“Zebenfaiger,” I said, though I doubted she heard me over the protests of the girls who had been getting ready to walk down the candy aisle. I gritted my teeth. “How are you?”
“Oh honey, I’m sure you don’t recognize me at all, do you?”
My head was hazy, and I tried to bring back the memory. From school? No, she was too old. Where had I seen her? I took in her pumpkin-orange scrub uniform and it hit me. “At Cecelia’s get together.”
“Yes! I had on makeup and real clothes that night. This is the everyday me.” She pulled the little boy’s finger out of his nose, then held her hand out to shake mine. “I’m Mary-Beth.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Sorry, I’ve met so many people this week,” I said, only lying a bit. “How’re you?”
“Great, great.” She turned her head, distracted by something one of her daughters muttered. “Yes, I know I promised. One piece each.” She sighed and looked at me with a look, probably supposed to be an adult conspiratorial look — kids. “I have to run. But please, Meg, give Cecelia my love.”
“You’ll see her before I do,” I said, glad she was pushing her cart back in the opposite direction. She stopped and looked at me.
“I wish I could, but with the kids,” she waves at the three of them, “I can’t afford to catch whatever it is she has.”
“Has?”
“She’s been out of work for days. Sick as a dog poor thing.”
“I didn’t know.” Mystery solved. She hadn’t picked the pissy side with Jordan, she was sick. I felt bad for all the things I had thought about her in the past few days, even though she didn’t know. “Do you know her address?”
“You don’t know where your cousin lives?” she asked, not bothering to hide her shock.
I smiled sheepishly and accepted the tampon wrapper she wrote Cecelia’s address on a minute later. After promising to give Cecelia her love, I bought my groceries and left.
I pulled into the little trailer park, surprised to see how cute, or Cecelia-like, the area looked. Almost like a village. I didn’t remember this place, meaning it was brand new, or cleaned up so well it no longer looked like itself.
Cecelia’s tan trailer was easy enough to find, number forty-two was one of the few without toys and bikes laying in a small patch of grass. What it lacked in Fisher Price, it made up for in potted plants. They lay all over her questionable looking porch. A long vine plant had grown past its own pot, trailing along the handrails and climbing all the way to her front door.
The windows all had half curtains that hung from the midpoint down, pulled snuggly closed. Each window a different flowery design. They had that crooked look of curtains made in home ec, instead of store bought. I couldn’t tell if this added to Cecelia’s charm, or to her annoying bumpkin persona.
Where the doorbell should have been, a hole and spiral wire protruded, like a snake from a basket. I knocked. No response after a few seconds, so I knocked louder.
There was still no answer, and I walked over to the closest window, peering in. I pressed my face against the window and cupped out the glare. I looked into a living room with a brown couch, television, and an ugly crocheted blanket made from little squares and filled with as many colors as imaginable. To the left of the couch a dark hallway led further into the trailer.
My stint as a peeping Tom was stupid if one number was off in this address Mary-Beth gave me. What would happen if the resident in this trailer was crazier than Cecelia and saw me peaking in at them? Most people in Cedar Valley were gunowners, a fact I’d forgotten until Tristan produced one in the middle of the night.
What if she was playing hooky? I didn’t know her well, maybe she was the type to blow off work for a week and go camping with Gary. Cecelia was the only hairdresser at the nursing home, and from how she talked, she loved her job. She wouldn’t leave the old ladies hanging with no one to do their hair and provide a place for gossip.
A clattering came from somewhere inside the house, and a darkness shuffled out from the hallway. Glimpsing a hunched over woman with wavy gray hair, I backed away from the window. I tripped over the piles of plants and caught myself on the railing, before the tiny pots fell off the porch.
Hopping back to the door, I crossed my fingers that the woman hadn’t spotted me. I didn’t want to scare her enough to have a heart attack. Or pull a loaded gun on me. My hands landed on my hips in a what I hoped was a relaxed pose as the door squeaked open.
