Betrayed

by Lynn Carthage

  “Not right now,” I say.

  Phoebe nods. I see what she’s feeling, it’s written all over her face. She wants me to go back with her, choose her, but I’m also so confused by what just happened that I can’t comfort her.

  I’m in my girlfriend’s bedroom. Is she my ex-girlfriend?

  We never broke up.

  “I think I should go,” Phoebe says. “You can stay and . . .” Her voice trails off.

  Next to the framed photo there’s a notebook I gave Gillian—it’s about the size of a playing card, with a cool blackbird design on the cover. It fitted in her pocket and was for drawing scenes as she walked around. She’s not carrying it with her anymore.

  I flash to a memory: Gillian and me at the women’s dress shop in Grenshire, which geared itself to those over the age of seventy. Gillian was trying to buy a hat without laughing. A black hat, of course. I don’t even remember what she called it, but it had a name she knew. She didn’t want to buy it because it was so expensive, but she pulled out that notebook and quickly sketched it.

  If I could touch this notebook—but I can’t—and turn the pages—which is now impossible for me—I’d see that hat again. For some reason, this brings the sense of loss for me to an indescribable high pitch. More so than seeing my girlfriend crying over a candle. Unbelievable. Over the thought of a drawing of a hat.

  Phoebe hears the strange pattern of my breath as I struggle not to cry. She hesitantly hugs me from behind.

  “Maybe we should both go back,” she suggests.

  I nod. “Okay.”

  “You’re ready?”

  I look one last time at the notebook and the photograph. I might never see them again. I might never see Gillian again. The girls had said they’d try to reach me again, but I’ve been warned now. I might be able to resist the pull. I will hear her voice and stay put. I don’t want to go through this again. It’s too hard.

  “Yes,” I say. “I’m ready.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Join our men’s swim team in our first meet of the season, 3 P.M. today. Everyone to wear blue in memory of our fallen teammate.

  —Emmons School Facebook page

  We’re back in France.

  Phoebe wisely guided us, not to the queen’s house, but to her family and Eleanor, now exploring the Temple of Love, a circular Greek temple with a statue inside its open-air layout.

  “Are you quite finished?” asks Eleanor crisply, her face flushed.

  I hang my head. I know what she thinks Phoebe and I have been doing this whole time, which honestly . . . we might have, if Gillian hadn’t had her séance. I’m scared at the thought that I was so carefree. I had found a new normal in my death, had fallen into Phoebe with careless happiness.

  “Whatever you think we were doing, we weren’t,” says Phoebe flatly.

  “Well, what on earth was going on while I’ve been playing nursemaid to your sister?”

  Phoebe softens. “Eleanor, oh . . . oh, dammit. You’re not obliged to watch Tabby. You never need to think you have to be a babysitter.”

  “I’m unfamiliar with that term,” says Eleanor stiffly.

  “She means childminder,” I say.

  Everyone’s feelings are getting hurt. Phoebe’s sad I had a relationship with Gillian, and now Eleanor’s sad I’m having one with Phoebe. “Sorry, Eleanor,” I add. “We didn’t mean to be gone so long.” I pause, trying to find the right words. “My girlfriend Gillian, from when I was alive: she was holding a séance just now and called me to her. That’s where we’ve been. Back at her house in Grenshire.”

  “Oh dear,” Eleanor says. “I’m so sorry. I’ve lived through that, too. I barely remember it. But I recall the sting.”

  “Austin tried to reach you after you died?” asks Phoebe, referring to Eleanor’s boyfriend when she was alive, back in the 1800s.

  “Yes, he did, as well as my parents, many of their . . .”

  She’s frowning.

  “Who were those people?” she asks herself.

  I don’t have an answer, but Phoebe jumps in. “What do you mean?”

  “There were people always over at our cottage and they were very concerned to try to reach me after I died. But I don’t know . . . why. I haven’t thought about it for centuries.”

  “Maybe it has something to do with our situation,” says Phoebe. “Whatever it is that keeps us as ghosts. The thing we have to accomplish to move on.”

  I instantly have a strange reaction: both excitement at the idea that I could find peace and move on from this half realm, and terror at the idea of everything ending. No more Phoebe. No more me.

