Haunted

by Lynn Carthage

  After I came down, we walked room to room in silence, as if a deaf-mute real estate agent led us. The glut of rooms was dizzying: some chambers elevated by a few steps, other sunken. The house was a beehive with these dark interlocking cells. I imagined a gigantic queen bee, mistress of the hive, loping ahead of us, dragging her useless wings, to not be seen.

  Once, after consulting his map, Steven knelt at a paneled wall and exposed what looked to be a cupboard but was actually the beginning of a passageway. After staring into its black depths for a moment, he closed it and said, “No, thanks.” I laughed in agreement. Too claustrophobic.

  At times, he jogged forward; at times, I had to stop and wait for him. I kept imagining hearing the swish of those giant bee wings, or maybe more like the sound of skirts, the way a small train would drag along the floor.

  Somehow we emerged back in the great hall. It took me a second to recognize it from the different perspective.

  “And that was just one wing of the house,” said Steven. “Holy Christ.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Steven didn’t usually swear in front of me. “You want to do the rest?” I asked. “I’m not tired.”

  He matter-of-factly folded his floor plans up and tucked them under his arm. “We’ll save the rest for a rainy day,” he said.

  We went back to the apartment, where Mom and Tabby were playing with spoons on the living room floor. They hadn’t been able to bring many of her toys, so apparently the flatware drawer was the new Babies R Us.

  Now that I knew some of what lay beyond the zany brightness of these 1970s walls, I found it wasn’t as easy to relax as before. Decay breathed behind the macramé. That’s pretty good, I thought. “Decay breathed behind the macramé.” I could use that in a story.

  “What’s it like?” asked Mom. Steven sat down on the floor next to her while I crashed on the sofa. For Tabby’s amusement, he began drawing lines in the shag’s pile with a soup spoon.

  “Huge. Beautiful in a really decrepit way.”

  “So it won’t be easy to make a showplace out of it.”

  He snorted. “It would be the project of the century.”

  “Sounds like just what we need,” she said.

  He snorted again.

  “No, honestly,” she said. “I need something to focus on. Anything we could sell to fund a renovation?”

  “There’s quite the library,” said Steven. “I should get a rare books expert in here to inventory it.”

  “How come your mom didn’t?” she asked.

  “A commonsense thing like that would never have occurred to her. And she was never here long enough to put something like that into action.” I saw the muscle at his jaw clench, just for a second.

  He didn’t like to talk about his mom. I had never met her.

  “How long did she live here?” I asked.

  “She and my father lived here less than a year, I think. She got pregnant with me, and he was abusive, so she fled back to the States to protect both of us.”

  My jaw dropped. I had never heard this. And from the look on Mom’s face, neither had she. Steven was secretive about his family.

  “He died soon afterward, so he was a nonevent as far as I’m concerned,” Steven added.

  “I’m really sorry,” I said lamely. I didn’t know what else to say. I was lucky that although my parents had separated, it wasn’t until I was ten. And pretty much immediately Steven was on the scene, so I never went dadless.

  “For anyone who would lift a hand to a child,” said Steven, “death is a good answer.”

  “You mean … he hit her when she was pregnant?” Mom asked.

  “That’s what she told me.”

  That was a weird way to answer, especially with the tone of voice he used. He stared down at the runes his spoon had made. “Well, anyway, ancient history. It makes me think about the life I might’ve had if he was a different person. That nursery was meant for me, you know; I would have been raised as an Arnaud heir on the palatial grounds of his forebears.”

  “Would you have wanted to?” she asked dubiously.

  “Well, things were much more in order back then,” he said. “The estate has been neglected for as long as I’ve been alive.”

  Personally, I didn’t think the manor’s crumbling was just from the last half century … things had been declining here for way longer than that.

  “It’s sad not to know your father,” said Steven. “And that’s the last I’m going to say on that.”