But it was Cecelia who opened the door. She’d lost weight since I’d last seen her, and dark half-moons sunk into the skin beneath her eyes. She breathed laboriously, like she smoked a pack a day instead of me.
“Meg? What are you doing here?” she asked. I looked behind her. The old woman was gone. Had I mistaken Cecelia for a lady at least twice her age? I’d keep that to myself.
I forced a smile though it didn’t last long before it faltered. What was I doing here? “I ran into Mary-Beth at the market. She said you weren’t feeling well. I wanted to see if there was anything I could do for you.”
Cecelia stared at me with pained depression in her eyes; the most un-Cecelia like I had ever seen her. She sagged against the door frame.
“What’s wrong with you? The flu?”
Cecelia sighed. “Something like that.”
“Can I...” I didn’t want to be there, remembering the last time I had the flu. I ended up in the hospital from dehydration and the bill still loomed over my head to that day. No. Not looming, more of a hanging out on my credit report with a dozen other bills I hadn’t acknowledged in years. If I had been a better person, then it would have loomed over my head.
“Come in.” She stepped back from the door, then slumped over to the couch. She collapsed into it, and dust fairies flew up from the cushions. “I’ve got pop in the fridge. Water’s good out of the tap.”
I edged into the room and leaned against the wall next to the door. Not wanting to step in too far. Not wanting to surround myself with germs. Bugs that were likely crawling off the wall and onto me right at that moment. I pulled my back straight.
I didn’t get like that around sick people, but something about the whole situation screamed death at me. I took a deep breath through my nose to steady myself, but it backfired with the overwhelming stench of antiseptic covering rot. I pulled the front of my t-shirt up over my nose.
“I try not to get sick. Because I don’t have a lot of, um...” I pinched my wrist.
“Meat on your bones,” she supplied.
“Yeah, well anyway. When I get sick, it gets real shitty. So, I avoid it. If I can. You know? Like the...” Plague. Plague. Don’t say plague, that’s rude. “Bubonic...”
“I’m not offended, Megan,” she said, a little of her usual chipper self peeked from behind her lethargic tone. “I’m really not. But it’s sweet you’re thinking about my feelings, doll.”
Was I that transparent? “Can I go get you anything?”
“Gary is bringing groceries after work. How are you? Tristan was asking about you.”
“Tristan?” I turned red and pretended like I was trying to place the name. “Oh, Tristan. From pizza?”
“From dancing.” She smiled, revealing deep set wrinkles by her eyes. Dang, the girl must have normally worn a lot of makeup to hide her age. “More than one kind of dancing.”
“Yeah.” I shook my head. “No. I’m sorry, Cecelia, he seems really—” Dense? Roided out? “—gentle.” Andre the Giant gentle.
“Not what I heard,” she sing-songed.
“I’m leaving in a few days so...” I waved it off. “I don’t need to take any kind of baggage with me, especially not some guy.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, like she already had the answer.
Forgetting about the invisible germs waiting to suck up my soul, I sank to the floor. My shirt fell from my nose. “Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
“Well? Curious minds want to know,” she said, then flew into a coughing fit and he
ld her index finger up for me to wait. I covered my mouth with the extra fabric at the end of my sweatshirt sleeve. Spittle flew through the air, visible through the sunlight cutting through the room.
When she quieted, I spoke. “I figure I’ll just drive till I can’t anymore. Or maybe sell the car, and get a bus ticket.”
“What are you going to do? Just live in the woods wherever your daddy’s car dies?” she demanded, as if she had never paused to cough up her lung. “Eat acorns and twigs?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” I said, muffled by my sleeve. Her and Jordan definitely had a friendship built on thinking they knew better than me. “Besides, I’m not going to live in the fucking woods. I’ll have the money from the auction. That’s all mine. The guy that came out and looked, he said he couldn’t make promises, but...” I hesitated, and didn’t know why. He gave me an estimate that day. Ten thousand dollars. More than enough to start over. I could drive to Angela’s base, find an apartment and land a job. See my real family. Get to know my niece.
