The Things She's Seen

by Ambelin Kwaymullina

  I try to track where we’re going.

  I can’t.

  Everything joins together in grayness. It’s all tunnels. Until it’s not.

  I’m in a room. A big room? A small one?

  I don’t know. Sleep is dragging at me.

  The world is fading.

  The Fetcher dumps me onto the floor.

  Not the floor. A bed.

  My head hits a pillow.

  He leaves.

  I fight to stay awake.

  I lose.

  Catching stopped speaking. Just stopped, and turned away from us to stare out the window at the long shadows of the late afternoon.

  Monsters and other-places. Other dimensions. It was all so unbelievable, and yet what she’d said felt true. And after all, I was living proof that there was more to the world than what most people saw. Okay…not living proof. But proof just the same.

  Only we still didn’t know how Catching had ended up back in this dimension on the night of the fire.

  “You can’t stop there!” I blurted out. “How did you escape?”

  Of course my words had no effect on her. I looked at Dad. “Ask her what happened next!”

  But all my father said to Catching was: “Talked enough for today, huh? That’s all right. I’ll come again another time.”

  What was he doing? We hadn’t even got to the fire, which was why he’d come here in the first place! But then Catching turned toward us, and I saw that her eyes were sunken and her cheeks hollow. Shame prickled over my skin. I should have noticed that it was hurting her to tell the story. Dad clearly had.

  He rose and offered her a smile. “Is there someone you want me to contact for you? A relative, perhaps?”

  “Worried I’m all alone?” Her lips twisted into a snarl that said back off as clearly as if she’d shouted it. “Don’t be. I got somebody.”

  I could see Dad would’ve liked to ask who but wasn’t going to push her. I trailed behind him as he strode to the door, pausing when I reached it to glance back at Catching. I wanted to make sure she was okay.

  She was looking right at me.

  No, she wasn’t. She was looking through me at my father. I suppressed an urge to wave at her and turned my back, ducking through the door as it started to swing shut.

  I never walked through doors or walls around Dad. It was just another reminder for him that I was dead. Besides, I needed to hold on to what it had been like to be alive. I was worried that if I lost my sense of the world being solid, I’d start drifting through everything like…um, a ghost.

  There were fewer patients in the waiting area now, and the only nurse at the station was the blond woman we’d talked to before. She sat up straight as Dad approached and spoke in a tone bright with curiosity: “You were in there awhile! Was she helpful? Her memory of that night is a bit spotty.”

  The remaining patients shifted a little toward us, straining to hear Dad’s response.

  The corner of Dad’s mouth turned up. He knew they were all hoping for a bit of news to share with their families about the big fire. He wasn’t going to give it to them, of course. He was too good a police officer for that. Instead, he said, “Seems like she could use some family support. Has anyone been in to see her?”

  The nurse shook her head. “Child services has only just managed to locate her mother. The girl’s a runaway from a rehab clinic in the city. Her mum should be here in about a week to take her back.”

  That was impossible, and I half expected Dad to say as much. But he just thanked her and strolled toward the front door, leaving the nurse and patients to stare after him in disappointment.

  “Why are you leaving?” I demanded. “They can’t be taking proper care of Catching if they don’t even realize her mum’s dead!”

  Dad didn’t respond until he was standing in the empty car park. Then he said, “Catching’s mum isn’t dead.”

  “She drowned in the river!”

  “I don’t think so, Beth.”

  I stared at him in confusion. How could he have heard what I’d heard and yet not felt the realness of it? “Catching wasn’t lying. I know she wasn’t.”

  “I don’t think she was lying, precisely. Just telling the truth in a different way.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Well…take the shimmer beasts. If you look at the horizon when it’s hot, it can shimmer. She was wandering around for a day before she was found, probably thirsty and disorientated. So the shimmering horizon becomes a horde of shimmer beasts chasing after her.”

  I frowned. “Okay, but you really think she imagined her mum dying?”