  “I’ll try to remember more,” says Eleanor. “In the meantime, you’ve just had a shock. Are you quite all right, Miles?”

  I look away.

  “His girlfriend was trying to reach him for his birthday,” Phoebe says. “She and her friends were burning a candle and calling out for him. They didn’t know we were there.”

  “That is a true shame,” says Eleanor. “You want her to feel some peace.”

  “I did say good-bye to her at the time,” I say grudgingly. “But maybe not in a way she understood.”

  “Really?” says Phoebe.

  “She was on the phone with emergency personnel and they kept her on the line, but when I felt like I couldn’t hold out any longer, I looked at her eyes and I thought she got it.”

  Eleanor and Phoebe are both silent.

  “I couldn’t talk,” I explain. “I was physically incapable. But I thought she saw it in my eyes.”

  Phoebe sighs. “It seems like she might’ve missed that, Miles. And for sure, she misses you.”

  “Do you think she has anything to do with our situation?” Eleanor asks.

  I shake my head emphatically. “No, I don’t think so. She just had the misfortune of getting involved with someone who died.”

  “So did I,” says Phoebe. She’s joking, but I see the sadness behind it.

  I try to imagine some alternate sixth-form college in my mind, the Emmons School of the Living and the Dead. At this school, I attend class with Gillian and Phoebe—and Eleanor’s there, too. I have a hard time picturing her in the school uniform rather than the long black dress she wears with the crisp white apron covering it, and her old-time hobnailed boots. I work at it until I can visualize her, her hair loose over her shoulders rather than in a braid that dangles from under the cap she sometimes discards. She’s the kind of girl who would get a lot of attention if she wasn’t dressed so severely. Instead, she was born into a life of service in a wretched time period, and thought very little of herself.

  It’s frightening to think of Gillian and Phoebe walking into that classroom together. Would they hate or like each other? As a new ghost, I’d spent a lot of time trying to break up with Gillian after I met Phoebe—“breaking up” because I wasn’t clear on the fact that I was dead.

  I imagine one would be my girlfriend and the other just a friend, but how would I configure that? Which one?

  Maybe neither. Enter Eleanor.

  Crap. I shake my head. Life (uh, death) was already complicated enough without adding another romantic interest into the mix.

  As I look at Phoebe, I realize that the intensity of my feelings for her have been special from the start. But if the circumstances of our being dead were taken away—if we were healthy people attending school together—would it be so intense? I don’t have a way to judge.

  And it’s a useless puzzle anyway. I can’t have Gillian and so it doesn’t make sense to figure out if I would have chosen her or not.

  “Enough of this,” I say. “What’s been happening while you were the nursemaid?” I wink at Eleanor to soften the blow of throwing her own words back at her.

  Predictably, she blushes.

  “Well,” she says. “Everyone’s okay. But I’ve noticed something.”

  “Yes?” Phoebe asks.

  Eleanor turns to Phoebe. “Your family seems sadder than usual today. Som
ething’s bothering them.”

  Of course Phoebe wants to catch up with her family and see what’s going on. They’ve been in sight the whole time, but now Phoebe scurries over to listen in on their conversation.

  The Temple of Love isn’t too exciting, but it does have about ten steps that let Tabby go up and down endlessly, giving her something to do while her parents talk. They’re talking about what to do tonight, where to eat. Steven’s found something in the guidebook, but he doesn’t know if it’s special enough.

  “It’ll be fine,” says Phoebe’s mum. “Well, it won’t be fine, but it will be our version of fine.”

  Steven, Phoebe’s stepdad, wraps his arms around her, standing at the top of the temple, and gives her a long heartfelt hug. Things won’t ever be fine for them; Phoebe’s with me now in the world of the dead.

  “I wish I could take a picture of them,” says Phoebe. “It’s such a great picture how they’re framed by the temple, but Tabby’s too young to take it.”

  “She’ll start taking their picture before you know it,” I say.

  “Yeah—but will they be hugging at the Temple of Love ever again? This is one of those once-in-a-lifetime shots.”

