The garden is a wilderness. There are plastic bags and beer cans and bottles and bits of costume strewn across the grass like weeds. There are masks staring blankly up at the sky. The grass grows through their eye sockets. They look like so many ghosts. I look up at the house and it looks back at me. I can’t see any faces in the windows. I wonder if I ever really did. When I open the front door, though, it groans like it always has, like it’s welcoming me home.
I go upstairs. The steps are hazardous. They threaten to collapse in upon themselves wherever I put my weight. I hang on to the banister rail for guidance, but even that feels fragile. I’m beginning to realize how dangerous it really was to have the party here. I wonder where Sam and Alice are and I begin to feel afraid.
When I reach the doors to the master bedroom, I stop. I don’t know if the doors will stay shut like they did at the party, but when I turn the handles, they let me in.
There is no mess inside the room. There are the flashlights we set up—dark now that their batteries have all died—and the waxy remains of candles. I’m surprised the whole house didn’t burn down. There is the charred fire pit in the middle of the bedroom, and there are the dusty drapes, and there are our footprints in the dirt on the floor, but that’s it. There are no bottles or candy wrappers or beer cans. There are no masks. There are just the dead candles and the silence.
I start to go back downstairs, but then I hear a little sound behind me, and instead of turning around, I stay facing the door and take out my phone. I try to breathe noiselessly, but it feels like the ghostly person behind me is taking their breaths exactly when I take mine. I hear them only as an echo. Quickly I spin to face the middle of the room and I raise my phone up in front of my face and snap a picture. Then I leave real fast.
I’m amazed the stairs hold my weight. I’m amazed the porch is still holding itself up. I’m amazed I don’t fall off the iron gates and crack my skull, but then I remember that it’s the first of November and so the accident season should be finished by now. But it still doesn’t feel like it’s over at all.
I go back to the river and I take out my phone, but before I can open up my pictures folder, I get a call. It’s Toby. I don’t answer. I have too many kisses to answer for already.
When the call ends, I go into my pictures folder. I open the photo I took in the master bedroom. When I brought my phone up in front of me, there were only the walls, the candle stubs, and the moldy drapes covering the dirty windows. The light was weak and grayish and speckled with dust motes like snow, although I don’t expect that to come up on the tiny screen. What comes up instead is Elsie. She is standing right in the shot like I was taking the picture of her all along. Her hair is escaping from its braid in flyaway locks and the lines on her forehead are pinched and deep. Her mouth is open like she’s in the middle of a sentence.
Before I even realize it, I’m running back to the house. I run like there’s someone chasing me, and it feels like there is, somehow; someone hard and fast and strangely silent on cold metal legs. My feet slap on the uneven road, and loose gravel rolls right in under my shoes, threatening to trip me up. The iron gates burn my hands and the weeds in the garden rise up to meet me. They tangle around my ankles like vines. Inside, the ghost house feels like it’ll collapse around me. Or maybe I am the one collapsing. I go upstairs.
Elsie is in the master bedroom.
15
Elsie is standing beside her typewriter. In front of her, sitting on the wooden box that the secrets go into, is a complicated-looking contraption that I think might be a hunter’s trap. It looks big enough to catch a small animal, anyway. It’s all iron and wire and coils. It almost hums. Without really meaning to, I ask Elsie the question again: “What are you trying to catch?”
Unsurprisingly, Elsie doesn’t answer me. “Do you want to leave a secret?” she says instead. I look at the trap on top of the box. I shake my head.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” she says. “In guardian spirits?”
I think about the secret I typed out a few years ago, when Elsie had just started with the secrets booth. I said that I wished there was such a thing as ghosts, like Bea believes, because that’d mean my father and Seth are still around somewhere. I also said that I didn’t actually believe it myself. Now I don’t know what to say.
“Sometimes I think I’m going crazy,” Elsie says. “Sometimes I think I am one.” She smiles, but it looks fake. “There’s a secret for the box.” She hunkers down and types the secret out.
