by Aarsen, Zoe
“Are you ready?” I asked Trey and Mischa both as we sat down around the board in the long grass. The sun was beginning to set; the sky was pale yellow above us. We could hear the occasional whizz of a car passing on the rural highway behind us, the pitch that the noise made shifting due to the Doppler Effect as the cars sped further along on their way out of town. We knew we were mostly hidden by the overgrown weeds in the lot, and paid the traffic no mind. I felt the moist coolness of the earth beneath me, dampening the seat of my pants.
This time, Mischa seemed solemnly prepared to communicate with the dead. Her nervous, giggly antics were a thing of the past, and she looked as tired as I felt. The three of us placed our fingers on the planchette, and moved it around slowly to warm the board up. I did the talking. “We are hoping to contact the spirit of Candace Cotton, if she has indeed crossed over to the other side. We only welcome kind spirits.”
We waited. The wind blew gently, whistling around us between the bare branches of the trees on Martha Road. For a second, I smelled a little glimmer of winter in the air, the chill, the hint of fires roaring in fireplaces further away in town. Then I felt the planchette slowly energize beneath my fingertip, and looked up to see that Trey and Mischa sensed it, too. “It’s here,” Mischa whispered.
The planchette coasted to the letter Y, and then came to a stop.
“Ask if it’s Candace,” Mischa urged.
But I hesitated, because it seemed like whatever spirit had contacted us through the board already had a message it was intent on delivering. The planchette slowly, deliberately moved from letter to letter, spelling out two words:
Y-O-U-N-E-X-T.
CHAPTER 16
“It was a riptide. There wasn’t anything anyone could do. A riptide.”
Candace’s stepmother sounded like a broken record the day of the wake. She was obviously very emotionally shaken by the events of the last few days, and while Mischa and I both wished she would just stop talking, neither of us felt empowered to put an end to her tirade. She looked like a younger, thinner version of Candace’s mom, blond and tan, in a blue and white wrap-around dress that seemed inappropriately informal for a wake. Mr. Cotton, quite possibly the only person who stood a legitimate chance of silencing his wife, seemed to be in a daze, picking at his fingernails, nodding to acknowledge everyone arriving at the funeral home but barely saying a word to anyone.
Candace’s mom, on the other hand, was simmering in a corner, nearing her boiling point. The veins in her neck stood out like metal rods supporting her head, and her sisters swarmed around her like bees, attempting to calm her. At times the corner of the parlor where Candace’s mom had been corralled by her sisters looked like a cluster of permed blond hair, bare swinging arms, and black stocking legs.
“We never even saw her fall under water! The tide just took her out to sea. Who would have known?” Candace’s stepmother continued on, despite Father Fahey, the priest from St. Monica’s who was scheduled to deliver a short service later that evening, trying to quiet her down. “I mean, who ever thinks a riptide is going to carry someone away from a resort that costs six hundred dollars a night?”
“Shut that woman up!” I heard Candace’s mom say from her corner. Her sisters swooped in, circling her more tightly.
Mischa, Matt, Trey, and I sat on the same floral couch Mischa and I had occupied during Olivia’s wake. Candace’s memorial was very different from Olivia’s, which had been somber and respectful. A second memorial for a high school student, following Olivia’s by just a few short weeks, seemed to be more than the good graces of our town could handle. By late in the afternoon, it was evident that the Richmonds would not be arriving to pay respects, probably because it would just be too difficult emotionally to set foot in Gundarsson’s again so soon. Just like at Olivia’s wake, the casket was closed, and the flower arrangements were so abundant that the funeral home director had run out of places to put them. A few were in the hallway, flanking the entrance to the parlor where everyone was gathering for Candace’s memorial. Her extended family seemed endless, with tall blond relatives of all ages comforting each other and fetching cups of coffee from the lounge area. The wake was held on Monday, and classes had been suspended at Willow High School for the day so that students could attend, but because of Candace’s erratic behavior in the weeks leading up to her death, the turnout was significantly less than the number of students who had shown up for Olivia’s wake.
“Candace’s mom is going to knock her stepmother over,” Mischa muttered, impressed by the potential for violence within the Cotton family.
“I don’t think I need to see that.” I got up from the couch, smoothed out the skirt of my black dress, and moments later Mischa stood to follow me out into the hallway and toward the lounge. I felt awkward seeing Candace’s mom under such terrible circumstances. She had been holding herself together the night she found out that Candace had drowned, the very same night we had taken the Ouija board to the abandoned lot. My mom had driven us over to the Cottons’ house to see if there was anything we could do to help. I either hadn’t known or hadn’t remembered this, but at one point when Jennie and I were very little, Mom and Candace’s mother had played together in the Willow ladies’ bowling league. As soon as Candace’s mom had called my house to tell us that it was Candace on the news who was missing, my mom insisted that we pile into the car and drive over. We had been there, in Candace’s kitchen, keeping our eyes open all night with piping hot coffee, at three in the morning when the call had come from Hawaii confirming that Candace’s body had washed up at high tide, nearly ten miles from where she had disappeared.
