The Girl With the Ghost Machine

by Lauren DeStefano

  Gully was crying out for his brother, Emmaline realized. Maybe he’d been shouting for a while, and she had only just begun to hear him now. Her arms hurt from trying to hold him back.

  “Get off the ice,” Madame DePaul told him. She looked at Emmaline, her expression pleading. “Take him inside.” In the next instant, Madame DePaul jumped into the water.

  Gully was shaking, from the cold and from the fear, and Emmaline began to realize that this was real. Oliver had gone under while she was off sobbing about her problems. They’d left him alone, and they hadn’t heard him break through.

  Emmaline could see that the ice was thin where they knelt, and she thought she could hear it cracking under them.

  “Gully, come on.” Her voice had purpose now. She pulled him to his feet. He didn’t fight her that time, and she could feel how suddenly weak he was. He was breathing hard. Both of them skidded on the ice, but somehow they didn’t fall.

  Madame DePaul broke through the water’s surface just as Emmaline managed to lead Gully off the frozen lake.

  She had Oliver held tightly in her arm, and Emmaline went back to not believing that any of this was real. Oliver was supposed to be warm and alive, with rosy cheeks and a gentle, mischievous smile. But this boy Madame DePaul pulled from the water wasn’t even breathing.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Hospital DuMont was a very tall building ten blocks from Emmaline’s house. At night she could see it from her bedroom window, its lights shining like a beacon out into the starry darkness.

  She had been inside it only once, when she was born. And then she’d been swaddled in a blanket and sent home to begin her life.

  Now she stepped through the glass double doors more frightened than she had ever been.

  Her father was beside her, and he put his hand on her shoulder. But for the first time, she moved out of his reach. She strode to the lady at the front desk and she said, “I’m here to see Oliver DePaul. He was brought here this afternoon.”

  The woman at the desk smelled of berry hand sanitizer. Her hair was pulled into a high bun that Emmaline knew was yellow, and yet everything about the woman seemed black and white. The entire building seemed that way.

  The woman shuffled through a stack of papers and opened a folder to read something inside. “He’s on the second floor in 7B.” There was sympathy in her tone, but Emmaline couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge it. She didn’t want to be pitied. That would mean there was something truly wrong, and she knew already that Oliver would be fine. She would find him sitting in his hospital bed, talking Gully’s ears off, and when he saw her, he would pet her hair the way he always did and tell her he was sorry he’d made her sad.

  She would pretend to be mad at him for making her worry. But only for a little while. And then she would hug him. And then maybe things would be in color again, rather than black and white.

  “Thank you,” Emmaline told the woman politely, and as she did so, she suddenly felt that manners were a waste of time.

  Emmaline and her father walked toward the elevator, and after Emmaline pushed the button, she turned to her father. “Is it okay if I go alone?” she said.

  Her father frowned sympathetically. He reached to pat her head, but then thought better of it and put his hands in his pockets. “I’ll be right here if you need me,” he said.

  The elevator doors opened, and Emmaline stepped inside alone.

  “Wake up,” she whispered to herself after the doors had closed. The elevator carpet was scarlet. The walls were brassy and reflective. But the girl in that reflection was a stranger, and none of the colors seemed real.

  The elevator doors opened on the second floor, and when Emmaline stepped out into the hallway, suddenly it was hard to breathe.

  Suddenly she was not in a hospital at all. Instead, she felt as though she were standing in the upstairs hallway of her house. She was ten years old again, and she was straining her ears to listen to the doctor and her father talking.

  Somehow she knew, in that moment, that her mother was gone. She knew that there would be no more giggling and dancing across the living room, pirouetting around the coffee table and couches while music played. There would be no more pancake batter. No more kisses that her mother placed on Emmaline’s nose when it crinkled as she laughed. The finality of it was certain. It filled the air like the thick smog that erased the buildings on summer mornings.

  “Wake up,” she told herself again. Things were going to be different this time. Oliver was a kid, like her, and kids simply didn’t die.

