A Skeleton in the Family (6 page)

“My pleasure. Thanks for the cookie.”

He gathered his things, got up, and then said, “Would you like to get together sometime?”

“For an interview about adjunct trials and tribulations?”

“Actually I was thinking dinner and a movie. Unless there's another man in the picture?”

“No, my picture is currently without male embellishment.” We exchanged smiles, and he left.

To add to my pleasure, Madison wandered by just then. She looked at me with a questioning expression, and when I put on a look of studied nonchalance, she checked Fletcher out from the rear and gave me a thumbs-up.

I had to agree with her grading. Not only was Fletcher more than presentable from the front, he had an excellent rear view.

The rest of the day went by quickly, even without further visits from attractive reporters. Since the con was being held on campus rather than at a hotel, it had to shut down earlier in the day than was the norm for cons, and the last panels ended at seven.

The plan had been for me to meet Sid back at my office at six so I could get him back out to the van before coming back inside to drag Madison away from her friends. But I'd been sidetracked by a particularly tricky level of Angry Birds, and I didn't get back to my office until quarter after. I'd been worried Sid would also have lost track of time since his costume hadn't included a watch, but as it turned out he was already in the office, and had packed up his costume and most of himself.

“Sorry I'm late,” I said.

“No problem.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Yeah.”

I waited for more, but that was it and there wasn't time to talk anyway, so I zipped up the suitcase and got him and his costume out to the car.

We made it by the skin of my teeth. I'd just slammed the back of the van shut when I caught sight of Madison and a trio of new friends heading my way. When she introduced me to Nikko, Liam, and Chelsea, at first I thought she was just being polite and thoughtful, when in fact, she had offered them all rides home and knew it would be tougher for me to refuse with them standing there. Before we'd gotten out of the parking lot, that had morphed into an invite for them to come to our house, after a short stop for sustenance at the Aquarius Drive-In, the burger joint that had been an institution even when I was in high school.

Most of the conversation during the drive was incomprehensible to me, but I did smile when I heard Madison say, “Did you guys see the guy dressed as Shinigami?”

“Could you annotate that for me?” I said, pretending ignorance.

“Lord Death from
Soul Eater
. He was awesome! He stayed in character all day long, and he was chopping people right and left. It was so funny!”

“Oh, him,” I said offhandedly. “He chopped me, too.” I hoped Sid could hear about the good impression he'd made.

Unfortunately, Madison's new coterie hung at the house until after midnight, which meant that I didn't get a chance to debrief with Sid. I had to wait until Madison went to bed to get his suitcase out of the van, and left him at the bottom of the attic stairs to make his way up by himself.

“I'll come get you tomorrow morning,” I whispered as he reassembled himself.

“Don't bother,” he said. “I think I'll stay home.”

“Didn't you have fun?”

“It was fine. It was good. I just think one day is plenty.”

“But—”

I heard Madison's bedroom door open, and slammed the attic door shut.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I thought I saw a bug.” Which was the first thing I could think of.

“G-mom and G-dad must have bug spray.”

“I'll take care of it tomorrow. You better get to bed if you want to go back to the con tomorrow.”

“Just getting a drink of water.”

With Madison wakeful, I didn't dare risk speaking to Sid again that night, and though I checked with him again the next morning, he insisted he didn't want to come along. So I hung out near the deli for most of the day, playing Angry Birds and hoping in vain to see Fletcher again.

M
onday was one minor disaster after another: Madison had forgotten to take her school clothes out of the drier, which meant they were a wrinkled mess; I spilled most of a carton of orange juice on the kitchen floor; my right rear tire had gone flat and I'd let my AAA membership lapse; my students were unexpectedly surly; and just before dinner, Madison announced that she needed poster board for a project that was due the next day. In other words, I had no time for Sid.

Tuesday wasn't much better, and Madison and I snarked at each other most of the day. I wasn't sure if it was her fault or mine or a combination, but when Deborah called and asked if I minded her running off with my daughter for the evening, I was delighted to give my blessing. I'd have given her my VISA card to pay for dinner, too, if I weren't nudging the credit limit.

As soon as they were out of the driveway, I headed up to the attic and knocked on the door. “Sid? The coast is clear!”

There was no response.

“Sid?”

“I'm reading.”

“You can read anytime. Come down and visit.”

“I'm getting to a really good part.”

