingers into my scalp, the tips disappearing beneath my ever-present frizzball.
I shake my head. “She’s not the kind of person who would hurt herself. I mean, she gets grouchy sometimes, when work is super busy or whatever. And I know I can irritate her. But she’s happy. And . . . look, I don’t mean to sound super cheesy or anything, but I know for a fact that she would never, ever hurt me. Not on purpose. Not . . .”
“Not if she was the one in control.” Nolan finishes for me.
Suddenly I feel like crying. He must sense it, because he changes the subject. Or at least moves on to the next possibility. “Then we have to consider the less obvious explanation. That the ghost made her do it.”
I swallow. “There’s more,” I say softly. “I mean, something else happened that night. She ate—” Just thinking about it makes me sick to my stomach. “Later that night she still cooked dinner. But she didn’t cook it. The chicken was practically raw. And she ate it anyway. She said it was perfect.” The word tastes sour in my mouth, but Nolan doesn’t look disgusted, just really concerned. I continue, “I don’t get it. I mean, the little girl always seems so nice. I really thought she just wanted to play with me. Has she just been tricking me into trusting her?”
“It’s possible,” Nolan considers. “Some kinds of spirits are famous for being tricksters. Or maybe . . . maybe she’s not alone.”
“What do you mean?”
“You said so yourself—she was begging for her life that night in the bathroom.”
“So?”
“So . . . who was she begging?”
“I don’t know,” I answer hopelessly. I play the video one more time, trying to make out a shape in the mist, looking for something—someone?—standing behind my mother, controlling her movements as if sh
e were a mere puppet. But the fog behind her is so thick—growing thicker when she hurts herself—that it’s impossible to see anything else.
I’m more confused now than ever. Maybe there are two ghosts in my haunted house? One good, one evil? I fold my arms on the table and drop my head down on top of them, my curls tickling my hands. I didn’t even bother trying to pull it back into a ponytail today. What’s the point? I’m pretty sure an elastic band wouldn’t have a fighting chance against all this.
I can feel Nolan’s hand hovering above me, like maybe he wants to rub my back. My muscles stiffen in anticipation, and he moves away. “We’ll get to the bottom of this,” he promises.
I look up. “Have you had any luck finding an expert who might be able to help us?” I ask hopefully.
“Not exactly. But I’ve got a lead on one from my grandfather’s old files. A professor at the university a couple of towns over.”
“What kind of college has a ghost department?”
Nolan shrugs. “We’ve got to start somewhere, right?”
“I’m scared. What if I’m not there the next time my mom—”
“You will be there. Look, you said she’s working all the time these days, right?”
I nod.
“So it shouldn’t be that hard to be home when she’s home so that she’s not alone. And if she hurts herself at work, then . . .”
“At least she’s already at the hospital,” I finish for him. He nods, and I let out a deep breath. I guess it’s lucky that my mom is a nurse. What if she were a teacher or a lawyer or something?
Nolan must sense that despite the proximity of medical care, I’m not exactly comforted by the thought of my beloved mother hurting herself at work, so he adds, “Anyway, if it’s the house that’s haunted—and it’s the ghost—”
“Or ghosts,” I interrupt.
“Or ghosts,” he agrees, “that made her hurt herself, then you don’t have to worry about her when she’s not home anyway.”
The Haunting of Sunshine Girl Page 10