by E. E. Holmes
He stood up, pacing the length of the table. “No matter how many times we discuss it, no matter how many times I implore her that there is ample time to get you girls properly settled, she insists on meddling in this matchmaking foolishness. You’re barely twenty-one, for heaven’s sake! What is the rush?”
“Apparently, in Mum’s eyes, we shrivel into unloveable spinsters by the time we’re twenty-five,” Lizzy grumbled, stabbing at a piece of cold carrot with her fork and then mashing it into a pulp.
“It was the same when you were accepted to Harvard!” Dad went on, ignoring the comment. “I told her it was the best place for you, insisted you could get no finer education anywhere, but she had her heart set on that infernal boarding school of hers. Half your classmates came out of that place with one foot down the aisle! I attended more weddings last summer than I’ve attended in my entire adult life!”
I winced as I thought of the closet full of bridesmaid dresses I’d already racked up, each one of them another brightly colored stripe in the rainbow of my mother’s shame that it was not yet us sauntering down the aisle in white.
“I realize things are… different, where your mother grew up, but I will not have her stifling your opportunity for a good education with this marriage foolishness. There will be a time and place for all of that, but you shouldn’t be dodging boys like landmines while you’re trying to focus on your studies. Speaking of which,” he looked down at us, suddenly stern, “how are your classes going?”
“They’re going great,” I said at once. “We’re working hard, Dad, I promise.”
He turned to Lizzy, who smiled ingratiatingly. “Very stimulating.”
“Excellent. I’ll not have either of you slacking off so that you can flounce around with boys. Put it out of your mind, now. I will speak to your mother.”
He kissed us both on the head, picked up his briefcase and hat, and left the room. I followed Lizzy to the kitchen, where she made each of us a bowl of Lucky Charms, which she called her “specialty,” and which she had convinced Mrs. Bryant to keep hidden for her behind the saucepans. We carried our bowls quietly upstairs and shut ourselves in Lizzy’s room just as the shouting began from the direction of our parents’ rooms.
“She’s going to be furious that we told him,” I said between mouthfuls of stale marshmallows.
“Good. If she’s not speaking to us, she can’t set us up on anymore surprise dates,” Lizzy said.
“She set the last two up without talking to us,” I pointed out.
“But she won’t. Not after this row with Dad. At least, she’ll have to be much more discreet about it.”
“Of course, this just opens the door for Dad to start throwing boys from church across our path,” I pointed out. Our father’s commitment to our education was rivaled only by his commitment to religion. We’d been dragged to services every Sunday since we were born and going away to college had not loosened that stricture. You’d think, given the patriarchal roots of religion, our father would have welcomed the idea of marrying his daughters off to good Christian boys before educational institutions could start filling our heads with dangerous ideas, but our father was one of those rare men of his generation who saw the benefit of both religion and strenuous education.
“God gave us free will and the capacity for knowledge. What kind of servants would we be if we wasted those gifts?” he was fond of saying. “Faith cannot exist in a vacuum. Only true faith can stand tall in the face of questions. Challenge it. Challenge it every day and watch how it sustains you.” Lizzy and I both knew that speech by heart now.
“Yeah, but at least he probably won’t start doing it until graduation,” Lizzy pointed out. “And in the meantime, we just need to—”
Lizzy stopped speaking. She was staring across the room at the bow window on which she had not yet pulled down the blinds.
There hovered Janine Saunders, staring in at us with wide, haunted eyes, her mouth open in a silent, perpetual scream.
“Christ, she followed us home,” Lizzy whispered. “What are we supposed to do? It’s not the full moon for another two weeks. I don’t think she’s going to wait for another lunar Crossing.”
“She might back off if we name her,” I suggested tentatively.
Naming was a technique taught at Fairhaven. Using a spirit’s name often gave the Durupinen a kind of power over them. Well, power was perhaps too strong a word. But there was something about using a spirit’s living name that connected them to their humanity. It often helped to ground them, to make them easier to communicate with. It was also a good reminder for Durupinen as well—sometimes, spirits could feel like “others,” when in reality, they were people. Just people, in their purest form.
