The Guest Room(54)

But even if Jesse had asked the question with the hope that Melissa would respond with a deep and honest answer, the girl wasn’t prepared to go there. At least not yet. Melissa shrugged and said, “Fine.” Then she put her ice cream into her mouth.

Jesse shook her head and reached across the booth, gently resting her fingers atop Melissa’s hand that wasn’t holding the spoon. “I get it,” the mother said. “This stuff is really confusing and scary. It’s hard to talk about.”

“I’d be scared of the ghosts,” Claudia piped in. “I told her, Mom.”

“Claudia, I specifically asked you not to talk with Melissa about this weird thing you have about ghosts,” Jesse said, exasperated.

Claudia shrugged and stirred what was left of her sundae into soup. “Anyway, that’s what would make me not fine.”

“There is no such thing as ghosts,” Jesse said pointedly, staring deep into Melissa’s eyes. “I’ve told Claudia that. And now I’m telling you that.”

Melissa looked away. She stared down at the woman’s hand atop hers. Jesse’s nail polish was a shade of red that reminded her of the maple leaves on the trees in their yard a week ago. Now most of those leaves were on the lawn. If her dad hadn’t still been in the city on Sunday—or maybe if they had all been allowed to go home—he probably would have raked them up that day.

“Claudia, dear, I’m not judging here,” Jesse was saying now to her own daughter. “But if you want the ice cream to be soup, why don’t you just order a shake?”

“Because a shake is a shake and soup’s soup.”

Melissa focused on Jesse’s nails. They were perfect. She wanted nails just like that, she decided. She wanted to wear leggings just like Jesse’s.

“How is your house?” the woman asked her, the tone nothing like the playfulness that marked her question to her own daughter about why she insisted on liquefying her ice cream.

Melissa thought about this. She thought about the bloodstains. She thought about the rubber on the blue plastic Tucker Tote lid. Before she could respond to Jesse, however, Emiko was saying something, and so Melissa turned her attention to her other friend.

“My grandmother always saw ghosts,” Emiko was explaining. “My grandfather never did, but my grandmother was always seeing them. She saw her aunts. She saw this friend of hers from elementary school who had died super young. She used to talk to them.”

Jesse lifted that beautiful hand of hers off of Melissa’s, and sat back against the bench on her side of the booth. She folded her arms across her chest. Then: “Melissa, are you scared of ghosts?” Again, there was that elongation of a single syllable—in this case, you. A sheep, it seemed to Melissa, when stretched so far. A homonym. Baaaaaaaa. She tried to remember how to spell the word for a female sheep, but she couldn’t.

“Melissa?” Jesse asked when she didn’t answer right away.

She put her spoon into the dish and pondered the…undead. She really hadn’t been scared until Claudia had put the idea into her head the other day that her house might now be haunted. Certainly last night she had been relieved that she was allowed to share her parents’ bed with her mom, even though it was because a man and a prostitute had had sex in her own bedroom, and because now her mom didn’t want her own husband in bed with her. Dad had been—and here was a word he had taught her, trying to make light of the situation—exiled to the living room. She guessed she would have been scared if she had had to sleep alone in her own bedroom. And now the idea that Emiko—far and away the sanest of her friends—seemed to believe in ghosts, only gave more credence to Claudia’s suggestion that she and her mom and dad were now sharing the home with a couple of dead men. Moreover, they were dead men who did bad things when they were alive. Which meant they might not be especially playful ghosts. Not Casper. They might be the kind who killed you in the night. When it was dark. They might be the kind of ghosts who quite literally scared you to death.

“I am a little scared of them,” she answered finally.

“A little?”

“A little scared of ghosts.”

“I would be,” Claudia agreed.

“Claudia? Seriously? Come on,” Jesse said. “I just told you, there is no such thing as ghosts. Emiko, that doesn’t mean your grandmother was mistaken or crazy. It just means that she was from a…a different generation.”

Melissa had wanted to speak with her mom yesterday about Claudia’s idea that their house might now be haunted, but there had never been a chance. They had found the rubber and her parents had fought, and then her mom had retreated, sobbing, to the bedroom. It had been awful. And it hadn’t been the bloodstains or the ruined painting or the gross stains on the furniture that had caused her mom to break down. It had been the rubber.

Her dad had told her mom that he hadn’t had sex with the prostitute, and Melissa wanted to believe him. She couldn’t imagine her dad telling a lie like that. But it was getting harder and harder for her not to be angry with him: the house was a mess, people were doing gross things in her bedroom, and he had made her mom cry. That was the worst part. He had made her mom cry a lot. And now they might have to move, and her parents might even get a divorce. Those were the things that really upset her; those were the things that really frightened her; and those were the things, she realized, that now had her furious with her dad.