I’d known better than to suggest that they’d do anything similar for me, but Mom reached me around the table in five swift steps and drew her hand back as if she were going to slap me. I raised the plates as a shield, thinking, I can’t drop them. I can’t drop them. She’ll kill me if I drop them.
“Pamela!” My father was on his feet in an instant, catching hold of her wrist. “Stop it! Who’s acting like Jane now?”
Mom had never tried to hit me before. I couldn’t imagine her hitting anybody. I’d never seen her so mad; her face was a mask of white, condensed fury. “Ginny was not a slut!” she said, her voice shaking. “Ginny was a sweet little girl!”
“Jane’s not a slut either, Mom!” Her eyes narrowed, and I knew I’d said the wrong thing again. “Mom, look, that wasn’t what I meant anyway, really it wasn’t—”
“What did you mean, then?”
“I think what she meant,” my father said sharply, putting his free arm around her waist, “is that parents are blind when it comes to their children. This is certainly true of Tom Halloran, who can’t see little Jane’s healthy anatomy waving in the breeze for anyone to snatch at, and unfortunately it’s equally true of you where Ginny’s concerned—”
Mom’s face tightened. “Ginny wouldn’t have—”
“Hush, love.” He’d gone back to his soothing doctor voice. “No, of course she wouldn’t. She devoted her existence to being every bit as pure as you demanded of her, which is why she’s supping with the saints even as we speak—”
“What?” Mom had grown wild-eyed in the dancing candlelight. She tried to get away from my father, but he held her too tightly. “What are you saying? Are you blaming me that she died?”
“Oh, Pam! Of course not. I meant that she’s in heaven, that’s all. You’re the poetic one, aren’t you?”
“You think I killed her, don’t you? I know you do! You think it’s my fault, because I encouraged her when we went to the circus.”
The circus? I’d never been to a circus. Once when I was little I’d asked Mom about them and she’d told me they were stupid, grown people dressed in silly costumes pretending to be children. Even at the time, I’d wondered why silly costumes upset her so much.
“You think it’s your fault,” my father said calmly. “I’ve never blamed you, and neither has anyone else. Pam, it wasn’t anybody’s fault, unless you want to blame some bacteria. It just happened, and it was terrible, and we all wish we could undo it. But don’t take it out on the imperfect child, all right? She’s had a bad enough day, what with falling down the Hallorans’ front steps. Emma, are you all right?”
“Yes.”
“Did your mother hurt you?”
“No.” You did. But he didn’t care about that. I was a pumpkin or a balloon, something that wasn’t conscious, something that just endured.
“I’m sorry,” Mom said stiffly. “I shouldn’t have gotten angry at you. I know you must be upset about Jane.”
“Forget it.”
“Honey—”
“I said forget it!” The way she said honey curdled my stomach. She hadn’t even looked at me when she said it.
“I think,” said my father, letting go of Mom’s waist, “that we should eat that pot roast now.”
“I can’t eat,” I told them, “I’m not hungry. I’m going to go up to my room and study.”
“Emma! You have to eat—”
“Why? I’m fat, remember? Missing one meal won’t kill me.”
“Nutrition,” my mother said, trying to smile.
“I don’t want any dinner! I’m not hungry! I feel sick, all right? Would you leave me alone?”
“Let her go,” my father said, and I fled up the stairs, favoring my sore knee. Behind me, I heard him say, “Pam, for God’s sake get rid of that thing.”
What thing? I crouched at the top of the stairs arid listened with ears fine-tuned by the breathing. I heard paper ripping, and he said matter-of-factly, “You’ve been brooding about this since last night. That’s what has you so keyed up.”
The poem? That had been the only paper on the table. Did he get to read Mom’s poetry? Maybe he helped her with the awful rhymes. What a joke. What rhymes with life, Stewart? Knife. What rhymes with love? Shove. What rhymes with trust? Lust.
The phone rang. Maybe it would be the hospital summoning my father back to work. I crouched in the darkness of the stairwell as he said, “You’d better answer that.”
