Between (20 page)

“Liz, are you at peace?” Josie asks.

The pointer swings quickly to
no
.

“Why not?” Her breath is almost fevered.

I stare as the pointer spells its final word.
H-E-L-L
.

“She’s moving it, Liz,” Alex whispers. He’s still peering at the pointer.

“Who is? Who’s moving it?”

“Josie.”

He and I stare at each other.

“But this isn’t hell,” I say to him.

There is a long pause.

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“Of course I’m sure.” And I stare at my stepsister, who is so focused, her expression practically electric. Then I understand: she wants my friends to know that I cheated on Richie. She wants to feel absolved for having a relationship with him now, and she’s using the Ouija board to convince them that I didn’t deserve him.

She is my best friend. She’s obviously not thinking straight. I just died a few weeks ago, and she’s still upset—that much is clear. This is exactly the kind of thing Nicole would do.

In fact, it
is
what Nicole did. Right after my mom died. Like mother, like daughter.

“I’m done with this,” Caroline says, yanking her hands away. “This is weird, Josie. These things are junk. I’m not doing this anymore.”

“What’s the matter?” Josie blinks at her innocently, as though nothing all that interesting has just happened. “We all knew Liz was acting differently over the past few months. She was keeping secrets, even from me. Maybe now she’s trying to tell us the truth—”

“This doesn’t prove anything,” Caroline interrupts. She stands up, rubbing her hands against her shoulders. She’s shaking all over.

Josie blinks calmly. “There are things in this world we don’t understand.”

“Yeah, Josie, but a twenty-dollar board game from Target doesn’t hold the key to unlocking the secrets of the universe.” Mera stands up quickly, but she’s unsteady on her feet. She’s already in her pajamas—I can’t believe my friends are having a sleepover, in my house, practically in my
room
—and she paces to my window, yanks it open, and starts rifling through her purse for a cigarette. She lights one up, leaning almost her entire body out the front window.

“Hey,” she says, exhaling, turning her head to look down the street. “Richie’s leaving his house.”

Josie is putting the Ouija board back in its box. She seems uninterested in Richie’s whereabouts. But I know Josie better than anybody. I can tell she’s only pretending not to care. “He’s probably going running again. He’s been running like a fiend lately.”

“Richie?” Mera’s tone is doubtful.

“Mera? Can you not smoke in here?” Caroline sniffles. “Liz hated smoke. It seems disrespectful to her.”

I glance at Alex, who’s still on the floor. “This from the girl who stole five hundred dollars from me not two weeks ago,” I say.

He nods slowly with understanding. “You’re right.”

The expression is startling. It occurs to me that it might be the first time since we’ve been together that Alex has smiled at me with anything other than detached disdain.

Then I remember something. “Richie already went running once today.”

“Yeah? Maybe he’s going out again,” Alex offers.

As soon as the words leave his mouth, Mera says, “I don’t think he’s going running, Josie. He’s wearing jeans and a sweatshirt … and flip-flops.” She pauses. She exhales a ribbon of smoke. Then she says, “It’s past ten. You don’t know what your own
boyfriend
is up to?” Again, she and Caroline exchange looks. It’s clear they’re skeptical of the idea of Richie and Josie dating.

“I thought you were going to go out with Jason,” Mera says. “He wants to ask you. You know that.” She’s talking about Jason Harvatt, who is only a junior but very popular. He’s on the basketball team. He’s cute. And he’s had a crush on Josie forever, but she’s never shown any interest in him.

“He’s not my type.” Josie shrugs.

“Where do you think Richie’s going?” I ask Alex.

“I don’t know. Probably on a drug run.”

But I don’t think so. I’m not sure why. It’s like I’ve said from the beginning—Richie and I are still connected. It’s almost like there is an invisible thread between us, binding us together somehow, and I can feel its tug as he makes his way down the street.

“I want to follow him,” I say.

Alex hesitates. He gives me a mock pout. “Can’t we stay? I was kind of hoping your friends would change into negligees and have a pillow fight.”

I walk over to him and grab him by the arm. “Yes, because that’s what we do at
every
slumber party. Come on. We’re leaving.”

But just as we’re heading toward the door, it swings open.

“Oh no,” I say, stopping dead in my tracks. “This is going to be bad.”

