The Mediator #1: Shadowland

by Jenny Carroll

  I wasn't really listening to my mother. My interest in school has always been pretty much zero. The whole reason I hadn't been able to move out here before Christmas was that there had been no space for me at the Mission School, and I'd been forced to wait until second semester started before something opened up. I hadn't minded – I'd gotten to live with my grandmother for a few months, which hadn't been at all bad. My grandmother, besides being a really excellent criminal attorney, is an awesome cook.

  I was sort of still distracted by the ocean, which had disappeared behind some hills. I was craning my neck, hoping for another glimpse, when it hit me. I went, "Wait a minute. When was this school built?"

  "The eighteenth century," Doc replied. "The mission system, implemented by the Franciscans under the guidelines of the Catholic Church and the Spanish government, was set up not only to Christianize the Native Americans, but also to train them to become successful tradespeople in the new Spanish society. Originally, the mission served as a – "

  "Eighteenth century?" I said, leaning forward. I was wedged between Sleepy – whose head had slumped forward until it was resting on my shoulder, enabling me to tell, just by sniffing, that he used Finesse shampoo – and Dopey. Let me tell you, Gina hadn't mentioned a thing about how much room boys take up, which, when they're both nearly six feet tall, and in the two hundred pound vicinity, is a lot. "Eighteenth century?"

  My mother must have heard the panic in my voice, since she turned in her seat and said, soothingly, "Now, Suze, we discussed this. I told you there's a year's waiting list at Robert Louis Stevenson, and you told me you didn't want to go to an all-girls school, so Sacred Heart is out, and Andy's heard some awful stories about drug abuse and gang violence in the public schools around here – "

  "Eighteenth century?" I could feel my heart starting to pound hard, as if I'd been running. "That's like three hundred years old!"

  "I don't get it." We were driving through the town of Carmel-by-the-Sea now, all picturesque cottages – some with thatched roofs, even – and beautiful little restaurants and art galleries. Andy had to drive carefully because the traffic was thick with people in cars with out-of-state licenses, and there weren't any stoplights, something that, for some reason, the natives took pride in. "What's so bad," he wanted to know, "about the eighteenth century?"

  My mother said, without any inflection in her voice whatsoever – what I call her bad-news voice, the one she uses on TV to report plane crashes and child murders, "Suze has never been very wild about old buildings."

  "Oh," Andy said. "Then I guess she isn't going to like the house."

  I gripped the back of his headrest. "Why?" I demanded, in a tight voice. "Why am I not going to like the house?"

  I saw why, of course, as soon as we pulled in. The house was huge, and impossibly pretty, with Victorian-style turrets and a widow's walk – the whole works. My mom had had it painted blue and white and cream, and it was surrounded by big, shady pine trees, and sprawling, flowering shrubs. Three stories high, constructed entirely from wood, and not the horrible glass-and-steel or terra-cotta stuff the houses around it were made of, it was the loveliest, most tasteful house in the neighborhood.

  And I didn't want to set foot in it.

  I knew when I'd agreed to move with my mom to California that I'd be in for lots of changes. The roadside artichokes, the lemon groves, the ocean…they were nothing, really. The fact was, the biggest change was going to be sharing my mom with other people. In the decade since my father had died, it had been just the two of us. And I have to admit, I sort of liked it like that. In fact, if it hadn't been for the fact that Andy made my mom so obviously happy, I would have put my foot down and said no way to the whole moving thing.

  But you couldn't even look at them together – Andy and my mom – and not be able to tell right away that they were completely gaga over each other. And what kind of daughter would I have been if I said no way to that? So I accepted Andy, and I accepted his three sons, and I accepted the fact that I was going to have to leave behind everything I had ever known and loved – my best friend, my grandmother, bagels, SoHo – in order to give my mom the happiness she deserved.

  But I hadn't really considered the fact that, for the first time in my life, I was going to have to live in a house.