“It’s probably for you.” Mom sounded hoarse, defeated, subdued.
“Answer the telephone,” he said quietly.
Mom could assume her sweet schoolteacher voice without thinking about it, and those were the tones that came from the kitchen. “Oh, Myrna. How are you? No, Emma’s fine. Just fine. And is Jane all right? Well, I’m certainly glad to hear that. No, she just skinned her knee; it’s nothing serious. That’s kind of you, but she’s already gone upstairs to study, and I’d rather she not be interrupted. Thank you for calling.”
My heart sank. The Hallorans had chewed out Tad’s father and now they were looking for me. “That busybody,” Mom said, and then let out a wail. “You burned it! Stewart—”
“Now, Pamela. Come on. I’m sure you had it memorized by now anyway.”
“You had no right!”
“All the right in the world. It was upsetting you.”
“It was also my property.”
“Pamela, my love, consider it a medical procedure. A cauterized wound. The work of a few seconds that prevents possible months of pain and infection.”
“I see,” she said coldly. “I know but matters of the house, and you, you know a thousand things. Is that it?”
“No, that’s not it. Pam, I’m sorry I upset you. Truly I am. But it’s better for you to get your mind onto something else.”
“It wasn’t yours to burn,” Mom said. She sounded hopeless again.
“What’s yours is mine. Isn’t that what our wedding vows said? Now look: I’ve already apologized for upsetting you. I don’t want to discuss this any more. Do you want me to go up and look at Emma?”
No. I never should have said I wasn’t feeling well. But to my infinite relief, Mom answered, “Emma’s fine. She said she’s studying. Let’s eat our dinner. I’ll take a tray up to her later, if she wants one.”
There was no way in the world I’d be able to study now, and I’d cut off any chance of getting out of the house. Even if I managed to sneak out, where could I go? The lake wasn’t safe anymore and neither was the Hallorans’ house, and anywhere else I’d just keep picturing Ginny and wondering if I was crazy. Sleep: sleep was the only place left. Sleep would protect me at least until dawn, when nothing could.
Sleep now, then. I crawled between the clean sheets without even taking my filthy clothing off, but when I closed my eyes all I could see was the look on Jane’s face when I told her mother what she’d done. I thought I’d been telling the truth, but when Tom Halloran yelled at Mr. Ewmet, he might as well have been yelling at me. Maybe he had been. Maybe he’d known that I’d be able to hear him.
But I’d been right, hadn’t I? It wasn’t safe to dress like that. It wasn’t safe to go out in leaky boats with boys you hardly knew who were staring at you. It wasn’t. It wasn’t. She should have known better. She could have kept herself safe so easily: by wearing a sweatshirt and not going out in the boat, by keeping her eyes open, by using her common sense. It would have been so easy for her not to get into trouble and she’d ignored all the signals, and there was no easy way out for me at all. If wearing a sweatshirt would have stopped the breathing I’d have worn ten of them at once, but it didn’t matter. He’d just wait until I fell asleep and then he’d come into my bedroom and it would start all over again, no matter how many sweatshirts I had on.
I wanted to stop thinking about it, wanted to stop thinking about everything, but sleep was impossible, and there wasn’t anywhere else I could go. Or was there? Could I leave my body now, even though it wasn’t dawn?
I could, and I did. The sudden absence of pain was as welcome as the first cool dive into the lake on a hot summer’s day. Out of my body, I felt better than I ever had inside it.
I floated effortlessly to the ceiling and spun so it became the floor. Did I have to do that, though? Why? Why did I have to stand on anything, if I could fly? I did an experimental cartwheel—I couldn’t land wrong and get hurt, since all my nerve endings were down on the bed—and discovered that it was easy. So I did a back flip and a handstand. They probably wouldn’t have looked very graceful to anyone watching me, and even without a body I’d never do them as well as Ginny had, but they were a lot more fun than studying or being scared.
“Pretty good,” Ginny said behind me as I was in the middle of a somersault, and if I’d been in my body I’d have fallen on my head and split my skull open,
“No, really,” she said as I scrambled to turn around, “that’s not bad at all, for somebody who’s just starting out. You need more practice, that’s all.”