  “If her mum was the one who put her into the rehab clinic, Catching could’ve felt abandoned, turned those feelings into a story about death. And there was a big storm a few months back. It was on the news, remember? It caused all that property damage. Except no one was killed in it.”

  He was starting to make sense. But I wasn’t giving up yet. “What about the other-place? And the Fetchers?”

  “When your life gets upended—like when you’re admitted to rehab, say—it can feel like you’ve been thrown into a strange place. And she would have been given medicine by the people who worked at the clinic.”

  “But the medicine hurt!”

  “Coming off drugs does hurt, Beth.”

  Oh. Catching had taken a bunch of events and woven them into a story, and, like Dad had said, it wasn’t exactly a lie.

  But nor was it exactly true. And I felt really stupid for having believed that it was.

  Dad reached for his phone, staring down at the screen. “Message,” he muttered, pushing a button and holding the phone to his ear. After a few moments, he let out an exasperated sigh.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Bank accounts,” he answered as he shoved the phone back into his pocket. “Tom Cavanagh’s and Martin Flint’s. We’ve been checking on their credit card activity and withdrawals, hoping to trace Cavanagh’s movements. Or even Flint’s, if by some small chance it turns out he didn’t die in the fire. And they both seem to have more money than they should.”

  I didn’t see why that was a problem. “So?”

  “So they could have been embezzling from the home. Which explains why Cavanagh ran.” He gave a frustrated shake of his head. “It’s just as I thought from the start—this is a waste of my time. Faulty wiring starts the fire, which gets out of control fast, the way fires do. Cavanagh realizes there’ll be an investigation and takes off. Flint is overcome by smoke. And a mixed-up teenage runaway from the city is found while people are searching for the director.”

  He yanked his keys from his pocket and headed for the car.

  “Where are you going now?” I demanded.

  “Hotel.”

  Where he’d probably sink into sadness now that he didn’t have the case to think about.

  “Why don’t you get some food?” I asked. “There was that café on the main street. It might still be open.”

  “Not hungry.”

  He hadn’t eaten since this morning, and my Uncle Kelvin wasn’t around to turn up at the door with one of his delicious stews and all of his best jokes. Uncle Kel hadn’t managed to get Dad to laugh yet, but he always got him to eat. Here, though, there was nobody to take care of Dad but me.

  “Have a sandwich or something,” I pleaded.

  He didn’t even bother to respond, just kept trudging wearily toward the car. In desperation, I called after him, “Talk to me, Dad! I’m right here.”

  He paused, with his hand on the door, and spoke without looking at me. “No, Beth. You’re not.”

  Then he got into the sedan and drove away.

  “I am!” I yelled. “I’m always here!”

  But my voice was swallowed by the sound of t
he engine as my father zoomed off into the distance. I was alone. Well, more alone, actually, since I’d already been feeling that way before he left. It didn’t seem right that I could sometimes feel so isolated around my father and yet always so much a part of everything around the rest of the family, when he was the one who could see me.

  Nothing ever went how it was supposed to. Like this case, which I’d really thought might change things for Dad. Now everything was ruined.

  Catching shouldn’t have lied to us.

  It was dumb to be mad at her. But I was. I was mad that she’d fooled me with her story. And I was mad that she hadn’t given Dad hope that there was more to this case. As long as she was inventing things, she could’ve invented something about the fire that would’ve made him think there was a real mystery to solve. That was illogical, and I knew it, but I didn’t care.

  I stalked back into the hospital, so angry that I didn’t think twice about charging through walls and doors to get to Catching. I stormed up to the end of her bed and opened my mouth to yell at her.

  She looked right at me. “Took you long enough.”

  I choked on my words, producing meaningless spluttering sounds, until I finally managed to put together a sentence. “You can see me?”

  She rolled her eyes.

  “How can you see me? No one else can except Dad!”

