by Foxglove Lee
My ears buzzed. There was white noise all around me, like I was wearing headphones and someone had left the radio between stations. Inside that white noise, I listened for any trace of a word.
Nothing.
Nothing was happening, but everything was weird. I tried to lift my head off the pillow, but I couldn’t. My muscles locked. The air was cool and the fire had died down to embers, but my cheeks bristled. My skin blazed even though my lungs were frozen.
“Who’s there?” I asked.
It was someone. I couldn’t see anything out of place, but I felt someone’s presence in my room.
Or… outside my room?
“Daddy?” I whispered. I didn’t usually call my father daddy, but I felt like a little girl again. I was so scared of monsters in the closet, of invisible phantoms. “Daddy, is that you?”
I heard a creak outside my door, and that made it all too real. My blood ran cold. Somebody was out there.
“Daddy?”
No response. If it was him, he’d have said something. Unless he was sleepwalking. I’d never known my father to sleepwalk, but what if he fell down the stairs? He could really hurt himself.
If there was even the slightest chance my father could be injured, I’d have to be brave and face whatever was out there. Casting off the covers, I threw my legs over the side of the bed and moved quietly across the cold floor. The air chilled my skin even though it was all covered up. The brass doorknob was cold too. I turned it slowly, trying to be as quiet as possible.
I opened the door a crack. When nothing happened, I opened it a little wider.
“Merry Christmas, Sylvie!” Celeste stood on the stairs beaming in her usual red velvet cloak. “It’s officially Christmas morning.”
My fear fell away and turned into tiredness as I looked at my wrist. I wasn’t wearing a watch. “What are you doing here at… what time is it?”
“Three in the morning,” she replied, with a bright smile. “I couldn’t wait to see you. Merry Christmas!”
“Uh-huh, yeah.” I yawned, but I only covered my mouth partway through. “Can you come back after nine? You’re going to wake my dad.”
“But I already woke you, so I might as well stay.”
There was such giddy glee on her face that I felt guilty for turning her away. In fact, her smile wasn’t the only thing that was glowing. Her hair looked almost white in the moonlight. Even though the house was dark, I could see her very clearly. She was her very own light source.
Maybe I was too sleepy to realize right away how weird that was, but it dawned on me after a moment that Celeste looked strange and unreal. Was I dreaming?
She smiled up at me as I stepped into the hallway. Her smile brightened the closer I came. It wasn’t until I set my hands on the bannister that I realized why Celeste looked so odd.
Her feet were not touching the ground.
I blinked my eyes. I rubbed them. But when I looked again, it was still the same vision before me. Celeste wasn’t standing on the stairs—she was floating above them…
Chapter Ten
“It’s you,” I said, stumbling back a few steps. “You’re the ghost! It was you all along!”
Celeste shrugged and smiled sweetly.
“Why are you here?” I asked her. “Why are you haunting my father’s house?”
For a split-second, Celeste looked like she was about to answer my question. Then, instead, she disappeared into thin air.
“Celeste?” My feet acted, hopping to the place where she’d been floating only moments before. “Celeste? Where did you go?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash downstairs and followed it. Celeste was in the front room. I could see her from the hallway. She was sitting in an armchair by the fire. Except—wait a minute—the room was completely different. It had old fashioned furniture, and the wallpaper wasn’t peeling. Everything looked fancy.
“What are you waiting for?” Celeste asked. “Put on your coat and your boots. There’s something I want to show you.”
I stood at the bottom of the stairs feeling stunned. What was I seeing? This had to be a dream.
And then, as if in response to that thought, Celeste dematerialized. This time, instead of disappearing completely, a bright light soared across the front room. It passed right through me, then went through the door. For that moment, when the light of her spirit crossed through me, I felt warmth inside and out. I felt completely at peace. I knew for sure Celeste meant me no harm, so I followed her.
Jamming my feet into my boots and my arms into my coat, I slipped out the front door and walked carefully down the creaky porch steps. I’d completely forgotten about the audience my father’s house kept, but luckily, since it was Christmas, everyone had gone home. Everyone but barbeque beard man. He’d fallen asleep in a lawn chair behind the garbage can that still glowed with his perpetual fire.
But he must have heard me trudging through the snow, because he awoke with a start.
Crap!
I could only hope his eyes were too blurry to see me as I dragged my right foot along. It was really acting up, way more than usual, to the point where I wished I’d brought my brace with me. Not that I would have time to run up to my room, take off my shoe, put it on, put my shoe back on and get back down to the lawn before the white light of Celeste’s spirit faded away.
I didn’t know much about ghosts, but I was pretty sure they wouldn’t hang around waiting for someone to change their shoes.
Celeste’s light moved between trees, guiding the way. I had to keep up my speed or I’d lose her, but my foot wasn’t cooperating. It kept catching on buried sticks and snow-covered branches. Every time my mittenless hands met the ground, snow and pine needles attacked my palms, but I wouldn’t give up.
My heart pounded. Every breath of cold air sliced my lungs like a knife. Still, I followed the white light through the woods. The world didn’t seem real. I felt dizzier than I’d ever been, and still I followed Celeste.