“What are you doing here?” She was still wearing her silly Snoopy pajamas, and when I yelled at her she picked up a piece of her hair and started chewing it. “I didn’t call you! I don’t want you here! You’re a hallucination!”
“You didn’t call me the first time, either.” She looked even more real than she had before; less fuzzy around the edges, somehow, as if whatever was showing this film of her—God? my imagination?—had adjusted the focus on the projector. “And I’m as real as you are. I told you that before.”
“You told me a lot of stuff. Not that any of it made any sense.”
She shrugged. “Well, maybe I have to come back until it makes sense. Anyhow, here I am.”
“Here you are. Why would anyone want to be here after being in heaven?”
She looked surprised. “I don’t know. This is where I lived. I was happy here, wasn’t I?”
“That’s what Mom says. You were happy here, but I’m not. Want to trade places?”
She shivered and shook her head, “Can’t do that. It’s not my body down there; it’s yours.”
“Yeah, it sure is. Would you want it if you had it? It’s ugly and clumsy, and right now it’s got blood all over it.”
Ginny looked at her feet. “You shouldn’t talk like that. You did that back flip pretty well, really you did. You’d get better if you practiced.”
“Sure,” I said, thinking of my conversation with Jane about Tennyson. I wondered if Ginny felt as embarrassed as I’d felt then.
What was I thinking? She couldn’t feel embarrassed; she couldn’t feel anything, any more than balloons or pumpkins could. She was dead, and I was imagining her. But I kept talking anyway, because she’d said something nice to me. “Not having to worry about gravity helps. So you remember gymnastics now, huh?”
“Gymnastics,” she said, and her face lit up the way it had when I’d said her name. “I remember a lot about gymnastics. I remember the uneven parallels: I used to get black and blue where I hit the bars, but the dismounts were like flying, and if you landed right it didn’t even hurt. And I remember the balance beam. I used to pretend that it was a high wire and I was performing at the circus.”
“The circus,” I said, disgusted again. Here she was talking about stuff I’d just heard; she must be my imagination. “You went there with Mom, didn’t you? She’s never taken me.”
“Yes,” Ginny said, but a shadow crossed her face. “She liked it. We both like the acrobats.” She shivered then, and chewed her hair again for a minute, and then said shyly, “Do you want me to show you how to do a triple somersault?”
“No. Why should you teach me how to do that? It won’t do me any good once I’m back in my fat ugly body. You might as well teach me how to fly.”
“But you are flying,” Ginny said. “Your mind is, anyway. And I didn’t have to teach you how to do it. You figured it out by yourself, just like you did with the cartwheel.”
“Great. So I’m the next incarnation of Wonder Girl, and the next time I go to the lake and somebody hassles me I can drag them up to cloud nine and dump them on top of a tree or something. You’re as bad as Myrna Halloran, you know that?”
“No, I don’t know her,” Ginny said seriously. Her face brightened again, “I remember the lake, though. It was pretty there. I used to go sit on that old dock on the western shore when no one else was around—”
“You did? You did? So do I!” Idiot, I told myself, of course she does. She’s you. She’s your imagination. What else would she do? More suspiciously, I said, “Mom never told me you did that.”
“She always thought I was at the library,” Ginny said, wrinkling her nose. “I studied at the lake sometimes, but mostly I just watched the fish.”
Just like me. What a surprise. “Minnows, right? The ones that make shadows on the bottom—”
“And the birds that peck in the sand looking for things to eat.” She grinned, and I realized that I hadn’t seen her smile before. One of her upper front teeth was chipped. Mom had never told me about that, either, and it didn’t show up in any of the family photographs. Well, so I didn’t want to think she was perfect. But how had I come up with the pajamas?
Ginny was still babbling about the lake. “And I used to see owls sometimes at dusk, and bats and raccoons, and once I saw a fox come to the water to drink. A big red one. It was beautiful. Have you ever seen a fox?”
