Spirit Legacy (13 page)

Something in my expression made him stop. Whatever he saw there told him that he would make no more headway with me today.

Damn right he wouldn’t.

I stalked straight through the waiting room and out to the car in silence. Karen put the key in the ignition, but didn’t turn it.

“I’m sorry you had to do that today.”

Surprise registered dimly in my brain. That wasn’t really what I’d been expecting her to say.

“Those shrinks think they know everything, but they don’t. They don’t know a thing about you, just remember that. You aren’t some case study they can just pick apart.” Her voice was unexpectedly bitter.

I didn’t know what to say. It was like she’d stolen my line.

“So … does that mean I don’t have to go back?”

Karen hesitated. For a moment, from the look on her face, I thought that she might actually let me off the hook. “I think it’s important for you to go. Your school arranged it, and I know that your dean is rather insistent on the point. I think, in the interest of staying on the administration’s good side, that you should continue to see Dr. Hildebrand. It’s not worth risking your education.”

§

My winter break taught me the truth behind the clichéd observation that the holidays are a difficult time of year. My mom had always made a huge deal of the Christmas season, even though she seemed to have little to no awareness of the fact that it was actually a religious holiday. We drove hours out of whatever city we were living in at the time to get a real Christmas tree, preferably one we could chop down ourselves. There was even one time she almost got herself arrested when she stopped on the side of the road to cut down a tree that turned out to be on someone’s private property. She’d plied the man with Christmas cookies and a sob story to get us out of that mess. Karen laughed herself into tears when I told her about it.

“So does that mean you don’t want to get a tree? I have a fake one in the basement we usually use,” she said.

“Ugh! A fake tree? Are you trying to kill me, Karen? What is sadder than a man-made tree?”

She looked a little sheepish. “I guess you’re right. I just hate cleaning up the needles.”

“I’ll clean up the needles. You won’t even be able to tell we dragged live foliage through the house, cross my heart,” I promised. “My mom would probably come back to haunt us if I let you have a fake tree while I was living here.”

I meant it as a joke, but neither of us laughed; Karen looked almost nauseous and I sat silently struggling with a possibility that had been cropping up in my mind ever since my first encounter with Evan. Ghosts existed, that much now I knew for sure. Did that mean that my mom was still out there somewhere, maybe even close to me? Was there a chance I might roll over some restless night and find her sitting by my bed, humming one of the made-up tunes that used to lull me to sleep? I couldn’t decide if the thought comforted or terrified me. Maybe a little of both.

Despite the loss that Karen and I were feeling so acutely, we managed to have a very nice Christmas. We double-teamed Noah and convinced him that he would like nothing better than to drive out to a nearby tree farm and trudge around behind us through the snow while we selected the perfect balsam, and then chop it down for us. I was a little disappointed when I came home from some shopping the next day to find that it had been professionally decorated by Karen’s usual interior designer. There was no denying that it was very beautiful, though I thought it lacked a certain charm due to the absence of homemade paper ornaments and stale popcorn threaded on a string.

I had to admit it was nice sleeping in on Christmas morning. My mother, a child at heart, had dragged me out of bed every year at the crack of dawn, too eager to wait to give me my presents, no matter how hungover she was or how scant the money was for gifts. Karen seemed pretty excited about giving gifts too, but apparently not excited enough to prevent me from sleeping until nearly ten o’clock.

After a big breakfast of cheese omelets and bacon (Karen was intensely apologetic, having attempted to cook the bacon on her own and turned it to what Noah euphemistically referred to as “Cajun style”) we sat down to open gifts. Karen glowed as I unwrapped a beautiful new leather portfolio for my artwork and several expensive-looking sweaters. I thanked her profusely and pulled one of the sweaters on over my pajamas to reassure her that I really did like it.

Karen complained that I’d surely spent too much on the boots I bought her, feeling guilty, no doubt, that she’d been eyeing a similar pair while we’d been out on Newbury Street. I told her that Tia, who never paid full price for anything, had helped me find them on eBay, so I hadn’t paid the laughable sticker price from the boutique. Noah seemed genuinely pleased when he unwrapped a book I’d bought him about the history of Fenway Park. He wasn’t treating me like a leper, so I could only assume that Karen hadn’t told him about my disturbing new talent.

