Flying in Place (8 page)

“No. Why should you teach me how to do that? It won’t do me any good once I’m back in my fat ugly body. You might as well teach me how to fly.”

“But you are flying,” Ginny said. “Your mind is, anyway. And I didn’t have to teach you how to do it. You figured it out by yourself, just like you did with the cartwheel.”

“Great. So I’m the next incarnation of Wonder Girl, and the next time I go to the lake and somebody hassles me I can drag them up to cloud nine and dump them on top of a tree or something. You’re as bad as Myrna Halloran, you know that?”

“No, I don’t know her,” Ginny said seriously. Her face brightened again, “I remember the lake, though. It was pretty there. I used to go sit on that old dock on the western shore when no one else was around—”

“You did? You
did
? So do I!” Idiot, I told myself, of course she does. She’s you. She’s your imagination. What else would she do? More suspiciously, I said, “Mom never told me you did that.”

“She always thought I was at the library,” Ginny said, wrinkling her nose. “I studied at the lake sometimes, but mostly I just watched the fish.”

Just like me. What a surprise. “Minnows, right? The ones that make shadows on the bottom—”

“And the birds that peck in the sand looking for things to eat.” She grinned, and I realized that I hadn’t seen her smile before. One of her upper front teeth was chipped. Mom had never told me about that, either, and it didn’t show up in any of the family photographs. Well, so I didn’t want to think she was perfect. But how had I come up with the pajamas?

Ginny was still babbling about the lake. “And I used to see owls sometimes at dusk, and bats and raccoons, and once I saw a fox come to the water to drink. A big red one. It was beautiful. Have you ever seen a fox?”

“No.” Just boys. “There aren’t so many animals around now, I guess because there are more people or something. Just the birds and the fish, and sometimes deer. But not very often.”

Ginny chewed her lip for a minute and then said, “Do you want to go there, to the lake? We can go there, if you want to.”

Oh, sure we can. “Won’t people see us?”

“No, silly. There won’t be anybody else there. We won’t
really
be there, not in the world. Just in our heads, sort of. It’s hard to explain.”

“You’re kidding.” I knew all of this was completely crazy, but I felt the same surge of lightness as when I’d left my body, I wanted to believe in her. I did, I did. “We can go to the Sake, just like that? You mean I can go to the lake and there won’t be anybody there? I can go there whenever I want to, just by leaving my body?”

“It’s not that different from daydreaming, is it? But if you stay out of your body for too long, you may not be able to get back.” Ginny frowned and picked up a strand of her hair again, tugging at it with thin fingers. “I don’t think I should have told you.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ll be careful. But look, can you take me into your room, too? So I can see it? I really want to see your room.”

“No,” Ginny said. “It doesn’t work that way. I can’t take you anywhere you haven’t been. If we go somewhere together, it has to be to a place we both remember.”

Stupid ghost. I wasn’t going to get any proof one way or the other with that dumb rule. “Great. So if flying’s so easy, why doesn’t everybody do it? Just flit around all day like Peter Pan?”

“I don’t know. I guess they prefer being in their bodies.” She smiled, shyly. “I remember
Peter Pan
. Mom used to read it to me.”

“Read it? She doesn’t have to. She’s got it memorized. That and ‘Goblin Market.’ Did you get ‘Goblin Market’?”

She shook her head, frowning. “Which one is that? The one about the little boy and the monsters?”

“Huh? No, that’s
Where the Wild Things Are
.” I’d never liked that story, because all the wild things looked like they breathed too loudly. “No, it’s the one about Lizzie who saves her sister Laura from the poison fruit, you know, ‘For your sake I have braved the glen / And had to do with goblin merchant men—’ ”

“It sounds scary,” Ginny said. “I don’t remember that one. Mom didn’t read me scary stories.”

“You’re kidding!
Peter Pan’s not
scary, with Hook and the crocodile and nasty little Tinkerbell trying to get Wendy shot down like a bird?”