It’s my dad. He’s standing in the doorway in red pajamas—a Christmas gift last year from Nicole. His reading glasses are perched on top of his messy brown hair—exactly the same shade as Josie’s natural color.

He turns on the lights, looks at the floor, at the Ouija box. He sucks in a sharp breath. “What’s going on in here?”

Mera, stunned into stillness, is frozen at the window, her lit cigarette burning between her fingers.

In a swift motion, Josie slides the Ouija box under my bed. “Nothing, Dad,” she says. “We were just playing a game.”

“A game?” His eyes are wide with disbelief. “Is that a Ouija board? Where did you get that?”

Josie glances first at Caroline, then at Mera. Both of them are staring at the floor, unwilling to make eye contact with my dad. I don’t blame them.

“Did your mother give it to you?” my dad demands.

Josie doesn’t say anything.

“And what’s this?” He strolls into the room. There is an edge in his voice unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. He isn’t just angry. He’s
furious
. “Wine? Where did you kids get wine?” He raises his voice and, before Josie has any time to protest, booms, “Nicole!”

There’s a thick, awkward silence in the room as my friends continue to avert their eyes. Only Josie will look at my dad, and she does so with a fierce gaze; she seems almost angry with him.

“My mom said it was okay.” Her tone is calm.

“Marshall?” Nicole appears in the doorway. “What’s the matter?” She stares at my sister, at my friends. “What are you girls doing in Liz’s room?”

“I smelled smoke,” my dad tells her. “I was afraid the damn house was on fire. But no. It’s just your daughter in here”—Josie winces visibly when he says “your daughter”—“having a damn
séance
. And they’re drunk.” My dad’s voice is steadily rising. “Whose idea was this, Nicole? You two went to church today, didn’t you?”

Nicole presses her lips together in a tight smile. “Marshall,” she says, her voice so calm and kind that it seems patronizing, “your heart.”

“I don’t give a damn about my heart. Your child is in here trying to contact the dead.” He stares at my friends. “You girls. You think this is okay? Elizabeth was your best friend. She’s dead now.”

He chokes up. He begins to sob. It hurts so badly to look at him as he’s falling apart.

“She was my daughter,” he says, his voice wavering with sorrow and tears. “My daughter is dead. You think there’s anything okay about that? You think it’s okay to come into her room, to conduct a séance? What did you learn? That she’s never coming back? She was just a baby. You girls are just babies, do you know that?”

My dad cannot stop crying. He’s breathing hard.

“Marshall,” Nicole soothes, rubbing his back, “come back to bed.” She glances at Josie. “The girls are just having a slumber party. It’s what they do.”

“It is not
what they do
. It is not okay, Nicole.” He stares at the floor. His cheeks are flushed with anger.

“Oh, Dad,” I whisper. “I’m right here.”

Alex stares at me. “I wish he could hear you,” he offers.

“Me, too,” I murmur.

“Think about him,” he suggests. “Remember something happy.”

Reality slips away almost effortlessly as I close my eyes. When I open them, trying to remember my father, I see that I’ve settled on a memory of the two of us. We are alone, and right away I realize that I’m revisiting the short period of time in between my mother’s death and my dad’s marriage to Nicole. He was only single for a few months before she and Josie moved in with us.

We are standing outside my dad’s car; back then he drove a silver Porsche. He has pulled over to the side of the road, where a large cardboard box rests in the sandy brush a few feet away. On the box, in black permanent marker, somebody has written: FREE KITTENS!

I am nine. It’s summertime. The sun shines brightly overhead in midafternoon, and from the looks of it, I’ve obviously just come from swimming somewhere. I’m wearing a pair of denim shorts over a one-piece red bathing suit. My long hair hangs in thick wet strands down my back. My shoulders are tan, my face slightly sunburned. My dad, I realize, probably had no idea how to raise a little girl by himself. I’m guessing he didn’t think to put sunscreen on me before I went swimming.

“Stay there, honey,” my dad says, taking a step forward by himself to peer into the box. “Let me see.” He stops, staring downward. “Oh my … would you look at that?” he breathes.

“What is it? Dad, are there really kittens?” I stand on tiptoe in my jelly sandals, trying to catch a glimpse.