  And not just any house, either, but, as Andy proudly told me as he was taking my bags from the car, and thrusting them into his sons' arms, a nineteenth century converted boarding house. Built in 1849, it had apparently had quite a little reputation in its day. Gunfights over card games and women had taken place in the front parlor. You could still see the bullet holes. In fact, Andy had framed one rather than filling it in. It was a bit morbid, he admitted, but interesting, too. He bet we were living in the only house in the Carmel hills that had a nineteenth century bullet hole in it.

  Huh, I said. I bet that was true.

  My mother kept glancing in my direction as we climbed the many steps to the front porch. I knew she was nervous about what I was going to think. I was kind of irked at her, really, for not warning me. I guess I could understand why she hadn't, though. If she'd told me she had bought a house that was more than a hundred years old, I wouldn't have moved out here. I would have stayed with Grandma until it came time for me to leave for college.

  Because my mom's right: I don't like old buildings.

  Although I saw, as old buildings went, this one was really something. When you stood on the front porch, you could see all of Carmel beneath you, the village, the valley, the beach, the sea. It was a breathtaking view, one that people would – and had, judging from the fanciness of the houses around ours – pay millions for; one that I shouldn't have resented, not in the least.

  And yet, when my mom said, "Come on, Suze. Come see your room," I couldn't help shuddering a little.

  The house was as beautiful inside as it was outside. All shiny maple and cheerful blues and yellows. I recognized my mom's things, and that made me feel a little better. There was the pie-safe she and I had bought once on a weekend trip to Vermont. There were my baby pictures, hanging on the wall in the living room, right alongside Sleepy, Dopey, and Doc's. There were my mother's books in the built-in shelves in the den. Her plants, which she'd paid so exorbitant a price to have shipped because she'd been unable to bear parting with them, were everywhere, on wooden stands, hanging in front of the stained-glass windows, perched on top of the newel post at the end of the stairs.

  But there were also things I didn't recognize: a sleek white computer sitting on the desk where my mother used to write out checks to pay the bills; a wide-screen TV incongruously rucked into a fireplace in the den, to which shift-sticks were wired for some sort of video game; surf boards leaning up against the wall by the door to the garage; a huge, slobbery dog, who seemed to think I was harboring food in my pockets since he kept thrusting his big wet nose into them.

  These all seemed like obtrusively masculine things, foreign things in the life my mother and I had carved out for ourselves. They were going to take some getting used to.

  My room was upstairs, just above the roof of the front porch. My mother had been going on nervously for almost the entire trip from the airport about the window seat Andy had installed in the bay window. The bay windows looked out over the same view as the porch, that sweeping vista that incorporated all of the peninsula. It was sweet of them, really, to give me such a nice room, the room with the best view in the whole house.

  And when I saw how much trouble they'd gone to, to make the room feel like home to me – or at least to some excessively feminine, phantom girl…not me. I had never been the glass-topped dressing table, princess phone type – how Andy had put cream colored wallpaper, dotted with blue forget-me-nots, all along the top of the intricate white wainscoting that lined the walls; how the same wallpaper covered the walls of my own personal adjoining bathroom; how they'd bought me a new bed – a four-poster with a lace canopy, the kind my mother had always wanted for me and had evide
ntly been unable to resist – I felt bad about how I'd acted in the car. I really did. I thought to myself, as I walked around the room, Okay, this isn't so bad. So far you're in the clear. Maybe it'll be all right, maybe no one was ever unhappy in this house, maybe all those people who got shot deserved it....

  Until I turned toward the bay window, and saw that someone was already sitting on the window seat Andy had so lovingly made for me.

  Someone who was not related to me, or to Sleepy, Dopey, or Doc.

  I turned toward Andy, to see if he'd noticed the intruder. He hadn't, even though he was right there, right in front of his face.

  My mother hadn't seen him, either. All she saw was my face. I guess my expression must not have been the most pleasant, since her own fell, and she said with a sad sigh, "Oh, Suze. Not again."