After a time, the light grew dim, the forest darkened and I walked forward guided only by the moon. I didn’t know where I was going, but somehow I could move with confidence. So I kept going. Until I found Celeste looking more like herself, not glowing anymore, and sitting on a rock.
Wait, no… that wasn’t a rock. It was a gravestone. She’d guided me to some kind of overgrown cemetery on my father’s property.
Of all the words that could have come out of my mouth as I stood there, panting, I asked, “Is that my grandfather’s headstone?”
“No, silly goose.” She inched her legs to the side so I could read the name. “It’s mine.”
My heart nearly stopped. I couldn’t catch my breath, and it clouded my vision in the cold night air. Dawn wasn’t far off, and the sky had a hopeful blue-grey glow behind its shield of darkness. It was enough that I could read the tombstone:
Celeste Langlois
Born 1885 ~ Died 1949
Age 64
“Sixty-four?” Suddenly this all seemed too real.
“I know, I know.” Celeste swung her legs around to cover her name. “I don’t look a day over sixty-three.”
How could she make jokes at a time like this?
“You’re dead!” I said. “You never told me you were dead.”
“In the past, when I’ve been forthright about my life status, people have been reluctant to form friendships.” She smiled sweetly. “I apologize for having deceived you.”
“Deceived me? That’s a pretty big deception.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Is it?”
“Yes!” I didn’t know whether to be angry or laugh hysterically. “Why are you here? Why aren’t you… I don’t know, in heaven or wherever normal dead people go?”
When she looked at me with mystery, I could tell she knew way more about the universe than I did. But all she said was, “I always looked back fondly on this time in my life, just before the turn of the century.”
I thought about sitting on one of t
he other low stones, but it seemed rude to put my butt on a grave that wasn’t my own. Celeste must have seen my thoughts, because she moved over and patted the spot beside her. The stone was surprisingly warm, and her thigh felt surprisingly real beside mine. In that moment, it was hard to believe she was a ghost.
“I grew up in that house, you know, just as your father did many years later. When I lived there it was new. This whole town was fairly new. This country was. It was such a happy time.”
“And that’s why you haven’t moved on?” I asked. “Because you were happy here?”
“Yes,” Celeste replied. “And no. You see, when I was your age I had a best and closest friend named Flora. We were inseparable. She was quite a lot like you. In fact, you even look somewhat similar. That’s why I found myself particularly drawn to you.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yes. It takes quite some effort to appear this way to the living. I wouldn’t do it for just anybody.”
Her compliment was a warm breeze that inflated my heart like a balloon and made me feel light and floating. “So, your friend Flora—was she, like, your girlfriend?”
“I wouldn’t have thought so at the time. When I was quite young I do recall telling my mother I was sweet on Flora. My mother informed me gently that a girl must not be sweet on another girl. She told me all girls feel this way when we are young, but we grow out of it in time. We learn to be sweet on boys instead.”
“A hundred years later and some moms still tell their kids stuff like that,” I said.
“Well, I never did learn to be sweet on boys. As a matter of fact, I never understood why I ought to. Flora felt much the same way, and so we formed our own secret sweethearts club, of which we were the only two members.”
“Aww, that’s so cute,” I said. “What did you do in your club?”
A blush took over Celeste’s pale skin when she said, “Mostly, we kissed. Our club met in the secret place I showed you when we met. We went there every day.”
Celeste and Flora kissing a hundred years ago was the most exciting thing I could possibly imagine. It sort of made me want to kiss Celeste then, as we sat on her gravestone. It sort of made me feel like it was okay to want that.
“My father was not partial to Flora,” Celeste went on. “He must have seen the way we looked at one another. He must have had his suspicions, and understood the implications, because one Christmas morning, when I met Flora under the pines, my father interrupted us.”
“Oh no!”
“Oh no, indeed,” Celeste replied, “for my father had brought his strap.”
“What’s a strap?” I asked.
Celeste laughed, and she’d never looked so pretty in my eyes. “How the times have changed, dear Sylvie! The strap was a length of leather used to punish children for their misbehaviour.”
“You mean he hit you with it?”
“He most certainly tried,” Celeste said. “But the weather was so frigid that morning the strap froze folded in his hand. Flora ran off screaming. For a long moment, I cowered in our bed of needles. As my father battled with the strap, I struggled not to laugh at the scene. It really was quite preposterous. But soon I realized I was in some danger, for I had never seen my father sneer in quite the way he did that morning.”
“Did you run away with Flora?” I asked.
Maybe I shouldn’t have, because Celeste hung her head. “I ran home to my mother and told her I was afraid. She must have seen the rage in my father’s eyes as he’d left to follow me. That very day, she packed up my belongings and hired a cart to take me into town.”
“Town?” I asked.
“The city,” Celeste clarified. “She sent me to care for a maiden aunt who, as it turned out, shared my same proclivities. Perhaps my mother knew this was the case. Perhaps sending me to live with Harriet was her show of mercy. At any rate, Harriet was quite elderly when I arrived and so I spent my formative years caring for the woman.”