  Catching yawned, as if talking to ghosts was no big deal. “My mum could see people who’d passed over.”

  Which meant Catching could too. Because all the strengths of the Catching women flow down the family line and into her.

  I couldn’t believe it. Someone besides my father could see me. Was talking to me. This was so enormous that I didn’t know what to say.

  Catching didn’t have that problem. “Did your dad kill you?”

  I gaped at her. “Wh— Of course not! That’s a horrible thing to say.”

  “Why’re you haunting him, then?”

  “I’m not. I’m looking after him.”

  “So who killed you?”

  I shrugged. “Some guy who lost control of his car in the rain. I died in a stupid accident.”

  She frowned. “But you’re stuck.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You’re still here, aren’t you? Like you’ve got unfinished business. If you weren’t murdered, why are you so crap at being dead?”

  “I am not! Besides, there’s no good way to be dead.”

  “Yeah, there is. It’s called moving on. To what’s next.”

  “Um, maybe this is my ‘what’s next.’ ”

  “Can’t be, because it’s your what was. You never got a call to go somewhere else?”

  “No, I…” But I couldn’t finish that sentence. Because there had been something, right after I’d died. A glimpse of something that dazzled and danced—like light, refracting through crystal. I’d been going to those colors until I’d heard my dad crying for me.

  Catching was watching my face. “Let me guess. You were going somewhere else. Then you decided it was a better idea to trail around after that sad old man.”

  I glared at her. “He’s not a sad old man!”

  “He looked pretty miserable to me.”

  “Well, I mean obviously he’s a bit sad, after everything.”

  Catching opened her eyes wide and spoke in a sugary tone: “Did something terrible happen to him?” Then her eyes narrowed and the sweetness vanished from her voice. “No, wait—something terrible happened to you. You’re the one who died.”

  “It happened to him too!” I didn’t like what she was saying. I especially didn’t like that a tiny part of me thought she might have a point.

  My anger bubbled back up, setting me on fire with a strange fizzing heat that seemed to pop and ripple along my skin.

  “You don’t know anything about him. But I know about you, Isobel Catching. You were never in an other-place, and your mum’s not even dead either. She just threw you into rehab.”

  The heat leaped into my throat to crackle out of my mouth.

  “So you’d better just take care of your own life and leave me and my dad alone!”

  The light in the ceiling exploded.

  I yelped in surprise. Catching dived under the bed, sheltering there until the sparks had faded and the glass had stopped falling.

  “Are you okay?” I asked as she came back out.

  “Yeah.” She shook out the blanket, sending a few tiny slivers skittering along the floor, and climbed onto the mattress. “No thanks to you.”

  “I did that?”

  But I knew I had. I’d felt the energy surge out of my body and into the room. I just didn’t quite believe it.

  “Do you know how I did that?”

  “Spirits can do things like that sometimes, when they’re really mad. Or happy or sad, or whatever. So my mum said.”

  I gazed up at the remains of the light in astonishment. I’d never blown anything up before. On the other hand, I’d never been that angry before—or at least not since right after I’d died.

  Except now my anger was gone, emptied out of me and into the light. And without the rage to cloud my thinking, I realized something.

  Catching believed my father was bad for me. First because she’d thought he’d hurt me, and then because she’d decided he was the reason I hadn’t moved on to “what’s next.” She was trying to help. She just had her own unique way of going about it.

  “Sorry,” I said. “For yelling and everything.”

  She shrugged as if she didn’t care whether I was sorry or not, but I could tell she was pleased. “What’s your name, ghost girl?”

  “Beth. Beth Teller.”

  An almost-smile pulled at the corner of her mouth. “Guess you have a strange name too. White boss give it to your family?”

  I shook my head. “It’s not Mum’s name; it’s Dad’s. I don’t think it means anything, except…I guess Dad is kind of a teller. Someone who tells what’s right from what’s wrong, that is.”

