The Girl With the Ghost Machine

by Lauren DeStefano

  Now, though, they were all bigger, and they could only fit in the tire one at a time.

  It was November, and too cold to swim, but Emmaline sat at the edge of the cliff, considering it. She wanted to feel like she was being shot out into nothingness. For just a few seconds.

  Gully sat beside her, his chin on his raised knee. He was watching Oliver, who sat in the tire, propelling himself off the edge of the cliff so that the rope twisted and twisted, causing him to spin.

  Though Gully’s eyes followed Oliver, they also appeared to be staring straight through him.

  “Are you thinking about Tidbit?” Emmaline asked, so softly that only he would hear.

  “Hmm?” He blinked, raised his head for a moment, and then returned it to his knee. “I guess I was thinking—was that truly a ghost? Or was it a projection?”

  “When I talked to my mother,” Emmaline began, thoughtfully, “she was talking to me about things that were happening now. The messy table, and how distant my father has been. She wasn’t a projection.”

  “But then—” Gully’s brows drew together. He looked troubled. “Does that mean ghosts are real?”

  “They must be,” Emmaline said. “Don’t you think?”

  “I didn’t think so,” Gully said, careful not to let Oliver hear him. Oliver, with his hopeful spirit and beaming imagination, would tell Gully he was wrong; unlike his brother, Oliver did not believe in absolutes. “It doesn’t make sense. Our brains make us who we are. Our hearts keep us alive. Our nerves. Skin.” He held out his hand and studied it. “When we die, it stops. It all stops. What is a ghost, if all the things that make you who you are have stopped working?”

  Emmaline smoothed the hem of her wool skirt; it was black and came just past her knees, which were covered by gray leggings. “Maybe there are things we can’t understand.”

  “No,” Gully said. “If it exists, there’s a way to understand it. There’s a reason. There’s some pattern.”

  Emmaline thought of her father’s theory about evaporation, but it sounded strange in the face of Gully’s stalwart logic.

  They fell silent. Gully’s troubled expression deepened, and Emmaline inched closer to him, so that their shoulders touched. There had to be something more than just brains and nerves and skin, she thought. Gully himself made her think so. Sometimes, it was as though he was looking right into her soul. He was seeing through whatever the world saw in her. He was seeing who she really was, in a way that no one else ever had or, she suspected, ever could.

  But she didn’t know how to tell him that.

  “Maybe you should have broken the machine,” he said. He nodded at Oliver, who had stopped spinning and was staring at the reflection of bright autumn leaves on the water’s surface. “All Oliver can talk about is seeing Tidbit again. He talks as though Tidbit is still alive. It’s …” he trailed, looking for the right word.

  “Confusing?” Emmaline suggested.

  “Yes. We said good-bye. And now it’s like he’s back, only he isn’t. He’s still gone.” He looked at her. “Does that make sense?”

  There was sadness in his eyes. Emmaline found it hard to look at him, suddenly. “That’s how I feel about my mother,” she said. “I’ll always miss her, and of course I want her back. But she’s gone, and I know it. And I wish my father would say good-bye to her, too, it’s just—” She ran her tongue along the roof of her mouth, still feeling the faint burnt patch from the hot tea. “I really miss her, and to see her again was wonderful.”

  “She’s still here,” Gully said, as though it were a simple truth, like the time or the weather. “The time you did have with her makes you who you are. So she’s alive as long as you’re alive.”

  The thought filled Emmaline with warmth. And suddenly she was fighting the urge to cry. She had cried many times since her mother’s death, but rarely because something had made her this happy.

  She composed herself, and when she felt able to speak, she said, “Hot cocoa?”

  “Oliver,” Gully said. “It’s getting cold out. We’re going for hot cocoa.” He stood, offering his hand to his brother. Oliver ignored it and kicked the edge of the cliff, gaining the momentum he needed to swing back onto the dirt.

