With the house mostly cleaned out, her mom started going to work at the urgent care place just a few miles away. Part-time at first, so Lily often woke up in the morning to an empty house. She drifted from room to room, feeling like something was missing. Their storage container had gotten lost, so they didn’t have their desktop and TVs. Even though the Wi-Fi and cable now worked, there was no way to use it. Her parents kept strict child locks on her phone, so she had texting and phone calls and music, but that was it. Bored to death, she found an old fishing rod in a trunk by the pool and caught bluegills from the dock with little balls of bread. Summer spread out, hot and slow, as summer tended to do.
A week passed, then two. The container was always supposedly on its way but never arrived. Lily began to think that all their belongings had been lost for good, that she would never again see her furniture or clothes or books. It was almost like they were stranded on a tiny island, out in the middle of the swamp. They couldn’t see their neighbors’ houses, and no one ever came down the long gravel driveway. Even the mail hadn’t shown up yet. School was a month away, and she had no idea where she would be going; when she asked, her mom said the schools were weird here and she was waiting to see where Lily had been accepted. It was so easy to feel unmoored, so disconnected from real life. She’d never felt this way in Colorado.
Lily tried texting Rachel several times but got no response. She asked casual questions at first, then apologized for what had happened, then begged forgiveness. Finally, when she was so lonely she wanted to cry, she told her mom she was going for a walk, and she put on her old sneakers and headed out the same way she’d gone the day she’d ended up in Rachel’s backyard. But she couldn’t make her way through the sucking mud, protruding roots, hanging vines, and interlaced branches. She was hot, her skin prickling, her hair straggling into her eyes, and it seemed she had barely gone ten feet before her path was solidly blocked. She went back home and took a shower to wash the scent of the swamp off her skin.
That night, Lily again dreamed that she was swimming.
But this time the dream was more immediate, more real. She had never swum much in real life, outside of paddling around in a hotel pool once for CJ’s birthday. She had hoped to learn to swim now that she lived in Florida. But if Rachel wouldn’t return her texts, clearly she wouldn’t be learning how to swim in Rachel’s nice pool, and there was no way she’d put so much as a toe in the lake.
But in the dream? She swam like an otter, like she had always known what to do in the turquoise pool. It was wonderful. The water was silky and cool, and her hair floated out like a mermaid’s. She could even flip forward or backward. She sank down, down, down to the bottom of the deep end and looked up at the shimmering corona of the sun. It was the nicest dream she’d had since moving to Florida, and she wanted it to go on forever. The sky was blue and the sun was warm and Lily floated on her back in crystal blue water, looking up at the string of Christmas lights that would shine at night in cheerful red, blue, and green. She felt at home and at peace.
Until everything changed.
The sky went dark like ink drops spreading in water. The pool was cold and clammy, the water growing viscous and thick, and her bones became leaden. Her feet touched down, scraping something hard, and her hair felt heavy, pulled underwater by invisible hands. She began to choke and thrash, trying to remember how to float, how to breathe, how to bring back the blue skies and the warm sun. But the darkness could not be repelled.
In that moment, she realized this had to be a dream, one that was swiftly becoming a nightmare. So she did what had always worked before: She screamed and screamed and screamed. But instead of waking up, instead of feeling her mom’s warm hand on her shoulder, she coughed and gasped as the thick black water ran down her throat, choking her. When she opened her eyes, everything was dark, except for a strange glimmer, a silver glow that seemed to touch every surface—and three colorful lights.
She wasn’t in bed. She wasn’t in her room. She wasn’t even in the house.
She could feel the weight of the air outside, that heat that wrapped around her, thick and heavy as an old wool coat. She was wet and struggling, and she wasn’t quite drowning, but she was standing in water somehow and…
Oh no.
Oh no oh no oh no.
It couldn’t be.
Not this.
Lily was in the swimming pool.
Her swimming pool, the one in her yard, that nasty hole in the ground just brimming with muck.
She was on her tiptoes in the deep end, and the water would choke her if she couldn’t keep her nose and mouth above it. She knew that if she could only get to the shallow end, she would be okay. That part was dry, and there were steps that led up to the patio. In her dream she had known how to move, how to swim, how to use the water. But this was no dream, and this was not clear water. This was nasty green sludge choked with algae and plants and dead things, and she could feel them moving past her and brushing over her skin as she fought her way to safety. She tried screaming again, but the filthy water ran down her throat, making her splutter. Not like her mom could hear her all the way outside, anyway.
There was nothing to hold on to, nothing but her body and the water, which pushed against her like something living, like some monster that wanted to hold her close. She struggled against it, walking on the tips of her toes, pulling her arms through the swampy black liquid, so close to being able to pull her body up onto the dry, safe concrete, when her foot tripped on something that might have been a stick or a snake or an old, wet bone. It rattled under her foot, and she slipped, and her head went under the water.