  Mom nodded wistfully, glancing over at me on the sofa. This was as much info on his family as we’d ever gotten. Mom had once warned me not to ask. It didn’t make sense to press for more. He’d talk when he wanted to.

  That night, I went to my lime-colored room. On a whim, I opened the dresser drawers to see neatly folded piles of my clothing. I hadn’t had time to unpack, but Mom, God bless her, had done it for me. She must’ve filled the drawers while Steven and I were exploring the house. A little unnerved, I searched for my diary until I found it, still safely locked with the key in the toe of my candy-cane Christmas socks.

  I sat down on my bed and let my mind drift back into a memory: Richard Spees stopping by our table in the cafeteria.

  He’s a senior and hot beyond belief. He stands right beside me, and I’m immediately thinking, No way! He’s standing by me? Uma freezes, her french fry, coated with ketchup, halfway to her mouth. I straighten my posture and tuck my hair behind my ears.

  “Hey, Phoebe, you looked good yesterday,” he says.

  “You were there?”

  “I was.”

  “Thanks,” I say, wishing I could come up with something cooler. Yesterday had been the swim meet against Oakland High. I’d torched them in the 100-meter freestyle, touching the wall what seemed like hours before anyone else. I think about how I must have looked from his eyes as I launched myself out of the pool in my school-colors-red-and-gold Speedo (last year, a few of us had petitioned for sexier, yet still aerodynamic, suits) and took all the high fives and wet hugs from my teammates. Finding out he had been looking at me when I didn’t even know it makes me feel selfconscious.

  “You looked good,” he repeats, and suddenly I see it as a compliment to my body, rather than a sports-based comment on my performance.

  I’m not going to say I completely take it in stride, because that doesn’t happen. My cheeks burn with a really big blush, but I do manage to give a huge and hopefully sassy grin. Luckily, Bethany rescues me.

  “Do you usually go to the swim meets?” she asks.

  I throw her a grateful look, but before he can answer, she adds, “Or was there someone there you wanted to see?” I try to kick her under the table but get only her chair leg. She jolts backward a half inch in her plastic seat and laughs.

  As I wait mortified for his response, it happens.

  Stars swim up from behind my eyes, lazy and spectacular, taking the place of Bethany’s gleeful face. The stars convey lightning bolts, too, and I’m dazzled and trying not to get hit. It’s a slow lightning storm across the landscape of my vision, and as air creeps into my lungs, I submit.

  Bethany tells me later that Richard said meaningfully, “There was someone I wanted to see,” but all hell broke loose and people were yelling.

  I wake up a few minutes after I passed out, Bethany says. Dozens of people cluster around me, and I’m lying facedown on the table. Ketchup from Uma’s fries coats my hair. I raise my head, and the cafeteria aide helps me walk to the nurse’s office.

  I had fainted. Pretty dramatically.

  It didn’t cost me Richard Spees, even though I’d drooled while I was unconscious. “It didn’t look great,” admitted Bethany when I’d pressed her. Plus, there had been that ketchup masquerading as hair gel. Yet Richard had risen above all his gentlemanly disgust and somehow considered me attractive, even while lifting me from the table like a beached jellyfish and slapping me.

  We dated for three excruciating months. He turned out to be a darb (d
ramatically asinine random boy) who prattled on and on until I had to admit my two-year-old sister was a more insightful conversationalist. But I was glad I dated him; I learned some skills I could put to better use with some other guy down the road. The kind of skills you have to write in code in your diary in case your mom reads it.

  The memory was over.

  I brushed my teeth in the bathroom (my own! Score one for England!) by the light of the 1970s big-eyed owl night-light. The wallpaper was gold foil depicting wheat stalks: so retro.

  I pulled back the jade-colored bedspread and got in bed. I missed my quilt from home, a red and white thing my grandma made from a pattern in a book of Amish quilts.

  I lay there looking at the ceiling, the kind of plaster that shows semicircular sweeps from some kind of tool. Like little white rainbows. I counted them. Wasn’t sure if I should count the half sweeps over by the walls.