This time it was me turning up my nose. “Eww, how could you stand it? I would be so grossed out if I had to spend all my time with some old lady.”
Celeste tilted her head and looked at me with an expression of surprise. After a moment, she said, “Perhaps I felt the same way when I first arrived at the small house we were to share. I felt as though I had instantly become a nursemaid. I was not as gracious as I ought to have been. But in time, as Harriet shared her life with me, I realized what extraordinary times she had lived through.”
I thought about Great-Aunt Esther: how my dad kept trying to get me to visit her, how I kept saying no. Imagine if my parents sent me to live with her and take care of her! That’s basically what had happened to Celeste.
“Harriet’s stories were really quite enthralling,” Celeste went on. “The more she told me about her life, the more I grew to respect and admire her. I was only in my twenties when Harriet died, and she left me her home and a considerable pension.”
“Wow,” I said. “Does that mean you didn’t have to work or anything? You could just go to the theatre and see musicals every day? Now we’re talking!”
Celeste giggled sweetly. “A life of leisure quickly loses its glittering quality when one is lacking in education and companionship. And so I enrolled at the university. It was there I met Nettie, the woman who won my heart.”
I don’t know why, but I felt jealous when she said that. I wasn’t even sure if I was jealous for myself or for Flora, but I decided not to say anything. I didn’t want to make her feel bad.
“Throughout our many years together,” Celeste confessed, “dear Nettie and I lived as spinster sisters.”
“As sisters?” I asked, bursting out with laughter. “Did you look anything like sisters? And what did people think when you kissed in public?”
“Oh, we never took chances like that,” Celeste said quite seriously. “Living as we did, we could have been arrested at any moment.”
“Arrested for what?” I asked. “You mean for being… lesbians?”
Celeste’s eyes widened. She stared down at her boots, nodding slowly.
“You’re joking,” I said. “It was against the law for a girl to fall in love with another girl?”
A smirk grew across her lips, like she recognized how stupid that sounded.
“Eww, wait,” I said as a weird thought dawned on me. “If this is your gravestone, does that mean your body is buried under the ground?”
Celeste nodded and her curls bobbed sweetly on the shoulders of her red velvet cape.
“Like your bones are down there rotting away as we speak?”
“Shall we dig a hole and find out?” she teased.
A shudder ran down my spine and I smacked her thigh. “You’re so gross, Celeste! I never knew ghosts had such a good sense of humour about their disgusting dead bodies.”
“I am a particularly good-natured ghost,” she bragged.
When I thought back on what she’d told me, one thing didn’t make sense. “If you lived most of your life in the city, why were you buried here?”
“Because when war broke out for the second time during our lives, Nettie and I sold the house in the city and moved here.”
“To my dad’s house?” I asked.
“Oh, no. By then your father’s family had taken up residence. At any rate, it was too big a place for two old maids. We couldn’t pretend we were sisters in Erinville. Too many townsfolk remembered my family. Nothing can compare with the fulfillment of returning to the place one grew up. I can understand your father’s joy.”
“But why would he feel joyful about abandoning his family?” I choked on that question, barely got it out.
Celeste tilted her head and smiled like she knew something I didn’t. Then she slipped her gloved hand into my bare hand and said, “In any town, there are more secrets than there are inhabitants. Would you believe many of the young people here in Erinville confided in Nettie and me?”
“That’s weird,” I said. “Because there were probably rumou
rs about you. People probably guessed you were a couple.”
“Yes indeed, and the town’s children and adults treated us with contempt. Some parents even went so far as to tell their young not to walk by our house. They believed we would have a corrosive influence, if you can imagine such a thing! We were merely two older ladies and half the town feared we would bring moral decrepitude down on their children. But the teenagers viewed us as rebels. You know what young people are like: they love everything their parents despise.”
“Hey, watch it,” I said. “I’m a young person, in case you’ve forgotten.”
She smiled gently. “The teens of Erinville trusted us with their secrets. Sylvie, your grandmother confided in me her love for your grandfather. She knew I would not judge her.”
I felt my face freeze, and it had nothing to do with the weather. A realization dawned on me like a punch in the gut. “That wasn’t my grandpa talking to us in the living room. All that spiritualism stuff—it wasn’t real. It was just you telling me who my grandfather was so I could tell my dad, so we could do the research.”
Celeste tilted her head. “I apologize for the deception, but I felt it was important to let you in on your own family secret before I go.”
I couldn’t keep up with what she was saying. “Before you go where?”
With a sigh, she said, “My happiness and unhappiness have resided together in this property far too long, Sylvie. The pain of my expulsion lives on in this place, though I died long ago.”
My heart started to race in a panicky way. “Why come back here, then?”
“Because my greatest happiness was here too,” she told me. “Those secret days with Flora were the grandest of my young life. I know well that she is long gone, and still I return to the land I loved, seeking one last kiss.”
“Just one kiss?” I asked. “And then you’ll be able move on and be happy forever?”
Celeste didn’t answer me. She looked up into the sky, which glowed an eerie dawning blue, then closed her eyes and smiled.