The Poe Estate

by Polly Shulman

  “You should run up and take a look. You’ll love the view,” said Cousin Hepzibah, pointing up the staircase with her cane.

  She was right. Up on the widow’s walk, the wind whipped my hair around my ears. I saw the hills and the winding road, the patches of woods, the town and the white church. Far off through the trees I even caught sight of sun on the sea.

  A crow landed on the railing and peered at me sideways. I started to lean on the railing, then thought better of it. The paint was flaking off and there were balusters missing; it didn’t look steady enough to support my weight. The crow didn’t seem worried, but crows have wings. It was getting too cold, and Cousin Hepzibah was waiting. I went back downstairs.

  Next, Cousin Hepzibah showed me through the ground floor of the east wing. There, early twentieth-century Thornes had spent some of the money from their investments in railroads and oil on building boudoirs, the gallery, the gun room, the conservatory.

  Things fell apart in the 1930s, though. The building stopped during the Great Depression, and apparently the repairs did too. Upstairs, where I went to finish the tour on my own, everything was cold and dusty, festooned with cobwebs. In some rooms, I left footprints in the dust. Clearly almost nobody climbed the stairs anymore.

  When I opened the casement window in what looked like a sewing room, I saw Mom and Dad in the driveway unloading our truck. “Sukie! Come down and help,” Mom called. I ran down the back staircase, the one meant for servants, creaking the treads.

  • • •

  We stashed our flea market stuff and some of our heavier furniture in the old carriage house, but most of our boxes went straight up into the main attic. It was hard work hauling our things up all those flights. The long, low attic room with its peaked roof stretched over the nineteenth-century additions. Eight dormer windows lit it dimly. A single lightbulb hung in the middle of the room, but nothing happened when I pulled its chain.

  “I’ll have to fix that,” said Dad, putting down his armload of boxes.

  The attic had that winter smell of cold dust. Groups of furniture stood around draped with dirty white drop cloths. I felt as if I’d tiptoed into a Halloween surprise party full of little kids dressed as ghosts, holding their breath while they waited to startle the guest of honor.

  I added my boxes to Dad’s pile and peeked under one of the drop cloths. It covered a collection of wooden chairs with spiky arms and legs. They looked uncomfortable.

  “Anything good?” asked Mom.

  “Eastlake, I think,” I said. “Pretty beat up, though.”

  Mom looked under a drop cloth near her and found an aluminum and Formica table from the 1950s. She let it fall back.

  Something rustled behind me. I spun around. A mouse? A ghost?

  It didn’t feel like a ghost, and for some reason, I didn’t think one would show up with my parents there. I made myself go look. Standing in that corner was a tall mirror in an elaborate wooden frame. My reflection looked elegant and mysterious.

  “Now, that’s more like it,” breathed Mom. “What a beauty!”

  “Hands off, Mom. It’s all Cousin Hepzibah’s,” I said. “We can’t sell it.”

  “I know, honey. Can’t I admire it?”

  “Quit slobbering. You’re like a wolf!”

  “Don’t worry, I’m still a Thorne,” said Mom. “Let’s cover that.”

  Together we threw a dusty cloth over the mirror. It unsettled a pile of old leaves by the window—the source of the rustling, maybe. I found an old broom and swept them into a newspaper, then opened the window and shook them out. The wind snatched them away, flinging them up and down and sweeping them toward the sea.

  When we were done stowing our boxes in the attic, I took the broom to my tower room. If I got rid of the cobweb trapezes, maybe ghosts wouldn’t find the place so hospitable.

  The broom felt cold in my cold hands, almost tingly. That happened sometimes—I got a cold, tingly feeling when I touched something, usually something old. I wasn’t really surprised to get the tingly feeling in this house, where everything was old.

  My ceiling was so tall that even with the broom, I had to stand on a chair to reach the corners. The chair creaked when I stepped on it, and I could almost hear Kitty scolding me to go get a real ladder before I broke my neck.