  Here is the way it had always been: Gully was born first, by three minutes and fifteen seconds. As they got older, Gully remained a heartbeat ahead of his brother, holding out his hand to pull him up onto steep embankments when they went hiking, forging ahead into dark rooms at night to be sure it was safe, standing on chairs to reach the top shelf so his brother wouldn’t have to.

  But now that they were twelve and three quarters, Oliver had begun to resist his brother’s protectiveness, kindly but firmly forging his own paths—even if it meant walking down the dark and daunting hallway by himself at night when he wanted to use the bathroom or get a glass of water. He had also begun to ignore Gully when he scolded him for climbing fences in a way that snagged his coat, or getting too enthusiastic with the heaps of sugar he spooned into his tea.

  They were the same age, after all, and practically grown up.

  In the café, the three of them shared a giant slab of chocolate cake with raspberry filling to go with their cocoa. They didn’t talk about the ghost machine. They didn’t talk about death, or those who had died, at all. They talked only about things that mattered to the living. The history test next Wednesday, and when they thought it might snow.

  Gully leaned in, and the sudden seriousness in his eyes made Emmaline and Oliver stop giggling about snowmen and lean in, too. “Emmy,” Gully whispered. “Isn’t that your neighbor? Sitting one table over? Don’t look.”

  Emmaline glanced at the next table.

  “I said don’t look.”

  “How can I know if I can’t look?” she whispered back. “But yes, that’s Mademoiselle Allemand.”

  After she made the confirmation, Emmaline realized how strange this was. Mademoiselle Allemand had the appearance of someone who had lived for a hundred years. Her skin was leathery; her mouth was puckered and thin and always painted up by a bright pink lipstick that glowed like a neon sign. She wore layers of fur—a leopard coat, a mink stole, a fox-fur-trimmed hat—all of which looked cumbersome on her short, brittle frame.

  Mademoiselle Allemand was part of a set. For as long as Emmaline had been alive, Mademoiselle Allemand had resided in the tall blue house across the street, with her two spinster sisters. All three of them had hair that had been scrubbed silvery white by all the years they had lived, and tiny gemstone eyes in varying shades of blue.

  They rarely left the house. Emmaline frequently saw grocers carrying bags to the front step. Occasionally one of the Sisters Allemand would come outside to retrieve Professor Boots, their orange tabby with white paws, who was a master of escape. But that brief chase around the house was as much sunlight as they got.

  “I saw her on the way to the lake,” Oliver offered. “She was walking into a shop.”

  Gully narrowed his eyes ponderingly. “I saw her, too.”

  “Running errands, maybe,” Emmaline said, although she had to admit that was highly unusual.

  “I think she’s following you,” Gully said. They were all still whispering.

  Emmaline blinked. “Why would she be doing that?”

  “She isn’t hurting anyone,” Oliver said, and sipped his cocoa. “Is she normally nice, Emmy?”

  “I don’t really know,” Emmaline said. “She’s never talked to me. She never talks to anyone but her sisters, and her cat.”

  “We could go to the park,” Oliver suggested. “There aren’t any stores that way, and there wouldn’t be anything for her to do. If she follows us out there, we’ll know about it for sure.”

  “It’s probably nothing,” Emmaline said. She wasn’t sure if she really believed that, but she wanted Gully to stop worrying. He had been lost in thought since she’d first told him that the ghost machine had worked. She knew that she was to blame. “It’s getting late, anyway. I should
go home and check on my father.”

  Her father had been out of the basement when she had last seen him. For once, he had been vacuuming the cobwebs from the stairs, in high spirits. But even so, Emmaline couldn’t shake the sense of dread that she might come home and find the door to the basement closed, her father once again under the spell of his creation.

  She even, she realized, dreaded coming home to find her mother’s ghost, smiling sweetly at her, hair all aglow in the late afternoon sun. She dreaded the price paid in the form of another memory, and the renewed loss when her mother left again.

  “We’ll walk you,” Oliver said, rooting his finger around the bottom of the mug to scoop up the last of the cocoa. Emmaline couldn’t help smiling at him. There was always something in the world to be happy about, and Oliver found these little things with ease.