  Or at least he had been. Before I’d died, Dad had always been the one I’d gone to when I didn’t know what to do about something. Only now it was him who couldn’t see what was right. Like calling Aunty Viv. I guessed that made me the teller now.

  But he wasn’t listening to me.

  My gaze slid back up to what was left of the light. “Catching? Did your mum ever say if someone who was, um, stuck like me could touch people? Like, hug them, or…or hold their hand?”

  She snorted. “That’s your plan now? Hang about and hold your dad’s hand for the rest of his life?”

  “No. Not exactly.” Even I could hear the lie in my voice.

  She pointed to the door. “Get out of here, Teller. Come back if you ever want help doing what you’re supposed to be doing and move on.”

  “Catching—”

  “Go!” she shouted.

  I faded out of the hospital before she got any madder. I’d have to wait until she calmed down before I saw her again. Except I didn’t want her help to move on. The help I needed was to stay.

  I turned my steps in the direction of the hotel Dad had checked into that morning. I didn’t actually need to walk to the place, because if I focused on Dad, I’d arrive at wherever he was. But I knew if I took long enough getting there, he’d be asleep, and that was a good thing. It meant I wouldn’t have to watch him crying. So I made a meandering journey through the town, wandering past a post office, a set of shops, and a school. I didn’t see many people, and once it got properly dark, there were none. Just me and the stars and a few crows calling out in the night.

  The hotel was called Lakeview, because the upstairs rooms in the old weatherboard part of the building had a view of a lake to the back. Dad’s room was in the newer brick extension and had a view of the road.

 
I phased into the room, relieved to find him sprawled across the bed and snoring. He’d left the lamp on. The soft glow shone across features that were slack and sunken, as if he was caving in on himself.

  He didn’t look like my dad. He didn’t look like he was together enough to be anyone’s dad.

  Catching’s unwelcome voice echoed in my memory: That’s your plan now? Hang about and hold your dad’s hand for the rest of his life?

  For a treacherous moment, I found myself wondering if there was something better for me than this grinding struggle to get my father back to himself. But I stomped on that thought, jamming it down into the depths of my being, where it belonged. He needed me. And I had a new way to help him. If I could figure out how to touch the world again, it’d change everything for Dad; I just knew it. Maybe I’d be able to reach the rest of the family too. I could just see their smiling faces…

  Only I couldn’t. All I could really see was Aunty June’s frizzy eyebrows drawn together in a frown and her black curls bouncing as she shook her head at me.

  Aunty June had always called me her butterfly girl, because I lived in the now, leaving behind the things that weighed me down the way butterflies left their caterpillar selves. Aunty had said I was always who I was today and never who I’d been yesterday, and that my mum had been the same. I liked that; it had made me feel closer to the mother I couldn’t remember.

  Except I didn’t feel like a butterfly girl anymore. I was heavy with the weight of lifting up my father, and I knew Aunty wouldn’t want that for me. I didn’t feel like a teller either. I couldn’t tell what the right thing was to do, or at least not the right thing for myself.

  And in the silence of this drab hotel room, the future, where I could make things right again for my caved-in father, seemed a long way away.

  I huddled down by the bed, wrapping my arms around my legs, and I did the thing I never did when Dad was awake to see it.

  I cried.

  Daylight shone through the gap in the curtains. I hadn’t slept, because I didn’t anymore. But in between when I’d stopped crying and now, I’d made a plan.

  When Dad woke up, I was going to tell him Catching could see me. That would get him interested in Catching again, which would get him interested in the case again. And her story might have more truth to it than Dad thought. Her gaze was so deep, like there was no end to the things she’d seen. She didn’t seem like someone who’d run away from a rehab facility and lost her way among trees and rocks. She seemed like someone whose mum had died and who’d been hunted by shimmer beasts and kidnapped by Fetchers. If anything that terrible, or even close to that terrible, had happened, then I was sure Dad could help her, and helping her would help him too.