  The chair held my weight. Cobwebs dodged away in the air currents as I slashed at them, and a spider dropped down on a long line to inspect me. “I’m not afraid of you,” I told it. “Go find someplace else. This is my room now.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  My Sister’s Ghost

  When Kitty died, my friends disappeared. Not all at once; Jessica Anthony, my best friend, hung on for a while. Her big sister, Victoria, was Kitty’s best friend, so naturally the four of us had spent a lot of time together. Kitty used to say that since she was stuck with me, they might as well bring Jess along too.

  Jess and I would make up endless dramas with our dolls. Sometimes they were ancient Greek priestesses of Artemis in their temple (the town band shell) or astronauts landing on an alien planet (the big rock outcropping behind the Methodist church) or brave sailors battling pirates on the deep blue sea (the Anthonys’ koi pond). If we strayed too far, Kitty would rein us in with a blast on her whistle, which Mom had given her to call me with back when I was only three.

  That whistle ruled my childhood. It was made of bright blue plastic with a hard little ball inside that danced around when she made it shriek. It stopped me at the edge of danger and excitement, pulling me reluctantly back to Kitty. Even though part of me resisted, I always obeyed.

  Once Kitty was too sick to take me, getting together with Jess outside of school became difficult. My parents were too preoccupied to arrange for me to see Jess. I wasn’t good at making plans once Kitty got sick, either, and afterward—I felt too cold and paralyzed.

  Kitty’s death set me apart at school. For a while the girls were extra nice to me in a distant way. April gave me her second cookie at lunch, and Keisha held the door for me as if I had a broken ankle. But whenever I tried to join a group that was laughing and talking, they would fall into a polite silence, and I would leave and go find a book to read.

  Looking back at it now, I think if I could have jumped in and laughed with them, they might have forgotten to treat me differently.

  I understood when Jess started spending more time with Keisha—hanging around with me wasn’t much fun. Then Jess’s dad got a new job and the Anthonys moved out of state.

  Starting middle school was the hardest. My new school was a long bus ride away. Three elementary schools fed into it, so I didn’t know most of the kids. That could have been an opportunity to reinvent myself as someone happy and normal, but I missed my chance.

  The teachers called me by my whole name, Susannah, but April called me Sukie, and some of the boys misheard the pronunciation, probably on purpose.

  “Is your name really Sucky?” asked Tyler Spinelli.

  “No, it’s Sukie,” I said. “It rhymes with cookie. It’s short for Susannah.”

  “Sucky Sukie!” said Cole Farley, Tyler’s friend. They poked each other, laughed, and started chanting it. “Sucky Sukie! Sucky Sukie! Sucky Sukie!”

  I tried to ignore them. I managed pretty well. They were just boys, after all. It was harder when the girls started to whisper.

  “Is it true Sucky’s sister is dead?” Ava Frank asked Keisha on the bus. She kept her voice down, but I still heard her.

  I couldn’t hear Keisha’s answer.

  “You mean right in their house? A dead body? That’s gross! Like in her bedroom?” said Ava, a little louder.

  Keisha said something else I couldn’t hear.

  “I bet it’s haunted,” said Ava. “Sucky lives in a haunted house. That must be why she’s so weird.”

  “Sh, Ava!” hissed Keisha audibly. “Don’t be
mean. She’s sitting right there!”

  Ava lowered her voice to a whisper and giggled. I didn’t mind that so much. But I minded when Keisha giggled back.

  That afternoon was the first time I blew Kitty’s whistle.

  • • •

  Kitty gave me her whistle on her deathbed. When the doctors at the hospital said there was nothing left to do but keep her comfortable, Mom and Dad brought her home. They rented a hospital bed, the kind with a cold metal railing on the side and control buttons to raise the head or the foot.

  Her first day back, Kitty called me into her room with a blast on her whistle. She was excited to be home, and she seemed better. Her cheeks were pink, like they used to be. “Come up here, Sukie!” she told me in her low, hoarse whisper, patting the spot next to her. “Check it out. It’s a robot bed!”