  Come on, you must be tired, go ahead and sleep, I coached myself.

  I was drifting restlessly when I heard the organ. It was playing low and quiet, a plodding, rhythmic bit of music, so subtle I thought for a while it was just noise in my head.

  When I realized what I was hearing, I sat bolt upright, my heart pounding. The music seemed to disappear the more I concentrated on listening, like trying to figure out what a newscaster is saying on TV a room away.

  I wandered out to the living room, where Steven was reading. The room was dark and he sat in the light cast by the gigantic hanging orb. Mom must have already gone to bed.

  “Did you hear that?” I asked him.

  His gaze didn’t waver from the page. He was like that; he’d get caught up in whatever he was reading

  “I thought I heard that organ playing, Steven,” I said louder. “Do you think there’s someone else in the house?”

  He closed the book, letting it lie in his lap, and rubbed his face with both hands. Exhausted. Maybe sad. “Just forget about it,” he said. “Let it go.”

  “Seriously? But if there’s someone in the house …”

  He sighed. He knew how to make gestures like that speak volumes. That sigh said, You’re a hysterical teenager, chill out.

  Insulted, I almost said something pissy, but I stopped myself. We had moved to England because of me. I had done something so very, very awful that we had to leave the country. If he didn’t think the organ was anything to worry about, it wasn’t anything to worry about.

  “Okay,” I said with a little smile. “They’ll come for you first.”

  He grimaced.

  I had imagined the organ because I was jet-lagged and out of sorts. Freaked out about living in a different house, a different continent. I went back down the hallway, opening the door to my own personal scarab-green room.

  I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes, but I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t relax enough.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The small town of Grenshire has no industry to boast of.

  Dotted with small pastures and dairies, the landscape is rural

  and unremarkable. The Hoffman Academy provided excellent

  education for boys until its closure in 1964; today’s Emmons

  School is a coeducational facility with consistently high test

  scores. A privately held estate, the Arnaud Manor (built

  1721–23) was the home of French émigrés and has

  fallen into disrepair.

  —From A History of the Towns of Northern England

  The next morning, I went and sat at the breakfast table even though I wasn’t hungry. Mom and Tabby were eating toast topped with butter and jelly, which Tabby managed to smear all over the lower hemisphere of her face. I listened to Tabby’s charming attempts at conversation, wondering where Steven was. Mom valiantly carried on her side of the inane discussion. She had a lot of patience, I had to admit, watching her try to clean wriggling Tabby, who kept saying “Don’t want.”

  This move sucked for Mom. She would be stuck here all day with a toddler and without any neighbors.

  “Mom, I’ll help you watch Tabby this summer, before I go to school,” I said.

  She paused and smiled tiredly. “You’re going to have the summer of your life, running around this place,” she said. “Just try not to fall through a trapdoor.”

  “Track door,” said Tabby.

  “You want me to watch her now?” I asked. “You and Steven can have some time together. Go out for coffee or something.”

  “What would I do without you?” she said, but she made no move to transfer Tabby to my arms. Whatever. She’d complain about never having time to herself, but then not take me up on a babysitting offer. I watched her continue to coo at Tabby and decipher her stilted sentences.

  Later, I went outside. It was making me nutty that there were no windows except in the living room, which faced the central courtyard. Our apartment was like a closed shoe box wedged into a large closet.

  I looked up, studying the face of the manor. The stones were dark with age, and the leaded glass windows offered no curtains to soften them. I could see that this was an architectural masterpiece with turrets, towers, and lots of engineering to make the varying levels of the stories work, but it left me cold. It was basically the manor you’d like to pay an entry fee for, roam around in for an afternoon, then go home to your clean, bright, real person’s home.

  I continued wandering the courtyard, thinking about how things had changed in the last few years. Babies need a lot of attention, but so did I. Dealing with Richard Spees would’ve been easier if Mom had actually shown some interest in my first real boyfriend. Deciding to break up with him wasn’t that simple, and she wasn’t there for me.

