A Curious Tale of the In-Between (5 page)

She threw bits of grass into the air like confetti. “Aunt Dee says I’m very pragmatic,” she said.

“Maybe you could tell him another secret. A smaller one, to test whether he’s trustworthy.”

“Like what?” Pram asked.

“Tell him what your hair looks like in the morning. If that doesn’t scare him off, nothing else will.”

“Felix, that’s mean.” But she laughed.

Felix smiled, but that smile faded when he saw Clarence watching them from the road. He stood, braced himself, and jumped into the pond. Pram would have called after him, but now she saw Clarence.

How
long had he been standing there?

She waved, and he started walking toward her. His hands were in his pockets, and he looked handsome in his Sunday suit.

Pram stood to meet him and dusted the grass from her wool coat and her skirt. “Hi,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I came to see you,” he said. “Were you just talking to someone?”

Ripples appeared on the pond that weren’t entirely the wind’s fault.

Pram didn’t want to lie. She was particularly bad at it, and it gave her a stomachache. She was good at changing the subject, though. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “There’s something I wanted to show you.”

She grabbed his hand and led him back to the house. Halfway there, they turned their walk into a race and started running. Clarence would have let her win, but he didn’t have to. She was brimming with energy. She waited for him on the front steps, but once he’d caught up, she ran inside and raced him up the stairs.

Aunt Nan stood in the kitchen, cringing as the children’s footsteps pounded through the house. But she didn’t have the heart to scold them.

“Bulls in a china shop,” Ms. Pruitt muttered into her water cracker.

“
That little girl thinks I’m a house,” Edgar said as Aunt Dee fixed his blanket.

Aunt Dee knew this to be his usual nonsense. “Don’t break anything!” she called after the children. But she was smiling.

Pram doubled over in the doorway of her attic bedroom to catch her breath. Clarence caught up to her and clutched the frame. He used to run before his mother died. He’d forgotten, and Pram had made him remember.

Pram fixed her ponytail. There were bits of grass in her hair. When she looked at Clarence again, her eyes were wide and very serious. “I’m trusting you with a big secret,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone, and you can’t, either.”

“I promise,” Clarence said. “Promise” was too small a word. Pram thought so, too, and she held her fist to him, pinkie extended. He linked his pinkie around hers, and with a firm shake, the promise was official.

She led him across her room, past a cabinet of stuffed bears, and into a closet with a wedge-shaped door. Once he’d followed her inside, she closed the door behind them and pulled the cord that turned on the light.

She knelt on the ground and pulled up the small floral mat that lay there. “This used to be my mother’s room, a long time ago,” Pram said. She ran her fingers over the
f
loorboards until she found the one that was loose. She pried it up, revealing a rectangle of darkness that looked like a missing tooth in the floorboards. Clarence felt uneasy as he watched her reach into that darkness; there might be mice.

But all she retrieved was an old shoe box and a sheet of dust, which she brushed away with a small cough.

He knelt beside her. “What is it?” he asked.

“Lower your voice,” she whispered. “I found it one day when I was looking for my teddy bear.” Felix had taken the bear after she’d made him angry, but she didn’t tell Clarence that. “It’s some of my mother’s things. She must’ve hidden them from her sisters.”

Pram methodically unpacked the contents of the box. There were black-and-white photographs of a handsome young man who, Clarence thought, had Pram’s heavy eyelids and timid smile. He was the subject of every photo, with the ocean a white-and-silver swirl behind him.

There was also a stack of letters, bundled together by twine, and a compass. At the very bottom of the box was a postcard. Pram held it up between her middle and index fingers.

Clarence leaned close so that he could read it.

Lily,

I see your exquisite face at every port. I’ve made a horrible mistake leaving you behind. Forgive me, forgive me, forgive me.

Max

“Max is the man in all the letters,” Pram said. “I think he’s my father. Maxwell Baines.”

“Where is he now?” Clarence said.

Pram shrugged. “Around. None of the envelopes have a return address. And the postmarks are all smudged away, so I don’t know when they stopped seeing each other, but I’m not mentioned in any of them.”

“Maybe your mother didn’t tell him about you,” Clarence said. He couldn’t imagine the willpower it would take to keep a secret as enormous as a child. Pram was very secretive about things, though, so he supposed it was possible her mother had been the same way.

“Maybe not,” Pram said. She placed everything neatly back into the box. “They were very in love, though, and he must miss her horribly. The letters say that my aunts didn’t like him. They met one summer, and when he came to visit her after that, my mother kept it a secret from them.”

Clarence
watched as she replaced the box and the floral mat.

“I want to look for my father,” she said. She wanted to also tell him about Felix, who hated the idea of her searching for her father. She wanted to tell Clarence all about the ghosts. But this was a safer secret, she thought. And if he kept it, she would be able to trust him with Felix later, when she’d worked up enough nerve to tell him.

“When?” Clarence said.

“I was going to wait until I was older,” Pram said. “But . . .”

She was quiet for a long time.

“What?” Clarence asked.

She stared at her lap. “I thought you might want to help me look for him. The way we’ve been looking for your mother.”

“But your father isn’t dead,” Clarence pointed out. “We wouldn’t be employing spiritualists.”