Now I was partially suspicious, and partially worried. Sid loved to read, but he could read all day and night, whereas I'd never known him to pass up a chance to gossip.

I tried again. “I'll put on your
Bone Songs
mix disc so we can dance.”

“I'm not in the mood.”

“We could watch
The Nightmare Before Christmas
.”

“No, thanks.”

Passing up music and his favorite movie. “Come on, Sid, I want to talk to you.”

“I told you I'm reading.”

I bent over to check the crack under the door. “With no light on?”

“Are you worried I'll ruin my eyes?”

It was an invasion of his privacy that I knew I'd feel guilty about later, but I tried the doorknob anyway. Alas, it was wasted guilt. Locked. “Unlock the door and come out or else!”

“Or else what?”

“Or else I'm going to get the screwdriver and take the hinges off the door, probably breaking every one of my fingernails in the process and getting half a dozen bruises.”

“Yeah? I don't have much trouble with fingernails and bruises.”

“I'll never get the door back up by myself, which will mean that you'll have to hide if Madison comes near the attic, which means that you won't be able to eavesdrop. And we'll either have to get Deborah to come fix it, which she won't make a priority, or wait until my parents get back from sabbatical, or hire somebody I can't afford to pay. Is your sulk really worth all that trouble?”

A few seconds passed, but finally Sid unlocked the door and opened it.

“I'm not sulking,” he said. “I'm thinking.” He turned to go back up.

Now I knew something was wrong. When Sid was in a good mood, all his bones were tightly connected as if still fastened by invisible tendons, but when he was down, the connections were loose, as if it weren't worth the trouble it took to hold himself together. He occasionally left behind a metatarsal if upset, like when I went to Europe for a month, and the day Deborah announced that she didn't want to talk to him anymore, he left two finger bones on the couch. This time, as I followed him up, I saw no fewer than a dozen tiny bones left on the stairs. I collected them as I went.

When I got upstairs, he'd collapsed on the chair, looking more like a pile of bones than he'd been when stuffed into his suitcase. I put the pieces he'd dropped next to him, but he didn't even bother to put them back into place.

“Talk to me, Sid. Why are you upset?”

“Who said I was upset?”

“Come on, spill your guts.” With his love of straight lines, he should have responded
They're already spilled
, or maybe
There's nothing left to spill
. Instead he just shrugged. Given that he'd been acting odd as early as Saturday, I made an educated guess. “Did something happen at the con?”

“No,” he said in a tone that any parent would have recognized as a lie.

“What happened?”

“Nothing happened.”

I waited him out.

“It's something I saw. Some
one
, I mean. I recognized somebody.”

“Okay. Was it one of Mom and Phil's friends or what?”

“No. I remember her from before.”

“From before what?”

“From before I was . . . like this. Georgia, I recognized a woman from when I was alive.”

“F
rom when you were alive?” I said stupidly. “Are you sure?”

“I think so. Yeah. Only she looked older.”

“That stands to reason. I mean, you've been living with us for thirty years.”

“Maybe I've been here that long, but I haven't been living here. I am dead, you know.”

“Mom always says you're in a different state of consciousness.”

“Yeah, the dead kind.”

“Whatever you call it, you've been part of this family for that long, so if you remember that woman from before, she would have to be older.”

“Even if I'm not.”

“So, who was she?”

Sid shrugged with a careless clatter. “I don't know. It's just that when I saw her, I felt . . . something.”

“Happiness? Sadness? Love? Hate?”

“Fear.”

“You were afraid of her?”

“Not exactly, but seeing her made me afraid. Like a flashback. You remember that time you slammed your finger in the car door and had to go to the emergency room? For months afterward, you flinched every time somebody shut a car door.”

“I still do.”

“Well, it was like that. Seeing her reminded me of being scared.”

“But you don't know why?”

He shook his head, his skull rattling alarmingly. “How can I be afraid of something I don't remember? There was something else. I felt guilty, too, as if I'd done something I shouldn't have or hadn't done something I should have. What if I did something bad when I was alive, Georgia?”

“The statute of limitations has run out for anything you could have done,” I said, trying to make a joke and failing miserably. The fact was, we really didn't know who Sid had been before he was Sid.

It wasn't as though my family hadn't wondered who he was or where he'd come from, but he'd never been able to remember anything about his past. He knew how to walk, talk, and read, and his knowledge of current events and popular culture was no more than a year or so out of date, but that was it. Though Phil had quizzed him about the experiences of death and his bony rebirth, his earliest memory was the first moment he saw me.