  C H A P T E R

  2

  I guess I should explain. I'm not exactly your typical sixteen-year-old girl.

  Oh, I seem normal enough, I guess. I don't do drugs, or drink, or smoke – well, okay, except for that one time when Sleepy caught me. I don't have anything pierced, except my ears, and only once on each earlobe. I don't have any tattoos. I've never dyed my hair. Except for my boots and leather jacket, I don't wear an excessive amount of black. I don't even wear dark fingernail polish. All in all, I am a pretty normal, every day, American teenage girl.

  Except, of course, for the fact that I can talk to the dead.

  I probably shouldn't put it that way. I should probably say that the dead talk to me. I mean, I don't go around initiating these conversations. In fact, I try to avoid the whole thing as much as possible.

  It's just that sometimes they won't let me.

  The ghosts, I mean.

  I don't think I'm crazy. At least, not any crazier than your average sixteen year old. I guess I might seem crazy to some people. Certainly the majority of kids in my old neighborhood thought I was. Nuts, I mean. I've had the school counselors sicced on me more than once. Sometimes I even think it might be simpler just to let them lock me up.

  But even on the ninth floor of Bellevue – which is where they lock up the crazy people in New York – I probably wouldn't be safe from the ghosts. They'd find me.

  They always do.

  I remember my first. I remember it as clearly as any of my other memories of that time, which is to say, not very well, since I was about two years old. I guess I remember it about as well as I remember taking a mouse away from our cat and cradling it in my arms until my horrified mother took it away.

  Hey, I was two, okay? I didn't know then that mice were something to be afraid of. Ghosts, either, for that matter. That's why, fourteen years later, neither of them frighten me. Startle me, maybe, sometimes. Annoy me, a lot. But frighten me?

  Never.

  The ghost, like the mouse, was little, grey and helpless. To this day, I don't know who she was. I spoke to her, some baby gibberish that she didn't understand. Ghosts can't understand two-year-olds any better than anybody else. She just looked at me sadly from the top of the stairs of our apartment building. I guess I felt sorry for her, the way I had for the mouse, and wanted to help her. Only I didn't know how. So I did what any uncertain two-year-old would do. I ran for my mother.

  That was when I learned my first lesson concerning ghosts: only I can see them.

  Well, obviously, other people can see them. How else would we have haunted houses and ghost stories and Unsolved Mysteries and all of that? But there's a difference. Most people who see ghosts only see one. I see all ghosts.

  All of them. Anybody. Anybody who has died and for whatever reason is hanging around on earth instead of going wherever it is he or she is supposed to go, I can see.

  And let me tell you, that is a lot of ghosts.

  I found out the same day that I saw my first ghost that most people – even my own mother – can't see them at all. Neither can anyone else I have ever met. At least, no one who'll admit it.

  Which brings us to the second thing I learned about ghosts that day fourteen years ago: it's really better, in the long run, not to mention that you've seen one. Or, as in my case, any.

  I'm not saying my mother figured out that it was a ghost I was pointing to and gibbering about that afternoon when I was two. I doubt she knew it. She probably thought I was trying to tell her something about the mouse, which she had confiscated from me earlier that morning. But she looked gamely up the stairs and nodded and said, "Uh-huh. Listen, Suze. What do you want for lunch today? Grilled cheese? Or tuna fish?"

  I hadn't exactly expected a reaction similar to the one the mouse had gotten – my mother, who'd been cradling a neighbor's newborn at the time, had let out a glorious shriek at the sight of the mouse in my arms, and had screamed even harder at my proud announcement, "Look, Mommy. Now I've got a baby, too," which I realize now she couldn't have understood, since she didn't get it about the ghost.

  But I had expected at least an acknowledgment of the thing floating at the top of the stairs. I was given explanations for virtually everything else I encountered on a daily basis, from fire hydrants to electrical outlets. Why not the thing at the top of the stairs?

  But as I sat munching my grilled cheese a little later, I realized that the reason my mother had offered no explanation for the grey thing was that she hadn't been able to see it. To her, it wasn't there.

