Help for the Haunted(108)

I told him I would then reached for the door handle, remembering how he hugged me last time, how his stubble brushed against me as he pressed his lips to my cheek and the warm, earthy smell of him enveloped me. I wondered if he might do it again, but the moment did not present itself. Probably those four years between us, I thought, all the differences they made. And so I opened the door and got out, that newspaper clipping from inside his yearbook slipping off my lap and falling to the ground as I did. I reached down, picked it up. “What’s this?”

“Oh. That’s the other thing I meant to show you. The article that came out after the freak accident I told you about. The one that cost me my fingers.”

I glanced at the headline, some part of me expecting to see the name Albert Lynch, since those were the only stories I paid attention to anymore. Instead, the headline read simply: DECK COLLAPSES, DOZENS OF TEENS INJURED.

“You can hang on to it,” Dereck told me. “Personally, I’d rather forget that drunken afternoon. But like I told you, it was big news around here.”

I stuck the clipping in my pocket and thanked him again for the ride. Dereck flicked on his high beams and waited for me to get inside before backing out of the driveway. He beeped his horn a few times, and I flashed the porch light to say good-bye.

After he was gone, I went upstairs and changed and washed up before making my way back down to the kitchen. Rose had replenished the supply of Popsicles, but I was tired of them. Apparently, she had tossed whatever Emily Sanino had baked, since it wasn’t on the steps or the counter.

I skipped any sort of dinner and stood beside the kitchen table, reading the article Dereck had given me. The story confirmed everything he had told me about that accident and how he lost his fingers. Two photos accompanied the article. One showed the splintered deck in pieces on the ground, the toppled grill and kegs and broken chairs all around. The other was of the lawn scattered with teenagers, some lying on the grass as paramedics attended to them, others standing in the background, unharmed.

I was about to put down the clipping when I remembered Dereck saying that my sister had been at the party. Just as I’d done with his yearbook photo, I traced my thumb over the crowd until, sure enough, I spotted Rose standing blank faced in the crowd. I stared at her fuzzy black-and-white image a moment before noticing the person beside her too.

I must have stared at that image for a solid ten minutes until I put the clipping aside at last and went to the cabinet beneath the sink. When I swung it open, the garbage can was empty, a fresh bag placed inside. I shut the cabinet and looked at that clipping again, tracing my finger over the people in the crowd until stopping in the same spot. This time, I put the paper down and walked to the front door, stepping out into the moonlight and heading for the trash cans my sister must have dragged to the street earlier.

Back in Rehoboth, I’d lifted the lid and used my finger to puncture the bag. I did the same here. Once more, foul odors rose up as I dug inside, churning through the entire bag until my hands grew sticky from handling Popsicle wrappers and crumpled paper towels and squashed soda cans. When I finished with that bag, I reached for the one below. The work wasn’t strenuous, but something had me breathing heavily anyway.

And then I felt the first of what I was searching for: slim, like a firecracker between my fingers with the same sort of wick at the tip, blunt and brittle from use. And not long after I had found one, others began to appear. Like some rabid raccoon, I tipped over the can and knelt on the ground picking among all the papers and wrappers and trash smeared with frosting. And when I located them all—twenty-five slim pink candles—I held them up in the dark. Even though they’d long since been blown out, it didn’t matter. It was as though they lit the entire sky above. It was as though they lit my way when I stepped into the church that snowy night the winter before, because at long last, I knew who it was I had seen. At long last, I knew.





[page]Chapter 20

Emergency Exits



May I please have seconds? I don’t want to be in the way . . . Sylvie? I have the same dream almost every night . . . When I say it is both good and bad, what I mean is that it starts out good—my mother is showing me the emergency exit rows, explaining about the lighted path in the aisles, the oxygen masks that drop from the ceiling—but peaceful as it begins, the dream always turns bad. It is that way with most things in life, my life anyway. Probably, it is the way things will go during my time here with you and your family—even though that is not what I want . . . My wish is that things stay good. My wish is that we stay friends, Sylvie, always and forever . . .



Even the greatest blizzards begin with one or two seemingly innocent snowflakes drifting down from the sky. That’s how it was with those simple words of gratitude—thank you—spoken by Abigail after she tucked herself into Rose’s bed and squeezed her eyes shut: they were the innocuous beginnings of all that was to come.

But I should not be talking about snowstorms, not yet. It was summer still, the sunniest and hottest I’d experienced in my life. Odd as it may sound, considering my sister had been plucked from our family and Abigail deposited in her place, it also came to be the happiest summer I recalled in a long time, that last summer my parents were alive.

When my father returned the following morning, he carried the empty suitcase Rose and I shared. She had no need for it there, I heard him tell my mother when she met him at the door, and seeing it would only keep thoughts of leaving the place thriving in her mind. Those weren’t his ideas, but protocol at Saint Julia’s, he explained. According to him, that same protocol prohibited family contact for the first ninety days to allow students time to detach from their former lives and acclimate to a new environment, one with rigid structure, firm values, and a strictly enforced disciplinary code. That was the most I heard him say about my sister, since my mother began telling him about all that had transpired in his absence—most important, how Albert Lynch and his daughter had shown up the day before, how she was with us still.