Ginny shook her head again. “No. I always knew it would come out all right in the end. Mom told me so the first time she read it to me.”

“She never told
me
that. Just let me be terrified through the whole thing.” Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about books anymore. “Let’s go to the lake. Right now. What do we do, fly out the window?”

“No,” Ginny said. “Not now. Mom’s here. You have to go back.”

“What?” I’d almost forgotten that my body was lying there on the bed, but when I looked at it I saw Mom bending over me, shaking my shoulder.

“Go back,” Ginny said. “Right now.”

“But—”

“Just go! She’s going to get really scared if she can’t wake you up.” She bit her lip and shivered all over, once, like a wet dog. “She’ll get hysterical. She’ll shake you and shake you and shake you, until you flop back and forth like a rag doll and all the IVs come out of your arms—”

“I don’t have IVs in my arms,” I said.

“I did.”

And then she turned and fled through the wall, and I was alone. Ginny was right; Mom was shaking me harder. As if through layers of cotton, I heard her saying, “Emma! Emma, wake up!” She looked almost as upset as she had when she’d tried to slap me.

I went back, wondering if she’d slap me for real this time because I hadn’t woken up more quickly. “Emma!” Her voice was so loud that it hurt my ears, and I jumped the way you do when the volume on a radio gets turned way up by accident. “Emma, wake up!”

“All right,” I said, opening my eyes. “I’m awake.” My voice came out funny; kind of slurred, like I’d forgotten how to use my throat. My body still hurt, but the pain was distant and muffled.

Mom was pale and sweaty, ugly wet splotches spreading from the armpits of her blouse. Just like Tom Halloran, I thought with satisfaction. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked sharply. “I must have been shaking you for five minutes—”

“I was tired, that’s all.”

“I thought you came up here to study for your math test. What happened?”

“I got sleepy, all right? I’m awake now.”

“Are you sick?” She felt my forehead and frowned. “You don’t have a fever. How can you be so tired at seven at night?”

Because I was flying around the ceiling with the ghost of your beloved dead daughter, “I don’t know, Mom. Maybe it’s because I have my period.”

She wrapped a tendril of reddish-gold hair around one finger. Her hands were shaking. “You’re not taking drugs, are you?”

“What?” I sat up; my body felt more real again, but so did the pain, and my voice was still weaker than it should have been. “No, I’m not taking drugs. Not unless you count the Tylenol Mrs. Halloran gave me. Look, Mom, I’m really okay. I’m sorry I upset you.”

“Will you be all right to go to school tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“You still sound exhausted. Maybe you should stay home tomorrow and reschedule the test. I’ll arrange it with Mr. Miller—”

“It’s okay, Mom. I’d rather get it over with.”

She tugged at her hair again. “Are you sure you aren’t sick?”

“No, I’m not sick!” If I were sick the famous doctor would have to examine me, not that he wouldn’t do it anyway. But I had to get her off the topic of my health before she took him up on his previous offer. “I guess I’m a little hungry. Maybe I should have dinner after all.”

Mom’s face relaxed, and she let go of the strand of hair. “I’ll bring up a tray. The pot roast and potatoes, and string beans, and some milk. And ice cream for dessert? Does that sound good?”

“That’s great, Mom.”

She gave me another of those strange shy smiles from the morning. “Maybe you’d better take an iron pill, too.”

“Sure, Mom.”

She nodded and bustled out of the room, and bustled back a few minutes later carrying a tray loaded with enough food to feed three of the Halloran children. She sat next to my bed and watched me eat it, and when I’d finished she said, “Do you want to go back to sleep now?”

“Yes.” I really wanted to fly, but I couldn’t tell her that.

Another shy smile. “I’ll read you
Peter Pan
, if you want me to.”

Peter Pan
, If she only knew. “It’s okay, Mom. You don’t have to. I think I’ll be able to fall asleep on my own.”

“All right,” she said, and got up and kissed me on the forehead and left the room. It was deep blue dusk outside, the loveliest time of evening, and I felt much better for having eaten. I got up and changed into light summer pajamas suitable for flying, and then I got back into bed and went to find Ginny.