Lizzy looked sharply at me. “We’d have to leave the Wards and expose ourselves to her to do that. That leaves me too vulnerable. We can’t risk it, not with Dad home.”
“Why don’t I do it myself?” I suggested.
“Alone? No way,” Lizzy said, crossing her arms and looking truculent.
“Come on, Lizzy, it’s the only way. She’s going to keep accosting us like this until we find out what she wants, and we can’t do it if you’re going to go to pieces every time she approaches. She needs to know that we understand, that she doesn’t need to project so much emotion just to be heard. If she realizes we know what happened to her, she won’t shove it down our throats every time she sees us.”
Lizzy still looked skeptical. “You have to take Liam with you,” she said. “And use the pool house, so no one spots you.”
“Good idea,” I said, draining the milk from my bowl and shrugging into my bathrobe. “I’ll be right back.”
It was only nine o’clock, but the house was quiet. Liam’s room was on the first floor near the back staircase, and I knew he would still be awake. I knocked softly on the door and listened to the hurried shuffle of his footsteps on the other side. He pulled the door ajar, squinting at me.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Yes, but I need your help,” I told him, and quickly explained the situation. He listened intently, nodding his head, then grabbed his Casting bag and pulled on his boots. Without another word, he followed me outside.
Liam had proven, after a bit of a rocky start, to be a competent Caomhnóir. Though Lizzy didn’t like to admit it, he’d grown up considerably since those first few months when they’d clashed so openly in the central courtyard. I’d always thought that Carrick, the new High Priestess’s Caomhnóir, had more than a little to do with it. It was clear he took great interest in Liam, though I didn’t really know why—perhaps he saw him as a sort of protégé. In any case, he had taken him under his wing and our training had progressed smoothly from then on out. Lizzy really didn’t give Liam enough credit. He had never failed us since, and I trusted him implicitly. I couldn’t call him a friend—but then, what Durupinen could call her Guardian her friend, really? The system didn’t allow for such intimacy.
We crept out into the back yard, taking the path around the left side of the house, as far from my parents’ bedroom as possible, Liam taking care to disable the automatic security lights so that they wouldn’t give us away. Our footsteps fell muffled on the carpet of leaves that October had strewn over the yard, and a fine mist fell over us, so that we glistened with a million tiny beads of it by the time we reached the pool house and slipped inside.
Janine was nearby—I knew it as soon as we shut the door. She had probably followed our progress from the house, drawn like a moth to the light of the Gateway.
“Stand right where you are, please,” Liam whispered the second we shut the door, and wasted no time in Casting a protective Summoning Circle around me, reinforcing it with rose quartz and salt and a number of runes scrawled swiftly in chalk. The pool house had been left intentionally Unwarded, the only space on our property to be left so, with the exception of a small dressing room of our mother’s chambers. It was important, Mother said, to protect the house from being
overrun, and yet allow ourselves spaces from which we could conduct Durupinen business and interact with spirits when we chose. My father, who detested swimming, never set foot in the pool house, and of course, my mother’s perfume-drenched inner sanctum of eye creams and pantyhose inspired a similar aversion.
I felt my breathing ease as the protection of the Circle rose up around me, and so it was with only a mild burst of anxiety that I watched Janine Saunders materialize before me outside the boundary of the Circle.
“Hello, Janine,” I said quietly.
As I had predicted, the initial, violent burst of her emotions faded at the sound of her own name. Her face went curiously rigid, her expression blank. She actually retreated a few inches, looking warily at me.
“What did you say?” she whispered.
“I said your name. You are Janine. Janine Saunders. Do you remember?” I asked.
“I…” I watched as she searched inside, digging through the horror of her trauma for this tiny shred of herself. I saw the light kindle in the deep wells of her eyes as she found it. That, right there, was the magic of naming. “Yes. Yes, I remember. That is my… my name.”