Mom and Phil had spent quite a lot of time theorizing about his origins, deciding that he was either a ghost haunting his own skeleton, a vegetarian zombie, a government project gone very wrong, or the most amazing shared delusion ever. None of the explanations stood up to scrutiny, of course, but I hadn't really cared where Sid came from and Sid didn't seem to, either. Sid was just . . . Sid. As I told my parents, I could always count on him, even if I couldn't account for him.

And right now he was upset and in danger of falling apart. Unlike most people, when he fell apart, he really fell apart.

“Tell me about this woman,” I said while there were still enough pieces hanging together for us to carry on a conversation. “What did she look like?”

“Tall. Older—like in her sixties. Jeans and a down jacket. Outdoorsy looking.”

“Did you talk to her?”

“No!”

“Could you read her name tag?”

“She wasn't wearing one.”

“Really?” Security at the con had been kind of tight—I was surprised they'd let anybody into the building without a tag.

“I don't think she was attending the con. She was looking around like she was confused, not turning her nose up or anything, but she clearly just didn't get it.”

“Then what?”

“That's it. She walked through the main hallway looking around, and I saw her meet some young guy and they left. And before you ask, I didn't recognize the guy and he didn't have a name tag, either.”

“That's it?”

“That's it.”

“And that's why you didn't want to go back to the con Sunday.”

“Yeah. I was afraid I'd see her again.” He paused, drumming his fingers noisily. “Now I don't know what to do.”

“You don't have to do anything,” I pointed out. “As long as you stay away from campus, you'll probably never see her again.”

“Maybe, but now I know she's out there. I've kind of got memories.” He shook his head. “Not exactly memories, but a feeling. It's like there's another person inside me, and I don't know who that person is. I don't like it.”

“Sid, there are two choices. One, forget it ever happened. Two, we try to find out who that woman is.”

“We?”

“Well you don't think I'd leave you alone with this, do you?”

“But you've got so much going on. It's not fair for me to ask you.”

“Did you ask? Unless you don't want me to—”

“No! I want you to.”

“Okay, then.”

“So . . . What do we do first?”

Never have I been so grateful to be interrupted as I was in the next second—I didn't have the slightest idea of how to start.

“Mom! Mom!” Not only was Madison home, but she was on her way up the stairs.

“Shit! I've got to go.” I practically ran down the attic stairs, and was grateful I didn't fall down them. I got the door slammed behind me just in time.

“Another bug?” Madison asked.

“No, but I thought I heard a squirrel up there—I may need to get a trap.” Before she could object, I added, “A humane one.”

“Good.”

“Why are you home from dinner so early? Did you and Aunt Deb have a fight?”

“I never fight with Aunt Deb.”

“Right, that's me.”

She rolled her eyes. “Aunt Deb got an emergency call from somebody who'd forgotten the code for his alarm system, so we ate fast and she dropped me off on her way.”

“And you came running to find me because you missed me?”

“No, look! I made Kevin Bolk's Tumblr!” She waved her phone at me, and I had to take it to hold it still long enough to see the photo of her standing next to Bolk, proudly holding the sketch she'd commissioned from him.

I thanked the powers that be for Kevin Bolk's Tumblr—now I had a suggestion for Sid. “I guess there must be a lot of pictures from Mangachusetts on the Web,” I said loudly, assuming that he was eavesdropping.

“Oh, sure. I've put some up on Facebook myself, and Samantha took a lot of pictures for her blog.”

“I'll have to go Web surfing and see if I can spot some of the people I saw there.”

“I'll send you some links,” she promised.

I didn't actually get to my computer until after Madison went to bed, but when I logged on, there was an e-mail from her with a dozen links. Many of those led to more, and I soon decided that I was the only attendee who hadn't taken and posted pictures. My original plan had been to print out any promising photos or group shots, but given the sheer numbers, I gave up that idea—there wasn't enough toner in the house to print that many. Instead, I tiptoed up to the attic and lent my laptop to Sid.

Though he'd rarely had reason to use a computer, he picked up the basics of Web surfing surprisingly quickly. As he smugly said, watching all those TV shows and movies of people using their laptops must have paid off. I just hoped he wouldn't somehow erase my hard drive or start World War III while I was asleep.

The next day, my laptop was outside my bedroom door with a sad note from Sid that had only two words:
NO LUCK
.