  They stepped outside, into an autumn sunset that was almost electric in its bright yellows and pinks. The trees were black against the sky, twitching nervously on the breeze.

  As they walked, Gully’s eyes darted toward the windows they passed. He was looking for glimpses of Mademoiselle Allemand’s reflection, Emmaline realized, in case she was following them. But she was nowhere to be seen.

  The twins walked Emmaline up to the front door, and Emmaline threw an arm around both of them, gathering them in a hug good-bye.

  “I’ll see you Monday on the way to school,” she told them.

  Emmaline waited until they had turned the corner at the end of the block before she stepped inside her house. “Papa?”

  The door to the basement was closed. The machine’s ever-present hum went on behind it. “Papa, I’ve brought you some carrot cake. It’s your favorite.”

  A sound from the basement caught her attention. It was not the same as the machine’s usual noise.

  She set the bag containing the cake on the table and knocked on the basement door. “Papa?”

  Now that she was standing so close, the sound was all that much louder. She turned the knob.

  She was greeted by a swarm of glowing beads that hovered in the air.

  “Close the door,” her father whispered excitedly, from somewhere in the darkness beyond the glow.

  “Papa, what—” One of the glowing beads passed before her eyes, and she realized it was not a bead at all. It had wings. “Fireflies?” she gasped.

  “Ghost fireflies,” her father said. “There must be hundreds of them!”

  Emmaline reached the bottom of the staircase and twirled to see all the brilliant little glimmers around her.

  It took several minutes for them to fade, until there were only a handful left. They scattered and then disappeared into the air, and beyond where they had been, Emmaline could see her father’s wild grin. “Emmaline, look.” He reached for her head, where a single firefly had landed at the part of her hair. It shifted and sat perched atop his finger, and he held it up for Emmaline to see.

  “I think I may have found a way to keep the ghosts around for longer,” he said. “I’ve tried with crickets and bees, even a garter snake—like we used to see in the garden, you know the ones.”

  Emmaline’s brow furrowed. The firefly still did not fade. “You’ve been down here since I left?” She had been gone with Gully and Oliver for hours.

  Her father didn’t seem to hear her. “If I feed the machine a memory, it will produce a ghost. But then that memory is gone forever. So, what if ”—his eyes brightened, outshining the insect in their purpose—“we can feed the machine a memory that goes on forever? One that can’t simply be burned up like fuel.”

  Emmaline resented the hope that she felt just then. She knew better than to wish for things like ghosts. She knew that to see her mother again would only double the pain in her heart when she had to go away.

  She also resented that the hope and curiosity won out over her logic. “How?” she asked.

  “Insects,” her father said. “Insects are always around. Spiders under the stairs and flies getting into the house, crickets chirping in the grass. There are too many of them to count. So we give the machine a memory of insects, and it can’t possibly burn up all the memories we have of them.”

  “I don’t understand,” Emmaline said.

  “Think of all the ants in the grass when we had picnics with your mother,” her father said. “We don’t need to lose the memory of the picnic to see her again. We feed the machine the memory of the ants instead. There are hundreds of ants. Thousands. Millions. Enough to keep your mother alive with us forever.”

  “Not alive,” Emmaline said.

  “Yes, yes, but it will be the same as alive,” her father said.

  “No, Papa. It won’t.”

  The firefly faded from his fingertip, as though her words had cast it back to oblivion. “Mama isn’t alive. She’ll never be alive again. She’ll never brush her hair or take a long bubble bath or make rings on the cover of her books when she sets down her tea. She’s dead, Papa.” Her voice broke. She didn’t realize that she had begun to cry until she heard the tears.

  “Emmaline,” her father began. But he didn’t finish whatever he was going to say. He hugged her, and she collapsed against his stomach, sobbing so hard that she shook. She tightened her arms around him, remembering now all at once what it felt like to have a living parent. Sometimes she forgot.