“You haven’t thought about it in a long time, have you?” I asked.
The specter shook her head, dark hair swinging. “No.”
“I know that it seems like no one can see or hear you, but I can, so please don’t project your emotions at me, okay?”
“Project my… what?” she asked dazedly.
“Your emotions. You may not realize it, but you’ve been accosting people with them, shouting with your experiences because no one can hear your voice. But I can hear you. Okay?”
The girl blinked again. “I… okay.” I was reminded that she had been almost exactly the same age as I was now when she died, and it sent a shiver up my spine.
“Do you know what I am? Do you know why you’re drawn to me?” I asked.
The girl nodded. “I can feel it. I’m supposed to… to go.”
“That’s right,” I said trying to inject some encouragement into my tone. Behind me, I felt the tautness of Liam’s presence, his second-by-second reading of the exchange, poised to react at the slightest sign of animosity. “But I’m not going to make you go, okay? It’s your choice.”
“None of this was my choice,” she said with a wail, her eyes darkening again.
I put both my hands up in front of me, in a gesture of surrender. “You’re right. Please forgive my insensitivity. You’re absolutely right. You did not have a choice, and that is terrible. I’m speaking only of what happens next, and it is your choice and yours alone. I promise you this, Janine.”
The girl’s face twisted for a moment, but then she gave a curt nod.
“I want to help you,” I went on.
“No one… no one can help me. I scream and scream. No one comes. No one,” she said, her voice breaking.
“That was a long time ago,” I said gently. “Do you realize that? That was many, many years ago, the screaming.”
She stopped, and again, I watched as she dug in her memory for some hold on time and place. When she raised her eyes again to mine, she looked devastated. “Oh.”
“Yes,” I said, keeping my voice gentle, a lullaby. “And you’ve been screaming since. But I’m here now. I want to help you. Tell me what you need.”
“I don’t know,” the girl gasped. “I… I don’t know.”
“Do you know who did this to you?” I asked.
She did not have to stop and think this time. After all, this was the moment in which she had been existing for years. She shook her head. “No. A stranger. A man.”
“They found him,” I told her. “The police. They found him and arrested him.”
Her eyes went, if possible, still wider. “They… they did?”
“Yes. He tried to attack another girl, but she got away, and the police caught him. He confessed to your attack, to try to lessen his sentence. He’s in prison. He’s been given a life sentence, with no possibility of parole. He will be there until he dies. I’ve been researching it ever since you first appeared to us. We found all of the records from the newspapers.”
The darkness of her eyes threatened to swallow me. “What is his name?”
Why did I have trouble saying the name? It was as though my mouth did not want to let go of it for some reason, perhaps because I knew the power of naming. “Donald Malone.”
“Where is he?” the girl whispered.
“Souza-Baranowski Correctional Center. It’s a maximum-security prison. He’s not getting out, Janine. He can’t hurt you or anyone else ever again.”
The girl smiled, a smile that did not reach her eyes. Then she was gone.
I released a breath I did not realize I had been holding and turned to Liam. He looked exceedingly troubled.
“I shouldn’t have told her, should I?” I asked him, my heart still thundering in my ears.
“I’m not sure. No. No, perhaps not,” he replied, and I read in his face the same fear that had lodged deeply in my chest.
§
For the next two weeks, our lives settled into a kind of normalcy that it would have been all too easy to get used to and was therefore much too good to last. Mum, chastened by her argument with Dad, had stopped hurling eligible boys across our path—or at least, she seemed to, as they stopped appearing out of the blue. I wasn’t foolish enough to think she’d truly stopped trying to engineer our matrimonial prospects, but at the very least, she seemed to be regrouping, coming up with a new strategy, which meant that Lizzy and I could breathe again, if only for the moment. And, thanks to Trina’s convenient lack of scruples, we soon had in our possession a list of the boys whose names had surfaced as a result of the initial scouting request, which meant we were forewarned if any other suitors decided to try their luck.
