Lily's Ghosts

by Laura Ruby

  Her mother put down the remains of her sandwich. “Oh, Lily! That was Uncle Wes. He called the store and wanted to know why you hung up on him. I told him that he must have misdialed. He just wanted to know how we were settling in.”

  “Oh,” Lily said, feeling like a bigger fig brain than ever. “What did you say?”

  “I told him that we were fine.” Lily’s mother sighed. “We only spoke for a few minutes. He just wipes me out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  For a minute, Lily thought that her mother wouldn’t answer the question, but she said, “Like I told you, he’s a strange old guy. I suppose I should feel sorry for him. He lost his father. Then his brother Max, then his mother, all in a short time. And my mom — his sister — just a few years ago. Still.”

  “Still?”

  “Oh, this is old news,” said her mother, shrugging. “Old news is rarely ever good news. Let’s just talk about something else.”

  Lily knew by her mother’s shrug that she’d say no more about Uncle Wes. “How was work?”

  “Work was work,” Arden said, getting up and bringing the dishes to the sink. “I didn’t have much with me. A few stones. A bit of silver.” Lily’s mother dropped her head, as if sizing up her feet.

  “Did you make anything?”

  “Some things,” she said. “I was a little distracted.” Her mother’s eyes were glassy, and Lily was afraid that she might start crying. Lily didn’t think she could stand it if her mother started crying again. It made Lily feel helpless, then angry. What had her mother thought? That they would live with the Computer Geek happily ever after?

  Lily’s mother didn’t cry. She turned on the water, rinsed off the gold-rimmed plate, and set it next to the sink. “But then, what’s done is done. It’s much more fun to think about what’s next, right?”

  “Right.”

  Her mother wiped at her eyes. “Something funny did happen, though.”

  “What?”

  “Just as I was about to lock up Something Fishy, this woman, this crazy woman comes running out of the shop across the street, screaming and waving.” Her mother pantomimed, pinwheeling her arms. “She looked like a giant dandelion with limbs.”

  “What was she screaming about?”

  “I don’t know. Something about a boy who was on fire.”

  “What’s with that?”

  “I have no idea. I didn’t have a chance to ask her either. She ran right back into her store. I could see her peeking out at me through the curtains. It was the weirdest thing.” She gestured to Lily’s plate. “If you’re done playing with your food, maybe you want to go out and take a walk or something. It’s not that cold.”

  “But, Mom!”

  “Come on, Lily. Give it a chance? For me? It’s a great little town. And who knows? Maybe you’ll run into somebody interesting.”

  * * *

  Lily tucked her hands into her pockets and breathed deeply, inhaling the scouring cold, the sea salt, amazed still that the ocean was so close, the smell of it everywhere. She headed for it, passing candy-colored Victorian homes festooned with gingerbread trim, trying to imagine what the streets would be like at the height of the summer season, packed with oily bodies in shorts and bathing suits, little kids sticky with sand and cotton candy.

  Lily crossed Beach Drive, climbed the steps to the promenade — a wide sidewalk snaking alongside the shore — and sat on one of the benches looking out over the sea. It was way too cold for beachgoers, too cold for the gulls even. The sand looked clean and white and soft and Lily couldn’t resist it.

  She picked a dry spot near the gray sand marked by the tide and sat, watching as the surf came up and licked at her toes. She pulled off her knit gloves and scooped up some of the sand in her palm, using a shell to dig up more sand and form it until she had the shape of something, a house. Packing the icy sand tightly with her numb fingers, she flattened rooftops, carved windows and a door with a small twig, erasing her mistakes with droplets of water. The wind whipped her long hair out from her head like a sail, and she shook it away so that she could see.

  A lone man in a long dark coat and brimmed hat stood still as a statue on the promenade. She squinted but could not make out his face beneath the hat. Her skin, already raw from the cold, rippled on her arms as the man continued to stare. What could he be looking at? Who could he be looking at? She glanced around, but there was nobody else on the beach. The sea was gray and boatless, the sky a dull shade of blue. Maybe he just likes beaches, she told herself. Maybe he likes the ocean.