She held her breath and flapped her arms, momentarily suspended as she struggled to find her feet again. There was nothing as dark as this place, nothing as terrifying as being trapped under that thick green water. Finally, she put down a foot and then another and flung her arms back, using her whole body to flounder up onto the dry concrete. Her fingers found it first, and her still-sensitive fingertips burned as she crawled on hands and knees up the steps. As soon as her entire body was out of the water, she flopped down on her side, pawing leaves and branches out of the way. A frog leapt into the air, terrified of her, and she almost laughed.
The thought that she was the scary thing here was hilarious.
She coughed up some vile black gunk and lay there, catching her breath. She was in her pajamas, soaked through. She had never been more exhausted in her life. Even covered in green slime, she felt like she had a fever, it was so hot out.
It took everything Lily had to drag herself to her wobbling feet and stagger away from the pool. Wiping gunk out of her eyes, she saw the kitchen door hanging open. Wearily she walked back toward the house, wincing as she stumbled over rocks and sticks and sharp, tiny shells. All the lights were out except for those three remaining Christmas lights hanging in the pool cage.
She paused at the doorstep.
If she walked inside right now, like this, she’d leave wet, slimy footprints everywhere, and then her mom would want to know what had happened, and she would be in trouble, or maybe end up in the psych ward somewhere. She’d read about insane asylums in a couple of horror books, and even though they couldn’t be as bad as the ones from the 1800s, she still didn’t want to try to explain to some old guy in a white coat that she was apparently sleepwalking and that a ghost had pushed her friend down the stairs.
With a heavy sigh, she reached into the kitchen and pulled over the roll of paper towels that sat by the stove. It was disgusting, rubbing wads of paper towels up and down her face and hair and arms and legs and seeing the white paper come away coated with green-and-black stains and peppered with dead bugs and rotten leaves. When she’d cleaned off all that she could, she tossed the pile of paper towels into the dumpster that still hadn’t been picked up, locked the kitchen door firmly behind herself, and headed into her bathroom.
22.
The next morning, Lily remembered only bits and pieces of what had happened in the night, as if it really had been a dream. But the pile of green-and-black-smeared paper towels in the dumpster did not lie. After breakfast she walked outside to the dented and ripped pool cage and stood over the still, thick, murky water. A green-black smear stretched from the water to the stairs, where her footprints were clearly visible.
It definitely wasn’t a dream.
Hands shaking, she brought a bowl of water from the kitchen and scrubbed the footprints away with more paper towels. Her parents never came out here, but she couldn’t take the risk.
That day books could not hold her attention, and wherever she went, she felt jumpy. Her mind was as dark and twisty as the pool water. Was she going crazy, or was there really a ghost—or two ghosts—haunting the new house? Neither answer was good. And thinking about it, trying to figure out which one was worse, was making her even crazier. Horrible thoughts spun through her head, thoughts of drowning or falling down the stairs or having her legs chopped off by the fan. She felt lost in her own life with no safe harbor and no one she could trust. She quietly murmured, “Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice,” like in the musical, but no one showed up from the other side to offer helpful suggestions.
As a last-ditch effort to distract herself, she decided she needed something to do, if only to stop her hands from fidgeting and her imagination from taking her down terrifying paths.
Her mom was at work, so Lily decided to poke around. After all the cleaning, it had been a relief to spend a few days without putting on yellow gloves or touching garbage bags, but it occurred to her that no one had yet tackled the spare room downstairs. Her mother had taken one look, firmly closed the door, and said, “We’ve got the dumpster for a while yet. This can wait. Not like it’s going anywhere.”
Now Lily gathered up a pair of gloves and a roll of garbage bags, and for the first time she stepped into the room that was so horrible even her mother had shied away.
It was even more densely packed than the den had been, but it looked like everything shoved into the spare room had been important—to someone, at some time. This wasn’t regular garbage but the sort of stuff old people accumulated over a lifetime, things too special to throw away, but only special to them. Trunks, boxes, thick brown folders of files held together with twine. Somewhere under all of it, she could see a dresser and the wooden posts of an old bed.
Her mouth twitched up. This room might actually hold the clues to what had happened to Brian and Britney. Well, if the Ouija board was right, Brian had died because he’d neglected to take his medicine, but she still had no idea what had happened to Britney. It would be ridiculous if what she needed to know had been sitting in here all along. As a bonus, her parents would probably be really pleased with her for doing some cleaning on her own and making the house more livable.
She put on her gloves and stepped inside. Closest to the open door were boxes stacked and labeled with things like Photos and Taxes and Barbara’s China. Those boxes were too heavy for Lily to lift, so she slipped around them to see what else was on the bed and dresser.
The first interesting thing she found was an old photo album. There was no label on the outside of the book, but as she flipped through it, she could see notations in careful, faded handwriting. She stopped when one caught her eye. Brian holds Melissa for the first time, it read. The man in the picture was holding a baby wrapped in a pink blanket, smiling for the camera. The photo was old, like from the eighties.
“Brian,” Lily murmured to herself.
But who was Melissa?