  “From what I’ve seen,” says Eleanor, “so much time is spent taking these photographs and not enough time experiencing.”

  “Sorry if this sounds ignorant,” says Phoebe, “but did you even have photography when you were alive?”

  “I don’t know,” says Eleanor. “It certainly wasn’t introduced at the Arnaud Manor. Perhaps in other, more lively cities.”

  Too soon, Tabby is bored with the steps. They resume walking, this time to the theater where Marie-Antoinette and favored courtiers performed in plays that showcased them to great advantage. It’s a small space that seats about a hundred, but what’s extraordinary are the painted backdrops, elaborate scenes of the French countryside.

  “This looks a lot like a mural in the part of the Arnaud Manor where Madame Arnaud lived,” says Eleanor.

  There’s a velvet rope to stop most people from climbing to the stage, but the three of us go up there without a second thought. We turn and look at Phoebe’s family, and I wonder what it was like for Marie-Antoinette to perform in the light shed by gas lamps: her audience was receptive and flattering, but the wider audience of France was not. Perhaps too much was asked of her; she didn’t have the fortitude to be a queen. She was just a young Austrian girl plucked too soon from her family, before she developed a true sense of herself.

  The light dims and I wonder for a second if someone has adjusted the lighting on the stage. Then I notice no one else is here anymore; the tourists have vanished. The fabric on the seats in the audience is a different design and the wood gleams brighter.

  Phoebe and I—but not Eleanor—have gone on another “trip.”

  To the side, in the wings where the curtain hangs pendulous in its golden rope, whispering starts. It’s from people who weren’t there before. Phoebe bolts across the stage and leaps back down to the main floor of the theater.

  I don’t need to hide: Madame Arnaud has never been able to see me.

  She’s not with Etienne. She’s speaking with another woman, taller and stronger-looking than her, although they look somewhat similar. The other woman’s hair is swept up into a grand cushion of starched and powdered hair and, unbelievably enough, a small model of a ship appears to be riding the white waves of her pompadour. The two women hold an intense, hushed discussion. Clearly in their time period they did not want to be overheard and had seized a moment in the unused theater to talk.

  “She’s stolen all that was meant to be mine,” Madame Arnaud is saying, and my mind races to translate as quickly as she speaks. “She drank from the vials that were my destiny. . . She’s spoiled it all . . .”

  “But you drank as well,” says the taller woman.

  “I did, yet she has tampered with my fate. It has been altered. She’s now Sangreçu, and she was never meant to be!”

  “Giraude, calm down. It can all be sorted out. She may have toyed with things, but the prophecy is much larger than a woman stealing from her sister.”

  Giraude?

  I whip my head around to look at Phoebe. Wasn’t Madame Arnaud’s first name Yolande, not Giraude?

  “I wish it had been as poison to her,” says Giraude bitterly. “Why didn’t it act as such?”

  “She will only get what she is meant to get. She has overstepped, but she cannot take your fate from you . . . if this is indeed your fate.”

  “She has already, in part. She’s Sangreçu.”

  “Only time will tell how long that will last.”

  “Can you stop her?”

  “She has tricked me, too, Giraude. She gained ancient secrets I thought I was telling you. I ought to have set up a word, something only we two knew.”

  “Make one now,” Giraude commands. “We shall stop the leak.”

  “What shall I choose?” The other woman cocks her head to the side, and I see she’s displeased.

  “It matters not, just something she’d never guess. And from now on, promise that if you entrust secrets to someone you believe to be me, you will first ascertain it is me.”

  “Now you are overstepping. Never instruct me.”

  Giraude looks down, and even in the dimness I see her hands trembling. “I apologize.”

  “I have been around for many, many, many centuries, Giraude. You call me Athénaïs now, but I have held other names and lived other lives. Your frustration is like a flea biting at my elbow.”

  “But I’m part of the prophecy, aren’t I? Isn’t my life bigger than just . . . me?”

  Athénaïs looks at her with pitiless eyes. “I’m not certain you are part of the prophecy after all. You don’t seem to have a big enough spirit.”