  Maybe he was the man who had been in her house.

  Lily shook her head — forget the man, forget the Kewpie, forget Montclair — adding windows and a front walk to the house. It was a while before she dared to look up again. Where the man once stood, there was a blond-haired girl wrestling with a dark-haired boy, both of them giggling madly. The sound made her limbs go quivery with loneliness. Even though she was far from the promenade, she could tell one of the wrestlers was Broken Nose Boy, and she turned away quickly, grabbing handfuls of her own hair and shoving it down the back of her coat so that he wouldn’t see it. See her building a sand castle like some dopey little kid. But she didn’t care how stupid it was. It was a good house, the best. She looked then at what she had built and saw that one of the levels, the smaller one, had caved in. She must have knocked it with her elbow or her foot when she turned away from the pretty boy, she must have ruined everything.

  * * *

  “Why can’t you ever watch what you’re doing! You just wrecked that little girl’s sand castle!” said the woman, the floppy flowers on her bathing cap ruffled by some strange wind.

  “What do you want me to do? I tripped, okay? That creep with the feathered hat was digging a darned hole again. Somebody oughta do something about him.”

  But the woman simply glared at her husband. “Why don’t you apologize to the girl instead of standing there like a fool?”

  “All right, all right,” the man said. “Keep your shirt on.” He turned to the girl. “Sorry about your castle, there, little girl. My eyes aren’t too good anymore.”

  “Oh, dear, now she’s upset!” the woman said. “Do something!”

  “What do you want me to do?” the man bellowed. “Mix some cement?”

  “Buy her a soda or a pretzel or something.”

  “The concession stand isn’t open yet.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “She’ll get over it,” said the man. “Kids always do.”

  Pink

  Lola lolled like the Cheshire Cat on top of the kitchen table, plotting glorious plots, scheming delicious schemes.

  Now that she’d moved into the old Victorian, looked around, got comfy, she saw that things were so much more unfair than she first thought. Totally, absolutely unfair.

  Steffie was rich. Maybe her dad was a science geek too, and had invented some scientific thingamagiggy that made a trillion dollars. The house was huge, and filled with all kinds of ugly but mondo expensive stuff. Steffie the geek got to star in Damn Yankees and then come home to eat caviar off of three-hundred-year old china plates and drink champagne out of flutes hand-blown for French kings. Not that Lola had seen Steffie or her mother ever eating caviar — they ate lots of pancakes, the cheeseballs — but she was totally sure they could afford to if they wanted.

  That was not right.

  And then there was the guy. The totally hot guy. Lola hadn’t got a good look at him until he was right in front of her, but even with the smushed schnozz and the blood she practically fell into those soulful eyes. Lola figured a babe like that wouldn’t ever dig a loser like Steffie. He’d dig someone…well, someone like Lola. And he would have been totally into Lola, she was sure of it, if he had just been able to see her. She had sung at the top of her lungs, she posed at the top of the stairs, performed a kicky, Fosse-inspired dance number on the porch, but of course he hadn’t noticed any of it. Being dead was the pits. She was so mad that she’
d had to trip Steffie just to make the day worth living.

  Ha! Living!

  Lola rolled over onto her back, gnashing her teeth at the little Siamese that seemed to be frowning at her from the windowsill. Cats were so judgmental. “Shoo!” she said. “Why don’t you go bother one of the others? It’s not like I’m the only ghost around here.” The Human Candle, for example. Something totally wrong with that guy. Creeped her out.

  The cat gave a stern little mewl of disapproval, jumped down from the sill, and sauntered off, tail in the air. Lola bet it wouldn’t act so snotty if she spray painted it pink.

  Pink, she thought. That was the ticket. A little makeover, a little drama, a little color in a dead gray world. She had done it before. Like on that other girl who Lola was positive was Steffie, but turned out to be some bank teller or whatever. (So many people looked and acted exactly like Steffie. Dozens, literally. Lola was amazed. The weirdest one was that forty-four-year-old mother of two. Lola was still a tad embarrassed about that mistake; she hoped the woman’s eyebrows were growing in okay.)

