The Boarding House (23 page)

Ellie was too weak and shaky to think about the future, so she took herself to bed.

Ellie’s weekend was a blur.
Cinnamon came by Saturday afternoon long enough to find out Ellie wasn’t well and didn’t stay. Sophie hovered, coaxing her to eat some soup and plumping her pillows.

Ellie woke up off and on during Sunday to find Wyatt sitting in a chair by her bed.

“What are you doing here?” she muttered.

“You’re sick.”

“Not sick, just tired,” she said, and rolled over and closed her eyes.

The next time she woke, Wyatt was gone and Cinnamon was there. “Hey. It’s Monday, your first official day as an unemployed high-school graduate. Wanna go listen to some music? There’s this band playing in the park and the lead singer is seriously hot.”

“No, thank you.”

Cinnamon leaned forward, staring intently into Ellie’s face. “I see secrets,” she whispered.

“Everyone has secrets,” Ellie muttered. “Go listen to your band and let me sleep.”

Garrett got home from work that evening and was concerned when Doris told him Ellie hadn’t gotten out of bed all day except to eat soup and crackers at noon.

He went straight to her room and knocked. “Ellie, it’s me. Are you alright? Do you need anything?”

She was sitting up in bed with the television on mute, staring blankly at the screen without a notion of what was playing. When he shouted, she wished her remote had a mute button for his voice, as well. “I’m fine. Go away.”

“Doris said you’ve been in bed all day. Do you need to go to a doctor?”

Ellie sighed and closed her eyes, willing him to disappear.

“Ellie. Damn it. Open this door so I can see you face to face if for no other reason than to assure myself you are alright.’

Ellie threw back the covers, dragged herself across the room and unlocked the door.

Garrett was surprised when it suddenly swung inward, but was shocked at Ellie’s appearance. Her hair was lank and clinging to her head—her skin color almost ashen. The dark circles under her eyes made her face gaunt.

“Oh my God. You look terrible. You need to see a doctor. Get your robe and house shoes. I’m taking you to the emergency room.”

Ellie pointed across the hall at Sophie’s room. “Keep your voice down unless you want her in the middle of this conversation.”

Garrett glanced over his shoulder, then caught himself and groaned. “Stop it with the Sophie business. You need to see a doctor. Now.”

Ellie grabbed him by the arm, yanked him into the bedroom and quickly shut the door. He had no time to process the fact that he was suddenly inside her inner sanctum, and at her bidding, when she blindsided him.

“I look like this because I don’t feel good. I don’t feel good because I went to an abortion clinic on Saturday and had an abortion. I had an abortion because you got me pregnant. You got me pregnant because you raped me. You raped me because you’re a sick, controlling pervert.” She opened the door and physically shoved him back outside. “For obvious reasons, you make me sick to my stomach. I am not going to the doctor. Don’t bother me again.”

She slammed the door shut in his face and punctuated it with the sound of the slide bolt.

Garrett shuddered. All he could think about was getting to his room before he came undone. As he turned, he caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror, and froze.

The man looking back at him was a stranger. He had not set out in life to become a murderer. The first time he justified it by telling himself it was for the love of Ellie. But this time, there was no justification. What he’d done to her had been in the name of jealousy and rage, not from love, and in the long run, had ended yet another life. There were no words for what he felt—only a final acceptance that there was no going back to the way it was. Not after this.

“Have you seen her today?” Sophie asked.

Wyatt nodded. “She looks like hell, excuse my language. But she won’t talk to me. She won’t even look at me anymore.”

Sophie blotted a tear and then wadded the tissue up in her lap. “I think we need to have an intervention.”

“That’s for addicts and alcoholics—people who are addicted. Not Ellie.”

Sophie persisted with the notion. “Then a confrontation. That’s it, a confrontation. We need to make her tell us what’s wrong.”

“You can’t make Ellie do anything she doesn’t want to do. Believe me, I know.”

“Then maybe we could ask Cinnamon. She might know something we don’t.”

The thought that Ellie would share something with that skanky redhead before sharing with him made Wyatt angry. “I don’t believe it. If something was really bad, Ellie would come to me. We share everything.”

“That’s not true,” Sophie said. “You don’t share what you do when you’re not with her.”

Wyatt shifted nervously. “That’s different.”

“No it’s not. I don’t care how close people are, there will always be things that must remain private. It’s how we’re made. Anyway, the next time Cinnamon comes, I’m going to ask her.”

“Whatever,” Wyatt muttered. “But count me out.”