“Well,” Candace’s mom had said with unnerving composure, “Now we know.”
In the lounge, we found Julia picking at a tray of cookies with some cousins her own age. She wore a short dress with a layer of black lace over it, which seemed a little provocative for a girl who was thirteen years old. I wondered for a second if that dress had been bought for a school dance. Probably no one had ever thought at the time that the dress was purchased that Julia would end up wearing it to an event as serious as her older half-sister’s wake.
“How’s it going, Julia?” I asked as I poured myself a cup of coffee. Julia had been asleep when the phone rang early on Friday morning. Mischa, Trey, my mom, and I had sat patiently and silently in the Cottons’ kitchen at the table with one of Candace’s aunts while her mom and another aunt had gone upstairs to wake up Julia at dawn to tell her the bad news. We left and drove Mischa home before Julia came downstairs, and we all called in sick for school on Friday.
“I’m okay,” Julia informed us, her eyes looking a little puffy. Her cousins said they were going outside to run in the parking lot and they abandoned her in the lounge with us.
“How is Candace’s dad holding up?” Mischa asked, stirring no-calorie sweetener into her own cup of coffee.
Julia shrugged and popped a thumbprint cookie into her mouth. “He looks like a total mess, I guess. But I don’t know. I don’t really know him that well. He had to ID the body, you know.”
Mischa and I exchanged nervous glances. So many details of Candace’s death had matched the basic story Hannah had told at Olivia’s birthday party, it was easy to assume that the part about her body already being badly decomposed had come true, too. “Wow, that’s rough,” Mischa said gently, about to probe for more information. “That must have been terrible for him.”
“Yeah, well, mostly because it was all gross and bloated and stuff,” Julia informed us. I tried to remember back to when Jennie died of what my understanding of death had been at the time. Julia’s casualness was probably an effect of her inability to comprehend the finality of death, the incomprehensibility of the fact that Candace would never, ever be coming back from Hawaii.
“Who told you that?” I asked.
Julia reached for another cookie and replied, “No one. That’s just what the newspaper said. But the casket is closed because my mom said when bodies
are in the water for a long time they get all puffy and gnarly.”
Hannah did not attend Candace’s memorial on Monday, which wasn’t surprising, but on the other hand, it kind of was. I wondered on Monday evening if she’d dare to show her face the following morning for the prayer service before the burial. Mischa’s parents had denied her request to be permitted to spend the night at my house on Monday night, and although my mom would probably have let me spend the night at hers, I wanted to stay close to home and Trey. Olivia’s spirit had mysteriously left my room quiet since Wednesday night, and it was a source of wonderment for me why she had decided to stop pestering me. If the original haunting had been intended to prevent Candace’s death, I had failed, and maybe her abandonment of my room meant that Mischa wasn’t in danger. Or maybe Olivia’s spirit was preoccupied with welcoming Candace’s spirit to the other side. I couldn’t know the reason, but I had a strong suspicion that my room hadn’t experienced the last of the supernatural activity. There would be more, but there was no way to know when to expect it.
On Monday night, Mom pressured me into an awkward and unpleasant conversation with my dad, during which he tried to convince me to make an appointment with the psychiatrist who had met with Candace.
“I’m fine, Dad. Really,” I insisted. I was eager to send a text message to Mischa, turn off the lights in my bedroom, and wait for Trey to knock on my window.
There was a pause and I could hear the television on in the background on his end of the line before he said, “Two close friends passing away in one school year. That doesn’t sound like the recipe for fine to me. But then, what do I know? I’m just a professor of clinical psychiatry and your dad.”
“No, you’re just a guy who walked out on us,” I absent-mindedly snapped before realizing how harsh my words must have sounded to him. “I’m sorry, Dad,” I quickly backtracked. “It’s just been a long day.”
I knew I had done some significant damage because a solid twenty seconds of silence passed before he responded. “No, no, you’re right, McKenna. Every reason you have for being angry with me is justified.”
He rambled for a while about indulging in a selfish impulse, convincing himself that his departure had truly been a constructive thing for me and Mom as well as for him. I didn’t have any interest in his apologies that night. I was more concerned with the order in which we had taken turns playing the game the night of Olivia’s birthday.
