Discovering

by Wendy Corsi Staub

“You didn’t read the rest of her e-mail.”

  “Not yet. But I was going to. I was going to . . . tonight.”

  Except that she wasn’t.

  Not tonight.

  Maybe not even tomorrow.

  It’s still so raw.

  “You don’t have to find out the rest of the story, you know,”Jacy says quietly. “It is what it is. You can just leave the e-mail alone and remember your mother the way she was.”

  “Except that I have a half sibling somewhere in this world.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “They had a baby together.”

  “Did Darrin raise it?”

  “It’s possible. But Darrin’s dead. I don’t know how I can find out now.”

  “You could ask his parents about it.”

  “His parents? You think they know? Do you think my grandmother knows, too?”

  “You won’t find out unless you ask.”

  “I know, but if I ask—and they didn’t know—then . . . they’ll know .”

  He’s silent.

  “I guess I could ask,”she says slowly.

  “You said you wanted to go talk to the Yateses this week, before they leave for the winter, and tell them Darrin’s dead. I’ll go with you. We’ll do it together.”

  “Is that really up to us, though?”She thought it was, back when she found the article on the Internet that stated Darrin had died last June in an unsolved murder. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  Jacy gives her a level look. “We’re probably the only two people alive who know that Tom Leolyn was really Darrin Yates. Are we really going to let those old people wonder for the rest of their lives whatever happened to their son?”

  “No! I wouldn’t do that.”She hesitates. “I’m just afraid to face them. Remember when they told us that they sense he’s still on the earth plane? How are they going to react when they find out they’re wrong?”

  “It won’t be easy for anyone, but I’ll go with you, like I said the other day. We’ll show them the death notice from the newspaper, and we’ll tell them what you found out.”

  “What, we’re going to just march over there and break the news that their son is dead? What do we do when they start screaming in grief? Because that’s what people do when someone they love dies, you know .”

  That’s what I did.

  She doesn’t say that part, though; just presses her fingertips to her temples, telling Jacy, “I have a pounding headache, and I can’t even think straight.”

  He wraps his arms around her again. “That’s no surprise. You’ve been through a lot.”

  She swallows hard. There’s a lump in her throat.

  Everything feels wrong in her life— everything but Jacy. Nothing is familiar— not this relationship. Not even herself. What happened to sweet, nice, easygoing Calla?

  She’s turned into a stranger. And so has her mother.

  “You said you wanted my advice, right?”

  “Right,”she tells Jacy in a small voice.

  “Here it is: go home and eat dinner and get some sleep to-night and forget all this for right now.”He tilts to press his forehead against hers. “It’s too much for you to handle. You can figure it all out later, and I’ll be there to help you.”

  “That,”Calla says gratefully, “might be the best advice I’ve ever heard.”

  “Calla?”

  Startled, she opens her eyes to find herself fully clothed on her bed in her lamplit room, an open textbook lying near her cheek. Rain is falling hard on the roof, pinging into the gutter outside her window.

  Her grandmother is in the doorway, telephone in hand. “It’s not even nine o’clock yet. Are you sleeping already?”

  “No, I . . . I mean, I guess I dozed off while I was studying.”

  “It’s Lisa.”Odelia waves the receiver. “Do you want me to tell her to call you back tomorrow?”

  Yes. She really does. She’s too drowsy to chat right now.

  But Lisa can probably hear every word they’re saying. She’ll be hurt if Calla doesn’t take the call.

  Reluctantly, she sits up. “It’s okay, I’ll talk to her.”

  As she holds out her hand, the lights flicker a little.

  Calla glances around, half expecting to see an apparition. Sometimes their energy interferes with the electricity.

  The room is empty, and distant thunder tells her the weather is responsible this time.

  Gammy looks at the window. “It’s really pouring out there. It’s not a good idea to talk on the phone during a storm. Make it quick, okay?”

  “Okay.”Hiding a yawn, she takes the receiver.

  “And get some sleep after you hang up,”Gammy tells her, planting a kiss on her forehead. “You need to rest.”

  “I will.”She waits until her grandmother has left the room, closing the door behind her. “Lisa? Hi.”

  “Hi,”Lisa drawls back. It comes out Ha–ah. “How were your flights this morning? Everything on time?”

  “Pretty much. We had a great view of Manhattan when we landed there. The pilot described everything. I was sitting on the left side of the plane, like you said I should, so I got to see all the good stuff.”

  “Did you see the Empire State Building?”

  “And the Statue of Liberty and Rocke feller Center . . .”

  “Cool.”

  “Yeah.”She hesitates. “It was really good to spend time with you, Lis’—I mean, other than what happened.”

  “You, too. I’m sorry I got so upset with you when you didn’t want to come to the senior class car wash with me Saturday morning.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I just didn’t get why you’d want to go poking around your old house after everything you went through there. I had no idea something like that was going to happen to you or I would have gone with you in a heartbeat. You know that, right?”

  “I know, Lis’. It’s really okay.”Calla paces across the rose-and-sage-colored braided rug, phone in hand, feeling groggy.

  “I feel so bad.”

  Calla can’t help but smile. Lisa really is a good friend. A good, and now guilt-ridden, friend.