When the rustle of wrapping paper finally died away, we all settled into the trademark quiet contentment of Christmas afternoon. Noah engrossed himself in the history of his favorite sports team while Karen and I watched
Miracle on 34
th
Street
and tidied up under the tree. The rituals were at once familiar and strange, like a jarring note misplayed in a favorite song.

As I crammed the last of the crumpled gold paper into the trash bag, a small, unobtrusive object caught my eye, tucked partially under the tree skirt. I knelt down and slid it out. At first I thought it was an article of clothing, but as I picked it up, I felt a solid, flat shape beneath the material. A gift, then, wrapped in a scrap of faded blue fabric and tied with a frayed white ribbon.

I turned to ask Karen about it, but my voice only made it halfway to my lips. A small piece of paper tucked under the ribbon answered my unasked question. In a tiny, elegant hand was the following message:

Jessica,

This was your mother’s, once upon a time. Now it rightfully belongs to you. I’m sure you will find it interesting.

There was no signature. My heart beating inexplicably fast, I tugged gently at the ribbon and followed its floating, featherlike fall to my knees. I unfolded the fabric, an ancient watered silk, and revealed the object inside. A small, leather-bound book rested in my palm. It was by far the oldest book I’d ever handled. Its binding was frayed and tattered; its leather surface was a fawn color, looking more like animal hide than processed leather. The texture had been worn to incredible softness. It took less than a moment to take all of this in before my attention was entirely occupied with the image burned into the leather. It was a line drawing, almost primitive in style. It depicted a woman’s hand in profile, cupped with the palm up, as though waiting for someone to drop something into it. Above it was another hand, identical to the first, but palm down and facing the other direction. In the space protected between these two hands was a symbol composed of three spirals, reminiscent of a pinwheel. I stared at it as one hypnotized. I could barely tear my eyes away from it to open the book. When I finally did, my disappointment was instantaneous. The rough cut pages were all blank.

Crash!

Startled, I turned to the doorway. Karen was kneeling there, gathering up dripping shards of porcelain with visibly trembling hands. She looked up and tried to smile, but only managed a grimace.

“Sorry,” she murmured. “Slipped out of my hand.” A puddle of eggnog was spreading across the floor.

I got up to help her, but Noah waved me back down. “I’ll get some paper towels,” he said, hopping up from the couch.

Karen just nodded and kept her eyes carefully on the remnants of her mug.

“Karen? Is this from you?” I asked, holding up the book.

When she raised her gaze to me, her casual tone didn’t reach her wary eyes. “Oh, yes, I’d forgotten all about that.”

“Was this really my mother’s? I don’t ever remember seeing it before.”

“Yes, it was. She left it here, actually. I didn’t even remember I had it. I found it in the basement last week when I was digging out the Christmas wreaths.”

“It’s really … what is it?”

“Just an old blank book. I don’t know where she got it—you know your mother and books. She probably found it in an antique shop or something. Anyway, I thought you might like to have it. Be careful with it, of course. Something that old should be handled with care.”

She walked into the kitchen—
fled
may have been a better word for it. I realized as I watched her whip around the corner that I didn’t believe a word she had just said to me, except maybe for the part about handling the book carefully.

I looked back down at the book. Why would she take the trouble to wrap it so distinctly from the other gifts, setting it apart as something special, but then claim to forget about it? Why the note, if it was just some old thing she found lying around? It didn’t make sense that she’d forgotten to give me something of my mother’s, especially when, as the note said, she thought it “rightfully belonged to me”.

Then of course there was the mystery of the book itself. She’d obviously seen it before, because she knew that the pages were blank, although I supposed she could have just glimpsed them when she came in the room. Why would my mother have such a thing and why, in all the time she had it, did she never write in it?

All through the rest of the evening, I kept the odd little book cradled in my hands, tracing and retracing its cover. Finally I trudged up to bed around ten-thirty, after nodding off during the middle of
It’s a Wonderful Life
, which I was pretty sure I would never get to see in its entirety. Balancing my mother’s book on top of my stack of other gifts, I was almost to my room when I heard Karen’s voice, hushed but urgent from her office.