“But what?” She leaned over the side of the couch and grabbed a crinkly bag of cough drops from the floor.
“But he said I’d have enough to get out of here with.”
“When’s the auction?” she asked.
“They’re picking everything up tomorrow for Friday night auction.”
She grunted and stared at me. “Tomorrow? Isn’t this all happening crazy fast, Megan? Don’t you wanna stick around a few weeks more, a few months maybe, see if Cedar Valley can be home for you again?”
“It’s not.”
“You haven’t even given it a chance.”
“I gave it a chance and now I have Bobby fucking me over.” I twisted the end of my sleeve in my palm. “Won’t be long before they’re spreading rumors about me to anyone who’ll listen. Telling them how easy I am. He’s done it before. And who knows what else they’ll do.”
“Tristan wouldn’t listen.”
“Look, everything is dumb here. It isn’t working, no matter what I do. Bobby screwed me over again, between telling the cops I tried to kill him, and then writing all over my car. Oh, and writing on the back of Dieter and Sons. I thought I’d fixed things with Jordan, but now it’s all worse than ever. Everything’s messed up. I don’t have anyone—”
“You have me.”
“—or anything. Everywhere I look in my dad’s house, I see all the stuff that happened there. I don’t know which personality Dad showed you, but I can guarantee it was not the one we got as kids. You might think he’s some kind of good guy who loved his wife and his kids, but she ran away because he was beating her. Turns out she wasn’t much better than him, because she left us there. Not caring what happened to us, as long as she was gone. As long as she was safe. And it wasn’t only him out there at the house, making things bad. Not just the real things. Not just human kind of terror and hate.”
“What do you mean?”
I looked at her, not sure if I trusted her. Hell, trust had nothing to do with it. I trusted Jordan, and he never believed me. “Just things. Things that shouldn’t be there. It’s hard to explain, harder to understand.”
“Try me.”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Is it the nightmares?”
“Something like that. And more.” I bent my toes and popped them. I didn’t have the energy to tell her every little thing right now. I’d lay out the highlights. People saw ghosts all the time, right? “Aunt Dee. She’s been showing up at the house.”
“She’s dead, Meg,” she said, calmly. Which was probably the tone she used when she spoke to the ladies in the nursing home, sitting in her chair getting a haircut and color. Talking about how their husbands would like the new style. But he’s been dead twenty years, dear. Remember?
“I know what I saw,” I said. “I’m aware it doesn’t make sense, and it defies all the stuff that gets defied, but she’s there. Out at the house. And she’s following me around in the middle of the night like...”
I trailed off, not sure how to finish that. She followed me around like a creature who belonged and didn’t, all at the same time. Cecelia was the same way. Her blinking beads. Two heads. Peering in a mirror, minus the reflection. I wouldn’t tell her about the woman from the tree.
“So that’s why you want to go?” she asked.
“Yep. Nope. There’s other reasons too. But yeah, I don’t want to get followed around by a decaying ghost.” I picked at a hangnail. “That and...this place ain’t home for me. It hasn’t been in years. Even since before I left, it wasn’t home for me.”
“Have you tried, calling her down?” she asked.
“What?”
“You know. Didn’t your mama — I’m sorry. I feel like we never get to talk about it all. Interruptions popping out every nook and cranny...but we should.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I was thinking, because every time I bring it up, you don’t seem to want to talk about it. Or you look at me like I’m a little kooky. I thought maybe you’re running from it, but maybe you don’t know?”
“Cecelia.”
“Sorry.” She rubbed her forehead. “Didn’t Aunt Dee teach you? I assumed. And you know what they say about assuming? Anyhow, Mama never taught us all of it, not everything she could do. But a little. Wasn’t ‘cause she thought she was better than us or nothing, but she knew we wouldn’t be able to understand it all.”