  The two women survey each other for a long moment, then Giraude narrows her eyes in anger and slips back into the darkness backstage. Athénaïs stands there for a while, then vanishes.

  Instantly, the light changes and I can hear Steven pontificating about something. Tabby’s pulling on her mother’s arm while she tries to look sincerely interested in what her husband is saying. I jump down off the stage with Eleanor.

  Eleanor looks at me and Phoebe urgently. “I saw this time. I watched you two vanish and then reappear. Was it Madame Arnaud again?”

  “Yes,” I say at the same time Phoebe says, “No.”

  “I have a theory,” Phoebe says.

  “I’m all ears,” I say.

  Eleanor looks at her strangely.

  “I mean, I’m interested to hear,” I amend. “It’s a saying.”

  “So, that’s not Madame Arnaud. It must be her twin. The other woman, Athénaïs, called her Giraude.”

  Ah yes. That makes sense, why she seemed so fun and silly while with Etienne. It was another woman altogether.

  “And Athénaïs said Giraude’s sister looks enough like her to trick her,” Phoebe adds.

  “Perhaps this Giraude never left France. Only her twin traveled to England,” says Eleanor.

  “And the vials she drank from?” I say. “The one thing we know Madame Arnaud drank . . . well, was this a better version of it?”

  “What was that strange term she used? ‘Song resoo’?” asks Phoebe. “It seemed to be related to the vials.”

  “I took a lot of French,” I say. “Blood is sang, which sounds like song. The other part of the word could be reçu, the past participle of recevoir, to receive. So: someone who received blood?”

  They both register distaste.

  “I had hoped that was just Madame Arnaud’s strange habit,” says Eleanor.

  “And now it’s part of some kind of prophecy,” says Phoebe glumly. “A whole bunch of blood-drinkers. How wretched.”

  “She mentioned a prophecy?” asks Eleanor.

  “Yes . . . Giraude wanted to be reassured that she was part of some prophecy, but Athénaïs wasn’t exactly agreeing,” I say.

  “Di
d they say what the prophecy was?”

  I shake my head.

  Phoebe’s family is filing out of the theater. We follow them back out into the sunshine. Although Eleanor seems disturbed, I’m bristling with our discovery. It’s not Madame Arnaud at all! We’ve got the “good twin” and so maybe Tabby’s not in danger here. We’re just reviewing pleasant scenes from Giraude’s past.

  Not too shabby. It turns out the Madame Arnaud who terrorized the village of Grenshire had a pretty decent, sexy sister.

  I turn to Phoebe with a grin, but then I see her gaze directed toward her mum and the smile falls off my face.

  The parents look tired and drawn. They’re sad, just like Eleanor said. They make efforts at bright talk for Tabby, but I also see Phoebe’s mum’s hand snake around behind Tabby’s body to fiercely grab her husband’s. They’re silently comforting each other.

  What’s going on?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The oeil-de-boeuf window is a small oval one in the shape of a bull’s-eye (as oeil-de-boeuf translates). At Versailles, such a window may be found in the antechamber to the king’s room, where courtiers were forced to cool their heels as they awaited the chance to see him.

  —Nooks and Crannies of Versailles

  We all backtrack to the grand marble courtyard at the main entrance and exit the grounds. We continue along to the dinner place the parents decided on after some back-and-forthing with Yelp. “We’ll have to behave really nicely in here,” cautions Phoebe’s mum to Tabby as we stand outside the tiny establishment in a narrow alley. “Do you think you can sit down and be quiet while we’re here?”

  I step through the glass-paned door to take a look inside, and understand why she’s anxious. It’s very intimate and adult with tiny clustered tables, each setting with a delicate wineglass at the ready: not the place for toddlers. Especially American ones, who everyone knows are louder. Back outside, I’m tempted to say this to Phoebe, but she’s aware of that sadness Eleanor picked up on, and I don’t think she’s up for being teased.

  After Tabby nods, her parents straighten up and enter the restaurant the traditional way. Steven holds the chair for Phoebe’s mum as she sits, and Tabby crawls into her lap. Usually, they would encourage her to take her own chair, but this time Phoebe’s mum rests her chin on Tabby’s head and nuzzles her.