  At two years old, this didn't seem unreasonable to me. It just seemed, at the time, like another thing that separated children from adults: Children had to eat all their vegetables. Adults did not. Children could ride the merry-go-round in the park. Adults could not. Children could see the grey things. Adults could not.

  And even though I was only two years old, I understood that the little grey thing at the top of the stairs was not something to be discussed. Not with anybody. Not ever.

  And I never did. I never told anyone about my first ghost, nor did I ever discuss with anyone the hundreds of other ghosts I encountered over the course of the next few years. What was there to discuss, really? I saw them. They spoke to me. For the most part, I didn't understand what they were saying, what they wanted, and they usually went away. End of story.

  It probably would have gone on like that indefinitely if my father hadn't suddenly up and died.

  Really. Just like that. One minute he was there, cooking and making jokes in the kitchen like he'd always done, and the next day he was gone.

  And, people kept assuring me all through the week following his death – which I spent on the stoop in front of our building, waiting for my dad to come home – he was never coming back.

  I, of course, didn't believe their assurances. Why should I? My dad, not coming back? Were they nuts? Sure, he might have been dead. I got that part. But he was definitely coming back. Who was going to help me with my math homework? Who was going to wake up early with me on Saturday mornings, and make Belgian waffles and watch cartoons? Who was going to teach me to drive, like he'd promised, when I turned sixteen? My dad might have been dead, but I was definitely going to see him again. I saw lots of dead people on a daily basis. Why shouldn't I see my dad?

  It turned out I was right. Oh, my dad was dead. No doubt about that. He'd died of a massive coronary. My mom had his body cremated, and she put his ashes in an antique German beer tankard. You know, that kind with the lid. My dad had always really liked beer. She put the tankard on a shelf, high up, where the cat couldn't knock it over, and sometimes, when she didn't think I was around, I caught her talking to it.

  This made me feel really sad. I mean, I guess I couldn't blame her, really. If I didn't know any better, I'd probably have talked to that tankard, too.

  But that, you see, was what all those people on my block had been wrong about. My dad was dead, yeah. But I did see him again.

  In fact, I probably see him more now than I did when he was alive. When he was alive, he had to go to work most days. Now that he's dead, he doesn't have all that much to do. So I see him a lot. Almost too much, in fact. H
is favorite thing to do is suddenly materialize when I least expect it. It's kind of annoying.

  My dad was the one who finally explained it to me. So I guess, in a way, it's a good thing he did die, since I might never have known, otherwise.

  Actually, that isn't true. There was a tarot card reader who said something about it once. It was at a school carnival. I only went because Gina didn't want to go alone. I pretty much thought it was a crock, but I went along because that's what best friends do for one another. The woman – Madame Zara, Psychic Medium – read Gina's cards, telling her exactly what she wanted to hear: Oh, you're going to be very successful, you'll be a brain surgeon, you'll marry at thirty, and have three kids, blah, blah, blah. When she was done, I got up to go, but Gina insisted Madame Zara do a reading for me, too.

  You can guess what happened. Madame Zara read the cards once, looked confused, and shuffled them up and read them again. Then she looked at me.

  "You," she said, "talk to the dead."

  This excited Gina. She went, "Oh my God! Oh my God! Really? Suze, did you hear that? You can talk to the dead! You're a psychic medium, too!"

  "Not a medium," Madame Zara said. "A mediator."

  Gina looked crushed. "A what? What's that?"

  But I knew. I'd never known what it was called, but I knew what it was. My dad hadn't put it quite that way when he'd explained things, but I got the gist of it, anyway: I am pretty much the contact person for just about anybody who croaks leaving things … well, untidy. Then, if I can, I clean up the mess.

  That's the only way I can think to explain it. I don't know how I got so lucky – I mean, I am normal in every other respect. Well, almost, anyway. I just have this unfortunate ability to communicate with the dead.

  Not any dead, either. Only the unhappy dead.