  The bed took up a lot of the room. Dad had had to push the dresser aside, and I remember noticing a strip of dust against the wall behind where it had been. But Kitty was home! Maybe now she would get well again. I crawled up next to her, and she pressed the button to raise the head. It made a low humming, grinding sound as it lifted us up and bent us forward from the waist. “That’s so cool!” I said. “Can I try?”

  “Wait, I want to show you the feet first.” She pressed the button to elevate our feet, bending us up into a U. Then she lowered our heads so we were lying on a downward slope. She rocked us back and forth, our heads and feet waving slowly up and down like the tentacles of sea anemones.

  “Come on, Kitty, let me try! It’s my turn!” We wrestled for the controller, laughing.

  That wasn’t the last time I heard her laugh, but it was the last time it really seemed natural—the last time I forgot that it might be the last time I heard it.

  • • •

  I was alone with Kitty the day she died. The doctor had rung the doorbell, and Mom had gone downstairs to let her in. Dad was out on a construction job. He didn’t want to take it with Kitty so sick, but we couldn’t afford for him not to.

  Kitty had her eyes closed. Her skin looked gray and her freckles stood out. “Where’s Mom?” she whispered.

  “Downstairs talking to the doctor. Want me to get her?”

  She moved her head no. The movement was too weak to call it a shake. “Don’t leave me alone. . . . I think it’s happening. . . .”

  “What’s happening?”

  “You know.”

  “It is not!” I said. “Who’s going to take care of me if you’re not here?”

  She opened her eyes and crawled her hand across the blanket to reach mine. “I am. No matter what. Always. I promise.” Her hand was icy cold, and her voice was so weak it was barely a whisper.

  “But you can’t, if you’re dead!” I spit out the word like a curse. I knew I was making her feel bad, but I didn’t care. I had to stop her.

  She pointed to the little table next to the bed. I thought she was asking for water, so I picked up the glass. I’d gotten good at dribbling it carefully between her lips without going too fast for her to swallow and spilling it on her neck and pillow.

  She moved her head no again. “The whistle,” she whispered.

  I picked it up and put it in her hand. She pushed it back into mine. “Use it. If you need me. I’ll come,” she breathed. “Okay?”

  “No, Kitty,” I said. “Don’t go.”

  “I’m sorry, Sukie,” she whispered. “But I’ll come. I promise.” Then she shut her eyes.

  “Kitty?” I said. She lay still. I squeezed her hand, but I couldn’t tell if she squeezed back. If she did, she did it too weakly for me to feel it.

  “Mom!” I yelled. “Dr. Robbins!” They came running upstairs, but Kitty didn’t open her eyes again.

  • • •

  I didn’t blow the whistle at all that school year. At first, I was too mad at Kitty for dying. I didn’t want to do anything she’d told me to do.

  Later, I still didn’t blow the whistle because I was afraid nothing would happen. Kitty would stay dead and leave me alone in this flat, bad world, and I would be mad at her all over again for breaking her promise.

  But the day Ava called me weird and Keisha laughed, I went home and threw myself on Kitty’s old bed and cried till my teeth tingled. Then I got up and went into my bedroom. I crawled under my bed and pulled out my secret box where I kept my treasures. It was an old cedar jewelry box of Grandma O’Dare’s, lined with faded pink satin with a mirror in the lid. It smelled like Grandma O’Dare’s face powder. I saw my tear-stained face in the dusty mirror as I dug through the contents: the silver dolphin pendant I’d found in the gutter behind Waxman’s Drugstore; the postcards Jess sent the summer she went to Switzerland with her family; my guppy, shark, and barracuda badges; the pencil I used to sign my name when I got my first library card. And Kitty’s blue plastic whistle.

  I held it in my hand. It rattled a little. It was smaller than I remembered, but its color hit a low, reverberating note of familiarity like a tuning fork struck on the inside of my sternum.

  I lifted it to my lips and blew.

  The whistle screamed. It called me urgently with its well-known voice, tearing into now from the impossible past, the gone-forever. I felt as if something had been ripped open—maybe me, maybe the universe.

  And then, through that rip, I felt a presence. Kitty.