The album showed Melissa going from a baby to ten years old, with pictures of her swimming in the ocean, or roller-skating, or learning to ride a bike as Brian ran behind her. Every now and then, rarely, a woman showed up in the pictures. She was younger than Brian, smiling and pretty. And then the book ended with Melissa at a restaurant for her tenth birthday party, with some creepy animatronic mouse looming behind her in striped overalls. The next album Lily found started with Melissa in a uniform, going to school. There was a Christmas picture, where Melissa got an old-fashioned Nintendo. And then there was a picture of crying Melissa hugging her mother, who was in a bed in the hospital. And then the album ended abruptly, leaving many empty pages.
Lily looked around for another album but didn’t find one. What had happened to the woman, and why were there no more pictures of Melissa? And where did Britney fit into the picture?
She focused on the box labeled Photos. It was full of paper, but she didn’t see any actual photos. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of Amazon packing slips. She used a nearby pencil to move the papers around, but the box was just too deep to see if there was anything interesting underneath, and she was still too skittish about the idea of roaches and spiders to dig around.
Oh well. Maybe if she cleaned up some of this junk, she would find more clues. She opened one of the black bags and began cleaning obvious garbage off the table. There were more receipts, plus stacks of magazines on fishing, hunting, and guns, with some old Highlights magazines mixed in. Under the table, she found boxes full of clothes, all for a little girl, in sizes six and seven. She thought about saving them for the donations bin, but they were faded and covered in roach eggs and mouse poop, so she carried them out to the dumpster. She threw away boxes of chewing tobacco and cigars, plastic bags filled with rags and paintbrushes rock-hard with yellow paint. She saved an old tool kit and a tackle box full of fishing stuff. She threw away broken toasters and plastic plates and a huge box full of old Christmas lights like the ones hanging around the pool cage. The ancient artificial tree went to the trash, too. She was getting lots of exercise, running to and from the dumpster again.
A little after noon, her mom showed up to grab her forgotten lunch. Apparently Lily had missed her text while she’d been cleaning, and she nearly had a heart attack when the front door opened. Lily didn’t want her mom to see the spare room until it was clean, so she shut the door and tiptoed in from the den. As they ate their sandwiches, Lily looked up and chose her words carefully.
“Mom, do you know when—”
With a snort, her mom interrupted her, which she didn’t do very often. “No, I don’t know when the storage container will get here. Believe me, it’s making us all crazy.”
So Lily tried a different tack. “Could you maybe unlock the internet on my phone? I’d at least like to look up the schools I might end up going to.”
Much to her surprise, her mom put her head in her hands and moaned. “Look, I know. I know I need to figure it out. I need to figure everything out. I’m trying, but it’s wearing me so thin. This place is getting to me.”
It felt like all noise ceased. That constant outdoor hum of bugs and birds went silent. The skin prickled up the back of Lily’s neck.
“Me too,” she said quietly.
Her mom looked up, worry in her eyes. “Yeah?”
“Nightmares,” Lily said, looking down. “Like, a lot. And Rachel.”
Her mom put a hand on her arm. “Honey, I told you. That wasn’t…She just slipped, okay? I saw the Ouija board at the top of the stairs. She slipped on it and fell. I’m sorry she’s not talking to you, but no one could blame you. You’re just a kid. It’s not your fault if she’s clumsy.”
“She’s not…I mean, that wasn’t what happened.”
Mom pulled away and gave her a bright-eyed look. “You’re at a confusing age. Your brain and body are changing—”
“Mom! Stop! Gross!”
“I just need to remind you that…it’s hard. I know it’s hard. It’s hard for everyone your age.”
Lily gulped down a hysterical laugh. Most kids her age weren’t waking up half dro
wned in abandoned swimming pools at midnight with no idea how they got there.
“It can make you feel cray, is all I’m saying. I definitely felt cray when I was your age.”
Lily rolled her eyes. “Mom. Seriously. Don’t say cray, okay?”
“Fine. Crazy. Out of control. Happy one second, angry the next. Crying for no reason. Insomnia, weird dreams, anxiety, depression, rage. Your body doesn’t feel like your body anymore. You feel out of control. It’s not just Florida—it’s just part of being your age. Part of being you. And after what happened last year—” She broke off and smiled, so soft and full of pity. “I just know you have a lot of feelings right now.”
Lily ignored that last bit and nervously picked the last chunk of her sandwich apart as she built up the nerve to ask her mom, “Do you believe in ghosts?”
But her mom just stood up to whisk the paper plates into the garbage. She was all work again, no nonsense.
“Of course not,” she said a little too harshly. “I believe that when creative kids get bored, their imaginations go wild and they look for drama where there is none. But news flash: Most of life is just boring.”
Lily got that deflated feeling she was becoming accustomed to each time she tried to confide in her parents and was completely written off. Her mom had basically blamed all the freaky stuff that had happened on puberty and boredom. Which was just insulting. Weird mood swings did not make a kid sleepwalk into the pool. But whatever. She had known from the start that her mom wouldn’t really hear what she had to say.
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