“Again. What are you talking about?” My patience had all but dissipated.
“You don’t know, do you, sweetie?”
“Cecelia.”
She looked up at me, her eyes sunken in her pale and thinned down face. She took in a deep wheezing breath, then let it out. “We got the magic in us.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
“Fever’s really getting to you, huh?” I asked, looking away from her and at the refrigerator, I might want a soda after all. Alphabet magnets scattered the front holding up take-out menus and pizza coupons.
“It’s no fever. You and I, our mamas, hell even our lunkheaded siblings. We all got the magic in our blood. Been that way for generations, going back as far as we could walk and live here in this land.”
She sounded like a crazy person. “Have you been drinking enough water, Cecelia?”
“You want to pretend like I don’t know what I’m talking about? When you’ve been seeing a dead woman?” She smacked her hand against the sofa and dust particles filled the air. “Ain’t nothing like that possible without magic.”
“Like, we’re magicians? Abracadabra?”
“No. But close.”
“What? Witches?” I snorted.
She shook her head. “I guess, something like that. That’s what people come to think of us now. I mean something else. Our mamas, they had it in their blood. Our bloodline is ancient.”
“Huh.” I dated a guy whose sister was a witch. When I asked him what that meant, he shrugged and said she drank a bunch of herbal tea and burned candles. That was nothing like what I’ve been going through. Hippie witch stuff. I saw downright supernatural monsters and ghosts. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”
“I dropped so many darn hints; I was waiting on you to say something.”
“What hints?”
“Well, they felt like anvils.”
Like a bolt of lightning, all of her little mentions on colors I should wear based on the moon, what herb to harvest on a Tuesday vs a Thursday, and talks about reading the signs made sense. Well, it didn’t make sense, but I knew why she said those things now.
Either that, or she’d been watching too much TV since she’d been sick. Getting real life and magic mixed up.
“I thought maybe your daddy’s blood washed out your own magic. Mama said that happens sometimes. And your mama ran off with your daddy to Oregon, had their first baby out that way. Mama never seen her again. Never did know if her offspring were born like us, or more normal and boring like.” She smiled, and I realized she was m
aking fun of me.
“You almost had me for a minute,” I said, lightheartedly, wanting her to stop. But she kept going.
“Mama said Dee woulda followed your mama to the ends of the earth, but only if those ends were sacred, giving her a place to lie down her roots. She was more like us than say, Donna, but we ain’t made the same as Dee. Because Dee came straight from the dirt. Reborn over and over again.” Cecelia broke into another coughing fit.
Something in Cecelia’s words raised the hairs on my arms. I’d heard them before. How much truth lived in this joke?
“I, um,” I said, pulling myself to my feet. “You need to get some rest.”
“Think about it,” she said, holding her hand up for me to wait. “Just think. Even if you don’t believe in magic, there are plenty of people who do. Religions that do. Even the major ones.”
“What? No, they don’t.” Great, two things that never crossed my mind I now had to find strong opinions on, while Cecelia laid on the couch, sick as hell. Religion and magic. Fairy tales.
She looked at me, pathetic and shivering as she pulled her afghan around her shoulders. “Water into wine?”
“Okay, whatever.”
“Parting the ocean. Walking on water. Angels straight from the sky. Divine intervention. The divine self.” As she spoke she got animated, and the more animated she became, the deeper her wheezing.
“Look, you need sleep.”
“What about seeing Aunt Dee? You don’t think you’re crazy, do you? I sure don’t think you’re crazy. Not entirely anyhow, but, what else could be the reason these things are attracted to you?”
“Nothing is attracted to me. When I see the things I see, no one else does. It’s gotta be in my head. Even water into wine was seen — tasted by everyone. This is me. It’s stress. And it’s heat. And it’s all these fucking memories I keep shoving away. It’s these storms. And not sleeping. And it’s—”
Going Home (Cedar Valley Hauntings Book 1) Page 19