“That’s exactly my point,” Pram said. “He’s alive somewhere. It would just be a matter of getting to him.”

Clarence was finding it difficult not to take offense. He stood and opened the closet door.

“Where are you going?” Pram asked.

“Home,” he said.

“Wait,” Pram said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“I don’t understand why you’d want to find him at
all,”
Clarence said. “He’s a stranger to you.” His mother wasn’t a stranger; couldn’t she be a priority? Being dead didn’t make her less important. He had expected Pram to understand that, but perhaps he’d been wrong about her.

“That’s just it,” Pram said. “He may not even know about me. I’d just like to find out.”

Clarence walked to the door. Pram followed him halfway across her bedroom.

“Please don’t go,” she said.

He paused in the doorway, his back to her. He clenched his fists in his pockets, and then he walked away.

CHAPTER

7

F
elix was not fond of Clarence.

Shortly after Clarence left, Pram sat at the pond’s edge, heartbroken because of that boy. It had taken her so long to make a living friend, and he’d hurt her.

Felix petted her hair. “Don’t be sad,” he said. “Thank goodness you didn’t tell him about your ability to see me, if that’s how he handles things. He would have gotten you sent to the circus for sure.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Pram said. “I was rude. I made it sound like finding my father was more important than finding his mother’s ghost.”

“You’d have found her by now if she wanted to be found,” Felix said.

Felix
never left the property, but she didn’t point this out.

“I should apologize,” Pram said.

“He should apologize,” Felix said. “You shared that big secret with him, and he stormed off.”

“Well, whether he wants to help me or not, I’m going to look for my father,” Pram said. “I’ve decided that it’s time.”

“I’ll go with you,” Felix said. He didn’t like the idea of Pram embarking on such a venture alone.

“Really?” Pram said. He never left the pond.

“Where should we start?”

“I’ve been watching the sailors leave the docks,” Pram said. “Every Saturday, I try to get the courage to ask if any of them know my father. I’m afraid they’ll laugh at me. Adults laugh at children all the time.”

“When should we go?” Felix asked.

“I don’t know,” Pram said. “Tomorrow, maybe.”

“Tomorrow sounds fine,” Felix said.

Neither of them wanted to admit being frightened.

That night in bed, Pram lay awake and considered Clarence’s question about wanting to find her father. She didn’t have an answer, and perhaps that absence of an answer
was
her answer. If she wanted to imagine her mother, she had the photo that hung over the stairs. But if she wanted to imagine her father, she had nothing. He was a shadow.

She
could look in the mirror and see her mother, a little, if she didn’t smile too much. But the rest of her was unaccounted for.

She wished she knew how to explain this to Clarence. He knew both of his parents. When he sought his mother’s ghost, he knew what he was looking for. But in searching for her father, more than anything Pram was searching for a bit more of herself.

The next day, Clarence remembered that it was Pram’s turn to have the desk. He didn’t say anything as she sat beside him.

“Are you still angry?” she said.

He couldn’t stay angry, so he said, “No.”

“Good,” she said. “I snuck two cookies into my lunch box.”

“What kind?” he asked.

“Chocolate chip.”

The bell rang and lessons began.

During lunch, Pram and Clarence ignored their sandwiches and ate the cookies instead.

“So all those times we went to the beach,” Clarence began, “was that because you wanted to look for your father?”

Pram nodded.

“
You could have told me.”

“I thought you’d find me strange,” Pram said.

Clarence laughed. “I’ve dragged you to every spiritualist in the city, and you thought I’d find you strange?”

“Everyone else does,” Pram said. “My aunts tell me I ought to be careful about the things I say.”

“Well, I don’t,” he said. “Is finding your father what you really want?”

“It really is,” Pram said confidently.

“What if—” Clarence paused, like he was trying to find a way to be tactful. “Well, what exactly are you expecting when you find him? You said that he’s a sailor. What if he lives on the ocean?”

“I think living on the ocean might be fun.” Pram shrugged. “If he wanted me, I’d like to travel with him. But if he doesn’t, that’s okay, too, I suppose. Really, I just want to know for sure.”

Clarence nodded. “I’ll help you.”

“Really?” she said.

“It’s what friends do,” he said. “I should know. I used to have plenty of them once.”

They must not have been very good friends if they weren’t still around, Pram thought. But she didn’t know much about having friends.

As she ate the last of her cookie, she became overcome with guilt. If Clarence was going to help her with the great
task
of finding her father, she should do all that she could to help him find his mother.

“Friends shouldn’t keep secrets, should they?” Pram said.

Clarence felt a spark of delight to think she was finally opening up to him. “They shouldn’t,” he agreed.

“Come home with me after school,” she said. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.”

Once they got off the school bus, Clarence wasn’t surprised that Pram led him to the pond. He’d seen her talking to someone there yesterday. Even though he hadn’t seen anyone with her, he was sure she hadn’t been alone.

It was a chilly afternoon, and Pram rubbed her gloved hands together. She was nervous. She’d never introduced anyone to Felix before—not since she realized she was the only one who could see him. She wasn’t entirely sure how this would work.

The tree branches shook on the wind. There were few leaves left clinging to them, and they shivered like paper bells.