  If you think about it, I had basically been an only child for the first decade-plus of my life. Suddenly there was this unexpected baby that wailed all night and depleted Mom’s energy with breast-feeding, and the house got filled with all these happy-colored toys that plinked out songs I could not get out of my head. Dinner conversations were no longer about what we’d all done that day, but instead what Tabby had done all day. Very little, in my opinion—but to Mom and Steven it was a freakin’ marvel that she’d managed to identify the letters a and b in a police lineup.

  I’m not as bitter as I sound. These years are the ones in which you’re supposed to detach from your parents, right? Preparing for college and adult life, becoming independent? But it was still a surprisingly hard adjustment for me.

  And if I think hard about it, maybe there was something about the fact that Steven is my stepdad, but Tabby’s real father. Steven’s been a great dad to me since my dad split … maybe I’m also mourning the loss of his attention. My status as his “daughter” took a blow when the real one showed up—although that’s just my imagination. He still treats me like I’m his.

  “Oh please, Phoebe, get a life,” I said aloud.

  I really, really do love Tabby, by the way.

  Steven told us he’d watch Tabby while Mom and I went into town. I was glad to get off the grounds of our bleak mansion, but soon found I was in another uncomfortable situation. I had to hold my breath, biting my lip, as Mom negotiated the strangeness of steering from the other side of the car. I looked over at her, her pretty face strained, wrinkles a little more noticeable when she was stressed out. She took her hand off the wheel for a second to tuck a strand of her short hair behind her ear. I noticed that her perfectly shaped eyebrows were starting to grow in; she’d meant to wax them before we’d left the U.S.

  “Aren’t most people in the world right-handed?” she muttered. “Who would put a gear shift on the left?”

  As soon as the road became paved and Mom got the knack of driving, I felt better. Soon we were seeing other houses, and gardens. When we hit town limits, I looked closely to see what our new “hometown” offered. It was very small, with a movie theater that listed only two movies on its marquee. I saw a few restaurants with floral half curtains, and some impressive wood-paneled structures with the strange, wonderful word
pub on them. Somehow the British made a bar seem timeless and historic by calling it a pub.

  Not many people walked these narrow streets. We saw a few middle-aged women wearing handkerchiefs over their heads and carrying string bags with their groceries inside. There weren’t any parking meters on High Street, which was the town’s main street. Our British car, which Steven had purchased unseen while we were still in the U.S., was one of the few vehicles at the curb after Mom parked. I saw the grocery store, a small glass-fronted shop the size of a retail store, rather than a supermarket.

  We got out and started walking, looking in at quaint, dark stores. I didn’t see a single person my age. I tried to ignore the sick feeling in my gut.

  In four blocks, we had reached the limits of town. The shops and pubs gave way to homes. In the distance, I could see the curving roofline of a behemoth of a tall brick building, overly grand for the plainness of Grenshire. Something about it seemed familiar.

  “That’s the pool,” said Mom. She had stopped walking and was staring at it.

  She had researched Grenshire a little before we moved here. Not much, since we were in a rush, but I’d leaned over her shoulder as she searched the Web, and I remembered now that this big brick building was the pool house of the former boys’ academy, now owned by the town.

  “My kind of place,” I said.

  “Tabby will need swimming lessons eventually,” she said.

  “Yeah!” I said excitedly. “I’ll help her learn.”

  “Not for a long, long time, though,” she said.

  “Some people start kids when they’re newborn,” I said. “I think you waited until I was four, though.”

  “Oh, Phoebe,” she said, and her voice was filled with love.

  I grinned. Mom and I had great memories of my learning to swim at the Y in San Francisco. We’d eat at the nearby Mediterranean hole-in-the-wall restaurant before going home. To this day, when I finish a swim I have a momentary craving for falafel and lemonade with crushed mint leaves floating in it.