  “Listen,”she says, “if it makes you feel any better, if I had any idea what I was walking into there, I would have definitely gone to the senior car wash instead.”

  Lisa laughs. “If you had, you would have seen Brittany Jensen in Daisy Dukes and the skimpiest bikini top ever, trying to win back Nick Rodriguez. But guess what? He called this afternoon and asked me out.”

  “That’s great! You’ve been hoping for that.”

  As Lisa recaps the conversation she had with Nick word for word, Calla leans her forehead against the window glass, looking out into the night. She can’t see much because of the glare—just tree branches swaying in the wet gusts.

  “Oh, and Calla, you so have to check out Nick’s MySpace page when you get a chance. There’s this great picture of him surfing.”

  “I wish I could see it.”

  “I thought you were online again. You said you were bringing your mom’s laptop back with you!”

  “Oh . . . right.”

  Funny. There was actually a time when she wanted the laptop just so that she could stay plugged in to her old life.

  “Check out Nick’s page. And then IM me and tell me what you think of the picture.”

  “Okay, I—”

  A flash of lightning illuminates the landscape.

  For a fleeting moment, she can clearly see a male figure standing in the yard below, looking up at her.

  Darrin Yates.

  Heart pounding, Calla gasps and jumps back from the window.

  “Calla? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, it was just . . . lightning. We’re having a storm.”She pulls the shade, knowing it won’t really keep him out if he wants to get to her. He’s been in this room before.

  Back when she didn’t realize he was visiting from the other side.

  “Lisa, I should get off the pho
ne.”

  “Okay. Make sure you check out Nick’s page, though.”

  “I will,”she says absently, and lifts the edge of the shade to peer into the night, looking for Darrin.

  Rather, Darrin’s spirit.

  “Oh, and my brother said he e-mailed you, too.”

  “He did?”That captures her attention.

  “Make sure you e-mail him back, okay? He’s really worried about you.”

  Calla doesn’t know what to say to that. Or how to feel about it.

  Too little, too late is how she would have reacted just days ago about Kevin, her ex-boyfriend, trying to reach out to her again after breaking up with her and dating someone new.

  But after staying under the same roof with him while she was in Florida—and after having a heart- to-heart talk with him Friday night, before everything happened— she isn’t so sure.

  He broke up with Annie, his new girlfriend.

  And the last thing he said to Calla that night was, “Don’t write me off just yet. Promise me you won’t.”

  She didn’t make any promises.

  But she didn’t tell him to forget it, either.

  Why not? Is it wrong to feel a connection— however slight—to Kevin when her feelings for Jacy are so strong?

  Caring about someone new doesn’t mean you automatically stop caring about someone else you once loved, advises a voice in Calla’s head—a voice that isn’t her own.

  She can hear her mother saying the words so clearly that she wonders, for a moment, if it’s something Mom actually told her back when she was still alive.

  If it is, though, she can’t remember when, or why, her mother would have said it.

  Thunder booms and, again, Calla peeks through the window— just in time to see lightning spark temporary daylight again.

  The spot where Darrin was standing is empty now.

  But he isn’t far away.

  Calla can feel his presence crackling in the air, as palpable as the electric storm outside.

  “Lisa, I really have to go,”she says, keeping an eye out for him as she moves across the room, away from the window.

  “Okay. Be safe. Love you.”

  “You, too.”

  She hangs up the phone and tosses it onto the bed.

  Then, after hesitating for a moment, she bends over and looks underneath it.

  No Darrin.

  Feeling a little sheepish, she straightens and goes over to the case that holds her mother’s laptop. As she picks it up, she wonders if this is a good idea.

  She really is exhausted.

  Maybe she should just forget it tonight, crawl into bed, turn out the light, and go to sleep. . . .

  With the spirit of her mother’s dead lover hanging around as if he’s trying to tell her something.

  Yawning deeply, she weighs the laptop in her hand, along with the decision.

  Should she follow Jacy’s advice and wait, at least until tomorrow, when she’s better equipped to deal with it?

  Or should she find out the truth right now?

  Now, she decides. The sooner she finds out the rest of the story, the sooner Darrin—and perhaps Aiyana—will leave her alone, and she’ll get closure and move on.

  Or the sooner she’ll be able to find her sister or brother.

  Mind made up, Calla opens the laptop, presses the power switch, and waits for it to boot up.

  Nervously, she looks around the room. Still no sign of Darrin.

  But that doesn’t mean he isn’t here, watching.

  It takes her a moment to realize nothing’s happening with the computer.

  Then she remembers: when she packed it away in Florida, she was in a hurry. She probably didn’t bother to turn it off. She must have drained the battery.

  Please, please, please, let that be the problem.

  It would be easy to fix.

  What if it’s something more serious? she wonders as she pulls the power cord out of the laptop case.

  What if the hard drive or the motherboard or whatever you call it crashed, and all the files have been lost?

  Then she’ll never know the truth.

  Please, please, please . . .

  Calla inserts the power cord into the laptop, then drops to her hands and knees with the plug, looking for an outlet.

  There’s one— and, how convenient, there’s the phone jack, right next to it.