“… had no right to send it to Jessica without talking to me first.”

Silence. She was obviously on the phone.

“Oh.” Her harsh tone was suddenly confused. “Well, if you didn’t send it to her, then I’d like to know who did!”

Silence. Karen was tapping something sharply against her desk.

“I understand that, Finvarra, and that may very well be the case in the end, but it wasn’t my decision. There wasn’t anything I could do to persuade Elizabeth against it, as I explained to the Council.”

The unusual name caught my attention. Who in the world was Karen talking to?

“We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that and see what happens. But I will not actively go against my sister’s wishes. You know as well as I do why I can’t do what you ask.”

A longer silence. I could hear Noah puttering in the kitchen below me.

“I understand, Finvarra. Oh, believe me, I intend to. And please speak to the others and find out who has done this. Whatever the disagreement on this situation, you and I both know this was not how it should be handled.” Another pause. “Very well. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Good night, then.”

I didn’t stay put long enough to hear her hang up the phone. I was already safely shut away in my room when I heard her slide her door carefully open and close it again.

Chapter 10—Drowning

Chapter 10—Drowning

M
y mother’s book wasn’t mentioned again by Karen
for the remaining two weeks of break. She did, however, seem unusually quiet and a little jumpy. And of course, she said not a word about her mysterious late night phone call to this Finvarra person. I had stowed the book carefully in my sock drawer, taking it out only when I was alone to examine it.

Further inspection revealed little else. I thought about using it as a diary; the blankness of the pages seemed to suggest it. But when I sat down to write, a sudden, unexplainable fear gripped me. My fingers started to shake, and I couldn’t bring myself to put pen to paper. Only when I had put the pen away and closed the book again did my breathing ease and my nerves calm themselves. After that, I wrapped the book in my favorite St. Matt’s sweatshirt and tucked it gently into the front pocket of my duffel bag, ready to return with me to school.

I tried not to waste the plethora of free time at my disposal. I sketched a lot, and I realized how much I had missed it while I was so busy and distracted at school. I also exhausted every avenue I could think of to locate the elusive Hannah. Trying to take a page from Tia’s book, I took to haunting the Boston Public Library, telling Karen I was trying to get ahead on next semester’s reading material. I was enough of a bookworm to pull it off, thank goodness. I managed to locate two more potential Hannahs. One lived on the street where Evan grew up,
and the other attended the sister school that sometimes held social fun
ctions with Evan’s all-boys high school. I found them both on Facebook and stalked their photographs; there were none that included Evan.
Emails to both girls yielded nothing; the neighbor had only known him casually and the sec
ond had never even met him. Frustration mounting, I took to locating every mention I could find of Evan, on the internet, local papers, everywhere, which I pasted together into a morbid scrapbook.
I even found a memorial Facebook page set up in his honor, which I joined. On the wall I simply posted: “I’m trying. I promise.”

I also suffered through three more fruitless sessions with Dr. Hildebrand, during which he talked a lot and I answered in one-word sentences and threw him the filthy glares. Karen drove me back and forth to them in stony, silent solidarity.

I took the train back to St. Matt’s on the fifteenth of January, two days before classes started up and the first day that campus opened for the new semester. Karen seemed upset that I was leaving early, but if she wasn’t going to be honest with me, I could see no reason to stay.

The dorm was quiet when I arrived Saturday morning, but by that night it had repopulated, the gathering snow storm whirling students through the doors on gusts of blustery wind. I knew that Sam would be there early too, since R. A.s had to oversee student arrival, so I swung by to visit him. He had one of the worst sunburns I’d ever seen.

“Nice tan! What beach did you lay on all break?” I asked.

“I wish. My family went skiing. This is windburn,” Sam said. “And it hurts like a bitch, I might add.”

“That sucks. Still, at least you did something interesting, which is more than I can say for my break.”

“That bad, huh?”

“Mind-numbing.”

“Didn’t you even get to….” Sam glanced past me out into the hall and shouted, “Really, O’Reilly? In a paper bag with the name of the liquor store on it?” He jumped up and leaned out the door. “I’m walking down to your room in thirty seconds, and I better find that bag full of junk food or something else that won’t get you put on housing probation!” He turned back to me, incredulous. “Seriously, it’s like they’re getting dumber every year. I should go take care of that.”