  She jumped down from the table and did a foxy little shimmy and a couple of high kicks before hopping down the steps into the basement. “Just what I was looking for,” she said. “Mr. Washer, Mr. Dryer.” She opened up the washer. “Whites! How very convenient. Oops!” she said, scooping a bright red sweater from the laundry basket and dropping it into the washer. After adding a half bottle of dish soap, she pulled the nozzle to start the wash, doing a hula to the slushy, sloshy sound of the water.

  Lola wiggled and Lola sang, imagining the red dye seeping out of the sweater and onto the rest of the white, white clothes.

  A little pink goes a long way, she thought. She wondered how far a lot of pink would go.

  Chapter Five

  As she had promised, Lily’s mother tossed the Kewpie into the closet with Uncle Max. “So Julep can’t play any more of her little tricks.” Lily spent the next couple of weeks doing algebra and struggling with literature, all the while keeping an eye on the windows and the doors. Except for the crank phone calls, no one in the town seemed to be interested in spying on them or even finding out who they were. Still, Lily was bored and uneasy. When she got too bored and too uneasy, she went down to the beach and carved little worlds out of the frigid sand.

  Lily sat at the dining-room table, trying to make sense of the book she had to read, The Old Man and the Sea, while Julep rolled a pen around on the floor. There weren’t many books Lily liked. They all seemed so unreal, the people saying such perfect things. Who says perfect things all the time? Her mother had tried to explain it to her. “Books aren’t life, they’re better. They distill life. Books are life with all the boring parts cut out.” Her mother had made up essay questions, which Lily thought was a terrible thing to do to your own kid.

  In her opinion, Hemingway had cut none of the boring parts out of The Old Man and the Sea. The entire thing was a giant snore. Some guy goes fishing. He catches a big fish. He tows it to shore but sharks eat it before he gets there. What was that supposed to mean?

  She gave up on the book, turned on the TV, and whipped through the channels. The dialog blurring into one long, babbling sentence: “Oh, Aurelia, tell me you love—,”

  “A doll like this could fetch thousands from—”

  “People who have been searching New Jersey beaches for everything from quarters to pirate treasure to—”

  “Tell me you love me, tell me you love me, tell me you love me!”

  The doorbell rang. It was a high, sweet chirping, like a bird. It didn’t go with the house. Lily had expected a trumpeting sound. Or maybe a gong.

  She scowled when she looked through the peephole and saw who it was, but she unlocked the door anyway and flung it open. “What do you want?”

  Broken-Nose Boy blinked. “Hello to you, too.” He held out her sweatshirt. “I wanted to bring you this. I think I got all the blood out.”

  Lily looked down at the sweatshirt, surprised. “Thanks,” she said. “I didn’t expect you to bring it back.”

  “I know,” he said, smiling.

  Lily took the shirt. She wasn’t sure what to make of this. She was worried that he had come to tease her about sand castles and ratty old clothes.

  “My mom told me to soak it in water and hand soap with a little ammonia,” he said. He gestured at the shirt she was wearing. “Maybe it would work for that one, too.”

  Lily looked down at her once-white shirt, now covered in huge pink blotches. “It’s not blood. A red sweater got mixed in with the whites. Everything I own is like this. It’s my new look, okay?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “Well, thanks,” she said, and started to close the door.

  “Wait,” he said. “Look, I think we started off all wrong. I’m Vaz.” He held out his hand. Lily had never shaken hands with anyone her own age. His was an ice cube.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Lily.”

  Vaz nodded. “That makes sense.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You look like one, kind of. It might be the hair. Like a tiger lily. My mom plants those everywhere.”

  She had no idea what to say — especially with him standing there smiling shyly — so focused in on his slanted nose instead. Even though she was still annoyed with him, she hoped that she wasn’t the one who had slanted it.