“No.” Just boys. “There aren’t so many animals around now, I guess because there are more people or something. Just the birds and the fish, and sometimes deer. But not very often.”
Ginny chewed her lip for a minute and then said, “Do you want to go there, to the lake? We can go there, if you want to.”
Oh, sure we can. “Won’t people see us?”
“No, silly. There won’t be anybody else there. We won’t really be there, not in the world. Just in our heads, sort of. It’s hard to explain.”
“You’re kidding.” I knew all of this was completely crazy, but I felt the same surge of lightness as when I’d left my body, I wanted to believe in her. I did, I did. “We can go to the Sake, just like that? You mean I can go to the lake and there won’t be anybody there? I can go there whenever I want to, just by leaving my body?”
“It’s not that different from daydreaming, is it? But if you stay out of your body for too long, you may not be able to get back.” Ginny frowned and picked up a strand of her hair again, tugging at it with thin fingers. “I don’t think I should have told you.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be careful. But look, can you take me into your room, too? So I can see it? I really want to see your room.”
“No,” Ginny said. “It doesn’t work that way. I can’t take you anywhere you haven’t been. If we go somewhere together, it has to be to a place we both remember.”
Stupid ghost. I wasn’t going to get any proof one way or the other with that dumb rule. “Great. So if flying’s so easy, why doesn’t everybody do it? Just flit around all day like Peter Pan?”
“I don’t know. I guess they prefer being in their bodies.” She smiled, shyly. “I remember Peter Pan. Mom used to read it to me.”
“Read it? She doesn’t have to. She’s got it memorized. That and ‘Goblin Market.’ Did you get ‘Goblin Market’?”
She shook her head, frowning. “Which one is that? The one about the little boy and the monsters?”
“Huh? No, that’s Where the Wild Things Are.” I’d never liked that story, because all the wild things looked like they breathed too loudly. “No, it’s the one about Lizzie who saves her sister Laura from the poison fruit, you know, ‘For your sake I have braved the glen / And had to do with goblin merchant men—’ ”
“It sounds scary,” Ginny said. “I don’t remember that one. Mom didn’t read me scary stories.”
“You’re kidding! Peter Pan’s not scary, with Hook and the crocodile and nasty little Tinkerbell trying to get Wendy shot down like a bird?”
Gin
ny shook her head again. “No. I always knew it would come out all right in the end. Mom told me so the first time she read it to me.”
“She never told me that. Just let me be terrified through the whole thing.” Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about books anymore. “Let’s go to the lake. Right now. What do we do, fly out the window?”
“No,” Ginny said. “Not now. Mom’s here. You have to go back.”
“What?” I’d almost forgotten that my body was lying there on the bed, but when I looked at it I saw Mom bending over me, shaking my shoulder.
“Go back,” Ginny said. “Right now.”
“But—”
“Just go! She’s going to get really scared if she can’t wake you up.” She bit her lip and shivered all over, once, like a wet dog. “She’ll get hysterical. She’ll shake you and shake you and shake you, until you flop back and forth like a rag doll and all the IVs come out of your arms—”
“I don’t have IVs in my arms,” I said.
“I did.”
And then she turned and fled through the wall, and I was alone. Ginny was right; Mom was shaking me harder. As if through layers of cotton, I heard her saying, “Emma! Emma, wake up!” She looked almost as upset as she had when she’d tried to slap me.
I went back, wondering if she’d slap me for real this time because I hadn’t woken up more quickly. “Emma!” Her voice was so loud that it hurt my ears, and I jumped the way you do when the volume on a radio gets turned way up by accident. “Emma, wake up!”
“All right,” I said, opening my eyes. “I’m awake.” My voice came out funny; kind of slurred, like I’d forgotten how to use my throat. My body still hurt, but the pain was distant and muffled.
Mom was pale and sweaty, ugly wet splotches spreading from the armpits of her blouse. Just like Tom Halloran, I thought with satisfaction. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked sharply. “I must have been shaking you for five minutes—”
“I was tired, that’s all.”
“I thought you came up here to study for your math test. What happened?”
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