I laughed. “No problem. I’ll catch you later.”

Sam stopped me in the doorway. “Hey, when Tia gets back, have her stop by. You know, if she wants to.”

“Sorry, lover boy, she’s not back yet, but I’m sure she’ll come running as soon as she gets here.” I patted his cheek a little harder than necessary. “You two are so cute. I could just eat you up.”

Sam blushed even redder. “Yeah, yeah, alright,” he grumbled, and took off down the hall after O’Reilly and his poorly disguised contraband.

After unpacking my stuff I headed to the student center, where I found a nice surprise in my campus mailbox. The final paper I’d written for Professor Marshall’s class was tucked into a big manila envelope along with a letter. The paper had earned me an A, I noted with a mixture of relief and pride. The letter was a relief too, containing an apology from Professor Marshall, who had read my email and was very sorry about her “overreaction” to my “honest mistake.” The whole reconciliation was something of a lie, of course, but I felt better anyway. I emailed her when I got back to the room, thanking her for her note and accepting her invitation to have coffee and a chat when classes resumed.

Tia called to let me know that she would not be back until Sunday afternoon. “Mami” couldn’t bear sending her little girl back to that place without ensuring that she had one last day of home-cooked sustenance. Leave it to a mom to mistrust institutional food. Tia actually ate the healthy stuff, for the most part. In fact, with the exception of the occasional bag of Skittles, Tia ate healthier than any normal college kid should.

I fully intended to use my alone time that night to do a last spot of non-assigned reading, but by ten o’clock, I was whacking myself in the face with my book as I dozed off. Rather than risk permanent facial damage, I lay the book aside, clicked off my reading lamp, and drifted to sleep quickly.

I couldn’t be sure what the sound was that woke me, but suddenly I was awake. It hadn’t been another dream, as far as I could remember. I rolled over and looked at my alarm clock, glowing like a neon sign in the darkness. 2:37AM. I heard loud music thumping next door, punctuated by raucous laughter. I briefly considered chucking one of my shoes at the wall, but I thought this may not be an obvious enough hint for them to quiet down, so I rolled over instead and pulled my pillow over my head.

The pillow dulled the sound enough that I should have been able to drift back off but I found that I couldn’t. It wasn’t the music that had wakened me at all. My feet were cold; they were bundled in fuzzy socks and my comforter, but they were as cold as though I’d stuck them out the window into the January air.

And there was another sound, indistinguishable at first from the racket bleeding through my wall. It was a steady dripping sound, as though I had left a faucet only partially shut off in the bathroom. I tried to ignore it, but once my ears had picked up on it, it was all I could hear—like the ticking of a clock in a silent room. I’d just made up my mind to crawl out of my bed and take care of it when I remembered that I didn’t have a bathroom. No bathroom and therefore, no faucet.

My heart was suddenly beating rapidly. Somehow I knew there was something I didn’t want to see on the other side of my pillow. I couldn’t say how I knew it, but I was certain that if I pulled that pillow away, I would not be alone. For a moment I was completely unable to move; my muscles had actually forgotten how to respond to my brain, which was screaming at me to leap out of the bed and out of the room as fast as I possibly could. Instead, I did the one thing I had absolutely no intention of doing; I flung the pillow off my face and looked for the source of the sound.

What I saw was as mystifying as it was horrifying, and it was all I could do to stop from screaming aloud. At the foot of my bed, hovering just above my achingly cold feet, was a figure. In the darkness, I could not immediately make out the details, but my terrified eyes quickly adjusted, each newly visible aspect multiplying my fright. The figure was that of a small boy, no more than seven or eight years old. He was dressed in a pair of jeans, a red jacket, and dirty white sneakers. Unwillingly, my eyes were drawn to his face. Black hair was billowing hypnotically around an eerie, green-tinged complexion. His eyes were so dark they looked almost black, and his expression was mirroring my own terror.