  “How’s the nose?”

  “Sore, but it still works.” He put his hands in his pockets and shivered. A breeze lifted a curl off his forehead where it stood like a question mark.

  “Do you want to come in?” Lily said, reluctantly. “It’s kind of cold out here.”

  “Thanks,” Vaz said, and stepped inside.

  She shut the door behind him. “I was just going to make some hot chocolate,” she said, though she had just thought of it. “You want some?”

  “Sure.” He followed her down the hallway, through the dining room, and into the kitchen. She pulled out some instant hot chocolate, saw him gaping at the dining room and parlor before she turned to fill some mugs with water. “I’ve never been inside one of these houses before,” he said from the doorway. “I didn’t think it would be so fancy.”

  “It’s not my house, remember? It’s my great-uncle’s.”

  “Still, what’s it like to live in this kind of place?”

  “You can’t sit on any of the furniture, and the maids are always mouthing off.”

  “You have maids?” he said.

  “I was making a joke.” She had no idea why, since she wasn’t very funny.

  Lily heated the mugs of water in the microwave, and stirred the mix into the water and brought the mugs into the dining room.

  He took off his coat and put it gingerly over the back of one of the dining room chairs. “Is this all right?”

  “Well, I don’t think your coat is going to break it.”

  “Guess not,” he said, and laughed, which pleased her despite herself. He looked down at the table. “Are these your books?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No one stole them today, huh?” He must have caught her scowl because he held up both hands. “Hey, I’m just kidding.” He thumbed The Old Man and the Sea. “I remember this book. It’s a good book.”

  He had surprised her again; first because he read books, second because he had such bad taste in them. “I think it’s a terrible book,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Some old fisherman catches a fish and the sharks eat it. Who cares?”

  “Oh, no,” said Vaz. “No. The guy’s not just a fisherman. He’s a hero. He battles against nature and wins.”

  “A bunch of sharks eat his fish. How is that winning?”

  “He caught the fish, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  He smiled at her with his big white teeth. “You’ve never been fishing, have you?”

  “How did you guess?”

  He took a sip of the hot chocol
ate. “My dad was a fisherman.” He tapped his own chest. “I’m from a long line of Greek guys who make their living on the water. He used to say that we go all the way back to Odysseus.”

  “Who?”

  “Odysseus. From The Odyssey? It’s this book about a guy who sails around for twenty years battling monsters and sorceresses, trying to get home.”

  “I must have missed that one.” Lily didn’t add that when she did read something, she never remembered much about it later. All that made up stuff. Who cared about made up people?

  Vaz put the book back onto the table. “The Old Man and the Sea is pretty cool.”

  “The sharks were cool, anyway,” Lily said.

  They sipped their hot chocolates, not saying anything for a few minutes. Lily sneaked looks at the boy. Even with the crooked nose, he was nice to look at. She wondered how she looked to him, if she really looked like a flower. She touched her hair, hoping that the bun on top of her head didn’t resemble a nest thrown together by spastic birds.

  Lily racked her brain for something to say. “So, you’re Greek? Like born in Greece Greek?”

  “No, like born in South Jersey Greek. Actually, I’m only half, the big nose, dark skin half. My mom’s Irish with a bunch of other stuff thrown in.” He put his hands around the mug. “How come you don’t go to school?”

  “My mom’s home-schooling me.”

  “No way.”

  Lily shrugged. “Better than going to junior high.”

  “Junior high’s not so bad.”

  “Yeah? What about your smashed nose?”

  “Oh, well,” Vaz frowned. “That’s different.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nah. It’s nothing. Stupid stuff. Hey, she’s cute. Come here, kitty.”

  Lily watched as Julep abandoned her pen, and wandered over to Vaz for a scratch under the chin. A fight over some girl, Lily thought, some cheerleader who looked like a Barbie, not a lily. Like the blond girl on the boardwalk.

  The phone rang. Lily ignored it. It rang again, and then a third time.