  Emmaline walked slowly. She saw 7B ahead of her, the door open. As she got closer, she listened for the sound of Gully and Oliver bickering. Gully would be mad at his brother for making him worry, and Oliver would be saying that of course he was fine, that he was tired of being looked over and bossed around.

  But as Emmaline approached, all she heard was silence. It was so silent, in fact, that she wondered if she had the right room. Her shuffling footsteps felt too loud as she stopped at the threshold.

  She saw Gully first. He was sitting beside his brother’s hospital bed, his head down and his back to the door so that Emmaline couldn’t see his expression. Madame DePaul sat on the other side of the bed, holding Oliver’s hand in both of hers. She looked very pale, and her eyes were darker than usual.

  And then she saw Oliver. He was not bickering with his brother. He was not smiling. He was as white as the bed sheets, and Emmaline could see tiny purple and blue veins under his eyes. Even his hair seemed paler. His hair, usually shiny and black and full of curls, seemed gray and limp, as though it, too, were sleeping.

  The next breath that Emmaline drew felt too noisy in the quiet space. Madame DePaul raised her head, and for a moment she tried to smile but couldn’t. “Hello, Little Mademoiselle Emmaline.” That was what she always called her.

  Gully raised his head, and Emmaline saw his face. He and Oliver truly were twins, because he looked just as pale as his brother. The same purple and blue lines ebbed below his own eyes. He looked as though he, too, had been pulled from an icy lake. He looked so dead that it was strange to see him breathing.

  “It’s all right, you can come in,” Madame DePaul said. Her voice sounded fragile. “We’re waiting for Monsieur DePaul to return from his business trip. Lots of trains to catch, you know.” She sniffled, and Emmaline braced herself. The only adult she had ever seen cry was her father, and it had been awful, and she wasn’t sure that she could endure such a thing again.

  But Madame DePaul didn’t cry. She patted Oliver’s arm and kissed his forehead.

  There was a tube going into Oliver’s mouth. Somehow Emmaline had not seen it until now. It made a loud, rhythmic noise that sounded more like wind than breathing. Once Emmaline became aware of it, the silence was shattered.

  Her knees felt weak.

  Gully looked at her for a moment, and then he looked at the floor again. He didn’t even seem sad. He was something beyond sad. Worse than sad.

  Emmaline heard herself whisper, “Oliver is going to be okay, isn’t he?”

  Madame DePaul gave Emmaline the most heartbroken smile she’d ever seen in her life. And then she said, “Come here, sweetheart.”

  Emmaline did, and when she stood beside Madame DePaul, Madame DePaul kissed her cheek.

  Emmaline didn’t know why, but this brought tears to her eyes. For the second time that day, she began to cry. The first time had been for her mother, who was already gone. But this time it was for Oliver, who was not supposed to be gone for a very long time. She had never thought to worry about losing Oliver, or Gully; it hadn’t seemed possible. It still didn’t.

  Madame DePaul put her arms around her, and that made the tears come even harder, because Madame DePaul had to let go of her son’s hand to do it, and Emmaline didn’t think she deserved to be the reason Madame DePaul let go of Oliver even for a second. This was all her fault. If she hadn’t gone off to sulk, she and Gully would have seen him fall through. They wou
ld have grabbed his hands and pulled him to the surface. Gully would have scolded him. “You have to be more careful,” he’d have said, and Oliver would have rolled his eyes and said, “Stop being so bossy.”

  But Gully and Oliver weren’t arguing now. There was only the stillness of the hospital room, and the soft sound of tears, and the machine that made Oliver breathe. That machine was just like the ghost machine in the basement. It gave the illusion of a living thing, but an illusion was all it was.

  Gully didn’t cry. His mouth was pressed into a tight line, and he stared at his brother’s face the same way he stared at his books. The same way he stared at math problems, and at science lab experiments, and any other thing that needed to be solved.

  Emmaline couldn’t bear it. She stepped out of Madame DePaul’s comforting embrace. She stepped away from the hospital bed.