Over the next two weeks,
we learned that there was no way for us to reach the lake in a straight line, because we didn’t know the same way to get there. New houses had been built on our block since Ginny died, and Tom Halloran’s highway now cut through one corner of town, carrying trucks and buses and vacationers headed for larger lakes to the north, I kept striking off in what I thought was the right direction, only to discover that Ginny was no longer next to me because I’d put myself somewhere she’d never seen and therefore couldn’t remember. The first time it happened—as I hovered over the Woolworth’s in town—I thought she’d abandoned me, but when I went back home I found her curled with her arms around her knees in one corner of my bedroom ceiling.

“I figured you’d have to come back here,” she said. “I was right over Palmer Street and then you weren’t there anymore—”

“
I
was over Palmer Street! Over the Woolworth’s!”

“There’s a Woolworth’s there now?” she asked, and then I realized what had happened. She looked at me and said sadly, “That’s how it works, Emma. We can only go to places I already know.”

“Can’t teach a dead dog new tricks,” I said, and regretted it the moment I’d spoken, but to my surprise Ginny answered with her sweet, infectious giggle. Mom had told me Ginny was kind to everyone, polite to everyone, honest, brave, moral, and coordinated, but she’d never described Ginny’s laugh. It reminded me of the triumphant chortles of the little birds who hunted for food at the edge of the water, and I wondered if Ginny had learned to imitate them from spending so much time at the lake. Did I laugh like that, too?

I’d stopped worrying about whether she was really real or not. Whatever she was, she was vibrant and interesting, and I wasn’t about to throw away any distractions. The bleeding had stopped, but the bruises continued, and the breathing had begun to follow me farther out of my body. I joined Ginny now at any time of day, whenever I could, but our dawn expeditions had a special urgency, because at dawn the breathing tracked us like a bloodhound. One morning I saw Ginny looking over her shoulder, frowning, as the noise whistled behind us, the moaning wind before a storm.

“You hear it too, don’t you?” I said, and she shivered.

“Come on,” she said, flying faster. “We have to find the lake.”

We gradually mapped out a route that led through backyards and bits of forest still untouched by the highway, past the elementary school we’d both attended, and along stretches of nearly forgotten back roads, rarely travelled except by children and animals, where the scenery changed only with the seasons. The backyards of the established families in town stayed fairly constant, and the ugly brick school would outlast my grandchildren, if I ever had any, but there were few other human landmarks I could share with Ginny. She had lived in a gentler, slower town than I did, a town untroubled by highways. I wondered if she’d recognize the lake when we finally found it, or if we would forever be unable to reach our destination because owls and foxes no longer glided through the twilight.

But at last we got there. Surrounded by trees, the lake we shared glimmered in an eerie silence, undisturbed by radios or powerboats. Nothing marred the water; there were no inner tubes or water-skiers or bobbing bits of trash. This was the lake of autumn sunsets when the chill kept everyone else away, the lake of summer dawns, the impossible lake of dreams. The first time we reached it, we spent what felt like hours flying loop-de-loops above the water, whirling in dizzying circles and alighting in the tops of trees to rest. When we swooped near the surface, thousands of minnows scattered at the shadows we made on the bottom, and the woods rang with birdsong, I’d never been so happy.

“This is great,” I called to Ginny. “This is so great. Is heaven always this much fun?”

“This isn’t heaven,” she told me, and flew off to sit on a tree branch. I followed her.

“Well, as far as I’m concerned it’s heaven. I’d sign on for this right now.”

“Not if it was all you could do,” she told me.

“Well, it’s not
hell
, is it? Where are we, then?”

“No place. Limbo.”

“Nuts,” I said, and pushed off the branch to do some more aerial cartwheels. But Ginny didn’t join me, and when I flew back to the branch she looked thinner somehow, hollower, with deeper shadows under her eyes. For a moment I almost fancied I could see through her.