  • • •

  I should have been scared, but I wasn’t. Instead, I felt overwhelming relief that I’d been set free from the fake, flat, bad world where Kitty no longer existed and allowed to return home to the real world where she did.

  I didn’t see her, not that first time. We didn’t speak. I just knew she was there. It wasn’t until later that I started to understand how complicated it can be to have a ghost sister.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Broom and a Pipe

  My parents and I finished packing the truck and drove down to the city early on Sunday morning, leaving well before dawn. Dad had rented a booth in the flea market in Hell’s Kitchen, the one in the basement of a building that used to be a car showroom. Sometimes we go to one of the schoolyard markets in Manhattan or Brooklyn or the big outdoor parking-lot market in SoHo, but Dad thought the snow would keep the customers away this weekend.

  Our allotted spot in the flea market was near the door. Scraps of paper and old leaves had blown in, so I got the old broom out of the truck and swept them up before we unloaded the furniture. We set up the long folding tables and unrolled an old tribal rug to make our space look more welcoming.

  Mom and I unwrapped the smaller items and set them out. There’s an art to arranging a flea market table. You want to space things out enough that people can see what you’re selling and imagine the things in their own homes. But you also want enough interesting clutter that they can think they’re making a brilliant discovery. Some people like things better when they have to hunt for them.

  I covered a little table with a tablecloth and laid out a tea service for two, then stacked linens and china nearby. I lined up the lamps, keeping the pairs together. Mom leaned the paintings against the wall and put out a box of old frames. We put a big $10 clutter box on the end of each table and seeded the boxes with items from the good-stuff stash we kept under one of the tables, to be replenished throughout the day. The occasional treasure makes the junk look more tempting.

  Dad went to say hi to the other sellers he was friends with and see if they had anything he wanted to buy for our customers. And the other sellers visited us, doing the rounds before the doors opened. Mom had saved some scarves for Rosetta, who specializes in twentieth-century vintage clothing; she bought six of them. Mr. Alton offered his opinion on a big, dingy landscape—1880s, not worth cleaning, might have more appeal in Brooklyn—and bought two of the small wooden frames.

  The morning was pretty slow. A young woman bought a handful of silver-plate flatware from
the 1930s. A man measured the big oak secretary desk and said he would bring his wife to check it out, but he never came back. Everybody asked Mom how much she wanted for the bronze deco box with the greyhound finial, but nobody bought it.

  I’d forgotten to bring my homework, so I chose a book from a stack of 150-year-old novels and settled down to read. Just before lunchtime, Dad went off to meet a potential client who was planning to remodel the kitchen in her country house, leaving Mom and me to mind the booth.

  A woman stopped to look at a lamp. “That’s sweet. How old is it?” she asked Mom. Reaching for it, she knocked over a chipped pink vase. She lunged for it but missed, and it smashed on the cement floor. “Oh, I’m so sorry!” she said. “I’ll pay for it, of course.”

  Mom smiled tensely. I could see her calculating the potential price of the vase against the goodwill she might earn by not making a fuss. Maybe if Mom was nice about the vase, the woman would feel bad enough to buy something else. “Don’t worry about it,” Mom said. “Accidents happen. Sukie, honey, can you reach the broom?”

  I swept the broken vase into a newspaper, leaned the broom against a walnut bookcase, and took the fragments to the trash. When I came back, the woman was counting out money and Mom was wrapping up the lamp. Apparently her calculation had worked.

  As I returned to our booth, I smelled something unpleasant—dense and smoky, like chocolate doused with sulfur—and found a man eyeing my broom. The smell was coming from his pipe, a fancy one with a painted bowl and an amber mouthpiece.

  Some flea market shoppers like to dress pretty wildly. Usually they favor old-fashioned styles: long dresses, maybe, or bell-bottoms and love beads, as if they just stepped out of 1914 or 1967. But this man had on extravagantly fashionable clothing. His suit was clearly new, with a subtle gray stripe shot through with threads of dull purple. He carried an expensive-looking coat over his arm. His tie—a light, bright red that was almost pink—matched his hat. He had picked up the broom and now turned as if planning to walk off with it.