  Through her watery, blurred vision, she looked at Oliver. She looked at him and looked at him, as though that alone could force him to wake up. She couldn’t believe that this was real, but it didn’t seem to matter what she believed.

  She had expected him to be feeling better when she visited him. She had expected him to pet her hair and tell her he was sorry for making her cry on the lake. But instead, she was the one who said, “I’m sorry, Oliver.” Her voice was broken and squeaky. “I’m sorry.”

  At the sound of her voice, Gully squeezed his eyes shut. His shoulders were quivering.

  Emmaline ran before she knew she was moving. She ran out of the room and down the hall, and she was gasping by the time she stepped inside the elevator.

  The elevator doors closed. She wiped furiously at her eyes. Stop crying, she told herself. Crying would make it true. But if she didn’t cry, like Gully and Madame DePaul, then soon Oliver would be better and there would be nothing to cry about at all.

  CHAPTER 11

  That night, the Beaumont house was quiet except for the humming of the machine. Emmaline ran straight to her bedroom as soon as they had returned from the hospital and slammed the door so hard it shook the walls.

  That was four hours ago. Julien knew this because he had gotten better at paying attention to clocks. For Emmaline’s sake, he was being more mindful of the living world and all its rules.

  For the first three hours since their return, he’d cleaned the house. He vacuumed the rug in the living room, and he scrubbed the sink, and he dusted the window ledges and the mantel. He watered the little pink flower that Emmaline had brought home and managed to keep alive through the fall.

  And then, for the fourth hour, he sat on the basement steps, staring at his machine. He held his wife’s blue silk scarf in his hands. It still smelled of her perfume, and he could still remember the elegant way she’d draped it around her neck as she would study herself in the hall mirror before going out.

  “I miss you desperately,” he told her, although she wasn’t there to hear it. “Our Emmaline is hurting, Margeaux. What do I do?”

  But at the end of the hour, when the clock struck eleven, he still hadn’t put the scarf in the machine. He couldn’t relinquish the memory of his wife smiling at him as she opened the door on their way out to a party. There were so many memories attached to that scarf. He didn’t know which he would lose, but he couldn’t bear to part with any of them.

  Instead of summoning his wife’s ghost, he returned the scarf to the hall closet, and he went to check on Emmaline, who was still very much alive.

  He knocked on the door. “Emmaline? Can I bring you some dinner? You should eat something.”

  After several seconds, her small voice answered, “I’m not hungry.”

  “Can I come in?”

  She sniffled. “All right.”

  Emmaline was sitting curled up on her window ledge, staring at the hospital across town. Rivers of tears were drying on her cheeks.

  Julien pulled the chair away from Emmaline’s desk and sat beside her. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Emmaline took a shaky breath. “We were talking about the machine the last time I spoke to him.” Her voice was hoarse and spent from hours of sobbing. “He said something that made me upset, and then he told me that he was sorry. But I didn’t answer him. I skated away, and left him alone. I wanted him to feel bad. I was jealous that his mother was still alive.” She didn’t fully realize this was true until she’d said it out loud, and it brought a new sort of pain. She had wanted Oliver to feel bad. Oliver, who would do anything in the world to make her happy.

  She hugged her knees tighter. “I want to tell him that it’s okay and I’m not mad at him. I want to tell him I’m sorry for being so awful.”

  Julien couldn’t bear the sight of his daughter’s tears. Loss was never fair. Death was most always an injustice; everyone came into the world with the hope that they would live to be very old. Not everyone would. But in the case of children, it was especially cruel.

  “Oliver has always been very observant,” Julien said. “That’s a gift, you know, to be able to read people so well. Few people are good at that.”

  Emmaline looked at him, her eyes pink and swollen.

  “And I’m sure he knew everything you just told me,” Julien went on. “He understood why you were upset, and he knew that you would be back to yourself again in a little while.”

  Emmaline shook her head. “I shouldn’t have left him. He never would have left me.”