As he raised a tiny, pale hand out towards me, I noticed for the first time that there was a faint glow surrounding the boy. It didn’t seem as if the light was emanating from him, but I could see no other source. The light was unsteady somehow, wavering across the fearful little face so that it rippled in and out of focus. The quality of the light was familiar, but it wasn’t until the boy’s mouth opened and emitted a stream of bubbles that I realized why. The boy was standing at the foot of my bed and yet he was very clearly submerged in water.

Before I could control it, a scream ripped from my throat, followed by another, and then another. I couldn’t stop, even as the ghostly form before me shook his head in protest. I screamed and screamed until I heard commotion in the hallway and a pounding on my door. Finally the door flew open and my room was flooded with light.

“Jess! What the hell? Are you okay?” I recognized Sam’s lithe form tearing across the room toward me, but I still couldn’t silence my own voice. My eyes remained trained on the spot where, moments before, the drowning boy had reached out to me and where now there was nothing but empty space.

“Jess! JESSICA!” Sam was by my side then, grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me harshly. He grasped my face and wrenched my head around until I was forced to look at him. The sight of his living, familiar features turned my screams immediately to sobs. I buried my face in his neck and his arms closed around my heaving shoulders.

“It’s fine, everything’s fine,” Sam called to the small crowd of students crammed into my doorway. “She had a nightmare or something; go back to your rooms.”

From the reactions it was clear that this was a rather anticlimactic conclusion to the uproar I had caused.

“A nightmare? Are you kidding me?”

“Did you hear her?”

“The whole campus heard her!”

“I thought we were going to find a serial killer in here.”

“Hey! Did you hear me? Clear out and shut up, before I write you all up for the party you’re throwing in there!” Sam shouted.

The muttering turned momentarily mutinous and died out as the crowd dispersed.

“It’s okay, Jess. Take a deep breath now, and try to calm down.” Sam said as I struggled to master myself. “Where’s Tia?”

“N-not back y-yet,” I managed to stammer.

“Can you tell me what happened?”

I picked my head up from his saturated t-shirt. His eyes were burning with concern.

“I … I think I had a nightmare,” I gasped.

“You
think
you had a nightmare? You’re not sure?”

“I … well, it m-must have been, I guess. But it just seemed s-so real.” The vision of the boy danced in negative before my eyes and I fought to dislodge it.

“What was it about? Do you want to tell me?”

I was too rattled to think up anything but the truth, so I told Sam exactly what I’d seen, making a mental note to draw it all out later when my hands stopped shaking. In an effort to salvage a scrap of my dignity, I made it sound as though I hadn’t known that I was wide awake.

Sam let out a low whistle when I’d finished. “Well, damn, I would have freaked too. What, did you watch another horror movie last night or something?”

“No.”

“Well, good. I was afraid you were going soft on me.”

I laughed weakly. “Sorry if I scared the crap out of you.”

“Yeah, I’m not gonna lie, I think I was about as scared as you were for a minute there. But I’m glad you’re okay. And you definitely subdued that party next door. I was going to have to bust them up soon, and I really wasn’t looking forward to that. So thanks!”

“Um, you’re welcome?”

Sam waited for me to stop crying, and after about the fiftieth time I told him he could go, he went. I didn’t sleep the rest of the night, and instead turned all the lights and the TV on, made myself a mug of tea and some ramen noodles in the microwave, and then sat down with my sketchbook. I had no desire to relive the visitation that had just awoken me, but I had to be sure to record what I had seen before time distorted it. I knew that this was another ghost, as Evan had been, though who he was or why he had visited me I had no idea. Was he a ghost who was always on the campus? Had he died on the property as Evan had? And, most crucially of all, why, why on earth were ghosts seeking me out? Were ghosts going to start appearing to me everywhere, scaring the living daylights out of me or following me around like lost puppy dogs? Was this boy really only the second I’d seen, or had there been others, that I hadn’t even recognized as ghosts? I had no idea if I would ever be able to find out who the boy was. I had no information to go on other than what I’d seen.

Sighing, I tucked the sketch away and tried to distract myself with a stream of syndicated 90’s sitcoms. My parapsychology class with David Pierce would begin in less than forty-eight hours. Now if only I could keep myself awake until then.