“A ghost?” I ask as she is typing.
“A ghost,” she says without looking up. “A guardian spirit. Something like that.”
I want to ask her how she can be unsure about whether or not she is a ghost, but then I think of all the things our brains deny, all the memories they hide from us, all the secrets they keep.
Elsie sits cross-legged on the floor in front of the typewriter. In one fluid movement I join her. We and the trap and the typewriter make a circle like we’re about to pray. I press the palms of my hands into the dust.
“Do you remember when we used to hang out?” I ask Elsie. She smiles. “We’d stay up in the library all break time and read these history books with lots of pictures. The ancient Greeks with their white dresses, Romans in armor, bare-breasted Amazons, Aztec sacrifices.”
“All dead,” says Elsie. “All gone. Like your dad.”
“I guess.” I want to trace the frown lines on her forehead. I can’t quite decide if I am scared of her or if I want to protect her. I remember what Bea’s cards said about her. She needs us to help her find her way home. “What about your family?” I ask. “Where do you even live?”
“My dad is dead,” she says. “Like yours.” She clacks that secret out on the keys. Her sweater is worn. Her hair is frizzing out of its messy braid. She looks so worried.
Without meaning to, I think out loud. “My family, we’ve got a lot of secrets. All of us.”
Elsie writes that down too. The click of the keys is like a heartbeat. I go on: “Bea is sort of always enchanted with the world, but she’s just a lost girl like the rest of us. Her dad is gone, and her mom—she spends all her time hanging around with pretentious theater folk, pretending she’s ten years younger than she is, which usually involves pretending she was never married, or that she doesn’t have a daughter. Bea is alone a lot.” Elsie types as I talk. It feels like candles are flickering around us, but none of them are lit. The walls are all shadow anyway.
“My sister is sad all the time. She was—well, I think she was hurt really badly once, and now she goes out with boys who hurt her and sometimes she hurts herself. She doesn’t need the accident season, I guess. My mother does. She needs it to explain all the bad things that’ve happened to her. To us all. My dad’s death, and Seth—he was my mother’s brother, he was her best friend, like Sam is to me, I guess, only—” I stop for a second. “Only not. Like he used to be, when we were little.” I want to stop talking, but I can’t. My mouth moves of its own accord and the words keep spilling out. Elsie keeps typing. She slides the bar over after every line like she’s slicing a piece of meat. Shedding skins.
“Things changed really fast.” I’m thinking while I’m talking, but my thoughts are running faster than what I’m saying. “Or maybe I just realized really fast that they’d been changing all along. Sam, he’s—he’s my ex-stepbrother, but you know that. When his father left, he was . . . blank, and angry.”
Elsie’s eyes are huge. She’s pulling in all my words through that typewriter, like she’s eating them for breakfast, like they’re the only words she’s heard in a year.
“Now he’s still got this—this—it’s not sadness, it’s more like, I don’t know . . . Like he’s not really there all the time. Like he’s flickering in and out of sight, like he’s afraid he’s going to disappear. Like his father disappeared.”
The typewriter dings again. I know
that what’s going on is strange, like being in a dream, but I can’t quite put a finger on why, so I find myself talking to her as if everything’s normal, as if I do this every day—spill my secrets and the secrets of those around me to a strange girl I used to know; as if I didn’t take a picture of an empty room and have her show up in it.
“You see a lot more than you think you do,” Elsie says.
“You sound like Bea,” I tell her. Then I say: “Bea is my best friend. I want to keep her close, like she’s this treasure I’ve found, but now I think she’s in love with Alice and that makes me afraid of being alone.”
“What about Sam?” Elsie says as she types. “Don’t you have him?”
I shake my head. “I wish.”
When I hear the words I’ve just said, I put my hands over my mouth. Elsie’s fingers fly over the typewriter keys. I want to tell her to stop; I want to take the last inked letters back, but I can’t speak.