  All she has to do is—

  A deafening crash of thunder . . . and the room is plunged into blackness.

  Almost immediately a siren kicks in somewhere outside, an eerie wail in the night.

  Whoa.

  She hears her grandmother calling her from downstairs. “Calla?”

  “Up here, Gammy.”

  “That must have struck a transformer. Looks like the whole town is dark. Don’t move. I’m coming up to find the—oof.”

  Hearing a thud, Calla cries out, “Gammy?”

  “I’m okay. I just walked into something.”

  “Be careful! Do you want me to come down?”

  “No, I’m coming up. Just stay where you—oof.”

  “Gammy!”

  “I’m okay, I’m okay.”Odelia mutters a curse under her breath and the steps creak as she painstakingly ascends.

  A few minutes—and oofs and curses— later, she appears in the doorway, accompanied by a blinding beam.

  “What is that, a searchlight?”Calla shields her eyes with her forearm.

  “It’s a miner’s hat. I used to live in coal mine country, remember?”

  “West Virginia?”

  “Pennsylvania.”

  “I didn’t know that. Don’t you have a regular flashlight?”

  “This is better. It leaves the hands free.”

  Yeah, for coal mining.

  “I have one for you, too,”Odelia says, and the blinding light comes closer. “Put it on and we’ll go downstairs and eat all the ice cream in the freezer.”

  “What? Why?”

  “So that it won’t melt and go to waste. Here you go.”

  Calla obediently puts on the miner’s hat her grandmother hands her, asking, “How long do you think it’ll be before the power comes back on?”

  “Oh, you never know . Sometimes just a few minutes. Once in a while, though, we’re out for a few days.”

  “A few days?!”

  “Hopefully it won’t be that long.”

  Hopefully not.

  But you’re probably not going to get into the laptop tonight, Calla tells herself, following her grandmother down to the kitchen.

  As she scoops Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch into a bowl in the beam of her miner’s flashlight, she can’t help but wonder if she isn’t just a little bit grateful, deep down inside, to put off delving into her mother’s secrets once more.

  SIX

  New York City

  Tuesday, October 9

  3:17 a.m.

  The dream begins the same as it always has.

  She’s walking along a grassy shore beside lapping blue water. It’s not a big lake; she can see the opposite shore not far in the distance, rimmed by rolling hills. The sky is blue and the sun is shining.

  There are lots of tall trees to cast dappled shade around her as she walks.

  Nearby, she can see clusters of cottages. Victorian- style, with shutters and fish-scale shingles; cupolas or mansard roofs; porches with gingerbread trim.

  There are flowers everywhere. The air is heavy with their perfume; they bloom in crowded garden beds, spill from window boxes and hanging pots.

  They’re even here, beneath her feet, growing in a clump on the grassy shore.

  These flowers have short, slender, sturdy stems fringed with tiny bell- shaped white blossoms.

  Lilies of the valley.

  She found a photo in a horticulture book months ago, when the dream first began to haunt her.

  As she bends to pick one of the fragile blooms, the sun slips behind a cloud. Thunder rumbles in the distance as she
raises the flower to inhale its fragrance, and all at once, she can hear voices. Female voices.

  She can’t see them, and she can’t hear most of what they’re saying, but what she does hear is disturbing:

  “. . . because I promised I’d never tell . . .”

  “. . . for your own good . . . don’t know how you can live with yourself . . .”

  “The only way we’ll learn the truth is to dredge the lake.”

  She gazes out over the lake to see that the water has turned black, churning ominously beneath a stormy sky.

  Now the women are crying, eerie wails that echo until the storm blows in to drown them out.

  Who are they?

  Where are they?

  Why are they arguing? Why are they crying?

  And why, Laura wonders, every time she wakes from the dream, chilled to the bone, do I keep having the same strange dream, over and over?

  SEVEN

  Lily Dale

  Tuesday, October 9

  7:50 a.m.

  “Morning, Calla!”

  Startled to hear a voice as she slips out her grandmother’s front door with her backpack, Calla spins around to see her father over on Ramona’s porch.

  “Dad!”

  “That was some storm last night, huh?”

  She nods. “When did the power come back on?”

  “Around midnight.”

  “Oh.”By that time, she had eaten herself into Coffee Heath Bar Crunch–induced oblivion, too zonked out to even dream.

  Seeing movement out of the corner of her eye, she turns and spots a translucent little boy perched in a tree beside Ramona’s porch. He’s wearing a 1930s-style newsboy hat and knickers, and she’s pretty sure she’s seen him hanging around before.

  “Are you wearing that to school?”

  She looks down at her jeans, long sleeved T-shirt, and sneakers. “Um . . . yes?”

  “Really.”

  “It’s a public school, Dad,”she reminds him. As opposed to a private school: at Shoreside Day back in Florida, she had to wear a preppy uniform every day.

  “So everyone dresses down for school? Is that it?”

  “Pretty much. Why?”

  The little boy in the tree crosses his eyes at her and giggles.

  “I just want to make sure that with your mother gone you’re not . . . you know . . .”

  “Letting my fashion sense go down the tubes?”she asks her father dryly. “That would be tragic.”