“Even if it’s for Ellie?”

“That’s not fair.”

“Life’s not fair,” Sophie stated, and the subject was closed.

Doris was running the vacuum
in the back of the house and had taken advantage of the beautiful weather to open the windows and air out the rooms. Ellie sat curled up on the window seat in the living room, watching traffic and trying to ignore the constant wail of the ghost baby’s cries.

It seemed that everything around her was amplified. The buzz and chirp of cicadas and grasshoppers, the birds up in the trees beyond the window, even the sound of her own breathing was a steady roar inside her head. She rubbed her hands up and down her legs, feeling the prickle of leg hair. The last time she’d tried to shave her legs she nicked the skin and made it bleed. The constant seeping of big red drops had turned into ladybug beetles crawling out of her skin. She didn’t know if she was losing her mind, or really had bugs, but just in case she wasn’t shaving anymore.

The baby shrieked, and Ellie covered her ears, focusing on the scent of lilacs filling the room. They reminded her of the days when Momma was still alive and how she had kept a vase of cut flowers in every room. She’d called it bringing the outside in.

Back then, Ellie would sit on a stool in the kitchen without making a sound, watching her mother arrange flowers while keeping up a running commentary about why she trimmed the stems on an angle and how adding an aspirin tablet to the water would keep them fresh longer. She didn’t know if it worked, but it had been her Momma’s way and so she’d do the same.

The baby hiccupped and paused.

Ellie’s heart skipped a beat. Maybe this was it. Maybe the crying had finally stopped. But the moment the notion went through her head, she heard a wail. About that same time, she spied a hummingbird dive-bombing the blossoms and hoped the baby’s cries didn’t scare it off.

Momma had planted the lilac bushes near the house on purpose to draw in the tiny birds, and she and Ellie made a game of counting how many they could count feeding at one time. Ellie had learned early that it was the small things in life that mattered. She wished she had Momma here now. She needed someone to tell her how to make that baby go away.

Ellie wasn’t the only one living with ghosts.

Garrett was languishing as well. He thought he might be dying—that he was rotting from the inside out. No matter how many showers he took, the scent of his body offended him. Despite Doris’s attempts to encourage his appetite, he couldn’t get down more than a few bites at a time and began taking sick days from work. The last time he’d missed work had been the day he’d buried his wife, so he knew whatever was wrong had to be bad. After a visit to the doctor he was given a clean bill of health, but he knew that wasn’t true. There wasn’t a single thing about him that was clean—certainly not his soul.

He and Ellie lived under the same roof with Sophie and Wyatt, and during the daytime, even Doris, but they were as far apart as if they were at opposite ends of the earth. He couldn’t look at her and bear the accusation in her eyes. His only resolution was to pretend she wasn’t there. What had once been an existence of constant turmoil between them had turned into a cold war.

It was the middle of the morning
when Sophie caught Ellie walking the hall. She stopped to visit, but Ellie would have moved past in what looked like a trance had she not caught Ellie by the arm.

“Ellie, darling, it’s so good to see you getting up and about again. Have you eaten anything today?”

Ellie rubbed her hands over her face in a rough, scrubbing motion then suddenly jerked and tilted her head.

“Do you hear that, Sophie?”

Sophie frowned at Ellie’s blank stare. “Hear what, dear?”

“That baby. I hear a baby crying.”

“No, but you know how hard of hearing I am,” Sophie said. “I’m going to make myself a bite to eat. Come sit with me and have something to eat.”

“I can’t. I have to find the baby.”

Worried about Ellie’s strange behavior, Sophie hurried off in search of Wyatt.

Ellie was still standing in the hallway when Doris came out into the hall. “Well, hello, Ellie. I’m finished in your father’s room and was about to do your room, but if you’re planning to take a nap, I can wait.”

Ellie shuddered. The thought of sleep made her panic. “No, no nap.”

“Then why don’t you get out of the house? Maybe go for a walk?” Doris asked.

The notion clicked. “I might go for a walk.”

“Whatever you want, dear, but I won’t be long in your room.”

“Doris?”

Doris paused on the threshold to Ellie’s room. “Yes?”

“Do you hear a baby?”

Doris’s heart skipped a beat. She’d lived too long in this house to ignore anything out of the usual order and this was definitely one of those times. “No, Ellie, there’s no baby here.”

“But I can hear it cry.”

Doris frowned. “There’s no baby. Maybe it’s a bird. You know how those mockingbirds are.”

“Bird?”