My mother drove me to back to Gundarsson’s the next morning for the prayer service, and opted to stay with me rather than wait in the car. All things considered, she was being great about the whole situation, not asking me questions about the issues Candace had been having after Olivia’s death, or backing up my dad’s insistence that I talk to a psychiatrist. Tracy arrived on Tuesday as some kind of an ambassador from Student Council, blabbing about how it was her social responsibility as Class Secretary to pay her respect. She also stated that Hannah had a severe cold and couldn’t attend, even though she really wanted to do so. As Tracy nonchalantly told us this, I felt Mischa’s muscles tighten, like a cat about to pounce. I had no way of knowing exactly what Mischa was experiencing emotionally, but a cold, restrictive sense of dread had taken over me. My body felt stiff. I couldn’t bring myself to cry even though I knew I would miss Candace terribly. This time there was no maybe about it: it was certain that we were under some kind of hex or curse. Even though I didn’t have the energy to think about what my next steps might be while still mourning Candace, I knew that Trey and I were going to need help in bringing an end to this. The enormity of taking on Hannah and whatever was helping her in the spirit world was simply too much to consider on that rainy morning before Candace’s funeral.
Mom stood next to me in the cemetery at St. Monica’s as Father Fahey led the small crowd that had gathered in a few prayers at the gravesite. Trey stood on my other side, loosely holding my left hand, letting his long dark hair cover most of his face. Big Isaac Johnston wiped a few tears from his eyes when the casket was lowered and shook his head.
Back at home that afternoon, I changed out of my black dress and tights and directly into my plaid pajamas, and crawled under my blankets even though it was still light outside. In the back of my mind I knew it was an hour when parents weren’t even driving home from their jobs yet, and the high school marching band was still practicing out on the football field, yet all I wanted to do was close my eyes and block out the world. I wanted to wake up in another town, in another life, another existence entirely in which I had never gone to Olivia’s birthday party and become a part of this nightmare.
You next.
Who next? Who had the spirit in the empty lot meant? It had denied that it was Olivia, denied that it was Candace. Was I vulnerable? Was I protected from the game because Hannah hadn’t been able to see my death? But even that wasn’t exactly true; Hannah had said she’d seen fire. What would that do to my mother, to lose her surviving daughter in a fire?
In the middle of the night when I stirred awake, Trey was there, and the lights were on.
“Can’t be too safe,” he told me when I blinked around, trying to figure out what time it was.
“Whatever was in my room is gone for now,” I assured him. “If it was really Olivia, we failed. We didn’t put the clues together fast enough. Now they’ve got Candace, too.”
Trey looked at me intently, directly into my eyes, and after a long moment asked, “The night you played the game, whose turn was it after Candace?”
“Mine.”
He nodded. “We’re getting help and we’re ending this thing.”
On Thursday my mother stood in the doorway and informed me that she was driving to campus for her class but would be driving back immediately afterward, handling her office hours over Skype from home. She didn’t have to spell it out for me because I already knew; there would be no expectation that I return to school that week if I didn’t want to, but her patience wouldn’t extend into the following week.
Trey’s mother drove him to school and he immediately doubled back on foot, knocking on our front door incessantly until I rose from my bed and met him, still wearing my pajamas. “Get dressed,” he ordered me. “We’re walking into town to meet with someone.”
I didn’t ask questions, simply tugged on jeans and a sweatshirt and followed Trey through the brisk morning air on a long walk through town. It was a foggy day, which was common weather for Wisconsin in the fall. School and regular life felt a million miles away. Mischa hadn’t sent me an email or text message since before we knew for certain Candace had died, but I strongly suspected that she was being kept home from school all week, too. Nothing felt real. I wasn’t thinking clearly, I was in a state of distractedness, following orders I could barely hear.
“State your business,” a female voice addressed us through the security system at the back door of the brick rectory building behind St. Monica’s church. Trey and I stood, shivering, on the cement staircase leading up to the rectory, which housed the church’s administrative offices and the priest’s living quarters. Standing there, I suddenly felt very exposed in the overcast daylight, the dead eyes of plaster statues of the Virgin Mary and St. Augustine upon us. I hadn’t felt as if I had been in danger on the walk over from our neighborhood, but now that we were standing at the perimeter of the sanctuary of the church grounds, I felt an urgent need to step inside.
“We’re here to ask for Father Fahey’s help in a personal matter,” Trey stated, gripping my hand a little more tightly. A surveillance camera was affixed above the rectory door in plain sight, presumably because the rectory hosted a soup kitchen and from time to time, people not quite right in the head turned up on this very same doorstep demanding help. We were asked for our names, which Trey supplied, and then we were buzzed in.
“Jim, two teenagers are here to speak with you,” a gray-haired secretary wearing a knit vest over a floral polyester blouse announced into her desk phone as soon as we entered the rectory. She sat at a
cluttered desk behind a glass window with a slot in it just like a teller’s window at a bank, and pointed at a wooden bench across from the window where she expected us to take a seat.
We sat down quietly and unzipped our jackets in the warm hallway. Down the hall and through a doorway, in what was presumably the rectory kitchen, we smelled soup and could hear the clattering of dishes.
“What’s the nature of this personal matter?” the secretary asked us through the window, her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.