  “Oliver knows that you care about him very much,” Julien said.

  “I just want to tell him.” Emmaline’s voice was tiny and high pitched. “I haven’t ever told him how much I care about him.”

  “That’s because it went without saying,” Julien said. “There are some people who mean so much to you, even if you never tell them, you both just know it.”

  Emmaline looked at the hospital again. She was wondering if Monsieur DePaul had taken all the trains and buses that would lead him to Oliver’s bedside. She was wondering what would happen once he arrived.

  “I should have told him,” she said.

  Emmaline lay in bed for hours, staring at the hospital lights in the distance. Her mind was filled with all the things she wished she had said when she had the chance. When she closed her eyes, she saw the words swirling and swirling like water going down a drain, and she couldn’t catch them before they slipped away forever.

  The sun had begun to rise by the time she fell asleep.

  Not long after that, the phone rang.

  “Emmaline?” She awoke to the sound of her bedroom door creaking open. She opened her eyes and saw her father standing in the hallway, but she didn’t move. His expression made her afraid to. She knew too well what bad news looked like even before it was said.

  “Emmaline, I’ve just gotten a call from Madame DePaul. She’d like for you to come and see Oliver, to tell him good-bye.”

  Emmaline had thought she had run dry of tears, but there always seemed to be more. Her body curled in on itself. “No,” she whimpered. Her body shook. She felt cold and sick.

  This time yesterday, Oliver had been waking up in his own bed, across the room from Gully. He got up, and brushed his teeth, and combed his hair, and went out into the world as though he had a hundred more years to live. But he hadn’t even had one more day.

  Her father sat on the edge of the bed. He tried to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away from him. She covered her face with her hands and screamed. She screamed the way she had screamed for Madame DePaul when Oliver was underwater and Gully tried to go after him. She screamed the way she had wanted to scream when they buried her mother, but she had been too timid and stunned, standing there in her black lace dress under the baking sun.

  She screamed for Oliver to come back.

  And then, after she was through, she got up, because that was what always came next, no matter what.

  She walked to the hospital, her father at her side. The entire morning felt unreal. It had snowed in the night, coating the city in a fresh sheet of white that glinted and winked in the
early sunlight. The sky was pink, like Oliver’s rosy cheeks.

  Her fists clenched in her pockets.

  This time, when she entered the hospital elevator, Emmaline told herself that she was prepared for what awaited her in room 7B. She stared at her own dulled reflection in the brass doors, until they slid open and revealed the hallway like a yawning mouth.

  But even though she had prepared herself, the fear and the sadness overtook her anew, and the elevator doors had begun to close by the time she mustered the courage to step forward.

  Oliver was still in his bed, and the tube was still in his mouth. Gully was still beside him. Monsieur and Madame DePaul were standing over both of their children, and their eyes were red and swollen.

  “Emmaline.” Madame DePaul tried to smile, but she cried instead.

  “Gully?” Emmaline whispered. He didn’t look at her, but he reached for her hand. He was wearing two scarves draped over his neck: one green and one red.

  She let him take her hand—the left hand, on which she wore her black lace glove—and she could feel that he was shaking.

  Oliver was very still, aside from the way his chest rose and fell as air was forced through the tube.

  Gully leaned close and whispered in her ear, “I told them to wait for you.”

  Emmaline didn’t know what to say. If they had waited for her, she wished she’d taken more time walking here. She wished she had sailed around the world and back again first, just to keep air in Oliver’s lungs.

  “Oliver is gone,” Madame DePaul said, and there was a wave of tears beating against the door of her words, trying to flood her. “And we have to say good-bye now.”

  Good-bye. Emmaline had said the word a thousand times. Good-bye to the mailman after he’d delivered the mail, good-bye to her father as she left for school, good-bye to Gully, good-bye to Oliver, good-bye when she hung up the phone. But now the word felt like a mountain to climb, filled with monsters and fires. Good-bye felt impossible and cruel.