Not only had the string of boys left us alone, but Janine Saunders had as well. From the moment she vanished from the pool house, we hadn’t seen a single glimpse of her, not a whiff of an errant emotion that didn’t belong to us. And though it was in many ways a relief not to have her floating around like a gruesome shadow, I was still uneasy. It felt ominous that a spirit so persistent should disappear so completely. Still, I managed to mostly push it from my mind, throwing myself into classes with reckless academic abandon, and was finally starting to feel like I might just belong at Harvard when my nebulous fears about Janine materialized at last.
Lizzy burst through the door of our dorm room and, without so much as a greeting, flung a slightly damp newspaper onto our bed.
“Have you seen this?”
“Seen what?” I asked, picking up the paper. She didn’t need to reply. The answer was splashed across the front page of the paper:
NOTORIOUS CAMBRIDGE COLLEGE STALKER FOUND DEAD IN PRISON CELL
I felt the bile rise in my throat. I looked up at Lizzy, whose expression was twisted with disgust. “Lizzy…”
“I know.”
The article went on for pages, but I was only able to absorb a few scattered details. “Donald Malone… reports of screams in the night… moved to psychiatric watch… apparent suicide… troubling security footage shows him carrying on conversations in his empty cell… unexplained marks on his body…”
“Oh, no,” I finally managed.
“I guess we know where Janine has been the last couple of weeks,” Lizzy muttered.
“What do you think we should… should we do something?” I whispered.
Lizzy raised her eyebrows. “Like what?”
“I don’t know… like, tell someone that…”
“Tell them what? That a ghost was responsible for this? How would we even begin to substantiate that without dynamiting the entire Code of Secrecy? We’d be up in front of the Council before we could even blink.”
“So, then what do we do?”
“We don’t do anything. Janine’s done enough.”
“But… can we really just… it’s our fault, isn’t it? Well, my faul
t! I’m the one who told her where he was!”
Lizzy grabbed me by the shoulders as my voice rose in a hysterical sob. “This part is not our job. We’re not here to decide what’s right and what’s wrong, okay? Life and death are too messy, too complicated. Somewhere beyond the Aether that will all get sorted out. You are guilty of nothing but trying to help a spirit get past her pain. That is it. The rest was her choice, and I’m not even sure it was the wrong one.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning Donald Malone was damn lucky I wasn’t a ghost who could get to him.”
I stared at my sister, and she stared calmly back at me until I felt my breathing return to normal. Finally, I nodded. We didn’t fully understand what happened in the Aether or beyond it—only those who had been there could fully comprehend what was to come. But in my heart, I thought there must be some sort of accounting—some sort of reckoning, not exactly of the sort my Dad believed in, but still—some sort of karma that balanced things. Lizzy nodded as she saw me come to my senses.
“We Cross them, Karen. That’s it. We don’t judge them. Let the universe sort it out.”
“Right. Okay.”
“We’ll open up our lunar Crossing tonight when we get home, and with any luck, Janine will feel the pull and find her way back to us. Now that I’ve seen this,” she tapped on the newspaper, “I have a feeling her unfinished business is officially finished.”
“Unfinished business” was one of those terms that Durupinen didn’t often use. It sprang up from mainstream culture, a way to rationalize the existence of ghosts among us and, sometimes, to encourage the mind to believe in the presence of a spirit who had departed for the Aether the moment it had parted ways with its body. The truth was, that there were as many reasons for a spirit to stay behind as there were spirits lingering, and even those who Crossed at once rarely did so with the sense of having done and said everything they hoped to in their time on earth. More often, it was confusion or attachment to someone in the living world that left a spirit in need of a Gateway. In some cases, though, a spirit’s reason for staying behind was singular, powerful, and destructive. Janine, it was clear now, was one such spirit. My pity for her was twisted up with a kind of fear now, and it was with definite relief that I considered the prospect of Crossing her safely out of our world and into the Aether where she belonged.