  Julien Beaumont could endure a great many things, but he couldn’t stand to see his daughter cry. And it had been such a long time since she had cried. She hid her sorrow for his sake. She appeared to be happy so that he would be happy, too. Even when she was sad, which, some days, Julien knew she was.

  Julien led her up the stairs, and Emmaline clung to his shirt and wiped her eyes on his sleeve as they walked. “Maybe a glass of milk will make you feel better,” he said sympathetically.

  “I brought you some carrot cake from the café,” she sniffed.

  They sat at the table, which was still free of its clutter. Only the bag from the café sat on its surface, and Emmaline stared at it through the blur of her tears.

  Her father poured her a glass of milk, but she didn’t want it. She wanted to throw it over the wires of the machine, to break it forever. But she also knew that she wouldn’t. Even if it did more harm than good, she couldn’t bear to ruin any chance of seeing her mother again.

  “I wish you’d never started building it,” she muttered. “I hate that thing. I hate it, Papa.”

  Her father was quiet for a long time. Emmaline saw the sympathy on his face. She saw her own pain mirrored back in his eyes. When he spoke at last, he said, “Maybe a break from the machine would do us both some good.”

  Emmaline rubbed her eyes with the collar of her turtleneck. “Really?” she said.

  “Really. When I spoke to your mother last night—” He paused. He must have heard how simple and beautiful those words were, too. The idea that he had spoken to his wife as though she were still alive— “When I spoke to her, she scolded me for not taking better care of you.” He frowned. “Emmaline, I built that machine for the both of us. We were both so sad, and I knew that there was nothing I could do to make us both feel better. Your mother was the one who took such good care of us. I just wanted to bring her back.”

  Emmaline’s heart felt warm at his words. “You don’t have to bring her back,” she said. “Mama isn’t here to take care of us, but we can take care of each other.”

  “Yes.” He patted her hand. “We can.” He tried to hide his sadness in his smile, but Emmaline saw it. She had long since begun to understand that she wasn’t enough to make him forget about the machine. She could open the curtains, and water the flower in the pot on the counter, and tell her father nice things, but it just wasn’t enough.

  CHAPTER 7

  At midnight, Emmaline awoke to the sound of the front door opening and closing amid the chime of the church’s clock tower. She knew it was her father, embarking on a moonlit visit to her mother’s grave. She climbed out of bed and looked through her window. Her fat
her was the only one on the cobbled streets, carrying a fistful of purple bougainvillea blooms. They grew wild along the back fence—her mother’s favorite.

  Maybe it would be good for him, Emmaline thought. Maybe he would come to understand that Margeaux Beaumont was buried under a stone there and she wasn’t going to come back. Maybe he would grieve. She didn’t expect him to move on all at once, but it would be a start if he would just unplug the machine’s many wires from the wall so that the lights in the house would stop flickering.

  She climbed back into bed and drifted back to sleep.

  A sound awoke her—she didn’t know how many minutes later. She returned to consciousness as though swimming in the night air. She had been dreaming about swinging from the tire and into the lake.

  The sound returned. Footsteps? No—something much heavier. It sounded like something had bumped against the table, unaware of the table’s presence in the darkness.

  She didn’t call out to her father. Something told her that he wasn’t the one who had made the sound.

  Next there came the creaking of a door. Her heart began thumping at that. The basement door.

  She crept out of bed, and even before she’d made it halfway down the stairs, she could smell the cold night air that had been let into the house and gotten trapped there. Someone had come in.

  The basement door was left ajar now, letting out a bit of the machine’s purple glow.

  The twins? Emmaline thought. No. It couldn’t be them. They would never walk in uninvited in the middle of the night. They didn’t have to sneak in to see the machine; all they ever had to do was ask, and she would take them to it. They knew that.

  Then who?

  Her heart was beating in her ears now. Her bare feet felt cold against the floorboards as she moved across the living room.

  She pushed the basement door all the way open, cringing at its keening creak. She took the first step and clutched the railing, leaning forward to see who was there.