When I tell her the next secret, my voice is a whisper. “I love him. Sam.” I close my eyes and feel his lips on mine. “I’m in love with him.” I touch my lips and whisper again. “But I can never tell him, and I have to keep pretending it isn’t there.”
“You can’t pretend love away,” Elsie says. She says it like someone who knows firsthand. I look up at her. She is hunched over her typewriter like she is every break time at school. Mousy hair, high-collared blouse. Her open cardigan has big red buttons running up the front. A couple of them are missing.
“Do you ever get this feeling . . .” I ask Elsie finally, when the room has grown silent after the tapping of her fingers on the keys. “This feeling that you’ve done everything wrong?” I press my dusty palms to my chest. “Right here. This feeling like your world’s about to blow open.”
Elsie’s shoulders slump. “All the time.”
I look down at the typewriter in front of her; at the animal trap resting on the wooden secrets box. “What are your secrets?” I ask Elsie softly. I don’t expect her to reply. “What are you trying to catch?”
Elsie turns the typewriter to face me. It makes a horrible metallic screech when she pushes it across the floor.
“When I was little,” she says, “before we became friends—before . . . before anything else I can remember, I remember this voice.”
I look down at the typewriter and position my fingers over the keys. When I look back up at Elsie, she starts talking again. “A woman,” she says. “She’d come to me and ask me things. To think of her, to remember her, to ask if I was happy and safe.”
“Just a voice?”
“Write it down,” is all Elsie says to me. I write it down. I write: I have been hearing a voice since I was a child. It asks me if I am happy and safe. I am neither.
“She kept coming to me, every week, thinking about me every day, and then she started thinking about somebody else too—another little girl. And then, later, another. Later still, a boy. She came to me with three children in her heart, and from the beginning she’d ask me to watch over them. To watch over you.”
I stop typing. “Me?”
“Keep writing,” Elsie whispers. “She came to me every week, asking me to watch over you. She was too afraid. She still is, I think. So I knew that was my job. To watch over you. I look out for you. But once a year, I go away. I go searching.”
“What?” I’m beginning to change my mind. I don’t think Elsie is a ghost, not really; but ghost or not, I do think she’s probably crazy. My hands rest lightly on the typewriter keys. “Elsie, what does this have to do with me?”
Elsie points at the typewriter, urging me to keep writing. She says it like it’s obvious: “I’ve been watching over you all.” When I look up from the little metal keys, I see that there are tears in Elsie’s eyes. She says: “I guess I’m not doing a very good job.”
“But why would . . . ?” Now that I can ask all my questions, I don’t know what to say.
“For one month of every year I get to go away, go searching,” she says. “I don’t abandon you,” she adds quickly. “I still try to look out for you; I’m always there in the background. I just . . . I just go away for a little while too.”
When I think about it, I realize that maybe there has always been a time when Elsie’s not around so much—around the accident season maybe—but then, I’m questioning my memory at the moment. I don’t trust anything I think I remember.
“I didn’t ask for this,” Elsie says, and her words echo what I said to Bea earlier. Her voice is strange. “I’m tired,” she says. “And I . . . I feel like I’ve failed. You and Sam, Alice . . . I don’t want to fail her again. But I feel like I’ve failed you all.”
I type out that secret. I feel like I’ve failed you all. I don’t know if it is Elsie’s secret or mine.
And I feel like I’ve failed Elsie—by not remembering her, by not finding her before now. I look at the worry lines on her forehead that have become so familiar. She looks so worried, always so worried, so I ask her, “If you’ve been watching over us, who is looking out for you?”
Elsie looks surprised; then she smiles. “Maybe I don’t need someone to look out for me,” she says. “Maybe I just need to be remembered.”
Maybe I just need to be remembered, I type. When the words hit the edge of the paper and the typewriter spits the sheet out with a chime, I go to put the page of secrets into the wooden box, but the trap is in my way.