“Come here, Liz. It’s okay.” He smiles at me over his shoulder. “There’s a whole litter, I think.” His forehead wrinkles in mild concern. “Who would leave them out here alone? How awful.”

Standing beside my younger self and my father, I look inside the box, already knowing what I’m about to see. Inside are seven tiny kittens, bright orange balls of almost unbearably adorable fluff and paws and sweet pink noses, their small mouths open, all of them mewing in a high tinny cacophony. There is barely enough room for them to move around in the box; they almost pile on top of one another, stumbling as they struggle to claw at the cardboard walls. Their tails are short and pointy, eyes glassy and bright blue, and as we gaze down at them, they tremble a bit, undoubtedly frightened, all alone in the world, beside the road, with no food or water. Whoever left them here didn’t care a bit what happened to them.

At age nine, I kneel beside the box and pick up a few, one by one. My dad watches as I hold their furry bodies against my chest, pressing them to my cheek, grinning wildly. “Daddy? Can we take them home? Please?”

Watching us now, the request strikes me as absurd. There are
seven
of them. But I remember this: I know how it works out. I realize that Alex is right about me, at least in one way: I was incredibly spoiled.

My dad shades his eyes, staring at the cloudless sky. “Kittens grow up, Liz. They won’t be little and cute forever. We should take them to the humane society.” He pauses. “I’ll let you keep one of them, if you’d like. But just one.”

“But Daddy, they’re brothers and sisters! They’ll miss each other!” And I pick up two more—they’re really tiny—so that I’m clutching five of them against my body. “Please? Please can we take them home? Just for a few days—then you can give them to the humane society. Daddy, they’re hungry. They’re lonely.” I gaze at my father with wide, pleading eyes.

My father: recently widowed, living with his young daughter, wanting more than anything in the world to make her happy. Wanting more than anything to make her smile. For her to not be alone. He would have done whatever I wanted. He
did
do whatever I wanted.

I didn’t have to pout or cry. I barely even had to beg.

“All right,” he says, smiling, “you can keep them for a few days. Maybe a week.”

I watch as my younger self—so overjoyed, so giddy with happiness that I practically seem drunk at nine years old—places the kittens back inside the box. My dad carries it to the car. Since the Porsche doesn’t have a backseat, he rests it on my lap for the ride home.

I watch the two of us drive away. I don’t have to follow to remember the rest of what happened with the kittens.

A week went by, and they were still so small—so cute!—that I couldn’t bear to part with any of them. I named each one after a day of the week. Sunday used to crawl into my dad’s dress shoes and fall asleep. Thursday never quite grasped the idea of a litter box. I remember it all so vividly.

I loved them for the next two months, for the rest of the summer. Then they started to grow into cats; eventually, they weren’t as cute anymore. I lost interest. I stopped playing with them. And one day, when I came home after school, they were gone. My dad had realized I didn’t want them anymore, so he took them to the humane society. He traded those seven cats in for a new, tiny kitten. I named her Little Fluff. And when she started getting big, he took
her
to the humane society and returned with another kitten—Mister Whiskers, who used to curl up in bed with me at night and purr away. I decided to keep Mister Whiskers.

I realize now that, if I’d let him—and if the humane society had tolerated it, which they probably wouldn’t have after a while—my dad might have continued trading cats for kittens, over and over again, so that I would never have to experience them growing up, so that, to me, they would be tiny and cute forever.

After my mother died, he did everything in his power to make me happy. Everything. He gave me whatever I wanted: the most expensive name-brand clothes, front-row concert tickets, designer handbags and shoes and makeup, and all the things my heart could possibly desire. He bought me a brand-new car when I turned seventeen.

He let me have a party on our boat for my eighteenth birthday. Anything and everything I wanted. No matter what the cost.

Back in the present, I watch my father as he stands in my old bedroom, crying. We don’t have Mister Whiskers anymore. One snowy day a few years ago, he went outside and simply never returned.

“Looks like the rest of your family isn’t holding up as well as you thought,” Alex says quietly.

“Yeah,” I say, nodding, “it looks that way.”

“Girls,” Nicole tells Josie and my friends, still keeping her tone light, “why don’t you all go down to the living room and … I don’t know, drink some cocoa or something?” To my father she says, “Marshall, let’s go. Let them be.”