I ask Elsie the question again. “But what are you looking for?” I think about the dream catchers and the mousetrap, the flypapers, the butterfly net. I stare down at the terrifying trap in front of me. I say, “What are you trying to catch?”
Elsie sort of shrugs and gestures toward the window. “My mother always said I would catch my death out there.”
She moves the trap off the top of the wooden box. It is heavy, but she’s stronger than she looks. “I want you to take it over,” she says.
“Take what over?”
“The secrets booth.” Elsie pushes the box toward me. “If you want it.”
I frown and push the box and the typewriter back toward Elsie. There’s a shaking in my limbs. “It’s yours,” I say to her. “When we go back to school after the midterm break you’ll be there, in the library, and people’ll type up their secrets and you’ll put them up on the clotheslines in the halls at the end of term and it’ll be the same as every year. I don’t know how to do that.”
Elsie shakes her head. She says my name gently, like a reminder. Like she knows that I knew when she’d disappeared. Like she knows that I know that everything’s changed. “I’m not going back to school,” Elsie tells me. She smiles, and for once it reaches her eyes. “I’m going to catch my death if it kills me.”
My laugh surprises me. “I didn’t realize you were funny.” Elsie laughs with me. The sound of it bounces around the room. When the laughter has echoed all around us, I whisper, “Are you really a ghost?”
“I don’t know,” Elsie says. “It’s hard to tell.”
“Is it? You’d think it’d be pretty obvious.”
“Surprisingly, it isn’t.” Elsie pushes herself off the floor and picks up her horrible trap. It is huge in her arms and looks heavy. “Maybe I’m just this crazy little lost girl. Maybe I saw you and your lovely family and was bored with my own only-child life and so I followed you around like a puppy who wished you’d adopt her.”
“But we never saw you.” Elsie’s walking away, but I can’t seem to stand up. The floorboards creak underneath me like they’re trying to keep me here. “You were in all my pictures, but I never saw you.”
“There’s a lot you pretend you didn’t see.”
When Elsie leaves, it is as if she’s never been. The dust where she was sitting is undisturbed, and when I try to find the photo of her in my phone, it has disappeared like it was never taken. Maybe I’ve been talking to myself all along.<
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16
I carry the typewriter all the way home. It’s balanced precariously on the wooden secrets box, and every few meters I stop and hoist it up again in my arms, and my muscles scream thinly. Rain falls on the keys like it’s trying to type out its own secrets. I would read them aloud, but I don’t speak the language of the rain. I’m not even sure I can understand the river anymore. It roars on beside me, but it doesn’t whisper my secrets back at me, and it doesn’t call my name. Maybe it never really did.
Halfway home, I slip on some loose gravel and fall to the ground. The typewriter flies out of my hands and buries itself in the mud in front of me. The wooden box lands on my foot. It is heavy with so many secrets. I can hear my bones crunch. October is over, but the accidents still seem to be happening. Nothing makes sense anymore.
I carry the secrets the rest of the way on a broken foot (perhaps it is not broken, but it feels like it is; it feels strained and pained and fragile, not a little like my heart). When I get home, the lights are on and voices are raised in the kitchen. I come inside like a storm, brittle bones and heavy secrets and all, and I drop the muddy typewriter on the kitchen table, where it clangs dimly long after it has hit the padded wood. Alice and my mother stare at me. Sam is slumped over the table, his head in his arms. If he’s staring at anything, I can’t see it.
“What happened to you?” My mother points at my mud-splattered clothes, the rip in the sleeve of my coat. “What’s this?” She gestures at the typewriter. Her eyes are wide and the circles underneath them are the same color as her hair. I open my mouth to reply, but at that moment Sam makes a low groaning sound and gets up unsteadily from his chair. His skin is gray. At first I think it is still the makeup from his costume, but then he turns around sharply and throws up in the sink. Alice’s throat chokes out a small noise. My mother drops heavily into the chair in front of her. She looks dazed.
The Accident Season Page 18